By Katherine Mezzacappa

1996

The advertisement in the estate agent’s window had not been there when Ellen had looked the previous day. Strictly speaking, the property was not a house nor could it accurately be described as being for sale. But it looked like one, built of rough flint, with a slate roof and diamond-paned pointed windows. Ellen could see sunlight bouncing off the uneven settings of each little piece of glass.

The ‘pros’ were obvious from the photographs. There was the cottage’s setting, nestled deep in the tough furze that grew thick and springy along the clifftop, and the view far across the bay, a mirage-like blur of blue. The area was designated as being of ‘outstanding natural beauty’ so no one could build nearby. No one would, of course, for the house could not be left to anyone, even had Ellen had children to leave it to. It was far enough from the cliff edge for her lifetime, but little more.

The ‘cons’ were listed facetiously: no bathroom, no kitchen, in fact no plumbing or lighting whatsoever. It was just a gazebo, a single whitewashed room. It was the arched door that decided Ellen, for a door could be locked. The price was not high, but nevertheless required consideration, despite a recent windfall. All Ellen could buy here, the agent told her, was a life interest, for on her death and that of her husband the gazebo would revert to the National Trust. It stood on the estate of Castle Peveril, also so entailed.

‘You will probably barely see the current owner. He lives in the attics of the house, what used to be the servants’ bedrooms. Can I make you an appointment to view?’

Ellen was met not by an agent but the Trust’s lawyer. She waited in her elderly Saab as the man saw off what looked like another prospective purchaser, the driver of a soft-top Mercedes with a personalised number plate. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned the visit to Adrian, given hers was probably a wasted journey. In any case, he was away at a conference and could not have accompanied her.

‘My husband is an academic. He needs somewhere to write,’ Ellen told the lawyer, knowing perfectly well that Adrian had never had any difficulty writing anywhere; he simply ignored everyone else.

‘The grounds will be open to the public,’ the man told her. ‘They will peer in. But a published historian would be rather appropriate, don’t you think? Not a hedge fund manager. With the approval of the Trust, of course, lace curtains of appropriate design could be obtained. And a small wooden fence would be needed to bar the public from the side of the building facing the sea. We don’t want them passing that way anyway. Too dangerous.’

‘A gazebo, Ellen? It’s an awful lot of money to pay for a garden shed.’

‘It’s not a garden shed, Adrian, look at the picture again!’

He patted her arm. ‘I like garden sheds. They’re good for writers. Look at Shaw – or better still, remember Dylan Thomas?’

She did: their flight into Wales more than thirty years ago, he flushed with the excitement of his new lectureship as much as with the excitement of what could have put it in jeopardy, the seduction of one of his students. At Laugharne they had fallen silent, faces pressed against the glass of Dylan Thomas’s writing shed perched high above the water. In that moment Ellen had become conscious of the aching of her thighs. That memory flickered again now, but the embers had long cooled. She now knew that the cooling had started, imperceptibly at first, when she had meekly changed her beloved History for Politics and Philosophy.

‘I thought it would be a fitting tribute to Ruth to spend her money this way,’ said Ellen. ‘I mean, better to do something special with it rather than just be sensible.’

She was wondering why she felt the need to justify herself. The money was hers, after all. Her mother’s favourite aunt had seen no point in hanging on any longer, for all her capital to be swallowed up by The Pines, Eastbourne, ‘home for retired gentlewomen’ (‘Daylight robbery, but what choice do I really have?’). Ellen had once toyed with the idea of having Ruth live with them, but had quailed at the thought of raising this with Adrian, fearing the eminently reasonable tone he would adopt in explaining to her why ‘it just wouldn’t work’. In any case, she suspected that Ruth had deliberately exaggerated the level of care she needed in order to scotch such a plan of Ellen’s – care that Ellen could not see being provided by The Pines. Paradoxically, this was Ruth’s way of preserving her independence.

Ruth, who had divorced a neglectful husband long before a woman leaving a marriage made no one blink, was probably the only person Ellen could have told of Her Secret, but knew she hadn’t because she lacked the courage to take the advice Ruth would no doubt have given her. Ellen had thought of going to Ruth’s grave to tell her, but then Ruth had no grave but the winds that blew her ashes around Beachy Head (‘Make sure no one is jumping off on my special day, dear; one would hate to be upstaged’). Had she stood there muttering and weeping her intentions would only have been misunderstood.

But she could talk to Ruth at the gazebo. On the days that Adrian was teaching she would go and sit amongst the things she had put there for him: the utility desk, the Lloyd Loom settee, the folding bookcase, the battery-operated light from the camping shop. She sometimes took a picnic, on colder days warming her hands around a flask. Even the clatter of voices and the shadows of heads the other side of the lace curtains did not annoy her; on the contrary, the fact that she could hear them but that they did not know she was there emphasised her privacy. And the Trust’s idiosyncratic opening hours meant there were entire days when no one encroached upon the park. What Ellen had not said to the lawyer was that the gazebo was less for Adrian to write in as for her to be in.

