Green Grass (7 page)

From the beginning, Peter left the children to do as they pleased, and in doing so gave them his house to love. They explored every corner and cupboard, sneezing dust motes off old stacked books and clothes, bringing life and youth and new layers of chaos into the neglected rooms. Making it their own. Even now, Laura opens cupboards in the kitchen and knows what is in them with more certainty than she does in her parents' house. At Crumbly she and Hedley ran their own lives, ate what they wanted to when they wanted to, and acted out every adolescent whim they could there. Filling the kettle now, Laura remembers turning the kitchen sink scarlet with Crazy Colour hair dye when she re-fashioned Hedley's schoolboy quiff into a Mohican for a punk party in the village hall.

The windows glisten with steam as the potatoes boil and Laura doesn't notice them burn at the bottom. She was so happy here in her teens, able to be herself, not pretending to be an academic like her parents and Hedley. It must be good for Tamsin
growing up here; on behalf of her own children, Laura envies her.

‘Come on, let's eat. I'm starving.' Inigo marches in, swinging a bottle of wine. He opens it, pours glasses for himself, Hedley and Laura, then stands fidgeting and ostentatiously looking at his watch to draw more attention to the lateness of supper. Despite his passion for cooking, Inigo never interferes in the kitchen at Crumbly. It's too medieval for him; doing anything culinary in the cavernous space makes him feel like a vassal, not a chef.

Laura feels like that all the time, but doesn't think it's worth mentioning. She drains the potatoes, ignoring the eager faces of Fred and Hedley hovering keenly like the Labrador Diver. She remembers her teenage culinary attempts at Crumbly. The meals were experimental and infrequent; at thirteen her cooking repertoire consisted largely of boiled eggs and cakes she liked to marble pink, purple and green with the small bottles of evil-looking food colouring the Crumbly village shop supplied. It has to be said, it hasn't increased much. The chicken pie she is placing on the table came out of Hedley's freezer ready cooked, and that's how Laura likes it. She calls Dolly and Tamsin through to supper, and everyone sits down at the long oak kitchen table.

‘It's so nice to be back here,' Laura says, raising her
glass to Hedley. He smiles, relaxing now the arrival is over.

‘Cheers,' he says, slopping wine as he chinks his glass against Fred's water tumbler, and then Dolly's before reaching across the table to Inigo and Tamsin and his sister.

Home with their parents in Cambridge had seemed small, the rules petty and the city hard, grey and implacable after Laura and Hedley's summers in Norfolk, where the days were their own and the horizons stretched forever with no rules or boundaries to get in the way.

‘Do you remember how awful it was going back to school after the summers here?' Laura asks Hedley, when everyone has got their food and is eating. ‘And how we begged Mum and Dad until they let us come for Christmas, and it was the year there was that incredible snow.' Laura's eyes shine; she has her elbows on the table, leaning towards Hedley, who is looking puzzled. ‘You must remember,' she urges. ‘We went on a tractor to see the Sex Pistols play in Cromer.'

Dolly and Tamsin are drooped over their plates, shoulders hunched, hair flopping forwards to make two curtains, one rusty red, the other matt brown like stout. Dolly toys with a pea, but not keenly enough to put it into her mouth. Like Tamsin, her body
language indicates torpor and boredom. However, when the girls hear the word ‘sex', they both suddenly sit up, push their hair away from their faces and with pleased expressions begin to eat the chicken pie.

‘Cool,' says Fred. ‘Did they sing “God save the Queen”?'

‘I saw them on
Rock Dinosaurs,'
says Dolly. ‘Mum, did you get the dead one's autograph?' she asks, back to her usual animated self now.

Tamsin struggles to retain her sense of separation. ‘The Sex Pistols are really rank,' she hisses. Hedley roars with laughter.

‘That's exactly what they are, or rather were – you're so right,' he beams. ‘And Uncle Peter thought so too. He had to wait through the whole evening inside the Town Hall where the gig was, because it would have taken too long to get home and then come back for us again.'

‘I can't think why he didn't go to a pub,' muses Laura. ‘But then—'

‘I think we're all past caring now, aren't we?' says Inigo sulkily, and Tamsin, with her radar sense for discord, looks at him and then at Laura with interest. Laura sighs, and the sigh becomes a yawn and then another sigh as if she is meditating. She gets up to break the pattern and clears the plates away.

