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“It’s harsh, I know,” Lou went on, “but it’s kind of preferable to that awful thing the English do of keeping a poker face and making you guess what you’ve done wrong. Anyway, the flipside is, if you can turn it around, you’ve got friends for life.”
“And how do you turn it around?”
“Oh you work hard and you make yourself useful… and you tell your kids to throw stones back.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Stopped overnight,” Lou replied, straight-faced. “And, thank God, because that first winter was hard. You can’t be self-sufficient in a community like that. It’s all tit for tat. You harvest my olives, I’ll fix your generator, sort of thing.”
“How fantastic,” said Sara.
“It is. There really is no better system when it’s working well. Everyone rallies round; there’s a sense of community. You share your surplus produce so there’s no waste.”
“Like a commune.” Sara stared wistfully out of the window at the serried garden fences of their own little enclave, dividing neighbour from neighbour as far as the eye could see. When she looked back, she was astonished to see Lou pressing her middle finger to the bridge of her nose, apparently holding back tears.
“Lou?” she said.
“Sorry.” Lou took a deep, shuddery breath. “I don’t know where that came from.”
Sara maintained a tactful silence, embarrassed, yet also thrilled that Lou seemed about to confide in her.
“We had four-and-a-half blissful years in Riofrio. We made some very, very good friends. People I’d trust with my life.”
“I’m sensing a but…?”
Lou took a gulp of wine and composed herself.
“It was a misunderstanding really. There isn’t a court in Spain that would have ruled in their favour…”
“A court?”
“Oh, it’s nothing terrible, honestly. As I say, a misunderstanding. If we’d had any money, we could have proved it…”
Sara frowned and sat forward in her seat, warming to her role as confidante.
Their neighbours, Dolores and Miguel Fernandez, had a smallholding further down the hill, Lou told her, a few sheep and an orchard. Miguel helped Gavin do the wiring for his studio and she and Gav pitched in at harvest time. So far, so neighbourly, but then the Fernandez decided to farm trout. A bit greedy really, according to Lou, because they were doing just fine as they were. But there were grants available and it looked good on paper.
“Typical Spain – to hell with the integrity of the landscape, bugger the ecosystem – if it ekes out a few more euros, go for it. The irony was,” she hugged herself and looked at the ceiling, blinking back tears, “Gavin helped them build the tanks. Worked flat out, even though he was meant to be getting his exhibition together for the Venice Biennale.”
It had only been up and running a week when they realised it was a disaster, she recalled. The constant whirring of the pumps gave Lou migraines, they didn’t know what to do with all the free trout (God knows they weren’t going to eat it, not the way those pellets smelled). The tanks were an eyesore. But they kept quiet because the Fernandez were their friends and they could see the bigger picture.
“And then one weekend,” she spread her hands wide, like a child, “all the fish died and they said it was Gavin’s fault.”
Sara shook her head.
“I know. Crazy,” said Lou, “but they claimed it was the residue from his studio.”
“Residue?”
“Gypsum, from the plaster of Paris. Of course you don’t know his work, do you?”
Sara shrugged apologetically.
“Well he’s been using it for years. Anyway, he’d hosed down his studio floor, and they claimed it ran down the mountain and contaminated their tanks.”
“Oh dear.”
“Never mind that the farm next door’s using God knows what on their rape. Never mind that Miguel’s an alcoholic and he could have just put the wrong chemicals in. We’re the newcomers, so it’s our fault, right?”
Her hand flexed convulsively on the oilcloth and a single tear brimmed over and tumbled down her cheek. Sara’s throat tightened in sympathy. She reached out to cover Lou’s hand with her own, but somehow suffered a failure of nerve and went instead for the tissue box.
“Thanks,” said Lou, honking noisily into the paper handkerchief. She met Sara’s eye with a brave smile.
“Well,” said Sara briskly, after a brief silence, “I for one am grateful to them.”
Lou looked puzzled.
“To the Fernandezes, or whatever they’re called. If it wasn’t for them and their stupid trout, you wouldn’t be here now, would you? We wouldn’t have you as neighbours.”
“Oh!” Lou gave her a tremulous smile.
The doorbell rang and Sara glanced at the clock.
“Shit!” she said. “Guitar.”
