He told Elise, the next day, as much as he’d told Annelies.
– You’ll have to give her the address, Elise said.
– Then Pia will refuse to see either of us.
– It’s her daughter, Paul! Imagine how I’d feel if it was Becky or Joni. I’d never, ever forgive you for holding that back from me.
– But Pia’s twenty.
– That’s not your reason. You’re up to something. I thought you were up to something, all those trips to London. I thought it might be a girl, and then it turns out just to be Pia. Pia, pregnant.
VII
L ater that week, Paul woke in the morning to the whine and shriek of a saw, and the burned smell of cut wood floating in at the open window. Pulling on his dressing gown, he ran downstairs and outside to find that Willis had the first of the aspens half down already, in a blare of sawdust startling as blood, petrol fumes from the saw thick in the air. James was with him. Elise in her kimono was already out there; she had abandoned the girls at the breakfast table and now they were hovering in tears at the house door. She was shrieking at Willis, her usual aloofness trampled in her desperation. Paul saw in Willis’s expression – filtered through a flirting, quivering fan of the leaves of the murdered and half-fallen tree – that this was exactly what he was cutting down the aspen for: to have the pair of them out in their nightclothes, screaming at him absurdly across a wall on a fine morning, exposed as idly breakfasting while working men sweated. It was as if he were an exorcist and had forced them to appear in their true form at last.
This was an outrage, they ranted. The aspens didn’t belong to him, they were on Tre Rhiw land (this was debatable, it wasn’t clear from the deeds), it was illegal for him to touch them without their permission, which they would never give. They would sue, they would get an injunction. And anyway, why was he cutting them down in the first place? Willis made his claim that the trees were getting in the way of the farm machinery. – Bullshit, said Paul. – It’s pure fucking aggressive vandalism, that’s what it is.
James meanwhile leaned on the saw, smiling into the grass and sawdust around his feet, sharing the joke of it all with himself.
– But don’t you think these trees are beautiful? asked Elise rashly.
– Trees are just trees, said Willis.
He agreed eventually, reluctantly, to leave the rest of them at least for this one day: probably only because he wasn’t really sure either who owned them. When Paul came back from dropping the girls at the bus pick-up, Elise was still in her kimono at the kitchen table, nursing her cold coffee. He was surprised to see she had been crying; she didn’t often cry. Soggy tissue was wadded in her palm.
– They belong here and we don’t, she said. – No matter how long we live here.
– He doesn’t belong here, El. He’s English, he comes from outside. You told me yourself, he isn’t popular. The other farmers in the village aren’t like him: they love this land. And what he’s doing is a mistake, even in farming terms: the trees are windbreaks. The aspen suckers help consolidate the soil. He doesn’t need to cut them: he’s only doing it to get at us.
– But behind it, the reason is real: why he hates us and resents us. He works the land; what are we? We’re nothing, we’re only playing here. This place where he earns his living is only our pleasure ground. That’s what he knows, he knows we feel it. If we live here all our lives, we can’t earn that out.
Paul was furious at her fatalism because it was something he was susceptible to himself. – I’m not going to feel guilty, he insisted. – Aren’t we working here? Who says that it’s his kind of work, mostly poisoning and destroying wildlife habitat, that earns the right to cut down the trees? We taxpayers subsidise farmers like him, to be custodians of the countryside. I’m phoning a solicitor, to get an injunction against him.
– Please don’t. Don’t make this more horrible than it has to be. I don’t want to get in a feud with them. We can plant new trees. We’ll put in a new row, on our side of the wall. Ruth says he wants to make enemies of us.
– What’s Ruth got to do with this? Did you call her while I was out?
– She belongs to this place, she understands how things work here. We have to respect these country people. Don’t forget, it isn’t only Willis who’s English.
– I resent you bringing Ruth into something that only concerns us.
They rowed as they hadn’t done for a long time, their quarrel degenerating almost at once into an ancient idiotic riff over who did most in the house, who was working the hardest, who was having the worst time. While they argued Elise was clearing the breakfast things from the table, scraping Rice Krispies savagely into the compost bin, dashing leftover cold tea into the sink. No one had properly finished eating or drinking that morning. Paul felt excitement mounting, a kind of release. They got onto the dangerous subject of Elise’s family. He said he had never been able to work out what her mother used to do all day, apart from choosing clothes and ordering servants about.
– Don’t be ridiculous, we didn’t have ‘servants’, not the way you make it sound. Only while we were in Washington.
He claimed there was something unhealthy in how her family hung on to trunks full of papers: diaries and memoirs, souvenirs of dogs and horses, photographs of the houses they had lived in, home movies. Her sisters had hours of taped recordings of their parents reminiscing.
– Who are you keeping it for? Whoever d’you think will be interested?
– I’m shocked, she said. – When I told you about those tapes, I never dreamed you were thinking all this horrible stuff.
– I couldn’t care less about the tapes. But you’ve got to admit, your family carries a lot of heavy baggage.
– No: it’s just meanness in you. Something miserable, that wants to shrivel up what other people care about. Does the meanness come from your background, did you get it from your parents? Are you jealous, of all the memories we have?
– I can’t believe you’ve actually used that word: ‘background’. What are you, my fucking social worker?
– Don’t you
Willis would have been gratified to hear them, Paul thought. Probably this was exactly how he imagined the intimate life of people like them, degraded because they had too much time to indulge themselves with thinking.
Elise said she had work to do, and went off to the barn. Paul stood for a while in the cramped tiny bedroom upstairs. The duvet was still heaped on the bed where he’d thrown it off when he heard the saw. Rage at Elise and rage at Willis’s assault on the tree were mixed painfully together. The bedroom seemed oppressively feminine, the dressing table with its bottles of perfume and cosmetics, the muslin curtains at the windows, the brass bed frame, the pink-striped duvet cover. How had he arrived at submitting to all this? Downstairs, Elise would be finishing the last of the little dining chairs. She had cut the fabric so that at the centre of each seat there was a single rose, black against a dark pink background. Ruth had found a buyer for the whole set of twelve, and someone wanted pictures of them for a lifestyle magazine, which would be good for business. Sometimes, preparing for one of these magazine photographs, Elise transformed one of the rooms in Tre Rhiw, painting its walls a different colour, purple or pink or green, bringing in furniture from the barn where it was waiting to be sold, whipping up new curtains on her machine. She was paid extra for all this. The hems on the curtains would only be pinned or roughly tacked, as if for a stage set, and she wouldn’t bother painting behind corner cupboards or a sofa. This set would become the frame of their real lives for months afterwards, until it was all changed for a new shoot.
Paul threw some clothes in a bag with a couple of books, put his passport out of long habit in his back pocket, his laptop in its carrying case, then left the house the front way, walking to the station on the road rather than using the path through the garden and along the river, so that Elise couldn’t see him go from her workroom. The raw gap of the aspen’s absence in the sky was a pulse of shock, a murder scene: its felled slender length stretched out along the red earth, new coppery-pale leaves still trembling and sprightly, its death not having reached them yet through the slow sap-channels. Should he have stayed, to phone the solicitors? But Elise was against him doing that anyway. He told himself it was futile to worry about a few trees, when the extreme weather this year was so full of
