Spiderweb (2 page)

The man and the two boys watched her come out of the bungalow. They saw her slam the door, march down the path, get into the car, roar the engine. The boys noted the set of her mouth, the swagger in her step, the deliberate din of door and accelerator. It could get their insides churning when she was like that, but this time they were in the clear.

Michael said, ‘Going to Carter’s, isn’t she?’

Their father nodded.

The car shot off, spraying dirt. They watched it belt away and turn into the lane that led to the main road.

‘Give Carter an earful, I bet,’ said Peter. ‘Stupid bugger don’t know what’s coming to him.’

Carter had a business selling animal feed. He’d sent one of his men over last night asking again for cash for a delivery made six weeks ago. She wasn’t paying because she said the delivery was a sack short. She’d have to find another supplier, but that wouldn’t bother her. Rather that and be one up on Carter.

‘Was the sacks one short?’ he said after a moment.

Their father shrugged. ‘Dunno. Could be.’

‘Stupid bugger,’ Peter said again. ‘He can’t do nothing, can he, if she won’t pay?’

Ted Hiscox grinned. ‘He’ll say he’s taking her to court, but he won’t. Too much trouble, in the long run. He’ll want to get her off his back, anyway.’

The boys stood there, thinking of her. Their thoughts ran parallel, as usual, and both knew this, so they did not even need to look at one another to be in accord. They thought of her bawling the man out at his own depot, in front of his men and other customers and whoever. She’d go on as long as it suited her. When she came back she’d be pleased as anything, riding high, in a good mood that would last the rest of the day. So Carter had done them a favour.

Ted Hiscox turned towards the repair shed. ‘I got a job over by Treborough. Get those tyres moved out of the way before I get back.’

When he had gone the boys went behind the shed to the place they’d made, a scoop in the hedge with a roof of corrugated iron. They sat in there and smoked, as near to easy as they could ever be, knowing that she was miles away. For an hour or so. They were fourteen and fifteen, short, stocky, silent boys with shaggy black hair who seldom spoke except to each other because they knew the rest of the world to be against them. They had been in collusion all their lives, embattled together against everything. Against her, first and last.

The younger boy, Peter, said, ‘Where’ll she get feed from now?’

‘Plenty of places.’

That was it, you could always move on. That was what she said herself – if someone tried to put one over you, then you gave them the shove. It’s each for himself in this world, she said, you’d better remember that or you’ll get nowhere. They remembered. They watched her and remembered.

Both or them wondered now if there’d really been a sack short. Not that it mattered one way or the other.

Stella Brentwood, looking out of the window of her kitchen, saw a red car go past along the lane, driven rather too fast. She did not much register either car or driver, since her mind at that moment was on other things. She was concerned with various needs and deficiencies within this new home: a lack of storage space, a dripping tap, a recalcitrant radiator. She was making a list, but the making of the list had been interrupted by a phone call, and now the phone call had distracted her further. By the time the red car had gone past she was no longer thinking of taps or radiators but had been pitched into another time and place which seemed suddenly more vivid and more reliable than this unfamiliar view of greenery, pink earth and the long slack lines of hills.

When Stella was twenty-one her best friend’s recently acquired lover took the most tremendous shine to her. He did little to conceal this and the best friend soon cottoned on. She tackled Stella in the ladies’ loo of the pub where a gang of them, the lover included, were having a few drinks before going on to a bottle party in someone’s flat which would probably last all night and at which much would be got up to.

‘Hands off,’ said Nadine, powdering her nose. ‘He’s mine.’

There had never been such talk between them before. Nadine meant business. She had not had much luck with men and saw this as her last chance. Marriage was taken seriously, back then, and was an essential move, even for a girl with an Oxford degree in history.

‘I don’t want him,’ said Stella. ‘He’s not my type.’

‘I dare say not, but you seem to be his.’ Nadine brushed powder flecks from her black jersey bat-wing top and snook out the turquoise circular felt skirt. She tightened her three-inch-wide belt by another notch. ‘So hands off, if you don’t mind.’

