by Marian Keyes
Ema galloped on the spot above Martha’s picture. ‘Good girlie,’ Anton encouraged, ‘give her a fine pounding there.’
Then Anton retreated several steps and took a running jump, landing with his size elevens on Martha’s face.
The three of us stamped and banged until the horrible words and Martha’s ugly mug were smeared with print. The grand finale was when Anton held up the page like a matador’s blanket and I put my foot through it with a ‘Da-dah!’
‘Feel better?’
‘A little.’
Not terribly, but it was worth a try.
Seconds later Mad Paddy appeared to complain. ‘What’s all the banging and clattering? A lump of plaster’s after falling off the ceiling into me tea!’
‘Tea!’ Anton scoffed and shut the door on him. ‘Long Island Iced Tea, more like.’
‘And so what if it is?’ Mad Paddy was muffled but indignant on the far side of the door.
‘It’s probably his bloody fault,’ Anton observed. ‘If he hadn’t sung “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”, that woman wouldn’t have been so vicious.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘We should move.
‘I’m serious,’ he said, when I made no reply. ‘We really should think about buying a place.’
‘With what? Beads and mirrors? We’re just about able to feed and clothe ourselves.’
‘The way your career is going, we won’t be skint for ever.’
‘The way my career is going, I’ll be stoned in the street.’ I reached for the phone. ‘I’m cancelling lunch at Dettol Hall.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m too ashamed to go out.’
‘Fuck them! You’ve done nothing wrong. Why should you be ashamed?’
‘I thought you would jump at the chance to get out of seeing Debs.’
‘I would. But it’s more important that you hold your head up high. If you go to bits now, Martha Hope Jones will have won.’
‘OΚ,’ I said wearily, ‘King’s Cross, here we come.’
*
The Sunday north London train service was pitifully threadbare… even before they cancelled the 11.48. And the 12.07.
Anton, Ema and I sat in the draughty station, waiting for the next train which hopefully might not be cancelled, and thought up things we would rather do than visit Debs.
‘Stick needles in my eyes.’
‘Go to an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.’
‘Lick Margaret Thatcher.’
‘Debs isn’t a bad person,’ I said.
‘No,’ Anton agreed. ‘She’s not a person at all. Watch her today and see how she never blinks. I’m telling you she’s an alien.
‘Don’t look!’ He held his hands in front of my eyes to block the sight of a woman on the next bench leafing through the Sunday Echo. My stomach churned wretchedly. Had she seen the piece about me? How many people throughout Britain were reading that poison?
Forty-five minutes late we stood on the doorstep of Dettol Hall. Debs opened the door and regarded us with her round, blue eyes and, on cue, Ema began to wail.
‘You were invited to lunch,’ Debs scolded, ‘good’ ‘humouredly’. ‘Not supper.’
As always she was kitted out in the pristine pastels of baby clothes and her little plimsolls were so white my eyes ached. To look directly at them one would need a piece of cardboard with a hole in it, of the type used for viewing a solar eclipse.
‘Sorry we’re late.’ I struggled to fold away the buggy as Anton calmed Ema. ‘The trains were up the spout.’
‘You and your trains,’ Debs said indulgently. She treats Anton and me as if we are wilfully Bohemian, instead of merely poor. ‘One of you really ought to get a proper job!’
I gave Anton a warning look. No killing the hostess.
‘Come through.’ Debs led the way down the hall, pointing each little foot before laying it carefully on the floor.
In the kitchen Dad folded me in his arms as if someone had died. ‘My little girl,’ he said hoarsely. When he finally let me go, he had tears in his eyes.
‘I take it you saw the Echo,’ I said.
‘She’s a witch, that woman, an evil witch.’
‘That’s no way to talk about your wife,’ Anton said quietly into my ear.
‘Anything I can do for you?’ Dad asked me.
‘No thanks, I would love just to forget about it. Ema, darling, say hello to Grandad!’
‘Look at her little face,’ Dad cooed. ‘It’s a picture.’
