Never Mind Miss Fox (11 page)

T
he cottage was nothing to do with Clive, and that was how it felt. Standing beside it tonight, watching his taxi grumble away down the stony track that crossed the field to the lane, he felt a familiar mood settle on his shoulder like a shuffling, black-feathered bird.

Martha often referred to her cottage as “Dad's.” When she did, Eliza would say, “Can't we call it something else? ‘Dad' means
my
dad, not your dad. Your dad's been dead for ages and ages.” She had never known Aiden and spoke of him with careless disregard, but she was even more haphazard with Martha's mother. “The deadest of all is your mum,” she occasionally intoned. “Not even you remember her.” It was true: Martha had been too small to commit her mother to memory. “It's like Dad says,” Eliza comforted her, “you can't miss what you never had.”

Dead relations were not interesting, but the consequences were. “You're an orphan,” she would say to her mother in a voice both pitying and envious. “Like Harry Potter and Oliver Twist.”

“All the best children are,” Martha would tease. “I bet you can't wait to get rid of us!” It was one of their favorite jokes.

Clive was not here alone—Martha and Eliza must be about somewhere—but he felt it. There seemed to be nothing moving but the steady drip of water from the leaves. Claws gripped his shoulder:
loneliness.
A roosting bird; black head tucked under black wing.

He glanced at the fretwork of the holly tree, a sharp silhouette against the moth-soft evening sky. This tree stood sentry in the garden, breathing and wakeful, while the others blurred and rustled in a wood behind the house.

Clive had wanted to cut the holly down but the man who came advised against it. “It's bad luck to cut them down.”

“But it makes the house dark.”

Martha had scented reprieve. “Just leave it, Clive, will you? Let's not tempt fate.”

When he had begun to earn decent money Clive had wanted to do up the house. He had told Martha that if he was going to have to spend every weekend there he wanted to be comfortable, but in fact—he had acknowledged this only to himself—he had wished to repay Aiden for that sneering put-down:
Commercial law? Your bank manager will be very proud.
There would be an achievement, however sordid and private, in renovating Aiden's house on the proceeds of the very career he had sniffed at.

Clive was denied the satisfaction, however, because Martha attached such sentiment to the house that she would not let him touch it—he did not seem to have any rights whether Aiden was dead or alive.

Exasperated, Clive had said, “Fine: keep it; pay for it.” She had taken him at his word.

“My work, my money, my cottage,” she would tell Clive when he tried to interfere. “You can be the boss in London.”

Martha's devotion to the cottage did not need superstitions to keep it alive, but she embraced them when they came: “It's a lady holly,” she had reported. “They have berries. They guard against evil spirits—that's what the tree man said.”

You're everything my father's not,
Martha had said once and Clive, hearing what he wanted, had melted away for the love of her.

Aiden would have put it another way:
I am everything you're not.

Aiden had died in this house alone, and Martha had found his body. It was thought—by the local doctor—that dying must have taken him a little while. It had been another little while before he was discovered.

Clive could be superstitious too. He turned his reluctant stare up to the roof.
Bats.
Right away—although he could neither see nor hear them—he thought he could sense their feverish, snickering presence, teeming and trembling, up in the rafters.

He began to picture them, chattering and diabolical, a wriggling, soil-brown knot that burrowed in the dark. Now he could smell the greasy mash of their fur, see the folds of flaccid skin and hear the click of spillikin bone.

“But, Dad, they're sweet,” Eliza had said, puzzled. “Look.” She had shown him a photograph on the computer screen. “They've always been there. The only difference is that now we know.”

The only difference; all the difference.
Clive stepped up to the front door.

He walked in to find Martha halfway downstairs and picking cobwebs off her jumper. “Oh—you're here,” she said. “Did it rain in London? It poured all the way down the motorway.” She was in her own cottage mood: present but absent. “I've just been in the attic,” she went on, “looking for those bats and their babies. It's stifling up there, but apparently that's what they like.” To herself she said, “I must take all that stuff to the tip sometime.” It was something Clive heard once a year.

“Where's Eliza?” Clive asked. The house did not feel as if there were another living person in it.

“Ah,” Martha said, guilty and smiling, “when I tell you, don't freak out—”

Clive felt a tremor. He knew what was coming. It was an approaching train and he was strapped to the rails.
I am not surprised,
he thought.
I have no right to be surprised.
The train would come and cut him in three: head, body and wriggling legs.

“—there's no point; it's done now and you'll only ruin our evening together.” Martha fiddled with her watch strap and then looked at him and said, “I let Eliza go with Eliot.” Now she took another step towards him. She would come close enough for a kiss, with the idea that it could placate him. “I'd already said yes. I couldn't tell her no—not without a reason. She was so excited; Eliot's her friend.”

Tell Martha? I won't have to.

Clive had pictured this scene—oh, a thousand times—but he had never rehearsed the actual words he might use. Now he groped for them, staring with a blank face at his wife. How, he wondered, could something so familiar to his mind be so impossible to communicate? It was unspeakable; unsayable. Whatever words he used the meaning would not translate. He would be unintelligible. He was not equipped with the skills or the tools that he needed.

Martha read his expression—frightened; struggling—and her own face changed. “What is it?”

“There is a reason.” These were words; it was a beginning. There was a pause, as if he had dropped four stones down a well and was waiting to hear them splash.

Martha said again, “What is it?”

He had never imagined what might appear in Martha's face as he told her. Now he watched as every word she heard made a mark and colored it in until her expression was so terrible—hurt; shock; rage; fear—that he could not bear to look at it. “I slept with Eliot,” he was saying, “years ago. That's why I didn't want—I don't want—to be around her.”

Martha was about to speak—he felt the air tense and thicken—and so he hurried on—
Yes, there's more.

