Chapter Five
Lila is not sure now how it started—probably her inability to combine the various remote controls and television options since Dan, or Tech Desk, as the girls used to call him, left—but for some months now Lila has been watching a Spanish soap opera, or telenovela. Most nights, if she can scrape an hour between shepherding the girls to bed and before she is too tired to see, she curls up on the sofa and watches a subtitled episode of La Familia Esperanza , an endlessly twisting narrative involving insanely glamorous Spanish-speaking women locked in intense warfare with each other and with the men they love. Everyone is dressed in vibrant colors, the weather is always warm, and the cast throw insults and pieces of furniture at each other with the joyful abandon of toddlers in a ball pit. Lila’s favorite is Estella Esperanza, a tiny fierce wife the same age as Lila, who looks a little like Salma Hayek. She had been a downtrodden mouse in the first six episodes, but then discovered her husband, Rodrigo, had been cheating on her with his teenage secretary. After numerous episodes of wailing grief, the consolation of her sisters, and prayers in the local church, she has morphed into a vengeful angel, who tracks her husband and his paramour and thinks up endlessly inventive ways in which to hijack their new life together.
This week, having discovered that Rodrigo and Isabella are to go on a romantic trip to a seaside resort, she has somehow gained employment as a temporary maid at the luxury hotel, and filled the Nespresso coffee capsules in their room with laxatives. The episode prior to this, she had hired a male escort to flirt with Isabella at a bar, making sure that Rodrigo walked in on it. Estella, meanwhile, has been taking shooting lessons at a local gun range, helped, of course, by a hot but sympathetic tutor, and it is clearly only a matter of time before she pulls her stylish little pistol from her designer handbag and gives her husband what he deserves. But, for now, Rodrigo suspects nothing, because he believes his wife to be a downtrodden mouse. Sometimes Lila pictures herself in Estella’s place, dressed in black, looking somehow stylish and wounded, striding through the playground scattering incriminating photographs of her former husband and yelling insults that sound so much better in Spanish or, on her worse days, pulling a gun from her designer handbag (she doesn’t have a designer handbag) and just…well, scaring them all a little.
She doesn’t talk about this little fantasy, not since she’d blurted it out to Eleanor one morning and Eleanor had stopped in her tracks and asked, Are you okay? But she keeps watching, willing Estella to do wilder and more terrible things, even as she sits in her tracksuit bottoms, with dog hair all over them, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie.
···
Celie does not talk to Lila for the next three days. She arrives home from school almost by subterfuge, letting herself in silently so that sometimes Lila only realizes she’s back when she hears Bill asking whether she’d like a drink and reminding her that she really should be drinking more water. Celie has avoided supper once, saying she was too busy with schoolwork, and on the other two evenings she sat at the table, eyes cast resolutely down, as if she wished she was anywhere but there. Lila has searched her room twice, found no sign of drugs and felt weirdly guilty the whole time she was doing it. Part of her is afraid to talk to Celie in case she gives anything away.
“You were just the same, darling,” Bill says, when Celie briefly leaves the table for the bathroom.
“I was not.”
“Oh, yes. You went silent for about two years. Drove your mother completely potty. And then you got to seventeen and started talking again. She’ll come round. It’s just very complicated being sixteen.”
She doesn’t tell Bill about the weed. He can barely cope with the idea of the girls drinking cola. Besides, he’s preoccupied. He has decided, he announces over dinner, that he would like to tidy the garden. “I thought we could make it a memorial garden. Or at least a corner of it. It would be nice to have somewhere we can sit and commune with nature and remember your grandmother.”
“Next door’s cat poos in our garden,” says Violet, who has been quietly burying pieces of carrot under her steamed chicken. “There’s a LOT of nature in that corner.”
“Well, I’ll spray some citronella. That tends to put them off.”
“There’s still lots of poo in the ground, though. Loads of it. You could probably grow a whole poo baby out of the amount of poo in our garden. An enormous poo baby.”
