‘We’ve come to see the show,’ Lara said.
‘Well I thought you might’ve. Come on in, come on in!’ Tina ushered them behind the bookshelves to the children’s section. A group of women and their offspring sat perched on ten or so rows of tiny wooden chairs, facing a table on which there was a plywood cut-out of a jug, two dozen giant eggs in a basket, and some heads of sweet corn. Behind this arrangement stood a canvas screen, painted with green hills that overlapped and disappeared into a cartoon-clouded blue sky.
‘There you are. Now,’ Tina said to Jack. ‘While you’re in here having
fun
, I’ll just make you out a card so’s you can pick up some books before you leave. What’s your address? You’re staying at the Larssen place, aren’t you?’ she asked Lara.
‘That’s right. Number one-four-six.’
Tina grimaced and turned to go back towards her desk.
‘Why did she make that face?’ Lara said as they looked for seats.
‘Do we have to do this?’ Marcus whispered.
‘No turning back,’ she said, and they slid into the back row. Jack immediately started to complain that he couldn’t see anything. Lara suggested he sat on the cushions at the front.
‘Come with me, Daddy,’ he said, tugging at Marcus’s arm.
‘Go on,’ Lara said. ‘I’ll stay back here.’
Marcus allowed himself to be dragged down to the front. With some difficulty, due to his jeans being too tight at the knees and waist, he sat on a cushion and folded his legs into the same crossed position as his son to keep them out of the performance area. Sitting there like that he looked as much a little boy as Jack. The two of them simultaneously smiled back at her and put their thumbs up.
‘Hi.’ A woman a few chairs away from Lara extracted her hand from the small child who clung to her side and extended it in greeting. ‘I’m Gina. I’ve not seen you here before.’
‘I’m Lara. And that’s Marcus and Jack. We’re here with the theatre company.’
‘You’re English!’ Gina said, with delight. ‘My husband’s a Brit.’
‘Really?’
‘We live just next door to the library. This is Bert.’ She gestured to the child, who now had his face buried in his mother’s shoulder. ‘He’s awful shy, aren’t you, Bert? And his sisters Gladys and Ethel are down in front. You must come for coffee after, if you’re free.’
‘I’d love to,’ Lara said.
‘I hope this programme’s all right,’ Gina leaned over and whispered. ‘They’re usually not very good. Quit your noise now, Bert!’ she said to her silent son. ‘Show’s about to start.’
A skinny woman in a blue milkmaid outfit strutted out from behind the screen, clucking like a chicken, swooping her hyperthyroid eyes from side to side. The children in the audience whooped with laughter.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘I’m going to tell you the very sad-indeedy story of Chicken Licken and Foxy Loxy.’ She spoke slowly, as if the children were halfwits and needed time to consider every syllable. ‘Does anyone
know
the story of Chicken Licken and Foxy Loxy?’
A couple of hands shot up in the audience.
‘I do!’ a large bespectacled boy in the front row said.
‘No?’ Chicken Milkmaid said, ignoring the boy, whose hand was up so high he was nearly bursting. ‘Do you
want
me to tell you the story of Chicken Licken and Foxy Loxy?’
‘Yes!’ the children yelled, sitting up straight, waiting.
‘I’m going to need some help then,’ she said, beaming round at everyone.
‘Me!’ The large boy shot his hand up again, followed by all the other children in the room.
A lot of business followed while Chicken Milkmaid cast the various characters from the audience. The boy in the front wasn’t chosen and started complaining loudly to his mother, who sat behind him, commiserating. Marcus turned and rather publicly grimaced to Lara.
‘Told ya,’ Gina whispered. ‘Not very good.’
When all the chosen children were dressed up, masked and armed with their lines on pieces of laminated card, Chicken Milkmaid turned back to the audience, smiling like a loon.
‘Well now, I think we’re missing someone, aren’t we children? We’ve got’ – and here she carefully pointed out each costumed child as she recited their character’s name – ‘Hen Len, Cock Lock, Duck Luck, Drake Lake, Gander Lander, Goose Loose and Turkey Lurkey. But who are we missing?’
‘Foxy Loxy!’ the large boy said, putting his hand up again, his hope reignited.
