We All Live Here

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-four

Gene had told Bill the story of his altercation with Philippa Graham over supper twice, and although Lila knew Bill probably wanted to disapprove—he couldn’t imagine anything worse than getting involved in other people’s emotional dramas—he couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, she sounds perfectly dreadful,” he said. “Well done, you.”

“I know, right? I wish I could have seen her face when she read what I wrote.” The two old men had dissolved into giggles again.

Bill has been laughing a lot more lately. He whistles when he’s preparing breakfast, and sometimes, from her desk upstairs, she can hear his soft baritone singing along to the choral classics. He is no longer a shadow of a person. It’s as if he took a brief leave of absence from himself and has now returned. Perhaps he’s one of those men who’s just better with a woman around. Perhaps at that age most men are.

Penelope Stockbridge is there most days now, either popping in to play the piano, or staying to join them for supper. According to Violet, who tracks these things assiduously, Penelope’s wardrobe choices have included: a pair of pink satin ballroom-dancing shoes, a dark green sequined beret, a jumper with a knitted cat on the front, and a pair of earrings in the shape of tiny pink glass elephants, which have been promised to Violet when she’s finally allowed to have her ears pierced (“finally” is given extra weight). A previous version of Lila might have resented her house becoming home to yet another quirky person of pensionable age, but she doesn’t really mind. Penelope takes nothing for granted, is eager to help, and hyper-sensitive to any possibility that she has outstayed her welcome.

Sometimes she brings Lila flowers from her garden, handing them over with exaggerated casualness. “Oh, they’re nothing. I just thought they might be cheering. I always find real flowers such a tonic for the spirit, don’t you?”

She has given Violet two free piano lessons, her manner grave and serious, but full of effusive praise when Violet gets something right. “Oh, I think you have a natural talent, Violet. You let me know if you’d like to do more, won’t you? I think you’d be marvelous at it.”

Lila wonders if this is Penelope’s way of trying to create yet another reason to pop in, but in truth Bill is probably all the reason she needs. They take regular walks around the Heath together (not with Truant, whose energy is too chaotic for them), stop in coffee shops, discuss the news, admire Jensen’s work in the garden. Over a period of weeks Penelope has become a fixture in their unconventional, extended family. Lila tries not to miss the tuna-pasta bakes.

Two days ago Bill, watching Jensen planting a couple of shrubs in the garden, had turned to Lila and said: “Are you sure your mother wouldn’t mind? Me seeing so much of Penelope, I mean.” And Lila had threaded her arm through his and said, no, absolutely not. That her mother of all people understood the importance of living as well and happily as one could.

“And you, dear girl? You’re okay with it? I mean, it must be a little strange for you. But—you know—I want to make it clear that I would never have looked at another woman had she not…Francesca was everything, everything to me…” His voice had tailed off. She had been able to reassure him that, yes, she knew. And, no, Lila cannot find it in herself to mind. Because a strange harmony has settled over her ramshackle, mismatched house, and after the past few years she more than anyone knows just to accept and enjoy these moments when they come.

Lila avoids the school gates as much as possible during this time. Gabriel is on a big project, and working long hours at his practice, and between there being almost no possibility of seeing him there, and her faint residual terror of Philippa Graham, she has handed over pickup duties willingly to Gene. He seems to enjoy having a daily role, and Violet likes having a celebrity grandpa, now that the story of who he is has filtered down from parents to her classmates, and Lila suspects there may be sugar-based diversions involved on the way home. It allows her more time to sit in her study and write uninterrupted.

···

“I stole your keys.” Jensen appears in the doorway of the study, knocking twice to announce his arrival. Lila, who has been deep in thought about whether hair removal is indeed a political act if you only do it before you go on holiday, turns in her seat, startled.

“What?”

“I stole your car keys. You were right about me all along.” He grins, and holds them up in his palm. “I charged your battery off my truck. Now you need to take it for a spin.”

“Oh! Um, I’m kind of in the middle of—”

“Bill says you’ve been writing all afternoon. You need breaks. C’mon, twenty minutes.”

Lila is suddenly conscious of the chaos in the little study: the still- packed cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, Gene’s crumpled bedding, the printer with two empty mugs on it, that she is probably wearing her pajama top under her sweatshirt. Jensen is not, for once, in gardening clothes but wearing a dark blue sweater with a lighter blue shirt underneath—which means he must have made the trip just to help her. “That’s…really nice of you.”

“I’m a very nice man.”

He hands her the keys as they stand on the driveway. She unlocks the Mercedes and notes that he is climbing into the passenger side. “Just to make sure it’s all working,” he says, when he sees her look at him. She settles into the seat, checks the mirror, and fires the engine, which, obligingly, starts first time. But Jensen’s voice cuts in: “What are you doing ?”

