Fran drives her car into the area at the back of the house, discreetly screened by a thick holly hedge, and parks it in the double garage, carefully not taking up too much room, although Mark won't be needing his space until next week. She remembers to change her shoes again and leave her flatties in the car. She's learning â though it has to be said that natural tidiness isn't in her nature. She heads for the house.
Its lovely, spicy cedar smell welcomes her as she enters. The muted light filtering through the blinds burnishes the pale wood floor to gold, the white walls to a warm apricot. Interlocking spaces rather than rooms meet her, a suspended staircase and a mezzanine floor. Height and light and, flanking the front windows, the lavish, seemingly never-ending curtains of shimmering ivory watered silk that stretch through two floors to the upstairs ceiling (God knows how many metres â a second mortgage) and are never drawn. There are holland blinds, necessary to shut out the sun when it's too intrusive. Or for privacy. Fran insists on drawing them in the evening against the blank-black night outside, when Mark would leave them undrawn, secure and unperturbed in his lighted glass cube.
The decor Mark chose is minimalist, hi-tech, with transparent tables, cool, neutral colours, tubular furniture. Some of Fran's own brilliant-hued wall hangings provide the only splash of colour. And, on a table, a pile of oranges heaped in the huge black basalt bowl she'd once guiltily splurged a fortune on. She frowns.
They look gorgeous, a black and orange composition on the smoked glass table, but she doesn't remember putting
them there, she prefers oranges cold from the fridge, juicy and almost lemon sharp. She cannot abide eating their flesh when it's warm. But there's no denying the evidence of her own eyes, she must have put them there and forgotten. She pauses, then shrugs. Well, yes, perhaps. She's found herself, regrettably, doing this sort of thing before. Subconsciously copying that habit of Mark's, that clever way he has of meticulously arranging groups of
objets trouvés.
Perhaps hoping to please him. Forgetting his habit of sometimes removing her vases of flowers because they don't fit in with his overall perception of what the house should look like. Annoyed with herself, ignoring the thought of what construction Claire would put on such a lapse, she puts the fruit back in the fridge. She's teaching herself to live with perfection, artistic perfection, but it isn't always easy.
She sighs. Most women would give their eye teeth for a husband who never leaves his dirty socks under the bed, who wipes the washbasin,
and
puts the cap back on the toothpaste, without even a conscious effort. Picks her things up, too, as well as his own, and not in any spirit of criticism â he's relaxed and easy, just never thinks about it, it's how he's made. Either that or his training has made him so. She reminds herself that architects need to be meticulous. Mind you, he isn't above letting her change the vacuum cleaner bag, or iron his shirts or struggle to put the fresh cover on the duvet. Wifely things he never thinks of doing.
It cuts both ways, though, doesn't it? He keeps an eye on her car and stops her from forgetting to make out her tax forms. He's wonderful when she has flu. And he's more fun to be with than anyone else she's ever known.
Kicking off her shoes to protect the floor, she pads around. No red, blinking light flashing from the answering machine, but loads of post. More bills than she wants to see, half a rain forest in junk mail, a folded slip of paper that turns out to be a note from Bibi: âSorry darling, couldn't make it tonight after all. I'll ring you and we'll fix
another time.' Typewritten, but at least she's signed it in her distinctive violet ink, and with her full name, too: Bianca, in rounded, schoolgirl handwriting, and with the tail of the final âa' curling backwards and round to encircle the whole signature with a great stylish flourish.
Fran goes into the kitchen, pours herself a glass of iced water and drinks it down in one, not entirely sorry Bibi won't be here tonight. It might be her ankle that's bothering her: she broke it a few weeks ago, and though she says it isn't actually painful now, it's still irksome. She's obliged to hobble, even with the aid of a stick. She must have persuaded the boy who works for Alyssa in the gardens to deliver the note on his way home. She isn't able to drive yet and being dependent on others to get about irritates her. She doesn't like everyone to know her business â where she's going and who she's been with. In her own way, she's a very independent person. Stubborn and secretive, more like, according to Mark. Mulish, at times. Yet, when she'd rung Fran that afternoon to say she'd be dropping in, she'd sounded ⦠well, almost pleading. She'd insisted it was urgent that they should talk. Perhaps she's been casting her own horoscope again. Maybe there is malevolence in Saturn, or whatever else it is that makes the planets inauspicious. Bibi's actions, her life even, are ruled by her belief in this sort of mumbo-jumbo, but you'd be very brave if you tried to laugh her out of it. She's deadly serious.