Bill is briefly flummoxed by this conversational turn, and Lila is grateful. Doing the garden is going to involve money, and she has reached the point at which she cannot think about finance without a huge anxiety knot landing, like a bowling ball, in her stomach. Emergency plumbers are costing hundreds every month just to keep the loos functioning. The sums she needs simply to exist reach dizzying amounts. And she is still no nearer to creating an outline for her new book about the apparently relentless joy of being a single mother.
“What do you think about a memorial garden, Celie?” Bill says gently.
Celie has returned, and quietly moved her knife and fork to the center of the plate. “Sure.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have somewhere nice to sit and remember Grandma?”
“We could make a bench out of dried poo,” says Violet, and starts cackling. “And we could sit on it.”
“Vi, you’re disgusting.” Celie gets up and walks to the bin with her plate, shielding it so that nobody can see how much leftover food she is scraping away.
“I do have a rather nice wooden bench,” Bill continues gamely. “I made it three months after Francesca died. It’s a Lutyens bench. It’s oak, so it’s starting to weather nicely. I could bring it and put it in the corner by the lilac.”
“We have a lilac?” says Lila.
“It would be nice to get the borders under control. It’s a decent-sized garden. Maybe we could even do some raised beds at the end for vegetables.”
“Not courgettes,” says Violet, who is surreptitiously feeding bits of steamed chicken to Truant. “I hate courgettes.”
“I had a nice chat with Jensen. He lives at the end of the road at the other house. We had a walk around the place while you were with your accountant, Lila. He has all sorts of ideas as to how we could tidy things up a bit.”
“Jensen?”
“Landscape gardener. You met him last week. Apparently you didn’t like him looking at the tree. Very amusing, he found it.”
“I didn’t know who he was.”
“He’s very much in demand but he was very fond of your mother so he says he’ll squeeze us in as soon as possible.”
“Kind of him,” says Lila, who is wondering about cost per hour.
“And he’s very ecologically minded—lots of bee-friendly plants, climate-friendly planting, no harmful pesticides, and recycled materials where possible.”
“But where does he stand on poo benches?” asks Violet, her voice lifting.
Bill chooses not to hear. “Anyway. He’s coming back on Friday to have a chat. Best to get the ball rolling, yes?”
Lila does not want to think where this particular ball is rolling to. Over the past few weeks she has noticed that Bill, while never fully discussing his intentions, appears to be making his stay permanent. Unfamiliar items keep appearing in her house, already clumped with piles of boxes from the move that she still hasn’t had the energy to unpack, or things that the girls won’t find a home for but cannot be got rid of so sit in corners, gathering dust. In her hallway a child’s bike is propped against the wall. It’s too small for Violet, but when she raised the possibility of taking it to the charity shop, both girls wailed that it was part of their childhood and she feels too guilty about the way their family has been fractured to go against their wishes.
And against this already cluttered backdrop she has noticed new items, a collection of piano music, a cedar-wood table bearing a carved map of South America, Bill’s ancient stereo system and accompanying collection of 1970s classical LPs. When she poked her head around the spare-room door while Bill was out the previous week, she noticed that he had somehow moved in a whole mahogany wardrobe and its contents. It fills the alcove to the right of the fireplace, its frontage beautifully polished and glowing, reflecting light onto Bill’s geometrically made bed. Inside it a row of perfectly ironed shirts hung an exact inch apart. Her bathroom cupboard now has a whole row of neatly lined bottles and packets containing Bill’s medications, blood-thinners, anti-cholesterol, and heart pills, as well as an interminable array of vitamins and supplements.
Lila is not sure how she feels about this. She needs Bill here, she knows. The girls need an adult presence when she isn’t there, and with his quiet cleaning and cooking he keeps some semblance of order when she seems incapable of it. But living with Bill is sometimes like living in the midst of a quiet domestic rebuke, especially when she comes home to find the breakfast dishes not in the sink where she left them but washed and stacked neatly on the drainer, or the window of the wood-burner gleaming when it had previously been obscured by soot. Bill’s cooking, his tidying, his insistence on peace and order are a constant reminder that she is apparently unable to provide those things. And although she knows rationally that his activities are a help, some dark part of her feels them as a stinging reminder that she has failed.
