The Heart of the Country Read online

  ‘Where are their offices?’ she asked. She didn’t even know that. My favourite haunt had somehow passed her by.

  It’s no use. I am guilty. I should never have caught up with Natalie that morning. I should have taken a lesson out of her book and kept myself to myself. I wanted to embarrass her and hurt her by asking about her husband, and I was punished.

  By Accident on Purpose

  You remember the Sally I mentioned, one of the women who ended up in a frilly dress waving a feather duster at the gawping crowds from a blazing float? She was another one who failed, by-accident-on-purpose to do her best for Natalie. That is to say, she really believed she was doing her best for her unfortunate sister, but her own state of mind got in the way. Since you can never tell what your motives are if you’re unhappy, you’d better interfere as little as you can as you go about the world. Or at least do your victims the honour of not trying to justify your actions, once you’ve done what you’ve done.

  Sally Bains works up at the office of Coombe Barrow School, where the fees are £1,250 a term, in advance, which for Ben and Alice means £2,500 a term, and all of that owing, and more. Sally’s married to Valentine. Sally and Val were research scientists until the unit where they both worked closed down for lack of government funding. Val was a world expert in ergot-related diseases of wheat, and Sally knew everything there was to know about fungal diseases in bats. But who cares about either, these days? The money came out of fungi and went into the development of defence mechanisms in outer space – Star Wars to you and me. Too late for Val and Sally to change their disciplines: they were in their forties, with bright young twenty-year-olds who never even stopped to read the newspaper treading hot on their heels. So Sally and Val took their redundancy money, sold their house, and bought a cottage in the West Country, putting what was left into High Risk Commodity shares, which a broker told Val were wrongly named. Low risk to the shrewd, he said, high risk only to the incompetent. First the cottage had to have a new roof – that was two thousand, one hundred pounds – and then eight thousand pounds of Val’s money disappeared overnight into some great vat of coffee beans, if you put your hand in which you might pull out a fortune, or more likely lose your hand altogether. Which Val did, so to speak. The day he heard the money had gone, Val stooped to pick up a handkerchief – why didn’t he use a tissue like anyone else? Then it would never have happened – and slipped a disc. He was tense, you see. Rest and manipulation failed; an operation exacerbated rather than soothed the trouble, and now Val lay in bed, depressed, and whether he was in pain or merely thought he was in pain, who could tell, and what difference did it make anyway? Meanwhile Sally worked as a secretary at Coombe Barrow, and thought herself lucky.

  The trouble with men who suffer from mild clinical depression – that is to say, not quite as bad as the drugged zombies you meet in here – is that they do tend to drink too much and hit their wives in their frustration, and the more their wives try to help the more they are insulted and berated for their pains. Everything’s wrong and miserable and awful, and whose fault can it be but the wife’s? And since wives tend to take their husband’s view of them, they get confused and wretched themselves, not to mention hit, and feel it’s their fault their husband’s job/back/talent/life has failed, because he keeps saying it is. ‘Look how I’m drinking!’ he raves. ‘Your fault!’ ‘Who, me?’ the startled spouse responds. ‘When I’ve done everything for you all these years! Really me? I suppose it must be, darling, if you say so. How I wish I were nearer what you want, that my breasts were bigger (smaller), my brain was better (worse), that I wasn’t so argumentative (acquiescent), then this would never have happened. I can see how it’s terrible for you, how my failure has driven you to infidelity. Oh, I am so sorry! Weren’t we once happy? What? No? Never? Oh, oh, oh!’ She weeps and wails and laments and he lowers through the once happy home, aggrieved and self-righteous. Well, that’s how I, Sonia, see it: I put it to the shrink and he agreed, but asked why I couldn’t keep my mind on my own problems, which run to the manic rather than the depressive.

  As I say, the morning Natalie came up to Sally Bains in the school office Sally herself was distressed and confused. She’d left Val a hump in the bed, with a thermos of coffee beside him for when he woke, and she kissed the top of his head fondly – it was all she could see – and he’d said something and she’d said:

  ‘What did you say, darling?’ and he’d said:

  ‘Don’t kiss the top of my head. You know you don’t mean it,’ and she’d said:

  ‘Oh,’ feeling as if she’d been slapped, and he’d opened an eye and said:

  ‘Christ. Don’t you know better than to put coffee in a thermos? Couldn’t you at least give it to me in a cup, like other people?’

  And since she was late for work – the making of the coffee had made her late, and the ringing of the doctor for a repeat prescription of painkillers for his back, and the phone had been engaged and engaged and engaged, as it always was in the early morning, she just left. And what’s more, he’d had the drawer by the bed open, in which he kept the photograph of the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally twenty years back. She knew she ought to have stayed and taken away the thermos and made fresh coffee and left that (in a cup and saucer: he didn’t like mugs either) by the bed, but somehow that morning she just had to get out. And now she was at the office she was beginning to feel better, only the feeling better was not somehow the true state, was it? It was a kind of frivolity. Other people lived in a cheerful, trivial world which Val did not allow her to inhabit. And Val was right. She knew well enough that coffee never tastes its best after being in a thermos an hour or so; she should have remembered that, instead of how the thermos would let him sleep on, escape from the pain in his back, and still have something hot and reviving to drink when he woke up. She’d got it wrong, as usual.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Mrs Bains?’

