A Rival Creation Read online

  The beautiful young woman who had asked one of the questions earlier made her way through the group of ladies to the empty circle round Liberty, hips swinging. Liberty admired her calf-length, tight-fitting, black skirt and the pale face with its full lips painted in pillar-box red. She had to be interesting, Liberty thought, to look so wonderfully out of place.

  ‘I’m Victoria Brooke,’ the woman said in her slow, thick voice that made the words drop from her lips like honey from a spoon. ‘I really enjoyed your talk. If you are still taking that writing class, I’d love to come some time. They say those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach, so I’m sure your classes are very good.’

  Liberty’s eyes widened. Did this lovely girl intend to insult with an elegance matched only by the cut of her clothes, or had she happened on the skill by luck? But she said, ‘Victoria Brooke, of course; you’re married to Evelyn’s nephew. Evelyn and I are next-door neighbours.’

  Just then the door to the hall opened for a tall man of about forty who brought with him a blast of chill air, like the wicked fairy at the christening.

  ‘Oscar!’ Victoria hurried towards him. The man bent down and kissed her cheek. Liberty looked round for someone else to talk to, but Victoria returned. ‘This is Oscar,’ she said, and Liberty smiled and shook hands, annoying herself by pushing her hair over her cheek to hide the scar. She hadn’t done that earlier, with only women and Neville looking at her.

  She looked up again, and her smile grew warmer. ‘Your aunt told me you had moved down here.’

  Oscar was just about to answer when Neville Pyke joined them, aiming words even as he crossed the room. ‘Mr Brooke, pleased to meet you. Very pleased to meet you indeed. I hear you’re our new editor. You’ll be glad to know that I’ve read the Tribune ever since I moved here and I think it compares very favourably with other local papers. I see myself as rather an expert on local papers you see, reading them wherever I find myself, and I have found myself in some strange places I don’t mind telling you.’

  Oscar had put a polite and interested look on his face, and it remained in place as Neville carried on. His eyes are wandering though, Liberty thought. He’s probably thinking about taking his beautiful wife home to bed.

  ‘But I had hoped that since our new editor…’ Neville went on.

  ‘I saw your book on the Colombian drugs trade,’ Liberty interrupted before apologizing to Neville. ‘It must be quite a change, coming down here?’ As she asked, Liberty found she was not really interested in Oscar’s answer, she just wanted to go home; home where razors and aspirins, brandy and ropes waited for her like a loving family. Then it occurred to her that at almost forty she still did not know how to tie a noose. Her cousin Bertil had promised to teach her one summer on the Swedish island when they were nine, but he had never got around to it.

  She realized that Oscar was speaking to her but, feeling she was coming from so far away she could not possibly hear, she excused herself and said goodbye. She could feel his surprised gaze on her back as she struggled to open the heavy outside doors. Those doors, inserted into the rickety walls of the village hall, always made her think of the story of the three little pigs, where one little pig’s house, made of straw, was blown clean away, leaving just the sturdy door standing with the little pig hiding stupidly behind it.

  She walked out into the autumn night and through the lowflying smoke from a dying bonfire in the vicarage garden. She got into the car and drove slowly through the village, across the bridge over the river that divided Tollymead in two, and down River Lane towards her cottage.

  Coming home used to seem like a reward to Liberty. It was the first place she had actually owned: pebbledash with a bow-window that looked all wrong, like pink ribbon on a bulldog. The narrow hall boasted a multi-coloured stained-glass window more suitable to a suburban semi. Liberty liked that too; it had made the move away from London easier. It amused her to think of all these town dwellers striving to make their homes into Marie Antoinette’s idea of a country cottage, and there was the builder of Liberty’s house, working away all those years ago, making his home a little piece of suburbia in the middle of the Hampshire countryside. She had christened the house Laburnum Terrace and placed a large aspidistra in a blue-and-white china pot on a stand in the hall. She was fond of the plant. It had survived alternate bouts of neglect and lavish care, to welcome her for five years now, but that evening even the sight of its blowzy abundance did not bring her comfort.