It was Chip, the eldest of the Calvert brothers, who brought Bibi to Membery Place, a couple of years ago. Chip, a prep school nickname for Crispin, which stuck and has been accepted ever since with the good humour that's typical of him. Chip, of all people, who might have been expected to settle down eventually with some county gel with a loud laugh, a shiny-haired bob and a way with horses. And, hopefully, money. But no, it was Bibi. About as far from that as you could get.
Fran first met the three Calverts at Henley, where she'd been taken by Connor OâSullivan, then her boss at the
O'Sullivan, O'Toole agency, now her fellow director. As a stand-in for his wife, who'd decided an invitation to join friends at their villa in Tuscany was a better prospect than the occasional few seconds' fleeting excitement offered by the passing of two racing boats. Blink, and you missed them. Though Fran had seen at once that for anyone other than enthusiasts, the racing wasn't by any means the only point of the Regatta.
Happily sipping her fruity Pimms, she'd gazed across the sea of pretty hats and frocks, blazers and panamas, and immediately noticed the three seriously gorgeous young men in white flannels and striped blazers, Leander pink socks and ties. Who wouldn't have? After the two college boats they'd been vociferously cheering had sped by, followed by the umpire boat, and were lost, they'd turned away simultaneously from leaning over the rail in the stand. Coolly surveying the crowd, standing shoulder to shoulder, they could only have been brothers, or at any rate closely related, sharing the dark, family attractiveness that had a good deal to do with that particular brand of assurance that comes only from a privileged background. Something else shared, too â an obvious solidarity, three against all comers. One for all and all for one.
Chip, of course, had been the first to notice Fran, to make a beeline for Connor's group, and get himself introduced to her, closely followed by Jonathan, himself never averse to a new prospect. But it had been Mark her attention had fixed on: then, and ever thereafter. And for Mark, too, it had been the same. Mark and Fran. Even Chip had acknowledged that before the end of the day, and backed off, showing a sensitivity one wouldn't have expected from him. Fran had found herself holding on to this memory lately, like a good-luck talisman, or perhaps a lifeline.
Chip is the eldest of the three brothers, big and glowing with healthy good spirits, laughing brown eyes and a Rugby-trophy broken nose that adds an endearing quirk to his rugged good looks. At that time obsessed with high-performance
cars, long-legged girls and having an astonishing capacity for beer. A phase, a rite of passage, they said. The cars, still fast but now sleeker, more conservative and more expensive, are around yet and, Fran suspects but doesn't really know, maybe the girls, too, though kept in the background, for Chip has become more circumspect as he's grown older, and the situation between him and Bibi is equivocal. Defying all previous prognostications, he has turned out to be something successful in the City, and his mother's adviser, having rescued her from disaster after his father died.
Their father was Conrad Calvert, gentleman of leisure, an ex-army man who'd retained his army rank of Captain to boost a stature he never again attained in civilian life. Who, had he been born into a different class, would have been called a layabout. Unremarkable for anything except the amount he could drink, the staggering extent of both his wine cellar and the debts he left behind when he died. How could a man like that have produced three such sons? All of them self-motivated, successful in the widely differing careers they've chosen. Chip, moneywise and self-assured. Jonathan, the youngest by several years, whose passion is his cello, who draws magic from its strings, who buys it an airline ticket and sits next to it on his flights abroad. He has a growing international reputation as a soloist and an increasingly busy life, with little time for personal considerations. Accompanied everywhere by Jilly, pale Jilly, a wisp of a girl who looks after his bookings and trails with him to the four corners of the earth, sitting on the other side of the cello in the aeroplanes, seemingly largely taken for granted by Jonathan.
And Mark.