After their initial visit she and Adrian did not go together to the gazebo. His first words on glancing around the little interior and her carefully chosen items were a dismissive: ‘Yes, all the silence and solitude a writer needs, I suppose.’ For a moment she envied Dylan and Caitlin, their drunken rows and flung books. It was at least communication. Even the editing and proofreading Ellen had done for Adrian over the years had been done in the role of an assistant, not as a help-mate. He showed her what style sheet she was to use, and how he wanted her to phrase her suggestions. He never wanted to go through these with her, and she had to be satisfied each time he published with finding her name amidst the acknowledgements.

It was on the fourth of her own solitary visits that Ellen collided with someone on a bend in the narrow path between the furze bushes. Her first thought was how inappropriate the man’s old tweed jacket was for such a warm day. She only discovered later that apart from his dinner jacket (which he told her he preserved for its memories rather than for the feeble hope he might wear it again), this was the only jacket George Peveril owned.

‘Peveril,’ he barked. ‘Might I offer you a drink?’

Ellen accepted without thinking, a polite reflex.

‘I can’t show you where I live,’ said Peveril. ‘The place is absolutely bloody squalid. We’ll have our drinks in the Long Salon. G and T do you?’

The Long Salon proved to be a dark-panelled corridor hung with moth-eaten tapestries and impassive portraits. It was also clearly a workshop.

‘I doubt the place has been so busy in its entire existence. Quite a procession of rude mechanicals: carpenters, upholsterers, electricians, French polishers and what-not. And now the conservators, cleaning up these rags.’ He waved a glass in the direction of the tapestries. ‘They’re like ants, moving over every stick of furniture and ancestral daub. I sometimes feel that in taking off the dirt they’re taking off the patina of my memories. Here’s the strangest thing: the conservators work for free. I certainly couldn’t afford to do that. This lot will take over my little flat too, once I shuffle off. It’ll become one of those expensive holiday lets.’

An odd friendship was born, beneath the gaze of satined and ruffled long-dead Peverils. ‘School of van Dyck – had they been the real thing I would have been tempted to sell ‘em. But hell, they were Peverils and what would that mean to Getty? There’s no portrait of me, of course. I’d cut a pretty poor figure next to these elegant ancestors, but isn’t the end of the line always a whimper rather than a bang? Most I’ll have is an obituary in The Times if I’m lucky. And they’ll praise me for my generosity in the guide books once I’m not around to leave dirty glasses in the public rooms.’

‘Adrian had his portrait painted when he was made Dean. I know the university is very new, but it likes to emulate these old traditions. It looks quite impressive hanging in Wilson Hall, and of course a photograph has nothing of the same impact.’

‘When shall I meet your husband?’

Ellen looked faintly troubled. ‘Adrian comes here alone. He needs peace to write.’

She saw Peveril hesitate, as though he’d been about to say something and felt better of it. What she remembered later was his expression of concern, trying to recall the last time anyone had bothered about how she felt.

‘The new warden has had words. Doesn’t like the evidence of human habitation in the Long Salon. Just as well the swine’ll be living in the stable block.’

‘I don’t like to feel I’ve made trouble for you, George. We could always meet at the gazebo instead.’

‘You kind gal. I’ll take you up on that, though it galls me to be turned out of my own home by some wretched little bureaucrat. Tells me he was at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but I doubt he saw beyond Admiralty Arch.’

Ellen took the folding chair by the desk, then regretted it, hearing the creaking of the Lloyd Loom settee beneath George’s weight.

‘Ruth would have liked this place,’ said Ellen. ‘She would have used it, too – she had an affair with her music teacher for thirty years. He wouldn’t, or rather couldn’t leave his wife. Couldn’t afford to, and she kept threatening nervous breakdowns. Ruth ended it – they’d been very careful but I suspect Ruth didn’t want to risk any more of the shunning she’d got following the divorce. And, you see, she was a very moral woman in her way.’

‘Of course she was – a faithful one and an honest one, but that’s not always what counts with the world,’ said George. ‘I’ve loved a man I haven’t seen since 1966. He got married, and didn’t even have the courage to tell me himself. He sent me the cutting from The Times. He would never let me ring him, never let me arrange to see him. Instead he’d send me notes telling me where we were to meet. It was part of the thrill, for him anyway, but it makes me shiver even now to think about the risks we ran. The treatment you’d get in prison… So I tore open that envelope expecting to read Rotherhithe railway arches, third one along or Toilets, Festival Hall. I barely go up to town now, but I can’t stand those perfumed old-young men with the plucked brows and the manicures who seem to be everywhere these days. They even make me long for the old days, when a boy was simply a boy and part of the fun was working out “is he?” Let a face be a face, whoever wears it. One of the reasons why I liked the look of you when I first saw you. Intelligent, I thought. Nice grey bob. Not plastered in slap. Eyebrows that follow your thought.’

Ellen tried to remember when she’d last had a compliment about her looks. And then she did.

‘I loved a man and never even told him,’ said Ellen. ‘In fact, I’ve never told anybody.’

