I was woken by an incongruous noise – a city noise; the gasp of air brakes on a truck followed by five syncopated toots of a horn. For a moment I thought I was back in Trenchard Street.
‘Nick,’ I mumbled, rolling over and patting his side of the bed. It was empty, the duvet thrown back. I sat up groggily, my head still pounding from the hangover and remembering where I was, stared one-eyed around the room. Nick’s jeans had gone from the chair and the bedroom door was ajar.
I could hear shouting coming from the lane now, more cheerful in tone, more ‘can-do’ than it would have been in London. Then came the electronic woop woop of the truck’s reversing, the clatter of metal; more bellowing. Imogen and her bloody marquee! No wonder Nick was up and at it. No doubt Gabe had been pressed into service too; I pictured a gang of able-bodied males, all waiting eagerly for Her Ladyship to say jump so they could chorus, ‘How high?’ I squinted at my phone. Seven forty-five a.m. They had a nerve. I flopped back onto the pillow and closed my eyes again but it was too late, I was wide-awake.
Thinking I might as well make the most of the early start, I put on an old T-shirt and my dungarees and made my way down to the kitchen. The sink was still full of last night’s dirty dishes. I was so hungry that even the slightly stale morning-after whiff of curry made my mouth water. I’d had nothing to eat, I realized, since the sushi I’d picked at yesterday with Jude. Nick and Gabe were long gone, the only evidence that they’d even passed through, two soggy teabags on the draining board. I put the kettle on and while it was boiling, opened the fridge and scooped cold rice into my mouth with my fingers. I’d have liked to help myself to a bowl of leftovers, but the thought of being in Nick’s debt, even in this small way, stuck in my craw. Instead I took a bruised banana out of the fruit bowl and, once the kettle had boiled, made a cup of tea and took my makeshift breakfast down to the studio.
I opened the door with trepidation, half expecting to find pottery shards on the floor, some sinister message scrawled in the clay dust, but everything was normal – perhaps not quite as clean as I might have left it on an average day, but orderly enough. I thought of the unexpected turn events had taken since I’d walked out of the studio on a whim to take my photographs – the heart-to-heart I had had with Cath in the woods, the disconcerting discovery of the van parked up in the barn, the whole Nick and Imogen fiasco, Ethan’s departure…
Ethan… I tried not to think about where my son might be now; what he might be up to. If I’d let it, my imagination would have run the gamut from crack dens to petty crime, but I chose to remember the dog-walking and trust in his essentially good character. When had worrying ever helped in the past? It hadn’t. I perched on a stool at my work surface and, peeling the banana, surveyed my studio, now so crowded with finished pots that there was scarcely room to dry new ones. The pots were more numerous than I remembered, but also, somehow, more accomplished. They looked like the work of a craftswoman, an artist, someone who had put in the hours and knew what she was doing. I washed down my last bite of banana with a swig of tea and hopped down from my stool.
The block of clay I had re-wrapped cursorily yesterday, expecting to be gone no more than an hour, still lay on my work surface like road kill. I heaved it off the melamine – a leathery dead thing – and lowered it into the bucket of viscous brown slip which I used to revitalise old clay. I fetched my cutting wire, wiped over the work surface with a clean cloth and, when I judged the clay to have had enough to drink, hauled it out again and set about dividing it in three.
I was wedging the first piece; had it almost ready to throw, when it all kicked off next door: clanging, banging, the clatter of mallets and the whirr of electric tools. Every kind of repetitive, spine-jolting, head-jangling noise and all of it accompanied, not by calling, not even by shouting, but by bellowing.
‘To you!’
‘To me!’
‘Left a bit… right a bit. Hold it there. Hold it… ho-o-old it…’
I marched over to close the window, but once there, I became distracted. It was too compelling an entertainment to ignore: the bluster, the camaraderie, the underlying masculine competitiveness; the sense that the very future of civilization depended on the successful completion of the task. I could hear Douglas issuing instructions in his clipped patrician tones, Nick being cheerfully insubordinate and Gabe trying to mediate between the two. There were other voices I didn’t recognize, an older gruff-sounding local and his sweary sidekick and an eager-to-please posh boy whose nasal laugh was frequently and ingratiatingly deployed.
Listening to their banter, I was relieved Ethan wasn’t there. I knew how it would have gone. Ethan would have done his best in the face of a barrage of little jibes and criticisms from Nick, designed to deflect responsibility for his son’s imaginary shortcomings. If they were lucky, they might have made it through the morning; if not, if Ethan had made some more conspicuous gaffe – mishandled a tool say, or twisted a guy rope (which his father’s ungenerous scrutiny would have made more likely), Nick might well have lost his temper and given Ethan a public dressing down. I had heard – or more precisely, not quite heard – such confrontations too many times over the years, hovering on landings and in doorways, eyes closed, fists clenched, trying to summon the nerve to intervene; to remind Nick that carping criticism was not necessarily the way to bring out the best in an insecure adolescent. I shut the window with a defiant bang and went over to my wheel. It was too late to be the parent I’d like to have been.
