We All Live Here

Chapter Nine

Although they are allegedly different, there is a weird uniformity to all publishing and agenting reception areas: the pale wood floors, the shelf of the latest bestsellers and not-so-bestselling books, rearranged daily to flatter and reassure whichever author is due in that day. A brightly colored sofa, possibly Ikea. And in the case of Anoushka Mellors, film and literary agent, a never-ending merry-go-round of identikit receptionists: sweet-natured twenty-something girls with lovely hair and a ready smile, whose names Lila can never quite remember. She sits on the bright turquoise sofa, checking The Rebuild on the bestseller shelf, and declines the coffee offered to her. She has been awake since five, and had already had three coffees by the time she’d set off. One more may push her over the edge from “slightly agitated” to “full on nervo.”

“She won’t be a minute,” says the sweet receptionist, for the third time. “She just had to take a call with a very important publisher.”

“No problem,” says Lila.

Bill had been absolutely furious the morning after the fight. He had shown it, as was Bill’s wont, in slightly peevish silences and a porridge so dense that the girls had held their spoons upside down for minutes as an experiment to see if any would fall off. It didn’t. Violet had quizzed her relentlessly about the play-fight when Bill left the kitchen, asking if it was definitely playing if someone flicked your nose really hard with a tea-towel (yes), whether Gene and Bill liked each other (of course they did), and what Grandma would have said if she had still been here (she couldn’t answer that one).

And then she had walked past her study on her way to brush her teeth and stopped dead in the doorway. Gene and his bag were gone.

She had stood there, taking in the empty room, the bed—of course unmade—and wondering how it was possible to feel so relieved yet at the same time conflicted in some undefined way. Her father had disappeared again. True to form. Always vanishing before the complicated conversations, before he was required to take ownership of any difficult situation. She wondered whether he had found some cast member to crash with, or perhaps some weary divorcée for whom he is still sprinkled lightly with stardust. She had felt a sudden, almost overwhelming melancholy. And then the girls had started shouting at each other about ownership of a particular hairbrush and Gene’s disappearance had fallen out of her head. She had, however, tripped over his cardboard boxes in the hall on her way out, which felt somehow fitting.

Gabriel Mallory has not been at the drop-off area for two days.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I really loved your book.”

Lila’s head shoots up. The girl is leaning forward over the desk, a shy smile playing around her beautifully outlined lips. “I hope it’s not unprofessional of me to say so.”

“Not at all. Thank you,” says Lila. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Me and my boyfriend were having a bit of trouble at the time—we do tend to trigger each other a lot. He’s an anxious attachment style and I’m an avoidant attachment style—and I read a lot of what you said about how you talk to your husband and it really helped us.”

Lila’s heart sinks a little. “That’s lovely to hear,” she says, and then looks at her phone.

“I hope we’re like you when we’ve been together for twenty years.” The girl smiles fully now, a conspiratorial smile. “That whole thing about counting to fifteen before you react to anything. I do it all the time now. It’s made such a difference. And the thing about radical acceptance and not trying to change your partner. You’re both so wise .”

Lila opens her mouth and closes it again.

The girl is looking at her expectantly.

There is a short silence.

“Actually, we’re not together any more,” Lila says finally.

The girl’s smile drops.

“What? Completely not together? Like you’ve actually split up?”

“No. I mean, yes.”

“But why?”

Lila smiles. “He—he went off with someone else.”

The girl’s eyes widen. “You’re kidding.”

“No. She’s pregnant and having his baby.”

The girl stares at her, as if this is some awful joke and she’s waiting for the punchline.

“Oh,” she says eventually. “Oh.”

“Sorry,” says Lila. She is not entirely sure why she’s saying sorry, but she feels somehow as if she’s let the girl down.

“That’s okay.” The girl’s bottom lip is actually trembling. “It’s just so sad. Oh, my God—haven’t you got kids?”

Lila swallows. “It’s fine. Honestly. They’re fine. We’re all fine.” When the girl doesn’t look convinced, she adds: “I’m actually writing a new book. About how much fun it is being single. That’s what I’m here to talk to Anoushka about.”

