There is no electricity and an ominous dripping sound echoes wetly from the bathroom in the Gate House, accompanied by a bad smell. Zeus has been sick three times in the car, and Vice the ferret is loose and has gone to ground somewhere under the back seat. This is Laura’s first attempt at going to the country alone since moving there. What she imagined would be a lovely bonding adventure for herself and the children is turning into the usual mutiny, with herself as chauffeur, slave and pack animal. Airily planning to buy food for supper on the way at a wholesome farm shop, Laura forgets that such outlets shut at five, and has to resort to a petrol station. There, fantasies about home-baked bread and organic lamb cutlets are subsumed by a reality of three half baked rolls and a sweaty hunk of cheese. Laura hurls her bags onto the kitchen table and turns to welcome the guests with a big fake smile.
‘So this is it,’ she beams. ‘Rural bliss,’ she adds unconvincingly. Dolly’s friend Rebecca and Fred’s friend Shane back nervously out of the door, trying not to let her see that they are holding their breath to ward off the awful smell. Dolly comes in to get a jug to milk Grass and scowls at Laura.
‘Mum, this place stinks. How could you do this when I’ve got Becca staying? And I’ve sprayed my deodorant and your scent in the car but I can’t get the smell of sick out, or the smell of that disgusting ferret.’ Dolly points her chin accusingly at her mother and swirls out of the door, slamming it as she goes.
Laura and her one adult guest, Gina, look at one another but say nothing for a moment. Gina reaches into the carrier bags of shopping and pulls out two cans of ready mixed gin and tonic. She passes one to Laura. ‘I’m bloody glad I had the sense to get a six-pack of these at that God-awful garage. I had a funny feeling we were going to need an instant hit. Does she always treat you like that?’
Laura swigs her drink. ‘Yup. Well, more and more of the time anyway. I wonder where the fuse box is?’ She gazed around hopelessly.
Gina, unpacking the ten Pot Noodles Dolly insisted on buying at the garage, discovers the fuse box in the larder and restores electricity with one flick of the trip switch. ‘Right, that was easy, let’s find the smell now,’ she says, and marches into the bathroom wielding a bottle of bleach. Laura watches her go, obscurely irritated by Gina’s swamping practicality. She hadn’t intended to ask her, in fact she hadn’t asked her. Gina, cousin of Cally and new occasional friend, walked past as Laura was packing the car.
‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ she observed after several moments of watching Laura attempt to heap suitcases into the tiny space left around Dolly and Fred and their friends, all sitting like waxworks in the car, their four pairs of headphones separating them from the world.
Gina poked at a pair of boots disparagingly. ‘No girl should be doing that. What’s the point of feminism if it doesn’t get rid of things like car packing? Where’s your delicious husband?’ Laura turned to face her and missed catching her own open suitcase which fell, spilling books, her alarm clock and underwear across the road.
‘In New York,’ Laura sighed. Gina’s eyes narrowed. She knew Inigo had left for the States weeks ago; she’d been with Laura to the cinema directly after he left. They’d seen a truly awful art film about a family in Taiwan in a high-rise block. It went on for four hours – long enough, as Laura had pointed out, to get to Paris and have supper much more enjoyably.
‘Still?’ Gina drawls, draining the word of every last drop of inference.
‘Yes, still,’ agreed Laura, beginning to retrieve her belongings from the pavement.
‘Your poor thing,’ said Gina, in a pitying tone which suggested that she, as a divorcée, knew just what ‘Still’ meant. Hovering, unwilling to leave Laura, Gina tiptoed forwards and picked up a very tired-looking bra, her perfect midriff on show above low-slung jeans, so toned it didn’t even crease as she bent.
‘Here you are. Mmm, this does look like an old favourite, so don’t leave it, will you.’ She draped the bra carefully over the roof of the car, and caught sight of the car’s occupants. She peered in at them for a moment before turning to Laura, her face crumpled with concern.
‘Oh darling, you’re all on your own with THEM.’ She shuddered. ‘I tell you what, why don’t I come with you to the country? I’ve been longing to see your place and I’m free this weekend. You’ll need back-up with THEM or you’ll never survive, you look exhausted already. Poor love.’ She leant forwards to hug Laura across the spilled suitcase, her bracelets jangling, her arms thin and cold but strong as wire. ‘Just wait a moment and I’ll get a few things. What fun we’ll have being girls together. I love the country.’