I just about managed to screen out the background noise after that. Only once did the ballyhoo break my concentration mid-throw. I was nine-tenths of the way there on what would (I had counted) have been my forty-third pot, all told, when a collective shout of consternation went up, followed by a pause, a creak and then the faint tinkling of glass.
There goes the Orangery, I thought, with some satisfaction, before slowing the wheel and gathering my clay back into a formless lump, ready to start again. But it could only have been a setback, because twenty minutes later I saw the pinnacle of the marquee swaying drunkenly back and forth above the hedge as its central support was hoist aloft. There was a brief babble of excitement, then a long and suspenseful pause, and finally, an almighty cheer. You would have thought they had raised the Titanic.
I was loading a couple of bone-dry pots from the rack into the kiln when I heard a tactful cough from behind me.
I ignored it and carried on with what I was doing.
‘It’s up!’ Nick said, his tone somewhere between pride and prickliness.
‘Great,’ I replied, closing the door of the kiln and ostentatiously devoting all my attention to setting the timer.
‘Brought you a little treat to celebrate.’
I turned round. Nick was propping up the doorway, hair dishevelled, sweat patches ringing his T-shirt, a plate in his hand and a winning grin on his face. Seeing him, my breath caught in my throat as it had that first time, as it did still, whenever I was ambushed like this by the sheer fact of his physical beauty, his ease.
‘What is it?’
‘A croissant.’
‘Where’ve you got a croissant from?’ I narrowed my eyes. Don’t flirt, I said to myself. Don’t succumb.
‘They be from ’Er Ladyship,’ he said, tugging his forelock comically. ‘’Er at big ’ouse. Workers’ perks.’
Of course! A second-hand croissant. Leftovers. I carried on with my task, pointedly refusing to make allowances for his presence.
‘No?’ he wheedled. ‘I can make you a coffee to go with it. We could sit on the steps and shoot the breeze.’
I turned back to my work.
‘I’m busy, Nick,’ I said.
I continued to ignore him, but still he loitered in the doorway.
‘So, it starts in a couple of hours…’ he said.
‘I’m not coming,’ I said.
His face fell.
‘What do you mean? You can’t not come.’
He grew petulant now, like a child used to having its own way.
‘You’ll be letting people down. They’re expecting you. It’s for charity.’
He pulled a booklet out of his back pocket and chucked it on my work surface. ‘You’re in the catalogue, for God’s sake.’
Now I saw. None of this was about me – his visit, the second-hand croissant, the making-nice. It was all about him. If I didn’t turn up to the Auction of Promises he would look bad. People would talk behind their hands; speculate. He had become the sort of person he used to ridicule. Perhaps he had been that person all along.
‘I have no desire,’ I said, ‘to sit around with a bunch of people who think I’m crazy, drinking sherry and making small talk to raise money for the church fucking roof, while my son’s sleeping in a doorway somewhere, thank you very—’
‘Karen!’ he barked, and I winced. ‘Karen… love…’
He took a step towards me, his tone already more reasonable, but beneath the surface I could sense pent-up rage, carefully mastered – the scariest kind. He came over to where I was squatting beside the kiln and, taking my hands, pulled me upright, holding my wrists gently. I felt my pulse quicken. I think he did too.
‘… Just please come along. Not for them, not for the church roof, not for appearance’s sake. For me. Because I’m proud of you. Because the pot you’ve pledged is going to raise a lot of money and put you on the map. Because you’re the best. Because I love you.’
An hour and a half later I was making my way downstairs, showered, coiffed, as made-up as I dared and sporting the strapless stripy jumpsuit I had bought in the Stella McCartney sale and fallen out of love with when Nick said it made me look like Andy Pandy. I could hear voices coming from the living room, not just Nick’s and Gabe’s, another voice too.
‘Cath!’ I said, and my surprise must have been almost as obvious as my pleasure. The three of them were sitting stiffly around Nick’s coffee table chatting awkwardly like wedding guests.
‘Well, hello!’ said Cath, turning round and giving my outfit the once-over. I could feel myself blushing, not only with the mortification of Cath’s very evident approval, but also with the fear that it might be misconstrued. To my surprise, however, Nick joined in with a wolf whistle of his own, half satirical, half genuine, as far as I could tell, and I blushed a shade darker.
‘Bit of Dutch courage before we brave the Gaineses’,’ Nick said, waggling his open beer bottle at me.