There is a short silence. The girl stares at a piece of paper on her desk. “I hated being single. It made me really sad.”

The phone rings. The girl snaps to attention, replacing her headset on her hair.

“Anoushka Mellors Literary Agency,” she says, in a singsong voice. “Hold on, I’ll put you through to Foreign Rights.”

···

“Darling, how are you? You look fantastic .”

Lila does not look fantastic. After five hours’ sleep she looks like the woman who drinks Tennent’s Extra outside Camden Town tube station and wears plastic bags on her feet, but she smiles and nods as if it might be true.

“How are those gorgeous girls of yours?”

“Fine,” says Lila, automatically. “I’ve had both my dads staying. So that’s been fun.”

“ Both your dads?” Anoushka blinks at her, briefly distracted from her screen. She is wearing a bright turquoise blouse and matching earrings, the kind of woman for whom dressing is always a statement.

“My stepfather, Bill, whom you’ve met. And my biological dad, Gene, whom you haven’t.”

“Oh, my goodness! How very modern! Two grandpas! I bet the girls love it.”

Lila smiles blandly, recalling the two old men shoving each other and flicking tea-towels in her narrow hallway. “It’s been…interesting. Anyway, my ‘real’ dad went home. So it’s just us and Bill again.” Bill, whose whole demeanor has become immediately sunnier, who now whistles in the morning, who has attacked the so-called memorial garden with a new fervor.

“How lovely. Right. To business! I have wonderful news.”

“You do?”

“Regent House are desperate to read your new manuscript. Apparently sexy menopause is all the rage at the moment.”

“Menopause?” Lila peers over the desk. “But I—I’m not menopausal.”

“Let’s not look a gift horse, darling. By the time it’s published you probably will be. And they are agog for tales of sexy cougars having fun now that they’ve shed their boring partners. I said yours was absolutely chock-full of romantic adventures, and after the success of The Rebuild they’re considering putting in a pre-empt.”

Lila shifts in her brightly colored chair. “Even though they haven’t seen anything?”

“You’re a Sunday Times bestseller, darling. They know you can write. And you’re about to give them what they want. Now obviously they’re going to want to see the first three chapters. How far have you got?”

Lila pulls a thoughtful face, as if she’s done so much she’s having trouble with exact recall. “Um…not quite three chapters.”

“Well, I suggest you finish chapter three as fast as possible. It’s a sizzling topic right now, and we want to strike while the iron’s hot. So if you could get something to me by the end of the week that would be amazing. We could have a deal by halfway through October.”

“How much are we talking?” says Lila.

“Oh, definitely six figures,” says Anoushka.

“Six figures?”

Anoushka smiles warmly. “Like I said, it’s what everyone’s looking for. We might even be able to get you a US deal. Actually, if you could put a little bit in about how you fit your assignations around looking after elderly parents that would be the icing on the cake. There are so many women having to look after both ends of the family these days. And you’ll be a shining example of having it all.” She holds up a hand. “ Stairlifts, School Runs, and Sexytimes: How I Became a Midlife Minx . I can see it now. If we’re lucky we’ll get it serialized in the Mail . They pay terribly well for those pieces.”

“I’m not quite a midlife—”

“You might have to wear one of those terrible cobalt blue dresses that they always make women wear, and some horrible wedgie sandals, but it’s a small price to pay.”

“Right,” says Lila, who is thinking about the last emergency-plumber bill. “Six figures.”

“Men like your very naughty Dan will be screaming that they ever let their wives go. You’ll be doing a public service. Wonderful! Shall we say Friday?” Anoushka leans forward conspiratorially. “Now tell me honestly. Does my office smell a bit vomity? Gracie hoicked up her breakfast again this morning. Didn’t even make the bin this time. I swear we’ll have to move offices at this rate.”

