When Inigo drives on the motorway, Laura sleeps. She knows she should be a support and talk to him, in fact she would enjoy this companionable way of conversing, side by side, the eye drawn ineluctably onward through the changing landscape, but she can never stay awake for more than five minutes. When the twins were younger, their needs occasionally roused her from slumber, and she would twist round in her seat to buy their silence with fruit or drinks, or lead them through the endlessly repeated chorus of ‘Oh My Darling Clementine’ and ‘Sweet Molly Malone’ (adapted, except for the death verse, to ‘Sweet Dolly Malone’.)
However, the twins prepared for this journey with CDs and Dolly’s new mobile phone. They have books and computer games, and Laura can see from the moment they leave home and Dolly and Fred both plug their ears with headphones and their mouths with gum, that they want no part in their parents’ conversations. Inigo doesn’t care whether he talks or not, because what he wants to do is drive, as fast as is humanly possible. He sees each notch he moves up on the speedometer as a personal victory against time, and he likes this crescendo of speed to build up through stirring highlights of epic opera – Aïda or The Ring Cycle are both a spur for Inigo’s driving.
Laura dozes, floating in lovely time off. Today has been nerve-wracking. Inigo, having seen Dolly off to a disco the night before, decided to use strobe lighting to illustrate the story of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Even an hour in the studio, with the blackout blinds drawn and light pulsing, not to mention the incessant repetition of the opening aria from the opera, left Laura with eye strain and a bad temper. Thankfully, at the end of that time, Inigo pinged up all the blinds and said, ‘This doesn’t work,’ before removing himself to the computer for an afternoon stress-busting on Super Mario Karts.
Working with Inigo, in the same space all day, every day, talking, arguing, and endlessly listening can be suffocating. Sometimes at dusk, Laura leaves the twins glued to the television and goes out for a walk, gulping air, her ears singing with the peaceful joy of not being needed. This walk, through the winding down late-afternoon streets, past shops closing and restaurants opening, lit, at this time of year, by the friendly glow of amber streetlights, could become a necessity if only she had a dog. She must persuade Inigo.
Half-asleep in the car, she turns to look at him now. His profile is not encouraging. It is almost dark outside, but the glow of the instruments on the dashboard cast a green light up towards Inigo’s jaw, highlighting the dark pits of new bristle growth on his chin and up towards his ears. Inigo’s mouth is slightly open; it has been pursed to whistle disapproval at the low-slung sports car which ricocheted past a few moments ago, and soon it will be folded neatly shut, but right now Laura can see his teeth, and the set of his mouth, pulled back in perpetual, slight grimace. Inigo’s nose is beautiful, and in profile is the best way to see it. Face on, his eyes are too close to it, but in profile the nose sweeps out of his brow without indentation at the level of his arching eyebrows. It sweeps nobly on, but midway is interrupted by a bump, which should mar the perfection, but in fact serves only to enhance the fine length and proportion of the nose.
It is a boxer’s nose, and it made Laura weak and breathless with longing when she first saw Inigo seventeen years ago, having bolted into his exhibition in Mercer Street in New York to escape a sudden summer downpour. Laura had been in New York for a year, studying film at NYU. She had another year to go, and she was missing home like crazy. She even missed her brother. Laura was on her way home from a class on creating the defining moment in a plot. She felt low and despondent; New York was breathless and humid, her apartment had no air conditioning, and her workload was greater than she could bear. She had no one to talk to about it, her fellow students were all so determined, so untrammelled by crises of confidence. Laura had a sneaking feeling this course was not for her. But what was? The humidity today was extreme; she held her hair up as she walked to let any small movement in the air play on her neck. She had a headache and was halfway home before she realised she’d left her coat in the seminar room. A clap of thunder and the hiss of summer rain invaded her thoughts, and she ran for shelter.
