Emily

Emily was my ticket to knowing everyone in the village. She’d grown up there, in the nicest house, right in the middle. Its grounds straddle the stream, and it has a blue plaque fixed on the old brick wall, just by the entrance, celebrating a famous poet who lived there once. I drive past from time to time. It’s been on sale forever – three years at least. The estate agent’s sign is still up, but it looks dusty and weather beaten and it leans at a slight angle. They should get it replaced, but I don’t think they care very much anymore.

The main house and the outbuildings look sad and neglected now. The roof of the barn sags in the middle. If they don’t do something soon it’s going to collapse. You can catch a glimpse of the garden over the wall as you reach the slight incline in the road, just before you pass the house. It’s the kind of garden you could have a magical childhood in. There are ancient fruit trees just perfect for making dens in. They have big thick boughs growing at exactly the right angle to tie a rope swing.

The kitchen is big – a real farmhouse kind. When Emily moved there after her mother died, she used her perfect taste to turn it into a dream room. It was shabby-grand, with a big Aga in the old fireplace. She was also married to James by then, and he was always brilliant at building kitchens – he did one for me once and it was the nicest I’ve ever had.

If you had a young family you would only have to walk through that kitchen door and you would instantly be taking fairy cakes out of the oven and putting them on the big scrubbed pine table in your imagination. Every wall is Farrow and Ball of course, and there are old-fashioned French windows leading from the sitting room out onto the lawn. It’s perfect; not flash, just comfortable and a little rambling.

I can’t think why it hasn’t sold. I wonder maybe, if the sadness seeps through the paint and puts the buyers off? I wonder if they can sense the ghosts of arguments, fights and much worse? I hope it sells soon – it deserves another chance, It is such a beautiful house, even if it needs a little love after three years of neglect.

When I moved to the village, Emily’s mother was still living there. She was a strange little woman. She played bridge and had an active social life – all those clubs with strange names that people have to be invited to join. I think she drank rather too much before her first stroke. She was kind, but odd. When you spoke to her she had a habit of peering a little too intently into your face. It always made me feel slightly uncomfortable.

Emily lived then further down the road, quite near me. She had one of the Victorian cottages. They were small but still nice, and of course Emily’s was always perfect. Nothing was ever out of place there. Despite being a single parent with a three-year-old daughter, you’d never find the kind of chaos you would expect. There weren’t any toys strewn around the floor, the plants were watered, no washing up left in the sink, no sticky handprints on the windows. Sophie didn’t even scribble on the walls.

In her tiny sitting room, she just had enough space to put her piano and that was how she made her living while Sophie was young. She taught my eldest son, and while he struggled away at chopsticks, there didn’t seem much point in going home, so I’d sit in the garden room at the back with my toddler, until they’d finished, trying hard to make sure he didn’t pull the heads off Sophie’s Barbie dolls while we waited.

I often wondered how she managed to be so perfect. She never looked tired, only beautiful and very calm. The minute the sun came out she would turn a golden brown. Her jeans were always just exactly the right kind of faded, and when it rained, her Barbour jacket was battered to perfection. She was kind to everyone in a quiet way. She took me in once when I had nowhere else to go, and gave me the peace and space that made it possible for me to go back home eventually.

She rescued animals too – stray cats and an old black dog. She had a real affinity with them. However disturbed they were when they arrived; they soon settled in and would sit or lie calmly whenever I visited. My children loved her too, and when her dog died peacefully of old age and my eldest son was distraught at his first experience of death, she talked to him quietly, helping him with great patience to understand the inevitability of such things.

A few years later, we’d meet every morning to walk our dogs. Emily had rescued another by then. We’d go to an odd little place known as the picnic area. By day it was a beautiful wild piece of land with wooded walks, and a river, and a big meadow filled with wildflowers and butterflies in the summer.

By night, bizarrely, it turned into one of England’s top ten cottaging sites – as mentioned in the Gay Times listings, and people would drive up from as far as London, filling the car park soon after dark. Sometimes, in the summer evenings, we’d make up a group and take our children there for a game of rounders, and as we left, we’d see solitary men in cars, waiting patiently for night to fall.

The same people came every day and Emily introduced me to them all – the funny eccentric solicitor who strode purposefully along, his hands behind his back, like royalty, making sarcastic jokes the whole way; the lovely old local man - Dick –whose accent was a joy to listen to. He would tell me stories of how they used to live during the war, when the Americans were stationed nearby in huge numbers, waiting for the Normandy invasion. Overpaid, over sexed, and over here; he showed me the place where you could still see the track marks in the kerb, made where they turned their tanks, and he described how they’d fling sweets out at the children who ran alongside.

He knew everything about everything – I bombarded him with questions about the plants, toadstools and trees we passed - he always knew the answer - and once, when my dog got stuck in the boggy area near the river, he made a bridge of planks and crawled out to rescue her. One magical morning when it was just the two of us, he took me to a place where trees and bushes grew close together. He made me stand perfectly still, and after a minute or so, as if on cue, I was able to hear a nightingale singing its heart out. They never did sing in Berkley Square, and there are hardly any left anywhere now, so it was my first and only time. He’s dead now, but I’ll never forget that moment, nor his generosity and patience with me.

It wasn’t until a few years later that Emily began to change slightly. It wasn’t sudden, like Jekyll and Hyde. Just every now and again we’d come across each other at the shops, or the picnic area, and instead of stopping to chat, she’d give me a curt nod for a greeting, and walk off in the other direction. At first, it happened only occasionally and I dismissed it, thinking maybe she was having a crap day, but as it occurred more frequently, I asked other friends about it and they said, “oh don’t worry, Emily’s just like that sometimes.”

