Green Grass Read online

  Laura raises her eyebrows at Cally’s roll-up. ‘But what’s the point of him treating you if this is what you do straight afterwards? You may as well save yourself the money and the journey and just get on with smoking at home.’

  Cally, coughing now because she has smoked almost the whole cigarette in three greedy drags, shakes her head. ‘No,’ she gasps. ‘No, I need to go because the fear stops me smoking until I’ve been, so if I go on Tuesdays, I only smoke until Friday at the latest then I stop for fear of Mr Ming.’

  Laura stops herself saying she doesn’t think that this is a very mature way to deal with addiction. Smoking is part of Cally; without it she is somehow diminished. The clanking bracelets as she delves into her bag, the hiss of the lighter, always a different one, embellished with feathers or cartoon stickers, glitter or tiny mosaics, and the trail of narrow half-smoked cigarettes which follow her through life are as much a part of her as her ready laughter and her flamboyant clothes. Today she is wearing a long fuchsia-pink velvet skirt and a lime-green and yellow striped jersey, between which a quantity of her midriff is visible. She grabs some of this exposed flesh, rolling it between her fingers.

  ‘I’m on my way to the gym. Look at this, I’ve got to do something about all this. Will you come with me?’

  Laura shakes her head. ‘No. I’ve got too much work, and I hate the gym. I’d rather just go for a walk than be chained to a treadmill.’

  Cally hadn’t expected her to come anyway. ‘Fine, fine,’ she breezes, ‘but I wondered if you and Inigo could come to supper next week. I want you to meet my cousin Gina. She’s divorced and predatory, and I love her.’

  ‘Yes, we’d like to,’ says Laura. ‘Inigo always loves a predatory female to flirt with.’ She breaks off, distracted by a telephone ringing.

  ‘I’m going, healthy living beckons.’ Cally waves, stubbing her cigarette out and departing with a clatter of bangles and maximum door banging.

  Laura swings around on her chair to the phone. It is Hedley.

  ‘I thought I’d catch you at the office, Laura, to put this idea to you.’

  ‘Oh, hi Hedley.’ Half-listening, Laura turns on the computer to check her e-mail; loud squawking sounds suggest that Hedley is in the hen run, and that he is upsetting the residents there. ‘Ow, get off you sodding bird,’ confirms this.

  Laura is distracted from her screen.

  ‘Hedley, why can’t you ever ring me from anywhere normal?’

  ‘I was going to, but Tamsin took the day off school saying she has an upset stomach and now she’s on the Internet looking for porn, and she knows much more than me about it, so she can bar me from sites I know she shouldn’t be looking at.’

  ‘How do you know she’s not doing her homework?’

  ‘Well, she asked me how to spell vibrator, and I don’t remember that being a word which came up very often in my O levels, do you?’

  An email from Inigo flashes onto her screen, commandingly flagged, Read me. Idly Laura scrolls down to it.

  ‘Oh well, she’s fifteen now, she’s bound to want to know all sorts of things like that,’ she says vaguely. ‘But what did you want to talk to me about?’

  Hedley coughs, as is his habit when nervous. ‘I wondered if you would like to have the Gate House. It’s been empty since Mrs Jenkins went into sheltered housing, and I thought if you all had it you could come for …’

  Laura’s head is about to explode. She has opened Inigo’s email and has been reading it while Hedley talks:

  Darling, I’m pulling Fall Back, I’m afraid, as Death Threat is mushrooming here and I’ve been offered a post on the board of the Met. It’s a position they’re creating for me of Artist In Residence. I don’t know if I can say no. What the hell – I don’t want to say no. It’s a year from September or October. Isn’t it great news? Email me back. XI.

  Laura moans low and angrily, more or less growling in fact, as a prelude to swearing.

  Hedley stops his sales pitch to shout at the hen behind him, ‘Oh, for God’s sake you stupid creature, what now? It’s not as though I’m sitting on you, is it? Oh! It’s not you making that noise? Christ, it must be Laura. How weird of you. Laura, is that you? What’s happened?’

  There are so many things in Inigo’s message that Laura cannot believe, her mind swims, and tears of rage prick her eyes. She blinks them away, and focuses on the first and least complicated point. The sodding Royal Parks people must be told. Thank God she hasn’t wasted any time over fruit nets. There is so much to do, including speaking to Inigo immediately.