And with that, the spell was broken. Lou was a neighbour she hardly knew, the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it and Caleb hadn’t practised Cavatina all week. She flew down the hall and let the guitar teacher in, noticing, even as she burbled apologetically to him about the chaos, the flicker of interest he betrayed as he passed Lou in the hall. It was the kind of glance Sara herself never elicited – not sexual exactly, though there was that in it – more a look of recognition. You are of my kind, the look said, or of the kind to which I aspire. And whilst appearing oblivious, Lou nevertheless managed both to acknowledge his need and to remain aloof from it. Sara felt a pang of envy.
Standing on the doorstep, Lou and Sara both started speaking at once.
“I can’t tell you how…”
“I’m really glad you…”
They laughed and Sara deferred to Lou, who shrugged as if suddenly lost for words.
“Thank you,” she said, finally, and they both laughed with relief. Lou had got as far as the garden gate, when she turned back, as if a rash new idea had occurred to her.
“We’re having a few people over on Saturday, a little get-together to christen the house. Why don’t you come?”
2 (#ulink_5fc58562-a828-54c3-8dff-28f2c6d7c418)
By the time they had settled the boys and let themselves out of the front door, the street lamps were turning from nascent pink to sodium orange. The Victorian semis loomed tall and narrow in the navy dusk, like nuns having a conflab. The dead hand of gentrification had not yet touched all of them. For every topiaried bay tree, there was a satellite dish, for every tasteful leaded light, a PVC porch. Gav and Lou’s place had yet to declare itself. The skip at the front provided some intriguing clues – an ugly fifties fire surround, a naked shop mannequin – but it was too soon to say for sure what kind of people these were.
“Bloody hell!” hissed Neil, as they stood on Gav and Lou’s doorstep, waiting in vain for someone to hear the bell. “What did you want to bring the Moët for?”
Sara shrugged.
“It’s all we had left.”
She had made a point of opening the last bottle of Sainsbury’s Soave, earlier in the evening, partly to settle her nerves, but mainly to make sure the Moët was all they had left. She knew, if she were honest, that Neil had tucked it at the back of the fridge on the off-chance he might soon have something to celebrate. He was plotting a boardroom coup in the housing association where he worked and he was pretty sure, he had told her over dinner the other night, his grey eyes animated, his jaw churning salad like a cement mixer, that he now had enough people onside to oust the finance director. This would remove the final obstacle between him and the CEO’s job he had long coveted. Sara had looked at him and seen little trace of the humble, idealistic undergraduate with whom she had fallen in love.
If she had told him, back then, that he would be buying Moët to toast his ascendancy to a boardroom, any boardroom, he would have called her a fantasist. Yet here he was, looking every inch the smart casual capitalist in his Paul Smith shirt and Camper shoes. He still had a plausible shtick on why his running Haven Housing would be the tenant-friendly outcome, but it seemed to her that the tenant-friendly outcome was inseparable these days from the Neil-friendly outcome. He had started at Haven wearing jeans and button-down shirts. Gradually, the jeans had gone and a tie had crept in (“tenants like a tie”, he’d said). A brief spell of chinos and sleeveless pullovers had given way to the era of the suit. Suits went down better with “stakeholders”, whoever they were. Scratch the suave surface, though, and you’d find the idealist beneath, still fighting the good fight, still standing up for the underdog. He wasn’t a cynic, her Neil.
She pushed the door, tentatively, and it opened.
“I think we’re just meant to go in,” she said.
It was still unclear whether the event was a soirée or a rave. All day she had kept her ear cocked and her eyes open, but there hadn’t been much to go on. The household had seemed to slumber until well after two, which, for a young family on a summer’s weekend, struck Sara as a significant feat. Then, when most people were beginning to wind down, they suddenly sprang into action. From her vantage point at the kitchen window, she could see Gavin hacking branches off the lime trees at the bottom of the garden with what must have been a blunt saw, because his torso was running with sweat. The temperature had to be in the mid-twenties, and, as it had seemed the whole of that summer, the humidity was high. Their fence was too tall and their shrubs too unkempt to afford anything but the odd glimpse of the kids, but she could hear their excited shrieks and yelps. Music blasted through the open windows – something kitschy and seventies, Supertramp maybe – but, occasionally, Lou would kill the volume and Sara would hear her call out, her tone plaintive, yet with a stridency that somehow managed to penetrate the rasp of the saw.
“Ga-a-av?”
When he had stopped and turned towards her, face glowing, chest heaving, she would ask him some trivial question or other, more to prove her entitlement to do so, it seemed to Sara, than because she really needed to know the answer.
