Cuckoo (2 page)
Two
It was a long phone call. After she put the receiver down, Rose realised that Gareth wasn’t in the kitchen any more. She searched the house, but she couldn’t find him. Pulling on her Barbour, and slipping her feet into boots, she took a torch and the baby alarm and, still reeling from the news about Christos, still unable to absorb it, she headed off into the moonlight to where she knew he would be.
A slow, deep river ran at the bottom of the field, and beside it stood a big old willow with a flat, smooth stone at its base. Rose had first discovered the spot fifteen months ago, after she had told Gareth she was pregnant.
It had been an accident, the pregnancy – the result of a rather messy topping-out night, when they had farmed Anna out to a friend’s house and invited the neighbours round to help them consume a lot of awful local cider. They had hauled a Christmas tree up onto the rooftop, there was a lot of whooping and dancing, and then everyone staggered home. Andy – Gareth’s brother, who had come over from France and was helping out and camping in the Annexe with them – collapsed in a drunken heap on the floor of the main house. Rose and Gareth covered him with blankets and tiptoed on their own up to the Annexe, where, after a nearly chaste eighteen months of sharing their bedroom with their small daughter, they let all caution fly to the wind.
So it was that, a few weeks later, when Rose did the test and it came out positive, it came as something of a blow. The plan had been that when the house was finished, Rose would find teaching work for the hours Anna was at school. This would take the financial pressure off Gareth, allowing him to pursue the more creative possibilities of his work. While he had enjoyed the practical satisfactions of putting doors up and knocking walls through, he had begun to feel stunted. In order to reboot his work, he needed uninterrupted, unpressured days in his studio – once he had built it.
Rose had known that this new baby would put paid to all that. She also knew that, for many reasons, Gareth had only wanted one child. So, with a chill in her heart, she had gone out to tell him. He was out in the rain, repointing an old stone wall that had been consumed by ivy. When she gave him the news, he jolted as if she had hit him with a stun gun. Then he dropped his trowel, stood up and just walked off.
She had spent ages trying to find him that time. She ran through the fields for a whole wet afternoon, calling out like a madwoman, growing increasingly desperate at how easily their happiness could be punctured. Eventually she found him sheltering under the willow, smoking and staring at the brown swirl of the water.
‘I suppose an abortion’s out of the question, then?’ he had asked, looking up at her.
It was, absolutely. Rose wanted that baby, and despite Gareth taking to his bed for three days, her pregnancy began to take shape.
‘We can make this work,’ she coaxed, offering him tea on the first day of his retreat, as the perpetual rain battered through the windowless ground floor of their unfinished home. ‘We’ve still got a bit of money, and I’ll give you all the practical support you need.’
Rose knew, from the almost weekly contact that Gareth was getting from the gallery, that there was a demand for his work that his absence had only made stronger.
‘And if you have the right conditions you can really work prolifically,’ she said on the second day, after she and Andy had worked side by side weatherproofing the house by battening blue plastic sheeting from lintel to sill on every gaping window hole.
By ‘right conditions’ Rose meant the light, airy studio that they were making from one of the outhouses. By ‘work prolifically’ she meant churn out more of the same old same old. Gareth didn’t have a leg to stand on with the financial argument. But he had planned a return to his more conceptual roots, and there he was being forced back to the commercial concerns he had tried to escape.
‘It could be perfect, Gareth. Just think, a baby,’ was her offer on the third day, when the first hard frost of what had been up till then a mild, wet winter finally set in.
Gareth eventually managed to get up and back to work on the house, but he wasn’t himself. His reaction had heralded a long and difficult period for them, from which they had now only recently emerged.
Rose had a nagging worry that this news about Christos – and, more specifically, the bit about Polly coming to stay – might kick everything off again. She knew that quick action was needed, so, drawing her Barbour around her, she hurried across the silvery-blue field towards the river. The picture of a laughing, sun-shot Christos hung in her mind so vividly that she reached out for him in the night air. And that’s when it jolted into her that she would never again hear his voice, never touch his skin again. She stopped and held her breath, as the awful fact of his death struck her fully for the first time. For a moment she felt lost, marooned in the middle of the field. If she didn’t hold on to herself, she thought she might disappear altogether.
Then she looked up and saw Gareth’s willow. Outlined by the moonlight, it looked like a drooping troll in the night. Rose could smell Drum tobacco, and she knew her husband was there. Her bearings recovered, she moved on towards the tree and crept into the tented circle made by what remained of the leaves.
She sat down next to him, joining him in silence.
‘Christos. I can’t believe it,’ he said, his eyes shut.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too horrible.’
‘He was so . . .’ Gareth looked up at the river with red eyes, searching for words.
‘He was your friend.’
‘She’s had the funeral, I take it?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid she has.’
‘I would have liked to have been there to bury him.’
‘Me too.’
‘That woman stole him and kept him to herself.’
‘I know, but—’
‘She should have told us sooner.’
‘Yes.’ She put her arm around him. The river flowed on at their feet, filling their silence with the sound of its journey from hill to ocean.
‘It’s the wrong time for this to happen,’ he said finally, digging his boot into some mud at the water’s edge.
