‘It’s lovely to be here,’ Rachel said, sounding lame and rather overpolite to her own ears. It was a feature of herself, among many others, which she did not like. Her social awkwardness, which she reminded herself was hardly surprising in the circumstances, and she should not make it worse by dwelling on it. Or on any of her so-called faults for that matter. There was nothing wrong with her, except desperately wanting to make a good impression.
‘It’s so marvellous that you could come,’ Grace Wiseman said. ‘The pleasure’s all ours. And you brought the fine weather with you. We’re well and truly blessed.’
It was a formal welcome speech, but delivered at such breakneck speed and with such warmth that the sincerity was obvious. It occurred to Rachel to wonder what she should call Ivy’s mother. Surely not Mrs Wiseman? Grace? Definitely Grace. Grace addressed most people as ‘darling’ and meant it. Grace was a name which suited her. Warm and gracious.
Grace Wiseman had been outrageously pleased to see them both, actually quivering with excitement and pleasure, beaming with joy and holding out her arms. Hugging Rachel into an embrace which smelled of baking and lavender, soap and polish, overlaid with pipe smoke, somehow exactly the mix of aromas belonging to a comfortable farmer’s wife straight out of the pages of fiction. She was not apple-cheeked; she was as brown as a plump, sun-dried raisin. The embrace was strong; Grace looked far younger than her sixty-five years, possessed the strength of a man of fifty. She had grannyish spectacles parked on her head and a vigorous amount of bulk. There was precious little resemblance to her daughter, who seemed, when they stood together, a whole foot taller, cool and willowy, even in her trademark T-shirt, jeans and trainers. The smell of Grace, the scent of a provider, nurturer, cook and cleaner, went with the confident physique. She could just as easily have smelled of diesel fuel and emerged in dungarees with a spanner in one hand. Her bare brown arms were both soft and muscled. Then there were the other surprises, adding another dimension. Her cotton shift was brilliant green, her abundant hair was a startling shade of purple, and her wrists rattled with bracelets.
‘She’s every inch the farmer’s wife and landlady,’ Ivy had explained on the way from London. ‘Only she never quite got over the hippy stage. Probably peaked in the 1960s just before I was born, and I wouldn’t put it past her to dance naked in the moonlight, even now, but you’d certainly know if she did. If you want my mother, follow the noise.’
Rachel loved her. She thought she would have killed to have a mother like this. A housewife who baked bread and biscuits, washed and ironed, thrilled to visitors and the drudgery of cooking, and in the meantime tended a garden of flowers, vegetables and herbs whilst oozing sympathy and wisdom. Watch out for homilies and homemade wine, Ivy warned. They’re her specialities.
‘They have to augment the farm income,’ she said. ‘Ma thought of that long before anyone else. Long before Common Agricultural Policies, BSE and foot and mouth. She said, if you’ve got a big house, use it. Bed and breakfast, with ambience. Only she can change the ambience at a whim. It’s been an artists’ retreat, writers’ retreat, partygoers’ paradise. Actually, it’s all her. She has to turn them away.’
‘Won’t I be taking a room that someone might have paid for?’ Rachel asked.
‘Don’t be daft. Rooms are something we have, and she does insist on having weeks off, even in the height of summer.’
Hers was a pretty room under the eaves, adjacent to Ivy’s and separated by a shared bathroom. It had a mellow wooden floor, a white rug for feet getting out of the warmth of the high bed, which was covered with a blue-and-white patchwork quilt. Fresh white towels on the iron frame of the bed, flowers in a vase and a jug of water on a folding table next to the bed.
‘She’s got the knack,’ Ivy had said. ‘She loves it.’
‘And your father?’ Rachel had asked anxiously.
‘Couldn’t give a shit. As long as he doesn’t have to part with his animals or his privacy, he’s as happy as one of his pigs. Turn right at the next junction.’
Ivy had chattered like a sparrow throughout the journey, surprising Rachel with the knowledge that she was actually nervous on both their accounts, anxious that Rachel should like what she would find at the other end, and that she, in turn, would make a good impression. As if Rachel’s opinion was vital. It touched her. As the car lurched down the narrow track towards the farm, Rachel ceased to listen and lost herself in the novelty, finding it all as beautiful as it was mysterious. Hawthorne branches flicked against the windows, making her flinch; it was like going into a tunnel marking the boundary between one country and another, but then she had felt like this in the months of utter loneliness, last year, living in a dark tunnel, bursting into sunlight only after she had met Ivy, and now this glorious fuss and juvenile excitement of being wanted. No wonder she did not quite know how to behave. It was all too much, like a surfeit of love and caring.
Grace hugged her again, those big brown arms like delicate pillows. Rachel looked towards the attic window and the blur of sunshine and wanted to turn her head from the light.