Stella considered. This moment of effortless power was rather enjoyable, even between old friends.

‘James Stanway is coming to the party,’ said Nadine. ‘You’ve always had a thing about him.’

‘It’s peaked,’ said Stella. ‘But I’ll look around and see what else there is.’

They inspected their reflections in the pock-marked mirror. They knew everything about each other, from political and spiritual views through food fads and fashion tastes to the details of their menstrual cycles.

‘Your bra strap shows a bit,’ said Nadine. ‘Is that scent Muguet des Bois or Mitsouko?’

They gathered up their possessions and bounced back to the steamy clamour of their friends, who were setting up a kitty for the purchase of bottles of cheap plonk. Presently they all surged off to the party, which by the small hours degenerated into a semi-darkness strident with gramophone records that kept getting stuck, and heaving bodies on floor and sofas. Stella heaved half-heartedly for a while with someone she hardly knew, who took her home in a taxi but turned out to be too sloshed to pay the fare. Nadine had somehow kept possession of the lover all night, though wearing a strained expression. Within months he had cleared off and a year later Nadine married Richard Faraday, who had taken the Civil Service exam and was starting at the Home Office.

‘Hang your hat on a pension,’ said Stella. ‘Incidentally he doesn’t fancy me at all. I don’t think he even likes me.’

Nadine giggled. She was heady with relief and excitement. There was going to be a proper wedding – no cut-price registry office do – and a two-bedroom flat in Fulham.

‘You next,’ she said benevolently.

By then they were twenty-three. Getting on in years, almost over the hill. If you were going to have children, said Nadine, you had to do it well before you were thirty, or you got incredibly fat and your insides went to pot entirely. She should make it nicely – two babies at least. By that time the Fulham flat would have been traded in for a house in Richmond, or maybe out in the country. But she was worried about Stella. After a further couple of years the benevolent concern turned to serious anxiety.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Apart from anything else, being married means sex whenever you like and not being scared all the time about getting pregnant.’ Nadine was by now extremely pregnant. ‘All those years counting the calendar … I’ve forgotten what it was like.’

Contrary to popular belief, the young of the fifties had as vibrant a sex life as those of the nineties. They simply made less fuss about it. Stella and Nadine had both had some anxious moments with the calendar.

‘I’ll have to take my chance,’ said Stella. It was not clear if she referred to her prospects of getting pregnant inadvertently or the effect on her figure and her insides of doing so too late.

Nadine gave her a cautionary look. The word spinster was still around back then – at its last gasp, admittedly. It hung between them, unspoken.

‘Maybe I’ll remain single,’ said Stella, ahead of her time semantically and perhaps in other ways.

‘What about sex?’

‘I don’t see that as a great problem.’ Again, it was not quite clear what Stella meant.

‘Men go for you,’ said Nadine sternly, as though this created some sort of obligation.

‘Oh, I rather go for them, too.’

Nadine sighed, rolled her eyes equivocally and folded her hands on her swelling stomach. She wore a voluminous pinafore dress. In Stella’s opinion, marriage had flung her friend into a premature matronhood that seemed like some smug assumption of the veil. Nadine, on the other hand, saw Stella as perversely embracing a future of promiscuity and ultimate solitude. This disparity of vision was to prompt a gradual distancing between the two of them. Monthly meetings would give way to an occasional exchange of letters and eventually to the ritual Christmas card.

‘How is Richard?’ said Stella, moving on to safer ground.

Richard, today, was a mere fifteen miles away and was perhaps also briefly deflected to other times by his phone conversation with Stella. It had been a slightly stilted conversation. Stella had been conscious that she was in his debt on account of the information about the cottage and should make some definite social overture. Richard had rung to ask if her removal had gone smoothly. He had seemed to scrape around determinedly for things to say. A rather stiff man, she remembered, always apparently on his best behaviour, perhaps because he knew of no other kind. In the end she had invited him over for lunch in a couple of days’ time.

