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  ‘That’s always been your problem, ’Mal,’ – the lazy drawl in Hari’s voice makes Amal wonder where he is, sofa, pub, bed – ‘I’ve never been very good with boundaries. You’re in church because?’

  ‘I’m hiding from the glorified village fete. Long story.’

  ‘They haven’t taken it well, then?’ ‘They don’t know. Not yet. Claud has to decide when, not me.’

  ‘Yes, best leave it to her. It’s a man’s job, after all.’

  He takes it, the barbs, same as he takes his wife’s. Day-to-day abuse delivered down phone lines. Daily, like cornflakes; as fulfilling as prayer. It is a masochism that always put him on the lower rung in previous relationships – lippy girls who told him he never did anything right, until he got out his credit card – a facet of character best suited to temporary residence here, where both the start and end point is one of sin.

  ‘If I didn’t have guts I wouldn’t have driven down here,’ he says flatly, as unconvinced as his listener.

  ‘I know you do,’ Hari says suddenly, welling with an unfamiliar remorse. ‘I’ve no idea how I’d react in the circumstances. Nowhere near as sound as you’re doing, I imagine.’

  ‘Don’t know about that. I’m . . . muddling along. Passing time until the day’s over.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have called you, I’m sorry. I’m sitting in the pub, bored because the person I’m meeting is twenty minutes late. It’s pathetic. Allow me to take leave and go fuck myself.’

  ‘Not before you tell me your news. You haven’t called for no reason.’

  ‘It’s nothing . . .’ He hesitates, embarrassed. ‘Just bored. Other people have the sense not to answer when they see my name. Not you.’

  ‘Sure?’ He is still in the market for distraction. If religious icons and a restored nave cannot do the job, maybe the mantle should be taken by the selfish, the trivial.

  ‘Yup. No different to usual. Empty mind and all that.’

  He feels hollow once Hari has hung up (‘Look after yourself, man. Look after her’), ill at ease with the uncertainty in his friend’s voice. Hari’s desire to self-censor is unheard of in other situations – shagging at funerals, nicking the odd present at wedding receptions – prompting him to wonder at which elements of their ordeal have driven this response. Notes of wistfulness maybe; that this tragedy is not his to experience first hand. Or is that just how he, Amal, now thinks of it? Willing himself to swap places with Hari and become the outsider.

  Then, a second phone interruption before he even has a chance to take his hand out of his pocket. Others are at fault for his inattention to prayer. He would be faithful, devout, if it were not for these distractions.

  The polysynthetic ring tone he chose as jokingly retro, pleasingly base next to Claud’s bog-standard BlackBerry audio signature, sounds just as tinny and cheap as it did moments earlier. No, worse than before, shamefully so, as its cartoonish top notes bounce from icon to font to altar steps. Even the echo seems to slide despairingly off each hard surface, slick of unwanted matter; like a Teflon pan coming into contact with mono-saturated fats.

  Similarly, his arse cannot help but skid across the pew, as he struggles to fish the phone from his pocket. It is as if the actual building knows he is an outsider, and refuses his attempt to take root. It renders the shelter into something temporary and of a flimsier construction than the one in his mind; pavilion bench or suburban bus stop.

  Try as he might, he will never fit into this town. Even in places where he hides away. No matter how well-worn his wellington boots are or how stained his Barbour Mac, the countryside will always reject him.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asks, softly, hearing her breath, and immediately wishing it was not this phone, but her nestled against his ear, her weight pushing into his neck, perfume filling his nose and mouth.

  ‘Better,’ says the voice on the other end. Claud’s, thick with warmth and hoarse with crying.

  A whisper that brings something back from their wedding, small utterances that only the other could hear: I’m bricking it; You’re beautiful; the ring won’t fit.

  ‘I’ve slept. Washed my face.’

  ‘That’s good. We’re leaving the Herald now.’

  ‘I think I’ve had enough of being on my own.’

  ‘I’m really pleased you called, Claud. It makes me happy.’

  He realizes his prayer as he says it. Silence paving the way for honesty. Anger and guilt, banished.