Laura began to mumble, ‘There isn’t room,’ but Gina, moving surprisingly fast on her slingback heels, was already out of earshot. Laura could have jumped into the car and driven off without her, but there was no other way of avoiding Gina’s company. Gina came.
‘Mum, can we shoot some pigeons?’ Fred appears, Shane hovering behind, shrouded like a spectre in his hooded sweatshirt. Both boys are armed with giant catapults. The catapults look like advanced and kinky torture instruments with black rubber grips and dolloping lengths of nude-coloured rubber tubing, but Fred has assured his mother that ‘all they do is kill birds and stuff – nothing worse, I promise, Mum.’
The boys rush off, tailed by the snuffling, bouncing pug, the ferret leering from Fred’s pocket like a glove puppet.
‘Don’t forget you’ve got Zeus,’ Laura calls after them. ‘He’s got no sense of direction so you’ll need his lead if you go far.’
Alone for a moment, she half-guiltily leaves the unpacking, preferring to head for the garden, where the last of the evening sun spills its warmth onto her back. Soaking up the peace she turns and tilts her face, closing her eyes, and leaning back on the wall. At first the only sound is her own breath slowing then, as if she has reached the point of trance in a textbook meditation session, Laura’s head fills with the gentle coo of doves, the rustle of leaves and the distant honky tonk of an ice-cream van. All tensions dissolve and she opens her eyes, blinking at the bright paradise of her garden. And the weeds.
Gina, having dealt with whatever it was in the bathroom, and earning Laura’s undying gratitude for not telling her about it, wanders out to the garden to join Laura crouched in her newly dug vegetable patch, planting salad leaves beneath a swinging row of old CDs Fred has set up to scare the pigeons away. Laura is immersed, singing to herself, all monstrous details of the journey erased by the long June evening, her children’s voices happy and, even better, not too close, a can of gin and tonic finished beside her and the promise of more as Gina approaches, shedding her shirt to reveal a pink and purple bra which hardly covers her voluptuous bosom.
‘Gosh, how wonderful not to be overlooked, and the sun really is warm, isn’t it?’ she cries, tripping through the daisies and settling herself on a small stool Laura likes to think she will sit on to view her garden but never does. Laura sprinkles water over the last of her seeds and stands back to view the Beatrix Potter loveliness of her vegetable plot. This area, an eight-foot square of freshly turned earth with neat edges and hospital corners, is in marked contrast to the rest of the garden. Laura is about to launch into a poetic explanation of happiness and its link for her with the soil, when there is a scream from the shed and Grass bounds out bleating and trots straight across the middle of the vegetables. Becca, waving a rope like a lasso, follows, breathless.
‘She bit Dolly and stamped on her foot,’ she pants, ‘but we’ve got loads of milk.’
‘She’d be better as goat curry,’ Laura mutters, as Gina, almost topless, sets off in pursuit of Grass who has swerved out of the gate and is heading down the track towards Crumbly, still bleating balefully. Dolly hobbles towards her mother, pink-faced and swearing fluently. Laura decides it’s best to pretend she can’t hear Dolly’s language and begins a soothing litany. ‘Don’t worry, darling, let me see. Ooh, how painful. Shall I kiss it better?’
Dolly pushes her away impatiently, reaching into her pocket for her mobile phone, today fetchingly clad in a fluffy pink cover, and begins stabbing the keys. ‘Oh shut up Mum, I’m not a baby. I hate that fucking goat. Why can’t Hedley take it away? It isn’t even ours and I’m never milking it or going near it again. I’m texting Tamsin, and Becca and I are going to see her right now, and I don’t know when we’ll be back.’
Dolly rushes into the house to complete her tantrum with the required hefty door slam. Becca skulks behind, feebly prodding her own more conservative pale blue plastic mobile. She sends her message then looks up at Laura whispering, ‘Umm, sorry Laura,’ before she too whisks into the house. God, the opera of Dolly’s life is becoming more gothic every day, Laura thinks, but before she can decide whether to follow her, there is a shout from the gate and Hedley, grinning hugely, enters with a swagger, dragging the still bleating Grass.