Oh yes, Mark. Bright, narrow eyes in a thin, sardonic face. Full of beguiling charm, which goes without saying, seeing he's a Calvert. Less obvious than Chip, and effortlessly clever in a way that makes even Jonathan's dedicated, driven talent seem laboured. Confident and self-contained, but basically, Fran has all too often found
herself thinking lately, unknowable. Too erratic and unpredictable for most people to feel sure of him and, despite his flashes of brilliance, too individualistic to settle into a well-paid, successful architectural partnership, which he has consistently refused to do.
He's never been a person you could hold on to, even less so recently. There are times when he seems to slip away from her altogether. More than that, the house suddenly seems to be getting on his nerves. She has a sinking feeling that he has caught the architect's disease and is already growing tired of it: architects don't need to live with the imperfections of their own creations, they can always move on to the next. This suspicion chills her with a kind of foreboding that isn't only to do with fears of losing the house itself, though this is certainly part of it. But he veers away from talking about it, just as he skilfully slides away from what is fast becoming her major preoccupation, the need to talk about their having a child.
Fran's experience of family life has been happy, if crowded and noisy, and she has never envisaged a life without children of her own. But Mark shrugs it off lately, every time she tries to open a discussion. Plenty of time, he says, aren't we happy as we are? Yes, of course they are. They have a loving, trusting relationship, they've built a satisfying life together, but it isn't complete. You can be a couple, but without children, you can't be a family. She tries to be patient, but her patience is growing thin. It isn't that Mark doesn't like children, per se, look how good he is with Jasie, who adores him. Which makes his indifference to having children of their own all the more baffling.
What is it about the Calvert men that makes them so anxious to steer clear of commitments? Understandable where Jonathan and Jilly are concerned: it's hard to see them as a staid married couple, their sort of life precludes it, and anyway, are they an item, in that way? Neither give away anything of their private life. By nature, Jilly plays her cards close to her chest: Jonathan isn't one for explaining
much, either. When they come to Membery, they don't share a room, but that might be out of consideration for his mother's feelings. For all her outward unconventionality, there's a strong streak of prudery in Alyssa. And perhaps in Jonathan, too.
But what about Chip and Bibi? No signs of marriage there, either, though it's just as likely to be Bibi who doesn't want permanence. Her previous relationship, which has resulted in Jasie, poor little scrap, has presumably not been an unqualified success.
Poor little scrap, indeed! No way can Jasie be called that. He's an ordinary, outgoing little boy, a cheerful little soul, mischievous â a fiend at times, like all children â but engaging and with nothing at all in him of his mother's feyness. Fran can't help smiling, thinking of him, but her smile is a little forced. She is thirty-seven, and the biological clock is ticking over.
She orders herself to stop mooning around and go upstairs and change out of her city clothes, but as she turns into the one dim corner of the house, at the bottom of the cantilevered staircase, she takes an involuntary step backwards, stifling a scream. Her heart leaps into her throat. In front of her, right opposite the front door, hovers a ghostly shadow. A white owl, wings outspread. It hangs motionless, and for a moment Fran can't move either. It stays there while her heart resumes its normal beat, and a rational explanation presents itself: an owl must have flown straight through the open door into the mirror on the end wall, directly opposite the front door, the impact imprinting the dust from its soft feathers into an uncanny impression of itself, its outspread wings, its large head and short neck, even â oh, shoot! â its eye sockets.
It isn't an unusual occurrence for birds to fly into the windows, deceived by the wide expanse of glass into thinking they're flying into open space. In an attempt to prevent it, Fran has at various times painted images of sparrowhawks, kestrels and other raptors: jackdaws and jays, crows and magpies, owls too, and hung them inside
different windows, and sometimes the fear of these birds of prey has warned the smaller birds off. But it isn't an entirely successful deterrent, sometimes the birds fail to see them â or else they aren't fooled. The larger birds are mostly just momentarily stunned by the impact and fly woozily away, as presumably the owl had done, since there are no other traces of it, but finding the small broken-necked bodies of thrushes, robins and finches distresses Fran, a reminder that the house is the intruder here, pushing itself into the habitat of these wild creatures.