A Perfect Life (27 page)

‘Now, has everyone got what they want? Foss, stop that, please, it's Jem's birthday.'

Why that is relevant to Foss flicking some small camouflaged army man into the special fried rice is a
mystery to me. Coral and Ruby are listening to Coral's iPod. Coral has not said one word to Dad since he turned up at the restaurant, even though she talked all the way here about how great life is in Sheffield and how we are all missing the point by not being in the North.

‘I think I'll stay up there when I finish,' she says, chin up, looking at Mum with defiance.

‘Well, if you like it as much after three years as you do after three weeks, you would be daft not to,' says Dad. He orders a Coke and drinks it in one big swallow. Coral looks as though she is going to punch him for a minute, then she relents and laughs.

‘I guess you're right, Nick, but it is really good fun,' she says. From her that is like handing out the biggest olive branch on the tree. Dad looks like Christmas has come, he is so bloody pleased she is speaking to him. He orders another Coke. He looks a lot older than usual, I think it's his hair. Or maybe the popping eyes. Mum looks weird too. She's got a new posture. I reckon it's to do with yoga, but she always looks as though she has been arranged at the moment, and she turns her whole body when she's talking to you, not just her head. I prefer not to look at either of them, so I gaze at my favourite thing in this Chinese restaurant, a gold-framed picture of 3-D swans in front of a waterfall. The swans ripple across the water past lily pads. It is a combination of kitsch art and computer-game graphics that I love.

Suddenly I get Mum's attention and a breath of her scent comes over me and my memory kicks in to the
whole of my childhood with her kissing me goodnight and hugging me and smelling of that particular perfume, so I am not listening, I am remembering, and I suddenly notice that everyone has stopped eating. It is something Dad is saying.

‘As we are all together, and this will not happen very many more times, I think it is the right moment for me to tell you that I am going to be spending a lot more of my time in New York after the divorce. You can all come there, of course. I hope you will like it.'

Ruby starts crying and rice falls out of her mouth. Mum looks like she's been hit, so does Dad.

Mum pulls this smile that looks painful to hold and says, ‘Well done, Nick,' like she really means it.

He says, ‘Thanks,' and they both start looking more normal than they have all evening.

Coral stands up and shouts. ‘Christ, you guys are crap. Can't you keep the carnage of your existence to yourselves?' which I think is a bit over the top. Foss and me are sitting next to one another. I take one of his army men off my plate and put it in his hand.

‘Fanks,' he whispers.

The waiter arrives with a plate on which is a round chocolate-orange ice cream sitting on a clear plastic stand like a rugby ball tee. A sparkler is fizzing on top. He comes round to where I am sitting and puts it on the table in front of me.

‘This is a bombshell surprise,' he says. ‘Many Happy Returns on the house.'

Ruby cracks up first and then I start laughing too. That's all I can do.

May Day. White cherry blossom blurs the edges of the trees in the wood in front of the house, festooned like lacy curtains around the view. From across the field under the canopy of a wide chestnut tree, Angel and Ruby gaze at the soft haze of the wood carpeted with bluebells. Behind them, among the roots of the tree, Foss squats, breathing heavily over a nest of ants.

‘Tell me again what happened in your bluebell wood when you were little.'

Ruby sits in a kink in a low snaking branch of the tree, swaying and swinging her legs. ‘Tell us the unicorn story,' she begs.

Angel is slow to answer, lost in a floating peacefulness, absorbed in the gentle warmth of the spring afternoon.

‘I'm not sure any more if it really happened or if I imagined it, you know that, don't you?' A ribbon of images, of many spring days, many memories
suffused with joy and sorrow, never one without the other, flicker through her mind, spooling through all her life until here and now. This moment when the tree smells green, and sunlight lies in pools on the cows huffing interest at a safe distance and she is here with her two youngest children. Happy. Ruby kicks a foot on the ground and the branch bounces gently.

‘I know, and sometimes when you tell me the story I think it's true and sometimes I know you made it up. It just depends what I feel like believing.'

‘Mum, I need a jar or a box, can you get one?' Foss appears in front of Angel, his hands cupped around something.