‘I’m on Earl Grey,’ Cath pointed out, as if to deflect any criticism. I shrugged and smiled.
‘Can I get you a drink, Karen?’ Gabe made to get up.
‘Oh, no. No thanks,’ I said, still trying to work out how this unlikely pow-wow could have come about. Nick seemed to read my mind.
‘I bumped into Cath earlier on and we agreed it might be a bit less daunting if we went to this shindig together; safety in numbers type of thing…’
I gave Nick a sceptical smile. The idea that a man who’d been touring the conference circuit for a decade might need his hand held at a country garden party was ridiculous, but that only left the theory that he had joined forces with Cath for her sake, or mine, or both – all three possibilities recasting him in a more favourable light than I had been prepared for.
‘Have you seen this?’ Cath waved the auction catalogue at me.
I gave a noncommittal shrug.
‘Some of the lots are hilarious,’ Gabe said. ‘Listen to this: “an antiques valuation in your home, offered by Marlowe & Foulkes, specialists in antique jewellery, Fabergé, Tiffany glassware and Russian antiques”.’
Nick looked around the living room with narrowed eyes, as if trying to recall where he’d left the gold-plated samovar and we laughed obligingly.
‘Or if that doesn’t appeal,’ Cath picked up her own copy and flicked through the pages, ‘how about a wine-tasting tutorial with Jacinta Berryman, food and drink correspondent for The Country Gazette.’
‘Oh, we should definitely bid for that, darling,’ Nick said to me, drolly. ‘We totally need to be refining our palettes now we’re in the county set.’
I stretched the corners of my mouth.
‘To be fair though,’ he added, ‘there’s some pretty decent stuff in here. I thought when they said “Auction of Promises”, it’d be like the ones they used to have at Inkerman Street,’ I stiffened slightly at the mention of Ethan’s school, ‘you know, “lot twenty-three, a baby-sitting session from the childminder from hell, lot twenty-five, a romantic dinner for two in the Salmonella Tandoori…”’
‘There was some good stuff,’ I chastised him gently. ‘There was a Reiki massage one time, I remember, and a nice lino-block print. We got outbid on that one.’
‘Thank God.’
Gabe, who had been flicking through his copy of the catalogue, looked up and shook his head in amusement.
‘Dad, there’s stuff in here you literally could not make up. Listen to this. “A circus skills workshop with Hengist Debonair.” I mean, what the fuck…?’
‘And if you do yourself a mischief on Hengist’s unicycle,’ Cath put in, bashing her own pamphlet triumphantly with the back of her hand, ‘a two-hour healing with crystals session from Marion Baverstock should do the trick.’
Once our guffaws had died down, there was a pause and we all sighed and shook our heads, the smiles of amusement fading from our lips and a slight awkwardness descending again.
‘Well… shall we?’ said Nick, standing and crooking his arm with exaggerated courtesy for Cath to take it, which she graciously did. Gabe turned and offered the same gallantry to me, and feeling foolishly overdressed, and in spite of myself, not a little curious, I took his arm.
The gates to Walford House were thrown wide and adorned with balloons and bunting. A large cardboard sign, coloured in felt pen and propped by the laurel hedge read, ‘AUCTION OF PROMISES OVERFLOW PARKING’. A hectic rainbow-coloured arrow pointed towards the neighbouring farmer’s field, but the overflow parking facility must itself have overflowed, because a number of cars had been left straddling ditches by the roadside.
‘Nice gaff,’ Gabe said, and I thought again how much like his dad he was. He was right. It was a very nice gaff – not the formidable English pile I had been expecting but a simple unpretentious house of mellow stone, with a gabled three-storey elevation on either side of an unadorned square porch. That its sandstone tiled roof sagged, that an elegant arched window on the third floor had been bricked up by some seventeenth-century tax-dodger and that one of its chimneys listed alarmingly, only added to its quirky charm, as did the late-blooming wisteria which rambled all over it.
There must already have been over a hundred people milling around on the lawn, not a familiar face among them. It was a much more mixed crowd than I’d been expecting. There were the usual suspects in flannels and Panama hats and at least two women in the same Boden dress, but there were also hipsters with sleeve tattoos, arty types in vintage clothing and flash-looking youths in Hollister. Cath nudged me and nodded towards a red-faced man in slacks and a navy blazer. ‘I swear he was on Question Time last week,’ she said, in a loud stage whisper. From inside the marquee came not the genteel sound of a string quartet, but the easy-going chug of a blues band. The two little Gaines girls appeared beside us, offering from trays of drinks.
‘There’s Pimm’s or prosecco or beer in the gazebo,’ they chanted in unison.