We rented a cottage by the sea once, and she and Sophie came with us. One morning she asked if I’d post a letter for her. It was addressed to someone in a high security jail. I raised an eyebrow and she explained how it was an ex-boyfriend who was serving a long sentence for armed robbery. They’d lived together for years, at the other end of the village, but he’d been violent towards her and she’d finally left. Sophie had been the product of a one-night stand shortly afterwards. She told me that when he was released, they hoped to get back together and have another child. She must have been thirty-five by then, and was hoping it wouldn’t be long.

I couldn’t equate a violent relationship with Emily at all. She always seemed so self sufficient, so in charge of her life. She’d hinted in the past at an unhappy childhood. She loved her stepfather, whose house they’d moved to when she was still young, but she had no time for her real one. She gave no details, but hinted he’d been violent towards her mother.

Her behaviour became stranger and less predictable. I think it was someone else who explained in more detail why people cut her some slack when she was like that. It was to do with her older brother. He had shot himself in the barn when Emily was about sixteen, and she’d been the one to find him. She’d gone to London soon after, but hadn’t been able to settle and had soon returned to the village, where she’d met the man who was in prison. “She drinks too, you know” they’d said. I didn’t believe them. I’d never seen her more than slightly tipsy. She was always so immaculate. It just didn’t fit.

I understood only after the party. It was an older friend’s fortieth – fancy dress – “come as something to do with music”. Emily asked if she could go with us. I remember I was still trying to work out if I had enough of my grandmother’s over the top rosaries around my neck to pass as Madonna, and if I’d be able to stand for more than two minutes in my high heels, when she arrived. I can’t recall what she was wearing, but her eyes glittered oddly and she was like a different person. She was clearly drunk, but not as I used to get drunk, slurring my words, staggering around, laughing a lot. She was fully in charge of herself – she even helped me put lipstick on which I am so hopeless at and have never been able to do drunk or sober – but she bore no resemblance to the Emily I knew. This new person was loud and brash.

At the party it was astounding. Without a second’s hesitation, she launched herself into a crowd by the bar, and I noticed people responding in a friendly way at first, then recoiling slightly. It was a huge party – full of people from London and elsewhere. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I felt slightly responsible for Emily so I edged nearer to see what was wrong.

She had her arms draped around a Frenchwoman who I knew, but Emily didn’t. “You are so beautiful. I just want you to know that” she was saying. Aude was trying to smile politely, back away, and disentangle herself all that the same time. I tried to diffuse the situation – jumping in and making a belated and clumsy introduction, asking Aude how she was, how her art studio was going, anything I could think of. Aude looked at me gratefully, and I said quietly, “Emily is really nice – I think she’s just a bit drunk”, but by then Emily had ricocheted herself off in another direction and I could hear her saying loudly . “god I need a fuck so badly. You have wonderful eyes”. It was a friend’s brother, up from London.

I’d never – in my whole rackety life, seen anyone behave like that before. Before two hours had gone by, she’d worked her way through the entire gathering, propositioning every single person there – male and female. I didn’t know what to do. I felt as if I ought to try something; she had come with me after all, and I hated to see her so out of control, making a fool of herself like that. Most people looked embarrassed and avoided her, but from time to time she would disappear into the car park for short periods, returning to drink more, and resume her circuit of the room.

I tried once; I went over and asked if she wanted me to get John to take her home, but she looked at me blankly with glazed eyes and said, “no – I’m not ready yet”. I’m not sure she even recognised me by then. That was the worst party I’ve ever been to. I hardly drank anything. I felt awful watching someone I cared for, someone I owed a lot to, so unhappy, so obviously self-destructing. The last I saw of her that night, she was staggering off down an unlit road with someone in a leather jacket. I knew there was nothing I could do but it didn’t stop me from feeling frustrated about it.

We never mentioned it afterwards. Her behaviour got worse. I moved away soon after that, but still saw her occasionally. Sometimes she’d speak; mostly she’d cross the street. Friends told me she had a boyfriend who moved in with her, but it was short-lived. He blacked her eye, and she called the police and threw him out. I felt so sorry for Sophie. I think she spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s.

A year or so later, I heard she’d started living with James who I knew quite well. He was a friend too, and I hoped she would find peace with him. At first it worked. They got married – a big wedding, with a reception in a marquee in her mother’s garden. Sophie was thrilled to finally have a father, and she changed her surname to James’. I was told that Emily had promised to give up drinking.

Soon afterwards, her mother died, and they moved into the big house, and added a pet pig to their menagerie. They worked together, renovating the house – making it beautiful. I used to see them together at the local weekly auction, looking for bits and pieces. Sophie would be there too, smiling and happy.

I don’t know what happened to make her break her promise. I don’t think it took very long. Outwardly she had everything. She was still pretty then. She had the house, and the animals, the tall good-looking husband. I remember driving past at that time and seeing a face at one of the upstairs windows. It was Sophie. She must have been about sixteen at the time. She was just standing there, looking out. She had a blank expression on her face. She didn’t look as if she was waiting for anyone; she just looked trapped and miserable.

James started divorce proceedings after Emily broke into the gun cabinet one night and tried to shoot him in a drunken rage. The house was put on the market and at first James moved into the barn, but it didn’t sell as quickly as they’d hoped and I don’t think anyone lives there now. Emily is in another village. She spends her life in the pub, and has gone back to her old self-destructive ways with men. I don’t think you could even call them one-night stands.

Sophie dropped out of school at sixteen and has started going to the pub too. I think it’s her way of spending any time with her mother. She is around twenty now. She’s never left home. Maybe she is worried what Emily might do if she were left alone. I’ve only seen them once since the divorce. I almost didn’t recognise Emily. Her face is puffy and white, with red patches, and her body looks bloated.