Green Grass (23 page)

Inigo, who was missing Laura painfully due to the
alarm of almost being caught out, maddened his mother by saying, ‘She doesn't cook, she's too busy.'

Betty's shortbread recipe has gone down a storm, and several of the leading hotels in New York are serving the biscuits with a very nasty sweet sherry as the new aperitif, and calling it the Inigo Miller. While finding the drink repulsive and the combination of it and the biscuit somewhat grannyish, Inigo cannot help being flattered by becoming a bar-room name – surely just one step from entering the vernacular, where infinite fame is assured.

He allows himself a small private smirk and addresses his children. ‘So Fred, Dolly. Tell me what's new at school?' Inigo is rewarded with a blank look from each of them.

‘Dunno,' says Fred finally.

‘Nothing,' says Dolly.

Laura sees Inigo is looking disappointed. ‘It's half-term,' she reminds him, and Inigo nods and starts telling a story about a beautiful actress he met at a party last week. No one is listening. Dolly pushes her salad and the tomato and basil in her mozzarella stack to one side of her plate and leaves it, as she is on a purity binge and will only consume protein and no vegetables at all. Mysteriously, this diet allows all fizzy drinks and crisps, but Laura has learnt now that the quickest way to get Dolly out of any of her obsessions
is to act as though they are completely normal. Fred cuts his lunch into small cubes and posts it onto his lap, where Vice is curled contentedly, consuming whatever comes her way. Laura, having listened to the first half of the story with commendable concentration, suddenly notices a small white swelling on Zeus's ear. ‘Oh you poor thing, what have you done?' she exclaims, right across the moment when the actress's boyfriend was refused entry to the night club where the actress and Inigo were enjoying a tequila slammer as the first drink of an evening planned to return jaded New Yorkers to teenagers.

‘She's got the leading role in the new Disney movie, so we'll be seeing a lot more of her,' says Inigo.

‘Oh my God, Mum, it's squidgy,' squeaks Dolly from the floor where she is examining Zeus's ear. ‘And I can't get it off. It's stuck, it's stuck.'

Fred drags his chair back and crouches beside his sister and Zeus, who is trembling now and licking his lips apologetically.

‘Oh, rank!' exclaims Fred. ‘There's a smaller one too on the inside.'

Inigo tries to continue. ‘And she wants to buy one of my—'

Laura leaps to her feet and rushes to scrabble in a drawer by the cooker. ‘Oh for heaven's sake! I've just remembered what they are!' she shouts. ‘They're
ticks. He must have got them in the garden at the Gate House last weekend. We just need a cigarette to burn them off.'

Inigo is torn between exasperation that no one wants to hear his story, surprise that there are cigarettes in the house and irritation that the bloody Gate House has contaminated his return with grey polyps. He will not even allow his gaze, never mind his thoughts to stray towards the amount of attention Zeus is getting.

‘You don't smoke,' he says, frowning as Laura puffs on a cigarette to draw red heat into the end. ‘Neither of us do. We gave up ages ago.'

A guilty look flashes across her face. ‘They're not mine, someone left them here, but actually I quite like having one from time to time.' She inhales defiantly and at length.

‘No one in New York smokes at all,' says Inigo crossly.

‘So what do they do about ticks?' asks Fred, leaning over his mother as she applies the flaring tangerine heat of the cigarette to Zeus's black velvet ear.

‘They don't have them,' says Inigo, trying not to sound superior as he knows it's not helpful, but rather longing to be back there, and away from the sordid elements of English pest life. ‘The only reason you are smoking is that you lack self-control. Now let
me put it out for you.' He reaches over to Laura, but she is beyond his reach, bending over the pug whose mouth is turned down in deepest gloom. Laura pushes Inigo away. ‘Don't be silly, I'm smoking to get rid of the tick.'

‘Mum, be careful, you'll burn him!' screams Dolly as Zeus yelps and scuttles under the table.

Laura drags surreptitiously on the cigarette, just to keep it alight, she assures herself. ‘No, I won't. Honestly, I've done this thousands of times before and you just burn the tick. The heat hasn't touched his ear, he's just frightened.'

