Green Grass (6 page)

It is a boxer's nose, and it made Laura weak and breathless with longing when she first saw Inigo seventeen years ago, having bolted into his exhibition in Mercer Street in New York to escape a sudden summer downpour. Laura had been in New York for a year, studying film at NYU. She had another year
to go, and she was missing home like crazy. She even missed her brother. Laura was on her way home from a class on creating the defining moment in a plot. She felt low and despondent; New York was breathless and humid, her apartment had no air conditioning, and her workload was greater than she could bear. She had no one to talk to about it, her fellow students were all so determined, so untrammelled by crises of confidence. Laura had a sneaking feeling this course was not for her. But what was? The humidity today was extreme; she held her hair up as she walked to let any small movement in the air play on her neck. She had a headache and was halfway home before she realised she'd left her coat in the seminar room. A clap of thunder and the hiss of summer rain invaded her thoughts, and she ran for shelter.

Inigo Miller was twenty-one that summer, and still wondering what on earth he was meant to say to justify his being here. He felt a fraud, but was in fact a success. His degree show had been lifted straight from art school and transported here, and it had opened with a queue around the block. Jack Smack, a creepy British agent, had offered to represent him, and since selling his soul to this whip-thin smooth talker, Inigo had hardly slept or stopped to draw breath, so constant was the round of interviews, meetings and exhibitions. Inigo made the most of
every minute, convinced that he would be exposed as no big deal and shipped home at any moment.

Now he was talking to a smiling brace of Japanese art agents who smoothed their hair and nodded fervently when Inigo said he was thinking of taking his show to Tokyo.

‘I want to have everything turned upside down. To re-examine it all from the perspective of another culture will be fascinating. I like to challenge my own perceptions,' he was saying, his tongue in his cheek. He didn't take it all so seriously then. Planning an escape as soon as possible, he glanced longingly at the door and saw Laura. In fact, he saw the back of Laura standing in the open doorway, smoothing the rain from her hair.

‘Excuse me,' Inigo said to the Japanese. ‘There's someone I—' He didn't finish his sentence because he had already gone. It was late June, and the hot streets streamed and steamed from this torrent of rain, and the smell of wet leaves hung in the air at the door of the gallery, making Laura shiver with nostalgia for her parents' garden and her childhood.

Inigo stood behind Laura, admiring her shoulders, her hair – everything about the back of her suggested the front would be wonderful. He couldn't think of anything to say to her, and he was afraid she might suddenly dart out into the rain again, and be gone
without him seeing her face. The only thing to do was to go out and then come back towards the door and hope that if he smiled and said, ‘Hello,' a conversation might develop.

Laura, glooming in the rain and relishing feeling sorry for herself, paid little attention when someone brushed past her to leave the gallery. But then he came back, presumably because he had forgotten something, and Laura looked up from her contemplation of the torrent swirling by the kerb to see Inigo, wet but smiling and suggesting hopefully: ‘Hello, would you like to come and have tea with my Japanese agent?'

‘What sort of Japanese agent?' Laura asked, smiling now, unconsciously reaching up to unknot her hair, shaking it onto her shoulders, unable to stop herself gazing at him.

‘Successful, I hope,' said Inigo, grinning delightedly; it was easier than he had thought to speak, now he had started, and she was better, even better than he had dared hope from seeing only the back of her beautiful neck. Best of all, he hadn't missed his moment and watched her walk away without ever seeing her face. She was here, with him now. She was part of his success.

In the car Laura wonders if it's worth broaching the
dog thing, and decides against it. Inigo is sulking anyway, partly because he had not wanted to spend the weekend at Hedley's house, and partly because Laura still hasn't got a new washing machine, despite the old one having broken five days ago. The fact that one is to be delivered in the middle of next week in no way placates him, nor do the neat piles of laundry in his drawers and cupboards. Inigo is a control freak, and no washing machine to him equals a worrying decline in standards at home and the eruption of chaos.