‘It’s all too much, isn’t it?’ Grace said. ‘We’re all too much. I’m so sorry. You mustn’t let us overwhelm you. But Ivy’s talked about you so much, I really was, literally, dying to meet you. You’ve done her so much good. You’re so welcome, you’ve no idea.’
Rachel stood, smiling idiotically.
Grace scrutinised the room and then made for the door. ‘Come down for tea or whatever, whenever you’re ready. I’d better get my big flat feet out of here and leave you to it. You can orientate yourself from this window, not like the paying guests. They never get beyond ground level.’
She came back and tweaked the curtain. ‘Ivy’ll be having her scout round the territory, like she will later as well, I expect. She’s like a cat. She does that whenever she comes home, even if it’s only for a couple of days. We can sometimes pin her down for a week at a time in the summer, when she stays on to help. She always has to check that things are the same. Fortunately, or unfortunately, they usually are. Right, I’m off to brew tea. Whenever you need me, just listen out. I’ll be somewhere around, you’ll always be able to hear where I am.’
She paused at the door and grinned. ‘Do you know, there’s one thing Ivy failed to mention about you, although she’s told us an awful lot. Can’t stop talking about you when she phones. She never said quite how beautiful you are. Sorry, that’s rude of me, people must tell you that all the time.’
Then she was gone, in a jangle of bracelets.
Rachel could feel the lump in her throat. It was so nice to be here. An understated description of a feeling of intense pleasure to which she hoped she would never become accustomed. Exhausting. She tried to control it by analysing why she felt as high as a kite. You are so suspicious of happiness, John used to say. You even treat contentment with contempt. Like someone with a healthy flowering plant who keeps digging it up to see if the roots are still OK. What’s wrong with you? You can’t accept the good things in life. You don’t even think they exist. She had believed everything he said, and it was only much later that she realised how little he had ever wanted to know her at all, and how small a person he had made her. And no, he had never told her she was beautiful to look at. He had simply implied there was good enough raw material to justify a makeover, and she must not blame him. It was she herself who made life so small.
It was nice to be here, she analysed, because it was a good place to be in which she would learn a little of a way of life so different from her own she may as well have travelled to Mars for the experience; and also, and more importantly, because no one had been so wonderfully pleased to see her since the second time she had met Ivy on her own, by prearrangement, outside of the classroom. On that occasion Ivy’s face had lit with such pleasure and relief that Rachel had felt as if her own mere presence was a miracle. Oh, you’ve got here, Ivy had announced, with a sigh of rapturous relief. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you. I was worried about you. I’ve been thinking about you.
Worried about me? Thinking about ME? No one had done that in a long time. It had been like music to the ears, as well as ironic. She was not the sort of person people worried about. Capable thirty-two-year-old accountants did not excite worry; if anyone in her civilised city world deserved worrying about, it was footloose, scatty, penniless, unstable and riotous Ivy, who was way too old at thirty-nine to live the squalid way she did. The other nice thing about being here, from Rachel’s point of view, was to see that her anxious concern for Ivy might have been misguided. It was a little as if she had discovered that a seemingly poor friend was really rich. Ivy might have lived like a hobo in London, but she had to be as stable as a rock, because this was her parents’ home, and she was rooted here.
In this house it was if the roots had risen to the surface and extended themselves, haphazardly, to form a shelter. The kitchen, once Rachel found it again, was a joy. A film-set kitchen, with an Aga, a huge, well-scrubbed pine table, flowers on one window ledge, an orderly row of herbs in pots on the other and a real ham hanging on a hook. All it lacked for theatrical perfection was an old dog to greet strangers with a wagging tail, and a cat curled in a basket by the stove. The heartbeat of the house, on a second look not quite so old-world conventional. There was plenty of stainless steel, too, and the walls, which might have been whitewashed, were tinted bright yellow. Homely, yet vivid also, like Grace herself.
‘The thing is,’ Grace was explaining while pouring tea from a surprisingly elegant china pot, ‘the buildings on this so-called farm are the only blasted things about it which are really organic. It was all based round the needs of the animals, you see. Human beings took second place. So the first permanent things were animal shelters. The house comes second. First a house, then bits added to a house. I think we’ve redressed the balance towards human priorities, but I’m never quite sure. I doubt if the paying guests realise they live in the old pigsties.’
Rachel realised it would take her a while to get the measure of it, and then thought it didn’t really matter if she did or she didn’t. She must stop trying to control her environment by pinning it down into a map in her head. She just wanted to be. Happy. Ivy’s descriptions had always concentrated on the land, rather than the house. Rachel felt it a disgrace in herself that she had never set foot on a real farm, except once to ask directions to somewhere else. Farming and the countryside was the stuff of myths and politics. It revealed her ignorance and innocence. She was secretly rather afraid of animals larger than a cat.
