A Bit of Earth Read online

  A BIT OF EARTH

  Rebecca Smith

  To S.M.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Chapter 1

  An organ would be too loud for a child’s funeral. As the pianist played Morningtown Ride the coffin was carried out, tiny and horribly small. He was a slight boy. Couldn’t have made it past three stone.

  Maybe it is raining

  Where our train shall ride,

  All the little travellers are warm and snug inside.

  Rocking, rolling, riding …

  Or never warm and never snug ever again. There were flower arrangements of a yellow digger and the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland with a watch that had now stopped for ever. The sun streamed through the stained glass, casting lozenges of light in sweetie-wrapper colours across the flagstones.

  Susannah woke, clawing at the pillow, finding that here it was sunshine and day. She lurched out of bed and across the landing to Felix’s bedroom. He was asleep. The sunshine couldn’t penetrate the curtains she had made for his room. They had thermal as well as black-out linings, for Susannah was a worrier. She gently sat down on the end of his bed, and picked up Marmalade, his toy cat. Felix woke.

  ‘Hello Mummy. Is it morning?’

  ‘Just about. You can stay in bed for a while longer if you like.’ She hugged him and wondered, yet again, why he always smelled faintly of mice. ‘I’m going to make your Ready Brek. I’ll call you. We don’t want to be late.’

  Susannah and Felix were never late for nursery. They took a short cut across the university and the botanical garden, often walking that far with Daddy, whose name was Guy. He was Professor Guy Misselthwaite, head of Botany, a department that was really only a side shoot of Biology and numbered just one and a half staff, himself and Jeanette, the secretary.

  Quarter to eleven. They would probably be playing outside on the bikes and trikes by now. Susannah tried to blink away the images of her dream. Perhaps she had stayed too long in Victorian Literature. She wheeled her trolley of books to be re-shelved into the Gothic Architecture section. Felix would be fine. Felix was safe. He was probably playing in the sandpit, or on the climbing frame or, most likely, making friends with some woodlice or gazing in awe at the woolly caterpillars that had colonised the tree next to the nursery playground.

  Professor Judy Lovage (History of Art), neat in her customary colours of a Siamese cat, smiled a ‘good morning’ as Susannah shelved the last of the books and pushed the trolley back towards the lifts.

  Susannah Misselthwaite, part-time university library assistant, wife of Professor Guy Misselthwaite, and mother of Felix (aged four and a half) sometimes forgot that she was an MA herself. She was mostly very content. Her morning was nearly over. She decided to catch the bus into town that afternoon. Felix needed some plain white polo shirts (five would be a good idea) before he started school. No point taking the car. It would be quicker and easier by bus.

  Susannah had sometimes wished that she was one of those feckless mothers, like the ones in books or films. Perhaps she should try to be like the mother in Hideous Kinky and give Felix a nomadic childhood of heat and dust, unsuitable friends and adult company. Then she thought of threadbare monkeys cruelly forced to perform, and of snake charmers. She had once seen a French documentary about a snake charmer. He went into the Sahara and dug snakes from their holes. She hadn’t really thought about it until then; hadn’t imagined that snakes who were charmed had once been wild.

  Susannah didn’t realise that her international background already gave her a low-level but enduring glamour in the queue outside the nursery.

  ‘Susannah,’ they said, ‘oh, she’s half-Swedish.’

  ‘I thought it was German.’

  ‘No, but her family live in Germany.’

  ‘She speaks five languages.’

  ‘And Felix is learning most of them.’

  The chorus shrugged and gave half-smiles at yet another instance of their own maternal inadequacy.

  Felix’s nursery session finished at 3 p.m. Some mummies would arrive early and stand outside juggling fractious babies or swaying from one Birkenstock to the other. Susannah would be one of these (minus the baby and sometimes the Birkenstocks). Then there were the ‘on time’ ones who always arrived exactly as the doors opened. There was also the late late crowd, who either sprinted in apologising every day, or most often sauntered in, unaware of the possible shame and anxiety caused to their offspring, who were left alone on the story mat or hiding under the climbing frame. Susannah would never have been one of these late ones. She thought that she had detected an edge, a barb, in the nursery ladies’ voices.

  ‘Oh, I expect Mummy’s just caught in a traffic jam, again …’

  ‘Don’t worry, Bethany, Daddy’s probably just in a long queue at the supermarket, like last week …’

  Felix had once burst into tears at a book read on Tweenies. A little boy’s mummy is late and he imagines she has gone to buy another boy or been eaten by a crocodile. She would never, ever, put Felix through that.

  What if one day the nursery ladies said something like ‘Daddy’s in the pub’ or ‘Mummy prefers being at the gym to being with you’? But she could see that they just wanted to get the sand swept up, and get home to make their own children’s tea.

  There were stern warnings issued in writing when children were enrolled. If you were twenty minutes late they would telephone the emergency contacts you had given. If those people weren’t available, the duty officer at Social Services would be informed, and if you still hadn’t arrived after half an hour, your child would be handed over to the authorities. Would they really do that? Surely one of them would just take the uncollected child home with them. She hadn’t discussed this possibility with any of the other mothers. After all, who would be more than twenty minutes late with their emergency contacts uncontactable? And who but Susannah, Library Lady, Uber-Organised Person Extraordinaire, would have bothered to read this small print anyway?

