The Heart of the Country (12 page)

Bernard and Flora had carved a fireplace into the cliff; Bernard had set up a clean, empty oil drum nearby and spent a morning filling it
with water, so now they had a constant water supply. Their privy was the nearby quarry: they heaped leaves to make things decent, but used other people’s water closets in the towns and villages when they could. Birds sang, grass swayed and flowers glowed. It was as near paradise, Bernard and Flora thought, as could be achieved, there on the edge of the council rubbish tip. They were not lonely – there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing in the near distance, as cyclists rode up to deposit single wine bottles, or men on tracks dumped industrial waste (forbidden) – yet still they were private. Mostly those who visited the tip were householders who came with the boots of their cars filled with sacks of kitchen waste, or their roof racks high with discarded consumer durables. Here in the rural depths of the heart of the country, you can put out your trash and wait a week for it to be collected, and in the meantime the dogs, the foxes and the badgers will knock over the bins, rifle the contents, and spread your intimate rubbish over acres. So the communal tips are widely used.

Flora put two boil-in-the-bag curry dinners into the pan of water which steamed on the little peat fire. (Bernard had recently acquired a couple of sacks of burning peat; it burned with a mild heady scent, and left behind dense grey ashes, which she liked.) She squatted before the pan, the skin stretching tight and smooth over her knees. Bernard watched and pondered over his first day’s work at Avon Farmers.

‘The farmers come up and
order by numbers,’ he said, ‘from the catalogue. I bring out the sacks, that’s all. Why do they pay me so much? And why me?’

‘You’re not straight,’ said Flora, ‘that’s why. It’s as Arthur said. You’ll keep your mouth shut, if it’s in your interest.’

‘But about what?’ he asked, as if she knew. ‘What’s in the sacks? This farmer today asked for lactose. Nothing wrong with lactose. It’s a form of sugar.’

‘Fancy you!’ said Flora.

‘I did A-level chemistry for a term,’ said Bernard. ‘I may be stupid but I’m not daft. But this geezer told me the lactose went in the milk, and brought it up to Marketing Board standards. Can that be right? Every tanker he takes in is worth ninety quid. If it’s low in sugar content it gets rejected. He wasn’t going to throw good milk away, he said. So he just tipped the lactose into the milk and then the results came up fine. If the Milk Board wants sugar, he said, they can have sugar! Why should I be penalized? Why should my cows be insulted? They’re good cows and they give good milk. It makes you wonder!’

‘Wonder what?’

‘What’s in the other sacks. Why we stay open at night, and why more people come by night than day, and why everyone pays with cash.’

‘I thought all that would be up your street, Bernard,’ said Flora, sadly. He was not renowned for his honesty, nor had his father been before him.

‘Tell you what,’ was all he said, ‘don’t let’s drink milk any more.’

With their curry they drank wine, which Flora had acquired from the Harris household over past months. It had been the Harris habit to buy their wine in boxes. Flora would open the packs when Natalie was out shopping, abstract a third of the wine, refill with water, shake well and then re-seal the containers. No one had ever noticed. It had been Bernard’s idea, and seemed to Flora not unreasonable, since she was so underpaid, and recently of course not paid at all.

Bernard put his arm round Flora and they spent a comfortable and cosy evening in the midst of their wasteland, watching the sun sink behind the Tor. Of such pleasures are domestic happiness made.

Attempts at Seduction

Angus went round to dinner at Dunbarton. Natalie had thawed, plucked (badly) and stewed (rather well) the chicken. She’d even remembered to de-gut it, holding her nose. (Her rubber gloves had split: she had no money for new ones. The electricity bill second reminder had arrived, but not yet the red one with threats.) She’d run the tap through the chicken’s poor empty sinewy middle. (The water rates had been unpaid for several months: but the Board seemed reluctant to actually cut off supplies.) She’d taken some of her clothes to the Nearly New shop in Wells and Brenda there, knowing Natalie’s predicament, had given her a good price there and then, on the spot: she had used that money to shop for vegetables and After Eights.

