Lottie announced that she was getting married. This was at the breakfast table at her parents' house one weekend. The kitchen in that house was upstairs, its windows overlooking the garden. It was a tall, thin, old house, comfortably untidy. The summer morning was rainy, so all the lights were on, the atmosphere close and dreamy, perfumed with toast and coffee.
"Whatever for?" said Lottie's mother, Hattie, and carried on reading her book. She was an English teacher, but she read crime novels at weekends: this one was about a detective in Venice.
Lottie was nineteen, but she looked more like thirteen or fourteen, just over five feet tall, with a tight little figure and a barrel chest. She insisted on wearing the same glasses with thick black frames that she had chosen years earlier, and her hair, the colour of washed-out straw, was pulled into pigtails.
Everyone happened to be at home that weekend, even Lottie's older brother and sister, Rufus and Em, who had moved away.
"Have you got a boyfriend at last?" Em asked.
Lottie was always pale, with milky translucent skin behind an arc of ghost-freckles across her snub nose, but she seemed to be even whiter than usual that morning, blue veins standing out at her temples; she clenched her hands on either side of the place mat in front of her. They were improbable hands for a violinist: pink and plump, with short blunt fingers and bitten cuticles.
"You're not taking me seriously!" she cried.
A squall of rain urged against the steamed-up windowpanes, toast sprang from the toaster for no one in particular. Lottie emanated intensity; her personality was like a demon trapped inside a space too small. Even as a baby she had been preternaturally perceptive and judgemental. Her talent for the violin, when they discovered it, had seemed an explanation for her surplus strength, or a solution to it; she had begun on an instrument so tiny that it looked like a toy or a Christmas tree decoration. Now she was living with her parents while she studied for her music degree at the university.
"Why ever would you want to get married?" Hattie said reasonably. "Dad and I have never felt the need."
"I'm not like you."
"Of course, you're not like anybody, sweetheart. You're just yourself."
"For a start, I happen to have religious beliefs. I believe that marriage is a holy sacrament."
"No, you don't," Rufus said. "You've never said anything about them before."
"So when, exactly, are you getting married?" Em asked sceptically. "And who to?"
"How could I possibly know yet, when? That's what I want to talk to you about. I want to sort out a date. I want you all to be there. I want it to be a proper wedding. With a dress and everything. And bridesmaids, probably."
"So you have got a boyfriend!" Em said.
Em was gracefully loose-jointed, with her mother's hooded, poetic eyes; she worked in the toxicology department of the local hospital.
Hattie put down her book and her coffee mug in concern. "Poppet, you're so young. There's no need to rush into anything."
Sullen white dents appeared in Lottie's cheeks where her jaw was set. "You forget that I have a whole life of my own now, as an adult, outside of this house, about which you know nothing, absolutely nothing. You don't warn Emily not to rush into anything."
"To be fair," Em said, "I'm not the one who just said I was getting married."
"Have we met him?" Hattie asked. "Is he on your course?"
"Is it the one with the stammer in your string quartet?" asked Noah, Lottie's younger brother, who was still at school.
"How could you think I'd want to marry Tristan?"
"So what's his name, then?"
Duncan, the children's father, arrived from his morning ritual with the Guardian in the bathroom upstairs. He was shorter than Hattie, stocky, densely and neatly made, with a wrinkled, ugly, interesting head; she was vague and languid, beginning to be faded. He taught special needs kids at a local comprehensive, not the same one where Hattie taught. "What is whose name?"
Alarm took flight in Hattie. "Lottie, darling, you're not pregnant, are you?"
"I just don't believe this family," Lottie wailed. "There's something horrible about the way your minds work."
"Because if you're pregnant we can deal with that. It doesn't mean you have to get married."
"Is she pregnant?" Duncan asked.
"Of course I'm not."
"She says she's going to get married."
"Whatever for?"
"Also that she has religious beliefs, suddenly."
This seemed to bother Rufus more than the marrying. He was an ironic pragmatist; he worked as a research analyst for the cabinet office.
"The reason is," Lottie said, "that I've met someone quite different from anyone I've ever known before, different from any of you. He's a great man. He's touched my life, and transformed it. I'm lucky he even noticed I exist."
She had a gift of vehemence, an occasional lightning flash of vision so strong it revealed to others for a moment the world as it was from her perspective.
"When you say 'great man,'" her father considered, "I get the feeling that you're not talking about one of your fellow students."
Hattie saw what he meant, after gaping at him for half a second. "One of your teachers! Is it? Does this teacher know that you feel this way about him?"