  As she reached the stop she saw a bus pulling away. Never mind. It wouldn’t matter. She had plenty of time. She could get right round the shops and be back in time to collect Felix. She sat down on one of the mean little flip-down seats, the only person waiting. Perhaps it was worth missing the bus so as not to have to stand in a crowd of students. Professor Lovage was walking towards her, smiling and swinging her bag in a girlish, carefree way. Susannah smiled too.

  ‘Off into town?’ Professor Lovage asked.

  ‘I just need the last few things for Felix starting school, some white polo shirts.’

  ‘A big step,’ said Professor Lovage. ‘Is he looking forward to it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He doesn’t seem to have much sense o
f time, so I don’t think he holds the idea in his head much. But some of the children he knows from nursery will be going.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right then. Good luck with the shopping.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Professor Lovage walked on, thinking that she should really go into town too. There were a lot of things she needed to do, birthdays coming up and so on. But the thought of her garden in summer was just too tempting. She would rather expend her energies there. The watering and tying back and hoeing, and sitting on her little bench, seemed much more important than shopping.

  Susannah stared up the road. Still no sign of a bus. Students were starting to gather and bunch up at the stop. When it finally came it would be crowded after all.

  ‘Oh look, a backhoe loader!’ she told herself as one passed. It might take her a long time to break the habit of commenting on all the heavy plant and construction vehicles she saw. Felix was now old enough not only to name them all accurately himself, but to be unimpressed by all but the most enormous or unusual. Here at the university, with its constant expansion and improvements, even giant wheel loaders were two a penny.

  She quietly wished that there was another little boy, a brother for Felix, to continue the hobby with. Or a little sister. But no more babies had arrived, and she and Guy would have found any kind of treatment too intrusive. They no longer talked about it.

  A car of astonishing beauty pulled up, an Alfa Romeo Spider in a metallic Mediterranean blue. The driver was Julius East, Head of Spanish.

  ‘Where are you off to, Susannah?’

  ‘Just shopping in the city.’

  ‘Fancy a ride?’

  She paused, too polite to accept eagerly, too polite to refuse.

  ‘I’m sure my bus will be along soon …’

  ‘You prefer a bus to this?’ He smiled at her slowly, knowing that she would accept. She stood there on the pavement, unsure, whilst he got out and came round to open the passenger door. It was a long time since anyone had done that for her.

  ‘In you get.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The seats were made of the softest leather that Susannah had ever felt. She supposed that there was some glossy brochure/car-showroom name for that colour. ‘Tan’ sounded too pedestrian. And what kind of animal had it once been? Susannah worried that she might mark the seats somehow. So lucky she hadn’t been wearing jeans. What if the rivets had ripped them? But she supposed that people who drove cars like this must sometimes wear trousers with rivets too.

  The seats were so low that she felt as though she were sitting on the road.

  ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘You have your knees all pulled up. You’re hugging them as though you’re a schoolgirl. Perhaps you are. You do look so young, Susannah. Too young to be married to a professor of botany.’

  ‘Oh, I’m really very old,’ said Susannah. But she stretched out her legs. ‘This is a beautiful car.’

  ‘It’s new. If you have time, we’ll just take a detour, then you’ll see what it’s really like.’

  Her hair was whipped back and then forwards again into her eyes. It might be turned to string by the time they arrived. She pushed it behind her ears again and again.

  ‘In there,’ he indicated the glove compartment with a slight thrust of his chin, ‘there’s a scarf you can borrow.’ She wouldn’t have been surprised if he kept a pair of gloves there too. The thought of gloves in a glove compartment pleased her, and she smiled. The scarf was a long thin rectangle of heavy white silk. She placed it over her hair and knotted it at the nape of her neck, wondering who it belonged to. Perhaps he just kept it there for whichever woman (or more likely, pretty student) he happened to pick up. She could feel his eyes on her legs. She placed her bag primly on her knees.

  They were in the forest now. She wondered when they would turn back.

  ‘I have to get some polo shirts for Felix. He’s starting school soon.’

  ‘You will have time on your hands.’

  She looked down at her hands, as though she might see time growing there, some sort of silky golden fur. Or perhaps it would be thyme, with pretty little stems coiling around her fingers. But her hands were unchanged, slim, neat and pink. She had a French manicure. The idea of having your nails painted so that they looked like nails pleased her as well.

  She looked out of the window – fields, ponies, more trees, and hedgerows gorgeous with butterflies, betony, ragwort, chamomile, and sun spurge. They zoomed past cow parsnip and earthnut pea, so much prettier than their names. The sky was much brighter out here.

  ‘The sky is bluer out here, don’t you think?’ she said, gazing upwards. There were three aeroplanes leaving wonderful paths across the sky. ‘Once when Felix saw some of those vapour trails he said, “Mummy, the clouds are lining up!”’

