As promised, Hedley is back the next morning, unusually smart in a suit, a red shirt and a tie with sunflowers all over it. Tamsin is with him, also very dolled up, although seemingly for a different, more retro occasion as her outfit consists of a crocheted silver mini-skirt, a purple fluffy coat, and knee-high pink suede boots.
‘Is Inigo back yet?’ Hedley asks nervously.
‘No, he said he wouldn’t be here till this afternoon, so I’ll come to the christening first. Whose is it anyway?’
‘Hedley’s old girlfriend Venetia,’ says Tamsin. Hedley looks at Laura, agonised.
‘Oh yes, of course.’ Laura smiles brightly at him, remembering rumours of a romance when Hedley first came to Crumbly.
‘I’m the godfather,’ he says, wielding a small wrapped package. ‘It’s a Swiss Army knife – what do you think?’
Tamsin, finding this conversation achingly boring, slouches up the narrow stairs to find Dolly. Moments later, music thumps through the ceiling, and Fred, forced out by the sound, appears, rumpled and sleepy but friendly.
‘Mum, can you ask Dolly to play something decent. Her music is so sad, I even prefer yours,’ he mumbles.
‘Your children are always asleep,’ marvels Hedley. ‘And they’re nice to you,’ he adds, as Fred drapes himself over his mother’s shoulders and kisses her cheek as she sits eating toast at the kitchen table. ‘I wish Tamsin was nice to me like that,’ Hedley sighs.
Laura opens her mouth to answer, but leaves it dangling as the doorframe is filled, the sunlight blocked by Inigo. Unshaven, eyes pink-rimmed and bloodshot, skin pallid, he walks straight up to Laura and puts his arms around her, dropping a bunch of lilies onto the table behind her.
‘You’re very early,’ she says, blinking amazement.
‘I was missing you too much,’ he says, bending his head to kiss her.
I hope he isn’t going to spoil things, Laura thinks. Shocked by her own ungenerosity, she pulls herself together and smiles back into Inigo’s ardent gaze, wondering why he always has to be so full on about everything, but amazed that he still makes her heart pound. She is off-balance seeing him here, annoyed in fact; it was such a relief not being affected by him, and now he’s the biggest thing in her new kitchen, and he’s brought the exotic, incongruous waft of hothouse flowers to the country.
Dolly, as excessive as Inigo, bounces into the room, clad in a small strappy top and tiny skirt, waving a selection of fleeces and cardigans, and hurls herself on her father, wrapping her arms around him, nuzzling his coat.
‘Dad, do you like our house? We’ve got a goat – come and see me milk it, quick.’
‘Won’t you be frozen, Dolly? That’s not much of a skirt for April.’ Laura is ignored.
‘Its name is Grass and it’s a nanny goat,’ adds Fred. ‘It’s got these really gross toggles dangling off its neck and a beard, it’s so cool.’
Correctly interpreting the grossness as the best bit, Inigo follows Fred and Dolly straight outside again without even speaking to Hedley, and round to the shed, accompanied by Tamsin, a little wobbly on her stiletto heels, but uncomplaining, much to Hedley’s surprise.
‘We’ve got a ferret and a pug to confess next,’ Laura whispers to Hedley.
‘Your children have such a good effect on Tamsin, why can’t it stretch to Inigo as well?’ Hedley complains, rising to leave. ‘You can’t come with me to church if he’s only just arrived, but don’t forget the christening lunch at one. It’s in the house at the end of the village on the right.’
Laura, conscious of an almost irresistible urge to escape Inigo and go with her brother now, follows him out and, keen to look busy, begins half-heartedly slashing at some nettles with the bread-knife. Inigo, armed with a small shark-skin sketchpad, and still wearing his long black coat, emerges from the goat shed with a cheerful spring in his step. He stands, pencil poised, watching Laura for a moment, making her feel like a work in progress instead of a person.
‘You can’t do it like that – you need a proper scythe, like the Grim Reaper. I’ll take a shower and then we’ll go into town to get one, shall we?’
Laura puts the bread-knife into his outstretched hand and follows him into the house. ‘There isn’t a shower, I’m afraid, just an ancient cast-iron bath in that room there.’ She points to a room beyond the kitchen. ‘It’s probably the most gruesome room in the house,’ she warns him.
