A Simple Life

Obediently they followed him through a hallway and into the centre of the house. The huge room soared up through complicated levels, its cool space enclosed by squares and rectangles of wood and rough stone and shimmering glass. Beyond the glass was blue air and the reckless colours of the trees.

‘Cool,’ Jack murmured.

‘This is an amazing house, Ed.’

‘You like it? I designed it myself, with a bit of help from an architect.’

Matthew looked around him, his hands in the pockets of his shabby khakis.

‘Is there no end to your talents?’

Ed turned on him, grinning and sharp-eyed.

‘Beginning, doesn’t the line go?’

Matthew was easy in the company of other men, particularly men as successful in their fields as he was in his own. He laughed now, genuinely amused by Ed’s disarming self-satisfaction.

‘That’s not what I said or what I intended. Hi, Sandra.’

Sandra appeared on one of the balconies projecting over their heads, and then fluttered down some steps to join them. Her hair was knotted close to her small skull and she was wearing a loose cream tunic that revealed the knobs of bone at the base of her throat. She kissed Matt and Dinah in turn, resting her hand for an instant on Dinah’s wrist.

Dinah and she had had lunch together the week before.

At Sandra’s suggestion they had met in one of the potted-fern-and-scrubbed-boards café bars that were popular in Franklin. They sat at a window table looking across the green towards the campus. Students streamed past in pairs and groups, on their way between morning and afternoon classes.

‘Would you like to be that age again?’ Sandra asked.

Dinah made the conventional response without thinking about it. ‘Only if I could be forewarned and forearmed against making all the same mistakes.’

‘Did you make so many?’

Dinah could not look at her. She felt an instant of fear that this woman was a threat. She might come too close and Dinah would not be able to fend her off in the way that she could keep Nancy and Dee Kerrigan and the others at bay. She heard herself laugh, a false high-pitched denial.

‘No, not really. What about you?’

Sandra turned her wineglass full circle on its stem. A spilled drop broke into shining globules on the polished table top. Dinah’s deflection of her question had been too sharp. She hesitated, on the brink of offering some truth of her own, and now thinking better of it. They looked at each other, suspecting an opportunity missed before they had even become properly aware of it.

Sandra said, ‘Mistakes? I couldn’t lay claim to too many, could I? Ed’s a good man, as well as a very successful one. I have everything I want. A husband, a daughter I adore …’

Family, wealth, travel, ease, luxury, Dinah silently supplied for her. Only Sandra did not have quite everything she wanted, evidently. Not her own freedom, perhaps, from her husband’s dictates. Dinah wanted to ask her why they had only one child. But she could not. The ripples that the question would make might stream back and rock her own precarious equanimity.

‘How is your daughter?’ she tried instead. Sandra had said the child was difficult. Fourteen …

Sandra drank her wine. ‘Milly’s quite unusual. Very strong-willed, very certain in her opinions. And we’ve probably spoiled her. But I expect most of the difficulty is just to do with her age, isn’t it?’

‘I should think so,’ Dinah murmured. ‘I daren’t think what will happen when Jack gets there.’

That was all. The spectre of intimacy had shivered between Dinah and Sandra and they found that they had somehow brushed it away. After that they talked about missing England, and all the places Ed and Sandra had travelled to when Camilla was smaller and more tractable.

Now, a week later, they were all in the Parkeses’ gleaming glass castle in the woods. Ed was herding them towards the drinks.

‘C’mon, honey, what’s going on? Are Bloody Marys okay for everyone? I don’t believe in these orange juice brunches. Take this glass and let’s fill it up for you. Listen you guys, the pool table is through there. You don’t have to hang out with us if you can find something better to do.’

Jack and Merlin sidled away, not needing to be told twice. Dinah and Matt were caught up and washed along like twigs in the full flood of Ed’s hospitality.

‘Now, you want the house tour? Outside or in first? Perhaps we’ll do outside after we’ve eaten, maybe we can get some kind of a walk. The property stretches a good distance, way down into the dip out of sight of here. I want to take you in my study, Matt, show you the setup I’ve got in there, maybe you can tell me something about computer modelling, I’ve got this idea I want to kick around? Dinah, what do you think of this bathroom?’