  He smiled. She could tell that he was smiling, but she didn’t look across, she just kept looking up. And that was why Susannah didn’t see the deer, or know that he was going to swerve to avoid it. She never knew what had happened.

  Chapter 2

  His mummy had never been late before. Felix sat on the carpet and waited. Soon all the other children were gone.

  ‘Your mummy’s a bit late today, Felix,’ said one of the ladies. ‘Don’t worry, she’ll soon be here. Why don’t you do this puzzle whilst we just finish sweeping up?’

  He finished the puzzle.

  ‘Would you like to help sort out these Stickle Bricks and Mega Bloks, they’ve got a bit mixed up.’

  Felix tipped them all out onto the floor and then helped put them into the right boxes.

  ‘Well, I think I’ll just try ringing your daddy instead.’

  ‘My mummy has a mobile phone.’

  ‘I know, sweetie, but sometimes if you’re in a really busy shop you don’t hear it ringing if it’s at the bottom of your bag.’

  They gave him two biscuits out of the tin that was just for grown-ups. He was thirsty, but he could see that they had already put the cups away. They let him eat the biscuits sitting on the carpet. He heard the lady talking to somebody on the phone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Daddy said that he’d come and collect you. He won’t be long. You can look at the books if you like.’

  The other ladies went home.

  Felix stood by the door and waited there. Daddy had hardly ever collected him. He wished he had come earlier, he could have shown him the bikes and how fast some of them could go.

  When Daddy arrived he didn’t look happy.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, but not to Felix. ‘I really don’t know where my wife can have got to. Perhaps I was meant to be getting him all along, and I forgot. Maybe she thought some other mother was taking him home. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. Bye Felix.’ The nursery lady was holding a big bunch of keys. She followed them out and locked the door behind them.

  ‘Oh good, it’s the car,’ said Felix.

  ‘Felix, were you meant to be going to tea with somebody and they didn’t come to nursery? Was I meant to be getting you today?’

  ‘I don’t know. But Dad, they have this big tyre thing on wheels. You can sit inside it and somebody, it has to be a grown-up, pulls you round. You could pull me round in that if you came before they put it away.’ But all his dad said was ‘Maybe she’s at home.’

  When they got back home Mummy wasn’t there either. Felix watched TV and had some juice, not diluted. His dad kept going to look out of the window and trying to ring her. After a while Felix knelt on the sofa so that he could look out of the window too.

  ‘Dad, a police car is coming. It hasn’t got its light on so it can’t be an emergency.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said his dad. ‘Oh no.’

  Two policemen came in. One was a lady. His dad started crying. Felix had never seen his dad cry. His face looked horrible, as though it was coming off. Felix started to cry as well. He ran to the mirror in the hall to see what his face looked like when he was crying. Did it look as th
ough it was coming off too? The policewoman came after him. He asked her why his dad was crying.

  Was this the bag of an adulterer? Here were tissues; a makeup bag with a cornflower design containing two lipsticks, a compact, mascara (brown not black), a miniature toothbrush and a tiny tube of toothpaste, and a brown tortoiseshell hairclip; a diary containing almost nothing but dates of nursery events and meetings for work; two blue rollerballs; a tube (bent and almost cracked) of anti-histamine cream; a tin containing plasters that were khaki camouflage instead of so-called skin colour, presumably for diminutive wounded soldiers; a letter from the school saying when Felix was due to start and what he would need: a copy of Mr Golightly’s Holiday; a pigeon feather (‘Mum, will you look after this?’); a packet of lemon-flavoured mints, and her keys with the photo-fob of Felix in his nursery sweatshirt against a background of clouds. The only thing that was a mystery was the old postcard she had been using as a bookmark – toy boats in the Tuileries gardens with the sky an improbable blue. It was captioned ‘Bassin dans les jardins des Tuileries, à l’arrière plan, l’Arc du Carrousel.’ They had never been to Paris. But Susannah had travelled a lot when she was a teenager and student, before they had been together. After all, she was a European.

  This bag could have been tipped upside down in public, on any headmaster’s desk or live on TV. It seemed that there was little here to be revealed, and nothing to shame her. There had been a once-white silk scarf too, now horribly stained. They hadn’t even offered it to him. He had seen it though. Guy did not know that silk scarf. Was it a present? Had it been given to her that day? Perhaps it had been kept secretly somewhere. A once-white silk scarf.

  Professor Lovage sat on her pale yellow sofa, drinking a cup of chamomile and spearmint tea. She had been reading a book about Stanley Spencer and resolving that this summer she would take a trip to Cookham. She was looking at one of her favourite pictures, which was of people lying on the pebbly beach at Southwold. She had just turned to the Resurrections when she noticed the time, and put on the TV to catch the end of the news and the weather. Ah, the local news. She was constantly impressed by the stories that they floated as local headlines, and astonished by the fixation with disputes between travellers and local residents; but so often she had to switch off something about a case involving cruelty to animals. Today her scalding tisane sloshed onto her lap.