‘Will you look at yourself, Ivy!’ Grace bellowed as Ivy came ambling in through the open door. ‘You’re five minutes out of doors and you’ve already got mud on your shoes. Don’t know how you find it. It hasn’t rained in days.’ She turned to Rachel. ‘She was always like that, you know.’
Ivy grinned and bent to unlace her undoubtedly muddy shoes. Rachel could not remember ever seeing her wear anything else other than a variation on jeans and T-shirts, except for the first time they had met, when Ivy was wearing nothing at all. Even then her bare feet had been black with dust.
Ivy nudged the soiled training shoes away from the door and into an alcove next to it, containing a washing machine of industrial size and other footwear on the floor.
‘Everything goes in there,’ Grace mourned. ‘Shoes, the lot. My darling husband thinks the washer’s omnipotent, reckons it can clean boots too. He puts his in there, next to it, in hope. Where is he, by the way, Ivy? Did you find him?’
‘With the piggies,’ Ivy said. ‘Says he’s too shy to come in while he smells. And doesn’t want me giving Rachel the tour of his fiefdom. He wants to do it himself, when all’s clear and fresh in the morning, he says. What a spoilsport. He says it’s his privilege.’
They are vying for my attention, Rachel thought. I like it. Grace pushed a plate of biscuits towards her. Somehow she had expected scones, but these were small and delicate almond wafers, perfect with strong tea. The bubble of happiness remained intact.
‘So that’s where you throw your clothes,’ Grace said, nodding in the direction of the alcove. ‘Some of the paying guests have such a strange notion of what people wear in the country. They bring the whole caboodle of waxed coats and things and don’t seem to realise that all you need is a lot of old rags and a washing machine, since everything’s dirty or wet most of the time. Ivy, love, if your dad’s earmarked the livestock tour, why don’t you show Rachel the rest while the sun’s still out? Supper’ll be a couple of hours. You could take a bottle of wine to the lake.
‘Sure. It’s mad to stay indoors.’
‘What lake?’
‘It’s a pond, really,’ Grace said.
A look passed between mother and daughter which Rachel could not decipher. She looked down at her own feet, and noted with satisfaction that her old, worn sandals had certainly not been bought for the occasion.
‘You just want us out of the way,’ Ivy said.
‘I just want you out of the kitchen,’ Grace said. ‘It’s far too soon for Rachel to see what goes into the food.’
‘You didn’t tell me about a lake,’ Rachel said, as they walked down the hill. ‘Can you swim in it?’
‘Ah, yes. Your exercise of choice.’
It had seemed like an endless day, which was always on the point of beginning a new episode.
‘Here, hold this, would you? Thanks.’
Ivy handed over the bottle of wine with cork perched precariously on the rim of the neck, making it look as if it was already tipsy itself, a creature with an undersized head held at an angle. She rummaged in her canvas bag for her cigarettes, lit one and then took back command of the bottle, with another, murmured thanks. It was what they both did, Rachel realised, Ivy and Grace. Never a demand, always a request. Would you? Could you possibly? And then, thanks: a recognition that whatever you had done was not taken for granted. The charm of that was infectious.
Ivy stopped at the curve of the track, and took a deep breath. She had her carpet bag of many colours over her shoulder, the bottle of homemade wine held between two fingers of her left hand, and was using her right to puff on the cigarette.
‘I don’t usually come down here,’ she said. ‘Grace must have wanted you to see. She’s so manipulative. She hates things to be hidden.’
She had walked ahead by then, round the turn of the track, which seemed to Rachel to lead to nothing but trees, and then, on another turn, the water stretched below them, gleaming in the evening sun, a great, even stretch of lake, the shore they were approaching littered with shrubs, the far side flanked by dense woods. It shimmered calmly with reflected colour, the foliage mirrored in the water in shades of gold to olive to dense, hungry green against the further bank. It took Rachel’s breath away. She simply followed Ivy’s expert steps down the side of the overgrown track, right to the edge of the water. They were not entirely alone. Two skinny kids were stuffing towels into a bag, shivering as they left on foot. A swimming place should have attracted far more than these on a hot evening, but they were all.
‘It’s usually deserted,’ Ivy said. ‘There’s no road to it, only a path.’
Rachel sat down suddenly. It felt like her own decision, but Ivy had sat first. Big bunches of hay grass, natural resting places close to the edge.
‘Oh, Ivy,’ Rachel whispered. ‘Why would you keep quiet about this? This is heaven. I’d have come for this alone. Water magics me. Even a bath.’
‘Like I said, I don’t come here so much myself,’ Ivy said.
She pulled out the cork from the bottle, produced the two glasses which had clinked together in her bag all the way here, balanced them on the tufty ground and poured. It was elderflower, described earlier by Grace as a thin thing with a mean punch, delicious if you wanted to drink the flavour of hay. Rachel sipped. From the woodland side of the lake four swans appeared, as if they had been waiting: two portentous adults, followed by two cygnets, sauntering across the lake, mirrored in it, in a regal procession.