‘Downstairs, how novel,’ says Inigo, fussily shaking the towel he finds on the floor before heading into the dank pit that is the bathroom. Laura’s heart sinks further. She hates it when Inigo decides to make the best of everything; it is so wearing because it is all a front.
The sound of sluicing water in the bathroom reminds her that she hasn’t washed up from breakfast. Filling the sink, she marvels that Inigo is still cheerful. The odds are stacked against it: he loathes the countryside, he hates animals, he finds disorder maddening and dirt repellent. She has rented a cottage, or rather a hovel, without consulting him and moved into it in his absence. It must be a huge blow to his control freakery. Suddenly Laura feels entirely unable to deal with him when he comes out of the bathroom. It will be better if he gets used to the Gate House without her there; that way she can avoid being defensive.
Leaving the washing up to soak, and grabbing Dolly’s pink sequinned cowboy hat and a very unsuitable pair of metallic purple high heels she bought yesterday in a junk shop, she shouts through the bathroom door, ‘I’ve just got to go and help Hedley with something. You go to town for the scythe – Woolworth’s will be open, and I’ll see you later on.’ Then she runs out of the house, putting the shoes on halfway down the path, and hoping that the very old skirt embroidered with mirrors and the faded sage-coloured T-shirt she put on this morning after frog work will be smart enough for a christening lunch.
Hastening through the village, Laura is glad that the early morning sun has been replaced by glowering light and a slicing wind, so no one is out to watch her hobbling in her ridiculous shoes as she passes. She slows down, partly through discomfort as a blister is forming, and partly curiosity.
Little has changed in Crumbly village at first glance; indeed, it is reassuringly identical to her memories. Even the chickens at the pub are the same over-sized and over-friendly breed that used to hop up onto the bench next to you if you chose an outside table for a drink. Laura pauses and stoops, putting out a hand, hoping to entice one of these creatures away from its business scratching up primulas from a tub by the pub door. The hen pauses, and looks at her severely. It groans horribly, perhaps indicating that it doesn’t much like what it sees and struts off to continue with its work in the flower bed by the pub wall. Walking past the creaking sign, Laura realises with irritation how Hampstead life has changed her when she is shocked for a second by the name. The picture is of two chocolate box black kittens, but even so the words ‘The Black Boys’ are startling now. There must have been a politically correct uprising in the village since she was last here: Laura vividly remembers the old sign, admittedly faded and in need of renovation, depicted two small African boys in white shirts and little skullcaps standing in front of a boat.
The first time Guy took her out for a drink on their own they came to The Black Boys. When he summoned the courage to ask her out, they agreed that the village pub was acceptable on the grounds that it was summer and they could sit in the garden, away from the curious eyes of Hedley and the rest of the cricket team, who spent most evenings, no matter how gentle and warm, in the smallest, darkest bar. Laura had hardly ever been to a pub before, and not wishing to let him know this, copied Guy and ordered draught beer. She shudders, remembering the sweet earthy taste, so revolting she almost gagged in front of him. Eyes watering, she asked him to get her something else, and Guy laughed and went back to the bar for wine. Feeding peanuts to the hens, Guy convinced her that they were Chinese Lap Chickens, originally reared alongside Pekineses for the royal household. She had believed him and, fascinated, had taken the story home to Hedley and Uncle Peter. Peter blinked and nodded vague corroboration, but Hedley grinned knowingly and said, ‘Come on, sis, you should never believe anything a man on a date tells you.’
Laura had flushed, felt foolish and protested, ‘But we weren’t on a date, I just went for a drink with him. Is it not true then?’
The next time they saw one another, Laura challenged Guy. ‘They said never believe anything a man on a date tells you, Guy, so what have you got to say to that?’ she teased.
He looked alarmed. ‘Am I accused of lying about chickens or taking you on a date?’ he asked, pulling her towards him so close she could feel his heart beating against her own. ‘Because I’m guilty of both.’ And he bent over her and kissed her on the bridge in the village, where anyone could see them.
