Late Season Read online

  Justine liked to think that underneath Tom and Louisa’s quarrelling, and their always obvious differences, there existed a mysterious elastic strength that held them together; love, or something. She was half aware that this was wish fulfilment; compensation for the fact that she knew no such thing bound her and Lucien, and that where she had always thought marriage indissolubly perfect, such as between Martin and Evie, it had turned out quite the opposite. Evie had disappeared from her perfect union of thirteen years; she had walked out one wet morning in late summer and had not come back.

  Justine heard footsteps some way off in the wood, and opened her eyes. She saw Martin and Dido appear up the stony path below the house and shielded her eyes from the glare with her hand; when they came into view she jumped up, and her book fell to the ground. It was clear straight away that there was something wrong.

  Martin was walking beside his daughter, and as they approached it became apparent that he was almost holding her up. Her head was leaning over towards him, and she was very pale, one side of her face drooping as though paralysed and her eyes half closed as if she was drugged.

  Martin tried to smile. ‘Migraine’ he said. ‘At least I think so. It’s happened before.’

  Across the grass, up under the trees Justine saw Lucien straighten and look over at them.

  Justine came around to Dido’s other side and supported her; she felt clammy and cold to the touch. Surprisingly light, too, despite her height, as though Justine could have carried her single-handed, and she realized that Dido had hardly spoken a word since their arrival. She felt a surge of pity for the girl, her loneliness.

  ‘Let’s get her upstairs,’ she said to Martin. ‘Does it help if she lies down in the dark?’

  Martin shook his head, helplessly, and there was something desperate in the look he gave her. She saw Lucien approaching across the grass.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, and between them she and Martin carried Dido up the broad stone staircase. At the back of the house, their room smelled warm and aromatic, of old wood and sunlight. The shutters were pulled to but not closed tight, allowing a little dim light into the room. A bright blade of sun shone through the door as they entered and Justine quickly closed it behind them, as Martin laid Dido on the bed.

  In the half-light Justine took in the fact that the room was tidy, the beds made and suitcases stacked in a corner. Not like a teenager’s room. She knelt and carefully took off Dido’s dusty sandals. The girl lay on her side, a hand across her eyes, and when her shoes were taken off she drew her knees up and made a small sound, as of pain imperfectly repressed. Downstairs Justine could hear Lucien moving about, but she didn’t call out to him; she didn’t even want to move suddenly.

  ‘I’ll get a bucket,’ she whispered to Martin. ‘In case she’s sick.’

  He nodded, but he didn’t take his eyes off Dido’s curled shape on the bed, and Justine tiptoed out of the room.

  Lucien was standing at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said, and Justine couldn’t quite make out his tone; irritation, perhaps, or impatience. Distracted, she dodged past him in search of a bucket and over her shoulder she told him.

  ‘It’s Dido, she’s got a migraine, or something. Whatever it is, it’s knocked her out, poor girl. And I thought, maybe she’d need a bucket in case she throws up.’

  Justine straightened from her position below the kitchen sink and held the fruits of her search out to Lucien: a plastic bowl.

  Lucien took it from her with what looked like reluctance. ‘I didn’t know children got migraines,’ he said, looking down at the bowl.

  Justine shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said. ‘But she’s almost not a child any more, is she?’

  Lucien nodded thoughtfully, turned with the bowl and headed upstairs.

  From outside Justine could hear the sound of the Fanes’ return; the boys’ shouting, breathless as they ran downhill with their sandals skidding on the stones, and Tom and Louisa laughing, further away.

  Tom was flushed with the walk, but looked cheerful, and Louisa was smiling. The boys were white with dust.

  ‘We saw a wild boar, Justine,’ blurted Sam, Angus pushing at him.

