Green Grass Page 11

  ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’ says Inigo with so little interest Laura would like to throttle him with the telephone wire. If he notices this lateral thrust at his absence, Inigo ignores it. ‘That’s great, babe, do what you like with the paper. I’m glad you’ve called now because I want to know what you think of the Met’s offer?’ Inigo only ever calls her ‘babe’ when he is showing off, and doubly when he is in another country showing off by telephone.

  ‘I don’t know, Inigo. I don’t know what to think about it. It’s all quite removed, you know—’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m glad we’ve talked, babe. I’m gonna give the story to Gerry Lavender to break. I’d better fly babe, I’m almost in the gallery and Lavender is here … Hey, Gerry, good to see you, man. Listen, babe, we’ll talk later, OK?’

  The telephone clicks and he is gone. It takes Laura a moment to realise that tears of rage and frustration are pouring down her face. Dolly and Fred glance up from the television and see her crying. At once they rush over, spreading their arms, engulfing her.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mum, he’ll be back soon.’ Dolly strokes her mother’s hair, then her cheek.

  Fred wraps both arms round her waist and squeezes; she laughs, breathless.

  ‘Mum, you’ll feel so much better when we’ve got a dog, you just won’t believe it. You’ll probably never cry again,’ he says.

  Laura wipes her eyes, and blows her nose on Dolly’s handkerchief. ‘I think you’re right,’ she says, and smiles.

  Chapter 9

  Inigo always makes an unpleasant fuss about having supper at Cally’s house. On the way there this evening he is bolshy: jet-lagged because he arrived back in London this morning, cross because his reception here was not rapturous as it had been in New York.

  ‘You could have told me you were going to be at home not the studio,’ he grumbles, flinching exaggeratedly as Laura, who is driving, swerves the car while attempting to put her seat belt on.

  ‘I didn’t know. I had to be at home because Dolly had a sore throat and needed to go to the doctor. I didn’t know she was going to be ill until this morning.’ Laura is patient only because she is preoccupied, negotiating across slow traffic, weaving through side streets across north London to Maida Vale and the canal.

  ‘Why can’t she live in a normal house?’ Inigo is too big in his bulky coat for Cally’s narrow gateway covered by a collapsing arch of roses, not out yet but showing sharp leaves. He squeezes through, dislodging a shower of water droplets which scatter behind him. Cally opens the door to greet them and a hot smell of spices and cooking bursts out, hitting the chilly spring air.

  ‘Inigo, I’m glad you’re back safely.’ She kisses him, winks at Laura and follows them onto the houseboat. At the far end of the long narrow room, a table is laid and beyond it, curled up on the sofa with Hybrid, Cally’s large ginger cat, is a woman wearing a black lace dress which clings like a stocking to her body. Inigo, poised to make an unpleasant remark about lentils, Cally’s most frequently offered dish, changes his mind and his expression.

  ‘This is Gina, my cousin,’ says Cally, wiping her hands on her skirt before pouring drinks.

  Gina is a big hit with Inigo, and by the time they are all sitting at the table eating Cally’s curry, Inigo has discovered some of the more intimate details of her divorce (she never really loved him, so when he turned out to be gay, although it destroyed her ego, her heart remained intact), and also that she lives very near them in Hampstead.

  ‘It’s great, Laura,’ he enthuses, forking tarka dal to his mouth with no hidden agenda at all. ‘Gina lives in that house with the silver front door.’

  ‘We drive past it every day to school,’ says Laura. ‘The children will be fascinated that we’ve met you – they are always fantasising about who lives there.’

  Gina looks alarmed. ‘I’m very sorry, I don’t think they’ll be at all pleased that it’s only me and not a famous pop star.’

  ‘But at least you’re on television,’ says Cally encouragingly, and tells Inigo: ‘Gina is the presenter of a talk show called In the Daytime.’ Inigo is a little crestfallen to hear this, and Laura deliberately drops her fork to hide the choke of laughter that bubbles up in her as he chews his rice and reassesses Gina.

  Gina swallows half her glass of wine in one gulp. ‘Yes, I’m on telly, and I was married to a performer, so I suppose I’ve earned the right to paint my house a silly colour.’

