The following weekend, Greg decided we should go camping at the beach. I was initially resistant but gave in under the pressure of his kindness. The sea, he said, was his prescription for all woes, personal and professional. He had been so understanding that week that I couldn't refuse and anyway he'd assured me that a night under canvas with him would be an entirely different proposition from the camping I'd done with my parents.
We left London late on Saturday morning. I watched him as he drove. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt that fitted snugly across his chest and a pair of knackered blue jeans that emphasised the length of his thighs with their curving muscle. I wanted to reach across and squeeze one, to feel its mix of softness and resistance. He had been for a run before breakfast and returned breathing fast, his navy running shirt clinging to his back with sweat. He gave off a primal fitness, a readiness for anything.
The countryside spread out on either side of us now, voluptuous and green again. The roads were all familiar but I didn't say anything. We stopped at the beach at Lepe, near Beaulieu, about five miles from my parents' house. I had been there hundreds of times before; it was where my parents used to take me and my brothers to swim. For me, the place had as many layers of memories as there were colours to suck through on one of the giant gobstoppers Dad used to buy for us at the shop set back from the front. As a small child I had been a regular, spending my pocket money on ice cream, wincing across the shingle on bare feet to get back to my mother again. I remembered feeling proud that, compared to the children on holiday from places like Birmingham and London, I was a local. I had thought them very citified. In the sixth form, it became a different sort of destination. My friends and I used to come down to drink cider and smoke cigarettes, either on our own or with guys from the college in Brockenhurst. We would lie on the beach and talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I could recall describing my big dream of being a journalist on a national paper and my determination that it would happen. In my teenage arrogance I had talked about how people who didn't achieve what they set out to had only themselves to blame for letting other things distract them. My ambition had burned like a coal then and I couldn't see how I would become one of those who didn't make it.
Greg must have seen the look on my face for he leaned across and stroked my hair. 'Come on, try not to think about it.'
We left the car in the top field and sat on the silky grass that covered the cliff. It tickled my legs where my shorts exposed them. Glad that I had thought to put my bikini on at home, I took off my shirt and let the sun get hot on my shoulders. I felt the tension in them relax a little. The heat was rising from the Solent and the shape of the Isle of Wight was imprecise against the deep blue of the sky. It seemed to rise out of the water like the spine of some enormous wallowing sea creature, perhaps a dinosaur like the ones that used to roam there. 'You know that I know this place, don't you?' I said.
'Yes,' he said. 'I wanted to come here with you. I've been here on my own before and you grew up near here and I wanted to tie the two together. I suppose it's a way of making you part of my experiences and me part of yours.'
'You're gate-crashing my past.'
He turned on his side and smiled. 'Do you mind?'
'No.' I kissed him.
We went down to the shore to swim. Afterwards we sat a little way up the shingle and dried off, watching the water drop away until the tide was fully out and a curvaceous landscape of mud, driftwood and debris was revealed. When we returned to the car, the families on the beach were beginning to pack up and go. Next to us was a Volvo whose back seat was thronged with kids. The mother of at least some of them was kneeling at the open door trying to brush the sand off a small pair of wriggling feet and to wedge them into a pair of jelly shoes. In the past few weeks I had been turning the thought of children over in my mind. Something was changing. I no longer had an immediate anti-reaction to the idea. In fact, I liked the image I had formulated of Greg and me with a child. Also, although I could barely admit it even to myself, I found something sexy about the idea of being pregnant with his child. That came as a complete shock, after years of considering the desire to have children a form of biological career-wrecking ambush on women.
We carried the tent to where the beach rounded the lip of Southampton Water and pitched it on an area of grass sheltered by gorse bushes from the slight breeze. As the power went out of the sun and the shadow of the pine trees began to lengthen, Greg collected driftwood and lit a fire. We sat by it and watched the yachts coming up with the making tide. His prescription had been the right one. There was something about the sea, its simultaneous power to adapt and complete immutability, its unfaltering rhythm, that stemmed the flow of anger and regret that had engulfed me. Being with him relaxed me as well. He had the ability to live in the moment and when I was with him it became easier for me, too.
