With his left arm laid along the top of the seat – his hand behind the nape of his wife’s neck so that she would only have to lean back a little for them to be touching—he gazed through the side window of the car and saw a half-dozen rabbits scattering across a field. Sheep grazed; lion-coloured cows stood by troughs in the shade of trees, swishing their tails. There was corn growing and oilseed rape, and red tractors raising a dust in the hayfields. In spite of everything – motorways, pesticide, a million new homes – here at least the country had retained its riches, its mannerly beauty. In his hurry to put England behind him he had underprized this. Now he felt the tug of it, as though this landscape – the first he had opened his eyes to – had some authoritative claim on him, something at the level of blood, which he was finally ready to acknowledge.
He looked at his mother, hunched in her seat as though the air were hardening on her shoulders. Could she take any pleasure in this? Was that still possible? It was a long time since she had been out of the house – a long time since going somewhere meant anything other than going to the hospital – and when he and Kirsty had gone in with her morning tea (into the shaded room no breeze seemed to freshen) she had been so flustered and confused they had wondered if the outing would be possible at all. She had complained wretchedly that she could no longer find any position to be comfortable in; how at night she wanted to turn on to her side but was afraid she would suffocate. Then, when Kirsty left them alone – Ella calling ‘Mom!’ from the bottom of the stairs – she had said she knew what a ‘kind doctor’ would do, a remark that Larry had refused to understand, though she had followed him around the room with her eyes until Kirsty came back and he could escape into the garden for a smoke.
For days now (months?) he had been trying to gather in himself the courage to speak to her. He needed – and the need was urgent – to appear before her as he truly was, to make himself visible to her: no more the shining target of her old pride, but a man who had proved unequal to those imperfections in himself he had barely suspected the existence of five years ago. And though he supposed she had already resigned herself to the loss of the old dream in which they had been such loyal partners, he was afraid that she would slip away (say ‘die’, Larry!) while some pretence still clouded the space between them. He needed to be recognized. It would take no more than a moment’s attention, a hand raised in blessing, but he would have to choose his moment with the utmost care. And choose it very soon.
To the right of them was Salisbury Plain: low, pale green hills jointed to the sky by fragments of dense, dark woodland. Then as they came within twenty miles of the house, Alice began to point things out. A church where she had once been a bridesmaid. A haunted pub. The gates of an estate behind which some local character had lived out a lordly decline.
To Ella, Kirsty explained: ‘This is where Gran’ma lived when she was a little girl.’
‘OK,’ said Ella, and she put on a short mime of looking out with interest, though there wasn’t much to excite a child from North Beach who had seen canyons and mountains and giant sequoia trees.
When Alec missed the turn-off, Alice waved a crumpled tissue at him and called him a fool, as if they drove this way every week. He apologized, reversed, and turned into a lane that ran between unmown verges, the ruts and potholes blue with last week’s rain.
‘Wow,’ said Kirsty, ‘real countryside.’
‘We may see some bears,’ said Larry. ‘Better wind up your window, Mum.’
But she wasn’t listening to them any more. She wasn’t interested in their chatter. This was private.
Larry leaned forward and touched his brother’s shoulder. ‘You remember this?’
Alec nodded. There were fields here they had once played in together, greening their knees. And certain small farms they had worked on during the holidays or at weekends, baling or scrumping, earning a few pounds, then drinking milk in the farmhouse kitchen when it was too dark to work. It stirred them, seeing it again, the lane twisting into the hills like time itself, and for the last fifteen minutes the journey was processional and solemn and they rode in silence.
The house stood alone on a stretch of road at the outskirts of the village: two storeys of red brick with the year ‘1907’ pricked out in black paint on a stone above the front door. From the outside at least, the place did not look very different, though there were new high gates, and a yellow alarm box prominent beside an upstairs window, and in the centre of the driveway a little fountain – cherub and urn – as in a country hotel. Alec parked the car between a Range Rover and a green MG, and as the brothers gently levered Alice from her seat, an old Labrador limped over the gravel to meet them, snuffling at the hem of Alice’s coat, as if the mink, dead half a century ago, still leaked some subtle feral stink.
‘Shoo,’ sighed Alice, but the dog was full of doggish interest in her, and followed them to the front door. Larry tugged at the craftwork iron bell-pull (a plain electric buzzer in Grandma Wilcox’s day), and after a minute the jangling was answered by a young man, twenty, twenty-two, who stood in the door frame, pale and pretty, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, looking at them as if good style meant a level of unresponsiveness that bordered on the moronic. Evidently, no one had told him who this gaunt and weirdly dressed woman might be. He leaned against the door and drawled, ‘I’m Tom.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, and letting go of her sons she staggered past him into the dark of the hall.
‘We’ve come to visit,’ said Alec, hurrying after her, afraid that she would crash disastrously on to the tiles.
‘Name of Valentine,’ added Larry, grinning at the boy’s discomfort and following the others inside.
‘We’re Valentines too!’ said Kirsty. ‘Do you have a bathroom for my little girl?’
By the time they were all in the house, Stephanie Gadd had emerged from one of the downstairs rooms, a woman in the vicinity of fifty, youthful, vigorous, dressed casually but punctiliously in navy blue slacks and a chiffon blouse. She had a string of pearls at her neck, which she turned and tangled in her fingers as she spoke.
‘Well done!’ she cried. ‘Did you have an awful journey? Tom had a B of a time coming down from London.’ She smiled at her son, lingeringly, then, without turning, gestured to the man behind her. ‘And this is Rupert, my other half.’
‘Really pleased you could make it,’ said Rupert. He grimaced and shook hands, squeezing hard as if he hoped to communicate dumb sincerity through the force of his grip, though when Larry squeezed back, much of the colour left the older man’s face.
Tom was asked to show Ella and Kirsty to the downstairs loo. The others were led into the dining room where an elaborate buffet lunch was laid out on snowy tablecloths.
‘Just finger food, I’m afraid,’ said Stephanie. ‘I don’t think people want anything substantial when the weather’s this warm.’
Alice was seated between Alec and Rupert. She would not be parted from her coat or stole, and sat in her place like the last days of a Hollywood starlet, or one of those women undone by absinthe in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.
When Kirsty and Ella came back, Stephanie handed out the plates and invited everyone to help themselves. On Sundays they were very informal and she hoped that was all right. Rupert drew the cork from a bottle of wine and held up the bottle to the light. He said he belonged to a wine club – ‘nothing too serious, just some chaps’ – but they had been impressed by this red from Peru.