  ‘Ask away.’ Sally smiled brightly. Sally knew that Harry Harris had run off with Marion Hopfoot the beauty queen. Everyone did. Some cared more than others. Most just thought it a good story.

  ‘How do I go about taking the children out of school? We are just a little financially pushed, and what with the back fees and so forth…’

  As she spoke Natalie stopped smiling brightly herself, turned quite pale and sat down. She could not quite grasp what she was saying, let alone the sense or otherwise of saying it. One part of her brain was trying to talk to the other, but couldn’t get through. It kept ringing engaged. It was a horrible feeling. But look now, rationally, using the brain that was attempting to ring through, even if Harry did eventually get in touch, did repent or whatever, did come home, did send a cheque, and it all turned out to be some kind of mistake, she could not rely upon it happening. It was just not sensible to have the children in private schools when there were free ones available. Somehow they had started with the schools and worked back.

  ‘There has to be a full term’s notice,’ said Sally. ‘You’re liable for fees for the next five months. That’s going to take what’s owing up to about seven thousand. Look, don’t worry. It’s happening all the time. People go bankrupt, husbands run off, someone falls ill, dies. Children are forever being taken out of these schools. There’s nothing permanent about privilege. That’s its point, isn’t it? It’s the battle to stay on top. All tooth and claw and you’re forever fighting to keep on your perch.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ said Natalie. It seemed to her that whenever she asked a simple question she got a reproach in return.

  ‘Now’s your chance,’ said Sally Bains. ‘The comprehensives round here aren’t bad. Of course they’re on strike a lot of the time. The Government means to privatize all schools, in due course, but you might just get a couple of years free schooling before the state system collapses altogether from lack of funding.’

  ‘I see,’ said Natalie, unsure whether Sally Bains approved or disapproved of free schools. Sally, of co
urse, had little emotional energy left over from her marriage to approve or disapprove of anything. She spoke out of the memory of herself as a political being, young and vigorous, not as wife of Val Bains, unemployed back-sufferer and depressive.

  ‘Ring up the headmaster of Quartermante. Don’t let them go to St John’s. No one’s got an O level out of there for five years, and now it’s GCSEs I don’t think they’re even bothering to enter anyone: it’s too expensive. Still, it’s a sort of free child minding service, I suppose, even if it’s not an education.’

  What Sally could have told Natalie, as she had told many another embarrassed parent in the past, was that all kinds of charities existed which would have been prepared, properly approached, to pay Ben and Alice’s fees – the rich look after their own – and that representation to the board of governors might well have resulted in the waiving of the money owing. But she did not tell her; Natalie was too neat and too pretty and her husband had run off, and Sally could not help wishing, from time to time, that Val’s back would improve sufficiently for him to be able to do what he kept threatening to do; look up the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally and run off – with her. What Sally felt for Natalie, amazingly, was envy. But that’s what being married to a depressive can do for a woman. How do I, Sonia, know all this? My husband Stephen, thank God, couldn’t claim to be a depressive; he was an anal retentive paranoic, which is bad enough. And personally I border on the manic (out and out it pours, doesn’t it, never stopping), but I reckon about two thirds of the women in the estate, all of us on the dole, were married to depressives at one time or another, or had our illegitimate children by them. And though we all started out as healthy, cheerful, female children, the male disease of depression is catching. Quite simply, the men pass it on to their womenfolk and, to use a dirty word, it’s as fatal as AIDS. We drudge down to the post office to cash our drafts: we can’t even get it together to have them paid direct into a bank.

  My shrink – sorry, psychiatrist – says this is nonsense: women are depressives too, sit in hospital corridors, speechless and motionless, staring into space, just like men; unmarried ones too – but I reckon they caught it from their fathers.

  Be that as it may, Sally failed to give Natalie proper sisterly help at a time when she needed it. Okay?

  In the meantime, Jax was restless at the end of his lead. He was hungry.

  Natalie took the telephone number of the recommended school from Sally, and then its address. A phone call would cost ten pence and, if she was left waiting at the end of the line, possibly more. She would do better to call round in person. That would be free. Or would it? Perhaps the free schools, like the museums, would now charge her admission? A fee to see the headmaster?

  Neatly dressed, clear-eyed little children with self-satisfied faces ran about the corridors as she left. That’s what £1,250 a term can do for the young, here in the heart of the country.

  Angus, driving past the school in the Audi Quattro, saw Natalie and Jax pass out through the school gates and pulled up beside them, with an enviable squealing of brakes, the kind that betokens a person of instant decision at the wheel. Natalie got in beside Angus. Jax, as if sensing the urgency of the situation, jumped into the back seat without demur. And on they all went towards Glastonbury.

  ‘You again!’ he said. ‘Surprise, surprise!’ He’d been up and down the road four times, waiting for her.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Natalie. ‘I hope he doesn’t leave hairs on your nice new seats.’