‘Found your house guest in distress,’ he smirks, turning to help Gina over the tiny step up to the path, clearly much too difficult for her to manage alone, and taking some time to remove his appreciative gaze from her cleavage.
‘Darling Laura, I just couldn’t manage to catch her until these charming men appeared.’ She bats her eyelashes at Hedley and murmurs to Laura, ‘Honestly, everyone in the country is so ruggedly handsome, especially your delicious brother. Why didn’t you tell me about him?’ Laura stares, incredulous, but there is no guile in Gina’s expression, just good old-fashioned come-hitherance, and it is directed at Hedley. Amazing. Laura has no time to think more because the garden is suddenly full of people as Guy and then Tamsin follow Gina in through the gate, and Fred and Shane, liberally covered in bits of twig and leaf, abseil on a frayed rope down from the big oak tree.
Laura has a sense of her whole being unravelling from the top of her head downwards as everybody begins shouting their business at once:
‘Mum, Mum, Zeus got his head stuck down a rabbit hole in that field and I didn’t dare pull him by his legs in case—’
‘Laura, that goat is impossible! It tried to eat my bra, thank God your brother came to my rescue—’
‘Laura, d’you know where Dolly is? I wondered if she’d like to come to the disco in the village hall—’
Guy grins across the wall of sound at her, apologetically shifting a basket of vegetables from one hand to the other, and handing her a bunch of fragrant sweet peas. ‘Hedley said you would be here this weekend, so I came to check on the goat, and I thought you might need some veg, but I can see you’re already growing your own—’
Laura thanks him, wishing that she, like Gina, was wearing a lovely girlie bra instead of baggy jeans with mud caked on the knees and a shapeless old T-shirt of Dolly’s with Elvis wrinkling with age on the front. Gina and Hedley are standing so close together it’s surprising they can see one another to speak, but from the shouts of laughter, they are clearly managing fine. A piercing scream from Dolly’s bedroom window penetrates the clamour, and Laura’s heart misses a beat then pounds in terror. Everyone stands as if petrified for a millisecond. The screaming continues, on a crescendo, and there is a stampede towards the house. Hedley, made omnipotent by the vision of Gina in her small amount of clothing, is first in, choosing to climb onto the roof via the water butt and enter through the window of his niece’s room. Laura, huffing up the stairs, is convinced she is about to die of a heart attack and makes a mental note to sacrifice all pleasures starting with tinned gin and tonic, and to become super-fit and virtuous if only Dolly is still alive when she gets to her. At the bedroom door she takes a deep breath, but Hedley is there first and opens it from the inside to greet her.
‘She won’t stop screaming, but I think this is the cause.’ He waves Vice, the ferret, above his head, and Fred leaps to reclaim her.
‘Oh, I wondered where she’d got to.’
‘She was in Dolly’s knicker drawer,’ whispers Becca, herself on the verge of tears. ‘And I think she bit Dolly. After the goat I think it was the final straw. Dolly says she’s going back to London and never coming here again.’
Fred rolls his eyes, tucks his ferret into his pocket and says without rancour, ‘Dolly’s mental. She’s always in a psyche nowadays – she thinks it makes her seem older, but I think it’s sad.’ This pithy summary of his sister’s character does not help, and he is bundled out of the room by Laura.
Everyone looks with interest at Dolly, including Grass, whose unwelcome presence upstairs in the house Laura notices with a rising sense of panic. Grass, masticating busily, coughs, and spits out a pink thong. Recognising Dolly’s favourite underwear, Laura whisks it behind her back and stuffs it in her pocket.
Becca translates the next scream, staring at the floor, discomfort scarlet on her face. ‘And she says she hopes Inigo leaves Laura and that she can go and live with him in New York and never see another animal as long as she lives.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Laura has really had enough of this absurd scene and is beginning to think that Dolly is doing it on purpose to punish her for Inigo’s absence. He’s been away for two weeks now, and even Laura, still fed up with him, is beginning to long for his return.