‘Not even Ruth?’

‘Especially not Ruth. I wasn’t afraid of her disapproval – I was afraid of her encouragement.’

The settee creaked and sighed as George leaned forward and took one of her hands in his.

‘Why, dear?’

‘I couldn’t tell him if he didn’t tell me. What if he hadn’t wanted me? What if he had? Adrian had just been made head of department – and the man I loved was a junior lecturer. It was when university posts were starting to get scarce, and he didn’t have tenure. As it was, he stayed two years and got a better job elsewhere. The friction between him and Adrian was almost palpable; you sensed it because they were so stiffly courteous to each other. He sent Christmas cards for the first few years. I’ve kept them, though they were hardly love letters.’

‘Did Adrian sense anything?’

‘I think he did, but the wrong way about. He used to jeer at me, say that Edward had the hots for me. I was so careful, I thought, not to let him sense how I felt. Once, when I was going to an open lecture of Edward’s he suggested I take a packet of condoms. That was a deep cut; we were unable to have children. I used to fantasise about meeting Edward and going to one of those hotels where you could hire a room by the hour. I don’t know where I’d have found one, but I think such places do exist.’

‘They do.’

‘What I regret most, really regret, isn’t the sex we never had, it’s never telling him how much I cared about him.’

‘Did he love you back, do you think?’ George asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘To hope that he did was too much of a risk. I never gave him any opportunity to let me down.’

Then Adrian did precisely that. Ellen sensed what was in the envelope left on the dining-room table before she picked it up.

The name of the research student was Jo. Jo was bright, witty, a gifted economic historian. Jo was pregnant. ‘So you will understand, my dear Ellen, that I really have little choice in the matter’. This was where Ellen got angry, not with what Adrian had done, but with his self-righteousness. ‘You will understand, I am sure,’ (that understanding again – why am I assumed to have so much of it?), ‘that it is only reasonable in these circumstances to ask you to leave this house, with, of course, an appropriate settlement.’

‘Poor bloody kid!’ exclaimed George.

‘Yes, poor bloody kid,’ echoed Ellen, with a sudden painful vision of a toddler giving way to tears in the face of perpetual ‘shushing’ not to disturb the writer upstairs, Adrian barking, ‘Will someone take this brat away – it is quite impossible to get on with anything with these constant interruptions!’ And finally the mother rebelling – as she must, mustn’t she? She was of course ‘somebody’, a star student, so she would rebel, not settling for a part-time assistant’s job in the university library, part of the academic community but no threat to the Great Man’s eminence.

The large hand patting her knee brought her back to the present.

‘And meanwhile, we must find you somewhere to live. Baldrick has a cunning plan.’

‘Do you think this is quite wise?’

Adrian blocked the doorway of the gazebo, waving the folded newspaper at her. Silhouetted as he was against the gleaming sunset, she could not read his expression, but heard superciliousness, exasperation, and a tinge of something else – not jealousy, surely?

‘Adrian… I didn’t even know you read those announcements!’

He ignored this. ‘Is this some sort of joke? Are you trying to humiliate me?’

‘Honestly, I didn’t think you’d even have been interested.’

He pulled the door shut behind him.

‘So a university lecturer isn’t good enough for you? Marrying for a title!’

No, Adrian, she thought, marrying for kindness and companionship, and the chance to pass the days with a dear friend, and to be alone here in Ruth’s little house when I wish, and never to be treated so thanklessly by anyone ever again.

‘How is Jo?’ she asked.

‘In Leicester. Now, can we put this down to a momentary lapse of good taste? Or am I to believe that you really do intend entering into some ill-considered arrangement with this old buffoon?’

‘Leicester?’

‘Lecturer in Gender Economics,’ said Adrian. ‘“Constructing a road map for women beyond the boundaries of roles as wife, mother, server of physical needs of husband and home”, et cetera, et cetera. Now could we please at least attempt to talk about this like sensible adults?’

‘I will ignore your comments about George as unworthy of you, Adrian. I am sorry to hear that Jo is no longer with you, and that you won’t be sharing this baby—’

‘Jo insisted on good genes for her child!’

‘Please don’t interrupt. I’m not flattered at your wanting to get me back – that is what you want, isn’t it?’ She stood up. ‘I think you should go now,’ she said more kindly. ‘George expects me for tea and I don’t wish to be late.’ She made to hand him a sturdy torch. ‘You’ll need this to get back to the car. I can manage, I know the paths well enough by now.’

Adrian knocked it out of her hand. ‘Keep your silly torch!’ He slammed the door so hard that it jumped the catch, so she could hear his swearing as he stumped away, getting scratched by the furze.

Ellen retrieved the torch, tested it, but partway along the path, she switched it off. The route was familiar enough to her, and the beam’s dancing lights and shadows obscured her sense for the bumps and slopes beneath her feet and confused the deeper darknesses of the bushes that were her landmarks. To her right she heard the relentless rise and fall of the sea, and a solitary shriek. Sometimes those seagulls sound almost human, she thought. Adrian really ought to have taken the torch.