  ‘My wife will hoover them up,’ said Angus. He was lying. ‘And I don’t mind anything so long as it’s to do with you.’

  He was getting fonder and fonder of Natalie by the minute. Female distress and incompetence, mixed with a soupçon of resistance, can do that to a man. Natalie wasn’t looking her best that morning. She had forgotten her make-up, the walk to school had flattened her hair and she had holes in her tights. It reassured him: she looked altogether approachable.

  ‘The truth of the matter is,’ she said, ‘I think my husband’s left home.’ She had to say it to someone. And so, at last, it became true.

  She wouldn’t go with Angus for a coffee. She said she had too much to do. He went all the way back to Waley and Rightly, estate agents, of which he was a director. Their offices nestled at the foot of Gurney Castle.

  Cough, Cough, Wheeze, Gasp

  Natalie went to the bank, to ask for a loan.

  The bank manager, by name Jasper Jones, was a strikingly good-looking man in his early thirties, who would presently be moved to an urban branch and no doubt end up at Head Office. In the meantime he jogged along country lanes with as much confidence as if they had been dry streets, dodging cow pats and slurry pools, knowing his life would not include them for ever. On a better day Natalie would have attempted to charm him, raising her dark-lashed blue eyes to his, and so forth, but not today.

  ‘I would like to give you a loan, Mrs Harris,’ he said, ‘but there is no way I can, I’m afraid. If you came to me with any kind of security, or these days even without it but with some workable scheme for making money out of nothing, then of course I would look favourably upon a request to borrow. But just money out of the blue, for groceries? No. Social security does that kind of thing. I suggest you get down there before the office closes for lunch. Your house is not a security, as you may have thought, but a liability. There’s an Inland Revenue bill outstanding: did you not know that? Of some forty thousand pounds – the tax people move fast. They can sell the house over your head, and at a lot less than market value, if they so choose.’

  ‘They can’t do that. I live there,’ said Natalie. Now actually she was right, and she could have had a stop put on a compulsory sale through the courts, but who was there to tell her that? Not the bank manager. Harry had fraudulently built up an overdraft of eighteen thousand pounds, against a non-materializing million-pound order, and how else but by the rapid sale of the house was the bank manager to get his money back, after the Inland Revenue had taken their cut, and get to Head Office in the end. I am not saying this went through the front of Jasper Jones’ mind, but it sure as hell passed somewhere through the back, enabling him to reply, firmly:

  ‘They can and they do. They can sell everything except personal belongings, and I can assure you there’s not much they see as personal, except a toothbrush or so. There is nothing wrong with accepting social security, Mrs Harris. A quarter of the country now depends on it, one way or the other. Just 30 per cent of the population works: the other 70 per cent live off their earnings.’

  ‘But once you’re on it,’ asked Natalie, ever simple, ‘how do you get off?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Jasper Jones. ‘That’s the problem. And by the way we don’t encourage dogs in the bank. He seems very restless. Is he safe?’

  ‘He’s hungry,’ said Natalie.

  Natalie went to the DHSS offices and there saw one of their senior clerks, a single lady in her forties, who had gone straight from school into the social services and risen through the ranks by virtue of her competence and administrative abilities. Natalie could have described her by her rather heavy tweed suit and the long green scarf she wore knotted around her neck for warmth and shelter, but not by her face, which was unexceptional to the point of anonymity. She was professionally kind and considerate but felt, herself, that the sooner her clients (as she was now taught to call them) learned to stand on their own two feet, the better. Her name was Mary Alice Dodson, and I (Sonia) have crossed her path several times, one way or another. I hate her for her self-righteousness. Natalie didn’t understand that she was hateful, and thought her perfectly pleasant. But then she saw herself as a supplicant, and not someone with rights. What a battle I was to have, raising Natalie’s client-consciousness!

  Mary Alice Dodson, having taken down a great deal of information about Natalie, said, in the kind of tone that can be construed as reproachful:

  ‘So what it comes to is that you have no family
you can turn to. Your children are without the normal aunts, uncles and grandparents. You’re very much alone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s no blame in it,’ said Mary Alice, enigmatically, ‘unless you’re prepared to take it.’

  I don’t want to be unfair to Mary Alice. All women are our sisters. She went potholing in the Cheddar Gorge as a hobby. She is underpaid and overworked like anyone else and is a virgin at forty-three. Some women are (a few) and there’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It’s just that Mary Alice does seem to feel it’s a woman’s fault if she finds herself in the kind of emotional and/or practical quandaries which afflict women who insist on consorting with men, and bearing their children, in an area of high unemployment. If they’d only keep their bodies to themselves, Mary Alice thinks, how much more cheerful and decent a place the world would be. Mary Alice’s hair is very coarse, straight and thick.

  ‘Now your husband has left, you are not anticipating an alternative live-in relationship?’

  ‘No. Are these questions necessary?’ Natalie shouldn’t have asked that.

  ‘I have to ask these personal questions,’ Mary Alice explained patiently to Natalie, ‘only in order to establish some kind of background. If you register it as an abuse of privacy try to understand our position. There are more and more people out there trying to take unfair advantage of a system which is breaking down already.’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask for money if I didn’t need it.’