She had forgotten that Richard was living in the West Country until his Christmas card had arrived, bleak with its solitary name in a neat, constricted hand. She remembered Nadine’s flowing scrawl. And noticed, too, the postmark. She was favouring that area herself as a place in which to settle. The card and the postmark had tipped the balance. She wrote to Richard asking him to look at estate agents’ advertisements for her.

‘I hope the new home is up to expectations,’ Richard had said just now, and for an instant she hadn’t understood what on earth he was on about. Whose home? Ah – her home, of course. This was what she now had, apparently. And must set to and play the part. Nest. Embellish. Fix rogue radiators, fit washers to taps.

She had lived, time was, in a house made of dried mud, in a straw hut, in various tents. In bed-sitters and flats over corner shops or at the top of high-rise buildings or slotted into nineteenth-century mansions. In a stone croft on an island and in a room over the coffee shop in a Greek mountain village. She had not perceived these places as homes, though each had in its way become important to her. She could still revisit them, in her head, could tour the fittings and fixtures. Her bed in the mud house had a thick woven red cover with a zig-zag pattern in black. On the wall of the flat above a greengrocer’s shop in Liverpool there hung a reproduction Degas of ballet dancers. The yellow oilcloth on the kitchen table of the stone croft was rubbed and cracked with age. These objects operated as a personal mnemonic system, but a random one. No logical progression ran from one to another: they were simply there, in full colour and with precise detail, serving as hitching posts and as prompts.

A social anthropologist lives over the shop, in a professional sense as well as sometimes in a literal one. Field-work is not an occupation conducive to family life, as Stella had had occasion to note. Marriages tended to break up when couples were confronted with the raw choice of extended separation or intense proximity under taxing conditions. In her trade, you travelled most fruitfully if you travelled alone. And it helped it you were footloose and singularly unfettered by personal possessions.

But now she owned a house. This house, this home. An entanglement that was causing her some unease as she confronted the implications. This is where she would now live, not just for weeks or months but for the foreseeable future. For years.

Her last job had been at a Midlands university. And where are you going to live? her colleagues had asked, as the final months ticked away, the countdown to the end of the summer term that would mark also this eerie shift from employment to statutory leisure. At first she had ignored the question. Then she had contemplated the prospect of continuing to live in the inner-city flat with nothing to recommend it but its convenient closeness to her department. Then she started looking at the atlas.

Thus, the cottage. She had seen at once that it would do, that, as Richard Faraday said, it met all her stipulated requirements. She couldn’t be bothered to trawl estate agents in case something marginally better lay around the corner. She bought it.

And now she felt no proprietorial surge, no glow of ownership. She would have to get more furniture, to build bookshelves. Of more immediate importance, she needed to discover this place, to do the sort of things she had always done in new surroundings. Move about, observe, listen. Without notebook or tape recorder but simply for her own interest, because she could no longer imagine any other way of living. The world is out there, richly stocked and inviting observation.

She was sixty-five, apparently. This totemic number had landed her here. Having spent much time noting and interpreting complex rites of passage in alien societies, she now found herself subject to one of the implacable rules of her own: stop working, get old.

In other societies the likes of her would be variously seen as valuable repositories of knowledge, as objects of pity and respect, or as economic encumbrances ripe for disposal. Exempt from such extremes, she could define her own position. She could be as she wished, do as she liked.

She had plans. There were articles that she intended to write, for the journals of her trade. She would keep her hand in professionally. But she would branch out, also. Read with luxurious eclecticism, pander to ignorance, learn about things of which she knew nothing.

And I will get a dog, she thought suddenly. I have always liked animals and there has never been an opportunity. A dog is appropriate, in a place like this, it would serve as a credential. I live here now – this is the end of the line, the last stop.

The prospect began to be interesting. She turned from the window and looked around her: at her own possessions which invited arrangement – books to be unpacked, pictures to be hung – at the fireplace for which she must find logs, the windows that needed curtains.

Stella turned from the window and went to the telephone, to rally plumbers and carpenters.