Daughters (4 page)

He turned away. ‘Listen to us, Lara.
Listen.
’

She observed his back. What could she read into it? Nothing she wished to read, and she stood for a while in the kitchen, waiting to touch base with the normal sounds. But there was silence. Why didn’t the boiler thump? The pipes rattle?

She went upstairs and shut herself into the bedroom. She needed to look at Bill’s things. There were his shoes stuffed into the cupboard, the jackets (all similar) exuding whiffs of aftershave and sweat. There was his dressing-gown in blue paisley. Handsome.

She tried pretending that she hadn’t heard what had been said. (‘I’m selectively deaf,’ her grandmother used to say. ‘You’ll find it a useful condition.’)

At that time, her ambitions had centred on peaceful interiors that smelt of ironing and fresh bread. Of transporting children, of family outings, of visits to the cinema with popcorn, and Sunday roasts with properly crisped potatoes.

Now what?

Hours later she emerged to discover Bill sitting on the top stair. ‘Shouldn’t you have something to eat?’ He touched the place where her hipbone jutted through her jeans.

Her head pounded. ‘Why would you care?’

‘I may be leaving you,’ his voice drifted in from a long way away, ‘but I’ll make sure you’re OK.’

She could see the scene clearly. To the onlooker, it was him and her having a – more or less – civilized conversation. But, at her hidden centre, she was molten with rage and pain. ‘You’re not taking the children,’ she said, proud of keeping her voice steady. ‘Don’t think it.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Yes, I do.
My
children … I won’t lose my children.’

At that, he appeared uneasy. ‘As it happens, Violet isn’t … keen.’

She rallied her forces. ‘Bill, you don’t have to do this. You have a choice.’

He stared up at her. ‘I don’t think so.’

The look on his face reminded her so vividly of times past – times when it had been all right between them and they had been happy, more than happy – that her defences crumbled. She heard herself blurt, ‘It would be easier if
you were dead,’ and had the satisfaction of seeing him pale.

It was true. If Bill had died she knew she would have coped better. The refuge and decorum of widowhood was so much easier an option than that of the abandoned wife.

‘Stop it.’

‘Why aren’t you dead instead of Louis?’ she blazed at him.

Uneasy and shocked, he followed her down the stairs into the kitchen. ‘Lara … can I ring your mother?’

‘Don’t talk to me.’

Pain was a protean thing. The pain of childbirth, seemingly unbearable at its worst, was, Lara discovered, bearable because it was forgotten. The pain of a collapsed marriage? Different again.

The pain of bereavement? That was of another order.

The two together?

‘At least, the agony cannot grow any more,’ she wrote in the notebook, after Bill had left. ‘It is just there, a poisoning thing, anchored and immutable, and I’ve got used to dealing with it. What I can’t handle is waking up in the morning, all clean and washed with sleep and revelling in those seconds of unknowing, only for it to hit me …’

If Bill’s going hurt, the struggle to subdue pride and rage and maintain a civilized face in front of the girls was almost worse. This would be a lifelong discipline – as tough as taking religious vows. She pictured herself as a figure in a classical painting kneeling in front of an infant Christ or a saint, promising silence and obedience, however hard. Lara’s lawyer advised, ‘You
have
to negotiate.’ True, cutting herself off and sending violent messages via
silence was more disturbing than being vocal, but, said the lawyer, it was not an option.

‘Why did he go?’ asked Lara’s mother. (She was a persistent woman and wouldn’t countenance Lara’s attempts to fob her off.)

‘I got pregnant with Maudie, then Louis, and that began a whole long story,’ she said. ‘You know the rest.’ To counter the tragedy, a traumatized Bill had taken refuge with Violet. The Shrinking V., slim and gleaming with desire, raising her thin arms and crying for more of him to the exclusion of anyone else. Who could blame her? Who could blame him?

Thinking, Children’s lunch, Lara had taken a knife out of the kitchen drawer and Bill had backed away. He looked at her with dawning incomprehension – her lovely husband, who couldn’t cope with his grief and its repercussions any longer.

‘Go to Violet.’

‘Lara …’

She raised the knife. ‘
Go
.’

A large white envelope fell on to the hall floor.

