‘You know what for.’ He takes her hands in his. ‘How much you’re sacrificing to be here with me. I don’t deserve you. I really don’t.’
‘You do deserve me. I’m “sloppy seconds”, remember?’
They smile wryly at each other. This is one of the many unpleasant things that Shaun’s ex-wife Pippa had found to say about Sophie when she’d first found out about her. Also, ‘She looks much older than thirty-four,’ and, ‘She has a strangely flat backside.’
‘Well, whatever you are, you’re the best. And I love you.’ He kisses her knuckles hard and then lets her hands go so that she can pick up her glass.
‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Sophie says dreamily, staring through the back gate and into the woods. ‘Where do they go?’
‘I have no idea,’ he replies. ‘Maybe you should go for a wander after lunch?’
‘Yes,’ says Sophie. ‘Maybe I will.’
Shaun and Sophie have only been together for six months. They met when Sophie came to Shaun’s school to give a talk about publishing and writing to a group of his A-level English students. He took her for lunch as a ‘thank you’ and at first she felt nervous, as if she’d done something wrong; the association between being alone with an older male teacher and having done something wrong was buried so deep into her psyche she couldn’t override it. But then she’d noticed that he had very, very dark brown eyes, almost black, and that his shoulders were broad and that he had a wonderful warm, hearty laugh and a soft mouth and no wedding band, and then she realised that he was flirting with her and then there was an email from him in her inbox a day later, sent from his private email address, thanking her for coming in and wondering if she might like to try the new Korean place they’d chatted about at lunch the previous day, maybe on Friday night, and she’d thought, I have never been on a date with a man in his forties, I have never been on a date with a man who wears a tie to work, and I have not, in fact, been on a date for five full years, and I really would like to try the new Korean place, so why not?
It was during their first date that Shaun told her he was leaving the big secondary school in Lewisham where he was head of sixth form at the end of the term to be a head teacher at a private boarding sixth-form college in the Surrey Hills. Not because he wanted to be in the private sector, working in a mahogany-lined office, but because his ex-wife Pippa was moving their twins from the perfectly nice state primary they’d both been at for three years to an expensive private school and expected him to contribute half of their school fees.
At first the implications of this development hadn’t really hit Sophie. March tumbled into April tumbled into May tumbled into June and she and Shaun became closer and closer and their lives became more and more intertwined and then Sophie met Shaun’s twins, who let her put them to bed and read them stories and comb their hair and then it was the summer holidays and she and Shaun started to spend even more time together, and then one night, drinking cocktails on a roof terrace overlooking the Thames, Shaun said, ‘Come with me. Come with me to Maypole House.’
Sophie’s gut reaction had been no. No no no no no. She was a Londoner. She was independent. She had a career of her own. A social life. Her family lived in London. But as July turned to August and Shaun’s departure drew ever closer and the fabric of her life started to feel as though it was stretching out of shape, she turned her thinking round. Maybe, she thought, it would be nice to live in the countryside. Maybe she could focus more on work, without all the distractions of city living. Maybe she’d enjoy the status of being the head teacher’s partner, the cachet of being the first lady of such an exclusive place. She went with Shaun to visit the school and she walked around the cottage and felt the warm solidity of the terracotta tiles beneath her feet, smelled the sensuous fragrance of wild roses, of freshly mowed grass, of sun-warmed jasmine through the back door. She saw a space below a window in the hallway that was just the right size for her writing desk, with a view across the school grounds. She thought, I am thirty-four. Soon I will be thirty-five. I have been alone for a long, long time. Maybe I should do this ridiculous thing.
And so she said yes.
She and Shaun made the most of every minute of their last few weeks in London. They sat on every pavement terrace in South London, ate every kind of obscure ethnic cuisine, watched films in multi-storey car parks, wandered around pop-up food fairs, picnicked in the park to the background sounds of grime music and sirens and diesel engines. They spent ten days in Mallorca in a cool Airbnb in downtown Palma with a balcony overlooking the marina. They spent weekends with Shaun’s children and took them to the South Bank to run through the fountains, for al fresco lunches at Giraffe and Wahaca, to the Tate Modern, to the playgrounds in Kensington Gardens.
And then she’d let her one-bedroom flat in New Cross to a friend, cancelled her gym membership, signed out of her Tuesday night writers’ group, packed some boxes and joined Shaun here, in the middle of nowhere.
And now, as the sun shines down through the tops of the towering trees, splashing dapples on to the dark fabric of her dress and the ground beneath her feet, Sophie starts to feel the beginning of happiness, a sense that this decision borne of pragmatism might in fact have been some kind of magical act of destiny unfurling, that they were meant to be here, that this will be good for her, good for both of them.
Shaun takes their lunch things through to the kitchen. She hears the tap go on and the clatter of dishes being laid down in the butler’s sink.
‘I’m going for a wander,’ she calls to Shaun through the open window.
She turns to put the latch on the gate as she leaves the back garden and as she does so her eye is caught by something nailed to the wooden fence.
A piece of cardboard, a flap torn from a box by the look of it.
Scrawled on it in marker and with an arrow pointing down to the earth, are the words ‘Dig Here’.
She stares at it curiously for a moment. Maybe, she thinks, it’s left over from a treasure trail, a party game, or a team-building exercise from theGleecourse that is finishing today. Maybe, she thinks, it’s a time capsule.
But then something else flashes through her mind. A jolting déjà vu. A certainty that she has seen this exact thing before: a cardboard sign nailed to a fence. The words ‘Dig Here’ in black marker pen. A downward-pointing arrow. She has seen this before.
But she cannot for the life of her remember where.
3
June 2017
Zach’s mum is older than Kim. Zach is her youngest child; she has another four, all girls, all much older than him. Her name is Megs. She answers the door to Kim in combat shorts and a voluminous green linen top, sunglasses on her head, a patch of sunburn on the bridge of her nose.
‘Kim,’ she says. Then she turns immediately to Noah and beams at him. ‘Hello, my beautiful bubba,’ she says. She chucks him under the chin, and then glances back at Kim. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Have you seen the kids?’ Kim says, hitching Noah onto her other hip. She walked here without the pram, it’s hot and Noah is heavy.
‘Tallulah, you mean? And Zach?’
‘Yeah.’ She shifts Noah again.