···

Six figures. Six figures would get her out of trouble. It would make Dan’s reduction in their money less catastrophic, pay to get the bathrooms redone, give her a financial cushion, even if it did come in installments. Six figures would mean she was still in the big-time. Lila thinks about six figures the whole way back to the house, and is so lost in allocating her imaginary cash that she almost walks into Jensen, who is standing in the passageway that runs from the front garden to the rear with a wheelbarrow full of shrub clippings, their tendrils waving gently over the metal edges like the arms of an octopus. He stops when he sees her, shielding his eyes from the sun. He has the messed-up sandy hair of a schoolboy and a fine crescent of soil is lodged beneath each of his nails.

“Bill has gone to his. He said I’d be fine starting work anyway. Hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine,” she says. She tries to make it sound friendlier than she feels. She is still not sure how she feels about a memorial garden, or that Bill is now making decisions about her house.

“Oh, and we have a bit of a situation in your shed.”

“What?”

He starts to pull a face, the kind of face tradesmen pull when they’re about to cost you a large amount of money. The shed will need pulling down, and a more expensive one will be recommended. The concrete apron is cracked and dangerous and will need replacing. It is housing a large family of rats that will need an expensive exterminator. Lila makes a split-second decision. Not right now, not when the prospect of financial salvation has just been dangled in front of her. Not now.

“I don’t want to know.”

Jensen straightens a little. “You don’t want to know?”

“No,” she says briskly. She has had two calm days and a good meeting. She, more than anyone, knows that you have to protect the small wins when they come. “Thanks, though.”

As Jensen stares at her, she lets herself into her house.

Oh, the absolute bliss of a silent house. Lila stands in the hallway for a minute, absorbing the complete stillness in the air, only disturbed by the gentle wag of Truant’s tail as he snakes his way delightedly to meet her. She crouches, rubbing his ears, feeling suddenly, unexpectedly happy. There is nobody in her house, and she has four hours in which to write the chapters that will launch the next stage of her life. Everything is doable.

Fifteen minutes later she is sitting at her desk, mulling over her first chapter. Should she write about The Rebuild ? Should she acknowledge everything that has happened to her? Lila knows too well that women’s disastrous love lives are catnip to readers. Nobody wants to read about a woman having it all: it just makes them feel they didn’t try hard enough. They want to read about how it’s impossible, about heartbreak and romantic catastrophe, to goggle at it as they sail past en route to happier destinations. Success is annoying. A life of pratfalls and disasters is…relatable.

Two years ago , she begins, I wrote a book about what I thought was my happy marriage. Two weeks after that book was published my husband left me.

She stares at the words, her fingers pausing on the keys. If she does this, she thinks, Dan will be very angry. He will hate her for dragging his personal life into the public sphere. The girls may be angry too. It is so personal, so close to the bone. She cannot write about her marriage without making reference to the children. But what else do I have? She remembers a quote she had once read on the internet: If you didn’t want me to write shit about you, you should have been nicer to me. She takes a breath.

There is not much that is more humiliating than inviting the world into your marriage to teach them the lessons you’ve learned about maintaining happiness, only to discover that everything you had put out there was a lie.

Suddenly the words are flowing, surging into her head and out through her fingertips in a relentless stream, unstoppable, alive. She picks and discards metaphors, writes dry, humorous references to her own hubris. She disappears into a world occupied only by her screen and her keyboard, lost in time. This is what she needed to write: a catharsis. Words have always been how she processes the world and now she realizes she needs them to process this. She writes a thousand, two thousand, three thousand words. She stops briefly to make a mug of tea and lets it go cold on her desk, lost in her own meditations. By the time she stands up again she has written 3,758 words and has her first chapter.

She stares at the word count and feels something unfamiliar and triumphant. “I can do this,” she says aloud. “I can bloody do this.”

Lila feels a little guilty about how brusque she was with Jensen earlier so she makes him a mug of tea, and steps outside. He is at the far end of the garden, up a ladder, from which he is carefully pruning a lilac bush, wearing a faded T-shirt and a pair of camouflage shorts that come to his knees. He has a farmer’s tan, cut off at the neck and sleeves, and the tanned bits are the deep caramel of someone who spends most of their life outside. She walks to the end of the garden, tailed by Truant, and waits at the bottom of the ladder for him to notice her.

