The Heart of the Country Page 5

  Anyway, as I was saying. The guests went home and Natalie was about to put the chicken bones in the bin, when she realized there was nothing to eat for tomorrow’s dinner. She took the debris back inside, filled a saucepan with water, put the bones in, then scraped the plates into the pan as well, including a bit of gristle chewed and rejected by Jean – Natalie was sure she was as healthy as a human being could be – put the lid on tight and boiled up the lot before she went to bed. She would serve it tomorrow for dinner, as soup. She was learning.

  She dreaded going to bed, but in fact fell immediately and soundly asleep, and had no dreams, or at any rate none that she could recall.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Alice asked, first thing.

  ‘Dad will really have to speak to that garage,’ said Ben. ‘It’s too bad.’

  He spoke in his father’s voice, and Natalie had to refrain from slapping him. I am not saying that Natalie did not love her children: merely remarking that it is easier to love a child who is the fruit of passionately desired loins, if you see what I mean, than to love a child to whose begetter you are indifferent or whom you actively dislike. And Natalie had never been passionate about Harry’s loins.

  They used to believe that love children – that is to say, children born out of wedlock – were always beautiful; a romantic view, of course, presupposing village love, not sordid urban accident by way of proximity or drunkenness, and not statistically viable; but it is something, I suppose, that people want to believe. Teresa, Bess and Edwina are good-looking enough. Regular features, good teeth. Though Edwina has (or had, when I last saw her – their father does not let them visit) those rather sad screwed-up little eyes which children get when they have suffered too many blows from fate. Perhaps now she is with her father and not her mad, bad mother they will begin to look more confidently at the world. (Self, self, self, Sonia. You’ll never get out at this rate.)

  ‘Your father’s away on business,’ said Natalie to Ben and Alice. What else could she say? It had a convincing enough ring: the nice impenetrability of the male reason for being off and out of the home. Away on business! What business? Where? They didn’t ask.

  Now Natalie’s Volvo, with its pitiful pool of petrol in the tank, and the yellow warning light not just flickering but full on for the last eight miles, was parked in front of the house. The garage, kept for Harry’s Cortina, stood empty, with only a dusty spot or two of oil to mark the place where it ought to be, at 8 o’clock in the morning. Jax was hungry. Natalie found a can of bolognese sauce at the back of the cupboard and fed him that. He looked reproachful but ate it.

  ‘I don’t know what Dad would say,’ said Ben, ‘if he saw you do that. What a wicked waste of money!’

  ‘Dad isn’t here to say anything,’ said Natalie, and somewhere from the back of her mind, creeping out from under the thick wodge of stupor that seemed to fill it, came the notion, like a thread of silk in a flannel cloth, that being able to do what you liked, as you liked, without comment, might be a pleasant thing. That, in fact, there might be life beyond marriage.

  Alice came out in alarm from her bedroom. From her window she could see two men in suits coming up the drive. They had left their Ford Escort in the road, where it was causing quite an obstruction; but they didn’t seem to care. One tried the driver’s door of the Volvo and, finding it open, got in and started the engine: it whirred, then died.

  ‘Mummy,’ cried Alice, ‘someone’s stealing the car!’

  But of course they were merely repossessing it. Harry had not kept up the payments. They showed Natalie documents which she did not understand.

  ‘It won’t start,’ said the would-be driver, reproachfully.

  ‘There’ll be trouble if the vehicle is damaged in any way,’ said his companion. They seemed unmoved by Natalie’s wide, troubled eyes and pale face. She was not used to that. Did one lose the power to affect men, along with a husband?

  ‘It’s out of petrol, that’s all,’ she said, and they got a can of petrol out of the Escort, fed the Volvo and drove it out.

  ‘You are a fool,’ said Ben. ‘You shouldn’t have told them that. Then they’d have had to have gone away and Dad would have come back and sorted it out. He’s going to be ever so angry.’

  ‘How are we going to get to school?’ asked Alice.

  ‘By taxi, idiot,’ said Ben.

  ‘We’re going to walk,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s a lovely morning.’

  ‘Walk!’ said’ Ben, speaking as one who has no legs. ‘I can’t possibly!’