‘Poor thing. I'll hold him,' coos Dolly, crawling after the dog. Fred and Laura watch for a second as she tries to extract Zeus from the table legs, and hearing him whimper, both crawl in too. ‘Let's just do it under here,' says Laura.

Inigo is left alone at the table with half a famous actress story untold, and substantial evidence that his family prefers pest control to conversation. Nothing is going well in the greater scheme of things.

At the studio on Sunday morning matters are worse. Dust and piled-up post greet Inigo when he opens the door and he is on the telephone to Laura immediately.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello?' Laura is piling supplies to pack into the car as Fred shouts through to her from the computer the meteorological predictions for the next few days at Crumbly.

‘It says there's going to be an ice cap,' he announces gleefully. ‘Oh, no. Sorry, that's in Antarctica. We're having flash floods and freezing cold wind.'

Dolly groans, ‘Oh no. Do we have to go? I'd rather stay here and finish my project with Becca. That house is so dank when it rains. Can't we wait until tomorrow? Then we won't have to be there for so long.'

Laura, tethered to the telephone, flaps her hand at them to be quiet and continues to throw things
into a basket. Matches, batteries, candles, her theme this week seems to be power; last week it was air, and she took a bag of balloons, a bicycle pump and a harmonica in her pile of essentials.

‘Have you been to the studio at all while I was away?' Inigo paces in front of the windows of the studio, rolling his bicycle wheel in front of him, agitated and querulous.

‘Er, yes, I think so.' Laura isn't concentrating; she is trying to open the fridge door with her toe as her arm cannot reach from within the circle of the telephone's wire.

‘But it's like Sleeping Beauty land here – there's dust everywhere, and unopened post and it looks completely neglected. Manfred has left six messages about that bloody papier-mâché. I finished it in such a rush to get back to you that I expect it's sodding well imploded or melted. This is the centre of operations for me. It's very important that you keep it working if I'm away.'

Laura is irritated by the tone of his outrage – it's his bloody studio after all, not hers, and if she doesn't choose to go there when he's swanning around in New York, it's her own affair.

‘I've been busy,' she says silkily.

Inigo's pacing subsides next to a desk on which a large blue-bottle fly has died. This is the last straw. He
spins his bicycle wheel like a coin upon his finger and yells down the line, ‘Why can't you get your bloody act together and look after things properly? I get home and the fridge is full of mould, the studio is thick with dust, your precious dog has got ticks and I expect the children are infested with something unspeakable, and all you do is carry more and more rubbish from home to your play house in the country. Get your act together, Laura. I've got to speak to Jack. At least my sodding agent takes care of things.'

Laura only hears the end of this tirade as the phone has slithered from her shoulder while she concentrates on filling a Tilley lamp with paraffin.

‘Oh yes, I will when I've got time,' she agrees sarcastically, ‘but at the moment I've got too much to do. We'll sort the studio out next week when the children are back at school, shall we? Come home so we can leave for Norfolk. You'll feel so much better out of London.' Her anger passes and automatically she soothes him, talking him down off his high horse.

He responds sulkily. ‘I won't be better out of London, I hate the countryside,' he growls. ‘I should really stay here and get some work done, but I suppose if I want to see you and the children, I'll have to come to that dump.'

‘Yup,' agrees Laura, relieved that this conversation is on the telephone and not taking place in front of
Dolly who would use it as ammunition in her stockade of sulking about going away. Laura tries to rally the sinking sensation she experiences by smoking a cigarette. It was too much to expect that Inigo's homecoming would be an unqualified success, but at least she had the sense to let him return to the studio by himself. He had wanted her to go with him and Laura had almost agreed to, indeed would have done but for the persistence of Fred who, having crawled out of bed at eleven, claimed he wanted her to help him with some homework he now refuses to look at.

