Robbie's Wife Read online

  Back at the hotel I showered and sorted out my notes, re-packed my bag, checked the map to see where the car hire place was, and finally, at ten o’clock, I went downstairs and dropped the key on the desk in front of the clerk who silently took it and I went out to find that the rain had stopped again and it looked as if the sun was trying to break through, the weak light coming off the pavement in a dull reflection.

  I took the underground to Charing Cross, came up into a full London traffic rush, nearly got myself killed because I looked the wrong way, and finally found Nigel’s office in a building that looked like it had probably housed Charles Dickens’ agent. I’d met Nigel once at a cocktail party in Los Angeles that Richard threw when MGM bought a script of mine. It never actually got filmed, but they paid me a shitload of money. That was the year we bought the house in Laurel Canyon. It seemed very easy.

  Nigel was in his early fifties, one of those Englishmen who went to the right schools and had a house in the country and a little place in France and knew a lot about wine and which was the right club in London in which to be seen. He asked how Richard was and what my plans were and I told him I had rented a cottage in Dorset and planned to spend the next six months writing non-stop, a script about a coast-watcher in World War II, that I’d spent the last month doing research and had found an old man in Dorset who had been a coast-watcher and it would be one of those movies steeped in the war, sex, intrigue, a sure-fire winner, and as I talked I knew that I was making it all up as I went along, that I had no old coast-watcher and I didn’t have a script like that in mind, but it began to actually sound good, and I realized that I was making the same kind of pitch I’d made countless times to a bunch of Hollywood film people, trying, as I watched their faces begin to reflect thoughts of lunch or tennis, to pull them back, inventing absurd scenarios, trying to get them to think about me and my brilliance rather than drift off to thoughts of spending the afternoon in the beach house at Malibu banging the mistress.

  There was, of course, no point in making a pitch to Nigel. He was merely a friend of Richard who might, if I needed help, put me in touch with someone. He was Richard’s friend, not mine, and he wished me luck and told me to keep in touch with him, my, Dorset was a good place to go if you didn’t want to be disturbed, sort of like dropping back into the 19th century if you asked him.

  He looked at his watch, asked if there was anything else he could do and I thought briefly about saying fuck you, Nigel, but didn’t because his disinterest was natural. I was the client of a friend, we had met once, and then he said, “Be sure to let me see a treatment of your coast-watcher script,” and I knew that was a perfunctory offer, merely being polite, and I could hear Richard’s voice in the background reminding me that I was stepping off into the abyss. I had a moment of panic, knowing that Nigel couldn’t care less about my fictional coast-watcher, and knowing that I didn’t have a story, only the feeling that my brain was empty. I remembered reading somewhere that Fitzgerald thought he had used up everything. That the writing was gone and he was just like everyone else. Still, I had my cottage in Dorset reserved, and I would make a fresh start on something new. I felt as if I had wiped the slate clean and all that remained was for me to make the first new marks on it. I wanted desperately for things to change.

  Downstairs, just outside the building I was accosted by a panhandler and I dropped all of my American change in his outstretched cap. Try spending that, I thought.

  4.

  It was gray again when I found the car hire agency, a tiny office in the corner of a garage at the end of the Northern Line, and it took less than half an hour to get on the road. The kid who gave me the keys assured me that I could be in Dorset well before dark, take the M25 to the M3, get off at the A303, go to Dorchester, ask somebody there for directions. Otherwise, “you’ll get lost in the fookin’ hedgerows,” he said.

