The Winter Children (12 page)

But things are working out very strangely. She remembers the way the return to England was broached. How it came about. An email from Olivia, not from Dan, who has not been in touch at all
beyond a few cheery greetings and replies to emails she sent him, in which she was always upbeat and friendly and never mentioned the thing that lay between them.

Olivia picked up the nickname from Dan, and although Francesca doesn’t really like her using it, there isn’t much she can do about it.

Francesca read and reread the email, trying to work out what was between the lines. The implication was that they needed the money that the London flat was bringing in. Did that mean that Dan
hadn’t been able to find another job, or that he didn’t intend to? If Olivia had decided not to live in London, it would be tricky for Dan to find a job in the sphere he’d worked
in before.

Gloucestershire?
She instantly conjured up the home where she grew up, a tiny house in a large estate on the edge of a big town. Her primary school had been all right, but her secondary
was a massive place in which she’d felt out of place and mostly ignored. Except there had been Mrs Patterson, who had encouraged her and made her feel she could achieve something. Mrs Patterson had seen her love of reading, and pushed her towards books and authors she’d never heard of.
Soon, Francesca was retreating to Mrs Patterson’s classroom whenever she could, to read quietly and study harder. Mrs Patterson had told her that she should apply to Cambridge University,
and that she could get there if she worked as hard as she could. Not far from her huge, concrete, sprawling monolith of a school two bus rides away from home, there was a private girls’
school, housed in an elegant Victorian brick building behind neatly trimmed hedges, playing fields for hockey and lacrosse stretching out beyond it. Francesca had seen the girls walking about the
grounds or heading home in the afternoons. The older ones wore their own clothes, and they seemed like impossibly graceful creatures in their floating skirts and printed blouses. All of them seemed
to be so polished, so elegant. She’d wondered if it was because they had money. But it couldn’t just be that, could it? Were they taught different things inside their exclusive,
closed-off world? Were they taught how to live in that easy, confident way, and were secret rules of existence divulged to them that meant they could belong and she could not? But she wanted to
belong. As thousands of kids poured through the gates of her school each morning, boys whooping, running, grubby schoolbags bouncing, uniforms skewed, girls caked in make-up, skirts hoisted up,
Francesca felt lost in their chaotic sea of humanity. She yearned to be in the other place, where life looked calm, quiet and ordered, and where rules were respected, where people seemed to matter. She knew then that Cambridge was the way to find those people and join them, and she decided that she would go there, if she possibly could. That was the beginning of her journey.

Gloucestershire?
She shivered at the thought of her twins being taken there. Of course, Olivia envisaged quite a different version of it: a Cotswold cottage with a verdant garden, a
village primary school with small classes and lots of outdoor space. But Francesca could only think of the place she’d been so desperate to escape.

That had been enough to set the ball rolling. Because how would she see enough of them if they were out in the middle of the countryside somewhere? This way she would be pulling them closer to
her, wrapping them up in her world.

As long as Olivia couldn’t resist the lure of the house and garden, and the idea that all of it was free. Francesca didn’t know what discussions or negotiations took place between
Dan and Olivia, but after the initial grateful thanks for a hugely kind offer, there was a wait of a fortnight or more before Olivia wrote back, asking if there was a way they could take a look at
the house.

That was when Francesca knew the plan had worked.

‘Dan, please, take them outside and play with them while I get this finished. Cheska will be here any minute.’

Olivia is flustered, rushing about to make it all look as tidy as possible. They haven’t long been in, just over a week, and there are still boxes everywhere, the things from their flat in
London having been delivered by a courier from the storage unit. The twins’ relentless routine has meant that unpacking has been relegated to nap times and in the evenings, when Dan and
Olivia are both tired from another long day of guarding two energetic toddlers.

‘Okay, okay.’ Dan scoops up Bea from her booster seat, where she’s been playing with the remains of her pasta and tomato sauce, smearing it lovingly over the pale blue polka-dotted oilcloth on the table. ‘Come on, monsters, let’s go out and leave Mummy to it.’ He looks over at Olivia as she hurries at the tomato sauce with a damp cloth. He unclips
the little black belt holding Stan in his place. He’s begging for a biscuit loudly. ‘Don’t get yourself too het up. It’s only Cheska, not a royal visit.’

‘I know but I want her to see that we can look after this place, that’s all.’ Olivia scrubs away at the red stain but it’s already sunk in and left a pale orange mark
behind. ‘Oh, bother this bloody sauce.’