  Into the general laughter, Inigo starts talking about music, and then he says, with a self-deprecating cough, ‘But of course my only claim to fame is through Leonard Cohen.’

  Laura rolls her eyes. If she had a pound for every time she’s heard this story, she’d definitely have enough to buy a pug outright by now.

  Gina’s eyes are big; she tucks her hair behind her ears and blinks. ‘How come?’ she asks obligingly.

  ‘He slept with Suzanne from that song,’ says Cally, who has heard it too, getting up for another bottle of wine.

  ‘Ooh,’ says Gina, eyeing him respectfully. ‘Did she feed you tea and oranges?’

  ‘That come all the way from China?’ Laura adds, swinging her legs under the table, wondering why everyone always asks exactly the same questions about bloody Suzanne.

  ‘What did she look like?’ Even Cally, who’s heard about it at least three times before, is interested.

  Inigo hugely enjoys this anecdote. If truth be known, it is much more enjoyable now as a story than when it was happening. Suzanne was fifteen years older than him, and although the sex was great from his point of view, he couldn’t help worrying at the time that if you’ve had Leonard Cohen, a twenty-year-old from Manchester might not cut much ice.

  ‘She looked great,’ he says. ‘I met her at a roller disco in the San Fernando Valley when I was visiting UCLA. She had long shaggy curly, dark hair and she wore tight jeans, like those ones Laura’s wearing now.’

  Laura obligingly gets up and does a pirouette, making a hideous face at Cally as she twirls. Both Cally and she dissolve giggling and pour each other more wine.

  Gina is still in the song. ‘And you spent the night for ever, but did you know she was half crazy?’

  ‘She wasn’t crazy, she was chilled out; she had a great figure, and dark skin, and a bit of a beaky nose. She was thirty-five then, I suppose, and she was looking for some fun.’

  ‘Blimey, says Gina. ‘It sounds just like another Leonard Cohen song to me.’

  ‘Is she dead yet, do you think?’ Laura muses.

  Inigo, slightly annoyed, protests, ‘No, of course she isn’t, she’d only be about sixty. I haven’t read anything in the papers anyway, have you?’

  There is a silence while they all think of Suzanne drawing her pension. Gina breaks it, getting up with a smile, pulling the clinging fabric of her dress away from her stomach.

  ‘I’m going to be the party pooper,’ she says. ‘All that talk about rock legends has left me feeling exhausted and ancient.’ She blows a kiss across the room towards Laura and Inigo. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ she says.

  Chapter 10

  All the windows of the car are open to the bottom as Laura, Dolly and Fred head north-east out of London on Friday afternoon. Inigo is not with them. His displeasure about the Gate House has not had a chance to ignite, as Manfred turned up with a large cheque for a piece of artwork that doesn’t exist.

  ‘How could you not have told me he was coming?’ Inigo had yelled the day before, in the studio loo, where he marched Laura when Manfred arrived.

  ‘I forgot.’ Laura crossed her arms and tapped her toes and said, ‘Anyway, you’d better get out there and start talking fast. You can do something with all that paper.’ An arrested expression crossed Inigo’s face. He pinched her cheek.

  ‘Yes, I can,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s papier mâché. I want to create the cramped space around a man in a commuter train reading a newspaper. Yes, I know how to do it, I’ve been thinking about it for ages. Clever girl, Laura, clever girl.’
Stifling an urge to kick him, Laura smoothed her skirt and preceded Inigo back into the studio to make a fuss of Manfred.

  ‘It’s called Infill…’ Inigo, suave and confident, talked Manfred through the piece, and agreed to install it this weekend in Manfred’s new private gallery in Berlin.

  ‘Laura will come too?’ asked Manfred hopefully.

  ‘Maybe next time. She’s needed here at the moment,’ Inigo said, shaking his head regretfully.

  Laura is fed up with Inigo; he simply pleases himself and rides roughshod over her plans. He should be coming with them to help them move in this weekend, but when she told him she’d taken Hedley’s Gate House, he glared at her in disbelief, then said, ‘Well, if you’ve decided that without me, then you can sort it out without me.’ Laura’s crossness is fuelled by the sneaking knowledge that she has not behaved particularly well herself. She orders a taxi to take him to the airport without mentioning the pug.