Inigo Miller was twenty-one that summer, and still wondering what on earth he was meant to say to justify his being here. He felt a fraud, but was in fact a success. His degree show had been lifted straight from art school and transported here, and it had opened with a queue around the block. Jack Smack, a creepy British agent, had offered to represent him, and since selling his soul to this whip-thin smooth talker, Inigo had hardly slept or stopped to draw breath, so constant was the round of interviews, meetings and exhibitions. Inigo made the most of every minute, convinced that he would be exposed as no big deal and shipped home at any moment.
Now he was talking to a smiling brace of Japanese art agents who smoothed their hair and nodded fervently when Inigo said he was thinking of taking his show to Tokyo.
‘I want to have everything turned upside down. To re-examine it all from the perspective of another culture will be fascinating. I like to challenge my own perceptions,’ he was saying, his tongue in his cheek. He didn’t take it all so seriously then. Planning an escape as soon as possible, he glanced longingly at the door and saw Laura. In fact, he saw the back of Laura standing in the open doorway, smoothing the rain from her hair.
‘Excuse me,’ Inigo said to the Japanese. ‘There’s someone I—’ He didn’t finish his sentence because he had already gone. It was late June, and the hot streets streamed and steamed from this torrent of rain, and the smell of wet leaves hung in the air at the door of the gallery, making Laura shiver with nostalgia for her parents’ garden and her childhood.
Inigo stood behind Laura, admiring her shoulders, her hair – everything about the back of her suggested the front would be wonderful. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her, and he was afraid she might suddenly dart out into the rain again, and be gone without him seeing her face. The only thing to do was to go out and then come back towards the door and hope that if he smiled and said, ‘Hello,’ a conversation might develop.
Laura, glooming in the rain and relishing feeling sorry for herself, paid little attention when someone brushed past her to leave the gallery. But then he came back, presumably because he had forgotten something, and Laura looked up from her contemplation of the torrent swirling by the kerb to see Inigo, wet but smiling and suggesting hopefully: ‘Hello, would you like to come and have tea with my Japanese agent?’
‘What sort of Japanese agent?’ Laura asked, smiling now, unconsciously reaching up to unknot her hair, shaking it onto her shoulders, unable to stop herself gazing at him.
‘Successful, I hope,’ said Inigo, grinning delightedly; it was easier than he had thought to speak, now he had started, and she was better, even better than he had dared hope from seeing only the back of her beautiful neck. Best of all, he hadn’t missed his moment and watched her walk away without ever seeing her face. She was here, with him now. She was part of his success.
In the car Laura wonders if it’s worth broaching the dog thing, and decides against it. Inigo is sulking anyway, partly because he had not wanted to spend the weekend at Hedley’s house, and partly because Laura still hasn’t got a new washing machine, despite the old one having broken five days ago. The fact that one is to be delivered in the middle of next week in no way placates him, nor do the neat piles of laundry in his drawers and cupboards. Inigo is a control freak, and no washing machine to him equals a worrying decline in standards at home and the eruption of chaos.
Laura is half-relieved that none of Inigo’s clothes were caught in the turquoise flood which killed the washing machine – he would be unspeakably angry. It would almost be worth it though, for the entertainment value of seeing him in frivolous beach blue. Inigo does not like to wear bright colours. Indeed, he only really likes dark green, and the odd streak of grey. He hates patterns, and Laura has come to notice that there is an element of Star Trek in the close-cut way he wears his clothes. She suspects that this predilection for polo-necks is fostered by his view of the low standards at home. Inigo knows that if he had shirts, he would not be able to persuade anyone to iron them for him. He has no intention of ironing them himself, so it is not worth having shirts. With some effort, Laura withdraws from her musings about Inigo’s laundry. It is time her mind became better occupied, but with what? For years now she has been looking after her family’s interests and has forgotten how to have any of her own.
Inigo turns off the motorway and dark descends suddenly around them.
‘When will we be there, Dad?’ shouts Fred, his voice raised too loud because he cannot gauge it with his music blasting in his ears.
‘Another hour,’ Inigo answers, not hoping or expecting that Fred will hear him. He glances at Laura, but cannot see if she is awake in the soft dimness. He sighs and accelerates through the night towards Norfolk.