  It was white-knuckle time until I got onto the M3, driving a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side; the empty seat to my left seemed insanely wrong and I had trouble judging where the other side of the car was. Once I nearly got wiped out at a roundabout by a truck, looked the wrong way again and it came out of nowhere, missed the car by inches. On the motorway it seemed like every driver was intent on winning the Grand Prix at Brand’s Hatch, ripping along through a fine rain, and I tried to maintain a steady 60 mph, a slow crawl for most English except for the occasional Morris Minor with some old couple. By the time I realized I was hungry it was two o’clock and I was down in the countryside, the fields green, the sky still heavy. I turned off on the A303, a two-lane road where heavy trucks, no, they were lorries now, filled three quarters of the road and I stopped at a lay-by where a van was parked with a big sign that announced tea and sandwiches. The sandwich was not much more than two slices of white bread with some sort of ground meat paste smeared over it and the tea was a paper mug that seemed to be mostly milk but it was hot and the man who sold it gave me directions to Dorchester. I showed him my map to White Church Farm and he said yes, he’d been down along the coast, not hard to find, head for Lyme Regis, lots of signposting, not to worry.

  It was late afternoon, the rain gone but the sky still heavy and darkening, when I found White Church Farm down a muddy track with the sea just beyond. Mr. Orchard, the farmer, came out of the low stone farmhouse, wearing a pair of muddy Wellington boots and a yellow rain parka.

  “This way,” he said. “Park the car up here. You’ll never get it back up the track if you go down to the cottage with it. Never seen so much bloody rain, coming down stair rods all afternoon, pissing down, but maybe we’ll have another summer. We had summer last weekend, you know,” and he grinned, as if it were a huge joke.

  I carried my duffel down the muddy lane that descended into the trees beyond the farmyard. The cottage was a low stone building, slate roofed, and he had to kick the door several times to dislodge it. “Rain swells everything,” he said. “Get a sunny day, it works like a charm.” But his accent, something I would learn later was Broad Dorset, made it sound like “Roinswellseverting. Gor asunnydai it works loik a germ.”

  There was a single bulb hanging from a cord and he screwed in the bulb, lighting up the room. A bed was against one wall, a small table under the window next to the door, a chair, a small sink against the wall and a gray-painted armoire. There was a shelf along a wall with what looked like a hot plate, and a door that he opened to reveal a toilet in what was apparently a lean-to added to the cottage. He seemed quite proud of the toilet. “En suite,” he said, “just like the advert says.”

  “Well,” he added as he stood at the door looking out toward the sea barely visible through the trees. “I reckon you be anxious to get settled in. We be having our tea about naow. Like the advert says, there’s breakfast at the house. We be having it about seven but if you be the kind what lies in, the wife will be happy to fix something up to eight. After that we be working and she be in an out.” And he was gone, trudging up the muddy path with a rolling gait, a yellow beach ball in green rubber boots, and I was left to sort out my new digs.

  They were as bad as they looked. The bed was damp, the only sign of heat was a tiny fireplace with a bucket of coal next to it. It took me a half an hour to get crumpled newspaper to catch the coal on fire and finally I had a fire going but it made the room smell like fuel oil and I opened the window for fresh air, defeating the whole purpose. There was a lamp on the little table, and I set up my laptop, looking for some place to plug it in, connected my little transformer, and when that was done I felt better. I was armed, ready to do battle with words again, and I put on my coat, changed into some old tennis shoes and went out into the gathering dusk. I had a good feeling that something would happen here. I was as far from Los Angeles and failure as I could be. I would break the pattern in this grotty stone hut, write something that was fucking brilliant although I hadn’t a clue what that would be. A dog came wagging up alongside me, one of those blue and white and black sheepdogs with the puzzling eyes
that look cloudy and strange, and it kept at my heel while I walked toward the sea, through an iron stile next to a gate, across a close-cropped field that slanted into the open. Pieces of yellow and gold sliced the clouds at the horizon and I wondered if it would be possible to find someone who had been a coast-watcher during the war, find a story here like the one I had invented for Nigel.

  5.

