The Lie of the Land Page 29

  To be a good mother is a goal that many women now pursue as in other times they pursued the ideal of being a good wife or a virtuous woman, but sheep manage it. All the HVs laughed at the magazine interviews with Di Tore in which she extolled the way she was bringing up Tiger and Dexter in their country idyll, when it’s common knowledge they spend most of the time in front of the TV eating crisps, just like other kids given half the chance. Of course, most mums don’t look as good as Di Tore, but it was amusing, especially when you knew that the organic veg garden that always featured in magazine photographs had been planted by professional gardeners the week before. Nor are most mums as confident, either.

  ‘Just trust your instincts,’ Sally keeps telling her charges; but what if your instincts urge you to pick up a child that won’t stop crying and smash its skull against the nearest wall?

  Janet’s Dawn, for instance: what has happened to her? She’d been such a bright girl, singing away in the choir like a skylark, real talent there, and always getting top marks in school.

  ‘That one, she’ll go to university if she keeps on, you mark my words,’ Tess would say. She’d always had an interest in her, even though Dawn’s mum had given her the brush-off.

  ‘We prefer to keep ourselves to ourselves, thank you,’ she’d actually said. As if her sister was some kind of busybody. Tess was that upset when she heard Dawn had dropped out of secondary school, she’d gone round to talk to her, hoping that (as Dawn’s former head teacher) she’d be listened to.

  ‘It was one of the oddest visits I’ve made,’ she told Sally. ‘Treated me as if I were something the cat brought in – and she has a stuffed cat on the sofa.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t just sleeping?’

  ‘No. I touched it. Gave me the creeps.’

  ‘And Dawn wouldn’t go back?’

  ‘No. Imagine, the waste. Janet told me it was her daughter’s decision. Not that I could get to see her. She’s working night shifts at Humbles and her mum picks her up and drops her off.’

  Oh, Sally thought, wouldn’t I like to get hold of politicians who think that the Maintenance Allowance is a waste! But there must have been some encouragement on Janet’s side, because Dawn had been one of the ones to have piano lessons with poor Oliver Randall. Sally had seen her turning off down the lane to Home Farm of an afternoon. Such a pity …

  Eventually, Sally falls into sleep. When she wakes, her concern remains. She’s reminded of it again when, at the end of a long day at the clinic, she encounters Janet’s car on the road back from town. It narrows at several points so that one driver has to give way to another, something everyone has to do a dozen times a day if you use any lane. Most people smile or nod, but Janet never does, and her daughter stares straight ahead. She must be driving her in to her shift at the factory.

  I wonder … Sally thinks.

  When she stops her car a little way from the entrance to the gatehouse to Shipcott Manor, she isn’t thinking consciously of what she’s doing. A quick stretch of her legs with Baggage. How pretty it looks, with all the ox-eye daisies still frothing in the banks. It’s warm, and she can feel herself sweating slightly … I could pop in on Di Tore, she tells herself. Make up some excuse.

  She approaches the gates, lifting her hand to press the bell, then stops. Some creature is wailing in the gatehouse, a thin, high-pitched sound that makes the blood jump in her heart. It’s a sound she has heard before, and the last she’d have expected: the cry of a baby, in pain or distress, calling for help.

  28

  Quentin Cultivates His Garden

  Quentin has lurked around Trelorn, trying to see if he can catch Lottie at it with Beardy again, but to no avail. Obviously, they are keeping their affair secret, because it might cause a scandal. But even without the kiss he had witnessed, he’d know something was up. She smiles and laughs again, and wears red lipstick. Lottie never puts on much make-up, but she’s one of those strong-featured women whose looks become striking as soon as she bothers.

  How cruel I was, and stupid, he thinks; but mostly, he is consumed with hatred for Martin. To think of that bearded oaf with his wife – those fat fingers, the silly laugh – how can she stand him?