She is on the bridge again now, pausing to look down out of almost forgotten habit to see if she can catch a glimpse of a lazy brown trout. It takes a moment to see anything more than her face and the sky reflected in the slow dark water, but then her eyes become accustomed and her focus shifts below the surface to undulating weed and there, beside a flat stone, is a trout, doing the fishy equivalent of treading water as it remains in the shadows, swaying but never moving and facing upstream.
‘Why do they always face upstream?’ she wonders aloud and nearly jumps out of her skin when a voice behind her answers, ‘That’s how they get oxygen into their gills.’
It is Guy. Different from when she saw him in the restaurant, and more as he was long ago, tousled and crumpled in dishevelled jeans and a worn shirt the same faded blue grey as his eyes. He is sitting in a sputtering low-slung car, and is looking more or less up Laura’s skirt as she hangs over the bridge. Red heat creeps up her face; she feels he knows she was thinking about kissing him. Guy rolls a cigarette with one hand. Laura wonders if he always does that or if he is trying to impress her. She finds herself staring at his teeth which are white and even, and his skin, already tanned even though it is April – no, Laura suddenly remembers that it is May the first today,
‘Are you going to the christening?’ Guy asks her. ‘If so, may I drive you the remaining few yards?’ Laura nods and fumbles with the door, glad to be able to sit down as her knees have gone weak.
‘Where’s your wife?’ she asks, now almost horizontal in the sagging passenger seat of Guy’s car.
‘She’s gone to a hunter trial – where’s your husband?’
Guy changes gear and Laura is flung back even further. ‘He’s gone to buy a scythe in Woolworth’s.’
‘A scythe? What for?’ Guy’s voice is full of amusement, and hearing this from an idiotic dentist-chair position enrages Laura. Inigo has as much right to a scythe as anyone. There is no time to put Guy straight on this one though, or to mention that she has become a neighbour, because they have arrived. Laura is hurled forwards against her seat belt as Guy pulls up.
‘You don’t seem to have much idea how to drive, this car,’ she mutters.
Guy pauses as he is about to get out, looks straight at her and says, ‘I’m sorry, I was nervous.’ He yanks a skateboard out from between the seats, and noticing the astonishment on her face, explains, ‘It’s my christening present. But I think the big boys will have to look after it for a few years until Harry’s old enough.’
‘Oh no,’ Laura gasps. ‘I wasn’t thinking about the skateboard – I mean, I haven’t got a present. I didn’t even know the baby was a boy.’
‘Don’t worry, you can share mine,’ says Guy.
Laura follows him through a gate and into a garden. It is hard to get to the house because a small girl clad in a wetsuit and snorkel is dragging a paddling pool out of the front door, attended by a parrot.
‘Put it over there, put it over there,’ scolds the parrot.’
‘I AM TRYING TO!’ roars the child. ‘And shuddup Gertie or I’ll christen you.’
‘That’s Venetia’s daughter,’ says Guy. ‘She’s obviously taken the wet bit of the christening to heart.’
Relieved that her own clothing cannot possibly seem out of place when the junior hostess is clad in neoprene, Laura enters the cottage, stepping over strewn dolls and cricket bats in the hallway to see into a crowded sitting room. There, behind a huge jugful of white narcissus and moulting pink cherry blossom, Hedley is talking to a majestic woman in purple, holding her glass for her as she lights one cigarette from another.
‘The thing is, they should always have a toast of some sort in the church,’ says the woman, waving her cigarette and casting a trail of ash onto her skirt and the white bull terrier nestling close to her. ‘Champagne is good, but if you want a change there’s nothing wrong with a nice bracing vodka and tonic in the morning, is there?’
Tamsin has taken off the shaggy coat she was wearing this morning to reveal an outfit made up of the sleeves of a navy blue jersey without any middle bit. Instead of the middle bit she has on a tiny camisole. Impressed, Laura wonders if these are the modern equivalent to leg warmers. Tamsin beckons her over, waving the pink drink she is sipping from a Teletubbies plastic beaker. She is perched on the back of a sofa near the music, with a boy about her age and another a bit younger with an ice-cream moustache.
‘Hi Laura, these are my friends,’ says Tamsin, simpering sweetly, her voice a soft coo, and a million miles from the grunts she usually favours her family with.