  The next morning I ate breakfast with the Orchards. She was a sunny woman, built like her husband, two fireplugs who chattered in a language that sounded vaguely like English while I wolfed down eggs and bacon and toast and jellies and tea in a big mug. I went back to the cottage to work but ended up taking a long walk toward the sea. It turned out to be too far off to get to, and I came back to the farmyard and drove until I found Lyme Regis on the coast where I looked for a store to buy food. I would have to do lunches and dinners on my own and I needed canned things I could open and heat on the hot plate. Mrs. Orchard had offered room in her refrigerator but I sensed that I was expected to keep to the cottage.

  I wandered around Lyme Regis, went out onto the quay where they had filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman and scenes from the Jane Austen series my wife had watched on TV, and I half expected people in costume to pop up but it was midweek and quiet and I was back at the farmyard by midafternoon. “Gor-blimey, you’re gonna write the fookin’ thing, you daft bugger,” I said to the dog who greeted me as I parked the car. The dog cocked his head. Obviously I needed practice.

  But by the end of the week I had written almost nothing and had grown tired of crushing cockroaches as big as mice, mice the size of rats, and everything I owned seemed soft with dampness. I was certain the laptop would seize up at any moment. When Friday came I told Mr. Orchard my plans had changed and I wouldn’t be staying on for the month as I had planned, there was an emergency and I had to go back to the States. Fortunately the deposit covered the first week and I knew he expected something more than just a goodbye but I wasn’t about to spend any more and Saturday morning I was back on the road, no destination, just driving the maze of “fookin’ hedgerows” as the kid in London had said.

  He was right about how easy it was to get lost. I went from village to village, finding a corner where a signpost showed arrows to half a dozen villages, and perhaps Dorchester further on, and when I got to the next intertwining of roads it seemed like the same signposts were there, different village names, Tolpuddle, Stourpaine, Hazelbury Bryan, Shillingstone, Maiden Castle, they all had the ring of some other time. Each was tiny, a church, a pub, a few stone houses, no more than wide places in the road. The roads were narrow, hedges rose on both sides and only occasionally was there a break where I could see into fields that were a rich green, clouds piled up along the horizon, the sun coming and going.

  At noon I stopped in Mappowder at the Flying Monk, where I found four men in a room with a ceiling so low that the tallest one continually stooped when he stood up. I ordered a beer and was asked by the girl behind the bar, which one?

  “What should I have,” I said to the man next to me. He turned and said, “You a Yank, are ye?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so. You sound like it. I’ve had American beer. I’d drink horse piss before I’d have any again.”

  “Which one of these are you drinking?” I gestured toward the handles in front of the girl.

  “Badger’s not bad. Depends on your taste, don’t it?”

  I learned in the next half hour that Badger beer was made in a town not far away, that I should have the ploughman’s lunch, a chunk of rich cheddar cheese and a generous piece of warm crusty bread, several silvery pickled onions and something that looked like relish and was sweet. My neighbor told me it was pickle, and when I said in America a pickle was a cucumber soaked in brine he put his hand to his crotch and made like he was jacking off and said, oh, that kind of pickle, yes, that was a pickle here, too, but this was Branston pickle. We had several more beers. His name was Will, the other three were his two brothers and a cousin and they didn’t say much, just nodded their heads while Will talked non-stop about John Wayne movies and did I know the Terminator and he’d like to get a leg over Sharon Stone if you know what I mean. I ate my ploughman’s and another pint came.

  “Can’t eat without sommet to wash it down,” Will said, and I bought the four of them another beer and realized I had gone through twenty pounds.

  “Time we was back at work, Mary,” Will said, draining his glass. He heaved himself off the stool, wished me luck, and his three silent partners followed him to the door. I was alone with Mary, the girl behind the bar.

  It was nearly two o’clock and I didn’t feel like driving the narrow roads. What I wanted to do was take a nap.

  “Do you rent rooms?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “There’s just us what lives here. You can find some that do, though. Through the village and take the road to Cerne Abbas you’ll find a farmhouse, Sheepheaven Farm. Robbie Barlow and his wife does bed-and-breakfast.”

