The Country Lovers

by Walker, Fiona

  How many times had her father stared into this mirror? Had he seen in it anything that she saw now? It was Alice who had inherited Johnny’s dark, fierce good looks; Tim had their mother’s blonde perfection. Pax was altogether different, and yet she was the one who sensed a strong bond the others denied: the familial curse.

  She unpinned her hair and shook it out, wild liver-chestnut curls that had loosened from clock to bed springs over the years, yet remained defiant, refusing to be tamed. Hers was her paternal grandmother’s hair, she’d been told. Johanna Dwyer had been the fast-riding daughter of Tipperary horse dealers who – if legend was to be believed – had been added as a sweetener to four good hunters and a harness draft, marrying the purchaser to seal the deal. All too briefly a goddess riding astride over Worcestershire hedges and hostess of the best farmers’ meets in Kinver, she’d drowned in the River Severn at just twenty-nine, the circumstances of her death shielded in typically gothic Ledwell family secrecy.

  Tight-lipped, Johnny would only ever say that his mother had been the bravest of women.

  ‘You have her heart, Patricia,’ he’d told Pax when she was about seven, no doubt plastered out of his mind, although she hadn’t learned to identify drunkenness until later. ‘Kind and fierce. It’s a rare thing. You must take good care of it; don’t ever let it grow sour.’

  Or old? Pax had found herself wondering more than once whether Johanna Ledwell’s premature death, like her son’s after her, had been of her own making? Was that the curse?

  She shuddered. It was so cold up here, she could see her own breath clouding in her reflection.

  Looking round at the bleak room, her grandmother’s kind heart stirred with a guilty conscience inside her. Luca O’Brien might be used to sub-zero Canadian temperatures, but she couldn’t let him freeze to death on his first night.

  She fetched the oil heater from her old bedroom in the main house, deciding she could sleep in her mother’s room above the warm kitchen. She then locked the doors that linked the annexe to the main house, except the ground-floor one, hiding the keys at the back of a kitchen drawer.

  To stop herself gravitating towards the Laphroaig bottle again, she went outside to pick a welcoming spray of rose hips and winter jasmine from the tangled bed by the front steps. The fog was suffocatingly cold now, the gleam from Lester’s cottage windows barely visible through its white veils. Having put the flowers in a small jug on the washstand, she went to fetch Luca a few books to read, some ancient stud manuals for amusement, along with Cold Comfort Farm and Wuthering Heights for irony. He needed a bedside light. She fetched that too, stealing the opposite partner to her mother’s bedside table which was one of the few in the house with a working bulb, forced to trail all the way down one set of stairs and up the other because she’d locked the interconnecting doors. Every time she passed the whisky bottle in the kitchen, her jaw tugged for a mouthful.

  ‘You’re a drunk, Tishy.’ Mack’s accusing words taunted her.

  She took the back stairs two at a time. She would show him. She would quit drinking at midnight. Damn him blaming the symptoms not the cause.

  The bedroom, already warmed by the heater, had taken on a whole new personality. Its reawakened scent hit her like a portal to another lifetime. Her father’s smell. Saddle soap, cologne, leather and whisky. Cigarettes, boiling linseed, Hibiscrub and whisky. Coffee, hot horse, wet waxed coat and whisky.

  Damn Luca O’Brien for taking her final freedom away. Let him find a cab.

  Downstairs again, she sat at the table, reaching out for the malt.

  Her mother’s phone let out a shrill beep that made Pax jump, her fingers catching the bottle. As it toppled over, she grabbed for it and missed.

  Behind her, the puppy had woken and started barking excitedly.

  Pax watched helplessly as the bottle rolled away from her to the table’s far edge where it teetered like the coach in The Italian Job.

  ‘Just bloody smash!’ she dared it.

  Obligingly it dropped, glass shattering, the distillery reek overpowering.

  The puppy whined by the kitchen door.

  Snatching him up, grabbing the still-beeping phone too, Pax went outside, teeth chattering as soon as the cold air hit her, not noticing the puppy doubling back inside to hurriedly relieve himself on the doormat. On the phone screen, an alarm reminder had kicked in: Text children HNY. Call and check Pax okay.