‘That’s correct. Foxy Loxy,’ she said, for the first time acknowledging him. The boy took this as a sign to get up and join the others on stage, but Chicken Milkmaid halted him with her outstretched palm. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘We need someone REALLY big and REALLY frightening to be our Foxy Loxy. Now then,’ she went on, raising her finger to her mouth like Shirley Temple. ‘Who shall we have?’
‘ME! ME!’ the poor boy said, nearly combusting.
‘I think … we’ll have … YOU, sir.’ And she pulled Marcus up by the hand. Jack whooped.
‘Here’s our scary Foxy Loxy!’ she cried. ‘And look,’ she said, picking up a strand of Marcus’s hair. ‘His tail is just the right colour. What’s your name, sir?’
‘Foxy Loxy?’ Marcus said. Every part of his body signalled that he wanted to run away. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.
‘No, good sir, your real name?’
‘Marcus. Marcus Wayland.’
‘Gor blimey, we’ve got a limey,’ Chicken Milkmaid chirruped in a Dick Van Dyke Cockney accent. Gina raised an eyebrow at Lara, who wanted the floor to open up and swallow Marcus. This was the worst form of torture for him. It cut deeply into his vulnerability, exposing the veins of self-doubt beneath his blustery veneer.
‘Poor man,’ Gina said.
Chicken Milkmaid snapped a pointed fox nose on to Marcus’s face. Then she tied on a badly fashioned mask, which circled his face with red fur and gave him tall, pointed ears. She gave his dignity a final blow with a little checked waistcoat and a walking stick. If it hadn’t been so grotesque it would have been funny.
There followed an excruciatingly repetitious enactment of what was never an exciting story in the first place. When it became clear that several of the performing children couldn’t actually read the lines they had been given, even the keenest and least critical young members of the audience grew restless.
‘I coulda done it a million times better,’ the kid in the front complained loudly to his mother.
‘I know, honey,’ she said back.
Poor Marcus had to stand silently throughout this. He tried to look nonchalant, giving the odd smile and thumbs-up to Jack, but it clearly took all he had.
When it came to his line ‘Come along with me and I’ll show you the way,’ which he was supposed to follow with a
Bwah hah hah hah
of an evil laugh, he didn’t do it with enough verve and gusto to satisfy Chicken Milkmaid, who made him repeat it over and over, ramping it up each time.
And Lara realised this is how it would be if she were to leave him. He’d be up there, ridiculous to the world, cuckolded, usurped by Stephen Molloy not only professionally but in his personal life too.
Could she do that to a man she once loved?
Then she gasped – out loud, so that Gina looked over at her – because, for the first time, she had thought of her love for Marcus in the past tense.
It was done, then, she thought, a heavy feeling in her belly. Stephen Molloy or no Stephen Molloy, continuing with Marcus would be like flogging a mortified fox.
‘So, you’ll come for coffee?’ Gina asked when the Foxy Loxy ordeal was over. Released from the stage, Marcus had fled back home to his lick his wounds and learn his lines and Jack was busy selecting a pile of picture books with which to while away the afternoon.
‘God, yes please,’ Lara said.
GINA’S HOUSE MUST HAVE BEEN BUILT AROUND THE SAME TIME AS
the Larssen place. It had the same, rickety air to it. But inside, it told a whole other story. Where the Waylands’ digs echoed with stifling emptiness, this home was darker and cooler, bursting at the seams with all the clutter of life. Piles of books and papers clustered on every surface, three racks of freshly baked cookies stood on the kitchen table, and the living-room floor was littered with toys and DVDs. It had the same spicy damp smell of the other house, though, and, as with everywhere else in the village, a skunk lurked within stinking distance.
As they walked over from the library, Gina had told Lara about how she home-schooled her children. All three were tall and skinny like their mother. Where Bert was still and painfully shy – Gina seemed unable to put him down in the presence of others – Gladys and Ethel, his eight- and ten-year-old sisters, were boisterous and constantly in motion. Once in the house, they scooped Jack into their angular arms as if he were a large doll, and took him upstairs to play.
Lara knew instinctively she had found a friend in Gina – so much so, she had to fight the urge to sit down and tell her the whole Stephen story. But of course she couldn’t even mention his name. Everything, but everything, had to stay secret.
‘How are you finding Trout Island?’ Gina asked, using her Bert-free hand to set the coffee pot on the stove.
‘We’ve only been here for a few days,’ Lara said. ‘But we really like it. It’s so beautiful round here.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘How long have you been here?’ Lara asked.