“What do you mean what am I doing? I’m starting the car.”

“No—no—no!”

“I know how to start my own car, Jensen,” Lila snaps at him. “You’re not going to tell me how to drive, are you?”

“No. What are you doing leaving the roof up?”

Lila follows his gaze upward.

“C’mon! You have to put the roof down! It’s pretty much the law if you have a convertible.”

It’s a cold day, but dry, and the sky is the kind of crisp azure that tells of frosty nights ahead. They button their jackets to their collars, and she shakes her head at the madness of it as he turns the heater to full blast. And then she pulls out onto the road, feeling the engine purr obligingly in front of her, trying not to feel like an idiot, first for snapping at him, and then for being the kind of show-off numpty who drives around in the cold with the roof down.

“I never see you take this car out,” Jensen observes, as they head toward the high street. He runs his hand over the walnut dashboard. “It’s a pity.”

Lila, who has deflated slightly, has to shout over the sound of the V8 engine. “I bought it for my mum. As a sort of tribute, I mean. It was the kind of thing she would have done, buying a completely unsuitable car for everyday use.” She indicates and pulls onto the main road. “Besides, I’m not sure I’m really a top-down kind of person.”

When he doesn’t say anything she adds: “It’s just…impractical, right? It’s a gorgeous thing, but it’s not very reliable and English weather means it’s only usable for a couple of months a year.”

“But that’s not the point of a car like this. You put the top down and turn the heater right up and you scrape every bit of joy out of the day with it.”

“And freeze your head while your toes boil. I don’t think so.”

“Lila, you’re looking at this car in totally the wrong way. This Mercedes is not just a car. It’s an injection of serotonin. You need to climb in, open her up, and just enjoy yourself. Even if it’s just a few times a week. Roof off, music up, and you’ll feel like you’ve had a mini holiday.”

Lila glances at him. “You’re very fond of telling me what to do, aren’t you?”

“Only when you need it.” His fingers reach for the music console. “C’mon. Let’s do it—let’s have the full mood-enhancing experience.”

She feels a little self-conscious with the 1980s disco beat pumping at the traffic lights—she’s sure people are looking at them. But Jensen doesn’t seem to care, nodding in time to the music, smiling with pleasure, tapping the side of the car with his broad hand, and turning it up louder when his favorite songs come on. After a few miles, when it becomes clear that he isn’t going to stop, she decides just not to think about the possible judgment of strangers, but to do what he’s doing, and enjoy the—admittedly quite pleasurable—assault on her senses.

“Why did you say that?”

She’s slowing to let someone out when he turns the volume down.

“Say what?”

“That you’re not a top-down kind of person. What did you mean?”

She stops at a zebra crossing. A small boy casts an unembarrassed, lingering look at the Mercedes bonnet as he dawdles across in front of them, tugged gently along by his mother, who is on her phone.

She shrugs, suddenly not wanting to look at him. “Well, my life isn’t really a top-down kind of life, is it? It’s…I don’t know…school runs and moody teens, grumpy elderly men and dodgy bathrooms, and we’ve run out of dog-poo bags.” She taps the steering wheel. “This car is for the kind of person who takes impulsive trips to Paris, and has white linen trousers and a selection of handbags without crumbs in the bottom.” This sudden realization makes her feel oddly melancholy. “I think I bought this for my fantasy life, rather than the one I actually live in.”

His silence is unusually long. For Jensen, anyway. “You are absolutely a top-down kind of person,” he observes eventually. “You’re just at a pinch point so you can’t see it right now.” He turns to her, at the exact moment she is brave enough to look at him, and his expression is almost unbearably kind. “You’ll have your top-down life before you know it, Lila. You’re getting there.”

Mortifyingly, and for no obvious reason, her eyes prickle. She tries to laugh it off.

“Don’t be nice to me, for God’s sake.” She wipes them furiously. “Ugh. I think I preferred you telling me how to drive.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have been nice if I’d known there were crumbs in your handbag,” he responds. “In fact, I wouldn’t have agreed to come if I’d known.” He gives her a sideways look. “C’mon, we’re out of the twenty mph zone here. Put your foot down a bit. Honestly, what kind of driver are you?”

They take off on the winding roads around the Heath, and she feels the car growling underneath her, the insistent pull of the torque, the steering wheel warm in her hands, and Jensen turns up the music, singing “I’m Every Woman” unselfconsciously and off-key, and Lila finding herself singing too, starts to get a whisper of what he means. There’s something about the cold blasting onto her cheeks, the exposure to the world around them, the music in her ears, her hair whipping around her face, that clears her head, scatters her endless looping thoughts. And then she is singing along, not caring who sees, laughing at Jensen’s made-up lyrics, the beauty of this ridiculous, unsuitable car.

