The Heart of the Country Read online

  ‘Why did you accept the invitation?’ It was in the nature of a complaint rather than a question.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, startled into protest. ‘You did.’

  ‘I’d rather stay home and watch TV,’ said Arthur, ‘than sit about with local tradesmen.’

  ‘The Harrises aren’t local,’ Jane said. ‘They come from somewhere in Africa.’

  ‘They’re the kind who buy new furniture and polish it with Sparkle.’ It was the worst thing he could say of anyone. ‘Harry Harris will talk about computers and his wife about schools.’

  ‘Angus and Jean are going,’ said Jane, in her best placating voice. She was the kind of wife who looks out of her front door in the morning and, if it’s raining, apologizes.

  ‘Angus will fall asleep, and Jean will look down her nose,’ said Arthur, not placated at all. It seemed to him that Angus was nosing ahead in their race to the top. Arthur lived above the shop; Angus a mile or so outside the town, in a Georgian house with three acres. Balance that against the fact the shop was a listed building of major historical interest and that the house had been bought cheap as bankrupt stock (from a man Angus had bankrupted, but never mind): in Arthur’s mind Angus was winning. Arthur, this particular evening when nothing seemed right, didn’t like the thought of that at all. He, Arthur, had a wife who twitched and heard children reading: Angus’ wife Jean was a qualified pharmacist and worked in the local Boots. Mind you, Jean didn’t seem to care about Angus; just raised her eyebrows and talked to him as if he were a child. Arthur could at least make his wife weep, and took comfort from the fact.

  Natalie watched the hands of the clock reach six, then half past six. Harry didn’t arrive home. She gave the children the last of the fishfingers from the bottom of the freezer. A pity, she thought, she hadn’t stocked up when she could. The table was laid for six. Arthur and Jane, Angus and Jean, herself and Harry: proof that they could now count themselves as part of the business community. She had laid out the smoked salmon and cut thin slices of buttered brown bread and even thinner slices of lemon. She had timed the chickens for nine o’clock: they were ready sprinkled with dried rosemary as the recipe book had suggested. Peeled potatoes were waiting in cold water. The frozen peas were decanted into the pan. A bread sauce mix waited in the bowl for its re-hydration. The chocolate mousse had been made and Ben and Alice had quarrelled over who should lick the spoon and who should scrape the bowl.

  The table was exceptionally prettily laid, with white linen napkins folded into bird-like shapes and placed in the tall wine glasses. The napkins were the only ones of Natalie’s possessions which linked her back to the past at all, the art of folding them the only traditional skill she had. The napkins had been her mother’s. They had been small enough and flat enough to pack and go around the world: they had never been lost. And the art of folding, just so, had been taught to her grandmother by her great-great aunt, back in the summer of 1912. The bird shapes seemed unnecessarily ornate on an otherwise simple table – she worried about their suitability. She wondered if there were people in the world who did not worry about things. I could have told her, but that was in the days before she said the thoughts out loud. She kept them inside, and they kept her dead.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Ben asked, at seven o’clock. ‘He said he’d be back at six-thirty. He’s always punctual. I set my watch by him.’ He didn’t, of course, but he liked the ring of the phrase.

  ‘He’s been delayed,’ said Natalie. She had put on her best blue dress with the wide white collar. Now she peered in the bedroom mirror, bevelled around the edges, and put on her eye make-up. That was blue, too. Women should never wear blue – it’s too innocent a colour. I remember as a child there was a colour called nigger brown: that was almost as bad: not innocent, simply dreary. Of course the phrase has gone out of fashion. Down here in the West Country they wouldn’t understand why, or approve if they did. No one but puffy pale pinkos in sight down here, and racism’s rampant. In this respect the heart of the country is mean, and spiteful, and frightened.

  ‘People should do what they say they’ll do,’ said Ben, going back to the television. He was doing his maths homework at the same time as watching the screen, which he was not supposed to do.

  ‘But perhaps he’s had an accident,’ said Alice, and her blue eyes opened wide with fancied horror.

  ‘He rang earlier and said he might have to go up to London,’ said Natalie, ‘on urgent business.’ She was trying out the excuses she would offer to her guests. ‘Perhaps he’s had a breakdown on the motorway; or his client’s flight was delayed.’