  ‘I wanted to tell her,’ Angus roared, pulling Sam over by the hem of his sweatshirt. They rolled on the grass, Angus pummelling Sam, who laughed helplessly.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Tom, without turning to look at the boys, looking at Justine. ‘What’s up? Where are the others?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ she said. ‘Dido’s not well. Martin says he thinks it’s a migraine. It came on while they were out walking’

  Justine saw a look pass briefly between Louisa and Tom.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Louisa quickly. ‘Just, poor girl, you know’ She turned to grab at Sam and Angus. ‘Shut up, you two, Dido’s ill. Go and look for wood, or something.’ The boys fell silent, and Angus stopped punching his brother and rolled off on to the grass.

  ‘We’d better go in,’ Louisa said.

  That first afternoon passed slowly. While Dido lay upstairs in the dark, silent house, as if by mutual agreement the others gravitated outside, and although nobody said anything it seemed to Justine they felt a communal reluctance to wander off too far. Perhaps it was the thought of leaving Dido alone, up there in the dim room, but certainly they were also subliminally aware of the days stretching out ahead of, them, and the need to ration activities and excursions for the holiday to come. From below them in the trees, down where they imagined the river to be, the hollow, doleful clang of cowbells sounded intermittently.

  Tom, who was already flushed from the sun, sat beneath the pergola with his eyes closed and a beer bottle in his dangling hand. Martin sat at some distance from the others, on a stone ledge against the house, leaning against the wall and reading with silent concentration. Perhaps it was just her imagination, thought Justine as she looked at him, but she felt a kind of negative energy coming off him, a resistance to their advice, their questions, their curiosity.

  Justine and Louisa lay in the sun, side by side on the dry, scratchy grass in front of the house, leaning up on their elbows as they watched the boys playing a war game with Lucien. The boys were armed with water guns so disproportionately large that they ran at a tilt, the weight pulling them down to one side, and Lucien was chasing them. The three of them dodged silently around the house, the boys occasionally yelping as they slipped on the fallen fruit from the plum trees that littered the ground. Lucien wore a pair of old army shorts; all his clothes were already old when he bought them. Justine thought he liked to take on someone’s else’s life, somehow, by buying clothes with evidence of years of work, a life spent building bridges in Malaysia, perhaps, or running a tobacco farm in Africa. His smooth, bare chest gleamed with water as he ran past them, a muscular blur in the mist sprayed by the boys’ oversized water pistols.

  Lucien was strong; he never seemed to sit still at home, always moving things around, furniture, wood for his carpentry, digging in the garden; and as a result he had textbook muscular definition. Broad shoulders, curved biceps, flat stomach; you could see that Lucien liked the way his body worked, like a perfectly engineered and serviced machine. Justine watched him chase Sam and Angus, fast and intent like a hunting animal, and despite the smile he flashed when he saw them watching she could tell that to him this was not a game. Justine looked at Louisa, who was watching the three of them too, and smiling, and Justine knew what she was thinking. What a wonderful father he’d make. She sighed involuntarily and turned over.

  Since their marriage Lucien and Justine had had the conversation – the one about having children – fifty times or more, in different guises, each one in a heavier disguise than the last. At first it was all very relaxed, or had seemed so at the time; looking back Justine wasn’t so sure. Naturally enough she had assumed that they would have children; it was one of the few reasons people bothered to get married these days, e
ven if Lucien hadn’t mentioned them specifically when he proposed. Under the circumstances, which were idyllic – sitting side by side on a velvet cushion in their Venetian trifora window in the Danieli on a weekend away Lucien had spent months planning – it might have seemed unromantic if he had come up with so practical a reason for their marrying. Perhaps that was what she thought at the time, anyway. Perhaps that was why it didn’t occur to her to make sure. For Lucien their marriage was about love, commitment to each other, celebrating their happiness, creating a perfect home together. Not about anything so mundane as reproduction.

  It was perhaps a year after their marriage that Justine had made an idle comment one evening as they sat watching television together, her head on Lucien’s shoulder. There’d been something on the screen about genetics, and she’d speculated about whether a child of theirs would inherit his green eyes or her brown. After a moment’s silence – with hindsight of course that moment was freighted with significance, but even at the time she had noticed it, the heartbeat too long before he responded – Lucien had murmured something vague about double recessive genes, then changed the subject. Now, of course, she couldn’t believe that they hadn’t talked about it before, because it changed everything.