The feeling of joyousness lasts a good hour after they return home and put the car to bed, their cheeks and ears glowing, and for some time after he has dismissed her thanks as unnecessary and headed off to his next job. It’s another hour before she wonders whether that feeling was something to do with Jensen.

···

Gene’s advert is due to air on the Thursday evening. He professes to be nonchalant about it—“Hey, it’s just an ad, not exactly Arthur Miller”—but Lila suspects that no one in the local postcode is unaware that Gene will be selling Strong Yet Sensitive whitening toothpaste at a quarter past eight this evening. When she had popped into the corner shop that morning for orange juice the young Turkish man behind the counter, who has never once acknowledged her presence even though she’s used the shop at least four times a week since she moved in, handed over her change and said: “It’s Gene’s advert tonight, isn’t it? My mum says she’s going to watch.”

Gene has invited them all to join him for pizza before it airs—“I’m paying”—but Bill has sweetly offered to cook instead. He is making American fried chicken with corn fritters and a tomato salsa in tribute. Penelope is coming, and Eleanor, and Jensen has apparently been invited too. There is a carefully worked-out schedule in which food happens beforehand and, according to Bill, they will all have finished the washing-up and be seated around the television “with homemade chocolate and pistachio cookies,” ready for Gene’s appearance.

Lila takes it all in with only half an ear. Gabriel has asked her to come for dinner the following evening, and her brain is a hot jumble of anticipation and nerves. Because dinner is not a casual drink after work. Dinner is serious. It is an invitation into his home. It is a word laden with possibility. Dinner means they are Moving Forward.

···

One of the things Lila most enjoys about her new life is the scent of cooking that greets her when she comes into her house. In the early months after Dan left she could barely rouse herself to cook: she had been so hollowed out with grief and shock that normal household tasks, like cooking and cleaning, had felt completely beyond her. They had lived on toast, or takeaways, or if Lila was feeling reasonably pulled together, pasta with a jar of pesto sauce, perhaps with the addition of a handful of frozen peas if she was worried about the girls getting rickets. Bill’s arrival had brought order and home-cooked meals to their house, but the smell of steamed fish or salad had not been exactly welcoming . Since the advent of Penelope—and perhaps even his entente cordiale with Gene—Bill’s cooking seems to have relaxed a little into something less rigidly nutritional, and more comforting. It frequently contains carbohydrates or crispy chicken skin or even a cheesy topping, so that Lila’s kitchen is often the source of delicious aromas that prompt immediate Pavlovian hunger pangs. The girls ask, “What’s for dinner?” with genuine anticipation rather than faint dread.

Everyone is excited about the fried chicken.

Along with that, and her upcoming date with Gabriel, the other thing adding to Lila’s general sense of satisfaction is that the garden is almost completed. The area that has seemed, for months, to be a continuing eyesore of clay soil, paving slabs, and piles of dead vegetation has very gradually, then quite suddenly morphed into something elegant and beautiful. When they had moved in, the end of her garden had been a wilderness of shrubs and apparently random pieces of half-buried concrete, the fences covered with sprawling dark ivy, its focal point a shed missing a good portion of its bitumen roof and colonized by bristly-legged spiders so enormous that Lila had occasionally thought about charging rent.

Now the centerpiece is Bill’s carved oak bench, sheltered by a small willow tree on one side, a Japanese acer on the other, and a new, small square pond beside it. Lilac and lavender bushes for bees punctuate each side, and two small raised beds house a variety of herbs, a winding reclaimed York stone patio charting the space between them. A redbrick wall, its surface softened by centuries of weather, has been revealed by Jensen’s endless pruning and hacking, and water trickles from a wall-mounted fountain in a never-ending tinkling stream. It isn’t finished, but already it’s ridiculously peaceful. It’s the first thing that draws the eye as Lila glances out of the window, and every time she does, she feels as if she has somehow been granted the kind of garden that only other people have.

“I’ve put giant purple alliums in those raised beds,” says Jensen, appearing beside her as she looks back at the house. His fingernails are black with soil and he shoves his hands into his pockets. “They’ll come up in May, June, and be a bit of a riot. Stop it looking too tidy. I thought it sounded like your mum—some fun and chaos amid the order.”

Lila, unexpectedly, feels a lump rise in her throat. “That’s lovely,” she says. “She would have liked that.”

“And just a truckload of spring bulbs, cyclamen, daffodils, that kind of thing. She was always cheerful, wasn’t she? And you can’t have enough cheery stuff by the end of winter.” He surveys his work with quiet satisfaction, and they stand for a moment, watching the hubbub of activity just visible through the French windows.

“You said it would be beautiful,” she says, turning to him.

He rubs a hand over his head. “Well, I’m always right. I did tell you that.”