By six o’clock, he was still perched in a cleft of the third and final tree, sawing at a stubborn shred of bark tethering the last substantial branch to its trunk. If it were Neil up the tree, and the two of them were having a “get-together” that night, however impromptu, she knew she’d have been going spare.
She had dithered about a babysitter, and in the end done nothing, because she didn’t really know what the deal was. She’d decided she’d just keep an eye out and when enough guests had arrived, they’d wander round. There was the problem of what to wear, but seeing the way their hosts had gone about things, she reckoned it had to be pretty relaxed. By eight, she was showered, and semi-got-up in her For All Mankind jeans, a silk camisole and strappy sandals, which she’d changed for Birkenstocks, as soon as she saw the look on Neil’s face. She could, she knew, have stared at his Coldplay T-shirt until it burst into flames and he still wouldn’t have got the hint, so in the end she’d just told him as nicely as she could to change it.
The hall was deserted. Tea lights on every step of the uncarpeted stairs threw juddering shadows up the wall.
“Place could go up like a tinderbox,” muttered Neil. The throb of seriously amplified music came from deep within the house. Closer at hand, the hum of party chatter made Sara’s stomach clench with anxiety. She poked her head around the door of the living room; a bearded man in a rumpled linen suit was sitting on a Scandinavian-style leather sofa rolling a joint on an album cover as if it were 1979. What she could see of the room was an odd combination of mess and emptiness. The walls were hung haphazardly with artworks. One alcove was crammed from floor to ceiling with books. In the other, a hydra-headed chrome floorlamp loomed behind a beaten-up Eames chair. Fairy lights were strung through the antlers of a stuffed stag’s head above the fireplace. There was a smell of curry and pot and a faint mustiness, which suggested that the age-old damp problem that had long beset the house had not necessarily been cured. In another corner of the room, she now picked out, amid the gloom, a man in a pork-pie hat and a woman in Rockabilly get-up. They were clutching cans of Red Stripe. She smiled at them tentatively and ducked back out again. She shrugged at Neil.
“Kitchen?”
They blinked as they entered the strip-lit room. It was as busy and vibrant as the living room had been underpopulated and dull. The decibel level alone was intimidating, and for a moment, confronted by what seemed to be an impenetrable wall of bonhomie, Sara’s instinct was to run. These people were not locals – they looked as though they had been flown in from an avant-garde New York gallery. Here were septuagenarians in skinny jeans and twenty-somethings in tweed. Here were Baader Meinhof intellectuals, kohl-eyed It girls, preening dandies and scrofulous punks. Sara felt instinctively for her husband’s hand and steered a course through the mêlée, until she reached safe harbour beside the kitchen table. Neil went to put the Moët down, but Sara gave him a warning look.
There had been no attempt to prettify the kitchen, or create atmosphere. It was just a watering hole and looked, as far as Sara could remember, exactly as it had when the house had gone up for auction. Perhaps Lou and Gavin had spent all their money converting the basement, or perhaps, seventies retro being back in fashion, they considered its brown floral tiles and yellow melamine cupboards a stylistic coup.
“Ooh, champagne! Crack it open then.”
“Carol, hi!” Sara was a little surprised, herself, at the grudging tone of her own greeting. Carol was wearing one of her Boden wrap dresses, accessorised with earrings, tights and nail varnish in the precise jade green of every third zigzag. Her short ginger hair had been freshly coiffed. She looked like a home-economics teacher who had wandered into a seedy jazz club and – unworthy impulse – Sara did not want to be seen with her. Not that Carol wasn’t a great girl, she was. She was stalwart and practical, clever and kind. She was as good for a heart-to-heart as she was for a cup of couscous. There had been confessions over the years and there had been tears. Carol ran a mean book group and threw a decent dinner party and if the guest lists for both tended to overlap, and the conversations repeat themselves, her hospitality was never less than generous. She was, however, no Bohemian.
Even now, as Sara reluctantly filled Carol’s glass with champagne, Carol was assessing the fixtures and fittings.
“Do you think this kitchen’s retro, or just old?”
“I don’t really know,” said Sara. She was trying to eavesdrop on a nearby conversation about rap music and misogyny, but with Carol prattling in one ear and Neil and Simon talking football in the other, it was impossible.