He led them through his house, flicking taps on and off and clicking remote controls of lights and blinds and screens into choreographed display. There were twin studies, a vast creamy bedroom with twin bathrooms, an exercise suite with every conceivable machine and a shipsized deck with a spa tub overlooking the descending panorama of trees. There were pictures everywhere, covering the limited wall space, excellent modern pictures. Ed had a good eye.

Matt and Dinah tried not to look at each other because they feared a descent into giggles. They suddenly felt like children, awed and irreverent in the face of such purchasing power. The house was beautiful, but in its sheer opulence and abundance it was also comical.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Ed himself. The energy of him was invigorating.

‘Quite a place,’ Matt murmured. Ed seemed to expect no more.

One corridor on the upper north side of the building was left unexplored. Dinah glimpsed at the end of it a door, firmly closed, and guessed that this must be Camilla’s territory. Because every other nook and cranny had been so freely displayed and demonstrated, she was left with the sense of something brooding, almost sinister, contained within the open geometry of the house.

Ed led them away from the corridor without comment and back to the big room. Sandra was setting out food and cutlery on a huge refectory table in a slate-floored annexe.

‘How are the drinks? Here, Matt, let me freshen you. What hardware have you got in that department of yours? Are we ready to eat, baby, those boys will be starving.’

‘Yes, everything’s ready,’ Sandra said.

The boys came in from the pool table at the first summons.

‘Where is she?’ Ed growled. The creases in his face were no longer genial.

Sandra picked up an intercom and pressed a button.

‘Milly? Brunch is ready, darling.’ She replaced the handset. ‘She’s coming,’ she said.

The six of them were standing behind their chairs, as if waiting to say grace.

A door slammed shut on another level. A moment later a girl appeared framed in one of the upper windows and stared down at them. There was a silence, and then an awkward clatter as they all pulled back their chairs and hurried to sit down. The girl was coming slowly down the stairs.

There was nothing pink or wobbly or plump about Camilla Parkes. Nothing so familiar or explicable.

She was thin and dark and her small pointy face was dead white. Her lustreless hair was matted and spiked and knotted into dreadlocks that hung around her cheeks and down her thin neck. Her eyes were painted with thick black lines and her mouth was outlined in vicious crayon. Her clothes were layers of shredded knits and torn and faded black drapes, and her spindly legs were thickened by black woollen tights with holes at the knees. On her feet she wore huge Doc Marten boots with steel toecaps. Her right nostril was pierced with two small silver rings.

Camilla did not look at any of them, or at Sandra’s scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and bagels and the baskets artfully heaped with raisin breads and croissants. She went to the fridge and took out a small dish covered in clingfilm, tore off the film and screwed it into a ball and aimed it towards the sink. Then she sat down at the far end of the table and began to eat, spooning up a gluey mixture of rice and beans without lifting her eyes from the dish.

‘Camilla is a vegan,’ Sandra explained. ‘Milly, please say hello to Professor and Mrs Steward.’

She raised her head briefly. Her eyes were full of anger.

‘And this is Jack, and Merlin. Some company for you.’

Milly didn’t favour the boys with so much as a glance.

‘Where do you go to school?’ Jack asked, refusing to be intimidated into silence.

‘Milly doesn’t go to school right now. A teaching assistant from UMass comes here to tutor her.’

Milly put down her spoon. There were dirty silver rings on every finger of both hands and her nails were painted black. She turned her burning stare on her mother.

‘Why do you answer everything for me, as though I’m a moron? Why do you think I can’t speak for myself?’

Her voice was pure glottal North London.

‘If you can speak, why don’t you?’ It was Ed who asked, with surprising forbearance. There was a flush of colour mottling Sandra’s lovely face.

Dinah had been watching Milly with terrible fascination, half-greedy and half-apprehensive. But as soon as the child opened her mouth familiarity embraced her and Dinah smiled, without thinking.

‘You make me remember London. It’s like hearing a piece of home.’

Oh, what a crappy thing to say, she reproached herself immediately the words were out.

But Milly only shifted her gaze in her direction.

‘Where you from?’

‘London.’

‘Yeah. London’s okay.’