Dan laughs. ‘For crying out loud, this is the best bit by far! Have you not looked at the rest of the house?’

Olivia laughs too. She sees his point. Beyond the door that links their bit with the big house lies a huge dirty emptiness that she only glimpsed once, not long after their arrival. The scale
seemed overwhelming. Their quarters are much more modest and they are lucky to have them. There was no sign that Dan was going to get another job, and when she asked him about it, he was evasive
and then bullish about the fact that they still had half of his redundancy money left after they had lived so cheaply in Argentina. They paid for the flights, contributed towards the bills and
covered the cost of their food, but Olivia’s sister didn’t charge them for their stay. When she said anxiously that life wouldn’t be so cheap back in England, Dan said that he
needed longer to work on his play. He had a unique chance to devote himself to writing, and once he went back into corporate life, it would be impossible. Besides, he was enjoying being with the
twins at this precious stage of their lives. She saw his point, even if she couldn’t help wondering how much longer the play would take when he’d already had two years, but it
didn’t solve the problem of how they would manage. Her own freelance career has been completely quiet since she had the babies, and her plan for a gardening book of her own has a hazy,
half-formed aspect. Besides, it would bring in very little money, certainly at first. She’s had a bit of success with gardening books and journalism, and that means she has some royalties every six months, but not enough to live on. So
when Francesca offered them free accommodation in a beautiful part of the country, it was not something to be turned down lightly. Just a few more years, and then the children would be at school
and Olivia would be free to reenergise her own career. And by then Dan would surely have got the play he is writing out of his system. He seems convinced that it will solve all their problems,
that staging it will be straightforward and that an inevitable success will follow its first performance. It happened to a friend of a friend of his, so why shouldn’t it happen to him too?
All he has to do is write the damn thing, but it’s harder than he imagined and the going is slow.

‘Writing isn’t easy, Olivia,’ he said one hot afternoon on the
estancia
when she asked after his progress. They were lying in their bed in the villa while the twins were
out playing with their grandmother in the garden. They’d taken the opportunity to retire to their bedroom and make love: intense, rather sweaty and rapid, as it had been since the babies
had arrived. They seemed to have lost the knack of leisurely pleasure, but no doubt it would come back as the children granted them more time to themselves. ‘Creative writing is particularly
demanding. It needs time and nurturing.’

She prickled a little at the implication that her writing was easy but then, maybe it was. She could no more write a play than she could fly, but she found plenty to say about the habits of hardy annuals or the best kinds of shade-loving bedding plants. Making things up must be harder.

She said, ‘So surely living rent-free at Renniston is the perfect solution. You can carry on writing and we don’t have to worry about earning more money right away, with what we have
left over from the flat rental.’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered, frowning. ‘Is it worth all the upheaval of moving there and getting ourselves settled in a part of the world we don’t know?’

‘But it’s a great offer,’ Olivia countered. ‘I’ve looked up the primary school and it really does seem just what I’d hoped for. Outstanding, according to
Ofsted. The pressure would be off for a couple of years at least.’

‘The play won’t take me that long,’ Dan replied, his hands tucked behind his head, his elbows pointed out like a pair of bony wings on either side. She could see the feathery
fronds of hair in his stretched armpit. It made her think of a woodlouse on its back, its many legs in the air. Dan’s chest, shoulders and torso were resolutely white but the rest of him had
tanned to a light brown in the Argentinian sun. He looked healthier than he had in London, where he’d had the pallor of the office worker, and his eyes shone bluer against his darker skin.
She turned over to him and ran a finger lightly over his chest and circled one of his nipples.

‘Of course it won’t. But I like the idea of being able to stay if we need to. I’m sure I can find some garden design work. I’ve already researched some local companies,
and I liked the look of one in particular. They might be interested in taking me on for a bit. And the house . . . well, it looks magnificent, don’t you think? What an amazing place for the children to spend some of their childhood.’

Dan frowned up at the ceiling, where a metal fan hung above them, whirring and slowly spinning, keeping cool currents moving through the room so that they didn’t stifle. ‘Yes. But—’

‘I know what you’re going to say. It’s my only real worry,’ Olivia said, turning back to lie on her pillows. She pushed her hair away where damp tendrils were sticking to
her cheek. ‘The place might be dangerous for little ones. And if there’s any building work going on . . . well, I can’t do it if it’s a building site. Cheska seemed to imply
we’d be quite separate from any of the work, though. So I think we should go and see it.’

Dan laughed shortly. ‘All the way to England just to look at it? I don’t think so.’