  Sheepheaven Farm turned out to be a square box of a house set on the road with a farmyard beyond it, some outbuildings, a battered old Land Rover and a small sign on the corner of the house that had only the letters B&B, so small it would have been easy to miss. I had the feeling I had passed it earlier.

  There seemed to be no sign of life when I pulled into the farmyard and I went to the concrete stoop on the side of the house and knocked at the door. A dog came around the corner of the house barking, and the door opened revealing a man in his early forties who was my height, slender, with a close-cropped black beard and deep-set eyes that seemed almost black.

  “Shut up, Jack,” he said, startling me until I realized that Jack might also be the dog’s name. He gave a shrill whistle and the dog turned and trotted off.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “Jack thinks he owns the farm and there’s times when I wish he did. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to rent a room for the night,” I said.

  “We do that.” He paused. “You’re American?” Apparently my accent gave me away immediately.

  “Yes.”

  “On holiday?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I had lunch in the village and I’m afraid I had a few more beers than I should and what I’d really like is a place to lie down.” The beer, obviously stronger than any I was used to, had kicked in, and I knew I was in trouble.

  He grinned. “And I bet I could tell you which buggers you were drinking with, too. Fifteen pounds cash and you get a clean bed and a good breakfast and for another fiver you can have dinner with us or you can go back to the pub and get pissed all over again. Maggie!” he called out. “We’ve got ourselves a weary traveler who needs ministering to.”

  A tall woman with long auburn hair came into the room and that was when I first met Robbie’s wife.

  6.

  No, I didn’t fall in love with Maggie the moment I set eyes on her. All I wanted at that moment was to lie down, there was a buzzing in the middle of my forehead where somebody was boring a hole and I wasn’t sure that the ploughman’s lunch was going to stay where I had parked it. Christ, I thought, did they make that beer out of badger carcasses? Robbie took the keys to the car, went out and got my duffel and took it up the stairs. Maggie said what I needed was to sit in a hot bath for a long time, all I had to do was get my clothes off and she’d draw the bath. It was down the hall and I sat on the bed wondering how to get my trousers off when she came back and said that the tub was ready, here were some towels, take my time. Did I want to have dinner with them?

  “I’m not sure,” I mumbled. “Food isn’t at the top of my list right now.” She laughed and said that was all right, she’d pop in on me later.

  I stripped off, wrapped a towel around my waist and found the bathroom. She was right, the hot tub did feel good and I lay in it until the water was cold, the buzzing went away and I felt a lassitude that became a dozing half-awake state until a knocking on the door startled m
e.

  “You all right in there?” came Robbie’s voice. “Not drowned or dead or anything.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m coming out.”

  Robbie opened the door a crack.

  “My guess is,” he said, “that it was the Stryker brothers you tried to keep up with and then they went off to shovel shit at their uncle’s farm and they’ll be back on those same stools tonight and they’ll close the place up and the four of them will line up and piss on the wall along the road and be up tomorrow morning at first light to muck out the barn. Amazing fucking capacity. Anyway, you stepped into the minefield and it looks like you survived. We have a couple of hours before tea. You can settle up with me then. I’ve got work to do.”

  He was gone and I went back to the room and fell asleep. I awoke in the late afternoon to a dull headache, dressed and went downstairs where I found a boy of about ten in the kitchen working laboriously over a school copybook.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Jack Stone. I’ve rented one of your rooms for the evening.”

  “I’m Terry Barlow,” he said. “My mother will be right back.” He bent again to his book.

  She came into the kitchen and I was struck by the way she walked. She was barefoot and she rose on her toes with each step, as if she were about to float. Later I would learn that she had been a dancer, that she was always barefoot in the house.

  “Well,” she said, “the wounded warrior arises.” Her voice was bright, lilting, and she grinned. She wore a long tattered skirt and a thick blue sweater and her long hair was done up at the nape of her neck with a thick rubber band. “You’ll be wanting a cup of tea.” She filled the electric kettle and turned it on.