15

I watched Carmen return from Newmarket in the BMW. Driver didn’t open the door for her. She seemed angry. She slammed the car door. Driver drove off briskly. Then Carmen’s key wouldn’t turn in her front door. She stood there for a second or so, apparently puzzled and undecided.

Then the door was opened from inside, and there stood Paul, her original flatmate; his great boots were already shredding her delicate rugs; her window was broken; the front door was peeling and a milk bottle had been broken on the step.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in alarm.

‘I live here,’ he said.

‘You don’t,’ she said.

‘I’m bigger than you,’ he said.

‘I’ll call the police,’ said Carmen, but Paul said, ‘I’m a friend of your brother and he’s asked me to stay, and it’s his house as much as yours.’

She had to concede that this was true. It was their parents’ house. She had even taken and spent the balance between her mother’s cheque and the cost of the house, some three thousand irreplaceable pounds. Carmen went through to her quaint little living room, which still had its shop windows, large and curved, and found it full of cigarette smoke and the smell of beer and Stephen reading The Sun with his boots on the white lace cloth she’d thrown over the sofa.

‘Hi, sis,’ said Stephen. ‘Well, if you’ve got it, flaunt it!’ for her betting-slip modesty vest was dropping. She hitched it up. And there her brother was, already a fixture: he’d been thrown out of college for organising a riot on a local housing estate – not even a political riot but the kind which is a cover-up for a mass exercise in looting. He said he was sick of college anyway; he had lost the knack of maths; they said it happened sometimes. So he’d come home to think about his future. Driver works fast when he has to: ask anyone.

In Landsfield Crescent everything appeared to be tranquil. Mavis dozed by the TV; Alan fidgeted with a Hornby engine — he had resigned from the ambulance service as Mavis’s practice became busier and he now used the garage for his new absorbing hobby, model trains. Angela for once had no visitors and in Laura’s house the children were sound asleep, Kubrick goggled drowsily in his tank, and Laura made her father and her husband cups of coffee. She was nothing if not domestic.

Kim said, ‘How about me going to the off-licence for a bottle of wine?’ to which Woodie replied, ‘Not for me, thanks. Once you get into that habit you end up an alcoholic,’ and Kim said, ‘How about you, Laura?’ and she said, ‘I’m far too pregnant to drink,’ to which Kim replied, ‘I feel like putting you two in an old folks’ home. I’d go over to see Angela, but I wouldn’t want to queer your pitch, Woodie.’

‘Angela!’ Woodie said, startled, but whether he was startled because Angela’s name came out of the blue, or because he didn’t want Kim to visit her, it would be hard to say.

‘I’ll go to the pub instead,’ said Kim, and Laura had the same feeling in the pit of her stomach she’d had the day Kim had asked her to feed Kubrick because he, Kim, was leaving home, ‘though frankly I think if I went over to Angela I’d be doing everyone a favour.’

And Kim left the house, slamming the door so that Sara woke up with a fright. Laura just sat and stared at Woodie, but Woodie avoided her gaze and went upstairs to put Sara back to sleep, taking a very long time about it. The sensation in the pit of Laura’s stomach turned to a pain. The baby was one day overdue.

‘I was going to tell you about Angela,’ said Woodie, ‘but I thought you might take it wrong. Sometimes when you’re out gadding about she comes over and keeps me company. She wants me to fit out her van – you know, shelves, sinks and so on. She’s going to start a mobile sandwich business. Take it round the development sites. She doesn’t just sit about, that one.’

Laura, from experience, felt as if her waters were about to break and went to the bathroom. They did. She mopped everything up and went back to Woodie. ‘And Kim came in one day,’ Woodie continued his confession, ‘while we had our heads together over a drawing and came to the wrong conclusion. It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to it. Your father’s a mean old bugger and if he isn’t causing trouble he isn’t happy. I’ve got you, Laura, why should I want anyone else?’

She wished he hadn’t said that: the answer seemed so obvious. What was she but a baby machine? Who’d want that? Not even Woodie. She hadn’t even considered running a mobile sandwich bar; it had never entered her head. Things like that just didn’t.

‘I think I’d better get to hospital,’ she said. ‘I have a feeling this is going to be very quick. But Kim’s out, so there’s no one to baby-sit. I’d better go by taxi.’

Woodie said he’d get Angela to baby-sit, but Laura wept and said no thank you, so Woodie was annoyed with Laura, and in the end Mavis was called in. All the phones in the neighbourhood were out of order (the embryo bypass at the back of Landsfield Crescent wreaked havoc with all mains systems) so they couldn’t call an ambulance and Alan insisted on taking Laura and Woodie to the hospital, and going too, not just lending the car, in case she needed delivering on the way. Mavis suffered some kind of frisson while this was going on and when she spoke it was with Count Capinski’s voice.

‘Dear young lady,’ said Mavis/Count – though, God knows, she struggled hard enough to keep him in, clamping her lips shut, but he forced them open – ‘with pain and sorrow shalt thou bring forth.’ Over and over again he said it, so it was decided Woodie should stay home after all, to look after Mavis, and Laura went to hospital with Alan, who was in a rage about the reappearance of Count Capinski. As Alan rounded the corner of Landsfield Crescent and took, much too fast, the bumpy section where the earth movers had inadvertently taken up a stretch of the Winterton­Fenedge road, and replaced it (after repeated requests) in a cursory manner, Laura saw Angela running towards Woodie and her home and children, and Kim nowhere in sight. It could all hardly have been worse. What was more, Count Capinski, or Mavis, was correct in his/her prophecy.

