Authors: Catherine Chanter
‘It can’t be that hard to find somewhere,’ said my colleagues at school.
‘With the price you’ll get for this . . .’ said our neighbours.
Moving out of London, living off the land, that was the dream. It always had been Mark’s dream, but he had mortgaged it for me and, although he never put it this way, he was calling in the debt. He had paid out for so long and now he was bankrupt, whereas I had been investing and accumulating in people and work and ways of living that to sell out now seemed, at the very least, daunting.
Standing like a child on tiptoe at the edge of the diving board, I wanted to jump and yet was terrified of jumping; I wanted to grasp the handrail and walk back down and yet the cold concrete world at the bottom was also slippery with fear. To plunge into a new, freshwater pool, live with a different energy in a world unpolluted by hatred, to come up for air at last, like Mark I was in love with the idea of getting away from it all and starting again in the country. But if we slipped, it would be a long, long way to fall and we would be far away from anyone familiar who might throw us a lifeline. As far as Mark saw it, it was the right thing to do at the right time. I was an inarticulate advocate and found it strangely hard to voice my worries in the face of his enthusiasm, not to mention his desperation. His central thesis was convincing; he might have had a fair hearing at the tribunal, been found innocent, but he had no hope of an unprejudiced future if we stayed. He had things to get away from; I had things to stay for. And whose fault was that, I thought, when I was at my lowest, even though that was neither true nor reasonable.
Mark had further supporting arguments in his brief: there may have been a lack of rain for a while, but these cycles had a habit
of correcting themselves, didn’t they? Money wasn’t an issue; the sale of our semi in the suburbs covered the price of a cottage in the west with land and some to spare, and his pay-off for his unfair dismissal from the local authority plus what I had inherited from my father was going to give us enough to live on for a bit; we had savings. Angie had turned out to be the cheapest of teenagers: hers was the one problem you cannot throw money at and the NHS, Social Services or HM Young Offenders had spent more time looking after her than we did. We spoiled our grandson Lucien, of course, but as I think of that word, I regret its double-edged meaning. Anyway, the theory was we would be fine for a couple of years, if we were careful, until we knew whether we could make a go of it. It, ostensibly, being the smallholding. It, in reality, being our relationship.
We almost didn’t bother to get the details of The Well. There was no video link and anything that wasn’t instantly accessible online seemed like too much hassle. We wanted to be able to view heaven now, without an appointment.
‘It’s got to be worth a real look,’ Mark said.
‘Only if there are two or three to see on the same day,’ I replied.
There were, but one was sold two days before and the other was taken off the market, so that left The Well. We argued about it, but went anyway. Lucien was with us. He had been staying for two or three weeks while Angie tried yet again to sort herself out. He must have been four at the time. ‘He’s a lucky little boy to have grandparents like you.’ That’s what our friends said, whenever we took him on again. I don’t expect it’s what they’re saying now.
It was an unnaturally hot autumn day, a sort of savage last stand by the sun after what had been yet another dull, dry summer following yet another dull, dry winter – dry, that is, according to the statistics the weathermen had then. The various restrictions in the southeast had already been extended to the rest of the country, even by April, and the serious papers carried editorials on
the introduction of compulsory water meters, while the tabloids alternated between the threat of Armageddon and close-ups of celebs wearing very little in the sweltering heat. No one knew then where the downward trajectory of the rainfall graphs would eventually take us.
The map was magnetic. The Well was on one of those pages where the red and yellow lines of the roads skirt around the edge, and everything else is white space with lanes pencilled in: lanes which skirt the boundaries of private estates of long-dead lords of the manor; lanes which make long detours seeking out old stone bridges, following the packhorse routes, from market to market. Mark preferred the satnav, but as we got close to our destination it let him down.
‘Where the hell are we? You’ve got the map.’
‘Don’t shout at me. This was your idea, traipsing around the middle of nowhere looking for a bolthole!’
Silence.
Me. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that.’ I turned the map upside down and squinted. ‘I think it’s back the way we came.’