She must have failed: otherwise Dan would have stayed.
“Anyway,” says Bill, as he starts to stack the dishwasher with plates he has already rinsed, “he’s coming along tomorrow to start planning his design. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”
···
Celie has refused to go to Dan’s house this week, so when he calls, Lila is half expecting a tirade about how she has poisoned the girls against him. But his voice is oddly hesitant, almost conciliatory.
“I can’t make her come, Dan,” she begins, but he cuts her off.
“It’s not actually that I wanted to talk about. Although obviously I would prefer it if she came. She is my daughter.”
“They don’t like not having their own rooms. Celie’s at that age…”
“This house is pretty small, Lils.”
Don’t call me Lils , she wants to say, but bites it back.
“Well. It matters more to Celie. That kind of thing. I’m just saying.” She wonders suddenly what will happen when the new baby arrives. Will there be any room for the girls at all? Seeing them off two nights a week is always bittersweet: yes, she wants them to have a relationship with their father, yes, it’s sometimes a relief to have a break from Celie’s mercurial moods and Violet’s endless, endless demands, but they are her babies and there is not a day that she feels ready to start a morning without them.
“I know. And I’m trying to work out how I can make room enough for everybody.” He doesn’t mention the baby, she notices. It’s always a vague reference. She wonders if he has misgivings about being a father again. She is dragged back to the conversation by his next sentence.
“So that’s really why I was calling.”
“What?”
Dan sighs heavily, as if even having to discuss this is causing him pain. “We will probably need to move at some point. Somewhere a little bigger. And things are not great at the magazine right now. There’s talk of redundancies. I’m fairly confident I’ll hold on to my job, but my monthly commitments are pretty horrendous.”
Are we a “monthly commitment” now? she thinks.
“I mean that when the new baby comes I’m probably not going to be able to pay as much as I have been.”
There is a brief silence.
“What?”
“I’m paying more than I’m legally required to as it is.”
“Dan, they’re your kids.”
“I know. And I know you’ve taken a knock with the writing so that’s why I’ve been trying to pay as much as I can. But I spoke to a lawyer and she says I have a legal obligation to make sure all the children are treated equally—”
“ All the children?”
“Well, Marja and I are a couple now so I have to include Hugo. It’s not like his dad exactly steps up. So that’s four children to support, which is quite a lot. And Marja and I definitely need another bedroom. This place only has three, as you know, and you’re in a five-bedroom place—”
“Dan, I am not selling this house.”
“I’m not asking you to sell the house.”
“I paid for this with the book money. It’s our children’s home .”
“I know. I’m not saying anything about your house. Just that I’m not going to be able to pay quite as much in support.”
She blinks. “How much less?”
“Probably five hundred a month.”
She is silenced by this sum.
“I’ll need to get another mortgage. And with rates what they are I’m not likely to get a great deal. I’m really sorry, Lils. But the money situation is what it is. You were always the bigger earner, and I was fine with leaving you and the girls in the house.”
“My house. Our house. And I’m barely earning.”
“Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads-up. I’ll look at what I’m legally required to pay, and hope I’ll be able to give you a bit more than that.”
She puts the phone down on him. She feels winded. She sees the expenses coming toward her that she could barely afford with Dan’s input and now? How is this fair? She wants to yell. How is it fair that you get to walk out and have a lovely new family and we all have to suffer? She drops her head into her hands.
And then Bill’s face appears around the door. “Sorry to interrupt, Lila darling, but Jensen is here.”
She looks up and blinks.
“The landscape gardener.”
A man’s face appears around the corner, just behind Bill’s. It’s softer than she remembers, slightly dirt-sprinkled, with a thatch of sandy hair. “Hi—I just wondered if you had five minutes to pop outside so we could talk about what needs doing. By the way your tree out front is starting to lean. You’ll need to do something about that.”
“I know. I have to do something about everything.” Her voice is a snap and she sees Bill’s eyebrows shoot up.