  Laura stops moaning and says to Hedley, ‘I’ll have to get back to you. I can’t think right now, I’ve got to speak to the Royal Park keepers.’

  A cockerel crows next to Hedley’s ear, partly obscuring his cross words. ‘You’ve gone completely barking, Laura. Ring me tonight or the offer closes.’

  Oh God, now Hedley is behaving like Attila the Hun as well. What is it with all these men? ‘I will,’ she promises.

  ‘Good, because if you don’t want it, I’m going to put an advertisement in The Lady,’ he says, adding as an afterthought, ‘Do you think I’ll get a lady? Because I was thinking it might be the secret to finding someone to share my life.’

  ‘Well, if I take the house, I’ll help you look for a life partner,’ Laura promises, with half her attention on the computer screen. Hedley says goodbye and Laura returns to the email to give it her full attention. She begins to shake, and wants to cry, pressing her fingers hard against her eyes then looking again at the screen.

  The selfish creep-faced bastard,’ she mutters to herself. ‘Who does he think is going to pick up the pieces of all that negotiation over the park? And what about the children if he goes off to live in New York for a whole bloody year? And what about me? How come Inigo thinks he can make decisions that affect all of us without consulting any of us. Actually, I think I’ll do the same. I like the idea of a country retreat and Crumbly is the perfect place.’ She grins to herself, relishing the thought that Inigo will loathe it.

  The telephone rings again. It is Manfred the German art collector she and Inigo met with Jack in March.

  ‘Laura, I have been planning a new home for my collection and I want a piece by Inigo Miller to be the focal point,’ he says, delighted to have got her when he thought he would have to speak to that smarmy agent Jack Smack. ‘I’d like something three-dimensional. I expect Inigo would come and install it himself, nein?’

  ‘Yes, of course he will.’ Laura’s mind is whirring, wondering if she could persuade Manfred to buy Paper in the Park – or at least the paper bit of it.

  ‘Could we arrange a meeting to talk about it, please?’ Manfred rustles his diary expectantly.

  Laura looks out into fitful April sunshine over the blossom-strewn streets and offers a date next week. Manfred agrees, and Laura has a rush of adrenaline, reminding her how much she used to enjoy working. However, now she has a new list of priorities, and the first is to do what she wants to do instead of what Inigo wants her to do. Her big plans for getting everything in perspective should surely begin with a call to the stud pug, Cavolo Nero. The children will like that, and it will be good for them to have to take care of something themselves. And then on to Inigo to listen to his excuses and check a few details like when he’s bloody coming back to sort his mess out, and then … and then. Laura isn’t sure what then, but doubtless something will come to her. Perhaps she could take a short scriptwriting course? After all, she is a film school major, and she can’t have forgotten everything they taught at NYU.

  But all a short trawl into her memory reveals are flashes back to hot nights hanging out in the Italian bars below Washington Square, smoking and arguing about Tarkovsky. Personally, Laura never really saw the point of Tarkovsky and managed to fall asleep on three different occasions when taken to the Film Forum by a languidly handsome final year student called Bradley who smoked grass throughout the films while Laura stuffed popcorn and wished she hadn’t. She
put her uncool behaviour down to being English and unused to the twenty-four-hour existence of New Yorkers, but she always found that she was a little removed from the lives her fellow students lived. It was as if she were breathing on glass that would never splinter to allow her through into their world of getting high, going clubbing and falling in love. New York in the early 1980s was as wild and outrageous as you wanted it to be, but Laura remained slightly aloof. No matter how unzipped the parties, how swinging the weekends, she remembered to eat at least once a day and she wrote to Guy, long letters once a week.

  Guy, who still lives in Norfolk near Hedley. Guy who really loved her once. Until she met Inigo. Refusing to allow herself to think slowly and rationally, Laura dials Hedley’s number and, ignoring the background sounds of chugging engines and falling masonry (Hedley is demolishing a wall by backing his tractor into it), says, ‘Yes please, dearest brother, we’d love the Gate House. Thank you so much for offering it. Let’s talk about it properly later.’