"I told you, he loves me. He's going to marry me."
Duncan wondered if it wasn't Edgar Lennox. "He's some kind of high-Anglican, isn't he? I believe he writes religious music."
"And? If it was him?"
"Oh no!" Hattie stood up out of her chair, uncharacteristically guttural, almost growling. "That's out of the question. Edgar Lennox. That's just not thinkable, in any way, shape or form."
"I hate it when you use that particular phrase," Lottie shouted, standing up too. "Way, shape or form. It's so idiotic. It's exactly the sort of thing you would say. It just goes to show your mediocrity."
"Let's try to talk about this calmly," Duncan said.
***
Edgar Lennox was old enough to be Lottie's grandfather. Forty years older than she was, Hattie shrieked; later, it turned out to be more like forty-five. His already being married, to his second wife, was only a minor difficulty compared with this. Duncan and Hattie had met him when they went to the university open day with Lottie. He had seemed at the time Hattie's ideal of an elderly creative artist: tall, very thin, with a shock of upstanding white hair, a face whose hollows seemed to have been carved out by suffering, tanned skin as soft as leather, a charcoal-grey linen shirt.
"When you say he's touched your life, could we be quite specific about this?" Duncan said. "Has he actually, in the ordinary, non-transcendent sense of the word, touched you?"
Em protested in disgust. "Dad, you can't ask her that!"
Em had been crying, her eyelids were swollen and puffy and her face was blotched. Hattie's and Lottie's eyes were hot and dry.
Hattie turned on him. "How can you put it like that? How could you make it into one of your clever remarks?"
"If you're asking whether we've consummated our relationship, of course we have. We're lovers."
"Naturally I'm making a formal complaint to the university," said Hattie.
"You're sure she isn't making all this up?" Rufus suggested.
"Think what you like. You'll soon know." Lottie sat with her mouth primly shut, shining with a tragic light.
Beyond the kitchen windows, veils of grey rain drove sideways into the sodden skirts of the horse-chestnut tree, darkening the pink flowers. Hattie said that the whole thing reminded her of when she was at art college, and someone's sister was on the point of entering a convent, a closed order that allowed no contact with family or friends.
"We piled on to a train and went up to Leeds together on the spur of the moment, six or seven of us who were close then, and met this sister in a tea shop, and tried to convince her of everything in the world that was worth staying for."
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm not going into a convent."
"Did it work?" Noah asked. "Did you convince her?"
Hattie frowned and pressed her knuckles to her forehead. "I can only remember the tea shop, and then after that a pub, and trying to think of all the things we couldn't bear to leave behind, and getting drunker and drunker."
"This isn't the same thing," Duncan said firmly. "And we aren't at anything like that stage yet."
Lottie stared at them in genuine bewilderment. "I don't understand you all," she said. "How can you not want for me what I want?"
***
Noah saw his parents leave the house, late in the evening. His bedroom was in the attic, he was sitting on the sill of his little casement window, his feet in the lead-lined gutter that ran like a trough the length of the Georgian terrace, looking down over the stone parapet into the street, four storeys below. Rain was sluicing down the grey slate roof into the gutter.
In the light of the street lamps, the road shone black; parked cars were plastered with wet leaves. His mother's high heels scraped fiercely in the empty street as she crossed to the car: she must have dressed up in her teaching clothes for the occasion. She was hanging on tightly to the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. She and Duncan dithered around the car under the half-globes of their umbrellas, probably quarrelling about who should drive; they seemed as small as dolls from where he watched. He supposed they were going to try to find Edgar Lennox at his house; they had been calling him on the phone all day, without getting through. It was strange to think of the two households, more or less unknown to each other before tonight, connected by this drama, awake in the city when everyone else was getting ready for sleep.
Hours later—he wasn't sure how many hours, he'd fallen asleep at his desk while revising for the geography GCSE exam he had on Monday morning—Noah woke to the sound of his mother's voice in the house again. She sounded like she did when she'd had too much wine at parties: rash and loud, extravagantly righteous. He went out to listen, leaning over the banister. The steep and narrow staircase, the core of the skinny house, drew sound upwards. Above his head, an ancient skylight rattled under the rain, leaking into a strategically placed bucket. His parents and Rufus and Em were crowded at the foot of the stairs, in the hallway's jumble of boots and bikes and baskets.
"I thought he'd be ashamed," Hattie was saying, "if I told him that Lottie was marrying him because she thinks he is a great man. But it was obvious that he thinks he is one too."
"Is he one?" Rufus asked.
"Don't be ridiculous. What would he be doing teaching in a second-rate music department at a provincial university?"