He stops and makes his way down the rungs, accepting the mug gratefully.

“Looking good,” she says brightly, although she genuinely has no idea if the bush looks good or not.

He gazes at it. “Yeah. I won’t go hard on it, although they’re proper thugs. I could probably take four feet from it and it would still look about the same size next year.”

She nods, as though any of this makes any sense. “Sorry about earlier. I mean, it’s rare that I get the house to myself, these days, so I just needed to get in and…Deadlines…”

He shakes his head, as if it’s of no matter, and swigs at his tea. Lila experiences a moment of peace, the kind of peace she can’t remember feeling before. It’s like smelling a fragrance from childhood, a reminder that there was another version of Lila from way, way back, one she had almost forgotten.

“I read your book.”

It takes her a moment to register what he’s said. “You read my book?”

“I didn’t read the whole thing. I’m not a very fast reader. But I read a lot of it. Like I skimmed it.”

“Probably best you don’t read all of it. Turns out it was pretty much fiction.” She smiles. She can smile about it today. With the new words, The Rebuild is already receding into the far distance.

“Yeah. Bill told me. Sorry about that. Oh, look. A squirrel.”

She waits for him to ask more questions, but he stares at the squirrel and appears to have forgotten the conversation. It is then she sees his wedding ring. She wonders if the rest of her life will involve checking which men are wearing one and which aren’t. She still misses her own—it was the only bit of jewelry she never lost.

“How long have you been doing gardens?”

“About four years.”

“Is that what you wanted to do?”

“No. I wanted to be a male model. But David Gandy had me run out of town. Didn’t like the competition.”

“I’ve heard that about him,” Lila says. “Very insecure.”

“Horribly. You know, the dadbod fills him with fear.”

She starts to laugh.

“What—you don’t think…?” He looks down at his stomach. It’s not big but he puffs it out a little, happy to go with the joke.

Lila tilts her head. “I’m also really sorry about the whole staring-at-the-tree thing. There’s been burglaries around here and—”

“And I give off strong criminal vibes. I get it. But you’re okay. You have Bill.”

She looks at him sideways.

He takes a final swig of his tea. “I’m serious. He gives good teacher face. You wouldn’t mess with him.”

“He can be very stern.”

“He gave me quite the talking-to before I started. About how you were going through a lot. And how we should all give you a lot of space.”

“He said that?”

“He loves you.” He says it so simply.

Lila realizes suddenly how rare it is for her to hear a man discuss love in open, simple terms. After the early days, Dan rarely told her he loved her. If she asked him he would look at her with an expression that was half bemusement tinged with faint irritation, as if to say, Why are you asking me that? She thinks sometimes that she always felt she was a little too much for him, too needy, too angry, too sad, too hysterical.

She feels a sudden flood of love for Bill, for his unassuming affection. “I’m lucky to have him,” she says, when she can’t think of anything else.

He hands her his empty mug. “Yup. I’m still going to steal your car, though.”

She laughs. She has turned to walk back across the garden when he calls: “Hey, the thing I wanted to tell you—the shed…”

She feels it then, the sudden clench, the sense that she is never allowed just to have a few hours of uncomplicated joy. And it is out of her mouth before she even thinks about it.

“No,” she says.

“No?”

She stops briefly and turns. “I don’t want to talk about the shed. I don’t want to do anything about the shed. It can wait.” It comes out a little more sternly than she’d planned, but she feels it viscerally. She doesn’t want to hear what else she’s going to be on the hook for. She wants one smooth day. Is that really too much to ask? “Look, I get that this is your job. It’s a project for you. And there are probably things you think I should be spending to make all this better or more functional or more beautiful, but I can’t do it right now. Okay? I’m not even sure I can be doing this. I don’t have the bandwidth and I certainly don’t have the money.”

“I wasn’t—” he begins, but she cuts him off.

“The bloody shed has stood here for twenty odd years, by the look of it. Whatever is wrong with it can just…wait.”

This time the warmth has gone from his expression. He lets his gaze rest on her face for a minute, studying her, and then he compresses his mouth, lifts his eyebrows, nods to himself, and walks back to his barrow, brushing his hands together as he goes.

