South-facing cost a million more and worth it. These years of work and achievement. Legacy, a serious conversation. This house, where they coalesced. A hundred acres, the river, the woods. This house. Domestic baroque, above a peaceful village squired away from change. This house. High Hurstwood.
Working at home, now they lived so far from the city. Late on a summer Friday, pushing ahead so they could log off with clean hands. By six, the lawn glassy with sunlight. Parched, obstinate grass bleached with bright weather. No breeze moved silk curtains blazing with summer. The windows gaped, their sashes tawny with heat. Down beyond the withered lawn, torpid shadows welled and thickened.
“This risk matrix.” She flipped her screen. “What did I miss?”
Reluctant to leave the Gantt he was building. All the pretty dependencies, chained in elapsed time. Her risk matrix cooked. Its stacked geometrics a navigable topography from sage green fields in the home corner to that broiling lair of red at the high angle. A fire among rocks. “You caught it all.” He was sure that was true. “You tell them to reframe the appetite?”
“Next Audit Committee.” She held her screen arm’s length, its twin in her eyes. “When’s your next gateway?”
“Three weeks. I want it before the chief economist goes on maternity. On leave.” He felt through the silence. “Senior independent director all-but said we’ve got the money. This will be big.” Words that held weight at the office, tiny beneath plaster flowers.
“Will you go in person?”
“I’m presenting. It’s better.”
“I have surplus office space as a risk. Audit Committee request.”
“Asset risk?” It came out belligerent.
“Not top line.” She hugged her device. “There’s an overarching risk around business change. The hybrid balance speaks to that.”
“Makes sense.” The risk managers at his place were featureless and incisive. Like boggy ground in the waste of the river, placid and lethal. She was a different standard: high likelihood, high impact. “Can you QA this for me?”
She held his screen as though it contained some delicate, brutal element. She racked the focus up and down, the Gantt too joyous to fit. “What’s your confidence in these milestones?”
“When the funding’s inked we can recruit. With the board onside, execs won’t need persuasion.”
“You assume everyone rolls over?”
“It’s a risk they don’t.”
The sky tilted side-on to the day. Tendrils of sunlight burned through handwoven swirls. A carpet like Christmas. Extravagant and authentic. The garden, blind with summer, swayed and coiled. “Time for wine?” That swing to her voice, a bright synthetic worn for fun.
“I should do more. There’s uncertainties skewing the year after next.”
“It’s August. There’s no decisions.”
He wondered if she thought his smile pedantic. Once, they played at this. Except it was him dragging her from work. When she got that promotion. When she had exams. Distracting a clever, successful wife – the ultimate luxury. He kept tapping the pad so the light on his profile stayed green. Maybe reset it to busy. A salient call. Late Friday bragging. She didn’t move how she used to. When she went to the kitchen – the modern kitchen down the hall, not the original sooty-bricked, spider-haunted basement – she didn’t have that spring to her calves, didn’t flex on her toes, lacked the momentum of bones engaged in purpose. Where she used to run, now she practised yoga. Where she moved, now she sat still.
He checked email. Some reminders, some invitations. A note of concern. Not immediate, not for now. A call, a meeting, projections. All fungible, with skill. In the early years, they studied the history of the house. Pevsner called it, ‘A sturdy structure in merchant baroque, altogether too heavy for the land it commands, altogether too plain to be bypassed’. Cobbett found it, ‘An imposition, starving those whom it chides’. The threadbare ghosts of scant places: walled-up women, their children consumed. High Hurstwood had nothing heroic and as its power over the village waned, the house fell inward, miserly, the world lost from its grasp.
The strike of stemware announced her through the hallway. Chiming the week’s end. This work week was average, but things got done. Not a memorable week. Incremental progress along the chart.
A fine afternoon, warm and heavy, the Beaune Chardonnay sweating fiercely against the heat of the room, as though hauled from sharp, clear water. She’d stabbed the cork, a crack across its face spilling old geology. Glasses for everyday drinking, not the crystal packed in its padded case. The austere curve of the bottle captured her risk matrix, its fiery reds stepped back to the ochre of blood. He returned to his Gantt, approving its orderly path, its timely intersections, its outputs clustered like village houses latched by broken lanes. “We could go to the pub after dinner.” In the city, Friday night was a sweaty fug of suits and skin, shouted triumphs and laughed-off disasters. Stewed ambition and abiding desire, resolved in unfamiliar beds. The village pub was old men telling tales half-forgotten, young couples competitively wrapped in each other, the lads who grew cannabis at the old dairy, its barns a white haze after dark. The retired music teacher might play the piano. Show tunes everyone swayed to and no one remembered. They’d talk about work over flabby house white, to not be incomers cast in silence.
Another glass and she held the screen arm’s length. “I’m sure there was something.”
“You caught it.”
“I’ll find it.” That thing she did, holding her glass to the sun as it filled the French doors. Old doors that had to be velvet-wrapped for winter. Refracted, the garden stretched and swam. The sun, an onyx bolt suspended in green. Her lips moved with the wavering heat. “That woman was in the village this morning.”