Mark attempted a three-point turn in a gateway with a ditch on either side. He wasn’t an angry person when I met him – purposeful was how other people used to describe him – but the allegations which had led to his dismissal had really got to him and his fuse was shorter, even by then. We crawled slowly back up the hill until we saw the footpath sign with just the symbol of a man with a pack on his back and a stick in his hand and no named destination.
We turned in and Mark stopped the car, took his hands off the steering wheel and held them in the air, like a priest. There was no sight of the cottage itself; it was not that, rather it was the circle of the world running in a blue rim around us which left us breathless. Far in the distance, hills upon hills shadowed each other to the north and the west until somewhere, far out of sight, they sank into the Atlantic. The closer ridges on the
other side of the valley were forested and in that heavy autumn light, the conifers were charcoal etchings, smudged against the dust gold of the recently harvested fields below them. To the east, the amber land was mainly scorched pasture, hedged and squared by centuries of farming and behind us, the bleak scree of the Crag.
‘Have we arrived yet, Granny R?’
‘Yes, Lucien, we have arrived.’
The track ahead of us was a dotted line awaiting our signature. There it is, we said to each other, as we spotted first the barn, then the mottled red brick chimneys rising up from the Victorian stone cottage, and suddenly we were children together, going on holiday and the squabbling in the back seat suddenly stops as the cry goes up from the first one to see the sea. There it is! Look at it! We’re here! We signed up the moment we stepped out of the car, but we didn’t know what for.
The estate agent was waiting for us, propped up against a bright red 4x4 and smoking.
‘Shouldn’t do that really,’ he said, squashing the cigarette under his deck shoes, ‘not with the fire risk nowadays.’
We shook hands. He seemed to me to stare a little too long at Mark, then withdraw his hand a little too quickly. I felt the familiar increase in my heartbeat; there had been times during the Mark’s hearing in London when I had been very afraid of what people might do. There had been other cases like his in the press, in other towns when the public had forgotten the concept of due process and taken things into their own hands. I looked over my shoulder, back up the drive. Maybe there is nowhere to run to, I thought.
But the estate agent had turned his attention to his car and the moment was gone. ‘You’ll need one of these,’ he joked over-loudly, stroking the bonnet, apologising for the state of it, what with the car washes closed and the hosepipe ban.
Breathing deeply to control my voice, I humoured him. ‘Think
we’re more likely to get a donkey. What per cent did they say petrol had gone up this year?’ I asked.
‘One hundred and twenty!’ He called the words as if it was a darts score.
Mark engaged in manly talk about clearance room and low ratio gears; I could see he was impatient to look around, but he was good like that, putting himself out to make other people feel at ease and his charm was dismissing whatever doubts the estate agent might have had. That was what he did with me when we first met, the morning after a party, in the last term of the last year, exams over and the future waiting somewhere beyond the overdraft and cleaning the fridge to get the deposit back. I was sleeping in an armchair, someone else’s overcoat covering my bare shoulders, and when I woke up there was a tall, dark, slightly foreign-looking gentleman offering to get me a coffee. He came back and never left me again. We spent that night together, we spent the rest of term together, and we altered our plans and spent the summer together. Four months later I was five months pregnant and we were at the registry office. We went from young to old very quickly.
The slam of a door brought me back. The estate agent was getting the details out of his car, disturbing a lone, white butterfly which had settled on a late-flowering buddleia by the gate. Everything is out of season this year, I thought, and where has the time gone, I wondered, all caught up in the past, and look at us now, moving to the country as middle-aged people do. In some odd, instinctive gesture, I put my hand on my stomach. ‘I love children,’ I remember Mark saying when I told him I was pregnant.
Lucien climbed out of the back of the car, smelling of crumbling chocolate and hot skin. Still sleepy, he held my hand and pointed to a grey squirrel, skulking up the trunk of the great oak tree. Our eyes followed it up through the branches until we lost it amongst the gilt-edged leaves, light falling like dappled water on dry ground
at our feet. A police car or ambulance was making its way up a main road somewhere over towards Middleton.
‘You can’t always hear the road,’ said the estate agent, keen to market the dream. ‘It depends on the wind.’
‘But that must be westerly,’ I concluded, taking my evidence from both the sun and the Welsh hills.