‘I know,’ she said, taking his hand.
‘We’ve had the most difficult two years of our lives, and now, just as we’re beginning to settle in and start really living this life we have worked so hard for, we’ve got to open our doors to that friend of yours and her kids.’
‘It’s bad timing,’ she said.
‘Why should we risk it all for her?’ he asked, looking straight at her.
‘Risk?’ she said. ‘That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?’
‘It’s an invasion.’ He threw his dog end in the river.
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘How do you want me to be?’
A breeze ruffled the willow, and they both listened to the rustle and scratch that encircled them.
‘But look,’ she said. ‘We’ve got the space. We’ve got the whole big house to ourselves, and Polly and the boys can stay in the Annexe. They’ll be entirely separate. They can even cook their own meals. We’ll hardly notice they’re there.’
The Annexe stood at the front of the property, just off the lane. It had been a glorified chicken coop for decades, and the first job had been to convert it into a comfortable, if basic, bed-sitting room for Rose, Gareth and Anna, with a tiny antechamber for Andy when he came. There was a fairly well-equipped kitchen area – Rose had to be able to provide good fuel for the workers – and a shower room. She had missed soaking in a bath, though.
‘And besides, who else do we know with this amount of space to offer?’ Rose went on.
It was true. All their other friends lived in London in tiny flats. Or, if they had children, they were in small terraced houses that were bursting at the seams. No one else they or Polly knew had the money for this sort of property. Even from Polly’s music business days nobody was left who ticked all three boxes of unwasted, wealthy enough and still living in the UK.
If it hadn’t been for the death of Rose’s parents, Rose and Gareth wouldn’t have been able to afford a big house either. Her father and mother had gone, one after the other, from, respectively, liver cancer and bowel cancer. Their legacy – the proceeds of the sale of their house in Scotland and a hoard of savings amassed through a result of clever house-buying in the days when that sort of thing had been possible – had been enough to allow Rose, their only child and their great disappointment, to dream a bit. The fact that they had thought to acknowledge her in this way had surprised her. She had expected the money to go to their church, or to a dogs’ home, or to distressed gentlefolk. Anywhere other than her.
This old house, The Lodge, which Rose and Gareth had first seen as a ruin with Buddleia growing where the roof should have been, had seemed to be just the stuff of a good dream. They decided to do almost all of the work on the house themselves, partly to stretch the money, and partly for the experience. Gareth had declared that he wanted to do it so that they could truly connect with their home. His enthusiasm was infectious. Once Gareth got something – good or bad – into his mind, there was no holding him back. He liked to see things through. And that was why Rose was determined to nip his objections to Polly coming to stay before they even came into bud.
The moonlight wove into the wind-rippled river and Gareth tugged at a strand of willow.
‘It’s not possible not to notice Polly,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t exactly blend in.’
‘That’s why I love her,’ Rose said. She looked at Gareth as he stared at the water. A nerve was flickering in his cheek, and his jaw was tense.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘I’m just tired,’ he said.
She sighed. This was his way of telling her to leave him alone. But she wasn’t going to do that this time. If she left it, there would be a disaster.
Back in London, when he was like this, he would throw himself into his work. He’d disappear to his studio, only to emerge a couple of days later with two or three pieces which went straight to the gallery.
This approach worked for him, but for Rose, stuck at home alone with Anna, it was less satisfactory. She wished sometimes that they could work things out together, that they could sit and talk about things until dawn, like she imagined other people did. Perhaps if they had done that, the whole pregnancy thing wouldn’t have made their lives so difficult. She also wished she didn’t have to be the gatekeeper, fending off Gareth’s behaviour around Anna, who wondered why she didn’t see her daddy.
‘But he’s at work, love,’ Rose would say, and they would go off and bake a cake.
This had been easy in Hackney, where the studio was far away, on the other side of Victoria Park. But in this new house, especially during the build, the work was all tied up with the life. There was nowhere for him to go, and he could infect them all with his downturn. It had happened once already, and she didn’t want it to happen again.
‘Look, Gareth. Christos, your friend, your old, old friend, is dead. For Christos, can’t you see a way?’
‘I’m not going to get a say in this, am I?’ he said, ripping a Rizla out of the packet and rolling another cigarette.
‘We’re talking about it now, aren’t we?’
‘But you’re decided. I can see that.’
‘If you like, I can phone Polly right back up and tell her not to come,’ Rose said. Part of her wanted to do that. She knew that Gareth had a point, that it was indeed the wrong time. But she couldn’t fully admit it, not now.
‘I just wish we could have discussed it before you said she could stay,’ he said.
‘But what else could I do? Polly and I practically grew up together. She’s like a sister to me,’ Rose said, counting the points off on her fingers. ‘We shared everything until we met you and Christos. And now Christos is gone, she’s widowed with two kids, she wants to come back and there’s no one else for them to stay with. I don’t even know if she’s got any money.’
They sat in silence. It was a cold night if you were still. Despite her sensible waxed coat, and the protection of the willow, Rose shivered.
‘Man,’ Gareth said. ‘Christos dead. I can’t believe it. Shit.’
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