“I thought it’d be state of the art,” Carol went on. “Fancy having the builders in all this time and the kitchen still looking like this.”
“They’ve been making a studio, Carol.”
“Oh yes, I forgot he’s an artist.” Carol widened her eyes satirically and then returned her gaze to the sea of much-pierced humanity surrounding her.
“Do you know any of these people?” she asked. Sara shook her head. The thing was, though, that she wanted to know them, and if Carol stuck to her like glue, that wasn’t going to happen. The crowd was starting to thin a bit now, as guests topped up their drinks and wandered out to the garden. Carol leaned in to make some fresh observation.
“Hold that thought,” Sara said, laying an apologetic hand on her friend’s arm, “I’m busting for the loo.”
Walking down the steps to the garden, she could at last make sense of the intensive tree pruning that had gone on earlier. A gazebo had been erected at the far end, which had been filled with cushions and kilims. Paper lanterns winked with promise from within. You had to take your hat off to Lou and Gavin; they knew how to create a sense of occasion. She supposed it was some sort of chill-out zone and wondered what might take place there as the evening wore on. There would be more pot, certainly, but would there be other drugs? She wondered what she would do if someone offered her cocaine – turn it down, she supposed. There were the kids, for one thing and besides, she’d only do it wrong and look an idiot.
There was still no sign of the hosts, but clusters of people were milling about on the grass, drinking, smoking, weaving their heads, serpent-like, to trip-hop. Most of them seemed to know each other. This must be how it felt to be a ghost, Sara thought, as she floated from one huddle of people to the next, hovering on the periphery, smiling hopefully, yet never quite plucking up the courage to introduce herself. A few guests made eye contact, one or two smiled back and shuffled aside to accommodate her, but their conversations were too bright and smooth and fluent to allow her an entrée – it was like trying to wade into a fast-flowing stream. It was a relief, then, to bump into an acquaintance from a few streets away, who, it turned out, had done an art foundation course with Lou, but who now wanted to talk school catchment areas. After twenty minutes nodding and smiling, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and twirling the stem of her glass, Sara had had enough. She made her excuses and was threading her way back through the throng towards the house, when she met the host coming down the steps.
“Top up?” he said, tilting a bottle of wine towards her glass.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re Gavin, aren’t you?”
“Guilty as charged.”
He filled her glass and started to move off again.
“We’re neighbours, by the way,” she added, quickly.
“Ahhh,” he said, turning back and re-engaging with genuine interest, “you must be Sara.”
3 (#ulink_12b1cfdc-cd44-59ef-810d-322360fb8e77)
Gavin apologised for taking so long to be neighbourly and explained that he had been like a dog, circling round and round in his basket, except in his case, his basket was his studio and it had had to be “not so much hewn from the living rock, as dug out of the London clay.’’ He nodded in the direction of the basement, which was still cordoned off with blue tarpaulins. At close quarters, Sara was relieved to discover he was only moderately handsome. One eyelid drooped fractionally, making him look faintly disreputable, and an otherwise fine profile was marred by a slight overbite. He spoke with a Lancastrian burr, which made everything he said sound vaguely sardonic, and prompted a certain archness in Sara’s response. She didn’t believe, she told him now, that the basement-conversion was a studio at all, but one of those underground gymnasia, beloved of Chelsea oligarchs. He said he’d happily prove her wrong, but not tonight, because he didn’t want just anyone – jerking his head towards his increasingly unruly party guests – traipsing through. At this whisper of a compliment, Sara felt a flutter of excitement in her belly.
“So what is it you do, Sara?” he asked after a pause.
“I’m a copywriter,” she said.
“Great! Advertising. Must be fun.”
“Oh it’s not Saatchi’s or anything,” she said quickly, “it’s really boring. Just in-house stuff for companies mainly. And consumer-y bits…”
He nodded, and turned his head, scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, she assumed.
“… But I write,” she added quickly, “just for myself, you know.”
“Cool,” he said, turning back to her. “What sort of thing?”
“Short stories, the odd poem. I’ve started a novel, but it’s run out of steam.”
“You should talk to Lou.”
“Oh?” said Sara warily.
“Yeah,” he replied, nodding, “she’ll give you a few pointers – depending on the kind of thing it is, of course.”
“Lou’s a writer?”
“A writer-director.”
“What, films?”
“Yeah. She’s working on a short at the moment. Terrific concept.”
“She never said…”