Guy edges into the room and walks up to Dolly, standing rigid and hysterical next to a drawer full of tangled underwear, both Tamsin and Becca draped protectively around her. He takes both her hands in his and rubs them. ‘Come on Dolly,’ he says gently. ‘You need to snap out of this.’
Laura has to clench both fists and press her arms to her sides to stop herself rushing forward and slapping her daughter, but to her immense relief, Guy is getting through to the three girls and Dolly’s screams begin to subside until she is sitting sniffing on the edge of her bed with her arms around her attendant nymphs, both of whom are murmuring gently and stroking her hair. Drained, Laura creeps away towards the stairs, keen to get Grass out before Dolly notices her. Grass has other ideas, and digs her hooves in, snaking her neck to snatch at the white muslin curtains Laura hung in a fit of domestic enthusiasm last time she was here.
Laura tugs as the ribboned edging quivers in the goat’s mouth, but too late, Grass chews and swallows violently, the twin toggles at her throat dancing hairily as the ribbon slides down. Laura wants to cry, but is damned if a bloody goat and a curtain will reduce her to tears. She grits her teeth and yanks at the rope. Grass resists.
‘You are evil,’ Laura says between gritted teeth. ‘I want to kill you.’
‘Come on now, don’t let’s get this out of proportion. It’s only a curtain,’ soothes Gina, who has emerged from Dolly’s bedroom with Hedley in bossy big sister mode. She slaps the goat’s bony bottom, and Grass gallops down the stairs, with Laura running at her side, determined to maintain this small measure of control. Dusk has fallen before any normality is regained. Guy and Hedley secure Grass in her shed, and with ostentatious hammering, then announce that it is fixed. Dolly still won’t speak to her mother and Laura is exhausted by trying to penetrate her stone wall daughter and longs for her to simply vanish.
Suddenly, Laura’s wish comes true; Tamsin marches into the kitchen and announces, ‘We’re going now. We’ll be back at eleven o’clock.’
‘Where?’ asks Laura, gaping as Dolly and Becca traipse in behind Tamsin wearing glistening blue and green eyeshadow, silver streaks in their hair and roller blades.
‘The village disco, of course.’ Tamsin leads her party out into the garden, where giggling and cursing accompanies them as they wobble out onto the road to the village. The peace, when they have gone, is palpable, but even so Laura cannot shake off the sense of being burdened. She particularly hates people feeling sorry for her; the quarrels with Dolly have been visible and audible to all, and she is sure Gina and Guy are pitying her wholeheartedly. Along with Hedley, they coax her to the pub, where her mood is aggressively cheerful. ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ she demands as the four of them peer through the darkness of the pub garden at their scampi and chips in baskets. ‘It’s such a treat to be out for supper.’
Gina, who knows full well that Inigo and Laura eat out more nights than in at home in London, raises her eyebrows. ‘Is it?’ she says. Both Hedley and Guy guffaw as if she is the world’s greatest wit.
Laura looks at them witheringly. ‘Oh, grow up!’ she snaps. ‘I’m so sick of pandering to teen egos, I’m not going to speak to any of you if you can’t be sensible.’ What she wants to know, more than anything now the children are left behind and the goat is locked up for the night, is why Guy is here on his own. Where is Celia?
She is about to ask when Guy, who is fidgeting, jumps up saying, ‘I think I’ll get us all another drink.’
Hedley reaches across the table, his brow quivering, and grabs his sister’s hand, leaning forward conspiratorially. ‘I’d better tell you before you put your foot right in it. Silly’s left.’
Both Laura and Gina stare at him blankly. ‘Why is he silly?’ whispers Gina, who is hugely enjoying herself.
Hedley shakes his head. ‘No, no, his wife Celia – we call her Silly – she left three weeks ago.’
Laura’s phone trills. She longs not to answer it and to hear more of Hedley’s fascinating news, but years of being at her children’s beck and call make it impossible. It is Fred.
‘Mum?’
‘What?’ If only she could train her other ear to absorb outside conversation while speaking on the phone. Hedley and Gina huddle, discussing Guy in low voices. ‘Oh poor him,’ Gina is murmuring. ‘How could you make someone choose like that?’