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Long White Cloud, the serpents which had been uncoiling, ready to strike, hissed and struck and bit. Suspicion and paranoia welled up in Annie: she gave voice to them and in so doing spoiled everything. It may just have been that Annie was so hungry: she had tried on the wedding dress and although Mrs McLean assured her that it fitted beautifully, and was even a little loose on her, Annie could feel it clinging so around her ribs she could hardly breathe in it. The white-to-cream heavy silk fabric had the agreeable patina of age: it spread gracefully over wire hoops; the neck was scooped so low that she couldn’t possibly wear a bra: another reason not to eat. ‘A McLean bride,’ said Mrs McLean, admiring her. ‘You’ve turned into a real beauty since you arrived. That’s our Tim, I expect, and some good fresh air and exercise. Don’t get too thin, though. Enough’s enough.’

But Annie looked in the mirror at a skin hopelessly reddened and toughened by sun and wind and at the muscles she hated to see in her arms and thought well, if that’s what the McLeans see as beauty, I certainly don’t.

At night Tim would feel her ribs and say Annie, you’re getting so sharp I could cut myself, and she’d feel cunning and think he was in the plot to keep her fat, weatherbeaten and ugly.

Carmen and Laura weren’t coming to the wedding because they couldn’t afford it, and Tim wouldn’t pay for their tickets. Yet he could buy a new Landrover, couldn’t he, and five hundred more sheep, which turned out to have some kind of blight so the wedding was postponed; luckily her parents had open tickets, the refundable kind. What was more, Tim was now talking of setting up a bunje jumping centre at Arthur’s Pass, for when the trekkers, trackers and hikers had a spare moment, and she wondered what was going on: how did he have so much money for everything except her friends’ air fare?

It was unfortunate (I am the Lord of Luck, says Driver) that one tea time a batch of scones Annie had whipped up out of a cloud of flour, a flaking of butter, a dash of icy cold water and a drift of salt, etc. had gone into an oven, the fire of which a changing of the wind’s direction and the backdraft attendant upon it had simply blown out, so that the oven was cool. By the time the scones were baked they were hard. Annie nearly junked them but decided Mrs McLean so hated waste she had better serve them after all.

‘What’s this, Annie?’ asked Tim, ‘a scone or a rock cake?’

‘She’ll learn,’ said Mrs McLean.

‘She’d better,’ said Tim, and Jock McLean just pushed his to the side of the plate and took one of his wife’s jam tarts instead.

‘Who’s “she”?’ enquired Annie. ‘The cat’s mother or the unpaid help?’

‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ said Tim into the startled silence.

‘You might well talk about my knickers,’ said Annie, ‘since you’re in them often enough, and for free.’

They stared at her for a little.

‘Now don’t take on,’ said Mrs McLean, ‘just because you made a duff batch of scones. You worked the gluten too much.’

‘I did not so,’ said Annie, ‘work the gluten too much. The southwester started and blew out the oven. Fancy living in a place where the way the wind blows can bugger up an afternoon! At least in the hotel I got paid, and I didn’t know what my future was. Now I do. Work and more work, and hanging upside down by your feet if you’ve got a moment to spare.’

‘She’s talking about bunje jumping,’ said Tim. ‘She told me she liked it, but I don’t think she did.’

‘I am not “she”,’ said Annie. ‘I am your fiancée. At least that’s what you tell me, but I think that’s just a ruse to keep me here as a servant. I think that’s what happened to Wendy. She rumbled you lot. You overworked her to the brink of death, but she got out from under just in time. You talk about this wedding, but it never seems to happen, does it? And you can always get a refund on my parents’ tickets if I do a Wendy and scarper. And then you’ll be off back to the old country, Tim, to chat up some other girl you find laying a carpet or chopping down a tree, and tell her all about the Land of the Long White Cloud, and she’ll fall for it.’

‘My,’ said Jock McLean, ‘that was a long speech.’

‘And that’s about the longest you’ve ever made,’ said Annie.

Tim said, ‘Once a pommie always a pommie.’

Annie said, ‘What does that mean?’

Tim said, ‘Whingeing.’

Mrs McLean said, ‘You two should keep your tiffs to the bedroom, not upset everyone.’

Jock McLean said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and left the room.

Annie threw the scones, or rock cakes, across the room. They bounced. A lamb looked at her curiously and she shrieked.

‘You’re insane,’ said Tim.

Annie said, ‘There isn’t a girl in this country who’d put up with what I have to. Cheap labour, that’s all your fiancées are. I want my wages to date and my ticket home and that’s it.’

Tim said, ‘Very well then,’ and walked out of the room.

Mrs McLean said, ‘Now you’ve upset him too. And me. You have terrible thoughts and I’m glad I don’t have to put up with the inside of your head. My son loves you very much, I happen to know, and you’ve been like a daughter to me, but I think you have insulted us enough and if you go to Jock’s office he will write you out a cheque for whatever amount you think is fair.’

‘I’m so tired,’ said Annie and began to cry but Mrs McLean just shook her head and left the room as well. Really, it could not have been worse.