Laura is half-relieved that none of Inigo's clothes were caught in the turquoise flood which killed the washing machine – he would be unspeakably angry. It would almost be worth it though, for the entertainment value of seeing him in frivolous beach blue. Inigo does not like to wear bright colours. Indeed, he only really likes dark green, and the odd streak of grey. He hates patterns, and Laura has come to notice that there is an element of
Star Trek
in the close-cut way he wears his clothes. She suspects that this predilection for polo-necks is fostered by his view of the low standards at home. Inigo knows that if he had shirts, he would not be able to persuade anyone to iron them for him. He has no intention of ironing them himself, so it is not worth having shirts. With some effort, Laura withdraws from her musings about
Inigo's laundry. It is time her mind became better occupied, but with what? For years now she has been looking after her family's interests and has forgotten how to have any of her own.

Inigo turns off the motorway and dark descends suddenly around them.

‘When will we be there, Dad?' shouts Fred, his voice raised too loud because he cannot gauge it with his music blasting in his ears.

‘Another hour,' Inigo answers, not hoping or expecting that Fred will hear him. He glances at Laura, but cannot see if she is awake in the soft dimness. He sighs and accelerates through the night towards Norfolk.

Laura had never expected that Norfolk, so much a part of her childhood, would become an important place to her again in her life. If she had thought about it at all, she would have imagined that her uncle's house, Crumbly Hall, would be sold when he died, and the place where she had spent her school summer holidays would become no more than a memory. She and Hedley both left for America before they were twenty, never thinking of looking back. Fifteen years later, Peter Sale died aged eighty-five and Hedley came back, leaving his university teaching in America, to live at Crumbly and run the small farm
there. He thought he would just do it for a year or two. An outdoor life on the north Norfolk coast seemed a bleak prospect for a newly divorced academic, but the change of pace was what he needed, and life lived according to the seasons suited him, and even soothed him as he struggled through the aftermath of his marriage. After four years at Crumbly, Hedley recognised that he would stay, and that he loved it now in a way he could never have imagined loving a place. Only Inigo's lack of enthusiasm stops Laura visiting him there more often.

Hedley sees the headlights approaching along the drive, swooping up and down, raking spindly branches with their gleam then diving down into ruts and potholes. He hovers inside the front door, not wanting to appear overeager by going out to greet them, but unable to return to the sitting room where Tamsin is watching an unsuitable film.

‘There's no such thing as unsuitable,' she snarled at him earlier, when he tried to suggest changing channels to the programme on the fruit flies and their habits. ‘And anyway,' she added, having watched five stony minutes of the nature programme, ‘your fruit flies are having sex and God knows what else. I don't think you've got a leg to stand on as far as suitable goes.'

Hopping from foot to foot in the hall, attended
by Diver, the Labrador, Hedley empathises with the dog's single-note whining, and can almost believe that his own ears, like Diver's, are cocked towards the door. He wouldn't be surprised to find himself drooling. It is lonely here in Norfolk with only a taciturn teenager and a devoted dog for company. Hedley never envisaged himself as a single man, but since his failed affair with a neighbour, he has been on his own, and quite honestly, he can't imagine anything changing now. Reflecting that it is time he got out more and spent some time with adults instead of pandering to Tamsin and complaining to Diver, Hedley opens the door to his sister and her family.

‘Inigo, Laura. Lovely to see you. Come in, come in.'

Laura hugs her brother, breathing deep as she steps away, loving the woodsmoke in the air, the hint of wet dog and the determined wafts of sweetness from a winter flowering jasmine scrambling up and over a plant stand in front of the fireplace in the hall.

‘Hello, Hedley. It's lovely to be back. I'd forgotten how much I love the smell here, and it never changes.' Laura smiles, taking off her coat and walking through towards the kitchen.

Inigo, behind her with a bag of groceries, mutters, ‘I hope you bought some wine, Laura. Hedley never
has anything decent to drink here, and I could do with something now.'

Hedley stays to greet Fred and Dolly, jumping back as if scalded when he puts his hands out to hug Dolly and encounters a slice of midriff complete with a diamanté tattoo below her belly button which reads
STIFF
.

God, she's becoming one too, he thinks despairingly. And last time I saw her she had plaits and still liked damming streams in the wood.

Dolly, chewing gum, her headphones dangling around her neck, dribbling a tune, gives him a long, expressionless look which makes Hedley want to shrivel to the size of a screwed-up pocket handkerchief.

