All the Hopeful Lovers (2 page)

The memory staggers her.

‘She was simply adorable. I was so proud of her.’

‘There you are, then,’ says Laura. ‘Not such a terrible crisis after all.’

‘So have you got Jack home yet?’

A little late in the day Belinda has realized that she should show some interest in Laura’s children.

‘He’s been home for ever. The Cambridge terms are so short.’

‘How does he like it there?’

‘It’s fine, as far as I can tell. He has a sweet girlfriend.’

‘Not pretty, then?’

‘Oh, Belinda. I didn’t say that. Hannah’s lovely.’

‘Not that it matters. Beauty isn’t everything. Just as well, given the sneaky way it runs out on you when you’re not looking.’ She glances at her reflection in the side window of a parked car. ‘But the party’s not over yet. My clock’s still ticking.’

The sound of piped carols drifts out onto the street as shoppers come and go through the glass doors of Woolworth’s on the far side. Signs in the windows say BIGGEST EVER SALE.

‘Isn’t it terrible about Woolworth’s?’ says Belinda. ‘Who’d have ever thought they’d go bust?’

Jack strides up the Downs, past the old landfill site, past the beeches with the low curving branches they call the swing trees. This was always the family walk in the days of his childhood. He wants to go back in time, to be a child again, to be anywhere but here, now.

He walks up on the high tussocky sides of the track, above the chalk-slime ruts. From here he can gaze down on the scoops of land, furrowed by sheep trails, empty of all human life, that are for him the shapes of history itself. In such a grand perspective, what does it matter that Hannah, his first love, his only love, has left him?

It’s a steep pull up to the summit, and there’s a cold wind coming off the sea that makes his eyes water. At least he never came up here with her.

He stops just above the swing trees, and as they always did when walking as a family he seeks out the roofs of their home. At this time of year the bare trees no longer screen the red tile-hung walls. As he looks he thinks he can just make out his mother’s car coming down the lane to the house. His mother now drives a Smart car. Jack was appalled when he first saw it.

‘What was wrong with the Volvo?’

‘It was fifteen years old, Jack. And we can’t just go on guzzling petrol any more. We have to think of the planet.’

‘So why do we heat our home like a sauna?’

Jack doesn’t want his parents to change their lifestyle to save the planet. Half his year may now be spent away at university, but this house remains his primary world. He wants his parents to continue in their comfortable profligate ways, and maintain the family home as it’s always been.

Hannah came to stay at raspberry-picking time. They all loved her, of course. Even Carrie. When was that, last July? You have to pick raspberries slowly. Look under the leaves where the dark red ones hang, the sweet ones, the ones that drop off the branch at a touch. The fingers gripping so lightly it’s almost not a grip, more a caress, so as not to bruise the fruit. Standing there close together, fingers probing among the leaves, learning a slower, kinder habit of touch. Then she puts one to his lips, pushes it into his mouth.

Then later, in his room in college, she told him it was over. Weeks ago now, right at the start of term, nothing to make a big deal out of any more.

‘It’s the last thing I want to do,’ she said, ‘but it’s the only honest thing I can do.’

He turns and tramps on up the Downs. His denim jacket is not proof against the cold, which he welcomes. At least he minds the cold. It’s the not-minding that’s so wearing. The flat summit before him now, and the concrete column of the trig point that he used never to be able to climb alone; always his father had to lift him up. Then one day when he was eight years old he did it all on his own. Beyond, the bare land slopes down to the sea.

On this dull day the sky is the colour of the sea and there’s barely a horizon. The sea all sky or the sky all sea. The shrill cries of the gulls from far off over Seaford. Only when they’re close do you realize how big they are. And those cruel beaks.

The evening they agreed to part was not as he had feared. All the tension between them melted away, and they were close in a manner they hadn’t been able to achieve for weeks. Hannah cried and said she loved him. That was how he knew for sure that it was over.

Then there came some days that his memory has blanked. No appetite, no desire. Alone in his room, wincing, trying to duck the waves of misery. But it passes. Everything passes. What remains is a low-level dullness of spirit. Carrie says, ‘Why’s Jack always grumpy?’