"I thought you said the department was something wonderful."
"That was before this."
"He does some film and television work if he can get it," Duncan said. "All fairly high-toned. And writes for the cathedral choir. Greatness, of course, wouldn't necessarily make him any better, as far as Lottie's concerned."
"What was his wife like? What's her name?"
"Valerie. She was frosty. She said, 'Whatever happens, I keep this house,' as if that was something we were after. The house wasn't what you'd expect, anyway, not arty: stuffy and old-fashioned. I should think she's about my age, but she's let herself go—grey ponytail, no make-up, one of those dowdy skirts with an elastic waistband."
"She was fierce," Duncan said. "I'd have been frightened of her, in his shoes."
"All she said was, that Lottie would soon learn. They have a son, about the same age as Noah."
"Did she know about it all already?"
"She hadn't known for long—he'd just told her."
"We walked in on it all. We were the aftershock."
"Where is Lottie, anyway?"
"It has to run its course," Duncan said. "We're not in a position to prevent anything."
"It can't be allowed to run its course, Duncan! What if they actually went through with this crazy wedding?"
He groaned consolingly. "She's an adult—she's nineteen. Worse things happen at sea."
Noah turned and saw that Lottie was standing in her nightdress on the stairs behind him. She put her finger to her lips, her eyes behind her glasses were black pits. She was trembling, gripping the banister to steady herself, probably because she had swallowed too many of the caffeine tablets she claimed she was addicted to, and no doubt also because she was exalted and frightened at her ability to raise this storm in adult lives. Noah felt a familiar irritation with her exaggerations, mixed with protectiveness. He and Lottie had grown up very close, adrift from the rest of the family in their bedrooms in the attic. He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won't be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can't stop now.
***
Lottie was wearing a white suit and contact lenses; without her glasses her face seemed weakly expectant. A white flower fastened behind her ear slid gradually down her cheek during the course of the afternoon until it was bobbing against her chin. She clung to Edgar, dropping her forehead to rest against his upper arm while he spoke, or throwing back her head to gaze into his face.
"It won't last," Duncan reassured his other children.
To Edgar's credit, he seemed sheepish under the family's observation, and did his best to jolly Lottie along, circulating with her arm tucked into his, playing the gentle public man, distinguished in his extreme thinness, his suit made out of some kind of rough taupe silk. You would have picked him out in any gathering as subtle and thoughtful and well informed. But there weren't really quite enough people at the reception to make it feel like a success: the atmosphere was constrained, the sun never came out from behind a mottled thick lid of cloud. After the drink ran out and the students had melted away, too much dispiriting white hair seemed to show up in the knots of guests remaining, like snow in the flowerbeds. Duncan overheard someone, sotto voce, refer to the newlyweds as "Little Nell and her grandfather."
Valerie phoned Lottie a week or so after the wedding to ask whether she knew that Edgar had tried the same thing the year before with the student who had sung at the reception, a tall beautiful black girl with a career ahead of her: she had had the sense to tell him where to go. "To fuck off," Valerie enjoyed enunciating precisely, as if she hadn't often used that word. Everyone knew about this because Valerie had also telephoned Hattie. When Hattie asked Lottie about it, Lottie only folded her hands together and smiled secretively into her lap. "It's all right, mum," she said. "He tells me everything. We don't have secrets. Soraya is an exceptional, gifted young woman. I love her too."
Hattie hated how every opinion Lottie offered now seemed to come from both of them: we like this, we always do that, we don't like this. They didn't like supermarkets, they didn't like muzak in restaurants, they didn't like television. As Duncan put it, they generally found that the modern world came out disappointingly below their expectations. Hattie said she wasn't ready to have Edgar in her house yet.
The university agreed that it was acceptable for Lottie to continue with her studies, as long as she didn't take any of Edgar's classes; but, of course, he carried on working with her on her violin. She wore her hair loose, and bought silky indeterminate dresses in the charity shops. Hattie saw her unexpectedly from behind once and thought for a moment that her own daughter was a stranger, a stumpy little child playing on the streets in clothes from a dressing-up box. Edgar and Lottie were renting a flat not far from her parents, tiny, with an awful galley kitchen and the landlord's furniture, but filled with music. Edgar had to pay about half his salary to Valerie to cover his share of the mortgage on the house and the part of Harold's schooling that wasn't covered by the scholarship; he and Lottie were pretty hard up, but at first they carried this off, too, as if it were a sign of something rare and fine.