After dark we watched the lights of the big ships passing in and out of Southampton, speculating on their destinations, cargo ships to Australia and the Far East, passenger ferries to France and the Channel Islands. I turned on to my back to look at the stars. They were one of the things I missed most about living in London, where it was easy to forget that there was a natural universe and we were part of it. I had the smell of wood smoke in my hair. Greg shifted closer to me and put his arms around my shoulder. 'Let's bring our children here,' he said.
It was almost a fortnight before Lucas called to apologise. It must have been Martha who told him what had happened. I hadn't trusted myself to in case I lost my temper. By the time he rang, though, my feelings about it, initially so raw, had hardened into a sort of resigned acceptance and I could at least think about it without the primal scream of frustration that had ripped through me at first. The disappointment, however, had not diminished; on the contrary, it seemed to be growing stronger from day to day. More than anything, my job at the
Gazette
now seemed entirely futile. What was the point of working there if it wasn't a stepping-stone to something better? I no longer felt I was serving an apprenticeship but instead saw that, unless something dramatic happened, I was there for the long haul, condemned to a future of parochial stories in a run-down office with no chance of a salary that matched those of my peers. The prize had been snatched away and what I was left with was something even tawdrier than I had allowed myself to acknowledge.
I also worried about how it would change Greg's perception of me. While I had the shot at a job on a national, I felt that I could hold my own with a boyfriend who was doing as well as he was. Now that I had been relegated to the
Gazette
again, I couldn't shake the feeling that anyone meeting us as a couple would think I was riding on his coat-tails. Nothing he had said had even suggested he thought this but my own pride made me keenly aware of it.
'Jo, I am so, so sorry,' Lucas said now. 'I really didn't realise how serious it was. You should have said.'
'I did try.' It occurred to me that, having not worked for months, he had ceased to understand what it was like, that there were obligations and one's personal life couldn't come first.
'I don't know what I can do to make it up to you.'
I didn't say anything.
'Are you coming up this weekend? Please come. I'll cook something amazing. Anything you want.' He sounded desperate but I found I didn't care.
'You don't have to do that,' I said. I had made a decision. I would go up to the house that weekend and I would talk to him properly. I needed to find a way to resolve the situation. I couldn't go on like this, living my life on a piece of elastic that he had only to tug on to drag me back away from the future and into that bizarre stasis that I had started to dread.
Diana was making a stew for supper when we arrived. She was wearing tight jeans with a rainbow-striped belt and her hair was tied in an artfully effortless-looking knot at the back of her head. She kissed me hello and then returned to stir the huge pot on the stove-top. Lucas wandered up behind her and slid his hands round her hips as she faced the cooker. Even with bare feet she was almost the same height as he was, three or four inches taller than me. She took the cigarette from his lips, had a drag and put it back with a smile. She was imbued with a sultry sexiness that I willed Greg not to see. Lucas caught me watching and smiled. I looked away quickly.
But I couldn't help watching them that evening. They had become very close very fast. The emotional intimacy had been there to start with, of course, in dormant form, but they seemed to have slipped together physically so comfortably, like a hand into a pocket. Lucas had the ease of long familiarity around her and I saw that he knew it and was enjoying the effect it had on me.
We sat at the kitchen table to eat. The double doors were open and the candles that Diana had lit had attracted a couple of moths, which she cupped in her hands and took out into the garden again. 'I hate it when they do that,' she said. 'I can't stand the idea of their wings being burnt.'
Later in the evening I left the room to go and fetch more cigarettes from the car and I met Lucas in the corridor on my way back. 'OK?' I asked, from habit.
'I'm so happy, Jo,' he replied.
Despite everything, even my anger about the job, I was jealous. It wasn't that I wanted him: the idea of being with anyone other than Greg was unthinkable now. It was the pain of being replaced, of feeling the framework that had been around me through university and my twenties crumbling away still further.
As soon as we got up to our room that night I pressed Greg against the wall and kissed him, undoing the top buttons of his shirt and running my hand over his coarse chest hair. I tugged at the buckle on his belt with one hand, pulling my own T-shirt over my head with the other. 'What's up with you?' he said into my hair.