Debs prepared drinks and said gaily to Anton, ‘Well! I see your lot has been at it again.’
‘What’s that, Mum?’
Debs frowned slightly at the ‘Mum’ and continued, ‘The IRA. Refusing to give up their weapons.’
We go through this charade whenever the IRA are in the news, and Anton has long given up trying to explain to Debs that, actually, he is not a member of the IRA. Anton is Irish and that is good enough for Debs. Debs’s thing is that she disapproves of foreign countries. Except for Provence and the Algarve, she cannot understand why the whole world simply cannot be English.
Then Anton greeted Joshua and Hattie, Debs’s eight-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter from her first marriage. ‘Ah,’ he said expansively, ‘the Children of the Corn.’
Debs thinks he calls them that because they are both blond. But The Children of the Corn is a Stephen King novel so it’s got little to do with the colour of their hair and lots to do with their oddness: they are unnaturally clean and pliant.
‘Hi Joshua, hi Hattie.’ I crouched down to say hello but they eluded eye contact. However, unlike proper rude children they did not push me over and run away. Instead they stood obediently before me and fixed their sight on an invisible object somewhere behind my head.
Anton says he has faith that they will grow up to be axe-murderers and butcher Debs while she lies sleeping.
Then, like a mini-whirlwind, in came Poppy. She looks oddly like a miniature Dad, but in a wild corkscrew wig. ‘Lily,’ she yelped. ‘Anton. And Ema!’ She kissed us all, then grabbed Ema by the hand and ran out of the room with her. She is a total and utter delight and we are all madly in love with her, especially Ema.
When we eventually sat down to it, lunch was rather grim. First came Debs’s apologies about the state of the roast beef. ‘But unfortunately it was due to be eaten over an hour ago.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered.
But that was simply a precursor to the real programme – the gloating over the Martha Hope Jones piece.
‘You must be wretched with embarrassment, Lily. I know I would be. Dying with it. Afraid to show my face. When one thinks of all those people reading it and judging you, well you must be dreadfully upset.’
Yes.’ I looked at my plate. ‘So I’d appreciate it if we didn’t discuss it.’
‘Of course. You must want to forget it ever happened. To have someone write such appalling things and then publish it in a national paper that has a circulation of several million… If it were me, I think I should kill myself.’
‘I’ll save you the bother and do it for you myself,’ Anton said cheerfully, ‘if you don’t shut up right away.’
Debs coloured. ‘I beg your pardon. I was being sympathetic. After such a dreadful, humiliating, embarrassing –’
‘That’s enough,’ Dad said. He sounded so firm that Debs looked momentarily uncertain, then he made the mistake of licking his butter knife and she pounced, scolding him shrilly.
Over the years Debs had done a My Fair Lady on what she regarded as Dad’s more objectionable mannerisms: drinking milk straight from the carton, spilling lots of it down his chin and wiping it away with his sleeve. She had even managed to reduce his weight by preparing him special low-fat meals, but it pained me to see how she had literally reduced him.
It was a dreadfully hard day but at four-thirty we were given a surprise early release: Debs was playing a tennis match. She left Dad up to his elbows in sudsy water as she ran o
ff to change. Five minutes later she skipped down the stairs in her flippy white skirt and neat, hairbanded hair.
‘Well,’ Anton said in admiration. ‘You look more like a schoolgirl than a forty-six-year-old alien.’
Debs posed jauntily with her racket over her shoulder, giggled, then frowned, ‘A forty-six-year-old what?’
‘Alien,’ Anton said cheerfully.
I wanted to run away.
‘Irish word. Means “goddess”.’
‘Really?’ A little uncertainly. ‘I see. Well, I should go. Time waits for no man.’
‘Or alien!’ Anton twinkled.
‘Um, yes.’
‘Bye. Good luck.’
‘And no going out with the girls and getting tiddly afterwards,’ Anton chided. ‘I know you, you naughty girl.’
She giggled again, then in grim silence ripped Joshua off her leg, flung him towards a corner of the hall, jogged out to her lemon Yaris and drove away.