"God knows what they eat," Hattie said. "Lottie doesn't know how to boil an egg. Probably Edgar doesn't know how to boil one, either. I'll bet he's had women running around him all his life."
Noah reported that they often had Chinese takeaway.
***
Then Lottie began to have babies. Familiarity had just started to silt up around the whole improbable idea of her and Edgar as a couple—high-minded, humourless, poignant in their unworldliness—when everything jolted on to this new track. Three diminutive girls arrived in quick succession, and life at Lottie and Edgar's, which had seemed to drift with 18th-century underwater slowness, snapped into noisy, earthy and chaotic contemporaneity. Lottie in pregnancy was as swollen as a beach ball; afterward, she never recovered her neat boxy little figure, nor that dreamily submissive phase of her personality. She became bossy, busy, cross; she abandoned her degree. She chopped off her hair with her own scissors, and mostly wore baggy tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts. Their tiny flat was submerged under packs of disposable nappies, cots, toys, washing, nursing bras and breast pads, a playpen, books on babies, books for babies. The tenant below them left in disgust, and they moved downstairs for the sake of the extra bedroom. As soon as the girls could toddle, they trashed Edgar's expensive audio equipment. He had to spend more and more time in his room at the university, anyway—he couldn't afford to turn down any commissions. Now Lottie spoke with emotion only about her children and about money.
The girls were all christened, but Lottie during the ceremonies was more managerial than rapt. With the fervour of a convert to practicality, she planned her days and steered through them. Duncan taught her to drive, she bought a battered old Ford Granada, unsubtle as a tank, and fitted it with child-seats, ferrying the girls around from nursery to swimming to birthday parties to baby gym. She was impatient if anyone tried to turn the conversation around to art or music, unless it was Tiny Tots ballet. She seemed to be carrying around, under the surface of her intolerant contempt for idleness, a burning unexpressed message about her used-up youth, her put-aside talent.
"She ought to be abashed," Hattie said. "We warned her. Instead, she seems to be angry with us."
Hattie had been longing for early retirement, but she decided against it, fearing that the empty days might only fill up with grandchildren. She believed that in the mirror she could see the signs in her face—like threads drawn tight—of the strain of these extra years of teaching that she had not wanted.
"Poor old Lottie," Duncan said.
"Lottie isn't old. Poor Edgar."
At weekends, Duncan sometimes came home to find Edgar taking refuge at his kitchen table, drinking tea while the children made scones or collages with Hattie. Edgar didn't do badly with them, considering, but it could take him three quarters of an hour to get all three little girls stuffed into coats and mittens and boots and pushchairs, ready to go. Physically, he was rather meticulous and pedantic. If Lottie was with him, she would push his fine long fingers brusquely aside and take over the zipping and buttoning. "Here, let me do it," she'd snap. To his credit, Edgar didn't seem to resent the intrusion of the babies into his life: he gave himself over to their existence with a kind of bemused wonder. He drew his tall thinness down to their level, noticing everything they noticed, involved in their childish chatter and speculation as Lottie didn't have time to be. They adored him—they ran to cling to his legs when their mummy was cross. Edgar's appearance was diminished, though, from what it had once been: his white hair had thinned and was cut shorter and lay down more tamely on his head; his clothes were the ordinary dull things anyone could buy in a supermarket. Hattie realised with surprise that it must have been Valerie who was behind the charcoal-grey linen shirts, the silk suits, the whole production of Edgar as exceptional and distinguished.
When Emily got pregnant with her first child, Lottie's youngest was nine months old, and Charis, her eldest, was five. Lottie dumped sacks of used baby things on Emily one evening without any warning. "Chuck them out if you don't want them, she said. "I've got no more use for them. I've had my tubes tied."
***
Noah went to London and got work intermittently as an assistant cameraman on small film projects. He dropped in at Lottie's whenever he came home, and they fell easily into their old companionable closeness. She fed him whatever awful mush she had cooked for tea. He was useful for swinging his nieces about and throwing them in the air, all the rough play that Edgar had to be careful of. Often Edgar wasn't there; Noah assumed that he was working in his room at the university.
One summer evening, Noah was lying on his back on the carpet in Lottie's front room. Two floor-length sash windows opened from this room on to a wrought-iron balcony; Lottie had made Edgar fix bars across, to stop the girls from getting out there. A warm incense of balsam poplar mingled with the petrol fumes breathed from the street. Lottie had triumphantly produced from the back of a cupboard a sticky bottle half full of Bacardi that nobody liked, and now they were drinking it, mixed with blackcurrant cordial because it was all she had. "We'll be horribly, pinkly, sick," Lottie predicted. The girls were asleep at last. Noah lay supine, Lottie crawled around him on her hands and knees, grunting with the effort, putting away in primary-coloured plastic boxes the primary-coloured toys that were strewn like strange manna all around the carpet.