'Do you love me?' I pulled his shirt out and pushed the two remaining buttons through, missing his lips in my hurry to kiss him again. He held me away from him by the shoulders, forcing me to stop and look at his face. My eyes were on his mouth, in particular on the full lower lip that I found so compulsive.
'Let me show you,' he said. He lifted me up and dropped me gently backwards on to the bed.
One thing that often struck me about the house was how much more we were governed by the weather there. In the city, weather influenced the view from the office window. At Stoneborough, rain changed everything.
The sound of it against the glass the next morning, even though it was as light as if the wisteria were rustling against the pane, told me that the plan to spend the day outside was off. By mid-morning it had grown in conviction. As we drank coffee in the kitchen the rain was hitting the ground with such force that it drilled pockmarks into the soil of the raised beds. 'Weather like this either makes me all pent-up and full of energy or so idle I can hardly move,' Diana said, watching it. 'Which is it today?' asked Lucas.
'Idle,' she said. 'Let's not do anything. Let's get some DVDs out and watch them in those big leather chairs in Patrick's study.'
Greg wanted a bath so I offered to go into Oxford to pick up the DVDs, glad to have the time alone to order my thoughts. Before I went, though, there was something I wanted to check. Making sure there was no one else around, I slipped into the library and closed the door behind me. The atmosphere in there was muted, not hostile but not friendly either. I had the paranoid sense now that the house was conserving its energy, biding its time. Moving one of the ladders along, I scanned the shelf until I found what I was looking for: the George Eliot novels. Sure enough,
Middlemarch
was missing, the other volumes pushed together to hide its absence. Bloody Danny: he couldn't even buy her a book.
It was strange to drive Greg's car, like borrowing someone else's shoes and feeling the shape of their feet rather than one's own. I wasn't familiar with automatics so I took the country route into town, approaching it from Boar's Hill and parking there for a few minutes to look at the view. It was the postcard angle on the city, just its sand-coloured spires, framed by a rich canvas of green, a rural idyll with a cosmopolitan centre. Today it was hunkered down under the low wet sky. I still hadn't worked out how I was going to raise with Lucas the fact that I couldn't keep coming to Stoneborough all the time. I thought again about what I had said to Greg in the car-park at the hospital, that it wasn't that Lucas wanted me any more, just that I was a symbol of the old order, which he clung to for stability. I understood that need and I also felt the pain of moving on but it had to be done. Perhaps now he had Diana he would feel he was at the beginning of a new chapter. And anyway, I reminded myself, I wasn't severing the link between us.
On the return journey, I turned the radio off to listen to the swish of the tyres along the wet road and the beat of the windscreen wipers. The rain had set in for the day. The clouds had lowered and compacted, as if someone had smoothed a dove-grey blanket across the sky and tucked it in at the horizon. The drive was like a rain forest, the huge leaves of the chestnuts emerald green and dripping, the potholes filled with water the colour of cold coffee. Even the house itself looked changed. The stone of the façade was dark. I tucked the DVDs under my jacket and made a dash for the front door. I got soaked nonetheless.
In the end, we didn't put the films on until late afternoon. Though it wasn't yet six o'clock, the rain was falling so heavily that it was bringing night in early. The sky was shading to indigo and it looked less like August than one of those days in October before the hour goes forward. Up in the study Diana wandered around, looking at things. 'I love this room. Patrick had such a good eye for design.' She ran her finger along the top of the bureau, drawing a line in the dust. 'You ought to ask the cleaner to do in here next week. And it's about time you went through some of this, Lucas.' She indicated the piles of paperwork that hadn't been touched in all the time we'd been coming to the house. 'I'll help you.'
Lost in Translation
was Greg's choice and that went on first. We were about halfway through when the door cranked open and we were dragged back into real life by the sight of Danny, dripping wet and exultant. He shook his hair, sending water spinning around him. 'Here you all are,' he said. 'I wondered where everyone had disappeared to. You shouldn't leave the front door open like that. Anyone could walk in.'
Lucas stood up. 'I haven't seen you in days. Where have you been?'
'You never write, you never call ... You're like a Jewish mother, mate.'
'I was worried about you, believe it or not.'
