Inglorious (23 page)

He was staring at her, thinking of something to say. Determined to practise virtue in all its forms, Rosa reeled off pleasantries. She was digging in her store of remembered questions. It was a while since she had been so stubborn and polite. She said, ‘Well, you have a lovely house. How do you find it living here? Do you like it? How do you find the region? How did you find the house?’

‘Rosa,’ said Will, uncurling his big legs and setting his feet firmly on the floor. ‘I love it. We live in total bliss. You should try it.’

‘Any time, Will. Any time you feel like a house-trade, your
lovely farmhouse for a room with a view of the train tracks, just let me know,’ she smiled.

Will smiled back. ‘Sounds great. Just what we need, an away-break in the city slums.’

‘How old are your children? What are they like? Are you planning more?’ asked Rosa.

Will rattled off their ages. Rosa nodded profoundly and failed to commit any of them to memory. Meanwhile Will was explaining that they wanted more children. Another one at least. Maybe two. ‘It’s genuinely miraculous. You hear everyone talking about it, and you can’t possibly understand it, but then you produce this being, and after a few weeks you can’t imagine that they never existed before. It’s extraordinary. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s so much work, of course. The work is insane. We farm some of it out. We have a nanny who lives a few doors away. She must be about to leave now. But she’s here most of the day. That’s a great bonus. And we have people from the village who help. But you know, we never sleep. One of them sleeps through the night, the other wakes up; Eliza goes mad at dawn, you know, it’s crazy. But still, it’s extraordinary how much I love them all.’

He was still smiling, beaming with wonder. When people talked about their children Rosa smiled and looked intent, but it seemed to her as if they alluded to something hermetic. Still she nodded, batted a few more questions towards him, about the neighbours and the sense of community, a few more platitudes, a compliment on the tea which was making her long for a hit of coffee.

He was grateful she was making the effort. Later, she knew, he would be just as polite to her. ‘Oh, they’re wonderful,’ he said. He meant the neighbours, she thought. Rosa was nodding with conviction. Now, as Will said: ‘Yes, the neighbours, really great. Some of them are incomers too. It’s such a quiet valley, the Duddon Valley, where we are. By summer there are fewer tourists than elsewhere. And we’ve helped a bit with local events. It’s sublime’ – as Will continued, Rosa felt her expression
was becoming fixed, like a mask. ‘Sublime,’ she said. ‘How lovely.’ She nodded and smiled again. She couldn’t drop the smile for fear of losing it altogether. Will, she thought, I am quite sure that you are dear to the gods. They have poured blessings on your head. There was a pause and Rosa was hunting for something else to say when Will puckered his brow and said, ‘Rosa, I’m very sorry about everything that’s happened. About the death of your mother. And I couldn’t believe it when I heard about you and Liam. Neither of us could believe it.’ His expression was open; he looked like he meant it.

‘Well, thanks,’ she said.

‘We just wanted you to know that.’

‘Good of you,’ said Rosa. ‘But really, it’s fine. No need for sympathy. I was knocked back for a while, but now I’m fine.’

‘I have to say, you look a little strained,’ said Will. He was leaning towards her, he seemed to be thinking about putting a hand on her arm. But he didn’t. ‘You look like you haven’t been having the best time of it recently.’

But that was a funny thing to say.
Who ever had a best time?
How did you get a best time? Tell me where to go for a best
time
, she thought,
and I’ll be out of here in a flash
. But she stopped herself again.
Discipline
, she thought.
Gratitude.

‘Oh that’s because of a lot of other things,’ said Rosa. ‘Other stuff. You know, existential.’

‘No, really, you look very worn.’