Laura adds his folder to a pile of things to take to the country. With any luck Inigo will relax once he's at the Gate House. Laura, blissfully uninterested in its domestic shortcomings, can't imagine anyone not relaxing there. She and the children have been as often as possible while Inigo was away, and she is addicted to it now. Inigo can chill out and when he is ready he can help Fred with his geography project. Fred is on section six: ‘Analysis of data and geographical conclusion'. Even reading the heading transports Laura straight back to the school feeling of frustration and boredom. It is, however, the sort of thing that Inigo uses in his work, minutely collaging endless maps, tufts of grass, photographs and the odd stone to create a bewildering whole; he will be quite at home with it. Just as well, as Fred certainly
isn't. When Laura asks him what he is doing for his geography project, he looks at her blankly for a while as though she is speaking an exotic language.

‘You know,' she says encouragingly, ‘what topic or subject have you chosen? It might be something like cliff erosion, or it might be artesian basins – that must be a popular one as I seem to remember that London is one or is on one. I just wondered what you are doing your project on.' Laura sits down at the table opposite her son, propping her chin on her hands, awaiting an answer with real interest. Fred's expression changes from blankness to pain, presumably at the effort of thought. Finally he manages to drag the word, ‘Dunno,' from the distant part of his brain used to operate speech. He then subsides, clearly exhausted by the effort, back into the cereal packet he was reading when Laura first approached him. The ignorance is odd, considering he claims to have reached section six of the project, and disturbing. Laura wonders if he might have contracted a hideous amnesia virus like an invaded computer, or if it is just his teen hormones manifesting themselves in sluggish contrast to Dolly's smouldering hysteria. Combine these two with Inigo's giant baby stance and Laura begins to wonder if she can stand any amount of time with them all in the cottage, and to think of the goat with sincere affection as the only sane member of the household. The linchpin.

As it turns out, Inigo can hardly see by the time they arrive at the Gate House, and remains in the car for some time after it has stopped, moaning, gasping and sneezing. ‘Poor you. I'll bring you some water,' says Laura, not very sympathetically as Inigo is a difficult invalid and has been a vile passenger – Laura was forced to take the wheel on the way, so violent were his paroxysms. The hay fever began as they passed the sign announcing their arrival in Norfolk. Even through his wheezing attack, Inigo was able to point this out. The road swept out of a shaggy density of pine trees and climbed a hill to a point where two vast fields stretched away on either side to the horizon. Laura gazed out across the field on her side of the car at corn ripening and swaying, a smattering of poppies dancing crimson above the green-gold whiskers of barley, and sighed her pleasure. Inigo, on the other side, took one look at the frothing crome-yellow of acre after acre of ripe oil-seed rape and began to sneeze. Ten minutes after the first sneeze he conceded defeat and pulled into a lay-by to swap places with Laura. From there, with a soothing baby wipe laid over his eyes by Dolly, and a few puffs on Fred's inhaler, he spent the rest of the journey suffering loudly and complaining about Laura's driving.

‘Oh, I feel ghastly. My head is full of snot,' he
announced with relish, interrupting himself to shout, ‘GO ON – you can pass that one now. I can see – I can see there's nothing coming.' Inigo slammed his hand against the dashboard as the car jerked, slowed and then accelerated, swaying wildly, past a caravan. ‘Come on, Laura, we've got a lot of ground to make up with that stop.'

Laura, knuckles white, her neck muscles knotted and her jaw clenched, glanced sideways at him and was pleased to see he looked wiped out. ‘Just shut your eyes and leave me to drive,' she suggested between gritted teeth.

‘Achoooo!
Oh God.' Inigo paused to blow his nose. ‘I'd love to, but will we actually ever get there?' he gasped through his handkerchief.

Only by rubbing soothing lavender oil (dispensed by Dolly the pharmacist) into her wrists and turning up the Waylon Jennings tape to top volume does Laura survive the journey without assaulting Inigo. Having got him into the house and bent double over the bath where he is running cold water over his head to get rid of any pollen that might have alighted on his slicked-back hair, Laura takes herself out to the compost area pretending that she will plant some marrows there, but in fact stealing a moment of peace. Fred joins her. ‘What are you doing, Mum?'

It is amazing how frequently Laura is asked this by
her children. When she is hanging out washing, when she is cooking supper, when she is putting clothes away, when she is waiting for them in the car. For Dolly and Fred, these seemingly routine moments are fraught with mystery, and Laura herself is evidently a creature of strange and elusive habits.