Laura had never expected that Norfolk, so much a part of her childhood, would become an important place to her again in her life. If she had thought about it at all, she would have imagined that her uncle’s house, Crumbly Hall, would be sold when he died, and the place where she had spent her school summer holidays would become no more than a memory. She and Hedley both left for America before they were twenty, never thinking of looking back. Fifteen years later, Peter Sale died aged eighty-five and Hedley came back, leaving his university teaching in America, to live at Crumbly and run the small farm there. He thought he would just do it for a year or two. An outdoor life on the north Norfolk coast seemed a bleak prospect for a newly divorced academic, but the change of pace was what he needed, and life lived according to the seasons suited him, and even soothed him as he struggled through the aftermath of his marriage. After four years at Crumbly, Hedley recognised that he would stay, and that he loved it now in a way he could never have imagined loving a place. Only Inigo’s lack of enthusiasm stops Laura visiting him there more often.
Hedley sees the headlights approaching along the drive, swooping up and down, raking spindly branches with their gleam then diving down into ruts and potholes. He hovers inside the front door, not wanting to appear overeager by going out to greet them, but unable to return to the sitting room where Tamsin is watching an unsuitable film.
‘There’s no such thing as unsuitable,’ she snarled at him earlier, when he tried to suggest changing channels to the programme on the fruit flies and their habits. ‘And anyway,’ she added, having watched five stony minutes of the nature programme, ‘your fruit flies are having sex and God knows what else. I don’t think you’ve got a leg to stand on as far as suitable goes.’
Hopping from foot to foot in the hall, attended by Diver, the Labrador, Hedley empathises with the dog’s single-note whining, and can almost believe that his own ears, like Diver’s, are cocked towards the door. He wouldn’t be surprised to find himself drooling. It is lonely here in Norfolk with only a taciturn teenager and a devoted dog for company. Hedley never envisaged himself as a single man, but since his failed affair with a neighbour, he has been on his own, and quite honestly, he can’t imagine anything changing now. Reflecting that it is time he got out more and spent some time with adults instead of pandering to Tamsin and complaining to Diver, Hedley opens the door to his sister and her family.
‘Inigo, Laura. Lovely to see you. Come in, come in.’
Laura hugs her brother, breathing deep as she steps away, loving the woodsmoke in the air, the hint of wet dog and the determined wafts of sweetness from a winter flowering jasmine scrambling up and over a plant stand in front of the fireplace in the hall.
‘Hello, Hedley. It’s lovely to be back. I’d forgotten how much I love the smell here, and it never changes.’ Laura smiles, taking off her coat and walking through towards the kitchen.
Inigo, behind her with a bag of groceries, mutters, ‘I hope you bought some wine, Laura. Hedley never has anything decent to drink here, and I could do with something now.’
Hedley stays to greet Fred and Dolly, jumping back as if scalded when he puts his hands out to hug Dolly and encounters a slice of midriff complete with a diamanté tattoo below her belly button which reads STIFF.
God, she’s becoming one too, he thinks despairingly. And last time I saw her she had plaits and still liked damming streams in the wood.
Dolly, chewing gum, her headphones dangling around her neck, dribbling a tune, gives him a long, expressionless look which makes Hedley want to shrivel to the size of a screwed-up pocket handkerchief.
‘Hello, Uncle Hedley,’ she says in the same lobotomised monotone with which Tamsin addresses him.
‘Tamsin’s in there.’ Hedley points to the sitting room. Dolly spits her gum into the palm of her hand and throws it into the jasmine plant pot before vanishing into the sitting room. Hedley turns to Fred, braced for more of the same treatment, and is unnerved to find his nephew giving him a friendly smile as he crouches to stroke Diver.
‘Hi, Uncle Hedley,’ he says cheerily. ‘Diver’s looking well.’