  She wandered aimlessly round the house, finally settling in the kitchen. She filled the kettle and put it on the Aga hot plate. She might be a failed writer, but she was becoming a nice little literary cliché herself: suicidal and Aga-owning. At least the Aga was unfashionably beige. She actually loved the thing: the way it had no buttons or controls and could not be set to cook your dinner half-an-hour before you returned home in the evening; the way it did not pretend to be a charcoal grill or a pizza oven. It just stood there, gently warming your home, a one-cooker stand against state-of-the-art technology, a solid hunk of metal protest. Liberty poured the water into the teapot and brought it to the table. Just as she was thinking she was too tired even to bother to die, the telephone rang. Hoping that this time it really would be Johnny, she leapt up to answer.

  ‘Would she,’ the operator asked, ‘accept the charge for a call from Sweden?’ She would, of course she would.

  ‘Johnny darling, how lovely!’

  Johnny just wanted to say hello. He was spending the first months of his gap-year in Sweden, working as assistant gamekeeper in a forest on the shores of a wide lake. He was an undemonstrative boy, but he liked to keep tabs on his mother, to make sure she was all right and not lonely without him.

  ‘I thought maybe you could come over here before I leave for Adelaide. I’ll miss Christmas at home.’

  He misses Christmas at home, Liberty thought. How can I kill myself when my son misses Christmas at home?

  She had become pregnant with Johnny in her second year at St Andrews, by a guest lecturer from the Outer Hebrides. Callum McLaughlan was a doctor of literature who had taken a year off from his teaching post in London to write a novel. He was also married, but Liberty had not thought to ask about that. She had listened to his lecture in the half-empty hall and looked at his lower arms that were covered in reddish-blond hair like the limbs of a golden fly. She had thought his lecture brilliant, marred only by the shuffling and whispering of some of the other students who, it seemed, failed to see what beauty of thought and body was offered to them by Callum McLaughlan. When the talk was over she had stayed behind, and later they had walked together to the restored old gypsy caravan in which he had travelled down. Had she had a mother, Liberty felt later, that mother might well have warned her daughter about men who travelled to work in purple-and-yellow caravans; but as she stepped through the fringed velvet curtain that night, Liberty thought only that if her life ended then, she would at least have known love.

  The next morning Callum had hung his head as he explained that he was married, with a small child, and that his wife was not strong like Liberty, but a soft vine that needed him to lean on or she would not survive. He left, and Liberty had found herself empty of all feelings other than a mild curiosity as to the softness of vines.

  It had not been easy to explain the pregnancy to her father. ‘We had so much in common,’ she had tried. Hamish’s eyes could be mild and yielding but that evening they had been like blue mirror lenses returning her worries, taking nothing.

  ‘There was literature…’ Liberty said, ‘and him being Scottish and me half…’

  ‘In Scotland, such men are not difficult to find. Will you be sleeping with all of them?’

  What a thing for a father to say. Even now, nineteen years later, Liberty blushed at the memory as she spoke on the phone to Callum’s and her son.

  ‘Love you,’ she said as she always did, as they rang off. And that love, she thought as she put the phone down with a sigh, was about th
e only sure thing in God’s strange creation.

  By now the tea was cold, so she tipped it into the stained sink and poured herself some dark Jamaican rum. She always kept a bottle to make the drink her grandfather used to make when she was small and had a cold: one tablespoon of dark rum, one tablespoon of demerara sugar and top it up with hot milk. Tonight she skipped the sugar and the milk, making up the difference with some more rum. She downed it and made herself another drink.

  ‘How could you do it, God?’ she muttered into her glass, as if He was lurking below the surface of the thick, dark spirit, ‘How could you let it happen? Were you sitting there, creating? “Artistic temperament and sensitivity: one teaspoon of each. Dedication: two heaped tablespoons. Passion for expressing herself in writing: three cupfuls. Talent… Whoops, there’s someone at the gate. Oh you’re getting it St Peter, thanks old chap. Now where was I? Finished I think. Down the hatch.” Was that the kind of day it had been?’