“I’ve got to go and pick up Violet,” she says, feeling somehow awkward. And then hating herself for it. It’s her house. She is allowed to place boundaries around what she’s willing to do.

“Thanks for the tea,” he says, raising a hand. He does not look back.

···

It is, of course, a complete coincidence that Lila goes to pick up Violet wearing a full face of makeup, with blow-dried hair that has not yet been pulled into an old scrunchie. And maybe kept on the outfit she wore to visit Anoushka’s offices rather than her usual jeans or tracksuit bottoms (the writer’s uniform, as Dan used to call it). And it is also possibly not a coincidence that when she walks in and bears left toward the play equipment where Gabriel Mallory is standing alone, rather than right toward the school building where the other mothers congregate, he lifts his eyebrows slightly and says: “You look very nice.”

“Do I?” she says, sounding surprised. She has forgotten the awkward exchange in her garden. Gabriel Mallory is wearing a soft blue shirt and expensive trainers, an eco brand she’s read about in a magazine. He has neat wire-rimmed glasses, the kind she suspects makes a face look even more handsome, and architect-like.

“Oh, yes,” she says blithely. “I had a meeting in town this morning. Couldn’t be bothered to get changed afterward.”

“You should have meetings every day,” he says. “It suits you. Luminosa .” And then holds out a bag. “Oh, yes. For you.”

She looks down. It is a paper bag from Annika’s. The weight suggests two cinnamon buns.

“Well,” he says, with a lopsided smile, “for you and your daughter. Sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.”

“Violet,” she says, trying not to flush with pleasure.

“It was really kind. It gave Lennie a boost.”

“Lennie?”

“Well, she’s Elena. But she wants to be a boy at the moment so she demands to be known as Lennie.”

“I’ll make sure I remember.” She fiddles with the paper bag, trying not to look at him. There is something about this man that is physically overwhelming, as if her whole body wants to propel itself against him, crush her mouth against his soft shirt. It is a very unsettling sensation. “How is she doing?” she says, trying to disguise this inner turbulence.

He tilts his head slightly, looks over at the door to the school. “She’s…okay. She misses her mum.”

Lila opens her mouth to ask, but he gives her an awkward sideways glance and says: “She—she’s not with us any more.”

“You mean…”

He nods, and Lila feels briefly winded. “Oh my goodness. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine.” He lets out a humorless laugh. “Well, it’s not. It’s been pretty awful. But…it is what it is.”

“If it makes you feel any better, my soon to be ex-husband’s new girlfriend is over there. Pregnant with his baby.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Right.” There is a short silence. “I guess we both have a lot going on, then,” he says.

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, you’re clearly handling it like a Don.”

Lila opens her mouth to respond, flushing, but the door to the school opens then and the children begin to flood out, pushing their way past the teacher in a pint-sized scrummage of brightly colored backpacks and already tattered pictures from the day, immediately welding themselves to their corresponding parents, like penguins returning across the frozen wastes.

“Here’s to cinnamon buns then,” Gabriel Mallory says, and gives her a little salute, as he starts to walk toward the throng.

“Buns!” says Lila, in response, and her voice does something high-pitched and strange.

She repeats “buns” sporadically under her breath, sometimes furiously, sometimes despairingly, the whole walk home.

···

Whatever therapeutic woodworking Bill has done at home over the past few days seems to have consolidated his more cheerful state of mind: he smiles readily when Lila and Violet return home, and only mentions for the third time that it would have been nice if Gene had bothered to strip, or even make, his bed before he’d left. Lila, who has guiltily wiped the last of the sugary bun from her lips as she walked up the steps of the front door, smiles back. It has been, she thinks, with unexpected pleasure, a pretty good day. Celie is in a reasonably good mood—at least, she deigns to speak at least twice during supper—there is a roast chicken and salad instead of fish and lentils, and Violet, still basking in the secret mischief of their contraband buns, manages to make only one scatological reference during the entire meal. Even Dan calling halfway through to ask to switch his days this week because Marja’s mother is coming over from Holland does not dent her general well-being. The girls eat their food without fuss, Bill discusses a friend with one leg from his teacher-training days who has got in touch with him via Facebook, and Lila spends most of the meal slightly lost in the imaginary arms of a man with a lopsided grin and a pair of sticky buns.