  An unexpected few days of balmy sunshine have brought spring onto the streets in a bustle of fullblown blossom and people in T-shirts and bare legs. In the car, Laura swigs water and succumbs to blandishments from her offspring to stop for ice cream. The traffic is intense and slow, overheating in the lazy warmth of the afternoon. A black car with brown tinted windows screeches up next to Laura, thumping with reggae music, the driver leaning into the windscreen, wraparound dark glasses obscuring his face.

  ‘How can he see out at all?’ Laura marvels. ‘It must be pitch dark in there with the windows that colour. Why on earth doesn’t he take his sunglasses off?’

  Fred clamps his hand to his brow and rolls his head against the seat to look at his mother. He is grinning fondly. ‘They’re not sunglasses, Mum, they’re shades, and he can see fine because tinted windows only look tinted from the outside. Inside they’re normal.’

  The traffic surges forward and Laura indicates to cross the final roundabout before the motorway and freedom. ‘How do you know?’

  Fred shuts his window and slides down in his seat as the car gathers speed. ‘I just know. Do you like this music, Mum, or shall we put some of yours on to help you stay calm?’

  Laura is white-knuckling the steering wheel, her jaw clenched in a rictus already and they’ve only just hit the motorway. She attempts a laugh, but it comes out all pitiful, and more of a bleat. ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’m much better now than I was. I’m used to going fast.’

  Dolly and Fred look at one another, but say nothing. All are remembering the last long-distance journey Laura and the children attempted without Inigo. In January Laura had decided to take them to Cambridge to visit her parents. It was a chilly, ill-lit day, with fog creeping along the edge of the motorway, billowing from time to time across all three lanes. For no reason she could think of, Laura had become hopelessly alarmed at the wheel, terrified by the proximity of vast lorries thundering past her, hypnotised by their spinning wheels and gasping pressure brakes, as she tried to hurry in the slow lane. Dolly had been forced to lean daringly forward between the seats to reach the radio and change it to soothing classical music, as the pulse of Fred’s favourite station had Laura yelling, ‘Quick, quick, I can’t cope, it’s all too fast, even the music. Put something soothing on, or I might crash the car.’ Feeling rather than seeing their horrified expressions, she attempted to gloss over this possibility. ‘I’m sure I won’t, don’t worry. But I might, I just might.’

  Fortunately, because she was craning to see the next service station, Laura failed to hear Fred’s background muttering of, ‘But we’re only doing sixty, for God’s sake. What’s your problem, Mum?’ She managed to retain a semblance of control until the car was parked by the air-fill pump of a petrol station and she was sobbing into her phone at Inigo, ‘You’ll have to come and get us, I can’t drive any further, it’s too scary.’

  ‘Laura, Laura, come on, you can do it, you know you can.’ The familiar sound of Inigo’s voice as much as his words was reassuring, and Laura felt steadier. Then a very young blond boy, driving a brand new silver Land Rover, had approached.

  ‘Are you lost? I can help you, I work on the Formula Three track over there. I know my way around here like the back of my hand.’

  Dolly rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t believe it. We’re getting sympathy from racing drivers now. This is so uncool. What is Mum like?’

  ‘It’s getting worse,’ hissed Fred. ‘She’s asking him to let us follow him.’

  Dolly shook her head. ‘No. She can’t. She wouldn’t.’

  But she could and she would. Laura, beaming relief, drove smoothly and calmly the last thirty miles through the fog to Cambridge escorted by a twenty-year-old racing driver and two cringing children. Inigo had laughed and pulled her into his arms when he heard.

  ‘I love the way you have no shame,’ he cried, kissing her forehead. Laura couldn’t see what there was to have shame about; she was just glad to be alive.

  Since that occasion, when she can be bothered, Laura has been practising breathing exercises and Pilates, and she is sure they will both help immeasurably. She has also taken the precaution of purchasing a tape version of White Fang, the only choice, among various hip and thigh diets and Engelbert Humperdinck collections, in the petrol station that could appeal to all three of them. She, Dolly and Fred thus arrive at Pug Paradise, the beguilingly named home of Cavolo Nero’s offspring, emotionally shattered and a little afraid of canine capabilities.