“She…I got her pregnant.” He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. “She had an abortion.” Now he shut his mouth.

Martha let loose a word that darted away like a swift: “When?”

His speech was so slow, it slid from his mouth like paste. “When we were doing our finals.”

“Our
finals?
” Now she stopped; now she started. “So she was…at school?” Thinking, calculating, she looked past him and out of the window.

Clive stepped forward.

“Don't come near me,” Martha snapped. “Get back. Let me think.”

He waited. Every moment he grew more transparent and Martha turned more opaque. When she spoke again she seemed almost made of stone. “I want to see her,” she said, “I want to see them both. Let me past.” She faced him, from her higher step.

“Martha—” Now it was Clive's turn to try to placate.

“Let me
past
—” She stepped to the floor and roughly pushed him with both hands, forcing him aside. He felt her meaning and gave way, shocked, to that message:
Let me past, you brute.
She picked up her car keys from the shelf beside the door, and said, “You wait here. Stay here.”

“Please—”

“Stay here!”
She turned and shouted it at him—as if she would have hit him with her fist, if she could—and then she had flung out of the door and was gone.

Martha knocked on Eliot's front door and when it opened she said—as quick as a slap—“Where is she?”

“Martha! What are you—?”

“Please! Eliot! Let me see her.”

Now Eliot looked at her again and said, “So you know.”

“Yes of course I fucking know. Let me in.”

Eliot opened the door and Martha blew in and up the stairs in a gust. Upstairs she found Eliza asleep in one half of Eliot's bed.

Martha exhaled a long breath. She stood looking down at Eliza, wanting to wake her but knowing it would not be sensible—it would only alarm her. “OK,” she said. “OK.” She let her shoulders drop and her hands unclench.

Downstairs in the hall again, Eliot said, “Are you all right?”

Martha looked at her, unseeing. “I don't know,” she said. “I can't take it in.” Then she asked, “Have you got anything to drink?”

In the kitchen a bottle of brandy, expensive and ribboned, stood on a high shelf. “What about this?” Eliot reached up to fetch it.

“That'll do,” said Martha. She drank, held out her glass and drank again. Eliot fetched a stool and Martha sank onto it, shoulders hunched and feet tucked underneath. As the alcohol took hold, fear loosened its grip. Now a rage—a churning, sulfurous heat—spread from her insides out. She turned her glass, as heavy as a paperweight, in her hand. She had not yet decided at whom to aim her anger or her punishment.

Eliot, watching her, stood with her back to the dark square of the kitchen window and spoke, as she did of herself, in tied-up portions. “When I met Eliza at the school,” she said, “I didn't know what to do.” She paused. “I always thought I'd see you again one day—it was inevitable—but not in such…” She stopped, searched Martha's face and changed tack. “I realized,” she continued, “as soon as I saw you, that Clive had never…” Another pause. “It wasn't up to me to tell you.”

Martha listened, but none of this seemed to be what mattered now. Her mind was turning back to face her past—her history—both near and distant. Recent days, weeks and months were lit by insight and then the years before, each and every one of them, began to be illuminated too. A sun was rising over a landscape she had crossed in darkness, and only now did she see how treacherous her journey had been. Every marker, turning point and resting post in her life was now spotlit by brilliant daylight. Nothing was what it had seemed.

“It changes everything,” she whispered. “It touches everything.” Wishing it might not be true, she tried to say, “But it's impossible. Clive—”

“—would never do something like that?” Eliot's words struck Martha's out of the air. Now Martha knew it was true, and now she believed it.

Clive opened his eyes and saw in front of him a cold, swept fireplace. He was on the sofa in the cottage, dressed in his clothes and lying under a blanket. He stayed still for several minutes.

He felt quite different this morning—not like a new man, but like a ghost of the old one. The Clive of yesterday had vanished forever. That man had come clean, and wiped himself out of existence.

With a groan and a thud, he rolled onto the floor and lay on his back, pegged to the rug by invisible ties. After a few minutes he felt the ground around him with his fingers.
Telephone.
When he found it he checked the screen, but it was blank. “Leave a message for Martha,” said the cool instruction when he rang her number. He did not wait for the beep.

He could call Tom, but—he blenched—
not quite yet.
Martha would have told him, he was certain, on her way to London last night.

With that conversation playing in his head Clive could not stay on the floor. He pulled himself to his feet and stood looking out of the window.
This house. I can't stand it. I won't stay.
He rang for a taxi, shut the front door and went back to London.

Eliza woke at Eliot's house. She felt an excited lurch inside and rolled over—but here on the bed was not Eliot but her mother, perched on the corner beside her feet and looking out of the window at the sky.

“There's only my bed,” Eliot had said to Eliza on the way home from the concert. “We'll have to share.”

“I won't sleep anyway,” Eliza had replied. She had been so happy she wanted never to sleep but to go on with this feeling forever. She had come straight upstairs from the front door and brushed her teeth with Eliot's toothpaste, in the bathroom where Eliot's washbag lay by the sink and her towel hung over the rail. It was strange to think of someone as special as Eliot drying her face with a towel like everyone else.

Eliza had climbed into the side of the bed where there was no bedside lamp. “My side,” she had said, wriggling down. Eliot had kissed her good night—“I'll be back in a minute”—and gone back downstairs. But despite her intention Eliza had fallen asleep right away, and had missed the treat of sharing.

Now Eliza was confused. “Mum?” she said. She sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

Martha twisted around to face her. “Hello, pet.” She smiled, but only a small amount.

Eliza did not smile. She frowned. “What are you doing here? Where's Eliot?”

“Downstairs.”

“Where's Dad?”

“In the cottage.”

“Did you have an argument?” This was said in a voice that implied, “Really, you two are the living end.”