‘Did you go to school there?’

‘Camden. Only I got expelled.’

Dinah and Milly looked at each other. In the child’s face, as she made her boast, Dinah read the habits of defiance and aggression, and also saw from the soft and uncontrollable pout of her lower lip that she was vulnerable, and deeply unhappy. Milly was very young, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise.

‘Tough,’ Dinah said.

But she was already becoming aware that Milly and her assumed disguise – fourteen-year-old part-punk, part-Goth and part-Dickens street-urchin – called on some hungry instinct ineffectively buried within herself. She was drawn to the child, and she also felt a cold stirring of fear brought on by the intensity of these feelings.

Merlin put down his bagel. ‘Ben Burnham was expelled from my old school. He used the phone in the secretary’s office to call the Fire Brigade. He told them the science room was on fire, and two fire engines came with ladders and hoses and about twenty firemen.’

The adults laughed and Jack sighed, but Milly gave no indication that she had heard the story. She ate the last grains of rice from her bowl and then left the table as silently as she had come. The tails of her wraps flapped behind her as she mounted the stairs and disappeared the way she had come.

‘Do you see what I mean?’ Sandra murmured to Dinah. ‘Somehow it’s easier just to let her …’

Ed shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up in a rakish crest on top of his big round head.

‘They’re parents as well, honey. You wait, you guys,’ he warned Dinah and Matthew. ‘They get past twelve years old and all bloody hell breaks out.’

‘I’m nearly eleven …’ Jack said meaningfully.

The adults laughed again and the boys were given permission to go back to the pool table. Coffee was poured and the baskets of croissants passed round, and the mellow Sunday morning talk was resumed. From time to time Dinah found herself glancing upwards to the frame where Milly had first appeared in the half-apprehensive hope that she might materialise again. But she did not, and there was no sound or movement to indicate that she was even in the house.

After the meal Ed proposed a walk. He wanted to show the Stewards the full extent of the property, and some thinning and replanting that was under way in his woodland. Ed liked to be physically involved in the work. He emerged for the expedition in a lumberjack’s coat and boots with a bow-saw slung over one shoulder. Sandra had already announced that she was not much of a walker, and would stay behind to have a nap.

Ed was leading the way through his woodland garden when an outer door slammed in the house. They all turned. Milly had put on a man’s long tweed coat over her ragbag clothes. The afternoon was mild but she was wearing gloves with the fingers roughly sawn off and a shapeless knitted hat. The Dickens urchin effect was complete.

‘Great,’ Ed called to her. ‘Glad you’re coming. Which way shall we go, Deer Path or along the ski trail?’

‘I dunno,’ Milly shrugged. The route was of no interest to her. She stood pointedly waiting until her father and Matt and the boys moved on again. She was not quite looking at Dinah, but almost. Dinah resisted the urge to turn and look at whatever it might be in the air six inches to the left of her own head. Ed’s voice faded in the distance. He was explaining something about cross-country skiing. The boys were running, chasing each other, their feet in the years’ depths of dead leaves sounding like waves breaking.

‘Shall we follow them?’ Dinah asked.

‘We’ll have to, I suppose. I don’t know the way, otherwise.’

The lack of familiarity with her own home ground was deliberate, Dinah thought. Milly didn’t want to know this place.

They began to walk, not quite side by side, along a wide path through the trees. The air was still scented with resin and leaf-mould. Dinah imagined how if she were to be lifted up over the treetops she would see the undulating woodland stretching in every direction. She had seen a pattern of leaves, a carpet in chemical approximations of these colours, somewhere, a long way …

No.

She asked Milly, not waiting to consider her words, ‘You live in London for part of the year, is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

I won’t make her talk if she doesn’t want to. She may just want to walk, not necessarily with me. I’m glad she came out. The thoughts skittered through Dinah’s head. She wanted Milly to continue beside her, not to frighten her off.

They continued in silence for perhaps a hundred yards. There were birds singing, and silverbarked birches with their leaves turning butter-gold.

‘It’s very beautiful here,’ Dinah said quietly.

‘I hate it.’ Milly’s voice was so low that it was barely audible.

Dinah waited, walking with her head bent and her eyes fixed on the path in order not to intrude on Milly.