“Yeah, now you’ve ruined it.”

He laughs. “I tell you what, I’m going to be ready for that fried chicken. I’m starving.”

They start to walk up toward the house.

“You’re doing okay, though?” Jensen says. “Gene tells me you have a new book deal.”

She smiles. “Yeah. Yeah. Not quite a top-down life yet but things seem to be…settling. How about you?”

“Good. Quiet, just as I like it.”

“Quiet is good,” she says emphatically. “I’m a big fan of quiet. ‘No alarms and no surprises.’ Isn’t that what Radiohead said?”

“I think that song was about suicide. But I get your general point.”

She stops walking, is about to speak, then changes her mind.

“You were about to say I’m quite annoying, weren’t you?” Jensen says.

“Yes,” Lila says. “Yes, I was.”

···

The fried chicken is sensational. Gene says so, at least four times, twice while he is actually chewing a mouthful, but the sentiment is so genuinely expressed that Bill seems not to mind the morsels of food spluttered in his general direction. Instead of dishing it onto individual plates, he has filled a platter with it and placed it in the center of the kitchen table. Hands frequently reach out for another piece, making the atmosphere somehow more relaxed than usual over dinner. The corn fritters are also a success, especially with Violet, who eats them with her fingers, her lips covered with grease and tomato salsa, and even the green salad that Bill has placed to the side (old habits die hard apparently) is swiftly demolished. Bottled beer and fizzy drinks scatter the table and some kind of upbeat jazz music plays gently in the background. Lila gazes at the visitors to her once-silent kitchen table: Bill and Penelope beside each other at the far end, talking animatedly about a piece of music they have decided to attempt, Gene telling Violet about the events on set at the stately home, the foibles of the actors, how the director was a dick, sorry, not a very nice person, and Violet sometimes even listening, Eleanor and Jensen, who seem to have hit it off, chatting about an exceptionally grotty bar they had both frequented in Camden Town. Celie, who has been more upbeat lately, is surreptitiously feeding Truant pieces of chicken under the table, occasionally breaking in to contradict something Violet says. It is a scene of life and warmth and color, and Lila feels oddly emotional at the sight of it, as if it is only now she can allow herself to acknowledge how far they have all come.

“It’s not a traditional family,” Eleanor had said, earlier that evening, when Lila had commented on how much easier she was finding it, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not a family.”

“How long do you think before you’re completely finished, Jensen?” says Bill, across the table.

“I’m waiting on the outdoor lights. Just a couple each side of the bench,” Jensen says. “And a couple more plants to go in. And then that’s pretty much it.”

“You’ve done a wonderful job,” Bill says. “Wonderful.”

“It looks very beautiful,” Penelope says, and then, in case that’s too presumptive, “I mean, as an outsider, it all looks very beautiful to me.”

“Penelope is a wonderful gardener,” says Bill. “You must take a look at her house, Jensen, when you have a minute. She has astonishingly green fingers.”

Penelope demurs, coloring. She is wearing a chain with a tiny toothpaste tube pendant “in honor of the occasion.” She had apparently crafted it from modeling clay and paint the previous day, just for fun, and has promised to show Violet how she did it. Lila is a little worried about what Violet will choose to make, but she guesses that Penelope will have to get used to her family one way or another, poo benches, X-rated rap lyrics and all.

They are settled in front of the television ten minutes before the allotted time for the advertisement broadcast. A plate of warm cookies is passed backward and forward along the two sofas, drinks refilled, a happy hum of conversation breaking across the television commentary. Violet is on the floor, as there is barely enough room for everyone, and Truant, who is not happy about the numbers currently in the house, eyes them all suspiciously from behind the curtain. Lila has found herself seated on the sofa beside Jensen, which makes her feel oddly self-conscious, but Eleanor, who has had several glasses of wine, is drumming up excitement, calling: “ We want Gene! We want Gene! ” sporadically, which draws everyone’s attention, including Jensen’s, so she mostly hangs on to her feelings of equanimity.

And then, breaking into a nature documentary about reptiles in Australia, there he is on the screen: her father, dressed in an unfamiliarly formal white shirt, his hair tamed and trimmed, gazing, concerned, at his teeth in a mirror.

It’s never too late to look a little brighter , says the female voiceover, and on-screen Gene, having brushed, suddenly smiles, his great shit-eating grin, and the whole room erupts. “Yay, Gene!” Eleanor, who is positively giddy, reaches over and high-fives him, the kids jump up, Bill says, “Very good, very good, Gene,” Truant starts barking, and as they all applaud, Lila absorbs what Eleanor said and thinks, Yes, maybe this is a family . With all its mad history and chaos, heartbreaks, stupid jokes, ridiculous triumphs, and distinct lack of Noguchi coffee-tables, maybe this is my family.