He was sipping his health tea and looking pensive. He seemed to find it painful, personally painful, that Rosa was so mashed. She was sure he was a good man. She certainly had them both pegged as good people. Their mantelpiece displayed it, all those shots of community functions and smiling small children. They were virtuous and productive. She had known them for years. She had met them – she could barely remember when she had met them. A long time ago, it must have been through mutual friends. A party, in the days when life was a pattern of parties and everyone thought they were unique and possibly immortal. In those days no one thought much about
the essential unknowability of things in themselves,
an sich
and the rest. They hardly cared a jot if space and time were merely intuitions, and they hardly considered the
ens realissimmum.
If they thought about it, they talked it through over a beer, but in a detached way, as if it didn’t directly concern them. Mostly they drank and fell in love. They trusted the physical world, invested heavily in it. Judy and Will met during that period. She had known Judy first, yes, she remembered a few coffees with Judy early on, and she remembered something about Judy and Will meeting and becoming so compelled and excited by each other that Judy cried. Was that real? Or a disturbed echo of something else? She had always thought of them with affection, though distantly, people she semi-knew but liked. When they lived in London she and Liam had them round for dinner a few times a year. That was cosy, and then they met at parties, in large groups. It was the closeness of their scrutiny that was freaking her out. But if you lugged bags of unwashed breeches around the country, pursued by rapacious bank sharks, you had to accept it. Still she thought it was strange he wanted to question her so closely. For all he knew, she was truly mad. He was lucky she still had some of the carapace stuck to her.

‘It’s very kind of you to bother about it, but I really don’t much care what I look like,’ said Rosa, trying to shrug him off.

‘It’s not that I care what you look like,’ said Will. ‘I’m only concerned if this outer layer hints at any turmoil within.’ When he said turmoil, he stuttered. As if he hardly remembered the word. As if he was saying,
Poor Rosa, I am not fluent
in your dialect of crazy-mad.
Really he was quite at ease. He folded his hands in his lap and waited.

Briskly, she said, ‘Really, Will, I’m fine. I’ve just got a job, well at least, a good prospect of a job, after a period which I just devoted to nothing at all.’

‘We were all surprised when you just walked out of your career. We had you pegged as the first female editor of the paper!’ He was laughing.

‘Best thing I ever did,’ said Rosa, fiercely. First female editor? How little they had known her. But she didn’t want to offend him. There was an uncomfortable pause, and then Will said, again: ‘I just think you look, sort of, fried. Frazzed. Done for. I don’t know how else to express it.’

God freedom and immortality,
thought Rosa, looking at Will. The problem was, she didn’t believe in any of them.
What do you think Will about the categorical imperative?
Does it concern you at all?
Well, he acted well enough, and if Will’s life became a general natural law, she wouldn’t complain. Will was looking at her in a kindly way, expecting an answer. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she gazed across the room, glancing at the careful arrangements of lamps, rugs, country furniture in mahogany, books, magazines, papers, toys, the flowers in the vases and the paintings – a view of Coniston Water, a view of Skiddaw, now she looked. With an effort, she said: ‘Oh, I’m not that serious at all. Not serious enough to be any of those things.’

After Will’s opening, there was the re-emergence of Judy, who lifted her reddish neck, threw back her hair (released for the evening, flying around her face like a force of nature) and said, ‘Oh Rosa! It’s so nice to see you!’ Then the children appeared, and they were dazzling and exhausting. It was impossible to imagine spending more than a couple of hours with them, as Samuel kept shouting and slapping his hand on Judy’s knee, and talked a lot of child nonsense and tried to kick Leila who played with boxes except when she was crying because Samuel had kicked her, and Eliza the baby dribbled and sometimes cried. Rosa played with them and sometimes over the sounds of the children they tried to talk. Then Will started to cook, and Rosa said she would help Judy put the children to bed. In the process, she read Samuel a story about a boy who saw snow for the first time, which Samuel knew by heart already. Then Judy reappeared to kiss him goodnight and turn off the light. When the children were settled Judy told Rosa about the mothers’ group in the village, and how
Will thought it was unfair there wasn’t a fathers’ group and had proposed establishing one, but there were only a few couples with young children anyway. Most of the villagers were older, though they had all been welcoming and kind. There followed some stories about tractors and power cuts and the exchange of bacon and eggs and lifts to the playgroup. Then Judy said, ‘Of course you’d find the people I deal with deadly dull. If I wasn’t such an earth mother I would too, and there’s a side of me that knows I’ve completely lost my analytical faculties. If I ever had any! It’s amazing how it takes you. The first time you find the dugs and lactation thing actually quite bizarre, but the next time it doesn’t even seem odd any more. Do you want them?’

Rosa made a noise that sounded like benign coyness, and Judy laughed. ‘All about the right time, right place, of course?’ she said. And Rosa nodded again, smiling broadly, aware she wasn’t giving Judy much in return for all her generosity and charm.