  It was so unexpected to find that her mother had calendared anything, let alone New Year greetings to loved ones, Pax felt a confused rush of emotion.

  She snoozed the message, quashing an ungrateful afterthought that no mother should need reminding to share a celebration with her children. Ronnie was never invited to join in family revels, after all. Excluded from birthdays, christenings, Easter, Christmas, she was isolated and out of the loop. No Service, just like the message read on her phone face.

  Back inside, she scraped up the glass with a dustpan and brush and mopped the floor as best she could, but the smell lingered, single malt running in rivulets between the flagstones, soaking through grout holes, washing in a tide beneath the dresser’s oak skirting. She opened one of its cupboards, her throat catching to see her grandparents’ dusty collection of kitchen ‘snifters’ still stored in there, the labels yellowed. Blended Scotch and supermarket sherry, knocked back in heavy-bottomed glasses at the farmhouse table, the malts and fino served to guests in crystal tumblers in the drawing room.

  ‘One toasts days to remember and drowns nights to forget,’ her grandmother Ann had been fond of saying, a Dorothy Parker in tweed and gaberdine, she could outdrink and outthink most men.

  If Pax had her Ledwell grandmother’s soul, she liked to think she had her Percy grandmother’s spirit – and love of spirits. She was nothing like her self-destructive father, she reminded herself, the smell making her gag. Nor was she a guzzler like so many of her friends; no Wine O’Clock, Mummy’s Glass, bottle-a-night habit for her. She’d knocked that on the head when the recycling got conspicuous, which is how she knew she could control it. She’d simply been brought up at the hip of an old-fashioned matriarch who rode, dog-walked, stood her ground, fought her corner and outdrank her husband into her seventies. Alice was the same. It was in their DNA.

  And like her grandmother, she wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind.

  Determined and furious, she marched outside with her phone, stumbling through the fog to the far end of the walled garden where a bar of signal was occasionally possible when balancing on the old compost heap, her fingers shaking almost too much to tap the screen. Bingo!

  Try to take our son away and I’ll make you wish you’d never lived! she texted Mack.

  U OK, Pax hun? came the reply

  Scrolling up, she realised she’d sent a message to ‘Mackenzie’s Mummy’, added to contacts for a recent party RSVP, an oversharing PTA heavyweight at Kes’s school.

  The state of the Forsyths’ marriage would be all over the mummy mafia before daybreak.

  Happy New Year! she typed, then deleted it. That was surely against the trade descriptions act. There was nothing happy about this one.

  *

  Bridge was already in a onesie and dressing gown, wood burner glowing, wine poured, cats Barack and Michelle curling around on the windowsill behind her. She’d sent WhatsApp video messages to Aleš and the kids in Poland – the Internet in his family’s rural house wasn’t good enough to live-stream – and then donned noise-cancelling headphones to wipe out next door’s shrill laughter and nineties rock playlist that could penetrate even three feet of sandstone. She was now trying to get to grips with an audiobook she’d lost her place in more than once whilst falling asleep recently. It was a gothic horror recommended by Petra and something extremely unpleasant was about to happen to a couple having adulterous sex in a tapestried bedchamber.

  The cats springing off the windowsill behind her, fur on end, made her start and look over her shoulder.

  A pale hand was presse
d to the glass pane, a mask of a face peering in, black-rimmed eyes huge.

  Bridge screamed, which in noise-cancelling headphones was a strange first, like singing underwater.

  The mask smiled and the hand waved.

  She knew Carly Turner by sight, although they’d barely exchanged more than a few words, which was odd given they had children much the same age. Bridge rarely ventured out with hers in the village, taking them instead into Broadbourne or Chipping Hampton to Tumble Tots, Water Babies and Jo Jingles, to catch up over coffee with NCT friends or to spend time with their cousins and her Polish sister-in-law in Micklecote. Carly, meanwhile, pushed hers miles around the local footpaths in a double buggy and baby backpack, recently accompanied by a scary-looking dog, always stopping for ages in gateways if there were horses there so she and the kids could fuss them. She cut a recognisable figure with her many c-shaped tattoos and slim, road-hardened physique. When Bridge opened the door, she realised Carly was dressed in a clingy, artfully slashed tube of red Lycra that would make anyone bigger than a size six look fat, shoulders inadequately caped in fun fur, her teeth chattering.