  ‘But the car’s just been serviced,’ said Ben. ‘And if it was a question of delay, surely the meeting would simply be rescheduled?’ He would sometimes get up really early and watch the business management courses, screened by the Open University.

  ‘We’ll wait and see,’ said Natalie, vaguely. But it was now 7.15 and she could see that Hilary had been right. Harry had done a bunk. She went up to her bedroom and opened the clever little jewellery box which played Schubert’s lullaby when she opened it and slid out all its drawers when she lifted the inner lid – Harry had given it to her one Christmas – and found her diamond ring gone and her amber necklace. All that was left was junk jewellery. She put on a pair of cheap hoop earrings and stared at herself, and thought they suited her quite well.

  ‘Don’t wear those earrings,’ said Alice, when she went downstairs, ‘they make you look like a gypsy.’

  ‘I’ll look like what I want!’ snapped Natalie, uncharacteristically. She took a swig of whisky, and tried to relocate herself, as it were, in her own skin. She felt as if she was in a corner of the room somewhere, watching her body move and act, but scarcely residing in it.

  She would have liked to have cried, but with guests expected for dinner, how could she? Her eyes would be red and puffy if she indulged her feelings.

  Meanwhile, Jean, Angus’ wife, the pharmacist, was tugging on a tight black suede skirt over thin hips. Then she pulled on a light fluffy blue angora jumper. She had thin shoulders and no breasts to speak of. Angus watched, and Jean was indifferent to his watching. She was dark and cross and seldom smiled, and he was plump and fair and smiled a lot, even as he stabbed you in the back. He wished he was married to the kind of wife who would fancy sex as she changed for dinner, but he wasn’t.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Angus said, as he changed out of his auctioneer’s tweedy suit into the smooth grey suit he wore for evening occasions. ‘You don’t think she’ll cook cuisine minceur?’

  ‘Fat hope,’ she said. ‘Actually we’ll be lucky if there’s any dinner at all.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ he asked.

  Now Jean loved dropping bombshells. Sometimes he thought she kept him for the sake of dropping them and watching him jump, in the same way as some people keep dogs in order to watch them sit up and beg.

  ‘Harrix went bust,’ she told him, as if she were mentioning that the cat had been sick.

  ‘Who said so?’ His hand stilled as he fumbled for buttons. Fool and joker he might be: king of the country he was. Ordinary intelligence – the talk in pubs and offices – had failed him. He needed to know.

  ‘Mrs Barnes came in after evening surgery for some Diezepan – said her husband was out of work again. So was everyone else up at Harrix.’

  ‘But he had a million-pound order on the books.’

  ‘So he said,’ said Jean. ‘More fool you to believe him. Do you want to call and cancel dinner? I don’t imagine Harris is much use to you now.’

  But he didn’t. He was hungry. If he stayed home Jean would give him a boiled egg and some salad and lecture him on cholesterol.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said. But she wouldn’t. She would feed him scraps of information as she fed him sight of her breasts, for the pleasure of snatching satisfaction away. ‘I don’t want to get a name for gossip,’ she said, ‘or they’ll stop telling me things. You’re putting on weight,’ she added, not failin
g to notice that he had to tug at his belt to get it to his normal hole.

  Only when they were in the car – a new Audi Quattro, with every modern gadget available, including a bleeper which went off if you exceeded the speed limit you set yourself, of which Angus was extremely proud – did Jean say: ‘What’s more, Mrs Hopfoot came in for Mogadon. She said her daughter had run off with Harry Harris. You know, that blonde girl with the good legs but the screwed-up face? I think perhaps a harelip, not very well fixed. Some said it gave her charm, but I never could see it.’

  ‘You’re having me on,’ he said. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘If it isn’t true, Harry Harris will be sitting at the head of the table, and if it is true, he won’t,’ she said, staring ahead from behind glasses upswept at the corners, with her wide West Country eyes, full of innocence and savagery mixed; and he thought perhaps she wasn’t joking.

  A little later she said:

  ‘Of course, you can’t blame Harry Harris too much, considering what his wife’s like.’