‘Nope,’ Anton said conclusively, as we rocked on the home-bound train.
‘Nope, what?’
‘I just can’t believe she’s ever had sex. She has a brillo pad for a heart. How did little Poppy come about? Let’s face it, Mr Muscle is the only man Debs seems interested in.’
‘Perhaps she brings a bottle of Dettol into bed with her.’
‘Oh stop. I’m having horrific thoughts. God, she’s vile.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But Dad is mad about her so I feel I ought to try. And in many ways she’s terribly good for him.’
‘How?’
‘She’s tempered the excesses of his financial risk-taking.’
‘You mean she was astute enough to get the title of Dettol Hall put in her name.’
‘At least they’ll always have a roof over their heads.’
‘True.’
45
‘Will you do something for me?’ Anton asked.
‘Anything,’ I said. Foolishly.
‘There’s a house for sale in Grantham Road. Will you and Ema come to see it with me?’
After a pause I said, ‘What’s the asking price?’
‘Four hundred and seventy-five thousand.’
‘Why do you want to view a house that we will never be able to afford, not in a million years?’
‘I see it every day on the way to the tube and I’m curious about it. It’s like a fairy-tale house, it doesn’t belong in London at all.’
‘Why are they selling?’
‘It belonged to an old man who died. His family don’t want it.’
I had a sudden hard place in my stomach. Anton had researched this without telling me.
‘It can’t hurt to look,’ he said.
I so did not agree. But Anton asked so little from me, how could I refuse him?
‘This is it,’ Anton said, standing before a detached, sturdy redbrick with a pointy Gothic roof. It was like a miniature castle and looked neither too big nor too small. Just right.
Arse.
‘Victorian,’ Anton said, pushing open a waist-high gate and extending a hand. Ema and I followed him up a short tinder path to a tiled porch with a pitched roof. The heavy blue front door was opened immediately by a young suited and booted bloke. Greg, the estate agent.
I stepped over the threshold into the hall, the door closed behind me and I was infused with calm. The light was quite different in here. The stained-glass fan-window above the front door threw coloured patterns onto the wooden floor and all was peaceful and golden.
‘Most of the furniture’s gone,’ Greg said. ‘The old man’s family took it. Let’s start here, shall we?’
Our feet echoed on the wooden floors as we followed him into a room that stretched the entire depth of the house. At the front was a pretty bay window and at the back, French doors leading to the garden – which looked crammed with old-fashioned, hollyhock-style foliage. A fireplace, patterned with William Morris-style ceramic tiles stood tall by the right wall.
‘Original,’ Greg said, knocking his knuckles on it.
There was the faintest smell of pipe tobacco and I imagined children wearing button boots, eating toffee apples and playing on a wooden rocking horse.
On the other side of the hall was a cosy little square room, also with a bay window and fireplace.
‘This could be your writing room,’ Anton said. ‘Lily’s a writer,’ he told Greg.
‘Oh?’ he said politely. ‘Have I heard of you?’
‘Lily Wright,’ I said shyly.
‘Oh,’ he repeated, my name clearly meaning nothing to him. ‘Er, well done.’
The floorboards by the window creaked and suddenly I remembered reading about an American woman who had wanted to recreate a Victorian house, so had paid for authentically squeaking floorboards. And here they were, already installed.
‘I could put my desk here,’ I said, stroking the wall. A piece of plaster crumbled into my hand.
‘Obviously the house needs a bit of work,’ Greg said. ‘Ought to be fun pulling it all together.’
‘Yes.’ And my assent was sincere.
Then the kitchen which was a gloomy hidey-hole. ‘We could knock through,’ I murmured, not really understanding what it meant, but seizing on the phrase.
I could see it already. My new knocked-through kitchen would be four times its current size and floored with warm terracotta tiles. At all times a heavy ceramic casserole would sit on a pale blue Aga, so should people drop in unexpectedly, I could wander out in my bare feet, welcome them warmly, give them dinner, then press my home-made elderberry wine on them. I would be like Nigella Lawson.