‘How lovely,’ I said, accepting a glass of Pimm’s from the one who had put the evil eye on me for splashing her dress with chutney. She gave me a chilly smile and turned to Cath who plucked a glass impulsively off the tray and stared at me defiantly. Nick bowed to each child in turn with exaggerated politesse.
‘Thank you, Grace, Honour,’ (either he’d struck lucky or he could actually tell them apart) ‘but I think the beer will be more up our street.’
He clapped a blokey hand on Gabe’s shoulder. ‘Their old man’s a bit of a craft ale fanatic,’ he explained.
‘Ladies,’ he turned to Cath and me, ‘shall we reconvene in the marquee in five?’
I watched them stroll across the lawn, their route taking them directly past Imogen, who despite being deep in conversation with a buxom dowager in a twin-set, plucked at Nick’s sleeve as he strode past. He didn’t break his stride, still less bother to stop and introduce Gabe to his hostess, just cast an amused glance over his shoulder. It was the sort of interaction, complacent and intimate, which you’d expect between very close friends – or lovers. I was still smarting from the pain of having witnessed it when Min appeared beside me, cool and stylish in a cream cotton Nehru jacket and jeans.
‘Hello, Karen,’ she said, ‘I was hoping you’d be here. Haven’t seen you in ages. You look lovely by the way.’
I blushed and stroked the back of my neck, unusually exposed by an experimental up-do, which I was already coming to regret. Given my behaviour last time we had met, I was surprised Min should evince such warmth, but I was grateful too and tried to show it.
‘And as for you,’ Min said to Cath with mock reproach.
‘Aye, yoga, I know, I know…’ Cath said, holding her palms up defensively, ‘I should never have let you sign me up.’
‘You do yoga?’ I said, regretting my tactlessness as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
‘Well, as it turns out, I don’t,’ Cath said ruefully, ‘but I do subsidise the yoga class Min goes to, which is a public service of a kind.’ She gave a wheezy chuckle and I thought how very fond of her I’d grown.
‘Sorry,’ I said blushing, ‘I didn’t mean…’
‘She’s made it to two classes all term,’ Min said, coming to my rescue, ‘but before she starts,’ she raised a warning finger at Cath, ‘she was complimented by the teacher on her exceptional core strength.’
‘That’ll be the gardening,’ I said.
‘It’ll be the reinforced lycra leggings,’ Cath corrected me. ‘If you want to know why I only made it to two classes, look no further than those diabolical things. They all but gave me a hernia. Great for staking fruit trees, though…’
Min and I laughed.
‘How about you, Karen?’ Min said. ‘It’s Hatha yoga, the gentle kind; a dozen middle-aged hippies in the village hall. Thursday mornings, nine-thirty…?’
I raised my eyebrows challengingly at Cath.
‘Aye, go on then,’ she relented, ‘I will if you will. We’ll get some of them hareem pants off the market. Sign us up for next term, Min.’
People were starting to move towards the marquee in greater numbers now, willowy well-spoken Charlottes and gangly blushing Rufuses, sandal-wearing Ziggies and blue-haired Skyes. Min took my arm and we filtered into the procession behind a gaggle of sweary young Irish grooms from the local racing stables.
‘Is Ray not with you?’ I asked, furrowing my brow. She jerked her head towards the marquee from where a husky, booze-soaked voice could be heard growling, ‘I laid in bed so long that I damn near saw another day come back round.’
‘No!’ I stared in delighted disbelief at Min and then at Cath for corroboration. But of course, it wasn’t such a stretch that Ray the petrol-head should also be Ray the bluesman. He wasn’t bad either.
‘Always one to make the most of a captive audience,’ Min said wryly, with just a hint of pride. ‘Well done for getting your menfolk to show up, by the way. Not an easy task when the football’s on telly. Ethan looks well.’
‘Ethan…?’ I said, looking around me in hopeful bewilderment. She waved vaguely towards the terrace.
‘Oh, that wasn’t Ethan,’ I said quickly, ‘that was Gabe, Nick’s other son.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know he had a… they’re very alike, aren’t they?’
Were they? I wondered. They didn’t seem so to me. The head-shape perhaps and the broadness of the shoulders. It wasn’t that you’d call Ethan less handsome – the opposite if anything; there was a fullness, a slightly female prettiness to Ethan’s looks which neither father nor half-brother possessed, but where Nick and Gabe bestrode the landscape like lions, easy and unselfconscious, Ethan’s gait was alert and defensive, as befitted one used to slinking in the wake of mightier creatures, scavenging their kills.
‘I suppose,’ I said doubtfully, ‘but Ethan’s not… around at the moment.’
‘That’s funny,’ she said, looking at me curiously, ‘because Ray said he bought him a pint up The Fleece the other night. Him and his young lady…’