Hunger (3 page)

Over the past nine years she had learned how to deal with Yvonne’s visits simply by carrying on as usual and letting Yvonne follow or not, accompany her or stay at home. It had worked quite well. Sometimes Yvonne came with her – to the art supplier, the shops, the park or a garden centre, to have coffee or even lunch out. Sometimes she did not, but put her feet up on the sofa and read crime novels. And waited – counting the minutes, Paula always thought – until Adrian returned from work.

They did not much like one another, she and Yvonne, but nor did they argue. There was not feeling between them energetic enough to spark off rows.

Yvonne was sitting in the half-dark, book on her lap.

‘Adrian is worn out.’

‘He soon makes up his sleep at the weekend.’

‘It’s this commuting.’

Paula did not answer. Her mother-in-law was right, of course, but it was not something she felt like discussing when his travelling was inevitable, a fact of their lives. It wasn’t as if he had not thought about it all before they had moved.

‘Don’t you ever ask yourself if you’re being selfish?’

Paula was startled.

‘It’s all very well for you down here, everything cosy, just enjoying the countryside and doing your painting.’

‘I work,’ Paula said. ‘What you call “your painting” is work. I get paid for it. We couldn’t manage without.’

‘Are you telling me Adrian isn’t the breadwinner around here?’

‘We both are. I’ll lock up now, Yvonne. You only need to switch the lights off when you come up.’

‘And what about children?’

‘I’ve already told you, I am not calling the police. I’ll try and find out a bit more about them and, of course, I’ll speak to them if they come here again, don’t worry – I don’t approve of letting them get away with theft any more than you do. But they’re very young. It isn’t a police matter. Not at the moment anyway.’

‘I did not,’ Yvonne said, ‘mean those children.’

Paula had never said that she did not like children, that children made her uneasy. She was nervous of them. She did not like the way they stared without smiling, felt judged by the stares. Judged, she thought now, slipping out of her jeans and T-shirt in the dark bedroom, by the stares of the children who had broken into the cottage and eaten the bird nuts, the four unsmiling, silent children.

Yvonne had raised the subject only two or three times in all their nine years and apparently never expected an answer to what had not exactly been a question. Why had they no children, she and Adrian? Because Paula did not like them and Adrian did not care enough to insist. If she had become pregnant, he would have taken to being a father as eagerly as he took to everything, regressing even more deeply into childhood himself as a result. But as she had not, he sailed along cheerfully with her alone.

She lay beside him on her back now, hands behind her head. She always left the curtains open. There was a moon, gliding majestically up the sky. Adrian breathed quietly. He was a quiet sleeper.

Images of the children were in her mind, stuffing their mouths with sour berries and bird nuts, sneaking out of her house with the biscuits and the box of cereal. Always, they looked straight at her, unsmiling, solemn, hostile, defiant.

She sat up. Little thieves. They were little Gypsies, ragged, running-wild thieves, the rural equivalent of streetwise.

The next time it would be tins and packets and jars, and then they would move on to the ornaments: silver box and knives, her paints, the laptop, Adrian’s coin collection. They thieved to order, surely. No group of such young children would think it up for themselves. The stirring game, the hedgerow berries, that was one thing. None of that mattered, even though they should clearly have been in school. And it was none of her business. But coming into the cottage and stealing was something else and they had been told to do it by adults.

She went to sleep abruptly, her thoughts snapped off midway and the children’s unsmiling faces shifted about in her mind, now shadowy, now clear, all night, all night.

The sun shone. She had almost finished her illustrations.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

Adrian rubbed his hair with the flat of his hand. It was Saturday.

‘About what?’

He dipped his forefinger into the butter and rolled it round, then into the sugar bowl, then sucked his finger.

‘That is disgusting.’

He shrugged.

‘You’re not really going to ring the police are you?’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Good. They’re just . . . ’

Paula moved the butter. ‘Enjoying the natural world around them?’

‘Thing is, they have the sort of freedom without boundaries that town kids never dream of.’

‘Town kids nick things.’

‘Come on . . . a few cornflakes?’