She is so lost in this train of thought that it takes her a while to notice Truant is barking again. The back door is open and she observes that the dog has set up the agitated staccato bark he reserves for blameless postmen and delivery drivers. He has been bad again for the last couple of days—it’s as if he’s set to high alert, always warning them that the sky is about to fall in.

“You really need to get that dog some training, Lila,” Bill murmurs.

“I know,” she says, muttering, “I’ll do it in the same free hours that I have pedicures, waxes, and meditate.” She leaves the table when she can ignore the sound no longer and heads out to the garden, still basically a war zone of freshly dug earth and slabs of York stone from Jensen’s earlier efforts. Truant is facing the door of the shed, his hackles up, and his teeth bared. Oh, God , she thinks. It is rats . Jensen had tried to tell her and she had just brushed him off. And now she is going to pay for it. She sees Violet’s bright blue baseball bat in the grass, and picks it up, in case they’re the kind that jump at your throat. She isn’t sure that rats actually jump at throats, but it feels like the kind of thing a rat might do.

Truant’s barking has grown ever more urgent now, and she tries to shush him, worried that if she opens the door he will be involved in some horrific animal-on-animal massacre. She pulls at his collar and, when that fails to stop him, walks a step closer to the door. She can hear Bill calling from the kitchen: “What’s going on? Lila? What’s he barking at?” And waves to him, as if to suggest everything’s fine and he doesn’t need to worry. She pushes the door open an inch with her foot and hears a loud clatter from inside. Her heart racing, she swings the door wide—and there is Gene, half collapsed into the outdoor sofa cushions on the floor, blinking as he registers Lila’s presence.

“Gene?”

He is wearing a sweatshirt, a leather jacket and a pair of tired-looking underpants. He pushes himself upright. Unfortunately this change in position shifts the pile of outdoor sofa cushions and brings an empty paint tin clattering down from a shelf onto his shoulder.

“Ow. Hey…hey, sweetheart,” he says, with a glassy smile, placing the tin carefully beside him.

“What on earth are you doing in here?”

He looks at her, as if considering this question carefully. Then appears to forget it. There is an empty crisps packet on his belly and he blinks at it, as if he’s just noticed it, then attempts to empty the crumbs into his mouth. He misses.

“You know,” he says, collapsing slowly backward into the cushions again, “the weed they sell in this country is way too strong. They should have a rule against it.”

···

If the neighbors were disturbed by Truant’s barking, that’s nothing to the sight of a seventy-five-year-old man being led across the garden in his pants while singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The curtains at number forty-seven are twitching so furiously it’s as if the entire house is having some kind of seizure. Lila finally manages to persuade him upstairs and into the study, where she remakes the sofa-bed she had stripped and folded up not two hours previously, and finally, with the promise of more potato chips, persuades him to take a nap. “Isn’t it great that we’re back together?” he says, his veiny old hands clasping hers like some kind of sandwich. “The old team together again.” Lila assures him that it is indeed great and, yes, what a team, and now it’s time for him definitely to take that nap, thank you very much.

Bill takes another bottle of wine round to the neighbors to apologize for the commotion and is gone for a dismayingly long time. While they wait for him to return, she and Celie sit in the front room and listen to Violet’s disconcertingly good impression of Lila’s father stumbling across a room and breaking off to sing emphatic and repeated lines of the song.

When she has calmed Bill, and assured him that, no, she had no idea and, yes, she will make sure Gene leaves when he’s straightened out, she disappears up to her bedroom.

···

Was Gene the problem in the shed?

Jensen’s response is swift. Yeah. Sleeping like a baby. I did try to tell you. There is a short pause, and then he types again. She watches the pulsing dots. I think he’s been there a couple of days.

Lila stares at the message, then closes her eyes and lies down on the floor.