‘Yeeess,’ says Hedley slowly, staring at him, fascinated by his civility, slowly warming beneath the uncritical expression on Fred’s face. ‘In fact, he’s just become a father. I’ve been up at a friend’s house looking at the puppies this evening,’
‘NO!’ bellows Inigo, who has removed his jacket to reveal a snug green polo-neck in very soft, lightweight fleece material which reveals every bulge of his biceps and chest and makes him look as if he has just been beamed into the dimly lit medieval hall at Crumbly from Planet Zog. ‘On no account are you to take Fred to look at those puppies, Hedley. I will not have it.’ Inigo paces about the room brushing invisible hairs off his sleeves and glancing venomously at Diver. ‘They’ll all shed hair like that one there. How can you stand it, Hedley?’
Hedley ignores this, recognising it as Inigo’s usual combative arrival. He will settle down when he has had a drink, but until then will prowl and scowl and find fault. Rather like a dog arriving at another dog’s house, Hedley thinks, amused.
Fred assumes a hurt expression. ‘Dad, I hadn’t even asked to see them, I hadn’t even said one single word. I don’t even know what kind of dog the mother is …’
In the kitchen, Laura leans against the Aga, enjoying the massaging effect its warmth has on her back. This Aga has been part of her life since she and Hedley first came here aged thirteen, dispatched from Cambridge by parents turned tight-lipped by the incessant volume of music and the ceaseless litany invoked by Laura and Hedley which scarcely varied from, ‘I’m bored, when will you stop working and take us somewhere?’
Michael and Anne Sale, both immersed in academic research and uninterested in entertaining their children, sent them to Michael’s half-brother in rural Norfolk. At the station they made a show of pretending to smile bravely, but in fact they were beaming in relief as they kissed their offspring and waved them off on the train, shouting down the platform, ‘Make sure Peter notices that you’ve arrived, and always offer to help.’ Then the pair of them returned to the library and their papers, the burden of the children a weight lifted now for ten weeks.
As their teenage status demanded, Laura and Hedley sulked as far as the first change on the train, but then they looked at each other and simultaneously grinned.
‘We’re having a new life now,’ Laura whispered.
‘We can do what we like,’ agreed Hedley.
Laura cannot forget her first sighting of the house. And every time she comes back, no matter what the time of day or year, or the state of her mind, the first moment of seeing it gives the same lift to her spirits. It was a swooning July day, with flooding sunlight spilling across the fields and hedgerows as they drove from the station. Bumping down the drive, grey flint walls and mullioned windows reflecting wisps of cloud became visible through the dense foliage of the avenue of lime trees. And then the sea. Laura gasped as she saw its denim blue stretching beyond the house, seeming to be on top of it, but in fact separated from the gardens by a mile or more of marshland.
Uncle Peter must have been there with them, but Laura cannot recall him ever dispensing discipline or even food. Indeed, only vast effort and the assistance of a curling old photograph on the kitchen mantelpiece conjures his face for her at all, although she remembers his tall gaunt figure, leaning on a stick, his dog at his heels, gazing out across the early morning sea.
The mumbling kitchen radio bleeps the hour, and Laura pulls herself away from the Aga. Some raw potatoes have been left suggestively in a saucepan on the side. Laura pushes the pan across to the hot plate and reaches the photograph down. Peter was a mild man, an academic like Laura’s father although he had chosen botany rather than history. Sixty-three when Laura and Hedley first went to stay with him, he had never married. His passion was reserved for bird and plant life, and for walking on the marshes beyond his garden, where he would spend all day weaving through the maze of silver-laced creeks with the certain step of one who has known every ditch and treacherous drain all his life.
From the beginning, Peter left the children to do as they pleased, and in doing so gave them his house to love. They explored every corner and cupboard, sneezing dust motes off old stacked books and clothes, bringing life and youth and new layers of chaos into the neglected rooms. Making it their own. Even now, Laura opens cupboards in the kitchen and knows what is in them with more certainty than she does in her parents’ house. At Crumbly she and Hedley ran their own lives, ate what they wanted to when they wanted to, and acted out every adolescent whim they could there. Filling the kettle now, Laura remembers turning the kitchen sink scarlet with Crazy Colour hair dye when she re-fashioned Hedley’s schoolboy quiff into a Mohican for a punk party in the village hall.