Lara was on her way out to work but she picked it up. ‘Lara’ – Sarah’s handwriting.

Sarah never gave up.

Inside, there was a sheaf of paper and a note. ‘Please take a look.’

The first document was a photocopy of an entry in
Country Houses
and Their Importance.
‘Built
c.
1751 by disciple of Robert Adam. Property of the Coates family until 1962. Thereafter property of Gurley Smith. The house, a small-scale commission, reflects early Adam characteristics and preoccupations and it is said that Adam himself insisted on designing fireplaces and pediments. The result is work that has a sense of overall unity, or flow.’

The second was from a garden gazetteer, dated the previous year. ‘Once superb, Membury House gardens have fallen into neglect. However, if on Open Days visitors are prepared to look beyond the pedestrian planting and lazy maintenance, they can find the odd gem, including a fine example of a Roman myrtle tree, said to have been planted by Jane Austen’s great-nephew.’

The third gave a short history of the Coates family, who had grown rich on the manufacture of imported cotton from the American colonies. Josiah Coates had had
the foresight to back the new flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing cotton in the late 1750s and had never looked back. Eventually the family had died out, owing, the writer speculated, to a genetic problem that appeared to have invaded it. As a result, only one out of three children survived, the last dying in 1961.

Now Sarah took up the story, penning in her neat hand: ‘My great-uncle Gurley bought it from the Coates executors and occupied it for over forty years. He never married.’

Finally, Lara picked up some printed pages, which had been torn out of a book – by the look and feel of them a cheap paperback. Again, Sarah’s writing along the top margin: ‘My mother told me that she was sure that the novelist, whose name was Matthew Banks, had modelled the house in the book on Membury and the village.’

Coat shrugged on, bag in hand, she stood in the hallway and began to read.

The writer was impassioned by his subject – and, possibly, a little overwrought:

Montford House was situated to the west of Middleford. Running between fields, which in summer were bright with poppies, corncockle, charlock and mayweed, the road through the centre of the village wound down towards the old London road and Alton, and took in the house on the left.

At ploughing time, the rooks rose above the ridge where the plough teams had danced on the turn of the
land. On cold days, the ground rang with the sound of hoofs, and the air echoed with the swish of the muck-spreading teams as they moved in lines across the fields, and the cries of workers harvesting cabbages. At dusk, the teams plodded home to the rattle of chain and harness. In summer, the flies rose in clouds above the crops and the herb-rich meadows. Pigs rooted in grasslands, poultry foraged, and the streams feeding the watercress beds, for which the area was famed, ran cold and clear. The shimmering silence was broken only by the corn soughing, the crack of oak and elm, and the tin-can caw of the rooks. Sheep and cattle dotted the horizon like the colourful images from a medieval book of hours …

As she read on – and there were several more pages in kind – the tiny hallway appeared even more cramped than normal. Outside in the street, a siren sounded and the dustmen scraped bins along the pavements. Looking down, she noticed the feathers of dirt drawn on the tiles by the draught. Looking up, she saw the grime etched into the glass panels of the front door.

‘Dirty, nasty place, the city,’ her mother had said, when she arrived to help out after Bill had left. ‘You can’t stay here. You need to come back home to Cornwall. Live near us.
Please
. It’s better for the children.’ Her complexion had gleamed with fresh air, and the smugness of the committed country dweller. ‘We can arrange things. Schools, friends …’

Lara had been standing in the centre of the room. It
was strewn with children’s stuff. She hadn’t changed her jeans in weeks. Her hair draped lankly on her shoulders. The room needed painting and, because of the rain beating outside, it was dark. As she stood there, it seemed to her that the walls were closing in. They were both prison and security of sorts.

No
.

‘Lara,’ her mother argued. ‘Think of the children.’

At that, Lara turned on her. ‘I think of
nothing
else.’

Here, hidden in the streets, she could wear blinkers, put her head down and look neither right nor left.

Over the years, she had become successful as a city dweller: grafted into its ways, its smells, its variety, its indifference. It suited her. She had grown to love the rough-and-tumble – and she had taught herself, above all, to be a creature of its streets and tumult.