‘What have you got?'

‘A chrysalis. I need to keep it warm.'

His whole face, his embracing stance, reflects his earnest desire to look after the creature. Angel cannot imagine how so much passion will ever survive. Foss's enthusiasm for small and often rather disgusting creatures is growing with him. It is not shared by anyone in his family, indeed it is largely ignored, but he does not care. Angel is suddenly moved by his solemnity.

‘I haven't got a box or a jar. How about a hankie?'

‘How about no?' Foss turns away, as if shielding the chrysalis from his mother's crassness.

‘Oh.' Slightly taken aback, Angel looks around. ‘I don't know what to suggest then.' No shelf of jam jars emerges helpfully from the tree.

‘I do.' Ruby swings off her branch, and brushing her skirt smooth, she runs around the trunk and
stands on tiptoe, reaching into a small hole on the other side.

‘What are you doing?' Angel is fascinated. What could possibly be in the tree trunk?

‘I've been here with Jem, smoking – and he always leaves some matches and his cigarettes here for next time.' Angel is little shocked that Ruby has a life and experience that she, Angel, did not know about, even here at home.

‘But won't he have taken them back to school?'

Ruby grins triumphantly. ‘No,' she giggles, waving a packet. Angel begins to laugh. Foss shuffles over to his sister, his hands still clasped over the black blob of insect.

‘Quick, throw those away and put this in,' he commands, and Ruby shakes three cigarettes on to the ground.

‘Perfect,' she murmurs. ‘Perfect,' echoes Foss. Angel can't stop laughing.

‘You two are so adorable,' she says.

Foss and Ruby give her a surprised look.

‘Come on, Mummy, let's have the rest of the story now,' says Ruby, tugging her hand as they move away from the tree, the cigarette packet safely stowed in Foss's trouser pocket.

Angel begins. Outside is a new setting for the story she normally tells sitting on the end of a child's bed, often when they are ill and need the extra comfort of something familiar.

‘OK. Well, years and years ago, when I was just about your age—'

‘Whose age? Mine or Foss's?' Ruby loves detail.

‘Probably just a bit older than you,' says Angel after a pause. ‘So when I was eight or nine, I used to ride my pony through a medieval wood near where we lived when I was growing up.'

‘A long way from here,' says Ruby, her eyes far away in the story.

‘Yes, far away, and long ago,' says Angel, smiling, ‘and at this time of year I often used to take a picnic with me and I would ride all day, and when I got tired, I would get off and lie in the bluebells.'

‘And what happened to the pony? Why didn't it run away?' asks Ruby, wanting to picture every moment.

‘I used to tie him to a wild lilac bush and he would eat the leaves and swish his tail to get rid of the flies,' replies Angel.

‘What kind of creatures were invented in your day?' asks Foss, trying to take an interest. ‘Did you ever have dragons around you?'

Ruby answers, deliberately flattening, not wanting her story to head off in his direction: ‘None of your sort of creepy crawlies, just unicorns and butterflies.'

They are nearly at the wood at the bottom of the field now. Holding both their hands, long grass cool on her legs and the whirring presence of swifts darting above the grass for invisible insects, Angel has a sudden moment of joy, sharply focused, fleeting and yet enduring.

She continues, ‘And my mother had always told me that there were unicorns in this ancient wood, and
that she had seen one when she was a child, and I never believed her because I had never seen one, though I had looked and looked every time I was there, and I had seen badgers and deer and sometimes a fox.' Angel stops. They are at the edge of the wood now, and the bluebells are as high as Foss's knees. She helps him over the ditch at the edge and follows him and Ruby into the intense blue.

‘One year I walked to the woods. My pony had got old and died the winter before, and I still wanted to go to the woods. I don't know why, as it was a long way to walk. Anyway, I was there and I was remembering him and feeling very sad and lonely, and I lay down on the bluebells.'

Telling it now, Angel remembers every detail as clearly as if it was yesterday, not thirty years ago. ‘The smell was just like this now, and I'm glad we are in here so you can describe it yourselves.' She pauses and breathes in the soft scent.

‘Mmm. Smells like smoky bacon,' says Foss dreamily.

