Hunger

On the second afternoon, after they had unpacked the last of the boxes, Adrian said they should go out for a walk. That, he said, was the whole point of moving here, to go out for walks.

‘Nature,’ he said. ‘You don’t just look at it, do you?’

For the time being she would have been happy to do that. She was bone-tired. Even her brain was tired. Filling the packing cases, cleaning the old flat for the people who were coming in, because that, apparently, was something else you did; travelling down, cleaning the cottage, because the people leaving had not done it for them; unpacking the boxes, putting things away. A hot poker bored into her lower back every time she moved. She had period pain. Her arms ached.

What she wanted to do was indeed to ‘just look at it’. To lie down and look at the dense, green leaves that blotted out the mould-coloured sky. The faint line of blue hills in the far distance. The jungle of garden.

‘We can get our bearings later,’ Adrian said.

Bearings.

She went in search of some painkillers. The bathroom had a sloping roof with a small square of window that let in more greenish, undersea light. The trees pressed in on them, but she supposed that in winter the light would be clear and they would see across fields to the blue hills.

‘Paula?’

He bounded up the stairs.

‘Come on. What are you doing?’

‘Looking for the Nurofen.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

She waved a hand vaguely.

‘Headache?’

‘Back. Arms. You know.’

‘You don’t need painkillers. You need a walk. Fresh air. Come on.’

She went, not being able to find the Nurofen. Maybe they were in her handbag. Maybe they were slipped in with the bed linen. Or the DVDs.

‘Come on!’

The wooden gate felt greasy after the night’s rain and the long grass trailed cold against her legs.

Adrian stood in the middle of the track and slowly stretched his arms above his head. Closed his eyes. Took a deep breath, expanding his rib cage. Released it slowly.

You look so stupid, she wanted to say. But just walked on past him.

‘AAAHHHH!’ he went again.

The cottage was at the end of the track that opened into a wider lane. There was no other house until you reached a small green at the top.

‘Do you think we’ll be snowed in?’

Adrian leaped and jumped until he reached her. His mouth was half-open, the huge white teeth grinning.

‘Hope so.’

‘What?’

He put his arm round her shoulders and pulled her in to him for a second.

‘Well, it would be fun and it’s all part of living in the country.’

‘It snows in the town.’

‘Different.’

‘How?’

‘Oh, you know – town snow melts to slush. It looks dirty.’

‘Doesn’t country snow?’

‘Not in the same way.’

Paula thought it probably did, but said nothing.

He pulled her along.

Past the houses, another lane led steeply downhill. Unsuitable for Motors.

It narrowed. Trees on either side, and more trees below. The air mushroomy.

Adrian turned to face her. His forehead was damp.

‘You’re going to love it. You could come down here every day.’

She tried to imagine that.

‘Before you start work.’

‘I start work at half past eight.’

‘But I’ll be gone by seven, and people get up early in the country.’

‘What people?’

‘Oh, everybody.’

But she liked it. Liked the great smooth tree trunks and the closeness of the air. She looked up. The sky seemed far away.

They dropped down the steep slope, clutching onto one another and suddenly Paula had a leap of the heart, as if this were some sort of mad, secret impulse, rather than a long-planned and several times almost-capsized move from suburban street to isolated village. But it had not capsized. The cottage had not been bought by someone else. They had packed up their lives and despatched them two hundred miles in a van, which had had to make three stabs at reversing down the track to their gate.

They were here, then. She slithered a couple of yards down to the point where the hard surface turned to mud.

‘What’s that?’

Adrian stood sideways, head cocked.

‘Sounds like singing.’

‘Not singing.’

It was quiet again, apart from the occasional shushing of the leaves.

‘There.’

‘Sounds like chanting.’

Paula hesitated.

‘What?’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t… disturb them.’

‘Disturb who?’

He went crashing on through the undergrowth. The noise stopped.

Eventually, she followed him.

There was a clearing. The ground was level, covered in leaf mould and twigs. Paula smelled burning wood.

They were a few yards away: four children, nine or ten years old down. Two girls, two boys. They were crouching or kneeling, and bending forwards to look into something from which a thin spiral of smoke was coiling.

‘What are they doing?’ She did not know why she whispered.

‘Whatever it is they shouldn’t be lighting fires in a wood,’ Adrian said. But he was whispering, too.

‘What have they got?’

They went forward a pace.

The children had started to half-sing, half-chant softly again. They had an old enamel bowl and a stick each; the bowl was balanced on a nest of twigs, which was alight and smoking feebly. Each child took a turn at stirring whatever was in the bowl, while the others watched; then another took over, on and on, stir and stir.

Paula smiled.

‘Damn silly,’ Adrian said.

‘It’s hardly alight. The sticks will be quite damp. They’re OK.’

Eventually, two of the children lifted the bowl and the oldest child banged on the sticks to extinguish the smouldering. They had a bucket and they poured a greenish liquid into it from the bowl. The two smaller children had lost interest and wandered away.

‘Great,’ Adrian turned to her, eyes bright. ‘Isn’t it? Great.’

‘But you said – ’

‘No, no. It wasn’t dangerous. There was hardly a spark. No, I meant it’s great for kids, playing out in the wild like this, making up their own games.’

‘Boy Scouts?’