  That racking, wrenching, twisting coil of agony and anger, the needle-like teeth of poisonous mortification, the sensation of being in the grip of a gigantic, malevolent snake whose heads cannot be cut off … this, presumably, is what Lottie too has felt. No wonder his wife had shrieked and sobbed. The only way to be rid of it is to stop caring, but how to cut her out of his heart? Being forced to live together again has also forced him to feel. Only it’s too late. She hates him, and now the sale of their home is going through there will be no reason to stay together. He’ll find some two-bedroomed flat in Zone 3 or further, one of those areas that the Evening Standard keeps telling him are ‘up and coming’, and that will be the end of everything because he’ll be alone.

  Lottie’s remark has come back to haunt him:

  We would at least have had each other.

  He watches his mother caring for Hugh. She is astonishingly patient and gentle, though his father takes it as his due that she does everything from cutting his toenails to wiping the shit from his arse.

  ‘I sometimes wonder whether she’s doing it to make him feel guilty.’

  ‘She loves him,’ Anne said.

  ‘He wasn’t a kind man, why should he value kindness?’ Quentin asked.

  ‘I think we all value kindness, by the end.’

  During the long hours when his mother rests and his father drifts in and out of consciousness, Quentin talks to Anne more than he has to anyone for several years. There are other nurses on the Marie Curie rota, but she’s the one they see most often, walking up the path just when things are unbearable. Lean, bespectacled, her short blonde hair turning grey, she is the kind of woman that, normally, he would never have given a second glance at. Yet she is one of the most admirable people he has ever met.

  ‘I worry most that he’s in awful pain,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Nobody needs die in pain,’ Anne answered. ‘That’s why we’re here. Cancer gives people time to set their affairs in order, and come to terms with leaving this world.’

  ‘You think there’s another one?’

  ‘I can only say what I’ve felt,’ Anne said. ‘When people die, something leaves the room that was there before. Where it goes, that’s the question.’

  ‘Into nothing, I’ve always thought.’

  ‘Nothing becomes nothing. It’s not the way the universe works.’

  Quentin is suspicious of this. He has always, as a rational person, loathed religion. It isn’t just priests putting on a special voice to talk to God in the same way some do to talk to children. Why do people feel the need to invent another world, when this one is so full of wonders? Maybe faith makes death less terrible, but it can’t be made less sad for those left behind. He thinks again of the skull he’d dug up, then reburied, and all the vigorous life teeming around it, hastening its decay. Why is the mutilation, the desecration of a dead person’s body so horrifying when the dead can no longer suffer? The instinct to treat another being’s mortal remains with respect and tenderness is so deep that it extends to elephants and dogs. It’s the only truth, yet it’s the one we most like to avoid accepting.

  Who, though, can live without delusion? Getting Hugh to accept that he is terminally ill has been the biggest battle. He has such a hunger for life that, despite feeling more and more tired, he demands to be told that he is getting better.

  ‘I just want this to be over.’

  ‘Yes, we all do,’ said Quentin.

  ‘I can’t read, I can’t eat. I can’t drink.’

  Having never had real pain himself, Quentin can only imagine just how much misery Hugh must be in.

  ‘I can read to you, Fa, if you like.’

  Quentin picked up The Small House at Allington, and continued where he had left off. He had never bothered with Victorian novels before;
their moral certainties annoyed him. Yet seeing the comfort they gave Hugh, he thought there might be something to be said for Trollope, if only as another opiate. He’d have expected his father to want something more modish, but here was his father, whose own life was ebbing away, caring about wholly imaginary people of over a century ago, and finding that their joys and sorrows seemed as urgent as his own.

  ‘So lovely,’ Hugh murmured.

  His father’s face, once so distinctive, is softening and blurring, and his eyebrows and hair are almost gone. His skull looks like a walnut. It’s frightening to see this. Every evening, when Quentin returns to his daughters, he looks at their perfection in astonishment and gratitude.

  He remembers a conversation with Tore.

  ‘I did so many bad things when I was young,’ he said. ‘I was given everything I thought I wanted by the time I was twenty, all those stupid things that money and fame can buy, and then I had to spend the next forty years trying to untangle the mess it caused.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Tore shrugged. ‘I’m saving that for my biographer.’