'Sorry, Lucas.' His voice was sincere. 'I was in London trying to get some stuff together for this film I'm thinking about.' That was news. As far as I'd known, Danny had hardly given work a second thought since he'd moved to Stoneborough.
'Were you with my mother?' asked Diana.
'Yes.'
In the silence Lucas turned slightly to touch her shoulder. Danny waved a hand at the screen. 'Good film. Though I suppose it helps if you're Francis Ford Coppola's daughter.' 'She's a good director, Coppola or not,' said Lucas.
'Admit it, Lucas. Family talks.' Danny shifted his weight on to the other foot. 'Listen, mate, could I have a quick word?'
'Sure.'
'In private?'
Lucas sighed. 'OK, but it'll have to be quick. We're in the middle of this.' He followed Danny out and their footsteps retreated down the landing.
After five minutes Lucas still hadn't returned so I went downstairs to make a pot of tea. As I approached the kitchen, I could hear that he had obviously had the same idea. There was the sound of the kettle nearing the boil and also voices. Something about the tone of Lucas's made me stop. I drew back into the shadow at the mouth of the passage to the flower lobby to listen.
'I can't understand why you need more,' he was saying.
'It's what it costs to live these days - things are expensive.' 'But I gave you a thousand pounds last week.'
'I know but I've been in London. It's not country prices there. And I want to be able to take Elizabeth out. I can't let her buy everything for me as if I were some sort of gigolo.' 'You've got your cards. I cleared those for you.'
'I don't want to run them up again. I know how stupid that was. You see, I do listen to you sometimes.'
Lucas sighed. 'Look, OK then, but I won't be able to get it for you until tomorrow.'
'Thanks, mate, it's appreciated. I don't know what I'd do without you. You're the only person I can rely on.' There was the shuffle of feet and a gentle thump, and I imagined Danny patting Lucas heavily on the back. 'By the way,' he said, 'how are things going with Diana?'
'It's early days,' said Lucas.
'She's a great girl. You should hold on to her.'
It was very hard to sit through the remainder of the film. I had known Lucas was supporting Danny, he had been open about that from the start, but I had had no idea about the scale of it. A thousand pounds a week - it was hardly credible. I'd never spent that amount - I'd never had it. And Danny didn't even have to cover rent or other domestic bills: those were all found. It certainly explained why his wardrobe hadn't seemed to suffer in the months we'd been coming to the house and how there had been a steady stream of new shoes, new jeans, new T-shirts. But I had heard exactly how he had played Lucas: it was cynical and masterly.
As soon as I could, I took Greg aside and we went to our room.
'Are you going to say something?' he asked. 'The credit card bills were thirty thousand pounds.'
'I don't know. How can I? I can't tell him that I was listening in the corridor and anyway, it's not my business. It's his money - he can do what he likes with it.' I walked to the window and looked out. The garden had disappeared into the darkness but the rain was still beating across the pane. 'Are you going to talk to him about easing up on the amount we come here?' he said.
I turned round again, surprised. It was such a sensitive issue between us, one which, apart from my being apologetic and his being decent, we never discussed. I had told him about my decision to talk to Lucas. I wanted to show him I was ready to move on and concentrate on our relationship and I had seen that it had made him happy.
Nevertheless I hesitated now. It was infuriating but just when I had screwed up all my anger about the job and my need to loose myself from the Gordian knot into which I was tied at the house, Danny's touching Lucas for money had prompted me to feel protective of him again. I looked at Greg, who had arranged his face into a neutral expression. 'Yes,' I said. 'I am going to talk to him. Tonight.'
I found Lucas in the library after supper. He had drawn the long tapestry curtains and the thorough darkness gave the room a winter feel. All that was missing was a fire in the grate like the one we had had on the night in January when he and I got together. He had ensconced himself in one of the armchairs and was reading, a large glass of whisky on the side table at his right hand. His hair was falling forward over his eyes and he seemed thoroughly engrossed. I watched him for a second or two, remembering all the other times I had seen him like that at university, at our parents' houses, on holidays, in our various flats in London.
'Lucas,' I said, shutting the door gently behind me.
He looked up and smiled as he saw me.
'Can we talk?' I asked.