Weeks in Naviras (17 page)

‘Oh that’s just typical, isn’t it?’ Bobby was still crying, despite being changed and fed just a few minutes ago. ‘Best thing you can do is call for a taxi from here, they only take ten minutes. Would you mind holding him for a second?’

I passed Bobby to Liz and picked up my phone. I was just about to call for a taxi when there was an incoming call, it was my Dad’s neighbour in London. She said the radio had been blaring out of Dad’s flat full-blast for several hours, she’d tried to knock on the door loudly but he wasn’t responding. Was he with me? I said I’d get to London as quickly as I could, to open the door with my key. I swore as I hung up, but was surprised to see Bobby had stopped crying in Liz’s arms.

‘You’ve got the touch,’ I said. ‘I’m jealous.’

‘It’s me who’s jealous,’ replied Liz. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t going to be something I’ll ever experience.’

I didn’t respond to that. ‘Listen, turns out I’ve got to drive into London, there’s been a little crisis with my father. Do you want a lift?’

As we drove along the motorway through London’s eastern fringes Liz explained how she’d had some health problems a few years before, the upshot being she’d always find it very difficult to conceive. She didn’t go into too many details. ‘Since then I’ve just been trying to focus on work,’ she said. I didn’t tell her that Bobby had been unplanned or unexpected, thinking it would’ve been cruel to say so.

Liz said she’d heard rumours that James had dated Rosie Costello before me, and asked me whether they were still close?

‘Not especially,’ I murmured, before braking hard to avoid being snapped by a speed camera. Both of us were jolted forward as our seat belts locked. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Liz. ‘This road’s a nightmare. Do you know Rosie well?’

‘Well enough.’

‘That sounds like you’d rather not know her any better.’ In the periphery of my vision I could see she was staring at me.

‘She’s not someone who’s easy to get to know,’ I said, speeding up again.

‘But her and your husband, they had a thing.’

‘Why don’t you just ask her, if it’s so important to you?’ A sports car snuck into the lane in front of me, forcing me to brake sharply and sound my horn. ‘That’s it,’ I said, veering into the inside lane and indicating to turn off at the approaching exit. ‘You’re getting out, you can get the tube back into town from here.’

‘I’m sorry, Ellie, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ said Liz. Maybe she was annoyed at herself for blowing a potential contact, perhaps just unhappy at the thought of getting soaked in the rain again. ‘That wasn’t my intention, I promise.’

I pulled up in a service road next to the main carriageway. In the back Bobby was making noises which signalled a looming tantrum. The rain lashed the windscreen, once the wipers were off it became impossible to see anything. I turned to Liz. ‘You have a husband?’

She nodded. ‘Well, a partner. We’ve been going out for too long to call him a boyfriend.’

‘Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to deal with having to see your partner’s exes all the time? No? Well I can assure you, it’s not easy, Liz. Actually it’s a pain, and all the while I’m stuck out in Eppingham I always wonder what’s going on at Westminster. I don’t need to be reminded of it, thanks all the same.’

She understood. ‘If my other half had previous like Rosie Costello, I’d feel the same, Ellie. She’s not a pleasant person, I know that.’

I gripped the steering wheel and closed my eyes. I seriously thought about telling Liz everything. Was there something about people like her, that encouraged their targets to spill the beans? I certainly came close, but in the end I struck a deal with her; I confirmed that James had been to Washington and was fairly close to Morgan, so long as she let me know if she ever heard further rumours about James and Rosie around Westminster.

‘I’m sorry to have reacted like that earlier,’ I said. ‘Since I’ve been on maternity leave my brain’s tended to over-think things.’

‘I can only imagine,’ said Liz. ‘How shall we stay in touch?’

‘Email’s best,’ I said. ‘And I can call you back if you ask me to. I’ll let you know if I hear anything more about Morgan Cross from James.’

Liz nodded emphatically. ‘Actually, it’s probably best if you don’t drop me back at Westminster. People might see me getting out, or something. I’ll get the tube from here.’

