A Rural Affair (18 page)

We had gone to Cornwall once and he’d hated it. ‘I don’t
get it, Poppy. I’m sorry, I just don’t. A ham roll on a freezing rock with a flapping
Telegraph
?’

I’d seen only my baby in the sand, little Clemmie, gazing in rapture as a minute sand crab shifted sideways down the beach
at speed. Later, building a small castle; building poignant memories too. Mind you, I also remember my husband’s skinny white
legs protruding from a towel and his clenched expression. It was the look of a man controlling himself in impossible circumstances.
So off we’d gone to Majorca the following year, and Phil had been happy and I’d once more retired to my head. So much so that
once, in a restaurant in Palma, when Phil asked me what I wanted, I said I’d have a pasty.

I’d have to keep my eye on Jennie.

The next day, I went to see Dad. There wasn’t any real need to ring, he was always there, doing what he always did, and was
always pleased to see me, but I gave him a call anyway before I pitched up. He was there. And he was pleased too.

I found him lunging a yearling in the field behind his cottage: a nervous young filly trotting round him in circles on the
end of a long piece of rope. My father’s face was a picture of rapt concentration, the only time it looked like that, aside
from when he was pricking out seedlings in what passed for his greenhouse. Yes, young things: fillies, seedlings, children.
I’d been lucky. And only my gran had known that when Mum died. Most people had looked at one another in horror: Peter Mortimer,
with a child of eleven! A little girl! But Gran had known about his nurturing heart and had no truck with people who’d told
her she should step in and take over. She lived reasonably close by and had popped in regularly – Mum’s mum, this is – and
if she’d ever been appalled at the chaos, the confusion, the endless saddles and bridles slung over chairs, the hastily opened
tins of beans for tea, she never said. Might have quietly cleaned up, but, looking out of the window as she washed up, would
have seen me perched in front of Dad in the saddle of some huge hunter, or with him in the barn filling hay nets or water
buckets, which could easily descend into a water fight in the yard, both of us running in drenched. I was always pretty grubby
and oddly dressed, but I was always with him: beside him in the rattling old horse
lorry off to the sales – never a seat belt and probably never a tax disc either. Dad wasn’t dishonest, but if he was up against
it money-wise, which he always was, he sailed fairly close to the wind. And Gran would have left us to it. Stayed for tea
– more beans – and gone away knowing I’d probably be awake until Dad went to bed. Knowing too that I didn’t always make it
to school if we’d been up all night with a mare foaling, that I drove around the farm alone in a horse box with hardly any
brakes, but also that I appeared to be thriving. That I was getting a different sort of nourishment.

Calling it a farm was pitching it high, I thought with a small smile as I stood at the edge of the flat, windy field, watching
the filly, who, nostrils flaring, all her instincts telling her this was not right and she shouldn’t be on the end of this
rope, was nonetheless falling for the patience and kindness of the man on the other end. The field was one of six, all patchy
and overgrazed, which together totalled thirty acres. A smallholding, really, with a cottage, a few tumbledown outhouses and
a barn, which Dad had personally divided into stalls. All the stalls were crib-bitten and crisis-managed, held together with
bits of plywood and binder twine, but they were scrupulously clean and the occupants looked happy enough. Glossy, healthy
and relaxed, rather as, years ago, the young occupant of the cottage had been: thriving on benign neglect.

‘What d’you think?’ Dad called softly. He’d slackened the rope and was walking towards her, stealthily winding the rope in
loops around his elbow as he went until he was beside her.

‘Lovely,’ I said quietly, walking across. I reached out a cautious hand, making sure she’d seen it first, to stroke a silky
chestnut neck. ‘Is that the first time you’ve lunged her?’

‘Second. Might put a blanket on her tomorrow.’

I smiled. Received horsey wisdom suggested one might not do this until the age of three, but Dad had his own method of breaking
horses, which involved treating them like adults from an early age. He’d adopted the same policy with me. He’d never turned
a hair at teenage indulgences, never joined the clucking mothers who endlessly dissected their children’s love – or rather
sex – lives; indeed he had no problem with my sexuality at all. What he did mind very much, though, was whose car I got into.

‘How long have you been driving?’ he’d quiz some surprised seventeen-year-old boy, probably Ben, as he came to pick me up.