Yvonne walked through the kitchen in her dressing gown on her way to light a cigarette outside.

Adrian made a gesture behind her back for ‘When is she going?’

The day Yvonne went they lay in the sun all afternoon with bottles of beer and bags of crisps and apples, and dozed and read and Adrian said he had never felt so light of heart. He used the actual words. Light of heart.

‘But you hate the commute.’

‘No, no, I’m used to it and it’s worth it, isn’t it? Worth it for all this.’

He made a vague sweep of his arm.

‘The green. Trees. Fresh air.’

‘Nature’s bounty.’

He glanced at her, but Paula’s face was solemn.

‘Well yes. You like it, don’t you? I mean, you’re happy? You wouldn’t want to go back? Back there?’ He seemed to need reassurance.

‘No. I wouldn’t want to go back. There.’

‘So you’re happy?’

‘Of course I am,’ Paula said.

She could not have begun to explain just how happy. She did not think she had admitted it to herself. Happy here. Happy every day she woke. Happy alone. Happy to see no one at all from the time she barely stirred when Adrian’s alarm went to the moment she heard him open the gate in the evening. Happy to lie on a rug in the garden or on her bed, looking at the trees. Working peacefully. Making tea. Clearing a bit more of the garden. Alone. Happy. She had met no one since they had arrived here except the postman and a woman walking a black dog. Unless you counted the children.

She could not have told him that she dreaded the weekends, when he was at home, not because she no longer loved him – she loved him as much as she ever had, which was probably not a great deal. She liked to be alone here, that was all.

The summer grew hotter. Paula could work only early in the morning because the lean-to became stifling. She read undemanding books and then just looked up at the leaves that hung heavy and still.

Adrian – jovial on Friday night, because he had a week’s holiday coming – suggested they go to the nearest village for a pub supper, which they ate at a table in the garden: home-cooked ham, eggs, chips, peas. Real ale.

‘None of this gourmet-dining rubbish,’ he said, wiping bread round the last smears of yolk. ‘Ruin of goods pubs, that’s been. Coulis of this and scented with that.’

She agreed. Agreeing was a relief. They held hands, walking back through the still, July night, stomachs bloated.

‘Best move we ever made.’ Adrian belched softly. She agreed again.

He sat in a deckchair most of the week, reading American crime novels recommended by Yvonne, while Paula worked. She looked up occasionally and saw him, legs splayed below khaki shorts, and felt irritable, her precious, solitary days invaded, time stolen.

‘Who needs to go away on holiday?’ Adrian said more than once.

She sent him out for walks, pleading work as an excuse for not joining him, and he strode off, looking conscientiously around.

‘So much to see, if only you lift your eyes. People just don’t look.’

He waved an arm.

The second time she was left alone, she came out of the lean-to when she was sure he was away up the lane and first heard something rustle, then the scrape of the gate. She waited in the doorway and saw a small shadow.

‘Hello?’

The girl froze.

‘Where are you going?’

No reply, only the stare.

‘You’re going to have to talk to me about this, you know. About coming here and trying to sneak in and taking things. Where are the others?’

When Paula went nearer to the girl, she saw something in her eyes as well as defiance, some wariness, and felt the tension in the thin body, poised, ready to streak away again.

‘There’s a jug of lemonade. Do you want some?’

She went past the girl without touching her and into the kitchen, took the lemonade from the fridge, two glasses. A shadow fell across the doorway.

‘You can come in.’

A couple of steps, but no more. Paula set the drinks on the table, with a packet of biscuits.

The child had dark brown hair in matted ringlets, a boys’ checked shirt and shorts. Her eyes were thickly lashed.

Paula drank her own lemonade.

‘I’m Paula.’

The girl dived forwards and grabbed three biscuits deftly off the plate.

‘Don’t eat like that, you’ll choke. Wash them down with this.’

But she gobbled the biscuits, then drank. Her face puckered up.

‘Sorry. It is a bit sharp.’

‘S’not lemonade.’

‘Yes it is. I made it. With lemons. There’s some milk.’