  The thought of speaking to Inigo is creating a sick space in Laura’s stomach, so she deals with the Royal Parks first instead. They were clearly very worried by the project, as they accept the last-minute cancellation without a murmur. Hovever, Laura does not wish to let Inigo know this yet; she would like to think that he will suffer a little over his appalling behaviour. She looks around the studio for other distractions and is delighted to notice the unopened post on her desk, and also a very satisfying amount of dust on top of the computer. Gladly she bustles to the sink to find dusters and polish, and while she is at it, what about mopping the floor? It hasn’t been done for months, and still has a faintly purple tinge at the point where Laura had bumped into a trestle table upon which Inigo had created a multi-coloured mountain range using nothing more solid than heaps of powdered pigment.

  Mopping now, Laura can afford to hum. It is such an easy job compared with the task then, when the air and the whole studio had filled with rainbow motes, and anything damp burst into a smear of Technicolor as pigment settled on the kettle, in the sink and all over Inigo’s newly washed rubber boots and hood which he had been wearing while welding a steel plate to support the larger, lunar pigment landscape he planned to execute next. To be fair to Inigo, he hadn’t been very angry then, but he had also done nothing to help clear up the mess. Laura was forced to forgo the Private View party they had been invited to, and spent until eleven at night trying to get the place clean again. Inigo went to the party, and then on out to dinner.

  It is three o’clock by the time Laura surfaces from her domestic frenzy, and time to leave the studio to fetch the children. No time for traumatic telephone conversations. She locks up and departs, her chin set in defiance, if only Inigo could see it. The weather, not usually a prominent feature of London life, matches her mood as she waits outside Fred’s school gates. The troubled sky has formed a low wedge of cloud from which bad temper in the form of hailstones is suddenly released, pinging down onto cars, bouncing off the pavement and tapping vociferously on Laura’s windscreen. This is good, as it means none of the other mothers will come to talk to her. In her present frame of mind, to have to make sleepover arrangements, or hear how well someone else’s children are doing at violin, would be the last straw. Laura has reached a point where she only wants to hear bad news.

  Fred gets into the car scowling. ‘I hate school. Just because I made a small joke, a really small one and was showing Shane how to walk like Mr Stevenson.’

  This is just up Laura’s street today. ‘How does Mr Stevenson walk?’ She kisses Fred, a gesture he accepts without any acknowledgement at all.

  ‘As if his pants were wet,’ he rushes on, bursting with injustice. ‘I got detention at lunchtime and I couldn’t go to the drumming seminar. They had someone really famous and really old like The Beatles but not them and I wanted to get his autograph for Dolly.’

  Laura manoeuvres the car round to the girls’ school gates, where Dolly is waiting, head bowed. Her school coat is much too short, shorter indeed than it was this morning. Laura decides it is best not to notice this. Dolly has it draped around her rather than worn, so she looks like a bedraggled painting of a saint with smooth long plaits and her face pale, indeed mauve in the cold.

  ‘Guess what,’ says Laura, when Dolly has arranged herself in the back and they are heading through more hail for home.

  ‘What?’ says Fred, not looking up from the Nintendo magazine he is reading. Dolly doesn’t even pretend to be listening; she hunts in her bag for her mobile phone and begins punching in text messages to her friends.

  ‘We’re going to live at Crumbly,’ says Laura, mustering all the enthusiasm she can get into her voice and feeling like a children’s television presenter as she does so.

  ‘Cool, can I get a ferret? When are we moving? We’ll need our own dog, won’t we, Mum?’ Fred bounces up in the passenger seat, lit with excitement.

  Dolly wraps her coat more closely around her and announces in trembling tones, ‘You may be moving to Crumbly, but I am staying here to complete my education.’ She sniffs and turns her nose up, suddenly an ambitious student under siege.

  Laura laughs. ‘Oh, come on, Doll. It’s only the weekends, you know. You’ll both be going to school just as usual.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to school as usual. I want to leave London and go to a school in the country,’ says Fred. ‘Why can’t we just leave Dolly here with Daddy and move in with Uncle Hedley full time?’

  ‘Oh, we’re not living with him, we’re going to have our own house there. It’s the Gate House – it’s that cottage down towards the village.’

  Dolly unwraps herself and leans over towards her mother, astonishment causing uncharacteristic animation. ‘You mean that ruined hovel?’ she hisses scornfully. ‘You’re crazy, Mum. What does Dad think anyway? I bet he doesn’t want to go there.’