‘I was born on a farm just outside of the village,’ Gina said. ‘But I’ve done my travelling. I ain’t just a hick.’ She had a way of delivering her words as if each sentence were the punch line to a joke.
‘And your husband. You say he’s English. Where’s he from?’
‘Coventry. Do you know it?’
‘I grew up not too far from there.’ Thinking of her upbringing as an only child on a private housing estate on the outskirts of Leicester put a metallic taste in Lara’s mouth. Her memory of those days was there was nothing much to remember, just mundanities: waiting for the bus in the rain in her embarrassing private-school uniform; long, dull Sunday afternoons spent in front of the TV with the central heating turned up too high. Her childhood seemed green-tinged, like a faded Polaroid.
So from an early age, she had cast around for a means of escape – first it was books, then it was theatre. But the most effective route, as it happened, turned out to be men. By marrying Marcus so young and so secretly, she had ensured that her disappointed parents – who muttered darkly about all that money spent on her education being wasted – had more or less lost interest. They had met the twins three times and Jack just the once, and Lara was far from heartbroken about this.
Gina poured the coffee and they sat at the table in the airy kitchen. Every wall was hidden by the children’s paintings. Other handiwork covered the horizontal surfaces: papier-mâché dinosaurs, galleons made of Lego and an electrical circuit construction that resembled some sort of bomb. The whole house seemed to be given over to the children. Lara watched Gina sipping her coffee, Bert curled into her side like a comma, and thought her strong, pretty features looked rather worn out.
‘So, why do you home-school?’ she asked, cradling her mug. Gina made an excellent cup of coffee.
‘The village school sucks. They make them pledge allegiance to the flag every morning, then they teach them all the wrong stuff at completely the wrong pace. They never have time for anything creative.’
‘Looks like you do, though.’
‘Oh yeah. I’m a bookbinder by trade, so I guess I’m a little bit arty,’ Gina said.
‘I’ll send my daughter down to visit. She’s bound for art school, we think.’
‘You have other kids?’
Gina was interested to hear how these urban British teenagers were coping with the quiet life in Trout Island. Lara mentioned Sean, and Gina agreed with her that he was a really nice kid, which confirmed Lara’s own instincts. However, when she told her about Olly’s friends – whose names, she had gleaned in a monosyllabic conversation with him, were Aaron, Brandon and Kyle – Gina sucked her teeth.
‘Problem?’ Lara asked.
‘Well, they wouldn’t be my friends if I were sixteen!’ Gina said.
‘Go on …’
‘Out here in the country there’s always those kind of kids. Same now as when I was at school. They come from big, poor families – chaotic, a little dirty. Mom’s on her own, or as good as, and too busy scrabbling around making a living to keep much of an eye on them. I mean, they don’t have much of a chance. They flunk out of school as soon as they can, then they just hang out all day, doing nothing, getting high, getting into bits of trouble.’
‘And these boys are like that?’
Gina nodded.
Lara decided to have a few words with Olly when she next saw him to make sure he wasn’t getting waylaid. But she suspected that the part of Gina that made her take her children out of mainstream schooling also might lead her to make those sort of judgements. The main thing about these boys, surely, was that they came from poor families. It would do Olly good to mix with kids like that, so he could see a different side to American culture, and realise how lucky he was himself.
So long as he kept his head.
She thought perhaps she might take a turn around the village next time he was out with them, to see if she could find out what he actually did with his new friends.
‘And how are you getting on in the house?’ Gina said, making the same face as Tina the librarian had. She got up to reach down some plates from an open shelf. ‘Cookie? Glad and Eth baked them this morning.’
‘Oh, go on, then. I’m going to get so fat here,’ Lara said, biting into one. It was perfect – chewy and maple-sweet, with a bit of walnutty earthiness underneath.
‘If only I could gain a couple pounds,’ Gina said, knocking her hip bone with her fist. ‘I eat like a pig all day and I just get bonier and bonier.’
‘Lucky you,’ Lara said, chewing. ‘I wanted to ask. Why did you make that face when you mentioned the house?’
‘Face?’
Lara showed her the expression. ‘And you sort of shuddered just now.’
‘Oh. Oh, sorry. It’s only, you know, with the history and all that.’
‘History?’
‘Oh my God. You don’t know, do you?’
‘Don’t know what?’