The windows glisten with steam as the potatoes boil and Laura doesn’t notice them burn at the bottom. She was so happy here in her teens, able to be herself, not pretending to be an academic like her parents and Hedley. It must be good for Tamsin growing up here; on behalf of her own children, Laura envies her.
‘Come on, let’s eat. I’m starving.’ Inigo marches in, swinging a bottle of wine. He opens it, pours glasses for himself, Hedley and Laura, then stands fidgeting and ostentatiously looking at his watch to draw more attention to the lateness of supper. Despite his passion for cooking, Inigo never interferes in the kitchen at Crumbly. It’s too medieval for him; doing anything culinary in the cavernous space makes him feel like a vassal, not a chef.
Laura feels like that all the time, but doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning. She drains the potatoes, ignoring the eager faces of Fred and Hedley hovering keenly like the Labrador Diver. She remembers her teenage culinary attempts at Crumbly. The meals were experimental and infrequent; at thirteen her cooking repertoire consisted largely of boiled eggs and cakes she liked to marble pink, purple and green with the small bottles of evil-looking food colouring the Crumbly village shop supplied. It has to be said, it hasn’t increased much. The chicken pie she is placing on the table came out of Hedley’s freezer ready cooked, and that’s how Laura likes it. She calls Dolly and Tamsin through to supper, and everyone sits down at the long oak kitchen table.
‘It’s so nice to be back here,’ Laura says, raising her glass to Hedley. He smiles, relaxing now the arrival is over.
‘Cheers,’ he says, slopping wine as he chinks his glass against Fred’s water tumbler, and then Dolly’s before reaching across the table to Inigo and Tamsin and his sister.
Home with their parents in Cambridge had seemed small, the rules petty and the city hard, grey and implacable after Laura and Hedley’s summers in Norfolk, where the days were their own and the horizons stretched forever with no rules or boundaries to get in the way.
‘Do you remember how awful it was going back to school after the summers here?’ Laura asks Hedley, when everyone has got their food and is eating. ‘And how we begged Mum and Dad until they let us come for Christmas, and it was the year there was that incredible snow.’ Laura’s eyes shine; she has her elbows on the table, leaning towards Hedley, who is looking puzzled. ‘You must remember,’ she urges. ‘We went on a tractor to see the Sex Pistols play in Cromer.’
Dolly and Tamsin are drooped over their plates, shoulders hunched, hair flopping forwards to make two curtains, one rusty red, the other matt brown like stout. Dolly toys with a pea, but not keenly enough to put it into her mouth. Like Tamsin, her body language indicates torpor and boredom. However, when the girls hear the word ‘sex’, they both suddenly sit up, push their hair away from their faces and with pleased expressions begin to eat the chicken pie.
‘Cool,’ says Fred. ‘Did they sing “God save the Queen”?’
‘I saw them on Rock Dinosaurs,’ says Dolly. ‘Mum, did you get the dead one’s autograph?’ she asks, back to her usual animated self now.
Tamsin struggles to retain her sense of separation. ‘The Sex Pistols are really rank,’ she hisses. Hedley roars with laughter.
‘That’s exactly what they are, or rather were – you’re so right,’ he beams. ‘And Uncle Peter thought so too. He had to wait through the whole evening inside the Town Hall where the gig was, because it would have taken too long to get home and then come back for us again.’
‘I can’t think why he didn’t go to a pub,’ muses Laura. ‘But then—’
‘I think we’re all past caring now, aren’t we?’ says Inigo sulkily, and Tamsin, with her radar sense for discord, looks at him and then at Laura with interest. Laura sighs, and the sigh becomes a yawn and then another sigh as if she is meditating. She gets up to break the pattern and clears the plates away.
Inigo carefully removes his hand from the neck of the wine bottle he has been clasping. He has positioned the corkscrew so it is poised like a ballerina on the rim. But before anyone can exclaim at his brilliance, Laura reaches across past him for Fred’s plate and knocks the corkscrew flying.
‘Mum,’ hisses Dolly. ‘Dad had to think his way into that and you just knocked it down.’