‘Westerly? Probably,’ he conceded. ‘That’s certainly where the prevailing wind comes from. But I bet you can hear a pin drop at night.’
Screech owls, I thought, and barking foxes.
I asked where the nearest neighbour was. Oh, he was saying, miles away and can’t see another house; but in truth, I was already feeling the distance between this place and the rest of the world and wondering if I could manage that. Maybe I looked to him like someone who wanted to escape. Much later, Sister Amelia would certainly reach the same conclusion the moment she met me.
A heavy velvet curtain hung inside the front door, which the agent held to one side for us, like a stagehand. It didn’t take long to look around. There was the back passage, the kitchen and Rayburn unchanged since the 1960s, Mark’s study – well, the room that he made into his study – and the little sitting room with a wood-burning stove, the one which we had to replace after the chimney fire. From there, we went upstairs and crowded into the small bedroom and the tiny bathroom and then in here, the main bedroom with the view, this alchemy of a view. Well trained, the estate agent left us to it and Mark felt for my hand and pulled me closer, kissed me once, slowly, on the cheek and I felt him breathe in deeply, as if he could taste oxygen for the first time in a very long while.
‘Just about enough room for Angie and Lucien,’ I said to Mark as we stepped apart. We both knew my daughter well enough to know that our home would always need to be big enough for both of them, and not just physically.
‘I love it,’ said Mark. I hadn’t heard him as enthusiastic about anything since before the tribunal. ‘A place to start again,’ he said.
Lucien loved it too, running up and down the creaking staircase, opening cupboards in the kitchen, peering into the fireplace. The sunlight coming through the bay window was showing up the cracks in the banisters, the stains on the carpet, the damp patches on the ceiling, but the place itself felt solid as though it could contain whatever we poured into it.
‘Ready to take a look outside?’
We followed the agent up to the ‘Stone outbuilding with electricity and water, currently used as a garage/barn. Scope for development’. If the old lady had owned a car, it was clear she had never put it away in there, jumbled as it was with stepladders and spades, broken sun-loungers and coal buckets without handles. No problem to upgrade it for a holiday let, we agreed; no problem to convert it into temporary accommodation for displaced family.
Along one side of the barn were neatly stacked and recently split logs.
‘How long had the old lady lived here?’ Mark asked.
The agent didn’t have the answer to that, but he did know that since her husband died, a lot of the land was let out to a neighbouring farmer, who had also been lending a hand, with the wood, that sort of thing. ‘They’re a tight-knit bunch round here, but the Taylors, they’d always help you out if you were in a fix, I’m sure.’
The synonyms for tight-knit must be interesting, I thought. Introspective, xenophobic? At what point does tight-knit become hostile? The agent was explaining that the letting agreement ran out on 31 March the following year.
‘Thirty acres of field and woodland. Just the right size,’ Mark commented, as if there was such a thing as a right size for a piece of paradise. It sounds small, thirty acres, for the havoc it has caused. We visited the orchard, picking up apples and pears which were feeding the worms, wondering at the old fruit cages hung like discarded hairnets over strands of growth, sticks leaning at odd
angles like old-fashioned hairpins. The vegetable garden showed signs of more recent work.
‘Look at this, Mark.’ Lucien had his small hands clasped around a fat marrow which had obviously continued swelling all summer, oblivious to the death of its planter. With a huge tug, it broke off the plant and he fell backwards. ‘Can we take it home? Can we eat it?’
‘It’s not ours, Lucien,’ I said.
‘It’s a good size, considering how little rain there’s been,’ said Mark.
‘Who’s going to mind? Give it a good tug and Mummy can carry it for you,’ said the agent.
It was a familiar error, which Lucien corrected. ‘This is my granny. My mummy’s away at the moment.’
‘Well, your granny certainly doesn’t look old enough to be a granny,’ smarmed the agent.
Lucien stared at him, crossly. ‘Well, she is,’ he insisted. ‘Everyone’s always doing that,’ he said to me, as hand in hand we went over to join Mark who, like an art lover in a gallery, was drinking in the burnished woods, mentally clearing brambles, thinning poplars, planting Spanish chestnuts where the pines had fallen in a strong wind, like spilled pencils in a dark classroom.