Choose what? Laura wonders. It could be anything from curtain material to group sex. Fred is clamouring in her ear.
‘MUM. I SAID MUM. Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, unfortunately,’ sighs Laura.
‘MUM, have you seen my trainers?’
‘No, Fred, I haven’t, and I’m out at the moment so I can’t look for them.’
There is a moment’s puzzled silence, in which Hedley nods, saying, ‘I know, and of course he’s terribly shocked, poor sod.’ Unlikely to be curtain material then, but quite possibly group sex.
Fred is still trying to make sense of Laura’s whereabouts. ‘You’re out? I thought you were in the kitchen. You were there a minute ago.’
‘Well, I’m not there now, and if I was, you would be much better off walking into the room to speak to me rather than frying your brains with that phone.’
There is a clunking sound as Fred moves through the house. ‘Oh yeah! You’re not here, are you?’ he says, presumably checking in the oven for his mother. His tone is one of astonishment.
‘No, I’m not. I’m trying to have supper. Don’t you remember I said I was going out?’
‘Did you?’ Fred’s interest flags, ‘OK, bye Mum.’
‘Bye, darling.’ Laura is about to press the off button when she hears him again.
‘Hey, Mum, wait – is there anything to eat?’
‘Oh bloody hell. You’ve had supper. Yes, there are hundreds of Pot Noodles in the larder, off you go now.’
There is an aggrieved pause. ‘No need to go mental,’ says Fred. ‘I was only asking. Bye, Mum.’
‘Bye,’ says Laura, maddened to see Guy returning with a tray already, and Gina and Hedley straightening and addressing their scampi with great interest. So unfair, she has missed it all.
Guy sits down next to Laura, even though Hedley is on his own on the other side of the table. Gina giggles and moves round to sit next to Hedley. They can’t keep their hands off one another, and Laura is relieved when Hedley suggests a game of pool and Gina follows him into the pub.
‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she blurts out.
Guy rubs his eyes and grins wryly. ‘I’m sorry she’s so angry,’ he says. ‘She thinks I’m ripping her off over her business, and it’s soured everything.’
‘Do you still love her?’ Is it the drink, or the dark or both that is making Laura so bold and uninhibited? Guy doesn’t clam up, he just looks sad as he answers.
‘I don’t think either of us ever loved each other. She never wanted to have children with me. I think I was a way for her to escape her family and be an independent woman.’
‘What about you?’ Every safety instinct Laura has is beating a warning not to ask this but she does so anyway.
Guy looks at her blankly. ‘What about me?’
‘You said neither of you ever loved one another.’
Guy laughs, exasperated, and stands up. ‘Well, you know about me, don’t you?’
Hedley and Gina, brushing their arms against one another walking side by side, appear at the table.
Guy puts his jacket on. ‘Come on, let’s go home, it’s late.’
Back at the Gate House, the kitchen is a Marie Celeste wreck with a trail of cereal, spilt milk and sprinkled sugar ending in the god Zeus’s basket, where he lies, snoring gently, his head resting in the sugar bowl.
‘It looks as though rats have invaded,’ remarks Gina, slumping in the armchair by the Rayburn, and kicking off her shoes.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I thought pugs were too privileged to pillage.’ Laura groans, automatically stooping to begin clearing up the mess. Through in the sitting room where, against Laura’s wishes, Inigo had a vast television installed two days after they moved in, Fred and Shane are watching something unsuitable with blood spraying everywhere. Laura averts her eyes and forces herself to speak in a kind and loving tone.
‘Hello, darlings. Are the girls back from the disco? Did you find what you wanted to eat?’
‘Mmph.’ Fred grunts and shifts into a more comfortable position on the sofa, but doesn’t bother to look up. Shane appears to have been turned to stone on his beanbag. Screaming, followed by blood glugging like wine issues from the television and Laura closes the door, happy to return to the squalor of the kitchen if gore is the alternative. Unheeding of the dirty plates, Guy and Hedley have produced a bottle of whisky, and settled purposefully at the table. They are not going home. Guy pats the chair next to him.
‘Come and have a drink, Laura.’