  Her painted eyes rolled apologetically. ‘I’ve been sent round to invite you to a shit party.’

  ‘Come in, queen, you’ll catch your death.’

  Carly dived inside gratefully, the cats curling around her ankles like mobile leg-warmers. ‘Look at your lovely fire. It’s much nicer in here than Flynn’s place. All he’s got there is home entertainment and recliner sofas.’

  ‘Stay and have a drink,’ Bridge offered, grateful for the company and curious to get some low-down on the bad-boy farrier next door. ‘I’m not leaving this house tonight.’

  ‘Don’t blame you.’ Carly flopped on the harlequin-striped sofa by the wood burner, pulling a big sheepskin cushion onto her knee and gazing around. ‘It’s amazing.’

  Bridge’s bold taste and Aleš’s love of Polish folk art meant their tiny cottage was a riot of colour: the walls that weren’t natural limestone were painted with flowers and patterns like a psychedelic inside-out canal barge; the old wooden shutters were adorned with felt hangings, colourful paper cuttings overlapped on the beams, big raw glazed pots overflowed with riotously bright paper flowers and carved wooden bowls held clutches of painted eggs.

  Having loved it at first, Bridge now secretly found herself craving minimalism, the sleek straight lines, walls of light and polished concrete floors of the eco houses her husband’s team built for the award-winning architect.

  ‘Picture it full of carrycots, Pampers bags and plastic toys which is more normal,’ she said, heading through to the little open-plan kitchen to fetch another glass and glug out some red wine for Carly.

  ‘How old are your little ones?’ Carly asked.

  ‘DS is thirteen months and lurches between the furniture just like his dad, and my always-talking DD is three next month. You?’

  ‘Jackson’s coming up eight months, Sienna’s almost three too, and Ellis will be five in March.’ Carly was holding the Merlot out in front of her like a precious orb, and Bridge guiltily wondered whether she drank wine. It was as instinctive to her to pull a cork at six in the evening as it was boil the kettle at six in the morning, but perhaps Carly was more of a cocktail type, or even teetotal. She’d seen her in the village often enough to know that beneath the war paint was a pretty, childlike face whose heavy-lidded insouciance was as artfully applied as tonight’s scarlet lipstick. Scrubbed, she could pass for fifteen.

  ‘Can I get you something else instead? Gin and tonic maybe? Tea?’

  ‘This is great.’ She took a huge swig, giving herself a red moustache. ‘Where’s your fella tonight?’

  ‘Enjoying Sylwester in a little village in Malopolska.’

  ‘Isn’t he the one that chased Tweety Pie?’

  She laughed. ‘It’s what the Polish call New Year’s Eve. They’ll all get very drunk and very jolly, and Aleš will cry and promise his mother that we will move back there soon – never! – and then they’ll sing and dance, and tomorrow they’ll take their hangovers for a forest sled ride to cook sausages over a haybale fire and sing and cry a bit more.’

  ‘Instead you chose to come back here to sit next to that?’ Carly jerked her head to indicate the whoops through the limestone, poignantly accompanied by ‘Wonderwall.’

  ‘I flew back for a job interview.’ Bridge pulled a face. ‘Shouldn’t have bothered, given Sous fecking Vide thinks Instagram styling is the primary skill of an office administrator. That, and brown-nosing her fecking arse.’ It was easier to joke off her disastrous meeting at The Jugged Hare with Carly than the Bags, her steady grey gaze amused and wise. She sensed she couldn’t shock Carly, however foul-mouthed she was.

  ‘I’m up for a waitressing job there.’ She lifted a well-plucked eyebrow. ‘I do shifts at Le Mill, but it’s hard getting over there without a car. If it’s going to be full of tools, I might forget it.’

  ‘On the other hand, the pay’s good. I did my research, and the money’s all ethical venture capital: local suppliers, bamboo uniforms, quirky staff perks, no expense spared.’

  ‘Must be minted.’

  ‘With aubergine carpaccio and pickled fecking raisins.’