He walks fast along the broad summit track from Edenfield Hill to Firle Beacon. Below lies all England, laid out in pastoral tranquillity, a land for lovers, a land for families. Up here the wind cuts through clothes and there’s a clear sight of the edge of the world and he knows the view is an illusion. Life does not go on in this orderly procession of meadows and woods, villages and farms, not for ever. There comes a time when it swoops up onto bald hills, and there reaches a brutal end.

People jump off cliffs when they can’t take any more. Beachy Head not so far away to the east, the famous beauty spot waiting for the day the beauty dies.

Thank Christ I’m over it now, the pain. One day soon I’ll be over thinking about how I’m over it.

There’s a kind of fascination in it, similar to the close interest people show in their diseases. The ebb and flow of it, the shapes it makes in your life. You can watch it like a movie, you’re the hero. In the beginning you get this savage beating and all of you hurts all the time, then just when you know you can’t endure any more it stops, as if a switch has been thrown. Then for a short time, sometimes for as long as an hour, you’re flooded with an extraordinary sensation of goodness. Not your own goodness: the goodness of things. The loyalty of the world. Gratitude to the ground, that it continues to support you, gratitude to the air that grants you breath. You’re overwhelmed by stupid but beautiful thoughts, most of all that life has not ended just because your love has abandoned you. Then like the tick of a thermostat as the temperature rises above the set limit, the stream of warmth ceases, and cold dark returns.

But not for ever. It passes. Everything passes.

Not Hannah’s fault. There’s some consolation in knowing that. He had become too needy. He knew it, but it wasn’t in his power to control it. Unable to believe she could really love him he had found grounds for fear everywhere he looked. When he saw her laughing with friends, he suffered. When he phoned and she didn’t pick up, he suffered. Who wants a boyfriend whose default mode is silent reproach? It’s no good loving someone too much. It makes you tiresome.

Her pictures long gone from his room, her pictures long deleted from his Facebook page. Only the occasional flash of memory. Sometimes she’s flicking her hair out of her eyes, giving him that sideways look. Sometimes she’s cross-legged on the floor, laughing, drunk. She got drunk so quickly, so inexpensively. ‘One drink and I’m anybody’s.’

He starts on the downward track, the long diagonal that clings to the steep side of Firle Beacon. Now the wind ceases, as the land wraps its protective arms round him. Below, the track turns into the valley, runs down to meet the coach road that will take him back into Edenfield.

There where the Downs path meets the rutted old road stands a solitary farm cottage, a square barn beside it, a garden round it, the whole enclosed by a low flint wall. The cottage has been empty ever since the family first came walking this way, which as far as Jack is concerned is all of his life. It has no services, no electricity or mains water or telephone. The garden has been left to run wild. Nettles and brambles grow right up to the front door. Carrie used to call it ‘her’ house, and talk of how she would buy it and live in it when she was grown up. This unjustified presumption of ownership always annoyed Jack, and he would explain to Carrie all the reasons why her plan was not feasible. The lack of electricity. The loneliness. Carrie said she didn’t care and she’d have candles and wood fires, and her friends would visit her there.

The cottage is called America Cottage, because it once belonged to the farm just over the brow of the hill known as America Farm. As far as anyone knows it’s still part of the Edenfield Estate, which was sold six years ago to a private equity consortium.

Now comes a small surprise: the cottage is occupied. Smoke rises from its single chimney. A blue car is parked on the rough ground by its garden gate. And there’s a man in the garden, smashing things.

Jack makes his way down the descending track, watching the tiny figure gesticulating with jerky arm movements, hearing the sound of breaking crockery. As he comes nearer he makes out the details. The stranger is an old man with a mass of shaggy white hair and a thick white beard. He wears blue-checked cook’s trousers and a navy blue Guernsey. He stands legs apart beside a garden table on which are stacked plates, bowls and mugs. One by one he’s picking them up and hurling them at the flint garden wall. With each throw he lets out the same loud cry, which is a single repeated word.

‘Die!’

Jack’s path takes him past the cottage, past the ancient powder-blue Peugeot. The angry old man seems not to see him, nor does he cease in his hurling and smashing. At close quarters his rage is frightening. His face is bright red within its frame of white hair, and his eyes flash with a ferocious hatred.

‘Die! Die!’