  The realization that Lucien did not want children had crept up on her gradually, given Lucien’s disinclination for direct confrontation, his desire to be the good guy. At first he had agreed that, yes, they would have children, of course, almost certainly, just not straight away. The house wasn’t suitable for children, it had to be sorted out. A pretty little Victorian cottage, Lucien’s house was full of junk with a half-built extension when Justine had moved in, a state of affairs that, over the years had changed but not significantly. She had felt a twinge of sadness when she left her Georgian bedsit to move in with Lucien, she had loved its high ceilings, crumbling plasterwork scrolls and acanthus leaves ornamenting the cornices, its single long window, although perhaps not the frowsty shared bathroom. It had been hers; she had thought that, in time, Lucien’s place would become hers too, but as she looked back now, from this distance, it never had felt the same.

  Justine had packed her few junkshop things in a box and taken them with her: a gold sunburst mirror, some chipped turquoise-rimmed plates decorated with rosebuds, an old flowered eiderdown; to date they had not been unpacked. But Justine had not moved, after all, because she wanted a new home, to arrange all her things about her and choose tiles. She had wanted to be with Lucien; she didn’t think she could live without him.

  Gradually, however, as she grew used to cohabitation, Justine became aware that this continued to be Lucien’s space, not a shared one; his junk sculptures were usurped by half-built escritoires and experiments with marquetry, and the extension was built but remained unplastered. It still did not seem a place for a family; everything was his; he built it, at his own pace, he offered it to her, the kitchen with its smoothly sliding drawers and hidden cupboards, clever little niches and rails, hanging Venetian glass baubles and perilously lopsided chandeliers. All she could offer back were her wages, and she felt he was the benefactor, she the beneficiary, for a long time.

  Although it was still not finished, the house was not squalid or uninhabitable; Lucien had a gift for arranging things so that they looked interesting: a work in progress, a collections of shells, or tools, a talent that was referred to as styling on home makeover shows, although it was not a word Lucien would have used. The garden was pretty, as Lucien had put a lot of work into it when he had his gardening column. It still looked very charming, although now all but the vegetable patch had become rather wild and rambling.

  When they entertained, as they often did because Lucien liked to show off his cooking, he would put all his creative energies into the task: planning menus, laying the table, finding old linen napkins and bits of family silver, and their guests would marvel at the whole deal, the perfectly presented food and all the beautiful objects on display. Justine was proud of Lucien, and he would look at her with triumph after a particularly successful dinner as she cleared away, the guests gone home, as if to say, what a perfect life we have. But after a while, and when feeling low, Justine couldn’t help thinking that the sorrel soup and homemade bread, the Indian wooden eggs, the rusty Victorian utensils and the smooth pebbles arranged on the floor were standing between her and a child.

  Justine didn’t want to replicate her own crowded family. The shrieks and feuds and grudges, the lack of privacy, and the necessity that she find her own way out of it all and into the light, like a plant in an essentially hostile environment, were all too fresh in her mind. Nor had she ever been aware of any physical instinct, the kind generally referred to as maternal, no yearning when she saw others’ babies. It seemed to be something more primitive still than that, embedded in some inaccessible lobe or cortex, something connected with basic survival. When, as now, she was with her friends and their children, some of them like Dido, approaching adulthood, she felt herself slipping between generations, aware that she was neither old nor young, neither a daughter any more nor yet a mother, and soon she wouldn’t be a grandmother, either. And despite herself, knowing as she did that to define herself or her friends by their biological function was demeaning and narrow-minded, she would be overwhelmed suddenly by a sense of her own pointlessness.