Ruby shoots him a filthy look. ‘No. It does not. It smells delicate, like lace,' she says crossly.

‘Anyway,' says Angel, moving on quickly, hoping she is not going to have to break up a squabble, ‘the sky went dark, as though it was going to thunder, and the air was purple and still, and all the buds on the trees were such a bright green I had to blink. And I looked down through the glade of bluebells. Where the path turned away at the bottom I saw a horse emerge quite silently from the woods.'

She pauses again and looks down at Foss and Ruby. Both of them gaze unblinking at her face, their argument forgotten; she smiles and squeezes each of their hands.

They both squeeze back and she continues, ‘My pony was grey, and at first I thought it was him. Or a ghost of him, and I was a bit scared. But then I realised it couldn't be him. This horse had dappled grey shoulders and hindquarters and its body was dazzling white. It had a long mane and tail and big dark eyes. It was so beautiful and so quiet, I just looked and looked. And it felt as though it was there for ever, and had been and would always be, but it also seemed to be there for just a moment. Then it began to walk away. I felt very sad watching it go. I thought I would cry, but the sun came out and glanced through the trees, and it caught the head of the horse, and for the briefest moment I saw a unicorn's horn. The horse disappeared in among the trees, and even though I ran to where I had seen it, there was nothing but the flattened grass of a path created by an animal's feet.'

Somehow, in the story, the three of them have stopped walking. They climb on to a fallen-down piece of fencing a few metres into the wood, under a veil of cherry blossom. ‘It was this kind of bright white,' says Angel, nodding at the flowers above their heads.

‘I wish I could see your unicorn.' Ruby hugs Angel tightly, her arms around her neck.

‘I wish you could too,' says Angel, kissing her forehead.

‘I can see it! It's come!' shouts Foss, standing up on the fence, gripping Angel's coat with one hand, pointing into the wood in front of them.

‘Look!'

They look. ‘I can't see anything,' Angel says faintly, not sure what Foss is imagining.

Ruby darts forward, threading a path through delicate white garlic flowers and the first pink campion and then up into the smoky blue of the woodland, her whole body crackling with excitement.

‘I can see it too, Mummy, look!' It is true, something is moving in the foliage, something separate. Light glints, but through the shadow of afternoon sun on leaves and festooning undergrowth, it is impossible to make sense of what it is. It could be anything. Excitement rushes through Angel, and a sense of wonder, long forgotten yet familiar. And at once Ruby is climbing, slipping in her excitement on long bluebell leaves curled like cats' tongues, the sap from the stems hanging in translucent spools. The soft scent of spring in the air, the damp shadows of the wood and the magical blue light make anything possible. Foss, just in front of Angel, holds out his hand.

‘We'll show you, Mum, quick, come and see!' he says, yanking her over a fallen branch. A tree stump with a sweep of wild honeysuckle leaves cascading over it blocks their path, and behind it something is moving. Ruby looks back at her mother and brother, and the smile on her face is so open, so lit with excitement, that tears spring in Angel's eyes. Holding hands, all three of them step around the
tree. A silver and white helium balloon bobs among the bluebells.

‘It's a butterfly,' says Ruby.

‘From a chrysalis,' agrees Foss.

‘No, it's a balloon butterfly,' corrects Ruby. ‘It's from a party, not a chrysalis.'

‘It's got a message on it,' says Angel.

‘It doesn't need one,' says Ruby. ‘We know why it's here.'

Raffaella Barker, daughter of the poet George Barker, was born and brought up in the Norfolk countryside. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels,
Come and Tell Me Some Lies
,
The Hook, Hens Dancing, Summertime, Green Grass, Poppyland
and
From a Distance
. She has also written a novel for young adults,
Phosphorescence
. She is a regular contributor to
Country Life
and the
Sunday Telegraph
and teaches on the Literature and Creative Writing BA at the University of East Anglia and the Guardian UEA Novel Writing Masterclass. Raffaella Barker lives in Cley next the Sea, Norfolk.

Come and Tell Me Some Lies
The Hook
Phosphorescence
Hens Dancing
Summertime
Green Grass
Poppyland
From a Distance