‘I hate it,’ Milly repeated more loudly after a minute.

‘Why?’ Dinah ventured.

Milly stopped walking. She half turned and made an eloquent gesture of spreading her hands an inch, opening her hunched shoulders, twisting her head against the backdrop of gilded trees and china-blue sky. And at once Dinah had a sense of her isolation in this calendar landscape, sullen and strange, adrift from the chains of healthy high-school kids she had seen dismounting from the dog-nosed yellow State of Massachusetts school buses. Milly fierce and freaky. Lost and longing to be found. And yet, she was not so different from hundreds of kids in London. She was only so different here.

To Dinah’s surprise, Milly suddenly smiled.

Her teeth were white and even, startlingly so as they appeared between the dark-painted lips. Her eyes slanted upwards, giving her a completely new expression of sceptical merriment.

‘See?’ Milly asked.

Dinah nodded. ‘Yes. I suppose I do.’

It came to her that she recalled the familiarity of London and home for Milly, just as Milly did for her. They had recognised the exile in one another. They walked on, the distance between them perceptibly lessened.

‘It will start snowing soon,’ Milly remarked.

‘Not that soon. Another two, maybe three months.’

‘Then everyone will put on their ski-suits and start poling around the trails like these clockwork people, arms up and down, two, three, legs going like stupid machines.’

Milly’s spidery black limbs jerked in cruel imitation and Dinah laughed at the image she conjured up.

‘Cross-country skiing is harmless enough,’ she protested mildly.

‘It isn’t just that, is it? It’s the woods and the empty fresh air and the kindness and health and shitty peace and beauty of it all.’

‘What would you like instead?’

Milly’s second shrug was as expressive as the first.

‘Decay,’ she murmured gothically.

Merlin appeared ahead. He scuffled back towards them through the leaves and then stood in the middle of the path.

‘What are you talking about?’ He looked from his mother to Milly with a hint of jealous accusation. His round face was shadowed. Milly ignored him, simply waiting for Dinah to deal with the interruption so they could resume their conversation. She was entirely focused on what interested her, and what was of no interest did not exist. Dinah reflected on this as she dealt with Merlin, and guiltily encouraged him to run on again to look for the men. She wanted to prolong this talk.

As soon as he was out of earshot Milly greedily reclaimed her attention. ‘Why don’t you like it here?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, you don’t, do you?’

Dinah sighed. ‘I miss … threads, connections. Nothing very specific.’ She could not explain, particularly she could not think of explaining to this child. Associations began to pile up, like nerve impulses behind the blocked synapses of denial.

‘Just plain homesickness,’ she offered lamely.

Milly walked with her hands in the pockets of her long coat. Her bottom lip stuck out; her expression was a young-old hybrid of disappointment and dismissiveness. Dinah saw that she had given an inadequate answer. ‘So what is it you miss?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Well, everything. People, you know. Mates. That you can just be with and, like, not have to pretend to be someone else for half the time just because they think you ought to be different from the way you are. I’ve got friends in London, in Camden, who know me all the way through. Better than Sandra and Ed ever will. I’d rather be there with them than stuck here.’

The tone of her voice was withering.

‘School friends?’ Dinah asked. She felt sorry for Milly, cut off in the glass castle from children of her own age, with only her UMass tutor for company.

‘God. I told you. I got expelled from Camden bloody School.’

‘Why?’

Milly sniffed in exasperation. ‘The usual shit. Smoking. Language. Defacing school property. Bunking off. Violence to a member of staff. Actually it was only a ruler I smacked her with. Should have been an iron bar, really. Only I didn’t have one in my pencil case.’ There was a distinct note of pride in this recitation.

Dinah nodded. ‘I see,’ she said mildly.

Milly’s voice softened. ‘No, my mates are nothing to do with school. I met them down the Lock. I used to hang round there in the day, not being at school. They just do stuff, like, their own way. They’ve got a place they live in, near Chalk Farm. Caz, that’s one of them, he’s fixed it well up so there’s water and heating and everything, not like some stinking squat. I’ll move in there, soon as I’m old enough.’