  He hears her intake of breath before replying; a pause where an unspoken apology is accepted.

  ‘Come home, ’Mal. I’m missing you.’

  The house smells of baking which alarms all of them. Like her mother everything she touches becomes burnt and inedible. From the front door they get a clear view of her, standing by the sink drying Liz’s mixing bowl and wooden spoon with a look of deep concentration, seeming not to notice that they are back. She does not rouse until Sam has one foot in the kitchen. She is wearing one of Liz’s old evening dresses, high-fronted and backed. The blue satin gives an incredibly high gloss, so much so that under the kitchen halogens he is sure that he can make out his reflection staring back at him, open-mouthed, incredulous. Everything about the silhouette clashes with the soberness of her chores – the movie star on her day off. With her face scrubbed of make-up, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail she looks younger and more vulnerable, as spirited and helpless as a gangly teenager.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t be back until much later. I wanted to surprise you with something.’

  Liz and Sam splutter over one another, something along the lines of, ‘you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble’, but now that they are reassured that nothing has been set on fire, they are nonplussed. Liz has won a seventh prize in the tombola. A smallish object held in a wooden case the size of a small book which she will not reveal until dinner.

  ‘Time and place for everything, you impatient people. Curiosity killed the cat or whatever that cliché was. This is the first time I’ve won anything. Isn’t it unbelievable?’

  ‘It would be, if you hadn’t given them a painting worth a hundred quid,’ grumbles Sam, who has talked of nothing else since he heard how much it cost from an eagle-eye shopper on the Green. He was only persuaded not to take it back after he was assured by his son-in-law that he had lost the receipt.

  Amal is staring at Claud’s stomach, whose overwhelming flatness is emphasized by the narrowness of the dress’s cut and the clinginess of the fabric. Realizing where he is looking, she hurriedly covers herself in the butcher’s stripe apron hanging in the peg by the back door, both of them hoping that the rush of motion proves distracting to overattentive parents who tend to pick up everything. The look she fires back is one of deep hurt, shocked that he would blatantly focus on that particular part of her.

  ‘Let me help you with that, darling. You were never any good with tying ribbons. You had a good nap?’

  ‘Been up for ages, Mum. Still got morning sickness. Threw up over my jumper.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, darling. You can wear whatever you like.’

  She smoothes Claud’s hair lovingly, strokes her indulgently. In the space of three steps both of them have regressed to the period when Liz originally wore the dress, a wedding reception in the late seventies when Claud was no older than five. Amal realizes then how the dress is familiar to him, from one of the family pictures in the living room.

  ‘I was going to come and join you, only I couldn’t find Amal’s keys, and the walk is . . .’

  ‘Inadvisable for a woman in your condition,’ affirmed Sam. ‘It was slippery on the path today. You did the right thing by staying here.’

  A look passes between Liz and Sam to express the horror of what could happen. There but for the grace of God; their one true time to put faith in Jesus. It bounces between them before being tossed in Amal’s direction like he is part of some football keepy-uppy group trick. Rural life has hardened them to the namby-pamby nature of
suburban protectiveness. Health and safety Nazis can go and take a running jump in their eyes; Pasteurization is pooh-poohed, fruit and vegetables continue to be bought in pounds and ounces, but when it comes to their daughter, their only child, cotton wool is not simply needed, it is mandatory. Life-giving oxygen made solid.

  If this is how they act when she is healthy, he wonders what will happen if he blurts it out by mistake, or if one look too many, one apron cover-up is correctly interpreted. She would be put on immediate bed rest with a twenty-four-hour nurse posted outside the door. He knows there will be an interrogation, and that it will be long and unpleasant. Liz will neglect to call him ‘my son’ until matters are satisfactorily concluded. Sam will do what he wished he did that first afternoon he was brought down to Sussex, and bare his fangs.

  Claud shares none of the dread that comes with his fortune-telling. She is treating her lie in the same way she does her career: single-minded, 100 per cent committed. The baking is the biggest indicator of that. She wants, needs everything to be perfect.