Laura swallows her impatience ruefully, recognising that it is best to maintain an equilibrium even though every sense rails against it. She gives an apologetic half-smile, but Inigo just grins.
‘Don’t worry, I can do it again.’
Hedley has been preoccupied for the past few minutes; then his brow clears. ‘Oh, I’ve got it!’ he exclaims. ‘The drilling starts tomorrow, there are trees to plant, and we’ve also got some men with ferrets coming. You’ll like that, Fred, I think, won’t you?’
‘Ferrets, great,’ says Fred, pushing back his chair and feeding most of his chicken pie to Diver.
‘Not ferrets,’ groans Inigo at the same moment. ‘Honestly, Hedley, I don’t know why you put yourself through all these charades. Drilling your fields, irrigating the crops, planting endless trees, worrying about rabbits. What is the point?’ The twins and Tamsin, eyeing Hedley and Inigo scornfully, slide out from their places and troop back towards the television. Laura wishes they would stay and talk, but cannot see any reason why they should.
Hedley interrupts Inigo. ‘You’re a fine one to ask “What is the point?”. Your work wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny with that as a criterion, would it? I mean, what a waste of bloody energy to go poncing around the world making bloody paper chains. I don’t see the point of contemporary art. It doesn’t make you think – in fact it’s an excuse not to.’
Inigo ignores this unhelpful interruption and continues, ‘You may as well accept that your role as a farmer is non-existent. What you are is a custodian of a small part of Norfolk. One day you will be bought by a rich Japanese businessman who will pay you a salary in order that he can come and take photographs of you going through the motions of farming. That’s about as good as it will ever get, and that, I guarantee, is the future.’
Hedley pours wine into his and Inigo’s glasses and looks at his brother-in-law with mild dislike, adjusting his look, when he remembers Inigo isn’t technically his brother-in-law, to one of stronger disdain.
‘I don’t see why you can’t accept that there is a valid existence to be had in rural England,’ he says, determinedly keeping his tone well modulated and reasonable, as Laura has instructed him to do in his dealings with Tamsin, but is unable to resist a provocative little jibe at the end: ‘And I haven’t heard your defence for your way of life either,’ he adds.
Inigo’s eyes glitter and Laura isn’t sure if it’s the wine or the success of Hedley’s baiting.
‘I don’t have to defend contemporary art,’ he says loftily. ‘Art has always been pilloried by philistines and it always will be. That doesn’t ever stop the creative process. No artist will be put down by detractors.’
Hedley is astonished and quietly amused. ‘I must say, Inigo, you are quite something. I don’t know when I was last called a philistine – I’m a bloody Classics professor, in case you’d forgotten.’
‘Oh, don’t start this one you two,’ Laura says wearily. ‘You sound like Laurel and Hardy, you really do.’
‘It beats your saunter down Memory Lane,’ says Inigo defiantly, sounding so like a spoilt toddler that Laura wants to slap him. Inigo in giant baby mode is maddening, and unfortunately it is one of his most frequently adopted poses. Look at him now, bottom lip out, scowling as he pushes the debris of supper away from his place setting, where he has assembled a handful of candles, removed from the many candelabra placed around the hall. Lighting the first one he warms the base of the next until the wax is tacky and receptive, then presses the lit wick of the first into it, and so on until he has one long candle. Laura keeps her head turned towards her brother, ostensibly discussing Tamsin, but she can see Inigo out of the corner of her eye, and has to close her eyes and take several deep breaths, which she exhales in a ribbon, to stop exasperation spilling over within her. Thank God some of the yoga has sunk in.
Gathering her thoughts to the internal rhythm of ‘I must focus on Tamsin, I must focus on Tamsin,’ Laura makes her cupped hands into blinkers and leans towards Hedley. ‘Tell me properly what’s been happening,’ she says.
Wrestling with the corkscrew and another bottle of wine, which Inigo, with a patronising smile, removes from him and opens, Hedley explains.