  She leant her head in her arms, mumbling, ‘God, Peter, Patrick…’

  Two

  Liberty had not been back long in London when she met Patrick Turner, a young architect, in the Friend’s Room at the Royal Academy. She had returned with Johnny from five years living in her grandparents’ wooden house on a small island off Sweden’s west coast. She rented a basement flat in Fulham and continued her work as a translator of children’s books. In her spare time she took Johnny for long walks in the park or round the museums, and at night she thought a lot of the past and of the future, and dreamed of a modest kind of glamour. Back in Sweden when Johnny had been a baby, she had pushed him in his pram along the streets of Gothenburg, and she had seen the students, no younger than her, sitting alone or in groups at the small tables in the cafés along the Avenue. She loved her son, but she had felt that sitting like that at a white wrought iron table, drinking cups of coffee and studying – hours and hours of studying – would be paradise. She would wear a red scarf, she decided on those long tramps along the slushy winter streets, and the books would pile up high as she turned the pages dense with text, and scribbled notes in the pages of her loose-leaf binder.

  When she moved back to England, her father paid for her to become a Friend of the Academy so that she could go in free with Johnny to all the exhibitions. She discovered they had a room, a nice, airy, café of a room where she could work on her translations with her books heaped on the table in front of her.

  One day she looked up to find a man standing by her table, smiling. He was older, about thirty five, dark-haired and crinkly-eyed, and he was wearing a red scarf thrown carelessly round his neck. He introduced himself, saying his name was Patrick Turner. Turner: such an easy, sensible name, and so apt, considering they were in a gallery. Liberty had raised her eyes to the ceiling, thinking that this was surely a sign.

  She had spent her life dreading every new meeting: the embarrassment at each new introduction. Speaking her name was like having to admit that the tipsy old thing in a black leather mini skirt and fishnet stockings really was your mother. When the moment came she would sometimes mumble, ‘Libt Bl,’ in a muddly quiet voice, hoping they would not bother to say, ‘Sorry, what was that?’ At other times she shouted out as if to silence any comment, ‘LIBERTY BELL,’ defying them to laugh. Still, it would be wrong, Liberty felt, to say she married Patrick just to have his name. People married each other for many reasons; her grandfather, for one, swore he married Liberty’s grandmother because she had a body like Mae West and the lightest touch with pastry of any woman on this earth. It was what happened afterwards that mattered, and for a long time Liberty and Patrick were happy. At that first meeting Patrick told her she looked like a cherub with a dirty secret. Liberty had not been sure quite what he meant, but it had made her laugh and she had packed away her books and walked round the exhibition of Italian architectural drawings with him.

  Patrick, who had spent three years in the States, said Johnny was a really neat little guy and it was obvious that Johnny thought Patrick was pretty neat too. After two months, Patrick proposed. Liberty asked if he could see Johnny as his son, because she could never have another child. Patrick had thought for a moment, his dark head bent, his chin resting in the palm of his hand. Then he had looked up with a smile and told her that yes, he could. He wanted her and he wanted Johnny, and to get them both was enough for any man.

  They got married, and at the wedding Patrick’s mother had cried at the thought of her lost grandchildren. At the time everyone thought they were tears of happiness.

  ‘What other tears are there at weddings?’ Hamish had said to his daughter, who had become quite alarmed at the crying that seemed to go on far longer than was necessary when seeing a son married. Liberty and Johnny moved from the dark little flat, where the loo had to be cajoled into flushing and where the kitchen cupboards were the colour of a sick orange, to Patrick’s house on Putney Hill. Liberty stopped going to the Friends’ Room at the Academy; instead she worked at a round mahogany table in the sitting-room bay with the long, narrow garden outside.

  ‘What’s mine is yours,’ Patrick said, and Liberty cared for each of his things as if she had chosen them herself. She polished the mahogany table with beeswax until it shone like a child’s newly washed hair, and Patrick thanked her and called Johnny and her, ‘my little family’.