‘Now, I want to show you your room, Rosa,’ said Judy. They passed along whitewashed corridors into a room with scruffy sofas arranged around an old slate fireplace, and piles of toys and books. ‘Where we really live,’ laughed Judy, and then into a room which had a long wooden table and a sculpture of an anguished naked woman in the corner. ‘Will made it,’ said Judy, and they stood in front of it for a few minutes while Rosa exclaimed in delight. ‘It’s me, when we were trying to get pregnant for the first time. Don’t I look depressed!’ ‘Mmm,’ said Rosa, leaning on the sound like a crutch.

‘A month later I found out, but when he modelled it, I really thought it would never happen.’ Judy turned, her eyes sparkling, and Rosa thought for a moment she was crying, but then Judy emitted another expansive laugh, and said, ‘Ridiculous! Quite neurotic. Chance would be a fine thing, to stop now!’ And you are, thought Rosa, like a conveyer belt, pounding out the human race. Forging it. They passed into Will’s study, which was crammed with careful clutter, books
piled on books, a computer with Post-it notes stuck round the screen, a leather armchair, a battered sofa with the stuffing spilling out, and a sculpture which seemed to represent a man drowning in mud. Rosa admired it, knowing it was another one of Will’s. Was this Will when Judy was failing to conceive, Rosa wondered? It was pretty good, when she looked more closely. Will was a modest Renaissance type, working a farm and loving his wife and kids and cooking and occasionally fashioning something from stone. He was far from talentless! And the house was charming. Every room, Judy was telling her, had been completely restored. Much of it Will and his sister had done together. The bedrooms were cluttered with children’s clothes and toys, and Judy and Will’s marital bed was a bright orange fertility symbol.

Rosa was reeling from the colours and scents and the general vibrancy, and her repetitions of ‘lovely’ were echoing along the corridor as they passed into another room, spartan and nearly empty. As Rosa admired the frilly farmhouse curtains and the pristine whitewash of the walls Judy turned and said: ‘Rosa, this is a complete secret, for the moment, because I’m not quite at three months, but it’s so wonderful to see you and I really want you to know – I’m pregnant again!’

Rosa was genuinely startled. A fine tally. Four children. And Judy barely thirty-five.

‘But that’s really it,’ said Judy. ‘I really can’t do any more.’

‘Hardly surprised,’ said Rosa, and it was the first truthful thing she had said for an hour. ‘Hardly surprised at all.’

And Judy laughed and patted her on the arm. ‘Literally, Rosa, I will go mad if I do another!’ Now Judy turned her head and walked again, drawing her along another corridor, past the sleeping brood – Judy with a finger raised to her lips – and then they passed into a cold wing of the house, where the wind seemed to rattle at the shutters.

‘We’re still renovating this part,’ said Judy. ‘But we’ve done this guest room’, and she pushed open a latched door to reveal another immaculate whitewashed room, with an iron bed and
a handsome iron fireplace, and an assortment of Lakeland prints on the walls. There were green jalousies across the windows. Judy walked across the room and flung them open.

‘You can’t see it,’ she said, gesturing into the blackness, ‘but this room has the most beautiful view of the lot. Tomorrow you’ll see. The fells are a brilliant red, and the sound of water you can hear, that’s the most gorgeous ghyll thundering down the slope, you’ll be able to see that too tomorrow. It’s exquisite. I wanted Will and I to use this room, but it’s too far away from all the children. You’ll be very glad of that when Eliza starts bawling at 4 a.m. Which she will, I assure you.’

Rosa put down her suitcase in the corner. There was a long mirror and a hat stand. There were some books on the windowsill.
Sons and Lovers,
Rosa noted. The complete works of Wordsworth. John le Carré. Some P.G. Wodehouse. They were educated but not showy. They didn’t stack up piles of Kant and Kierkegaard. There were fresh flowers in a vase on the bedside table, beautiful red and white flowers, she had no idea what they were. It was too much for Rosa. Feeling suddenly ashamed, she said, ‘Judy. I shouldn’t have come. You’re so busy with the children. And you put flowers in a vase. It’s so kind of you. But I really shouldn’t stay.’

Judy paused and turned, as if this was the frank admission she had been waiting for. She was stern and definite. Her face was puce, but her hands were steady. ‘Rosa. I won’t hear anything of the sort. You’re to stay as long as you like. I think it’s just dreadful, what’s happened. You have my utmost sympathy. I don’t know what happened between you and Liam, but I know there are always two sides to such things.’