‘Um, about three weeks, Mr Mortimer.’

‘Shift across and let Poppy drive, would you?’

‘OK,’ the boy would say, stunned. And he’d shift, because of course I’d been driving untaxed cars since I was twelve.

There again, as many of the mothers muttered, it was all very well. He was lucky with me. I hadn’t rebelled. I hadn’t had
sex at thirteen, didn’t get pissed on a regular basis and I hated smoking. Now if Peter Mortimer had had our Chloe, for instance,
they’d say, rolling their eyes … and Dad would smile, incline his head and agree. Privately, though, he’d wonder whether,
if our Chloe had been around enough whisky and overflowing ashtrays in her formative years, had sipped Famous Grouse straight
from the bottle and been sick, taken a puff of Capstan Full Strength and been sick again, and not had the rules and regulations
about such things almost planted in her shoulder bag, she would have been in so much of a hurry. Would it have been such a
thrill?

Jennie’s mother, Barbara, hadn’t been like that: quietly tutting and waiting in the wings for Peter and Poppy to come a
cropper. Barbara, like Gran, had been discreetly helpful, taking me and Jennie to Boots and letting us fill a basket each:
a bit of make-up, shampoo. ‘You’ll want some conditioner now, Poppy.’ Quietly popping in some STs – ‘For your drawer, by your
bed,’ she’d explained. Things Dad really wouldn’t have a clue about.

So yes, we’d had a bit of a support network. But so subtle and considerate you’d hardly know it was there, like a cobweb.
When some busybody in the village had suggested Social Services look at the state of our bathroom, which at that point not
only had a whisky optic on the wall so Dad could top up his glass in the bath, but also some guppies of mine living in the
tub, Barbara and Gran had pointed out, metaphorically rolling up their sleeves, that it was summer, and Peter and Poppy swam
in the river every day, so what was the problem? The busybody backed off and the fish stayed a couple more weeks until Dad,
half-cut, accidentally pulled the plug out. I remember being distraught and Dad couldn’t have been more sorry; but then, he
was always sorry after he’d been drinking heavily. I make the distinction heavily, because Dad always drank, it was just that
sometimes he drank a bit more than usual. If truth be told, he was probably always faintly sloshed after midday, but so amiable
and jolly no one really minded. He never got to the abusive or slurring, embarrassing stage, because when he got too tight
he simply fell asleep wherever he happened to be. He’d wake up flat on his back in the garden, or on a sofa, or beside one
of his mares in a stable. Then he’d blink a bit, look faintly surprised at his surroundings and say, ‘Right. Must crack on.’

These days I doubt I’d have been allowed to stay with him, I thought, as we walked the filly back to her stable. Yet would
Dad have parked me with Gran while he went cycling in
Majorca? Or, OK, hunting in Ireland? No, he would not. If he went to Ireland I went too, whilst the lad down the road did
the horses. The one and only time I didn’t accompany him was when someone tipped the school off that I was about to have my
annual day’s holiday at the Newmarket sales. Dad, rebuked by my teacher, had sheepishly gone alone. He’d been very late picking
me up. I remember waiting on the school steps, getting nervous. Then panicky. Dusk had gathered. No mobile, of course, and
my mouth had lost all its moisture. I had him dead in a ditch. I started to cry, which turned into hysterics. By the time
Dad arrived, I was shaking with sobs, and even though he was beside me, holding me, I couldn’t stop. Wave after wave broke
over me, all to do with a terrible sense of loss. Because despite Dad being so brilliant, and despite the fantastic support
of Gran and Barbara, I’d lost my mother. And I didn’t have siblings. It would be too convenient to hope I’d come out of that
unscathed. I was left with an impenetrable fear of being alone.

The only time I felt like that again, that terrible rising panic, just the tip of it even, was when I put down the phone to
Ben on the stairs in Clapham. When he told me he’d met someone in New York. I’d recognized the signs. Felt them bubbling within
me, as, with a trembling hand, I’d put the brush back in my nail varnish. And it had scared the living daylights out of me.
I’d acted fast.