  ‘Then stay home,’ said Natalie, briefly, so he went away to pack his books and came back to say the handle of his briefcase was broken and he had to have a new one that very day. Natalie told him he could keep his books in a plastic bag and he snorted his derision. He was upset about the seizure of the car. Who wouldn’t be?

  ‘It’s like The Railway Children,’ said Alice. ‘We’re reading it at school. Their father’s falsely accused and goes to prison and then they’re very poor and have adventures.’

  ‘You’re so stupid!’ said Ben, and pulled her hair. So Alice went for Ben with her nails and Natalie slapped both their faces so hard it actually hurt, and after that they behaved. She, who never slapped children, beginning to behave like the rest of us! Distraught + distracted + dismayed = slaps and shrieks.

  Natalie stood numbed and carless in her kitchen when the back door pushed open and there stood – no, not Harry, but Angus. He carried a dead hen by its legs.

  ‘Excellent dinner last night,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d drop by and say thank you in person.’

  ‘It was a horrible dinner,’ she said. ‘The chickens were dry. Fish and chips from the Chinese takeaway would have been nicer.’ Yes, Chinese takeaways have reached even as far as Eddon Gurney, Somerset.

  ‘I thought I might have missed you,’ he said. ‘Your car’s not there.’

  ‘It’s having a service,’ she said, not even sure why she lied.

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I thought I passed it on the road. Being driven by a man I know. Works for a hire-purchase company.’

  ‘Can’t have been,’ she said.

  ‘Harry’s car’s not in the garage either,’ said Angus. ‘He’s off early.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t he?’ she said. She didn’t like Angus. He was too fair and fleshy for her taste.

  ‘Have it your own way,’ he said. ‘Do you want a chicken? Fox left it.’

  There was a drop of blood upon her tiled floor.

  Natalie thought once, twice, thrice.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and Angus put the dead bird, feathers and all, in her fridge. Why does he feel so much at home, she wondered? Coming in without knocking, opening her fridge without so much as an if you please. I told her the answer later. Men have a group consciousness, just as ants do. If one falls off the shelf another fills the gap. It’s only natural, especially if there’s honey around.

  ‘Your fridge is almost empty,’ he said. ‘Not a pretty sight. I reckon you’ll be needing some help, girl.’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Natalie.

  ‘Have it your own way,’ he said. ‘How are you getting the kids to school?’

  ‘We’re walking.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

  ‘It’s a fine morning. We often walk.’

  ‘You’ve got friends, I suppose? Family?’

  ‘Of course I have.’ But she hadn’t. And whose fault was that? She shouldn’t have looked down her nose at the likes of Pauline, not to mention me, Sonia. She should have written to aunts who sent her birthday cards. She’d thought herself too good for too many people, said ‘I prefer the company of men’ once too often. Pride comes before a fall; a sense of sisterhood with sad experience.

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said. ‘Give Harry my regards when he gets back. We missed him last night.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘I expect you did too,’ he added, laughing. She stared at him unblinking. ‘Anyway,’ h
e added, ‘Arthur will always look after you. Good fellow, Arthur.’

  This time she did blink, which gratified him enough to allow him to leave.

  First things first. Get the children to school, then face the day. Picture the scene: Natalie shepherding her two children along the side of the main road, along which she was so blithely accustomed to drive. Ben’s right cheek is unduly pink, as is Alice’s left. Natalie herself is pale, in spite of her good night’s sleep. Sonia sees her walking ahead, and hurries Teresa, Bess and Edwina along to catch up with her. In so doing she changes her life.

  Ros Sweeney from over the way had told Sonia that morning that Marion Hopfoot had run off with Natalie Harris’ husband. Sonia had been partly appalled and partly gratified that Natalie had left the wives and joined the women; and was certainly awed by the rapid working of her curse. She wanted to be in, moreover, at the kill. Not nice!