‘These are Venetia’s sons Giles and Felix,’ adds Guy, introducing Laura, and she grins at them and wishes she had brought Fred and Dolly.
‘Hello,’ says Felix, the younger one, not looking at her but staring at her shoes. ‘Mum’s got some shoes like that,’ he says, dreamily extracting a piece of chewing gum from his mouth and clamping it to the side of his cup. ‘She says they’re bloody agony,’
‘They are,’ laughs Laura.
Giles pokes his brother. ‘Felix,’ he hisses, ‘you’re not supposed to swear at christenings.’
‘Well, we’ve had the christening, and Harry made such a racket in my ear I think I’m a bit deaf now. I don’t know why Mum bothered having another baby. There were enough of us already.’ Felix’s chin sinks forward almost onto his chest, and he stares more fixedly at Laura’s shoes.
Giles tries to jolly him out of this gloomy train of thought. ‘Oh come on, Felix, Harry’s all right, he’s only a baby and he can’t help it. They did give us a trampoline when he came.’
‘Yeah, but I wanted a PlayStation much more.’
Giles rolls his eyes at Tamsin and gives Laura an embarrassed grin. She touches Felix on the shoulder and says, ‘Do you think my son Fred could come and play on your trampoline some time? He would love to meet you, he wants a PlayStation too.’
Felix brightens. ‘Does he? Mint! Maybe we can save up together. I’ve got seventeen pounds and I’ve asked Mum to pay me all the pocket money she owes me for the whole of my life which is twelve years of one pound a week because she never gives me any, which is …’
‘Don’t get in a psyche about pocket money,’ warns Giles.
Guy brings Venetia over to meet Laura.
‘Mum, look, she’s got the same shoes as you and her son wants a PlayStation,’ says Felix.
‘I got them in a junk shop yesterday,’ Laura says, looking doubtfully at the shoes.
Venetia giggles. ‘The one just beyond the village? In the barn?’
Laura nods. Venetia carries on, ‘Then I bet they are mine – I sold him a chest last week and all my shoes have disappeared and Giles has just told me that The Beauty – that’s my four-year-old, the one outside with the parrot – was making it into a shoe shop. It’s my own fault, I was so stupid not to look inside it.’
Laura laughs. ‘Well, you must have them back now, as long as you don’t mind a barefoot gate-crasher, or perhaps I could borrow some wellies.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ answers Venetia, sloshing wine into two glasses and passing one to Laura. ‘It’s such a good sign, I wouldn’t dream of taking them back. They’re yours now.’
She moves off to speak to the vicar. Laura looks around the colourful room, full of laughter and friendly-faced people, and compares it to the Private Views and parties she usually attends. At these, everyone is one age – forty – and pretending not to be. Invariably they are clad in black, no one smokes, only a few defiant people drink, and hardly anyone laughs. Sipping her drink, she admits that in London Inigo is the best person to talk to at parties, the only irreverent voice. His favourite trick, last employed at a dinner given by the National Art Fund with the Home Secretary present, is to draw naked cartoons of other guests and pass them to Laura while she is talking to someone.
‘Here, I need you to hold onto my inspiration,’ he whispered on that occasion, and tucked a drawing of the Home Secretary in all his glory folded like a paper aeroplane into her belt.
Laura gazes around the christening party. Without knowing Venetia at all, she is sure that this is how she would like her life to be, conveniently forgetting that yesterday she wanted it to be like Marjorie the pug lady’s. But no matter how idyllic Marjorie’s garden and animal life is, this house has all the vibrancy and chaos that a family home should have. From where she is standing, Laura can see through to a kitchen painted vivid yellow, pictures by the children stuck haphazardly over the walls, and a fat white dog asleep on a black feather boa in front of the red Aga. Laura thinks of her own white and steel London kitchen, and of her new mould-speckled one at the Gate House. Could she create a vivid world like this one? And it would have to be her own creation. It would be perfect and easy to get Dolly and Fred over here now, but there’s Inigo. She tries to imagine him here, perhaps talking to the vicar about fund-raising for the new bell, as Hedley is doing, but it is impossible. Inigo would be uncomfortable here, where a toddler has just stuck a finger into the chocolate christening cake, to the huge amusement of Venetia and her mother standing together toasting baby Harry. He would not appreciate a life where every situation is beyond control, and every surface is covered; he would create an atmosphere. He is too different a species.