‘Hello, Uncle Hedley,' she says in the same lobotomised monotone with which Tamsin addresses him.

‘Tamsin's in there.' Hedley points to the sitting room. Dolly spits her gum into the palm of her hand and throws it into the jasmine plant pot before vanishing into the sitting room. Hedley turns to Fred, braced for more of the same treatment, and is unnerved to find his nephew giving him a friendly smile as he crouches to stroke Diver.

‘Hi, Uncle Hedley,' he says cheerily. ‘Diver's looking well.'

‘Yeeess,' says Hedley slowly, staring at him, fascinated by his civility, slowly warming beneath the uncritical expression on Fred's face. ‘In fact, he's just become a father. I've been up at a friend's house looking at the puppies this evening,'

‘NO!' bellows Inigo, who has removed his jacket to reveal a snug green polo-neck in very soft, lightweight fleece material which reveals every bulge of his biceps and chest and makes him look as if he has just been beamed into the dimly lit medieval hall at Crumbly from Planet Zog. ‘On no account are you to take Fred to look at those puppies, Hedley. I will not have it.' Inigo paces about the room brushing invisible hairs off his sleeves and glancing venomously at Diver. ‘They'll all shed hair like that one there. How can you stand it, Hedley?'

Hedley ignores this, recognising it as Inigo's usual combative arrival. He will settle down when he has had a drink, but until then will prowl and scowl and find fault. Rather like a dog arriving at another dog's house, Hedley thinks, amused.

Fred assumes a hurt expression. ‘Dad, I hadn't even asked to see them, I hadn't even said one single word. I don't even know what kind of dog the mother is …'

In the kitchen, Laura leans against the Aga, enjoying the massaging effect its warmth has on her back.
This Aga has been part of her life since she and Hedley first came here aged thirteen, dispatched from Cambridge by parents turned tight-lipped by the incessant volume of music and the ceaseless litany invoked by Laura and Hedley which scarcely varied from, ‘I'm bored, when will you stop working and take us somewhere?'

Michael and Anne Sale, both immersed in academic research and uninterested in entertaining their children, sent them to Michael's half-brother in rural Norfolk. At the station they made a show of pretending to smile bravely, but in fact they were beaming in relief as they kissed their offspring and waved them off on the train, shouting down the platform, ‘Make sure Peter notices that you've arrived, and always offer to help.' Then the pair of them returned to the library and their papers, the burden of the children a weight lifted now for ten weeks.

As their teenage status demanded, Laura and Hedley sulked as far as the first change on the train, but then they looked at each other and simultaneously grinned.

‘We're having a new life now,' Laura whispered.

‘We can do what we like,' agreed Hedley.

Laura cannot forget her first sighting of the house. And every time she comes back, no matter what the time of day or year, or the state of her mind, the first
moment of seeing it gives the same lift to her spirits. It was a swooning July day, with flooding sunlight spilling across the fields and hedgerows as they drove from the station. Bumping down the drive, grey flint walls and mullioned windows reflecting wisps of cloud became visible through the dense foliage of the avenue of lime trees. And then the sea. Laura gasped as she saw its denim blue stretching beyond the house, seeming to be on top of it, but in fact separated from the gardens by a mile or more of marshland.

Uncle Peter must have been there with them, but Laura cannot recall him ever dispensing discipline or even food. Indeed, only vast effort and the assistance of a curling old photograph on the kitchen mantelpiece conjures his face for her at all, although she remembers his tall gaunt figure, leaning on a stick, his dog at his heels, gazing out across the early morning sea.

The mumbling kitchen radio bleeps the hour, and Laura pulls herself away from the Aga. Some raw potatoes have been left suggestively in a saucepan on the side. Laura pushes the pan across to the hot plate and reaches the photograph down. Peter was a mild man, an academic like Laura's father although he had chosen botany rather than history. Sixty-three when Laura and Hedley first went to stay with him,
he had never married. His passion was reserved for bird and plant life, and for walking on the marshes beyond his garden, where he would spend all day weaving through the maze of silver-laced creeks with the certain step of one who has known every ditch and treacherous drain all his life.