Golden Hour (24 page)

“Right,” he says.

He watches her as she moves about with her camera. She's acutely sensitive to his gaze, and takes care to stand in a becoming way; which means with the weight on one leg, so that her generally admired bum appears to advantage.

“So will it all be okay?” he says.

Maggie hesitates. Usually she takes care to give no opinion on a first site visit, but she feels a strong desire to get into a longer conversation.

“I think there may be some problems,” she says, still taking pictures. “This is a fine example of an early nineteenth-century oak-frame lodge.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Don't you think it would be a shame to brick it up?”

He stands gazing at the cart lodge, frowning.

“It would in a way,” he says. “But then where would I do my work?”

“What work do you do, Mr. Strachan? If you don't mind me asking.”

“I'm a writer.”

Maggie's heart gives a jump. A writer! No wonder he looks so interesting.

“Isn't there somewhere in the house where you can do your writing?”

“Oh, yes. I can write pretty much anywhere, really.”

She puts away her camera and turns to him, fixing him with the full force of her charming eyes.

“The truth is I'm really not sure I can recommend approval of these proposals. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But this is a listed building. I'm not saying there might not be some other, more sensitive way of doing it.”

So much for the words she speaks. Her eyes, her face, her body, are all saying something else. They're saying, I find you very attractive. Why don't you ask me in to your house?

“Why don't you come in?” he says. “I'll make you a cup of tea or something.”

“Thank you. I'd like that.”

She follows him into the house. Inside, various random efforts have been made to disfigure the rooms: curtains with pelmets, an over-painted fireplace, off-the-peg paneled doors in place of the original ledge-and-brace. But the dignity of the house still shows.

“This is how it was when we bought it,” he says as he takes her through to the kitchen. “The previous owners didn't really have a clue. There's a nice house underneath all this.”

“I can see.”

He shambles round the kitchen, makes them both a mug of instant coffee, glancing back at her from time to time. She's happy to see that he's very aware of her gaze. Also that he seems unbothered by her negative response to his planning proposal.

“We're bound by quite strict guidelines,” she says. “English Heritage will have to give their opinion too. To be honest with
you, I don't think there's much chance they'll go for it.”

“Oh, well,” says Alan Strachan. “I suppose at least that saves us some money.”

He gives her a steaming mug.

“So what do you write?” she says.

“Plays. Films. Or I try to.”

“Would I have heard of anything?”

“I had a play on a few years ago, called
Sweetheart
. It was about an underage prostitute and her client. God, that sounds so sleazy.”

“No,” says Maggie, amazed. “I saw it. I remember it. It was really good. You wrote that? Wow!”

“Not much wow since, I'm afraid.”

“You can't be doing too badly.”

She means the house they're sitting in, which must have cost close to a million.

“Oh, that's film money. That's not real writing.”

He's sitting down facing her now, his chin in his hands, smiling at her. His face turns out to be quite lined. This is a real grown-up.

“How old are you?”

Oh God, did I say that out loud? That's so embarrassing.

“About to be forty,” he says, not seeming to mind. “Coming into my prime. If only.”

“That's nothing,” says Maggie. “I'm thirty, and I feel as if my life's practically over.”

She can't believe the way she's talking. Here she is, a professional, on a visit to a married man, and she's giving him teaser lines as if this is a chat-up in a club.

“Actually,” he says, “there's a film of mine being shot not far from here, over by the Seven Sisters. Only it turns out that without telling me they've brought in a new writer to change everything I've written.”

Maggie opens her eyes very wide.

“Are they allowed to do that?”

“They can do what the hell they want.”

He's hurt, and he's letting her see it. She wants to put her arms round him and make the hurt go away.

A car pulls up outside. He goes on looking at her, feeling her sympathy. Then the door opens and someone comes in.

“Jesus Christ! I have had it with my bloody mother!”

A woman with a hard, handsome face and unkempt hair throws her bag down on the kitchen table. Maggie stands up, puts out her hand.

“Maggie Dutton. Conservation Officer.”

“Oh, shit! Is it today? Hell and damnation.”

She looks almost frantic, moving about, eyes jumping. She goes to a calendar pinned above the fridge.

“Yes, you're right. Ten a.m. How did I miss that?”

But her mind is elsewhere.

“I stopped off to see Mum after I dropped Cas off. She won't have Bridget back. It's driving me insane.” To Maggie, “Sorry. Batty old mother problems.”

“That's okay,” says Maggie. “I've got all I need now. I should be getting on.”

The sight of Alan's wife has shocked her back into reality. This man is
married
. He is
not available
. What have I been thinking of?

“She'll come round,” he's saying, his voice soothing his wife. “Give it time.”

“Alan, she can't look after herself.”

Then seeing Maggie is on the way out, she turns her attention on her, as if taking her in properly for the first time.

“So what happens next? How long will it take?”

“I'm afraid you may have to reconsider,” says Maggie. “I don't
think I'm going to be able to recommend the plans as they stand.”

This is met by a shocked silence.

“It would alter the character of the building.”

“Of course it would alter the character of the building. We're not putting hay wagons in it any more. We're turning it into a work space.”

“I do understand.” Maggie is on familiar ground here, though it's never comfortable. “But in the case of listed buildings we try our best to preserve the original character and appearance.”

“So what are we supposed to do with it?”

The wife is getting angry now; or finding an outlet for anger that was already there.

“I don't see that it's such a big deal,” says Alan.

She rounds on him in fury.

“Not such a big deal? It's taken us four months to get this far! How much longer do we have to wait?” Then to Maggie, “This is our property. Don't we have a right to live in it as we please?”