‘Tamsin will be fifteen in April.’ Laura nods. Hedley glances at her doubtfully, but her expression is sympathetic, and in direct contrast with Inigo’s scowl, so to irritate him more than anything, Hedley launches in with detail. ‘She’s been telephoning her mother to discuss her birthday. It isn’t for a few weeks, but Sarah’s been so off-hand.’
Inigo leans back in his chair, balancing it on its two back legs and stretches, yawning. Hedley ignores him. ‘The calls got off to a bad start when Sarah appeared to have forgotten who Tamsin was. By chance I came into the kitchen and found her sobbing by the telephone. I thought she must have had bad news, and I picked up the receiver. Sarah was on the other end saying, “Jasmine who?” and sounding lobotomised. I got rid of her and spent an hour convincing Tamsin that her mother was deaf and dim now she was nearly fifty, and should have an ear lift as well along with the soul cleansing she was enjoying in Turkey.’ He gulps wine, rubbing his eyes. ‘She has spoken to her now, but she resents her mother for having left her. Her form mistress at school says she needs someone to talk to about makeup and boyfriends and whatever else teenage girls obsess about.’ Hedley coughs, to represent everything else in the teen repertoire. Laura tries to imagine him in the role of Agony Aunt and suppresses a smile.
Hedley rushes on, ‘Anyway, Tamsin says her mother is a bitch from hell and won’t let me mention her name or bring up the subject at all. And she says she wants to have a party here for her birthday, and I’ve no idea how to go about it.’ He tips his chair forwards and peers anxiously at his sister from beneath his lowered brow. He sighs. ‘She seems to hold me responsible for Sarah’s behaviour, and a lot of the time I feel that I am.’
Inigo pulls himself up from the table. ‘I think you are,’ he says. ‘Sarah would never have left you if you’d stayed in America. You should have sold this place when you inherited it. You would have bought yourself freedom, and you’d still have a wife.’
Laura glares at him and looks pointedly towards the door. ‘Inigo, just shut up, can’t you? You don’t know anything about Sarah, or about Hedley. If you did, you would remember that they were hopelessly unsuited, and splitting up was a huge relief for both of them. And to sell Crumbly would have been heartbreaking, as well as stupid. Think of the capital gains. Anyway, that was four years ago, and we’ve moved on.’
Inigo leans his giant candle against the Aga and prepares to leave the kitchen, but cannot resist a parting shot. ‘Well, I think your problems start and end with this derelict heap of rubble, and the idea that its land pays for it is absurd. No one since Marie-Antoinette has got away with toy farming.’
‘Your candle will melt if you leave it there,’ warns Hedley.
Inigo grins wickedly. ‘I know, that’s the point,’ he says. ‘I’m off to bed so I can be up early to have a look at this ferret frenzy. I’ll send the children up so you two can carry on bonding for as long as you want.’
Just to annoy him, Laura blows him a kiss. Hedley shoots him a suspicious glance, but Inigo is sweetness and light now, smiling benevolence at bedtime.
Laura looks after him wearily. ‘He’s good at making up,’ she says into Hedley’s silence, and then, feeling more is needed, ‘I do love him, you know.’
She sighs. Hedley sighs too, then looking across at her says, ‘It’s a pity, I always wished you’d married Guy myself. Then you could have come back and lived here too.’
There is a silence. Laura laughs first. ‘I think I’d better go to bed,’ she says. ‘Inigo won’t like facing rural noises on his own at night – he’s a real wimp about stuff like that.’
One of the things that Laura had found most attractive about Inigo when she met him was his passion for an urban existence. She didn’t know he loathed the countryside though. He was in New York selling himself and he was loving it. Laura’s small apartment on the Lower East Side was shared with a boy from Seattle training to be an opera singer and a Spanish hairdresser. Laura became a part-time waitress to subsidise her course. She knew no one save her fellow students but she could be who she wanted to be, and she thought she’d never go back to provincial life again. Meeting Inigo at the point where she wanted to give up and go home changed everything. The art world fascinated her, Inigo drew her into it, and gave her a role she enjoyed. Now though, leaning out of the bathroom window, watching the stars and breathing a shock of cold air, she realises that Hedley is drawing her back to Norfolk.