Gina puts a Marvin Gaye track on, and turns the overhead light off, bathing the kitchen in a pleasing rosy glow, caused by the pink T-shirt that is draped over the one lamp. She begins to dance. Hedley, swigging a gulp of his whisky, joins her. The sensible thing now would be to go to bed, but then look where being sensible gets you, thinks Laura. Guy lights a cigarette, and with a sense of leaping into the dark, Laura takes one too.
Pins and needles, a dead weight on her arm, and a thumping void behind her eyes. Laura wakes with a jolt. She is in bed with Zeus licking her cheek joyfully. She turns away and finds herself staring at a body. The head is invisible beneath a twist of sheet, but in horror Laura examines shoulders beneath a T-shirt, the ribcage rising and falling slowly. She has been sleeping with someone. Oh God. Oh hell. What is she to do? Where can she hide? Nausea, remorse and shock surge in her throat and she leaps up to rush to the loo, wishing that alcohol abuse had killed her instead of leaving her maimed and guilty, the destroyer of a happy family. Returning, only marginally purged, some minutes later to get her clothes and escape, she forces herself to look at the bed again.
‘You have to confront these things, you have to face up to your wrongs,’ she tells herself, and holding her breath, pulls back the sheet. A tangle of long red hair and Dolly’s perfect profile greets her. Laura’s relief is indescribable and eclipses her hangover for several moments. But she must have done something wrong to have the instinct of guilt, and sure enough, next to Dolly is another body. She tugs the sheet from this newly discovered form, her heart and head throbbing a vile tympany which may well kill her at any moment. It is Becca, curled up on the edge of the bed and rubbing her eyes as Zeus burrows down next to her. Relief, and the effort of dressing, pump a thousand more toxins around her body, and she totters downstairs moaning weakly, ‘I need to go to hospital, I must go to hospital.’
Of all the horrible sights in the kitchen, the worst is Hedley, ashen-faced and emitting a gentle non-stop moan. His sleeves are rolled up and he is using the might of both hands to try and turn a tap on to fill the kettle. Laura takes the kettle from him, saying, ‘That’s the wrong tap. It doesn’t work. I’ll do it if you go and let the goat out.’
‘Guy’s done it. He’s milked her too.’ Hedley clutches his head with both hands as if it is a rugby ball, and staggers to the table to sit down.
‘Oh, he’s here too, is he?’ Laura presses her hands to her cheeks so Hedley doesn’t see her flush. She sips some water to practise before committing herself to tea. ‘Where did you sleep?’
A spasm of alarm crosses Hedley’s face. ‘Err, umm. In the girls’ room. They said I could, don’t you remember, because they said they could easily both fit in with you.’
Laura blunders on, wielding obtuseness like a blunt instrument. ‘So you and Guy shared that rickety old bed of Dolly’s? God, I must have been drunk. I should have put Gina in there. I wonder how she liked the sofa? It’s hellishly uncomfortable to sit on, so lying on it must be like sleeping on cobbles.’
Hedley shifts uncomfortably but is saved from answering by Gina drifting in, yawning ostentatiously and draping herself along the Rayburn. Hedley attempts a smile but just looks vacant. Laura, watching them, finally realises who slept with whom in Dolly’s bed.
‘I’m starving,’ says Gina, shaking her hair voluptuously and throwing a speaking glance at Hedley. Guy appears in the doorway.
‘Good,’ he says, ‘because I’ve found some eggs in the barn.’
‘But I haven’t got any hens,’ Laura insists, breaking off, distracted from this mystery by the sight of Gina suddenly putting her hand out and pressing it against Hedley’s chest in the v of his open shirt.
‘Well, there are certainly some here, so I’d make the most of them if I were you,’ says Guy, putting the eggs down.
‘I’ve never seen anyone so keen on Hedley,’ Laura whispers to Guy. ‘It’s a miracle.’ He finds a bowl and begins cracking eggs into it.
‘It’s good. She’s allowing her inner feelings a free rein,’ he replies, referring to Gina’s drunken and repetitive cry of the night before, that this new country life will help Laura become true to her inner self.