  Four years later, when he told Liberty he was leaving her for the love of a fertile woman, there were tears in his eyes. Could she, would she understand that having Johnny had only made him long for a child of his own all the more?

  Now she had got what she wanted, Patrick’s mother had been very kind to Liberty. She persuaded her son to let them stay on in the house until they found somewhere else. Patrick, she said, could move in with her.

  Hamish found her the cottage in Tollymead. It was derelict, but she had the money for a down payment from her pay as a translator. ‘Johnny can be a day boy at Tollymead Manor,’ Hamish had said. ‘Staff get reduced fees.’ So that was settled and, as it happened, Johnny and Liberty moved out of the house on Putney Hill on the day that Patrick’s son was born.

  As a child, Liberty had scribbled stories full of death and love in endless notebooks, and she had started no less than three newspapers, written and produced by her entirely, and bought by her family and a few friends who even at such a young age were not immune to the charms of seeing their names in print. She knew with quiet certainty that one day she would write books; she was just waiting for the right moment. That moment came when Patrick left her steeped in her grief and frustration, and with more time on her hands now there were only Johnny’s shirts to iron (her own things were almost entirely drip-dry) and no dinner parties or client lunches to arrange. The book she wrote was about an architect who lived alone in a villa in the Umbrian hills and got drunk one day after designing a particularly beautiful house. He got into his gleaming car and he drove down the steep, winding road, right into a young woman and her small son. The man got out of the car and looked at the woman and child, who lay in a twisted embrace on the dust track, then he got back in again and drove off, leaving them to die. But the child survived, although no-one knew who had killed his mother, no-one that is until an English tourist, another young woman, staying in the small hotel owned by the dead woman’s aunt, decided to find out. It was a book with a mystery, some love and even a few good jokes, and she wrote it in the early hours of the morning, between four and seven, when Johnny was still asleep and the phone did not ring. As this was when there was still plenty of money around, a publisher bought it.

  Liberty had begun to feel her own life was like one of those American films where the woman loses the man but finds herself, and she was happy. For three years and three more books she was happy, and so was Johnny. Then came the day when her new manuscript was turned down. Her publishers were giving their big annual party that Thursday, and Liberty had organized a baby-sitter for Johnny and bought a black velvet jacket for herself. On Wednesday morning Alistair, her editor, calle
d to say he wanted to tell her straight away, what with the party the next day and everything, that it was with great regret they had decided to let her go. He had talked a lot about shrinking markets and changing fashions and, sounding genuinely distressed, he had said goodbye. Liberty had cancelled the babysitter and taken the jacket back to the shop. The assistant wanted to give her a credit note but Liberty had said could she please have the money back; she needed it now.

  All that was eight years ago; eight years, two lovers and five rejected manuscripts. God, Peter, Patrick … she fell asleep at the kitchen table, her head in her arms.

  She woke at five the next morning, with a stiff neck and a dry mouth, surprised and not at all pleased to find herself still alive. Getting up from the table she reasoned with herself, ‘You drank some rum and then you fell asleep, so what did you expect, spontaneous combustion?’ She eased herself up from the hard kitchen chair and, grabbing her sweater, scuffed across the tiled floor, trailing the sweater by its sleeve as if it were an old teddy. She stopped for a moment by the cork board on the wall next to the Aga and looked hard at the pictures of Johnny, blond and smiling, before plodding upstairs and into bed.

  When she woke again it was half past ten, and it took her a few minutes to remember that it was Harvest Sunday and she had paid for a ticket to the Harvest Lunch in the village hall. Two tickets in fact; Tom was meant to have come with her. She slid out of bed and padded into the bathroom, showered and dressed in a brown-and-white flower print frock that was meant to turn her into a fashionable waif, but managed instead to make her look like a washed-out matron. But there was no time to change as she was running late already for the church service at eleven. It was such bad form, she thought, to turn up to the lunch without having been to church first – rather like missing the funeral but being the life and soul of the wake.