  Quentin couldn’t conceal his disappointment, for even when he’d thought his landlord a tramp he had been intrigued by him. ‘You’ve found one?’

  ‘Maybe. You were asking about Ollie Randall, though.’

  ‘Yes, I wonder if you know why he might have been murdered.’

  ‘If I did, I’d go straight to the police.’

  There was no doubting Tore’s sincerity, and yet Quentin had interviewed enough people to have an instinct about when they were withholding something. He couldn’t press: Tore was too shrewd to fall for any of the usual bromides. In a curious way, Quentin thought, he was so famous as to be beyond vanity. It was hard to tell whether he loved his ravishing wife and children, but it was clear that he really liked them. The manic energy of his stage persona was completely absent.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t let him live at Home Farm.’

  ‘But how were you to know he’d meet such a terrible death there?’

  ‘I didn’t. It’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time that gets people killed.’

  Is it worse to be killed, or to die by inches like his own father?

  ‘You’re not alone,’ Anne will say when Hugh wakes and yelps like an animal, caught in the trap of his own body. ‘We’re here.’

  ‘What are you putting into me?’ Hugh asks.

  ‘Morphine, mostly,’ the nurse answers.

  ‘Any moment now I’ll see a damsel with a dulcimer. Though I’d prefer gin.’

  ‘Well, you can have that,’ Anne said.

  Hugh finds it increasingly hard to swallow, but Anne has a solution: frozen ice cubes of gin and tonic, which she passes over his lips. His whole face relaxes.

  ‘Ah. I never thought I’d taste that again.’

  When he had been at university, Hugh had announced he was coming up to see him. Quentin spent half of his meagre allowance buying a small bottle of Gordon’s, only to have it mocked as an inferior brand; though he still drank it all.

  ‘Bastard, bastard,’ Quentin mutters to himself. He hates his father for a hundred reasons, yet he can’t stop crying, furtively and awkwardly, at the horror of what is happening, at his mother’s grief, at, unexpectedly, his own.

  The next day he stops at the nearest big supermarket and buys a bottle of Hendricks.

  ‘That’s so thoughtful of you, darling. So kind. I know he’ll appreciate it.’

  No, he won’t, Quentin thinks; he remains a cantankerous, stubborn, rude old sod, and he probably won’t be able to taste the difference.

  ‘When am I going to be well?’

  Anne says, ‘What do you think is happening to you, Hugh?’

  Naomi, aghast, whispers, ‘No. Don’t say it.’

  ‘I’m dying, aren’t I?’ he says.

  Anne puts her arm round Naomi as if she were a grieving child as she cries, silently. Quentin, to his surprise, feels someone squeeze his fingers. He looks down. So this is what it means to wring your hands, he thinks, as though you could force grief out of your body like water. He is going to have to get through this alone.

  ‘He needs hope,’ his mother says, with something close to anger. ‘He can fight this.’

  ‘No, Ma. He needs truth,’ Quentin says. ‘We all need the fucking truth, for once.’

  Anne says, ‘We can’t make you better, but you will feel better, I promise. We can give you stronger drugs now that you know what’s happening to you. You can have the death you want, at home, with your family. However, you do need to sign a form. Hugh?’

  His father opens one eye, irritably.

  ‘Stop babbling, and give me the drugs.’

  Later, Quentin and his mother agree that the bureaucracy of death is one of its oddest aspects. Without the form, Hugh’s death will be far more painful and prolonged. Modern medicine means he is not allowed to die. If he begins to have a heart attack, they or the nurse will be obliged to call an ambulance, whose crew will then have to try to restart his father’s heart while racing to Plymouth hospital, possibly breaking his ribs while doing so, even though a quick death is the best thing. It’s the same if he gets pneumonia: without the form, his medics have to give him antibiotics.

  This way, he can be given lethal doses of painkillers that will make him intermittently conscious but happy. Or, as he puts it, conscious and not unhappy.