Gran was long dead now, though, and the support network had dwindled with her. Now it was my father who was very much alone.
Not that it bothered him. Left to his own devices he went his own sweet, shambolic way. I tried not to show my despair as
we left the filly in her immaculate stable, crossed the yard and went through the peeling back door, which Dad had to shoulder-barge
twice, and into the kitchen.
Raddled blue lino curled on the floor, bare in patches, and the Formica surfaces – what you could see of them for empty tins,
cartons of cigarettes and plastic milk bottles – were chipped and pitted. Plates on the side by the sink looked suspiciously
clean but then Dad put them down to be licked by the dogs, picked them up later, and later still – I swear this is true though
he pooh-poohs it – absent-mindedly put them away thinking they were clean. Even if things were washed, pans and oven trays
were always black and crusty. All with what my dad – who, incidentally, barely had a day’s illness in his life – would call
an acceptable level of filth.

Upstairs the place smelled of ripe bachelor; downstairs of stale smoke, dogs and saddle soap. The sitting room – I poked my
nose in – was, as ever, a homage to the
Racing Times
and
Sporting Life
, pagodas of which tottered in every corner. I sighed and shut the door. It was probably no more chaotic than usual, but what
had seemed normal when I was growing up looked abnormal the more time I spent away from it. I went to the loo, which I won’t
tell you about, but then, to be fair, it got a lot of use. When Dad realized pulling the chain in the upstairs bathroom caused
plaster to cascade into the sitting room, he’d done the only sensible thing and put it out of action. Three years ago. I came
back and put the kettle on, quietly pleased I’d put my cleaning things in the back of the car. Dad reached for his whisky.

‘You look better, love,’ he remarked, eyeing me narrowly. ‘Much improved. I’m relieved.’ He moved
Horse and Hound
from a chair and sat down, rolling a cigarette on his knee. Mitch, his Jack Russell, jumped up on his other one, whilst Blanche
the beagle scavenged under the table. Elvis crooned softly in the background.

‘I am better. Completely.’

Dad raised his eyebrows.

‘Well, no, OK,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe not. It’s not that simple, is it? I’m still a widow and I’ve still got fatherless children.
But that terrible feeling of blundering around in a fog has gone.’ I sat down opposite him, still in my coat for warmth. ‘I
didn’t think I’d ever see my way out of that and I panicked. Then later, I think I just gave up. Like people do in the snow
eventually.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘It’s weird, Dad, but when he died, I felt pretty abandoned, I can tell you, even though
we didn’t have the happiest of marriages. Even though I didn’t really love him. I’d even got to the furious how-dare-he-leave-me
stage; quite normal, according to my doctor. But when I heard about his bird’ – Dad knew all the sordid details now – ‘it
was like a double whammy. Like he’d left me twice. There I was, thinking at least I was coping, plodding on, when all of a
sudden I was back at the starting line again. Miles behind it, in fact.’

Dad stroked Mitch’s coat and waited. He’d always known how to listen.

‘And the odd thing was,’ I stared up at the ceiling for concentration, for clarity, ‘I somehow felt I’d let
him
down. That it was all my fault.’ I came back, shook my head. ‘Ridiculous, really.’

‘Guilt,’ he grunted quietly, making a long arm to the tap and adding some water to his whisky. ‘And if you felt like that
with your tit of a husband, imagine how I felt that Boxing Day. When your mother was haring around trying to be all things
to all people as usual.’

It was said lightly but it struck me Dad’s burden of guilt must have been tremendous. And he’d never shown it. Oh, we’d cried
buckets together, great torrents of grief – Dad said he never trusted a man who didn’t cry – but he’d never saddled me with
the more complicated, adult feelings of
culpability. He was made of sterner stuff than me. Suddenly I felt rather ashamed of my recent little collapse in front of
my own children.

‘I suppose the only good thing that’s come out of it,’ I went on, feeling my way, ‘is that recently I haven’t felt so bad
about not grieving him enough initially. I sort of feel vindicated, if you know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ he said shortly.

We were silent a moment.

‘Anyway,’ I swept on, taking a great gulp of my coffee which was cold. ‘I’m not here to dwell on that. The thing is, he left
me some money.’

‘Did he?’ Dad said distractedly, reaching down to take something from the beagle’s mouth. ‘Well, that’s something. What have
you got, you little minx?’ This, not a reference to my financial gain, his commercial acumen being about as acute as mine,
but to Blanche the beagle.

‘What
has
she got?’ I peered as he removed something cream and pearly.