‘You aren’t old enough yet.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. All I’m old enough for is either being towed round while Ed researches his crap books, or being left behind with some pain in the arse housekeeper. It’s no wonder nothing worked out in school, really. I was always being taken out to go somewhere else, that they wanted.’

Dinah contemplated this opposing perspective on Milly’s life.

‘I can see that would be difficult.’

Milly shrugged. She stuck her hands deeper in her pockets and walked on, looking straight ahead, as if she had already given too much away.

Dinah tried one or two more conversational openings, but Milly did not respond. They walked the rest of the way in silence, but it was a companionable silence.

When they came back to the house, having made a wide arc through the unrelenting woodland, Ed was already waving at them from the deck, the bow-saw hanging over the other arm. Sandra was watching too. Her eyes flicked from Milly to Dinah. Milly veered away from Dinah.

‘See you,’ she muttered.

It might have been a threat or a promise. Her face was closed up again, admitting nothing. She went up the steps, looking at no one, and vanished into the house.

The Stewards were ready to leave. The boys were already inside the Jeep and the adults gathered in a loose group beside it to exchange their goodbyes. Sandra stood beside Dinah.

‘Thank you for taking such trouble with Milly.’ The thanks sounded oddly formal.

‘I liked her,’ Dinah said. ‘Did you?’

It was less than the truth, but even the mild assurance seemed to displease Sandra.

‘She doesn’t often go out for a walk. You were honoured,’ Sandra told her.

‘Great, great, we must do that,’ Ed was saying to Matthew. ‘I’ll call you and we’ll fix it.’ He crossed in front of the Toyota to Dinah’s side, taking something out of his wallet as he did so. Dinah watched him, noting the set of his head on his neck and the forward thrust of his chest and shoulders. He was a bully, she thought. An amiable one, but still a bully. She wondered how the Parkeses lived together when there was no call for the polish of hospitality.

Ed was talking to her. ‘Di, you said you were thinking of looking for a job of some kind? Sounded like a good idea …’

They had discussed it, only very briefly, over lunch.

‘Well …’

Ed had taken out a card. He passed it to her now through the open window. ‘This woman’s a good friend of mine, an employment consultant. Now, don’t look like that. She’s the best, and I’ll call her about you. Go see her, won’t you? Can’t do any harm.’

‘No, it can’t do any harm,’ Dinah agreed. It was not easy to deny Ed.

The car rolled down the driveway leaving the Parkeses with their arms around each other, waving, against the backdrop of their woodland castle. Dinah wondered if Milly was mutely watching from some window slit.

‘I rather like Ed,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s something about all that energy.’

Matt liked him because he reflected himself, Dinah thought. Matt was full of his own kind of energy, and he was capable of the same self-absorption.

‘Odd child, wasn’t she? Why do they let her behave like that? It’s almost as if they’re afraid of her, of what she might say or do.’

‘Camilla-and-custard,’ one of the boys murmured from the back of the car.

‘Or the wild witch of the woods.’

Dinah thought of the streetwise shell and the vulnerable core she had glimpsed within the carapace of clothes and cosmetics, and suppressed her impulse to jump to Milly’s defence.

‘What did you talk to her about on the walk?’ ‘Home,’ Dinah said.

Matt sighed. He would not pursue the conversation, and a space of silence admonished them both. Dinah stared ahead at the trees and the dipping road and then the gas stations and parking lots as they drove back into Franklin.

A little later, when the boys were back in school and her days were no longer superficially occupied with their needs and demands, Dinah crossed town in the Jeep on her way to an appointment with Ed’s employment consultant. Dinah had concluded that it could not do any harm to see her, as Ed had pointed out at the beginning, and the woman had sounded pleasant and businesslike on the telephone. Dinah’s résumé and some examples of her work were in the unfamiliar briefcase on the passenger seat beside her.

The town lay quiet under a pallid, sunless sky. The trees that lined Main Street brandished their fall colours, but less noticeably against the backdrop of dignified clapboard houses and the rosy brick-built façades across the green. The windows of some of the tackier shops were already displaying Hallowe’en masks and costumes. There was little traffic in the wide streets and she arrived too early for her appointment. She parked the Jeep and sat waiting, thinking.