She got a carton from the fridge. When she turned round, the child was pushing three more biscuits into her mouth and the last one into the pocket of her shorts.

‘I could make you some toast.’

Paula watched the milk drain down the glass, as in a speeded-up film.

She made three rounds of toast with butter and strawberry jam.

Starving children happened in Africa, not here in rural England, she thought as the child ate, this land of plenty and supermarkets twenty minutes away. Shame flooded through her. She had not realised until now that the leaf soup and unripe berries, the bird nuts, were free food for empty bellies. She made two more slices of toast, but as she started to butter them Adrian came in through the door, red-faced and perspiring, his shirt tied round his waist. His pale upper body was damp.

‘What on earth’s going on?’

The child was trying to bolt, clutching the toast, but could not get out, because Adrian’s thick body was blocking the doorway.

‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘sit down again. It’s only Adrian. He doesn’t mind.’

‘Who the hell said I didn’t mind?’ He threw his shirt onto the floor. ‘Are we feeding the neighbourhood kids now or what?’

The girl’s eyes were wide with alarm. Paula reached out and tried to lead her back to the table, but she pulled away, wire-taut at the touch.

‘I don’t even know your name.’

‘She’s in here stuffing herself with our food and she hasn’t even told you who she is?’

‘Shut up!’

He looked astonished and in his astonishment, stepped forwards.

The girl was out of the door and away, her feet soundless on the path.

‘For God’s sake, Paula.’

‘No, actually, for God’s sake, Adrian. Why did you frighten her like that? That child’s hungry – heaven knows when she last ate a proper meal.’

‘And it’s all down to us to remedy that, is it? You know what’ll happen, don’t you? Come six o’clock the lot of them will be round here and you’ll be giving them a full cooked meal, and where do you suppose it will end? Next thing, they’ll be living here.’

‘No,’ Paula said, clearing the crockery. ‘They won’t. But if they come back for more food, they can have it. Have you ever been hungry?’

‘Well of course I’ve been hungry. So have you – everyone’s been hungry.’

‘Yes and known where the next meal was coming from and when. Not the same.’

He stood at the sink, sloshing cold water over his face and shoulders. The water sprayed over the draining board onto the floor.

‘You could have a cold shower,’ Paula said.

For the week that he was home there was no sign of the children. Adrian insisted on their taking numerous walks, in spite of the heat.

‘Gypsies,’ he said one day, panting up the slope between overhanging trees. ‘They’ll have moved on. You could tell they were Gypsy kids.’

‘How?’

‘Thieving. Never at school. Besides, they had a Gypsy look.’

‘A Gypsy look?’

‘You know what I mean. Swarthy.’

‘The little boys were quite fair.’

Adrian pushed ahead of her as the path widened.

On Monday he left at seven o’clock for work and by nine two of the children were hanging about near the gate.

‘If those kids come back, you don’t feed them, OK? It’s like stray cats. Once you start . . . ’

She made a pile of toast and took it out to them, with a bought fruitcake. They snatched and ran. Paula followed.

It was a caravan, parked in the corner of a field, hidden behind a thicket away from the road and the houses. She saw them streak along, keeping close to the hedge, and disappear inside. Through the open door she saw a table and a woman’s back against the light. After a few moments the woman came out. There was a white plastic garden chair beside the caravan steps in which she sat heavily and turned her face to the sun.

Everything went quiet. Paula went on, keeping so close to the hedge that brambles scraped her bare arms.

The caravan was quite large with a gas cylinder attached to the back and a rainwater butt. Two of the children, the boys, had come to the doorway and were staring at Paula in the usual hostile way, eyes like pebbles.

The girl appeared behind them.

‘Ma.’

It was almost a whisper, like a warning.

The woman opened her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ Paula said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

The children huddled together.

‘Creeping up like that. Who the fuck are you?’ She half-turned her head. ‘You lot get back in.’

The huddle vanished.

‘Oh, I get it. You’re the one that hands out food. What the fuck do you mean by that?’

Paula cleared her throat.

‘We don’t need handouts. We’re not charity cases.’

‘I was only – they seemed hungry.’