We exchanged email addresses before I dropped her off, then I drove quickly to Dad’s flat where I found him in another of his stupors, the radio still turned up full blast. The next day Liz ran a story about how James had friends in high places in Washington, it was buried on page twelve of her paper and wasn’t really picked up by anyone except for the blogs. James wondered out loud the next morning whom the ‘well-connected source’ might be, not thinking for a moment it could be me.

Bobby’s sleeping wasn’t great in the first six months, and spending untold hours on my own provided unwelcome time to ruminate. Especially at night, when I’d go downstairs so James could get some sleep. Standing alone in the living room feeding Bobby I became quite transfixed by the American news networks in those small hours of the morning, their primetime bulletins replayed on their British affiliates. Morgan was rarely out of the news.

‘Any evidence of a state-sponsored Chinese cyber attack must and will be considered an act of war,’ she declared to reporters one night. ‘But you know, the fact of the matter is that China is only conducting its affairs in this way because it’s frightened of the outside world. And I just feel that pandering to this paranoia will send out the wrong message to the American people.’

‘It’s all lining up,’ I told Bobby, who was looking up at me while suckling, quiet and warm. ‘She’s going to take over the world.’ It was a bit disappointing to me that she was playing by the same old rules as other politicians, trumpeting the oil industry even though people were seriously questioning the size of America’s reserves. Still I was delighted for her, willed her on. Maybe it’s because I’d met her, found it somehow flattering that I’d spent time in the personal company of a woman who might one day go all the way. Perhaps also that I’d seen a different side to her on the terrace in parliament, one that few people would ever see.

Rosie announced a few weeks later that she was getting married to the tedious Foreign Office wonk she’d brought to Naviras the previous year. Actually, he’d left government to become a private consultant, no doubt quadrupling his salary in the process. It seemed incongruous at first; Rosie had displayed no sign of ever being wildly in love. I think sometimes the husbands of women like Rosie know they’ve not quite sealed the deal, but they’re happy enough to go through life’s rituals. Maybe they just think they’ll get to have affairs later.

I don’t think Rosie ever seriously harboured aspirations to become an MP herself, always knew she was more effective as a backroom operator. She must have also known deep down that not enough people really liked her. One doesn’t need to have everyone in the party liking you to get elected, but you need enough of the right people on-side.

Rosie never came close to achieving that, except of course with James. During that period she was a distant object, rarely coming to Eppingham and keeping a low profile at Westminster. I saw her and her fiancé on the Commons terrace a month before they were married, it became clear to me that underneath the demure façade she was quite the nag. Her poor fiancée was never allowed out of her field of vision and seemed to be on an invisible leash. At one point that evening Rosie’s eyes met mine; perhaps my face revealed I knew about her and James. We froze, then I looked away first.

Gail came out to Eppingham one Saturday afternoon. ‘Oh my God, you’ve become the Countess of Essex,’ she said, marvelling at the size of our house. Already our lives had diverged tangentially; normally both too busy to catch up much in London, but it went further than that. Gail’s love life consisted of multiple dating, or ‘the revolving carousel of love’, as she called it. ‘I’m seeing three blokes at the moment, I like to have at least two on the go at any one time.’

She went into details about her sexy city boy – ‘He’s a tool. Emotionally dead.’ Then her online university lecturer pull – ‘Hopeless in bed, but he’s got good chat.’

‘And the third?’

‘Oh, you’ll have to keep quiet about that one,’ she said. ‘Do you promise?’

He was a senior barrister at another chambers, they’d crossed swords in court during the only major case Gail had lead on and lost. ‘It’s a mistake, I know, but he’s teaching me far more than I could learn anywhere else. I wouldn’t be seeing him if he didn’t have a wife.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Even if I did feel like settling down, I wouldn’t dream of doing it with another lawyer. And for the record, L, I don’t feel like settling down.’

‘Don’t you want kids?’

‘Absolutely not, I mean can you see me holding a crappy nappy?’ She regretted saying it instantly. ‘Are you thinking about having another one?’

‘Well, James wants to, and I definitely want a brother or sister for this one,’ I said, looking down at Bobby. ‘Maybe it’s be better to get the whole thing out of the way.’

