The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (12 page)

She bounds out onto the main road, and accelerating away from the Edenfield roundabout she reaches seventy on the straight before being forced to slow down for a farm tractor. The tractor makes a great noise but goes no faster than twenty miles an hour. Mrs Dickinson bears it for a few minutes and then can bear it no more. She swings out to overtake, sees to her surprise a silver car approaching at speed, accelerates fiercely to get past the tractor, hears the blast of the silver car’s horn, feels the slam of air as they pass within inches of each other, the silver car banging on the verge, and pulls back into her lane entirely unharmed, indeed, exhilarated. She rams down the accelerator once more, and briefly touches seventy-five miles an hour before she’s braking hard ahead of the right turn to Underhill School.

I’ll give Alice the rest of the leg of lamb for supper, she thinks. She never gets real food at home.

15

Jack’s late getting out of class after last bell because old Jimmy picks him out for a little chat. You’d think he could see Jack is busting to go but Jimmy Hall lives in a universe all of his own. Carrie’s class does gym last lesson on Wednesdays which means they get let out early to change, and Jack suspects her of meaning to bag the front car seat. By law and tradition the front seat is his this afternoon. Carrie sat in the front last time so now it’s his turn. Legally there’s no argument. But Carrie is a cheat and a liar and not to be trusted.

‘Do you ever read the
Sussex County Chronicle
, Jack?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You should. Tell your parents. Good for local democracy, you know. We all need to keep informed.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘More to writing newspapers than meets the eye, Jack. No good just saying this happened, and this, and this. You have to tell a story.’

‘Yes sir.’

Old Jimmy has no one to go home to so he hangs around after school for as long as he can and comes in at weekends, which is sad, but Jack feels no pity. He can hear the clatter of running feet in the hall and the rumble of cars in the drive.

‘Got to go, sir. My mother’ll be waiting.’

‘Off you go, Jack. Off you go.’

Out into the crowded hall and push through the scrum of blue blazers to the porch where Mrs Kilmartin stands, big as a church. Jack lets himself be carried on the wave of home-going bodies into the open air. So far no sign of Carrie. Jason Ferris’s mother is there with a new Labrador puppy on a lead, drawing a crowd. Jack hesitates by the coned-off section where they’re supposed to wait for their pick-up, checking to see if anyone else from Carrie’s class is out yet. Peter Mackie passes by and idly and for no reason at all hits him on the shoulder, hard enough to hurt.

‘Hey! What was that for?’

‘Only a joke. Can’t you take a joke? Jacko can’t take a joke.’

Naomi Truscott comes out with her blazer on, which means Carrie’s class has been out for at least five minutes, and Carrie’s always one of the first. With a lurch of insight Jack realizes she must have gone on ahead, she’ll already be on the far side of the rhododendrons, waiting to intercept their mother’s car before he even sees it.

He sets off down the drive at a run, and there she is, a solitary figure with a drooping head, and there’s his mother’s car drawing to a stop. Even at this distance Jack can tell Carrie is starting to cry. He is outraged. He runs as fast as he can, fuelled by his sense of the unfolding injustice. As he approaches, Carrie has the car door open and is climbing into the front seat, when she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is his turn in the front seat this afternoon.

‘Carrie! Get out! It’s not your turn!’

His mother fixes him with reproachful eyes.

‘Please, Jack. Carrie’s upset.’

‘But it’s not her turn in the front!’

‘Oh, really. What does it matter where you sit? Now jump in the back. We’re holding up the other cars.’

Jack is speechless with shock. How can she say it doesn’t matter where they sit? She knows as well as he does how carefully the turns have been negotiated.

‘Come on, Jack. Get in.’

Jack gets in and shuts the door. Carrie looks round and for a second he glimpses her triumphant face and he can’t bear it.

‘It’s my turn! It is!’

His mother weaves the Volvo past the other cars, exchanging friendly waves with fellow parents, looping round the school porch and out towards the main road again.

‘Carrie’s upset, Jack. Be more sympathetic.’

‘No she isn’t. What’s she got to be upset about?’

‘She’s been having problems with Naomi. You know that.’

‘No she hasn’t. I saw them playing together in break. They were just fine.’

He had, too. That is, he had seen them talking together, heads bent and close, and no one walking away.

‘Well, I think that’s Carrie’s business, don’t you?’

‘But she’s lying!’

‘I am not!’ Carrie bursts into tears.

‘All right, darling. Jack, please leave her alone.’

Jack feels helpless in the face of his sister’s outrageous manipulation. How can his mother not see it?

‘It’s still my turn,’ he says, clinging fiercely to the one undeniable truth.

‘Jack. I don’t want to hear another word. Now tell me how your day has been.’

He says nothing. She doesn’t want to hear another word. She just said so. He was going to tell her about the Dogman, but not now.

‘Did Mr Strachan hand you back your composition?’

Silence.

‘So did he?’

‘Yes.’

Jack hasn’t given one single thought to his composition since getting it back. Life has been too full.

‘Did he like it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Oh.’

Jack catches a small note of dismay in his mother’s voice. All at once it strikes him there is ammunition here. There is the opportunity for a counterstroke. He makes his voice small.

‘He wrote on it,
You can do better than this
.’

‘Oh, darling. I was so sure he’d like it.’

‘Me too.’

His voice is so small now his mother can hardly hear him. The strategy is working.

‘Sweetheart! What a beast that man is. He’s wrong. It was a wonderful composition. Daddy was terribly impressed.’

‘Was he?’

Now his sad little voice is breaking her heart. She pulls the car into the side of the road. She turns round, reaches out a hand.

‘Were you terribly disappointed?’