  Now it is Sonia’s shrink’s belief that in this new world of ours, in which what happens on a TV screen is accepted as more real than life itself, and certainly more true to the truth of experience, that the way to deal with personal trauma is to project painful scenes – the ones we’d prefer just to forget – onto the screens of our minds, and so learn to accept and incorporate the negative aspects of our personalities. To see ourselves as not central to our own experience, as it were, but an inevitable part of a larger interweaving drama. It does seem to work. I, Sonia, in replaying the last scene, can now see that in believing my curse worked, I was merely trying to edge nearer the centre of a stage that is not mine by rights. I am not omnipotent and to know that is to be relieved of a good deal of guilt. Next time I am handed a cup of sweet tea I will mention that I don’t take sugar. Such are the wages of a clear conscience. You begin to be able to look after yourself.

  There were eight of us on the carnival float the day it caught fire. That was in November. Natalie’s husband left in March, when the daffodils were springing. Odd about daffodils, don’t you think? A delight in the New Year, rare, forced and pale: boring and oppressive by April, when they’re everywhere, too bright and cheap. Even I sometimes buy a bunch in April, when the greengrocers are almost paying you to take them out of their sight. In my great days – for that’s how I now see the days when I was reckoned sane – I used to get a total of fifty-two pounds thirty-two pence a week from social security for me and the three kids. You can’t often afford shop flowers on that, and you don’t have the energy or will to pick wild ones from the hedgerows, and stick them in a jam jar. That’s what a low income does to you. It makes you punish yourself long after others have stopped doing it. If you’re poor, the logic goes in your head, you deserve to be poor. That’s if you’re a woman, of course. Misfortune makes women feel guilty; men take to rioting in the streets. That’s why women in our society are poorer than men by 42 per cent. Or something like that.

  I could go on about wild flowers, too: about how rare they’ve become in the heart of the country, thanks to pesticides, fungicides and weedkiller, but I won’t. Teresa, Bess and Edwina were wild flowers, in their way. Oh, forget it!

  This float, this carnival float. The West Country has its own carnival, not like the Rio one, true, but considering the narrowness of the roads and the chilliness of November fairly spectacular. West Avon Estate Agents, Dealers and Auctioneers (Arthur and Angus in disguise) last year entered one of the better floats, and on it, dressed as traditional housewives, in bright, waisted dresses and with frilly aprons, and waving feather dusters at the passing crowd, stood Natalie, Jean, Jane, Sonia, Ros, Sally (whom Sonia hasn’t yet told you about), Pauline, and Flora – you remember, Natalie’s cleaner? – sitting central and triumphant as the carnival queen. Flora was dressed in old lace, halfway between the old Virgin Mary and the new Madonna, pop star. I don’t think any more it was Sonia’s fault the float burned: rather it was society’s. By ‘society’ I mean men, for who else forms and regulates the world we live in? Who else but men would dress their wives and mistresses, those they torment, abuse and exploit, in the clothes of the fifties, hand them feather dusters, oblige them to smile and parade the streets of Somerset on a ninety foot float consisting of pretty little estate houses with lace curtains? In a world where something like 40 per cent of women are out at work (and 45 per cent of men), 25 per cent of mothers are on social security, 40 per cent (and rising) are over 60 years of age, how can men still cling to the consoling myth of the loving female in the dream house? Husband out to work, two children at school, mother at home looking after them – that’s the rarity these days, not the norm, just 23 per cent of the total of households. No, I’m glad the float burned, it deserved to burn, and though Sonia stays in the loonybin (forgive me, patients, friends, relatives of those incarcerated – sorry, there I go again. No locks and bars these days, just the chemical cosh, the heavy tranquilizers) – stays in the psychiatric hospital for ever she’s not going to say otherwise.

  Sonia’s shrink says he reads everything she writes, but Sonia doesn’t believe it. Sonia is going to write on, and then smuggle the manuscript out of here and get it to a publisher. They give you paper to write on if its therapy, but not if you’re writing fiction. Sometimes Sonia can’t remember who’s pulling whose leg.

  Facing the Day

  Sonia made a joke or so that morning, catching up with Natalie on the walk to school. Natalie wasn’t particularly talkative. She still had this idea that if you kept yourself to yourself everything would be okay. Slam the front door and keep the world out, was her motto. Only now if she slammed the front door the whole house would shake and fall.