"My life's so grey," she was complaining.
"When does Edgar get back from work?"
"Don't be thick, Noah. Ed's retired. The university couldn't keep on employing him forever. He's seventy-two this year. Why d'you think I've been going on to you about how hard up we are?"
"Where is he then?"
"At Valerie's, I expect."
Noah opened his eyes in surprise, angling his head up from the floor to get a look at her. "Oh!"
"That's where he usually is."
"Is that all right?"
"Why shouldn't he? When we've been paying half the mortgage for all these years—at least that's finished at last, thank Christ. There's a room there where he can work; it's impossible here. And we don't have space for a piano. He still likes to write at a piano, before he puts it on the computer."
"So they get on OK, him and Valerie?"
"She brings him coffee and plates of sandwiches while he's working. She unplugs the phone in the hall, in case it disturbs him. He plays things to her. I expect that sometimes while he's in the throes of composition he forgets he doesn't live there any more, in that quiet house."
"Mum said the house was old-fashioned."
"It is old-fashioned. Full of antiques, from Valerie's mother, but Valerie wouldn't know how to show them off. Valerie doesn't have a showing-off bone in her body. She's a gifted cellist, apparently, but she can't play in public."
"I suppose you've got to know her."
Lottie aimed bricks at a box. "Not in the face-to-face sense. Occasionally she and I do have to talk, about Harold's allowance or whatever."
"He doesn't still have an allowance?"
"Not after we had the talk. On my wedding night, I tell you, it was like Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. My metaphorical wedding night—I don't actually mean that one night in particular. Behind the first door, the torture chamber; behind the second door, a lake of tears and so on. Behind the last door were his other wives, alive and well. Well, the first one isn't exactly alive, but I could tell you all about her."
"I'd forgotten there was a first one."
"Danish, actress, had problems with her abusive father, drank."
"He goes on about them?"
"Not really. They're just his life—they crop up, as you can imagine. There's a lot of life behind him to crop up. Don't forget, once Valerie was the one he ran away with."
"I'd never thought of it like that."
"Were the babies my revenge? Poor Ed, I've nearly killed him."
Lottie lay down on the floor, head to toe with Noah, holding her glass on the soft mound of her stomach, tilting the viscous red drink backward and forward as she breathed.
"The other week, I was so angry about something—can't remember what—that I drove up to the recycling depot with the babies in the back of the car to throw my violin into the skip for miscellaneous household waste."
Noah sat upright. "The one mum and dad bought for you? Didn't that cost loads of money? Thousands?"
"I looked down into the skip and got the violin out of the case to throw, and then I put it away again. Apart from anything else, I told myself, I could always sell it. And it's possible I might want to start again, when this is over. But probably I won't, ever."
"Is Edgar any good?" Noah demanded drunkenly, suddenly aggressive. "I mean, is his music really, actually any good?"
"Noah, how can you ask that?" Although Lottie protested, the question seemed intimately known to her, as if she had thrown herself too often against its closed door. "How can I judge? I can't tell. I think he's good. He's writing something at the moment, for strings. It'll get a premiere at the festival. It's something new, different. Actually, I think it might be lovely."
Just then they heard Edgar's deliberate slow step on the stairs, his key in the door to the flat.
"He pretends this new piece is for me. But I know it's not about me."
Edgar stood squinting at them from the doorway, getting used to the light; his khaki hooded waterproof and stooped shoulders gave him, incongruously, the toughened, bemused aura of an explorer returned. Noah imagined how infantile he and Lottie must look, lying on the floor among the toys with their bright red drinks, and how uninteresting youth might sometimes seem.
"We're finishing up that Bacardi, Ed," Lottie said, enunciating too carefully. "Do you want some?"
Edgar's eyes these days had retreated behind his jutting cheekbones and sprouting eyebrows; something suave had gone out of his manner. He said that he would rather have a hot drink. Forgetfully he waited, as if he expected Lottie to jump up and make it for him. When he remembered after a moment, and went into the kitchen to do it himself, he didn't imply the least reproach; he was only absorbed, his thoughts were elsewhere. Noah saw how hungrily from where she lay Lottie followed the ordinary kitchen music—the crescendo of the kettle, the chatter of crockery, the punctuation of cupboard doors, the chiming of the spoon in the cup—as if she might hear in it something that was meant for her.