Yes, the city was dirty and brutish, but the lobby who argued that it was only that did not know the half of it.

The final line of Sarah’s note read: ‘Please come and see Membury. I want you to
know
it as much as I will.’

Eve’s email to Lara began:

Wedding Plans, Stage One

First Question: What kind of wedding?

Typical Eve. Clear and decided.

She continued:

Once we have the location, then we can set the date. We can’t do anything without the location. Love Bridezilla

What kind of wedding?
In Eve’s case, it was a rhetorical question, and what Lara wanted for Eve was what Lara had wanted for herself – but better.

… the streams feeding the watercress beds, for which the area was famed, ran cold and clear. The shimmering silence was broken only by the corn soughing, the crack of oak and elm and the tin-can caw of the rooks …

How strange. Matthew Banks’s description of the village had crawled inside her head and gone to sleep, waking every so often to nudge her. ‘The shimmering silence … the crack of oak and elm …’

She found herself wanting to go there so she could see it for herself.

Bill was amenable and, after consulting him, Eve arranged for Andrew and Lara to travel down to Middleford the following Sunday.

It might be a Sunday morning, and freezing, but it was astonishing how busy the station was. Cluttered with groups, luggage, vendors, the forecourt was an animated panorama of ants.

Punctual as ever, Eve was already there, waiting under the clock. Lara paused to take a good look. Black beret, short circular fifties jacket, jeans tucked into Spanish leather riding boots. Her restless gaze was everywhere as she talked into her phone.

Eve spotted her, terminated the call, snatched Lara’s hand and held it to her cheek. ‘Thank you for coming.’

She kissed her stepdaughter who smelt – slightly – of cigars, which would have horrified the fastidious Eve. ‘Where’s Andrew?’

‘Buying papers. Everything OK at home?’

‘Fine.’ Lara dished out the cappuccinos she had bought at the kiosk. ‘Here. I bet you haven’t had breakfast.’ Eve shook her head. ‘I’ve got one for Andrew, too.’

He joined them at the ticket barrier. ‘How early is this, Lara?’ he asked, but kissed her with his usual grace. ‘Fiancée and mother-in-law, I’m a lucky man.’

He meant it and didn’t mean it. It was the kind of compliment he tossed out, oh, so charmingly. She held out the coffee. ‘Starter fuel. Any good?’

‘You know something?’ he said. ‘I think I want to marry you.’

Eve slipped her hand into Andrew’s coat pocket. Beside him she looked small and fragile. ‘Only a tiny point, but I got there first.’

Andrew shrugged. ‘Sorry about that.’ Above them the departures board flipped to reveal the platform. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘We should have taken the car. It’s freezing and it might snow. Great.’

‘Much quicker on the train,’ said Eve, in her practical way. ‘Carbon footprint.’

‘Oh, God.’ Andrew rolled his eyes. ‘Not that.’ He turned a straight face on Lara. ‘
Now
I humour her but … just give it few years.’

‘No,’ said Eve, quietly. ‘You agree with me.’

‘Do I?’

She looked up at him and said, ‘You do.’

He rested his hands on her shoulders, turned her round and pushed her gently in the direction of the train. ‘If you say so.’

On the journey down, Andrew and Eve sat opposite each other and didn’t talk much for the hour or so it took. Andrew hunched back on the seat and closed his eyes, an unread newspaper on his lap. Lara squinted at the top story’s headline, speculating on the date of the general election. This year, next year, some time, never, she thought. Eve opened her laptop (which never left her) and tapped away. The demands of the on-line high-fashion retailer for whom she worked never let up. Once, she lifted her eyes to Lara. ‘I have a good feeling about Membury,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

Mum, you won’t leave me like my real mum did?

No, Evie, I won’t.

A landscape of frost-embellished back gardens, washing lines and scrubby infill plantings of pines flew past. Clickety-clack went the train, and Lara computed the things that mattered to its rhythm. Eve and Andrew had somewhere to live
. Clickety-clack
. Andrew’s parents had offered them a run-down cottage in the grounds of their larger house. They were handsome and capable.
Clickety-clack
. Their future seemed straightforward. It seemed good.
Clickety-clack
. How different would things be, having a daughter married?