  Liz and Sam go upstairs to change, leaving them standing at the oven, watching uncertainly for signs of flour-egg-sugar alchemy. Her earlier warmth on the phone now burning with the cakes. Funny how he now feels more comfortable with them than with her. The power of paganism makes friendships of men.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Carrot cake. There was a bunch in the fridge looking like they were about to turn.’

  ‘Waste not want not.’

  ‘Precisely. We should practise some of that at home. We buy far too much food, ’Mal. No one’s ever around to eat it.’

  Meaning he is not around to eat it or cook it. For at least a third of the twenty-one days, when he sat in his car and talked himself out of his fear, she has been left on her own, steaming fish and ready prepped vegetables in the plug-in machine that promises miracles for hopeless cooks.

  ‘So what’s in the cake, Claud?’

  ‘Carrots. I told you.’

  ‘I know that. I meant, what else you put in it. Which recipe you used.’

  ‘Flour . . . and other stuff, all right? I thought I was doing something useful, ’Mal. Didn’t expect to be questioned on every element that’s gone in it.’

  ‘I’m just interested. Not trying to start an argument. I just can’t remember you ever baking before.’

  ‘Oh, I have, plenty of times.’

  She had been so open with him about the baby. Every sensation that flooded through her in those three weeks was shared, making him feel the shift in hormones to the point where he was certain that change was happening in his body too. Simpatico. They had laughed about it. Now she wants him to know nothing about her. Recipes are secret, the workings of her body, private. He is eligible for the firing squad just for looking at her. When the darkness in her eyes pauses its intolerant transmission they exude mystery – more mystery – and a desire not to be read. She expects him to be as blank as her. Two canvases, like the junk they bought in Battle; stony-faced, without an opinion between them. At the oven or elsewhere she has no use for him. Even the need for his manky sperm is negligible.

  ‘Let me do something. Chuck me over that dishcloth.’

  She stays where she is at the draining board.

  ‘It’s fine. I got it covered.’

  He tells her about the maypole, hoping there is something in the history and comedy of the Green that will thaw her, but her joints remain frozen and ungiving. If they hung ribbon from her she could be danced around, worshipped. No one would be any the wiser.

  If she has guessed his true fear of the pole, that he had Ophelia-type visions of her wailing to the fertility gods in an Anglo Saxon paean to the Bollywood melodrama, disrupting everyone’s afternoon, she does not show it. How to communicate that fear and break the ice? He remembers reading an online report, probably bogus, which mentioned that six per cent of victims of serious road traffic accidents – the ones who walked away miraculously with a scratch – stopped speaking for up to sixteen weeks after the incident. Her lips are folded thickly one under the other; thick folds like her curdled cake mixture.

  For the second time today he thinks about channelling Puppa and using a physical act to shock her into her senses. A shake or slap. Something he would not dare try here. His anger must find a more effective channel before he does something regrettable and dangerous in Sam’s house.

  He cools down outdoors. The garden is magnificent in its maturity and stamps on suburban aspirations, where single trees and timid bushes of hydrangea, rose and ivy are worshipped. His in-laws have had over thirty years to harness the rich orchard soil that backs the house, to preserve the wide tunnel of hard fruit trees planted in the last century, whilst allowing the invasion of newer, more alien greenery to flourish. Three decades in, there is no questioning the logic of the Japanese autumn ferns that form a lofty second wall along the existing brickwork, nor the kiwi fruit bushes planted in favoured west-facing soil, and whose branches lean widely in all directions until they almost touch their cousins of pear, apple and plum. Mistakes have been corrected along the way; the best places for patio slabs, walkways, bird baths and fish ponds have been tried and tried again until they were wholly satisfied that the right balance was reached – wild, well-tended, and in some parts, hidden and magical.