Inigo carefully removes his hand from the neck
of the wine bottle he has been clasping. He has positioned the corkscrew so it is poised like a ballerina on the rim. But before anyone can exclaim at his brilliance, Laura reaches across past him for Fred's plate and knocks the corkscrew flying.

‘Mum,' hisses Dolly. ‘Dad had to think his way into that and you just knocked it down.'

Laura swallows her impatience ruefully, recognising that it is best to maintain an equilibrium even though every sense rails against it. She gives an apologetic half-smile, but Inigo just grins.

‘Don't worry, I can do it again.'

Hedley has been preoccupied for the past few minutes; then his brow clears. ‘Oh, I've got it!' he exclaims. ‘The drilling starts tomorrow, there are trees to plant, and we've also got some men with ferrets coming. You'll like that, Fred, I think, won't you?'

‘Ferrets, great,' says Fred, pushing back his chair and feeding most of his chicken pie to Diver.

‘Not ferrets,' groans Inigo at the same moment. ‘Honestly, Hedley, I don't know why you put yourself through all these charades. Drilling your fields, irrigating the crops, planting endless trees, worrying about rabbits. What is the point?' The twins and Tamsin, eyeing Hedley and Inigo scornfully, slide out from their places and troop back towards the
television. Laura wishes they would stay and talk, but cannot see any reason why they should.

Hedley interrupts Inigo. ‘You're a fine one to ask “What is the point?”. Your work wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny with that as a criterion, would it? I mean, what a waste of bloody energy to go poncing around the world making bloody paper chains. I don't see the point of contemporary art. It doesn't make you think – in fact it's an excuse not to.'

Inigo ignores this unhelpful interruption and continues, ‘You may as well accept that your role as a farmer is non-existent. What you are is a custodian of a small part of Norfolk. One day you will be bought by a rich Japanese businessman who will pay you a salary in order that he can come and take photographs of you going through the motions of farming. That's about as good as it will ever get, and that, I guarantee, is the future.'

Hedley pours wine into his and Inigo's glasses and looks at his brother-in-law with mild dislike, adjusting his look, when he remembers Inigo isn't technically his brother-in-law, to one of stronger disdain.

‘I don't see why you can't accept that there is a valid existence to be had in rural England,' he says, determinedly keeping his tone well modulated and reasonable, as Laura has instructed him to do in his dealings with Tamsin, but is unable to resist a
provocative little jibe at the end: ‘And I haven't heard your defence for your way of life either,' he adds.

Inigo's eyes glitter and Laura isn't sure if it's the wine or the success of Hedley's baiting.

‘I don't have to defend contemporary art,' he says loftily. ‘Art has always been pilloried by philistines and it always will be. That doesn't ever stop the creative process. No artist will be put down by detractors.'

Hedley is astonished and quietly amused. ‘I must say, Inigo, you are quite something. I don't know when I was last called a philistine – I'm a bloody Classics professor, in case you'd forgotten.'

‘Oh, don't start this one you two,' Laura says wearily. ‘You sound like Laurel and Hardy, you really do.'

‘It beats your saunter down Memory Lane,' says Inigo defiantly, sounding so like a spoilt toddler that Laura wants to slap him. Inigo in giant baby mode is maddening, and unfortunately it is one of his most frequently adopted poses. Look at him now, bottom lip out, scowling as he pushes the debris of supper away from his place setting, where he has assembled a handful of candles, removed from the many candelabra placed around the hall. Lighting the first one he warms the base of the next until the wax is tacky and receptive, then presses the lit wick of the first into it, and so on until he has one long candle. Laura keeps her head turned towards her brother,
ostensibly discussing Tamsin, but she can see Inigo out of the corner of her eye, and has to close her eyes and take several deep breaths, which she exhales in a ribbon, to stop exasperation spilling over within her. Thank God some of the yoga has sunk in.

Gathering her thoughts to the internal rhythm of ‘I must focus on Tamsin, I must focus on Tamsin,' Laura makes her cupped hands into blinkers and leans towards Hedley. ‘Tell me properly what's been happening,' she says.

