We left Swindon around five, me sneaking past reception to the car while Matthew dawdled to tell the concierge he’d received a phone call requesting his immediate return, so alas would not be staying and would not require breakfast in the morning. He drove in silence and as we neared home I ducked my head between my knees in case the passing headlights of a neighbour or relative’s vehicle happened to illuminate our incongruous faces. He dropped me off at the other end of town and I changed back into my Nikes to plod home, past the Post Office, grocer’s and butcher’s, preparing my lies and not-quite-lies in my head.
‘Yes, Mum, Claire and I had a great time.’ Claire most probably enjoyed her day off too and I didn’t say we had a great time together, so we’ll call this true.
‘We went to this cool little café and had cream teas.’ True. It was called the Scribbling Horse and the woman gave us extra cream.
‘The Road to Eldorado is okay, it’s a bit childish, though.’ You don’t have to see the film to know this and, as my mother refuses to watch animations, it seems unlikely I’ll be quizzed about plot and character development. Therefore, true, plus extra points for successful Bunbury.
‘Hastings was really crowded.’ Also most likely true … I just wasn’t there.
‘No, I didn’t buy anything, but we did look in some book shops.’ True. Matthew bought a Collected Letters of Virginia Woolf and I fingered a first edition Oscar Wilde, but shopping wasn’t our main priority.
‘The bus was a little late.’ Okay, this one’s a lie, but unavoidable. Five truths and one lie – not bad.
A few hours later, my mum, my brother and I banged our gate and walked the 300 yards to number fourteen. Lydia answered and led us into the sitting room. Annabelle was already sprawled on the floor with her work-friend Lucy, inspecting hand-made jewellery. Lydia’s sister, Hannah, was fussing over a teapot by the bay window, and their frail but sharp-eyed mother, Valerie, was characteristically bent double beside a bookshelf, hunting for a specific volume of her 1948 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. These were my mother’s friends: people who had been kind to me since I was in single digits; honorary aunts and uncles who cared for my brother and me like children of a collective. Occasionally I felt a pang of guilty tenderness towards this extended family, but mostly over the past few months I’d begun to see them through Matthew’s cruel cynicism, noting their individual quirks and scorning their refusal to stick their heads above the parapet.
‘I’m so glad you could come on short notice,’ Hannah gushed in over-the-top hostess mode. ‘Lucy’s showing us her gems. Isn’t she good? I’m thinking of taking a course.’
My mum had said we’d been invited to look at jewellery; a kind of Tupperware party with beads I supposed. I’d fancied a cup of tea and James had been bribed with biscuits. I shuffled into the room after my brother and noticed Matthew on the end of the couch, a book in his lap. He made eye contact and I turned away, willing my cheeks not to burn.
My eyes landed on Annabelle’s patterned skirt. She’d coupled it with an embroidered shirt and looked sumptuously hippyish. In contrast, Hannah wore tight black jeans, ankle-boots and an oversized jumper that made less than subtle allusions to the 1980s, a period in fashion that had not yet returned to the likes of Topshop and H&M.
Lucy, a tiny blonde woman swathed in coloured silk, was explaining how she chose each bead. Something about the karmic energy, I think. I watched her mouth as she talked for a while, but quickly turned my attention to her husband, Graham, who wore ripped jeans and sat with an air of boredom on the sofa next to Matthew. He and Lucy had a son two years above me at school, but Graham looked a bit like a floppy-haired George Clooney so I figured it wasn’t too bad to have a crush on him. I sat on the floor next to his feet and asked him about his motorbike, giggling when he said I should come for a ride one day.
‘If your mum says it’s all right, that is.’
I flushed with excitement and tried not to notice how old Matthew looked beside Graham, how his leg rested effeminately upon his knee and his shirt fell over a muscle-less torso. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him or that I didn’t want to repeat what we’d done this afternoon, but something had changed today and I felt a new kind of energy coursing through my limbs, one that drew me instinctively towards the Grahams and Lucys of the world.
I wasn’t the only one, though, and before the evening was over, Hannah was sat tipsily in Graham’s lap and Annabelle was fawning over Lucy’s earrings, brushing the skin on her neck as she fingered the green gems dangling from her lobes. My mum and Valerie were deep in discussion about the treatment of mental health patients in 1975 and James’s head rested heavily on his arm as Lydia spoke of the difficulties of getting out to do the gardening. On the way home, James growled at my mum that he’d never be forced to go to one of those things again and she muttered a reply along the lines of, ‘I don’t know why you have to be so antisocial; Nat seemed to enjoy herself.’
On dreary country days, when the air choked with the pitiful mediocrity of small town life, old ladies wheeled their trolleys through town to collect their pensions from Nicky at the Post Office and Ray listened to people natter about haemorrhoids in the chemist before dispensing Preparation H, I would sit in Matthew and Annabelle’s open-plan kitchen, playing cards and drinking tea from a pot. Sometimes I’d curl my legs under me on the awkward unpadded chairs while Annabelle doodled flowers beside the crossword in the Telegraph and Matthew consulted The Racing Post. He sat at the head, with the two of us on either side; these were unarticulated but set places and it was always odd when Annabelle was away and Matthew set my place for dinner at her chair.
During term time, I spent six out of seven nights there and, on holidays, most days too. Eight front doors and eleven cars separated their house from my mum’s. The Grays, the Smiths, the Popels, Mrs Pratt, Mr Davis, Oliver and June, Beatrice and the Roberts lived in between. Our immediate neighbours, the Grays, had retired to tend their immaculate garden and always said hello when I passed them on the pavement, but would become more reserved in a few months once I moved in with my dad and my mum began muttering up and down the street about my being an ‘awkward teenager’. Mrs Pratt had been a teacher at my primary school and, although she asked kindly about my exams and future plans, I was still a little afraid of her and mumbled nervously whenever I encountered her on my way to the house on the end.
Matthew’s study lay behind the street-side window, so I could always tell before I arrived whether he or Annabelle would answer my knock first. Their post-box-red front door encased in its black frame now looms overly significant in my memory. Stepping through that doorway I would shed the unhappy teenager living in a deadly dull town that haunted me on the outside and enter the safe place of art, poetry, philosophy and love.
A kingfisher I had drawn in pastels at the age of eight hung above their stove, the Piglet I had won Matthew at the fair was pinned to the whiteboard in his study, my cribbage board had found a permanent home on the shelf with his chess set, and Juno, Annabelle’s cat, paid no attention to my comings and goings. Towards the end, I might even have had a key, and, of course, volumes of my angsty diaries lay in a locked drawer of Matthew’s bureau because we’d agreed early on that this was safer than having them only perfunctorily hidden beneath my mattress.
The three of us played cards, drank wine and sometimes smoked weed acquired from my friends at school. Matthew and I would touch feet under the table and sneak a kiss when Annabelle ran upstairs to fetch something. Sometime after 10pm Annabelle would pour herself a tiny glass of port and wish us goodnight. I would stay, wrapped in Matthew’s arms as we whispered secrets to each other or dared ourselves to forget Annabelle was only upstairs, until it got late enough that I worried a parent might come looking for me and I let myself out, arrived home and calmly watched some television repeat with my unquestioning family.
My first memories of