The children possessed Post Office Savings books, which was just as well. On the day Harry left, Alice had had twenty-three pounds in hers and Ben eighty-five (he would) in his. These sums their mother had persuaded them to part with. She had not returned to the DHSS offices; she was putting that off to the last possible moment, continuing to believe that any minute Harry would ring, or write, or even turn up on the doorstep. If people can go suddenly, they can return suddenly. Inspector Took rang to say Harry had been traced to
Marbella but extradition proceedings weren’t likely. The inspector, in other words, was prepared to let sleeping dogs rot. Inland Revenue were putting the house and contents up for auction in three weeks’ time: Angus was to be the auctioneer. The bank would claim its overdraft, various building societies their debts. These pieces of news Natalie received calmly, as if they related to her dream and not her waking life.

In the meantime Natalie went to bed in the same room, dressed in the same clothes, ate – admittedly cheaper but much the same – food, stroked the cat as usual and weeded the garden. She suffered from occasional bursts of one nasty passion or another.

‘How do you cope?’ she demanded of Sonia. ‘How do you manage?’

‘You have no choice,’ replied Sonia, bleakly.

Sometimes Natalie would walk to the school with Sonia and her kids, but sometimes she would leave either early or late so as to miss her. She did it on purpose. Alice and Ben were beginning to seem more real and less like marionettes than before, and Natalie now found some comfort in their company. She jumped when the phone rang, half fearing bad news, and half hoping for good. But the telephone bill had gone into the red, and then beyond threats into bold statements of intent and soon would no longer be a source of either fear or hope, but simply of silence.

Well, well! Tonight Angus was coming to supper and leaving Jean behind, on the grounds that Natalie needed help and advice. She was amazed at how simply and easily she managed to prepare and cook the supper. Onions steeped in hot oil, with rosemary from the garden added, the lanky chicken joints rolled in sesame seed and fried with the onions and rosemary, and then simmered for ever in added white wine. The chicken was tough but the flavour was fine; now Harry was gone she could cook. How strange, she thought. Perhaps her fits of rage, grief and resentment were nothing to do with the loss of Harry, but to do with the loss of years wasted in a half life, as half Harry.

But listen, enough about Natalie, Angus is at
last talking. Nothing will stop him. He looks at her shyly from time to time. He feels awkward in his body: his tie is askew. He has been up to say goodnight to Natalie’s children, to boom at them with an unfamiliar but reassuring male voice. The children’s bedrooms are not right next door to Natalie’s bedroom: there is a bathroom in between. He is glad of that. He hopes her kids sleep soundly. He realizes his mind is leaping ahead too far and too fast; but then again, nothing ventured, nothing won. And Angus is in a position of power. Even so, he feels tentative and helpful and is surprised at himself.

‘Do
you have any candles?’ he’s saying. ‘I like dinner by candlelight. Jean doesn’t see any sense in it. She’s a practical woman. No softness. You’re not a practical woman, Natalie, or you wouldn’t be in this fix now. The house not even in joint ownership! It was bound to happen. Down comes Inland Revenue, up go the For Sale notices and before you know if your house is sold to the first bidder. Not the best but the first and if word gets round it can go for as little as half market value. Inland Revenue don’t care, so long as they get their whack, why should they? There’ll be nothing left over for you, if you’re not careful. But don’t worry, I won’t let it happen. I have quite a lot of pull round here. I’m ever so fond of you, Natalie.’

She stares at him with her full blue eyes. He doesn’t know what she’s thinking. He wishes they could forget supper and go straight to bed.

‘What happened between you and Arthur?’ He wants to know, and he thinks it would be good to remind her she’s not so virtuous as she makes out. Again she doesn’t reply. ‘Don’t bother,’ he says. ‘I can imagine. Worried husbands aren’t much cop in bed. Me, I never worry.’ He laughs lightly, to show it’s true. ‘Harry was a bit of a cold fish, wasn’t he. Did he wear his steel-rimmed glasses in bed? Why did you marry him? What got into you? Someone as gorgeous as you? What did you talk about in the evenings? Or did he just watch telly? Anyway, you found a bit of light relief in Arthur. I don’t blame you. Except Arthur! – Well, there you go again. A bit of a poseur, really, Arthur. An eye to the main chance, sexually. Not serious. I’m serious, Natalie.’

He finds he is. He doesn’t want to go to bed with her now. He’s frightened. He wants her to love him, and want him, and when he’s sure of that only then he’ll go to bed with her.