  It makes Amal ashamed of their froufrou shrubbery in Richmond where each plant has been austerely potted and made separate from the others. The tightly packed Boxwood shrubs, cosmetically pleasing and well-mannered in their growth, and the pink Cordyline, whose spiky leaves shoot upwards from the earth, injecting a little rock ’n’ roll into their young fogeyness whilst still continuing to complement the garden furniture. There is no contact from one plant to the next; even the roots, he suspects, mind their own business, each existing in its own alkaline-leaning bubble.

  What does he know about nature? He has lived in five different houses through childhood, where gardens were for playing in, not maturing.

  Sam is also outside, doing something out of view behind the arch of Sweet William, beyond which lies the swing seat where Claud swotted for her A-levels, and the sundial where she daydreamed about boys, and occasionally smoked with them. It is a job that requires changing into a pair of wellington boots and an old gardening jumper, a blue and cream Fair Isle, knackered at the elbows and much loved by moths everywhere else.

  ‘Come and have a look at this, or not, if you can’t make it,’ he calls, louder than is necessary, and looking pointedly at Amal’s shoes, as if to imply the distance involved from patio to muddy lawn has more significance than a mere stroll of a hundred or so yards. His son-in-law is labelled a city boy who does not like to get his hands dirty and will always be so. Nothing since the wedding has given him cause to change his mind. He pays no mind that Amal’s brogues are already covered in dirt from the hike to the village and the trampled-in mud of the Green. A few more steps are not going to hurt.

  He finds Sam standing over a freshly covered hole at the base of the sundial the size of a shoebox.

  ‘We’ve had trespassers. Probably trying to steal the thing while we were at the Herald.’

  ‘A fox?’

  ‘Kids. A few gardens have been vandalized around here recently. Greenhouses smashed, urinating in rainwater barrels and the like. Didn’t think they were the digging type though.’

  ‘I thought it was animals that went round digging holes.’

  ‘Our four-legged friends aren’t that tidy, mate. Not in this country, anyway.’

  They are standing among loose clumps of mud, which have sprayed across this part of the lawn, stubbornly sticking to the grass like the after effects of a howling storm. The covering of the hole, slightly domed and patted down, is neat and considered. Too neat for both animals and bored teenagers.

  ‘Jesus Christ, look at the size of it! That’s good turf they’ve mashed up.’

  ‘That’s a little harsh, isn’t it? For the old blasphemy?’

  ‘Say what I
like in my own house! Don’t believe in any of that crap, anyway. It’s only your lot who follow that mumbo jumbo to the letter these days.’

  ‘And who’s “my lot” when they’re at home?’

  ‘Converts.’

  This family will never forget what he has done. Never thank him enough.

  Sam goes to check the shed rather than seeing what is underneath. He has over five hundred pounds worth of grass cutters and power tools piled one on top of another, of which only the lawn mower is regularly used. They are at the age where handymen are called in to take care of the rest. His father-in-law is active, but does not have enough faith in the strength of his joints to be going up and down ladders like a banana boy.

  ‘Check the spade!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If the kids have broken in, Sam, they’ll have used the spade.’

  ‘They might have brought their own. I told you, son, they’re professionals.’

  Son-in-law’s lot, to be wrong at every turn.

  His fingers burrow deep into the freshly dug earth. Though it is damp and matted to the touch, he is surprised how much it feels like something more familiar under his hands: dough mix. Surprised too at the profound thump that has returned in his chest. Every time he thinks it has gone, the raised pulse returns. Unless, of course, it is simply a matter of perception; that his heart has been beating at something close to sprint rate from the moment Claud came down the stairs yesterday afternoon and said disbelievingly that she thought something was wrong. Maybe it has never deflected since then. His body responses remaining on an emergency mode.

  He is past wrist deep, half his forearm stained with dirt, before dough hits rocky road, a hard square object. He scrabbles to retrieve the box, aware of how dog-like his movements have become; quick and sharp, never allowing speed to deflect from accuracy. He feels the soil flying into his lap and, as he works, heat dappling his temples and forehead, every sensation pleasurable and exciting. The mindlessness of the animal, a dog with no cares aside from reuniting with his bone. A plastic box he can sink his teeth into, and grapple with. A human chew toy designed to take his mind off everything else.