Hedley’s hand circles Gina’s wrist, and Laura, pushing between them to place a saucepan on the Rayburn, is suddenly struck with a pang of envy. Hurling toast into the oven, her sense of ill-usage intensifies. It is not on account of her brother and Gina’s passionate liaison – no, she is thrilled about that. But she can’t bear the injustice of having suffered wrenching guilt herself, as well as nearly dying of shock at the sight of a person in her bed, when in fact her existence is drearily blameless. The mists of alcohol begin to dissipate, aided by the scrupulous kitchen cleansing programme Laura is operating, and she is left with an increasing belief that a blameless existence does one no good at all. As she reaches the larder door for the second time in the walls and woodwork subsection of her housework marathon, she comes to the conclusion that she might as well have had tempestuous sex with Guy all night, as she has suffered agonising guilt for it without having any of the fun.
Polishing the greenish brass taps on the unworking sink, Laura broods. She is shocked to find herself gazing at Guy across the table when he refuses more toast, and thinking, I would have made you hungry. Really, the morning is becoming a subplot to A Streetcar Named Desire. She must pull herself together and think wholesome thoughts before the children come down to be corrupted.
‘Mum, if your friends are going to shag all night, can you please get me some earplugs? I had to put up with you snoring as well and I’m knackered.’ Dolly erupts into the room with unusual energy for the morning. She pulls a handful of soft white dough from the centre of the loaf Hedley has been slicing for toast, and swings herself onto the table chewing defiantly, her gaze not swerving for a second from her mother’s face.
Laura feels herself blushing, or more likely having a hot flush. ‘I don’t snore,’ she says sulkily. Gina giggles, Guy raises an eyebrow. It is unbearable in the kitchen with all these people. Her country idyll, her bolt-hole has turned into a doss house for the disaffected and the young. It is all wrong. Laura’s phone rings. Inigo’s mother, Betty, is on the other end.
‘Laura, I need to talk to you.’
‘Hello, Betty.’ Laura gestures frantically for everyone to be quiet.
‘I’ve been meaning to telephone you, but I’ve been on a cruise. Inigo sent me a ticket and I went to New York – very comfortable it was too.’
‘Good.’ Laura is pleased Inigo organised Betty’s trip to visit him. They’d planned it as a seventieth birthday present months ago, and Laura had utterly forgotten about it. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ She is finding the enunciation of words very tricky this morning, but Betty doesn’t seem to notice.
‘Oh, Inigo is so wonderful, and he really does try to keep his feet on the ground, although I don’t know how with all the attention he’s getting.’ She leaves an accusing pause then starts again, ‘But I want to know why you don’t make biscuits for him and the children.’
‘What?’ Betty has gone nuts, it shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is. Laura clutches her head and listens:
‘Yes, biscuits. The dear boy had to rush me into a private room as soon as I got there to ask for my shortbread recipe. He needed it for his show, poor lad, and he’s never made a biscuit before in his life. I don’t know why you haven’t been helping him with this, Laura.’
‘Er. Umm.’ Another flush sweeps over Laura’s face. It is impossible to answer Betty, there is nothing to say. In desperation Laura shouts, ‘Oh Betty, we haven’t seen you for so long. Come and stay when Inigo gets back.’
‘No, thank you,’ she says, ‘I’d prefer you all to visit me. I gather it’s not very comfortable where you are.’
Inigo, you treacherous creep, thinks Laura.
Shattered, she turns on her heel out of the busy kitchen and marches into the garden. Once there she slows for a moment wondering what to do, and unable to think of anything, wanders aimlessly around the garden. It is hideously abundant. Grass, tall and collapsing under its own weight, billows like the sea from the house to the apple trees where the weight of the blossom has torn a branch down, the bark peeled back to reveal a split of yellow new wood. It must have happened last week, but bindweed has already crept up the branch, coiling heart-shaped leaves among the pink blossom. Beyond the apples, nettles soar like rockets in another lagoon of grass and a breaking wave of cow parsley froths to the bottom of the wall. Everything needs doing. There is nowhere to look that does not cry out for love and attention. It is as demanding as any member of the family, and Laura is already overwhelmed. Zeus paddles towards her through the lawn, his tiny tail curled neat and crisp like a very chic black tortellino. Laura picks him up, and whispers, ‘How I love to hug my pug.’