‘Warmth,’ he says, out of the blue. ‘A man can’t live without…’ He isn’t sure what it is a man can’t live without, except all the things he’d had to: he lives with a woman set up in antagonism against him; the best he can do with her is a kind of animated, sometimes even exhilarating, armed truce – but what he wants is gentleness, enclosure, love – who doesn’t?

‘Take me seriously, Natalie,’ is all he can say.

And Natalie responded to Angus with what she described later, ashamedly, as a splurge of self-pity.

‘You called me Natalie,’ she said. ‘You called me by my name. There’s no one to do that anymore. I don’t seem to have friends. There are people who call me Mrs Harris and either blame me for what Harry did, because wives are always held responsible, or blame me because somehow or other I must have driven him away, and the children call me Mum, and now I come to think of it Harry most often called me “you”. Miss Eddon Gurney’s name is Marion. I expect he’s with her now. I expect he says her name all the time. What would the time be in Marbella? They’re probably making love this very minute. Though why should I think they’d wait for night? If people really fancy each other, night or day should make no difference, they’d be at it all the time. Harry and I only ever made love in bed. Never once out of it. Some people use the bath, don’t they, or sofas, or fields, or floors.’

‘When they’re young,’ he said, cautiously, thinking of his back. What was she suggesting? But she fell silent, and wouldn’t meet his eye. He moved in to take the benefit of the moment and put his arm round her but she stepped away.

‘You’re taking advantage of me,’ she said. Well, what did she expect? Of course he was, in a way.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ he said. Of course he said it.

‘You’re not
helping,’ she said. ‘How can I explain to you how my body feels? That if anyone touches it, anyone gives it a feeling that will upset it, it will simply collapse and die and me with it. You don’t care about that: you just care about you. You’ll help me out, you say. You’ll get a good price for this house. You mean if I go to bed with you you will. Otherwise not.’

‘
I
didn’t mean it like that.’ Well, he half had, half hadn’t.

‘I don’t care what happens to the house,’ she said. ‘What happens to me and the children?’

‘Same thing,’ he said. ‘Money is what matters.’

‘My body matters,’ she said, savagely. ‘Harry used it and threw it away, and Arthur entertained himself okay with it, just for the time being – ’

‘You were doing the same thing, weren’t you?’

‘Then I was wrong,’ she said severely, reminding him horribly of his wife. ‘I want my body for myself, thank you, for the time being.’ And Natalie shut her mouth tight; clamp, clamp, in the mood of one fixing a chastity belt upon herself, iron and unforgiving though it might be. In Natalie’s situation, I can tell you, I’d have been in bed with Angus like a shot, and forget his paunch and his maunderings, but not Natalie. Well, some women are like that. Irrational and unrealistic. Fussy, in a word.

‘Quite wrong,’ Natalie opened her mouth sufficiently to say, before snapping it shut again, and Angus felt defeated, and fat, and unwanted and went home to Jean without his supper. Jean had a period, or so she said. No doubt she had pills to bring one on whenever she felt inclined, which was mostly. He was the more aggrieved because he had felt and offered love.

Arthur lay in bed that night with his wife Jane and thought she was a dear, good creature, and he should behave better to her. She had never, even in her younger days, given him cause for jealousy, and so he scarcely understood the emotion himself, but understood it must be painful and obsessive, or why else was she so thin and jumpy? It was a mistake for her to live above the shop: she should be further away from the back room. Then her mind could be more at peace, and she would not feel obliged to go searching for stray hairpins and long (or worse, short and curly) hairs, which she would then put under a child’s microscope in order to identify, by colour. But of course, these days, so many people’s hair was multi-coloured.

‘Tell you what, Jane,’ he said, ‘let’s rent out the flat and buy something outside Eddon Gurney.’

‘Something with level floors,’ she said, ‘so I
can wear heels.’

‘Something
new?’
he said, shocked. Then he said, generously, ‘But if it’s what you want.’

‘There’s so little on the market,’ she said. And there was. House prices rose and rose. Now the trains from Castle Carey and Bath were so much improved, the rich were moving further out of the London suburbs and commuting in to work. It was becoming more and more like Surrey, Arthur complained. But now was obviously the time to buy; just before the property boom was properly underway.

‘I’ll look out for something,’ he said. ‘I expect I’ll hate it but if it’s what you want, that’s the main thing.’