He shouldn’t have this. “It’s nothing to fret for.”
“The twins were with her. They walk everywhere now. She still takes the pushchair.”
“Did you speak to her?”
But she was tracking something along the far lawn.
This Gantt lacked momentum, its milestones too slow. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Beautiful, the twins. She doesn’t dress them alike. They can choose how they want.”
The sun, an idle moment in derelict rooms. A mystery of lost purpose. “We do well with the village.” The words appeared on the sun-washed screen. An executive aspiration. “Everyone’s so kind.”
At the threshold of sunlight, casting short shadows. “It’s okay, isn’t it? To tell people they have beautiful children. People take it as praise. Like they said to the midwife: ‘We’re clever and good, give us beautiful children.’”
“It’s nothing to worry about. People don’t mind what you say.”
The sun angled her face. Her hair on fire. “What I say? There’s nothing I say.”
An appealing mistress, this project. To shoot for the best. Never hollow. “People like praise for their children. It’s nice.”
“Two beautiful girls. Identical. No pretty or plain. No gorgeous or strong. No limit to how they’re adored.”
He shouldn’t have this. What was done was finished. “When’s your Audit Committee?”
“In person. In London. I’ll need to stay over.”
An unplanned task. A milestone, of sorts. Alone in this house with its coarse earth and marshy river.
“I knew you wouldn’t want to come.” She stopped at the open doors. A gentle compulsion kept her inside. Her raised glass scanned the garden. Watching through wine, the day amber and green.
“It probably won’t be possible.” He adjusted the markers that fenced when tasks were complete. “I’m recruiting. Expanding the team. I may be stepping up.”
“Pregnant, again, your boss’s wife? Will she carry this time?”
He closed his eyes, the yellow air insistent. “They’re hoping it works.”
“Works?” She tried her foot against the step. The room held her. “It’s not machinery. If she can’t carry…” Something caught her eye. Her shadow wavered. “The village women conceive like clockwork. Have you noticed? There’s always two or three letting out the seams. They take turns. They give birth in seasons. The school hired an assistant. Too many for one teacher.”
When he stopped in the village, children ran everywhere. They sat by the road spinning jacks. They climbed the walls. At the pub, shrewd women and satisfied men stayed close and easy. He didn’t say they had nothing else to do. He answered with economics. “It’s good to see a small place thrive. A lot of villages age out.”
She filled his glass and finished the bottle, her hand glazed with its frost. “Sure you can’t come to London?”
“This.” He showed the Gantt. “I can’t tell the team it’s critical, then go missing.” He admired its saintly order. “We’ll get a lot for this.”
The glass at her lips, her hand on her waist: a figure of pensive desire. “We?”
“The roof needs looking at. There’s that cold place on the back landing. I’ll get a good payday from this.” The Gantt, a burning icon in the savage sun.
“I’ll stay with my sister. That’ll save money.”
“And her husband.”
“Yes, they’re married.” She took up her device, flushed more cells, heightening the risk. “Leave the back landing. You know why it’s cold.”
“The chimneys aren’t capped properly. There’s bricks gone rotten.”
“They’re trying to reach us. They want us to know they’re still here.”
Years back, drunk, she’d tap dance on tables. She could tap, she had the shoes and took classes. They’d go to vintage car shows. She’d swing around muddy fields in a puce fedora. He was saving to restore a Lotus Seven. He took less than cost, for quick sale, when they got the news. For those nine months she really backed off drinking. She was exemplary. “Fix the roof or drain the river.” With the board, his boss, a client, he was professional and persuasive. Perhaps a joke, to lift the mood. No provocation.
She slurred, drinking fast in the heat. Wine from a place they’d never see. “It’s too late to drain the river. Where you been? It’s too late.” Her distress, unplanned and untidy. “I said it was risky. You said it’s okay. You can’t fight water.” With easy, unsteady grace, she palmed the vodka from behind the couch. “I saw them down there today. In the water.”
“No you didn’t.”
She lunged but the bottle clung to her hand, too valuable to let go. “I see them always.”
“You don’t.” His hands described a small world. “You really don’t.”
The Gantt’s milestones were instrumental. He set the order. The chief economist, his boss’s wife, was sure to carry. Last time was bad luck. A clean break, but fair and friendly. A generous split. Time apart, somewhere good for the nerves.
She stared that blank, drunken way into the rabid sunshine. Its lying shimmer twin girls in white dresses. Alive before the tide.
Mark Wagstaff’s work has appeared in Ginosko Literary Journal, Solstice, Does It Have Pockets? and The New Guard. He won the 39th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest with off-kilter romcom, Attack of the Lonely Hearts, published by Anvil Press. Mark’s latest novel, On the Level, was published in 2022 through Leaf by Leaf, an imprint of Cinnamon Press. www.markwagstaff.com