  The Bags would have hooted with obliging laughter, but Carly creased her forehead uncertainly, wary of being taken for a fool.

  ‘Your man’s next door, I take it?’

  She nodded, eyes staying cynically narrow. ‘It’s more of a lads’ night.’

  ‘Stay here for as long as you like. I was about to watch Black Panther on Box Office.’

  ‘Seriously? I love that film. I’ll text Ash that I’ve broken a nail. That’ll buy me an hour.’ Seeing Bridge’s sceptical face, she explained, ‘Janine makes out like it’s a dark art, and she’s so slow at it Turner men think fake nails take longer than heart surgery.’ To authenticate her story, Carly took one of her long thumb talons between her teeth and tugged off its fake gel tip, leaving a naked little pad to pat out the text super-fast on her phone screen. About to press send, she pulled a face. ‘Then again, the lads might come round here.’

  ‘Tell him we’re sharing birth stories.’ Bridge winked, reaching for the remote.

  ‘Love it!’ The thumb danced once more.

  *

  When Pax set off, the white-out on the top of the Comptons’ ridge made driving difficult, as Lester had predicted. Even navigating her way to the end of the drive took concentration. She was grateful for the Noddy car’s fog lights, Mack’s puppy whimpering in the boot of the car.

  ‘It’s okay, little one,’ she soothed. Remembering that Landseer had gone mad, she’d decided against calling him that. Mack, disinterested, had suggested Rover. Perhaps they should ask Kes to name him. The fog in front of her blurred. ‘Stop it!’ she hissed to herself.

  As soon as they were on the village lane her phone found a mobile signal and started trilling with incoming messages, the car’s dash screen lighting up with a flurry of backlogged notifications. Distracted, she pulled up to read them in a gateway. All were from Mack, each one increasingly desperate for an answer.

  He claimed he’d had a change of heart (or a stiff talking-to from his big sister, more likely). He’d been too hasty embracing his parents’ plans without discussing them with her first. Of course they must talk. They’d work things through. For Kes. For each other.

  Pax had motion sickness from the mood swings of marriage break-up, the constant ups and downs, the indecision.

  The messages got more demanding and emotional with each successive time stamp. In the last few, he’d added kisses – and cs – told her he loved her – and lived for her – and that he mossed, mussed and missed her. If one of them was halfway down a whisky bottle, it wasn’t her.

  She didn’t reply.

  Dropping down from the escarpment, she found herself driving just beneath the fog, like an eerie false ceiling. It was just a few feet overhead by the time Pax turned onto the M40, heading towards
Birmingham, her radio tuned to rebellious anthems. The rusted exhaust was deafening now. She hoped it would hold out.

  At least the noise drowned out the trills of yet more texts arriving from Mack.

  He called as she joined the M42, the fog lower now, speed reduction warnings flashing from the electronic boards.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ his slurred voice demanded through the speakers. There was ceilidh music and conversation in the background.

  ‘You know there’s no signal at the stud. Is Kes okay?’

  ‘Fine. Fast asleep. Pax, I…’ He started to cry.

  So unexpected, so unlike him, it made her cry too. She almost side-swiped another car.

  ‘Don’t take Kes away from me,’ he sobbed.

  ‘You want to take him from me!’ She hid her tears from him, mouth full of marbles.

  ‘YOU want out of the MARRIAGE!’

  She made it to the hard shoulder, hazards on, head in her arms on the wheel.

  ‘Mack, it can’t go on as it is, can it?’

  ‘Do you shtill love me?’ he demanded. He had to have been drinking for hours to ask something like that.

  Yellow lights were flashing in her mirrors. She flinched as a shower of grit hit the roof of her car and the salting truck trundled by.

  ‘Are you shtill there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you? Or washthat “yes” your answer?’

  She found she couldn’t respond, tears blinding her, only a few ungainly snorts coming out. Damn her honesty. Damn her unflinching honesty.

  ‘I’ll make my own mind up, shall I?’

  ‘Let’s talk again tomorrow, Mack. When you’re sober.’ Oh, hollow victory. ‘Happy New Year.’ There she’d done it. Polite as a Forsyth. Calm as a Ledwell. Tough as a Percy.