‘Sort of.’ He feels his eyes fill with tears. His mother’s sympathy is so delicious that the required emotions rise up in him without effort on his part. He finds he has been hurt by Mr Strachan’s dismissal of his dream. He had hoped for praise. Instead he has been rejected. A tear rolls down his cheek.

‘Oh, darling.’ His mother dabs his cheek. ‘Carrie, why don’t you climb in the back and let Jack come by me?’

‘But Mummy—’

‘We’re halfway home already, darling.’

So Carrie goes in the back and Jack goes in the front and for the next ten minutes his victory is doubly sweet, because it has been won after an initial reversal. He knows Carrie’s submission is only temporary, but it is his turn in the front, not hers, she deliberately set out to violate the treaty, and now order is restored.

‘I’m going to tell Daddy about this,’ says his mother. ‘It’s just not good enough. It makes me angry. It really does.’

She turns the car off the road and down the short drive to home.

16

Martin Linton manoeuvres the ancient mud-encrusted Landrover down the farm road, weaving round the deeper pot-holes, banging into the shallower ones, his dogs yipping softly in the back as they smell home. The road has not been resurfaced by the Edenfield Estate for twenty years now. He receives the repeated hammer-blows to the suspension with a bitter satisfaction. His life has been so punishing for so long that he has come to source his pride in his ability to endure hardship. The jolting ride sings a song to which he has words: ‘Do your worst you’ll never—, do your worst you’ll never—, do your worst you’ll never—, knock me down.’ He recalls the sight of the Underhill boys pelting away across the field in terror.

Should have shot the little shits.

To the end of the track and into the yard. Nettles grow in the cracks where the concrete paving has buckled. The old flint walls of the great barn are beginning to crumble. Wind and rain have scratched at the lime mortar and etched it away so that now the flints stand out like teeth. Here and there the roof tiles have slipped, letting in the weather to rust the farm machinery stored within. Only the barn’s timber frame is sound. Posts, beams, rafters, purlins all oak, the original timbers cut and slotted over three hundred years ago, and still too hard to knock a nail into without bending it. From a practical point of view the steel and aluminium Atcost barns in the storage yard do a better job, being virtually maintenance-free and entirely weather-proof. However those modern structures draw no envious glances from passing walkers; whereas the handsome old barn beside Home Farm causes them to stand and stare, consumed with covetousness.

The dogs jump out as soon as the Landrover stops, and bound up to the back door of the house. Martin always comes and goes by the back door. The front door looks onto the village street, and has an eighteenth-century portico, and a brick path leading to a pretty iron gate. It’s so little used that the hinges have rusted, and ground elder covers the front step.

‘Down Bess! Down Sal!’

The dogs stand back to let him through. The door opens into a dark back kitchen, where he eases off his boots and his damp coat and washes his hands in water from the cold tap, the only tap above the big chipped white sink. A trug of new potatoes stands on the table, the black earth still fresh on the egg-white skin. He relishes the chill of the cold water on his hands. From the kitchen next door come familiar sounds: the shrill squeal of his daughters’ voices, the racket of the dogs running round and round the table as they always do on arrival, the soft admonitory tones of his wife.

Jenny is sitting at the table, a newspaper spread open before her. The girls see their father in the doorway and come running. He picks them both up, one in each arm, and they rub their noses against his stubble, and wriggle and squeal at the delicious prickliness. Jenny looks up and manages a smile for him.

‘You shouldn’t be digging potatoes,’ he says.

‘Oh, well.’ She’s over nine months gone now, and permanently exhausted.

‘Daddy Daddy Daddy,’ sing the girls.

He lowers them carefully to the ground. They’re both in nightdresses, barefoot, ready for bed. He opens his hands and receives one small hand in each big hand. This is the ritual.

‘Kiss Mummy.’

Poppy goes first, three years old, round face and blue eyes. People exclaim when they see her, ‘A cherub! An angel!’ She has a fierce and stubborn will, which her father traces back to himself, but her beauty, her sweet manipulative charm, is all Jenny’s.

‘There, darling. Don’t squash Bobby.’

The baby is to be a boy called Bobby.

Lily follows her sister in her mother’s arms: Lily the silent, Lily the grave. At five years old she has a reading age of eight. She reads
My Naughty Little Sister
stories over and over. Her father knows she is unusual, and will grow up to be a remarkable person, and will do great things.

Then up the stairs they go, hand in hand, step by step, all silently counting the steps as they go. Fifteen to the half landing, fourteen more to the top. Pad-pad-pad go the bare feet along the carpetless boards of the landing to the girls’ bedroom, the pink-walled heart of the house.

‘Into bed, now. Cuddle up.’

He sits in the rocking chair between their two beds and reads them their story. He dearly wants his cup of tea, and then his bath, but this nightly self-denial is one of the ways he is able to feel, as a bodily sensation, his intense love for his daughters. The book must be held on his lap just so, so that each of them, squirming under bedclothes, can hang out of the beds’ sides and follow the pictures. The stories are baby stories, for the benefit of Poppy, but Lily doesn’t mind. They remind her of when she was young.

He reads
Goodnight Moon
. Their lips move as they follow the familiar words with him.

‘Goodnight comb. And goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering hush.’

Poppy’s finger touches each item as it’s named. Martin reads slowly, because this is bedtime, and soon they’ll be asleep.

‘Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.’

He kisses them, kneeling on the floor so that he can rest his head beside theirs on the pillow. Out goes the reading lamp, to leave only the soft pink glow of the night light.

‘Sleep tight, my darling ones.’

‘Daddy Daddy, what shall I dream about?’

‘Dream about—’