Laura moves across and makes a space for herself on the window seat, squeezing in next to a large cat and a pile of what look like more of Tamsin’s sweater sleeves with no middles. Outside, the wetsuit wearer and the parrot have dragooned Guy into helping them, and the paddling pool is filling fast. The little girl flourishes a bottle of bath essence and pours a long gloop of blue into the water. Bubbles rise; she and the parrot caper about shouting, ‘Hubble Bubble, Hubble Bubble.’ The clouds, threatening all morning, are now lower and menacing. A wind whisks up, and Guy persuades the two bathers to come inside with him just as rain bursts from the darkest cloud onto the road and the garden. Laura thinks of Inigo and the scythe, Dolly and Fred and the goat, and decides it is time to go; the only trouble is that she will be drenched. There is an embarrassing Pac-a-Mac in her handbag, but no weather could be foul enough to persuade her to put it on anywhere near this house full of flowers and colour. Indeed, she is determined from today onwards to become the kind of person who doesn’t even know what a Pac-a-Mac looks like. At least she didn’t choose it, it was Inigo who bought the mac; always on the lookout for ways to waste money, he was delighted to find something so mundane at such a price in Bond Street one day when they were looking at Cork Street shows together. He tucked it into her bag, joking, ‘Here’s something for a rainy day.’
As she hovers by the front door, watching the sky, waiting for a moment to dash, Guy appears.
‘Can I give you a lift back to Hedley’s?’ he asks, chivalrously flourishing a Barbie umbrella he has pinched from an overcrowded chimney pot in the hall. He holds it over her head and they set off into slapping cold rain. Laura bumps against him as they negotiate the gate, and her heart beats in her throat. Guy’s neck and chest are wet where rain has crept down his open shirt.
‘I’m not staying with Hedley, we’ve just moved into the Gate House.’
They have reached the car now. Guy unlocks the door for her and bundles her in. Laura scrambles to stuff the Pac-a-Mac to the bottom of her bag in case he sees it. His shirt is wet through across the shoulders. Laura rubs the raindrops off her bare arms and legs and shivers.
Guy turns the heating up and starts the car, murmuring almost to himself, ‘So you’ve moved into the village have you? Now I’ll believe anything. You said you’d never be back, do you remember?’
‘Well, I’m not back.’ Laura shifts crossly, yanking her seat belt over her. ‘Not full time anyway, but we love the Gate House. And I’m very excited to be here again. At last.’
Nearly twenty years ago, Guy had driven her to the tiny local station and said goodbye. She was dreading the possibility that they might be the only people waiting there for the train, and they were. Guy stood on the platform next to her, and the glass windows of the railway house on the opposite side of the track reflected him back, his hair shaggy over his eyes, face obscured because he was looking down at a stone he scuffed with his shoe on the platform. Laura saw herself next to him, her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans, biting her lip, not speaking but restless. She pulled her hands out of her pockets, accidentally brushing against Guy’s bare arm. They both jumped as if electrified and stood a little further apart, not looking at one another. Laura rolled back on her heels and prayed the train would appear right now out of a hole in the earth.
She swayed and tried to whistle, wrapping her arms around herself, making herself narrower and less visibly there on the platform with Guy and the flooding sadness of the September light. Her throat was dry and she couldn’t whistle, nor could she speak; no words came into her mind to fill the loud silence.
‘Saying goodbye is a mistake, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘You should go now.’
‘Will you come back?’ Guy knew that whatever he said would be wrong, but surely this was the worst? How needy, bleating and desperate he sounded. He watched Laura’s reflection, her hair whipped across her face by the sun-baked breeze, edged now with the chill of autumn. He saw her glance up at him, angry and upset.
‘I can’t. I don’t belong here. I need the city. This is your place. I can’t come back.’ Her words were cruel, harsher than she ever meant them to be, and her eyes were bright with tears.
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Guy and the reflection of him and Laura standing side by side on the platform blurred and smeared in his hot eyes as the train arrived, grinding and hissing as if it were steam. Laura’s hands were cold and stiff when he held them to kiss her goodbye.