  ‘What’s his wife like?’

  ‘She’s been having it off with Arthur, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, back of the shop.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ But he did. He went too fast round a corner and had to brake sharply. The bleeper sounded and he had to grope for the switch to turn it off.

  ‘I suppose you envy Arthur,’ his wife remarked. And then, as if by the way, ‘Idiotic car, isn’t it! Why did you buy it? All it does is make you look a fool. It’s too big and too flash; it uses too much petrol and it’s impossible to park. You’re such a baby. You think people admire you and envy you for your fancy new car, but they don’t. All they think is, there goes a man with more money than sense.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘Fancy Arthur yourself?’

  She yawned, artificially.

  ‘If I was going to fancy anyone,’ she said, ‘I’d fancy a twenty-year-old, not a middle-aged antique dealer.’

  ‘Fun evening this is going to be,’ was all he could think of to say.

  It wasn’t, of course. Conversation was stilted. Harry Harris was indeed missing. Natalie said he’d gone to London unexpectedly that morning, and had rung from a garage to say he’d broken down on the motorway. No one believed her, but no one said they didn’t. There wasn’t enough smoked salmon. It was impossible to squeeze the lemon. The chickens had dried out. Jean refused the chocolate mousse on account of the cholesterol it contained. Natalie nearly said it came from a packet and was a special low-calorie brand, favoured by Harry, but stopped herself in time. Jane looked as if she were about to burst into tears. The only thing of interest that happened – apart from the negative fact of Harry’s absence – was that Angus admired Natalie’s hoop earrings; it occurred to him that she was just the sort of woman who would enjoy ten minutes’ sex while changing for dinner, or even twenty minutes, and if she saw something in Arthur she might see even more in him, Angus. What’s more, if Harry had gone missing, he, Angus, might be able to help her out.

  Angus pinched Natalie’s bottom in the kitchen, going out to help her fetch another bottle of wine – she’d kept the red in the fridge, and taken out the white to warm: well, she was distracted – and she slapped his hand away. Had the instinct for self-preservation been predominant in her mind, she would have welcomed the bruise left by those powerful and monied and possibly helpful fingers. As it was, he was hurt, and never quite forgave her, not in all that came after. Natalie carried some kind of female aura around with her; she carried it like a suitcase: it was fixed to her and yet not part of her, a burden and a delight. It was impersonal and it made men want her to smile at them, and rendered them very irritable if she didn’t.

  It wasn’t only men Natalie affected like this: it was women too. Look how I cursed her when she splashed me, driving by like Lady Muck: she with the debts and the runaway husband and not a true friend to her name, only the kind of business acquaintance who’d come to dinner and gossip about her behind her back, and fuck her out of turn, or try to. For love read hate. I brought it all down on her: or the demons in my head did. They feed on love and spew out hate. The more hope there is, the stronger they get. Flat depression, flat despair, is easier. Take my word for it.

  Our dinner that night up at the housing estate consisted of kale and potatoes with a few scraps of sausage stirred in. Teresa, Bess and Edwina ate it without argument and afterwards we all watched Top of the Pops. When I look back on that time it seems happy enough – compared at any rate to now. I blame Natalie for what happened.

  My shrink says I am prepared to blame everyone except myself for my fate. If I practised understanding and sympathy more, he says, I might blame less, and be the happier for it. More brutally, if I learned not to hate myself, I might not hate others, and then he might even let me out of the madhouse. He is ever hopeful! He thinks arson (one of my crimes, or madnesses) is a declaration of hate. I think arson is a pretty fine idea, one way and another. Fire is beautiful. What it burns is dross, rubbish; it eats up ugliness: it devours the debris of lost hope: it obliterates the imperfect. The ashes from a really good fire are soft, young and fine. I loved Natalie. I didn’t wish her any harm. When her troubles came upon her, how the vultures moved in! Then for a time, I was her only friend. It was she who betrayed me, not the other way round. If to want happiness for yourself is to be guilty, then, yes, I am guilty. But I am not full of hate and rage, on the contrary. I wish I was – then I could see a way out of this dismal place.