  ‘Car broken down then?’ Sonia asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Natalie, conscious of Ben blenching. Obviously it was as he feared, and this embarrassing acquaintance could never now be shaken free. In the file that made its way to school were six females (four of them sponging off the State) and one male, and he was the male. It was a terrible situation. He would be seen, moreover, by friends from school, who were driving past in proper style and comfort, and laughed at. He hated his childhood. It was appalling to be so at the mercy of the adult world: to be obliged to suffer one humiliation after another because of its disinterest or actual sadism. It would have been perfectly possible for his mother to have ordered a taxi and saved him from this ordeal, but she just wouldn’t.

  ‘Can’t your husband mend the car?’ asked Sonia (the bitch!), and her voice floated in the wind over hedges and fields. I will give you a discourse on hedges presently: about layering. Hedges ought to be layered in the winter, not just have their tops sheared by that machinery which is so dangerous to passing traffic. Branches must be bent, part-severed, and intertwined in all but horizontal position, so a calculated and stock-proof tangle of foliage is achieved. The cuts heal, leaves and flowers spring, birds delight, fieldmice rejoice. (You said presently, Sonia, not now. You mean well, then you forget. Part of your difficulty is your capacity to be sidetracked: into, for example, arson: shrink)

  ‘No,’ said Natalie.

  ‘What do you keep him for then?’ asked Sonia. That was the joke. (Shall we consider anti-male humour and what we are really trying to say when we indulge in it?: shrink)

  Natalie laughed politely. Sonia knew then she wanted something.

  ‘Walking’s all right in this weather,’ said Sonia. ‘It’s when it rains and the cars splash you I hate it. Mostly it’s the women drivers are the worst. And people who have dogs in the back. I don’t know why.’

  But Natalie didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘Can you tell me about social security?’ was all she asked.

  Now she’d come to the right person for that. Sonia was practically a founder member of the Claimants’ Union. (Now defunct by reason of encroaching lethargy. My own theory is that they put something in the glue on the back of the brown envelopes circulated by the DHSS.)

  ‘Not between now and nine o’clock, no,’ said Sonia. ‘Some time perhaps when I’ve got a week to spare. When I’m dying of ma
lnutrition in the cottage hospital, and have a spare moment from taking the kids to school and back, you come to my bedside and I’ll tell you. Not that they usually admit those dying of malnutrition into hospital these days – they’d have no room for proper contributing citizens if they did, would they? But I might swing it through the Claimants’ Union. Though, now I come to think of it, they’ve closed the Cottage Hospital, so you’d have to take the bus into Bristol to visit me: they might give you a special compassionate allowance to pay that, but by then I’d be dead.’

  ‘Seriously though,’ said Natalie. She was just a kid herself. She thought I was joking.

  ‘What do you want to know, precisely? Low Income Family Supplement? That’s great if you swing it, but you have to find yourself a full-time job first. You can get them round here cleaning the milk tankers. Inside, not out. You crawl around inside them all night for sixty pounds a week. The fumes make you sick all the next day, and may do long term damage to the CNS. Central nervous system, to you. And you’re not the type employers are looking for: you might ask for more, little Olivia Twist, or go to the Factory Inspectorate. But you just might be lucky, and actually get the job. Then you could claim a blanket allowance, a whole 50p! Lucky old you. Dog food? No – no pets on the State, I’m afraid. If you’re thinking of going on social security, why don’t you cook and eat the dog?’

  Jax was bringing up the rear of our little procession; did I forget to tell you that? Bess was frightened of him, and I’m not surprised. She kept bumping into my legs while I walked, in her attempts to keep out of the beast’s way. I had to keep turning round, and warning her not to go too far out into the centre of the road, where death awaited, not just the fear and exhaustion of walking along its edge.

  ‘So, no pets,’ Sonia went on. ‘They’ll pay for a colour telly though, so the kids can watch monsters, rape and murder and not feel left out. A spot of sexist singing and dancing and a blown-up body or so and a close-up of a child starved to death by its parents on the news. They’re stopping subsidized school dinners round here. Presently they’ll start handing out a sandwich lunch allowance on a sliding scale, depending on fillings, which will cost more to administer than a free dinner a day for the entire population. That’s the way it goes. Does that answer your question about social security, or the DHSS as it is known to connoisseurs?’