  It immediately becomes clear that Pug Paradise, a small pink house surrounded by fields of sheep outside a sleepy town in Suffolk, is a very wonderful place. Laura peers through the wicket gate and up a path between white narcissus, red tulips and little blue grape hyacinths to the kitchen door. Without having met her, Laura longs to have the life that Marjorie the pug owner leads almost more than she wants the pug itself.

  Marjorie greets her, a dead pigeon swinging in one hand as she comes through the gate, the other positioned ready to shake with Laura.

  ‘Hello there. I’ll just feed this to the ferrets and then we can start. You two could do with a bit of fresh air, couldn’t you,’ she says, nodding at Dolly and Fred as they climb out of the car stretching and yawning, rubbing tired eyes before they can compose themselves and grunt a greeting. Marjorie clearly has little truck with teenagers, and folds her lips in disapproval, looking at them measuringly. ‘Why don’t you come and help me give this bird to the ferrets. Can either of you pluck?’

  ‘I can,’ says Fred, rushing to catch up with Marjorie who is climbing steps up to a thatched barn and a line of dog kennels. ‘How many ferrets do you have?’

  Dolly holds back, scowling at her mother. ‘Why are we looking at ferrets? We’re here for the pugs and I want to get to Hedley’s in time for Top of the Pops:’

  Laura has got out her camera and is photographing the flower beds, and a trio of enchanting lavender-coloured hens who are pecking about next to a tub of primroses. The scene is exquisite and desirable. She has to breathe deeply to prevent herself from panting with longing.

  ‘This is so lovely. I think we should try and do something like this at the Gate House. It’s got a garden, I think.’ Then, as Dolly’s remark sinks in, she lowers the camera, saying anxiously, ‘But you know we aren’t staying with Hedley, don’t you? We’ve got our own place now. Hedley has lent us some old beds and we’re moving in tonight. And I’m afraid we haven’t got a television.’ Laura braces herself for the wrath of Dolly to engulf her like a tidal wave, but nothing happens. She realises she has instinctively closed her eyes and hunched her shoulders for impact. With no little effort she shakes off the fear of teen rage and quickly stands tall, wiping her hands over her face and assuming an alert, Blue Peter-ish expression, very glad that Marjorie is off doing something gruesome with ferrets and hasn’t seen her being idiotic.

  Dolly’s fury has been curbed by the appearance of five teeny pug puppies on the lawn. ‘Look, Mum, have you ever seen anything so sweet? Please, please can we have one? You can have all my lunch mon
ey for next term and the one after to pay for it.’

  Laura can’t help thinking that at two pounds a day, the lunch money isn’t going to make a lot of headway into the gigantic pug debt they will have if she succumbs. Dolly is on her knees beside the puppies and they are climbing over her, wriggling and snuffling, yapping their delight. Two are jet black, and in the evening sunlight they gleam exotic and irresistible, while the three brown ones (known as fawn, Laura remembers reading) are a blur of soft cuteness. Tears start at Laura’s eyes. She wipes them away as Marjorie and Fred approach, Fred carrying a chocolate-coloured ferret.

  ‘Mum, this is Vice. Marjorie’s husband rescued her from Budgen’s car park and they’ve taught her all sorts of tricks and she doesn’t bite like Precious and if you get a pug, couldn’t I have this dear little ferret – please, Mum, please.’

  Laura puts both hands behind her back, determined not to be bitten by this creature. Her thoughts stray to Inigo, and how much he is annoying her at the moment. Marjorie looms, a brisk, kindly presence, with a good, no-nonsense approach to life, illustrated by the one short conversation Laura has had with her. Marjorie would never stoop to using animals as a tool to defy her husband; Marjorie would never allow herself to be blackmailed by her children.

  Laura coughs, and gingerly reaches to stroke the ferret. ‘Slow down, Fred, we need to think about all this very carefully.’

  Marjorie rests a hand on her arm and whispers importantly, ‘I must tell you, your son is very gifted with vermin. Very.’ She blinks, and her watery gaze slides back to Fred. ‘I don’t often like to recommend ferrets to children, but he is exceptional.’

  Reflecting on what a simple and effective ploy it is to praise a child to its mother, Laura nods and almost agrees to the ferret. With an effort she manages instead to say, ‘Yes. Well, let’s see when we’ve talked about the pugs. Which are the ones needing homes?’