The smashed pieces of crockery pile up at the foot of the wall among the winter weeds. The destruction goes on. The old man shows stamina and dedication in his fury.

‘Die! Die!’

Jack is impressed. He realizes for the first time that beneath his own disillusion and self-reproach there is anger. Better to rage at life than to suffer in silence. But if he were to cry out as the old man cries out, who would he want to die? Not Hannah. Not any of their mutual friends, whose intimacy with Hannah he used to watch with such jealousy and dread. The only possible candidate is himself. He would gladly smash the self that lost him his love. Not a suicidal impulse, he has no wish to die: just to be rid of this helpless needy creature who turns all his efforts at love into self-pity and desperation.

He passes on down the coach road and round the back of the big house. Not many cars parked in front of Edenfield Place, now operating as a hotel. Everyone in the village expects it to go bust because the long boom has ended. The rumour is the buyers spent five million converting the Victorian Gothic monstrosity. They started out asking £200 a night for the rooms. That made the local people laugh.

Turning off the Newhaven road to the lane that leads home, he feels his shoulders hunch and his face assume a wary defensive expression. As he pushes through the side gate and tramps over the gravel to the back door, Jack has the sensation of walking in water. All action has become effortful. For some reason he has never got round to telling his family that he and Hannah have split up, even though it’s old news now and he stopped minding weeks ago.

To his irritation he finds his mother in the kitchen.

‘Hello, darling. Been out for a walk?’

She looks up from the kitchen table where she’s checking train times. Jack puts the kettle on for a cup of coffee.

‘I have to go to London,’ says his mother. ‘Diana just called. She absolutely insists I go up to town right away. I’m meeting her at the Hayward to see this new exhibition.’

Jack is incredulous.

‘Do you want to see it?’

‘No, not really. But I expect it’ll do me good. I’m hopeless about modern art. I really should make more effort.’

‘I don’t understand why you always give in to Diana,’ says Jack. ‘She snaps her fingers and you come running.’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I think she may be having some kind of little crisis.’

‘About modern art?’

‘It was something in her voice. After all, she is my only
sister.’

The kettle boils. Jack shuffles about fetching a mug and the jar of Gold Blend.

‘There’s someone living at America Cottage,’ he says.

‘Is there? Who?’

‘A crazy old man. He was smashing plates.’

‘Did you get yourself some lunch, darling? You were still asleep when I went out.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

She looks at him with anxious eyes, which only annoys him more. He just wants her to leave him alone. He knows he’s behaving badly, staying in his room for hours, doing the chores he can’t avoid with a poor grace. But that’s just how it is.

‘I just had lunch with Belinda Redknapp,’ says his mother, pulling on her outdoor coat. She’s using her bright voice to show she’s not thinking about what’s getting Jack down. ‘She’s in a great state because Chloe’s coming home today. She says whenever she sees Chloe she feels old. Belinda really is amazing. She actually told me she was jealous of Chloe’s love life.’

‘Does Chloe have such a great love life?’

‘I don’t know about great. Apparently it’s plentiful.’ She searches round for her handbag. ‘If I hurry I should make the two-sixteen.’

Jack takes his mug of instant coffee upstairs to his room. This information about Chloe Redknapp interests him. He remembers meeting her in Lewes at the end of the summer. They stood on School Hill outside Strutt and Parker and chatted for five minutes. All the time she was talking to him she kept her eyes fixed on his and smiled, moving her body slightly from side to side. She was wearing a low-necked shirt and he had to take care not to stare at her amazing tits, though he must have looked a little because he can see them now. They talked about nothing, about half-forgotten friends from Underhill, about university life to come; but it had seemed to him that her soft laughing voice carried beneath its commonplace words a secret message: do you find me desirable? Do you want me? Only flirting, of course. The habitual exercise of power by a pretty girl who knows how to tease. The actual delivery not available to the likes of him.

In matters of the heart, as in everything else, there is a hierarchy. There are those who make the phone call and those who wait to receive it. Jack is a waiter by the phone. He’s incapable of making a move until he’s sure the move is welcome; which means he’s never the one who makes the first move. He has found a language to justify this hesitancy: he calls it respect. But it’s only fear.

‘You’re such a sweet boy,’ Hannah said.