  Shuffling ladies in shapeless cardigans are forever bringing me cups of over-sugared tea, which it would seem churlish to refuse. They ask me why I write instead of joining in their singsongs, and I just nod and smile and they seem not to notice that I haven’t answered. Someone did once ask what I was writing and I replied ‘Just therapy’ and she said ‘Novel or autobiography?’ and I was at a loss to reply. Not that it mattered; she shook her double chins at me and drifted off, like anyone else. It’s the drugs produce the double chins. But none of my questioners seems to have any teeth. Can this be the result of too much tannin? How bad people are at looking after themselves!

  That was dinner, anyway, on the night of the day Harry Harris left for work, and never came home.

  Chomp, Chomp, Grittle-Grax, Gone!

  The fox was out that night. It got Ros’ duckling. Ros lives across the road from me in Wendover Drive. The duckling was a pretty little thing. It had been reared by her two daft hens. One of her kids had found this still warm duck’s egg under a hedge, and since Ros’ hens spent every spring and summer broody, without ever so much as laying an egg in return for their keep, she put the blue egg where a single addled white shop egg had rested for six weeks or so and look, folks, it hatched! How excited we all were! Silly little cheeping, trusting, mismatched creature. Small things please small minds: us, that is, up in the housing estate. Those of us who live off the State get smaller and smaller minds. We don’t take the newspapers, perhaps that’s it. Then the fox got the duckling. Ros’ children cried. So did Teresa, Bess and Edwina. I could have wrung its neck. The duckling’s, not the fox’s. The duckling stirred delight in us, who had no business to be delighted; we, the rejects of the system, the rejects of marriage, the unsupported mothers who live off the State. Cheep, cheep, it went: saved by a miracle, hatched by besotted elderly spinsters, it made us think that nice things still could happen. I don’t blame the fox. It only acted according to its nature. Chomp, chomp, grittle-grax, gone!

  Natalie told me she saw it, or its brother, run across her lawn. After the guests had gone she was putting out the rubbish in her bin – she was like that: never left waste until the morning – when the fox ran across her back lawn. She saw it in the light which shone out from her kitchen. It stopped and stared at her with its red eyes, seeming quite unafraid, and then loped on.

  Foxes have a nasty habit of killing everything in the henhouse and leaving the debris behind and the straw and the walls spattered by bloo
d and feather. They like to kill, not just to eat, or so the story goes. But every creature has its defenders, and I heard someone say on the radio the other day that the fox is not really blood-crazed: it’s just that its instincts can’t cope with walls. In the wild its victims would all have run off before it could get to them. I leave that for you to think about.

  Anyway, the elderly hens couldn’t run off. The fox got them too. The duckling just vanished, but bits of hen were everywhere. Well, they’d done their bit, I suppose. What good’s an old hen that doesn’t lay eggs, any more than a woman too old or too cut about to have children? I was sterilized after Edwina. Stephen thought it a good idea. Three little girls in as many years, after ten years of trying and nothing. Delicious at the time! But where was it going to end? And then, I don’t know, it was as if my non-pregnancy or perpetual pregnancy was the only solder that kept us interested in each other. When I wasn’t in the market for babies and sex was for sex’s sake Stephen just seemed to lose interest. Then I fell in love with Alec, our solicitor, and Stephen acted as if he were Othello and I was Desdemona, only I’d recovered from the strangling and absolutely spoiled the play. And if you ask me it was my hysterectomized state which prevented Alec from taking me seriously. What man wants a woman without a womb, any more than he wants a woman with a womb that age has dried up? It goes against nature.

  Mind you, it was said in my defence at the trial that my hysterectomy had preyed upon my mind. I pleaded guilty but insane and the plea was accepted. I must have been mad. All you have to do with a prison term is just sit it out and it comes to an end, and you go home – or whatever’s left of home after you’ve been out of it for a decade or so. But if you get sent to a psychiatric hospital, or ‘loonybin’ as we who know them still call them, you only get out if and when some psychiatrist swears you are now sane. And who’s ever going to swear that about another human being? Chomp, chomp, grittle-grax, gone! Ros’ duckling and me, but not Natalie. Natalie proved too tough for predators.