I was surprised when she nodded. ‘You’ll find things are a lot easier if you play it like that. You’ll get a much fairer wind if they think you’re all done and dusted. You’d be 35 with all your sprogs popped. They’d like that.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Any future employer,’ she replied, looking at me intently.

Even though Bobby was a fairly placid baby I dared not take him to Rosie’s wedding, fearing he’d cry during the service. I was already aware of Rosie’s determination to avoid what she saw as failures of decorum during my own wedding. I didn’t take it personally, James and I had been among the first of our friends to get married, those who wed later always had the luxury of learning lessons.

Rosie’s service was high Anglican with no quirkiness to it, perhaps because half a dozen Tory backbenchers had accepted invitations. Owing to Rosie’s growing network and allure quite a few journalists attended, too. It ended up on the blogs but not in the papers. She never showed any outward hostility to me, and saw her wedding as part of the effort, a brand exercise. This included James most especially. I wasn’t surprised, though, to discover later that she’d almost entirely edited both him and me from her wedding photos.

At Rosie’s wedding I felt like
I’d turned a corner with her. As she walked down the aisle and saw me, I wondered whether she felt like she’d lost to me in some way, had settled for someone else once she’d realised James was out of bounds. Still I kept a close eye on her for a long time afterward, and of course never stopped hating her.

Although James was resigned about going to Naviras – ‘again’ was a suffix he’d sometimes accidentally apply to it – he was never very keen on political people coming out there. Rav and Rosie were part of his inner core, but other MPs were strangely not invited. I’d even suggested it to a few backbenchers who sounded intrigued, but James would never follow it up. I couldn’t see why he’d be embarrassed about being in Naviras, it was remote but comfortable. It wasn’t ramshackle or tacky, so was he really embarrassed about me?

Lottie showed no sign of wanting to wind down Casa Amanhã, even if she seemed to have aged considerably the next time we went out. She’d given Luis a lot more responsibility for the accounts and had taken a step back in kitchen, taking on more staff to do the cooking. But she still hovered behind them as they were working, sometimes getting annoyed when things weren’t just so. She’d taken up painting, normally landscapes and usually of places around Naviras. Occasionally she’d drive up the coast to paint some deserted beach, or inland to take in a vineyard or a farmhouse. But she’d painted one portrait, of me, or at least of the back of me, standing on the slipway looking out to sea. I was shocked to see it hanging up in the vestibule, couldn’t understand how she’d managed to paint it until Lottie explained it derived from a photo she’d taken of me the previous year. ‘I took it without you noticing, very sneaky of me,’ she giggled. ‘It’s been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘You can take it as a housewarming present, maybe?’

Some of her paintings ended up in the public parts of Casa Amanhã, but mostly she kept them in her private rooms, which took up a whole wing of the house where very few people were ever invited. The paintings competed for space with her expansive and seemingly disorganised library. Yet she had a book on almost everything and always knew exactly where to find it. Once I told her how I’d been trying to grow gazanias in my garden in Eppingham but they wouldn’t survive year-round. ‘I have just the book you need,’ she declared, disappearing off for a five minutes, returning with a well-thumbed copy of
The Cacti and Succulents of Portugal,
an English translation. ‘Now look here,’ she flipped through the book until she found the entry on gazanias. I took the book down to the beach bar to read as Lottie painted. ‘They’re not really succulents, of course,’ she said. ‘But all you need do is regrow them from cutting in the winter. Do you have a greenhouse?’

‘No, but we’ve got a conservatory.’

‘Oh. Well, you could grow them in there for a while, I suppose, if you kept the heating on.’

‘Mind you, when this little fellow gets bigger he’ll be pulling them up,’ I said, nodding at Bobby asleep in his pushchair.

She pulled a thin paintbrush out of the bun in her hair, which was noticeably whiter. She chewed on the end of the brush for a moment. ‘I’ve been so, what’s the word? So very thrilled at how you’ve settled into motherhood, darling. I must say I worried it wouldn’t be for you, especially so soon after getting married. But you’ve taken to it marvellously.’