  It is pleasing to Laura that Dolly’s early flair for language is still discernible, and she enjoys her pithy use of ‘hovel’, but otherwise she doesn’t much want to be drawn.

  ‘You’ll be in the dog house when Dad gets back,’ Dolly goes on scathingly. Then, more cheerfully, ‘Speaking of dogs, can we get one now Dad’s away and you’ve decided to do exactly as you please?’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Laura, not particularly meaning it but wanting to hear what it sounds like to almost agree to becoming a dog-owner. It sounds great, so she follows it up confidently and positively by saying, ‘Yes, why don’t we?’

  There is a stunned silence before Dolly and Fred begin their favourite debate over what kind of dog and what it should be called.

  Laura interrupts, ‘I’d like a pug. A black pug. There’s a stallion pug, or whatever you call them, called Cavolo Nero. Let’s see if we can get one of his, shall we?’

  ‘You can’t have a pug, it’s so embarrassing, and when we go to Crumbly, Diver will eat it,’ moans Fred, but Dolly claps her hands and says, ‘Mum, what a brilliant idea, and Dad can’t complain because they hardly look like dogs, they’re more like a bad joke, or a weird guinea pig. I know what, let’s say it’s a guinea pig. He’ll never know.’

  Telephoning Inigo that evening, Laura can scarcely focus on his iniquities, so many and various are the secrets she is keeping from him. She has spoken to Cavolo Nero’s headquarters and discovered a batch, no sorry, a litter of baby pugs in Suffolk, ready to go to homes in a few weeks. Due to a marriage bust-up, the breeder has two of the tiny darlings, presently known as Bruschetta and Aïoli, suddenly homeless.

  ‘It was the same old story,’ the breeder sighs, her voice neatly clipped to reveal maximum world-weariness. ‘The wife ordered them as a final revenge on the husband, and when he saw the bill, he stopped the cheque. Of course, she couldn’t afford to pay for them. Can you?’

  Horrified, convinced that this pug breeder has Mystic Meg qualities and can see into her head, much more clearly than she herself can, Laura gasps then recovers. ‘Oh yes,’ she says carefully, adding nonchalantly, ‘But remind
me how much they are again, could you?’

  ‘Seven for the dog, seven-fifty for the bitch – you can take your pick. I must go, someone’s come about the ferrets. We’ll expect you on Friday evening. G’dbye.’

  Panting, Laura puts the phone down. Dolly is next to her, hovering anxiously. ‘What did she say? Has she got any? Can we have one?’

  Laura sits down, sinking her face into her hands. ‘Dolly, they cost seven hundred pounds,’ she says in awed tones. ‘Can you imagine paying seven hundred pounds for a dog?’

  ‘Yes, easily,’ says her daughter, with all the insouciance of someone with exactly thirteen pence in her purse. ‘We can all contribute. He can be a quarter each of ours. No, maybe a third and leave Dad out. A third each is … is …’ The girl goes slightly cross-eyed with concentration, and Laura, noticing this and remembering it is not the first time she’s seen Dolly squinting, is stabbed with guilt that she has not made her an appointment with the optician.

  ‘A third each is two hundred and thirty-three pounds,’ says Fred, who has deliberately not been taking an interest because he wanted a manly Labrador. ‘Or if it’s a quarter each, it’s one hundred and seventy-five pounds.’

  ‘See?’ says Dolly, who doesn’t herself. ‘Not too bad really, is it?’

  ‘No,’ says Laura dryly. ‘Not when you consider that Dad is actually paying all the quarters.’

  The call to Inigo is briefer than planned because he has Jack with him and is downtown, walking along Mercer Street towards the gallery where they are meeting New York’s most revered and feared art critic, Gerry Lavender. Inigo is bullish, lapping up the attention and accolade, and enjoying being a star in New York. It is like speaking to a stranger. Laura does not try for long.

  ‘I’ve sorted out the Royal Parks about Fall Back and it’s all fine. What do you want me to do with all that torn-up paper though? It’s in the fancy dressmaker’s studio in bales, but someone might want to rent that before you’re back. I think I could get Manfred, that German collector, interested in it.’