Wrestling with the corkscrew and another bottle of wine, which Inigo, with a patronising smile, removes from him and opens, Hedley explains.

‘Tamsin will be fifteen in April.' Laura nods. Hedley glances at her doubtfully, but her expression is sympathetic, and in direct contrast with Inigo's scowl, so to irritate him more than anything, Hedley launches in with detail. ‘She's been telephoning her mother to discuss her birthday. It isn't for a few weeks, but Sarah's been so off-hand.'

Inigo leans back in his chair, balancing it on its two back legs and stretches, yawning. Hedley ignores him. ‘The calls got off to a bad start when Sarah appeared to have forgotten who Tamsin was. By chance I came into the kitchen and found her sobbing by the telephone. I thought she must have had bad news, and I picked up the receiver. Sarah was on
the other end saying, “Jasmine who?” and sounding lobotomised. I got rid of her and spent an hour convincing Tamsin that her mother was deaf and dim now she was nearly fifty, and should have an ear lift as well along with the soul cleansing she was enjoying in Turkey.' He gulps wine, rubbing his eyes. ‘She has spoken to her now, but she resents her mother for having left her. Her form mistress at school says she needs someone to talk to about makeup and boyfriends and whatever else teenage girls obsess about.' Hedley coughs, to represent everything else in the teen repertoire. Laura tries to imagine him in the role of Agony Aunt and suppresses a smile.

Hedley rushes on, ‘Anyway, Tamsin says her mother is a bitch from hell and won't let me mention her name or bring up the subject at all. And she says she wants to have a party here for her birthday, and I've no idea how to go about it.' He tips his chair forwards and peers anxiously at his sister from beneath his lowered brow. He sighs. ‘She seems to hold me responsible for Sarah's behaviour, and a lot of the time I feel that I am.'

Inigo pulls himself up from the table. ‘I think you are,' he says. ‘Sarah would never have left you if you'd stayed in America. You should have sold this place when you inherited it. You would have bought yourself freedom, and you'd still have a wife.'

Laura glares at him and looks pointedly towards the door. ‘Inigo, just shut up, can't you? You don't know anything about Sarah, or about Hedley. If you did, you would remember that they were hopelessly unsuited, and splitting up was a huge relief for both of them. And to sell Crumbly would have been heartbreaking, as well as stupid. Think of the capital gains. Anyway, that was four years ago, and we've moved on.'

Inigo leans his giant candle against the Aga and prepares to leave the kitchen, but cannot resist a parting shot. ‘Well, I think your problems start and end with this derelict heap of rubble, and the idea that its land pays for it is absurd. No one since Marie-Antoinette has got away with toy farming.'

‘Your candle will melt if you leave it there,' warns Hedley.

Inigo grins wickedly. ‘I know, that's the point,' he says. ‘I'm off to bed so I can be up early to have a look at this ferret frenzy. I'll send the children up so you two can carry on bonding for as long as you want.'

Just to annoy him, Laura blows him a kiss. Hedley shoots him a suspicious glance, but Inigo is sweetness and light now, smiling benevolence at bedtime.

Laura looks after him wearily. ‘He's good at making up,' she says into Hedley's silence, and then, feeling more is needed, ‘I do love him, you know.'

She sighs. Hedley sighs too, then looking across at
her says, ‘It's a pity, I always wished you'd married Guy myself. Then you could have come back and lived here too.'

There is a silence. Laura laughs first. ‘I think I'd better go to bed,' she says. ‘Inigo won't like facing rural noises on his own at night – he's a real wimp about stuff like that.'

One of the things that Laura had found most attractive about Inigo when she met him was his passion for an urban existence. She didn't know he loathed the countryside though. He was in New York selling himself and he was loving it. Laura's small apartment on the Lower East Side was shared with a boy from Seattle training to be an opera singer and a Spanish hairdresser. Laura became a part-time waitress to subsidise her course. She knew no one save her fellow students but she could be who she wanted to be, and she thought she'd never go back to provincial life again. Meeting Inigo at the point where she wanted to give up and go home changed everything. The art world fascinated her, Inigo drew her into it, and gave her a role she enjoyed. Now though, leaning out of the bathroom window, watching the stars and breathing a shock of cold air, she realises that Hedley is drawing her back to Norfolk.