  ‘I should have been on morphine years ago,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, you should,’ Quentin says. ‘You’re actually quite nice, on drugs.’

  Hugh can hardly hold the pen as he signs his name. It occurs to Quentin that these are probably the last words his father will ever write. All those years of ink, and it has come down to this, giving permission to someone to kill him.

  Outside the living room, Anne puts a hand on his arm. ‘If there are things you need to say to him, say them in the next day.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘There’s still time. When he’s gone, there won’t be.’

  ‘The moment I saw through him, he wanted to crush me.’

  ‘Maybe you can still forgive him. Parents don’t always realise how deeply they hurt children.’

  ‘I’d have thought, after a hundred years of psychoanalysis, they must have some inkling.’

  ‘Children can hurt parents too, though.’

  Anne now knows more about him than anyone else, including his own mother. It’s a deep intimacy, and no less deep for being so sudden, for time has lost all meaning. Quentin has told Anne about how appalling Hugh had been as a father and husband, how he had never said a single word of love to any of them, how he had mortified them all with his affairs, how he had turned a blind eye to Quentin being bullied at school, and Anne listens. How many secrets doctors and nurses must keep, he thinks. Yet he knows that this is part of her job: to tend to the living as well as the dead.

  ‘So there you are,’ Quentin says. ‘Not a pretty story.’

  ‘Have you ever told your wife about this?’ is the only question she asks.

  ‘No. I don’t think it would have done any good. There’s no point in going over it now, on his deathbed.’

  ‘Everyone can be helped,’ says Anne. Quentin shrugs, and asks, ‘What’s it like when people die?’

  ‘It’s not as bad as you may think. I wouldn’t say it’s joyful, but it can be a good experience.’

  Out in his mother’s garden he finds some ease in turning over each clod, shaking out the loose soil, and dumping the mass of grass and buttercup into a wheelbarrow. To cultivate your garden was a moral act, if you believed in that crap. At least Naomi’s weedy beds don’t conceal a severed head. At some point soon he’s going to dig the head up and bury it somewhere else, far away, where it can rot until doomsday.

  ‘Interesting how the weeds always have fat white roots. If only the rest of life were colour-coded,’ he remarks to Naomi.

  ‘We had a lovely garden in Cape Town,’ his mother says
. She has been ordered outside by Anne, sheet-pale from staying indoors so much. ‘If I regret anything about leaving, it’s that. You wouldn’t believe the flowers.’

  Quentin gives an exasperated sigh.

  ‘I don’t believe in regret. It’s a waste of energy.’

  Naomi smiles. ‘When you were a child, you’d march about saying, “I don’t like that!” You never knew what you did want, only what you didn’t.’

  ‘Well, anger is a kind of energy.’

  ‘Not always a good kind, though,’ she says.

  He stops, and puts his arms round his mother.

  ‘How will you manage here, all on your own?’ he asks, before starting to dig again. It’s the only thing that seems to help his misery. ‘You know, I’m here for you if you need it. You can’t drive, and living here can’t be easy.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be fine. Plenty of people want a four-bedroom cottage, you know.’

  The fork spears into Quentin’s wellington boot, just missing his toes.

  ‘You’re going to sell up?’

  ‘I’ve put my name down for the first of Lottie’s new homes, in fact. I’ll be moving in this autumn, if I get an offer.’

  ‘Good God.’ Much as he loathes The Hovel, he can’t imagine his mother living anywhere else. ‘Does Fa know?’

  ‘Yes. I promised to stay here until the end.’

  ‘I thought you were the one who insisted on living here.’

  ‘No, Hugh was always a country boy. That’s why he took the job at Knotshead. I grew up in a city, remember. I must say, I’m looking forward to having central heating.’

  Quentin thinks of his parents, and their incomprehensible yet lasting union. How have they managed it? Di Tore, who informed him only yesterday that marriage is an outdated concept, especially now people are living such a long time, would be just as mystified, he thinks. A year ago, he would have said the same.