  Justine didn’t know, and still didn’t know, why Lucien didn’t want children; he had never admitted outright that he didn’t and had therefore been able to avoid giving any explanation. Perhaps it was his own family background; most things, after all, came down to that; but examine it as she might – or what she knew of it, which was little – she could find no clue there. An only child of wealthy parents, he had had a privileged upbringing in an opulent Edwardian house on Barnes Common. His father was a stiff, dull, distant man, a partner in a big City firm of solicitors; he had shaken Justine’s hand and asked what her father did. Lucien’s mother was an heiress who, it seemed to Justine, suspected her husband of having married her for her money and who drank too much, and, on the only occasion Justine had met them, she had found her chilly. There was no leavening of humour in her, a tall woman swathed in bohemian splendour who lavished a great deal of querulous attention on Lucien, her only child, but addressed not a single question to Justine.

  It wasn’t that Justine envied Evie (or Louisa, or any of her other parent-friends) the sleepless nights, the mooning about Mothercare, or even the tiny, blinking, grimacing babies they held so tenderly, their opaque little eyes and soft mouths opening and closing like primitive sea creatures. What she wanted was their certainty, the look in Louisa’s eyes, even at her most infuriatingly efficient, as she narrowed them to scrutinize Sam and Angus; the look she’d seen in Evie’s as she looked down at Dido in the maternity ward. What they saw – or what she thought they saw, which was perhaps not quite the same thing – was incontrovertible proof of their survival: a baby. Justine was dimly aware that this desire for security might not be considered a good enough reason to become a parent; that the more loftily self-satisfied among her acquaintance might consider it an indication that there was something else wrong in her life that she should fix first. Which was the reason Justine never articulated it to anyone; that and an obscure sense of shame that she should want a child and should be unable to persuade Lucien that they should have one.

  It was hot on the grass outside Il Vignacce, and Justine could feel the sun on her back through her T-shirt. Reluctantly she pulled her sleeves right down to her wrists; she knew she should go into the shade, but sometimes she so missed the sun. She felt as though she was being purified, burned clean in the dry heat. The only sound was the scratching of the cicadas in the trees, pulsing in time with the heat haze that shimmered over the pasture; the birds had all fallen silent in the half-light of the forest, and Justine imagined the cows, which they had not yet seen, must be asleep in the shade. The pace of the water fight around the house was slowing, and, as Justine and Louisa watched, Lucien slipped into th
e house while the boys were around the back. They went on running all the same, around and around, pelting each other with plums for variety, and when Lucien did not reappear they seemed to run out of energy quite suddenly and collapsed in the shade of a tree, lying across each other like dogs.

  Justine turned over and saw Louisa looking at her.

  ‘So how are things? With you and Lucien?’ Louisa asked. Her tone was light, but Justine could tell there was more to it than a polite enquiry. Louisa had known Lucien longer than she had, after all, and Justine had always thought she had a soft spot for him. He had that effect on women. Some women.

  ‘Oh, you know,’Justine said reluctantly, trying to deflect Louisa’s probing but unable to bring herself to utter a blatant lie.

  ‘Mmm?’ said Louisa, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘Fine,’ said Justine wearily, ‘He’s getting into this cabinet-making now, you know. He likes to have something on the go’.

  Louisa nodded absent-mindedly. ‘He is so clever at that kind of thing, isn’t he? Easily the most creative man I know. It’s… odd that he doesn’t ever… want to go and make money doing it, don’t: you think? I mean, he could get a job tomorrow, couldn’t he?’

  Justine knew what she was getting at and decided not to give her any ammunition, not just yet. ‘I think he will, with the cabinet-making, once it’s up and running. It’s a question of the word getting round, building up a client list…’ She trailed off as she heard the lameness of her reply.

  Louisa nodded. ‘And I think it’s such a good idea to put off having children until you’re sure. They are a total commitment, you know’. She pulled a face. ‘All that struggle to get your figure back, putting their names down for the right schools. And you’ve got a wonderful job, it’s not as though you’re unfulfilled, is it? You’ve got your lives so well sorted out, you and Lucien.’