‘According to Irish legend, there was a king whose second wife was so jealous of his daughters that she used her powers to turn the girls into swans,’ Ivy said. ‘The spell was incomplete, as all spells are, so they were left with the ability to sing, and sing they did. The song enticed suitors and friends, and in the end the stepmother was killed, for her sins. I like that story. Only fucking swans don’t sing. Not ever.’
She pulled on another cigarette, pointed again.
‘See that one, over there? That’s my girl. The most beautiful of the tribe. She can sing if she wants, I bet. I don’t believe much, but I do believe that a girl can be turned into a swan. Like the daughters of Lir. I always wanted to be turned into a swan when I was a child. Shame it never happened.’
‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t believe in a place like this,’ Rachel said. She shuffled to sit close to Ivy. Their thighs touched, companionably. Shared warmth. From doubtful beginnings the wine grew better by the mouthful. The grass tickled her calves. Rachel felt as if she was floating free, suspended between the water and the sky.
‘I suppose you shouldn’t believe in myths and legends, except when tempted,’ Ivy said. ‘And you know me and temptation. Always give in.’
‘Is that why you don’t come here first when you come home? In case you succumb to the lure of legend? Big old bruiser like you?’
Ivy shook her head, violently. She had tough blonde hair which looked as if it had been hacked with scissors rather than styled. Hair which had been bleached and tinted, permed and ignored, and finally left to grow into a thatch.
‘No. I don’t avoid that. I leave it until last, because …’
‘Because what?’
Rachel watched the white swans fading into the darkness of shadow. Ivy lit another of the hand-rolled cigarettes she kept in a battered tin.
‘Because this was where my daughter drowned.’
The sun was sinking lower in the sky; the outline of the woods was blurred. Nothing was as silent as it seemed. There was a myriad of noises, the sound of water, the calling of birds over the trees, the slight, audible movement of the long grass. Rachel did not know if it was the beauty of the place, the sounds or the announcement which made her want to cry. She felt an absurd sense of disappointment, and hated herself for her own selfishness. Ivy plucked a grass and chewed the end.
‘Sorry for springing that one on you. I know I told you about it. Child, children, marriage, death and breakdown. I just didn’t tell you where it happened.’
‘I thought she drowned in the sea.’
Ivy shook her head. ‘No. Here. Yards from home. Don’t let it poison the lake for you. You must come here and swim whenever you want. It’s wonderfully safe now.’ She touched Rachel’s hand. ‘I didn’t tell you the details,’ she went on, lightly, ‘because, first of all, it’s a lot to burden anyone with, and I thought I’d burdened you with enough.’
‘You don’t burden me,’ Rachel said, equally lightly. ‘You’ve brought colour and meaning into my otherwise monochrome existence and I want to know everything about you. I’ve told you everything about me. Knowing stuff isn’t a burden, it’s a privilege.’
‘Do people ever tell one another everything?’ Ivy said. ‘Especially if they love one another.’
Then, suddenly, she was laughing. ‘There, I’ve said it. I love you. What an utterly scandalous state of affairs. What a fucking admission. Two straight women, crazy about one another. But seriously, dear, I didn’t tell you all about Cassie, and how and where she died, because I can’t trust myself to tell you the truth. I no longer know it, you see. So, if you really want to know, ask my mother.’
Rachel nodded.
‘And then you can ask my father about the lake. There’s quite a history. He’d love to tell it. They both love to talk. But for serious swimming, dearest, we get in your car and go to the sea.’
The swans disappeared into the deep shadow of the woods. Rachel wanted them to come back.
‘They were so different, my two kids,’ Ivy said. ‘Cassie loved it here. My son hated it, probably in self-defence, but then he hated everything except his father, poor mite.’
‘Was he here too? How did he react, oh, poor boy …’
‘React? With the indifference of childhood, I hope. I really don’t know for sure. I was absolutely out of it. Incapable of motherhood. Post-heroin fucked up for years, and then it was all too late.’
Her tone was still light. The air was still warm.
‘All for the best, probably,’ Ivy said, without rancour. ‘He was better off without me. I don’t much like men, especially young ones. Shall we amble home? I could eat a horse.’
She was always hungry. Rachel was torn between two tempting prospects, moving towards food with a belly so empty it wanted to crawl, and staying where they were. Hearing more, not wanting to ask, waiting to be led.
‘Do we have to?’
Ivy was smiling. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, Rachel Doe? You have to learn to do whatever you like and not hesitate about it. But I must warn you, my father likes to talk and can be a bit of a bore.’
‘Wait,’ Rachel said, ‘until you meet mine.’