Jensen seems not to notice. “I think it’s possibly dying. Either way I’d suggest getting a tree surgeon to take a look. I know a guy whose rates aren’t too astronomical.”
···
She barely hears what Jensen is saying about her garden. It’s an unseasonably balmy evening and the sun leaches gold through the gaps in the branches as he walks around, drawing images in the air of raised beds and shingle pathways. As he talks, her head is still humming with the ramifications of what Dan has told her. It’s not just the financial anxiety but the injustice of it. She wants to scream, How can you do this to us? like an unending lament, through his letterbox.
“And I thought maybe you could have a water feature here. There’s a salvage yard out in Kent, which has some really beautiful pieces that would look great. They’re not as cheap as they used to be—everyone’s worked out that salvage is the way to go—but it would provide a really lovely focal point.”
“We could put the bench beside it,” says Bill.
“The poo bench?” says Violet, hopefully. She has somehow found the diet cola, which Lila had hidden in the cupboard with the cleaning products, and is slurping noisily from the edge of a can.
“Poo bench?” says Jensen.
“Don’t ask,” says Bill. “Maybe we could have two water features. One each side of this lovely Acer . I bet if we cleared away some of these climbers there’s a lovely shape under there.”
Oh, God , thinks Lila. What if Dan decides he can no longer live nearby? Marja’s son is young enough to transfer schools. If they want a bigger property and money is a problem maybe he’ll move to one of the outer boroughs. Then Celie and Violet will have to get buses to their dad’s house. They will not be down the road but in another postcode entirely. What if he moves out to the country? What if Marja ends up with the house Lila always wanted in the middle of nowhere with cow parsley and log fires and a brick kitchen floor?
“Lila?”
Bill’s hand is on her upper arm. She looks up with a start and he is gazing at her, clearly awaiting a reply.
“Um…yes,” she says, not entirely sure what she is being asked. “Yes” is usually the answer.
It is then, out of the corner of her eye, that she sees Celie walking across the kitchen. She is wearing her short bomber jacket and her eyes are outlined in a smoky black charcoal liner. “Actually, no.”
“No?”
“Celie?” she yells across the garden. Celie glances toward her but turns away, clearly hoping to leave the house swiftly. “Celie! Where are you going?”
Celie stops.
“Out.”
“Where ‘out’?”
“Don’t you like water features?” says Bill. “You always loved the fountain at the other house.”
Lila starts to walk back toward the French windows.
“Celie! Don’t you dare leave before we’ve spoken!”
Celie throws her chin upward in the manner of the perpetually thwarted. “Oh, my God, are you my actual jailer now?”
“I just want to know where you’re going.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t have to be a water feature,” says Bill, his voice lifting. “I just thought a statue of your mother might be a bit much.”
“Are you smoking weed again?”
“Weed?” says Bill.
Jensen takes a few steps toward Lila. “I can come back if this is not a good time.”
“It’s never a good time,” says Lila. “There is not one single good time for anything right now. Not for my tree to fall down, not for my loos to block, not for my own book to make me a laughing stock every bloody day and certainly not for my husband to impregnate his much younger lover on top of her Noguchi bloody coffee-table.”
“Okay,” says Jensen.
Celie stomps up to Lila and faces off. “I’m going to get trashed in the park, okay? I’m going to get completely high on weed that you hypocritically say is bad for you, even though you’re quite happy to use it yourself. I’m going to drink lots of alcohol, and smoke a ton of weed, then get felt up by strange men while I’m in a state of drug-induced inebriation. Is that okay? Or are you going to be extra about that too?”
“Sounds like a good night!” says a voice. And Lila spins round. She stares at the man who has just let himself in through the back gate. He is dragging a battered wheelie case and his broad smile reveals a row of impossibly white teeth. There is a brief silence.
Celie gazes at him, and then at Lila, who cannot speak and whose mouth is hanging very slightly open. “Mum?” she says, turning toward Lila uncertainly.
“ Gene? ” says Lila. And Truant comes streaking out of the French windows, like a large hairy bullet, and, without a moment’s hesitation, sinks his teeth determinedly into the man’s leg.