“Within the regulations governing listed buildings,” says Maggie, falling back on her stock of official answers.

“So what are we supposed to do? Milk cows there? This is all nonsense! This isn't a farm any more. We're not farmers. Why do we have to pretend nothing's changed? Who are these rules for? Is it so the walkers can come down the lane and say, Oh look, isn't that pretty? This isn't a museum, for God's sake!”

“I'm sorry,” says Maggie. “You always have the right to appeal. Now I really must go.”

She beats a hasty retreat, as she has done so often before. Back in her car, heading up the narrow lane, she forgets the anger of the wife and remembers the wry smile on the face of the husband. She caught his eye a couple of times, and she's sure she saw
complicity there. And what if she did? What happens next? Nothing. He's not about to leave his wife.

Not as far as I know.

The encounter leaves her in total disarray. She's ashamed of herself, conscious of having behaved badly, but no real harm has been done. No words were spoken that make her blush in retrospect. It was all a matter of looks. And yet she's quite certain that he understood her and she understood him. How extraordinary it is, this discovery of mutual attraction. Two total strangers know within seconds that they have recognized something in each other; like travelers in faraway lands who can tell a fellow countryman by the way he turns his head, by the shape of his smile.

I could be wrong, of course. The less you know about someone, the more they fill up the waiting space in your dreams. Maybe this flash of excitement is just the effect of novelty, and what's new becomes old quite quickly. Maybe that's how other people do it. They make their commitments fast, before the novelty wears off.

It was all so different with Andrew. We were friends before we were lovers. Hard to pinpoint, looking back, the exact moment at which we became a couple. People think the first time you sleep together is the watershed moment, but you can have sex and not become a couple, we've all done it. Some other process is at work that pulls you together, some recognition that you fill the gaps in each other's lives. You start seeing more of each other, you come to depend on the other person being there, and little by little your lives become intertwined. No moment of decision, and yet a decision of sorts is reached. From that point on your route is set, and it takes an act of will to diverge from it. Or an outside force.

Liz has just driven ten miles to take Cas to a friend's house in Folkington, which turned out to have electric gates and servants' quarters, for God's sake, and handed Cas over to a nanny who clearly thought she too was a nanny, and then all the way back to her mother's house, who she hoped had got some sense into her overnight but instead turned out to be expecting an apology from her, which not being forthcoming led to another nasty row, and she comes home to find this! Some dolly from the council simpering at Alan and telling him he can't have his office and Alan lies there like a dog with his paws in the air having his tummy tickled.

“Why didn't you tell her to piss off? Who does she think she is? I should bloody well think we will appeal! What is this British obsession with the past? No wonder we're no good at making things any more. We're so busy pretending it's still Rule, Britannia! and the empire on which the sun never sets.”

“I suppose there has to be some kind of limit,” says Alan, attempting to be reasonable at a time when reason is not called for.

“You were a big lot of use,” says Liz. “You let her walk all over you.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“Stand up for yourself. Argue back. Who the hell is she anyway? Why is her opinion more important than ours?”

“Well, that's her job. To protect old buildings.”

“Whose side are you on here, Alan?”

“It's not about sides. There are regulations, that's all.”

“You know she was flirting with you?”

“Oh, come on.”

“You really don't know? Jesus, Alan! Wake up!”

“Why on earth would she flirt with me?”

“I don't know. People do. She was quite pretty. Or didn't you notice?”

“To be honest I've got other things on my mind.”

“Well, you can kiss goodbye to your office. Little Miss Flirty's going to put a stop to that.”

“I can live with that.”

“Oh, sure. But what about me? I have to go on working in a cupboard.”

“Then you take the parlor. I'll have the cupboard.”

“Jesus!”

It comes out as a shout of frustration. At Alan. At life.

“I honestly don't know what else to say, Liz.”

“Anything! Say anything! Why do you have to accept everything? Why don't you ever fight for what you want? Why does it always have to be me? I'm tired of fighting.”

“Then maybe you should stop.”

“And join you in the victims' club?”

“I'm not a victim,” he says. “Don't say that.”

She's beginning to get him angry too, and realizes this is what she wants.

“Have you called your producer?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Why not? You're just going to take it, aren't you? They fuck
you around, they bring in another writer without even telling you, and you just sit there and take it.”

“I have no choice!” Now he's shouting. “Life isn't a newspaper column, Liz. You can't make all the bad stuff go away by complaining to the
Daily Telegraph
. Get some dignity, for Christ's sake!”

“Dignity? What's that? Letting everyone roll over you?”

“It's not having tantrums when you don't get your own way, like a spoiled four-year-old.”

“You think this is a tantrum? This is not a fucking tantrum! This is fury! This is the real thing, believe me. I am sick and tired of all this self-destructive misery. I'm drowning in it. There's my bloody mother poisoning herself with hatred for anyone who tries to help her. There's you letting yourself get shat on because you're so bloody sodden with self-pity. There's this house which we bought to be a place where we could both work and neither of us can do a fucking thing. Jesus, why do I bother?”

She goes out of the room and stamps upstairs. Alan stays in the kitchen, looking out of the window at the sunshine on the yard wall. Then he follows her.

She's lying on their bed, crying. Just low snuffly crying, nothing too violent. He sits on the edge of the bed beside her and speaks in a steady reasonable voice.

“I spoke to Robert at the agency about this new writer. He says there's nothing I can do. I've asked Jane to send me the new draft. If I really hate what they've done I can take my name off it. That's as far as I can go.”

Liz snuffles a bit more and dabs at her eyes but says nothing.

“You're right about the self-pity. I do feel sorry for myself right now. But it'll pass.”