When people had crises, they would appear on my prettily tiled doorstep, knowing they could depend on me for sanctuary. I would bundle them in a mohair blanket, place them on a daybed in the bay window to watch the breeze playing on the branches and supply camomile tea in charmingly mismatched cups and saucers until their crise had passed.
Greg led us to the stairs and as I bent down to carry Ema I noticed pinprick holes in the floorboards. Woodworm. How charming. How… how… authentic. It would be impossible ever to be unhappy in this house.
The three bedrooms were each more delightful than the previous. Visions of iron bedsteads, embroidered quilts, rocking chairs and voile curtains billowing in the gentle breeze entranced me.
I took a brief look at the poky antediluvian bathroom and murmured once again about knocking through.
Then Greg took us downstairs for the property highlight: the charmingly overgrown garden. Along the edges a horseshoe of trees and tangled bushes leant inwards and camouflaged much of the houses and tower blocks of the outside world.
‘Blackcurrant bushes. Raspberry vines,’ Greg indicated. ‘An apple tree. In the summer you’ll have fruit.’
I had to clutch Anton.
Near the back fence there was a low, old-fashioned greenhouse growing tomatoes. Beside it was a south-facing garden seat like an old park bench, with white-painted wooden slats and wrought-iron legs.
‘Hardly know you were in London,’ Greg said.
‘Mmmm,’ I agreed, quite happy to ignore the screech of a car alarm from a street away.
I saw myself sitting in this garden, writing in a pretty notebook, a basket of freshly picked raspberries by my side. In the sunlight my hair was blonde and ripply, as if my highlights had just been done, and I was draped in a floaty white something from Ghost, or perhaps Marni.
Clearest of all was my vision of Ema playing with other children – her brothers and sisters perhaps? For some reason they all had ringlets and were happily throwing stones at the greenhouse.
I would press flowers. My French windows would have light muslin drapes which shifted in the breeze and I would meander barefoot from garden to house carrying secateurs and an over-arm basket.
It smelt and felt like a half-remembered dream. As familiar as if I had been here before, even though I knew I had not.
I had never been materialistic. For as long as I remembered I had
held the opinion that money plays one false: promises the world – perhaps even delivers it briefly – before removing it again.
But suddenly it was clear what an idiot I had been. I ought to have got my foot on the property ladder at the first opportunity. I should have hustled for better pay.
At that moment I wanted the house so badly, I was avid with greed. I would have sold my grandmother had she been still alive and had anyone wanted to buy her.
I had never before desired something so intensely. I would die without this house. But there was no need for such melodrama because it was my house already. I simply needed to find half a million pounds from somewhere.
I barely remember the walk home, but when I found myself once again in my poky little flat I rounded on Anton. I felt as though I had had a near-death experience and come face-to-face with the transcendent beauty of the divine, only to be returned to my body because, due to a clerical error, it was not yet my time. It had ruined me for anything else.
‘Why did you show it to me? We could never afford it.’
‘Listen to me a minute.’ Anton was scribbling calculations on a paper bag. ‘You’ve sold almost two hundred thousand copies, so you should get roughly one hundred thousand pounds in royalties.’
‘I keep telling you, my first tranche of royalties won’t be paid until the end of September and that’s nearly five months away. The house will be gone by then.’
He was shaking his head. ‘We can borrow against future income.’
‘Can we? But Anton, the house is half a million and we’d need knocking-through money.’
‘Think of the future,’ he urged, his eyes shining. ‘At some stage Eye-Kon is going to start turning a profit.’
I remained silent because I did not want to seem unsupportive. But until now all Eye-Kon had turned was my stomach when I saw on their balance sheet how much was spent on lunches in Soho buttering people up and how little work it had yielded.
‘But much more importantly,’ Anton said, ‘you have a two-book deal.’
‘Yes, but I’ve written only two chapters of my second one.’ And no one at Dalkin Emery had cared until recently. It was only when Mimi’s Remedies surprised them by selling so many that they even remembered I was signed up for a second book.