‘No, not Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts are organised – by adults. This is all the kids themselves. I think it’s great. It’s what they should be doing. It’s why we’ve come here, Paula.’

‘We’re not kids.’

But she could see he was impatient.

The children had trailed away, two trying to carry the bucket between them.

Adrian stretched, arms high, fingertips splayed out.

‘Don’t you think that’s what they ought to be doing? No dangerous roads, no mindless computer games, out in the fresh air.’

‘I was wondering why they aren’t at school.’

Adrian was keen on proper schooling.

‘When we have our own…’

But they did not have their own.

‘It’ll be some holiday or other. Country holidays, you know. May Days and so forth.’

‘It’s the end of June.’

He turned. ‘Why do you always have to pick me up when I say anything? Why do you have to pour cold water? You agreed we should move to the country. You wanted to move here.’

Which was true.

They hauled themselves back up the muddy path.

She needed to think about it. Yes, she had agreed. Was that the same as wanting to? She wasn’t sure. She agreed to a lot of things.

She thought of lying in bed, looking at the green leaves. Grey sky. Listening to the silence.

‘You’re not the one having to get a train at seven every morning, commute for over an hour, walk at both ends, rain or shine, leave in the dark, get home in the dark.’

‘Well, in winter.’

‘You’re not the one.’

Was she the one who had wanted to move to the country? After a time they both had, but she couldn’t remember where it had begun.

You are not the one left alone here in a cottage at the end of a lane in a hamlet without anything, without a shop, a pub, a school, a bus, a…

Not that she needed the pub, school or bus.

Knowing nobody.

‘You’ve always said you prefer your own company.’

Had she?

‘Those kids,’ he said, taking her hand and swinging it as they went back past the row of cottages.

‘I mean, it’s a paradise, isn’t it? Running loose, perfectly safe.’

‘How do you know they’re perfectly safe?’

He swung her hand up and kissed it. Smack. His lips were damp.

‘You’re not worried about the mad axeman?’

‘No. I just wonder how you know it’s perfectly safe. I mean, why the country would be safer than the town. The city.’

Adrian gave his hyena laugh.

‘Traffic. Road rage. Paedophiles. Knife crime. Oh yes, indeed, urban life is very safe.’

‘I didn’t–’

‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’

The Nurofen had begun to wear off. Someone was dragging her insides down at the front and boring the hot poker into her back. The headache was gone, though.

‘What do you think they were doing? Cooking something?’

Stone Soup, she remembered.

‘Making witches’ potions.’ Adrian put on a spooky voice. ‘Stirring the cauldron. Eye of newt and all that. I think it’s great. Really great. All that space. No one telling you what to do. No Nintendo.’

‘I don’t think children play Nintendo now, do they? Isn’t it something else?’

Adrian slammed the gate.

‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Why do always have to correct me? Why do you have to be right?’

‘I wasn’t…’

But he had gone thundering up the uncarpeted stairs and crashing into the bathroom.

He had two more days off, during which they sorted out the furniture, the curtains, the kitchen, the linen, the lamps, the books, and Paula forgot what it was like not to ache, not to feel so tired she longed to lie on the floor and sleep without undressing. It rained. Adrian sang and whistled. The electricity failed. The oil delivery came. And every morning and afternoon he made her go out for a walk, to explore, even in the rain, because, he went on saying, that was why they had come here.

‘Fresh air. The natural world. Space. Exercise.’

And she had agreed. When they had still been living in Salisbury Road she had agreed, had longed for all of this, the greenness, the space, the silence. She did not blame him at all.

When he went back to work, she would start organising her workroom, an old lean-to conservatory at the back, with a couple of broken panes and rotting wood in the door. But hers. It had a floor of old, uneven bricks and a tortoise stove. She could see the shadows of the blue hills and the sky was soft with cloud, right above her head.

On the second morning she went for a walk alone, ambling along the track and across the field without any sense of direction or purpose. Adrian always had a purpose – to the east, to the west, to the woods, to the fields, to see a view, to reach the end of somewhere. Not having one made her feel peaceful.

On the far side of the field, beside a high hedge, she could see them again: a little cluster of children close together, arms stretched up, then backs bent, arms up and bent. Paula zigzagged quietly towards them.

They were picking unripe berries, green and small, and dropping them into a plastic tub.

‘You do know you can’t eat those?’

Two of the children turned and stared at her, but did not smile or speak.

‘Leave them till autumn. They’re OK when they’re ripe.’

One of the boys stripped a handful of the green berries and ate them, looking her straight in the eye.

‘You’ll get tummy ache.’

But after a moment, during which they merely stared at her in silence and unsmiling, she turned away.

‘Wonderful,’ Adrian would have said, ‘foraging for their own treats, not buying all that sugary junk from a shop. That’s how it should be.’

Paula wondered again why they were not in school.

She began to notice the birds that came into the garden. While she was at her drawing board or painting at her table she kept looking up and spotting a blackbird under the bushes, a thrush on the fence, a long-tailed tit, a great tit, chaffinches. Once or twice a woodpecker swooped in, flashing scarlet and white. They did not fly up in panic. She put breadcrumbs on the step and they were gone within the hour.

At the weekend they drove to the nearest market town for groceries and she bought a bag of bird nuts and a plastic feeder. An extra loaf.

‘How is it,’ she asked Adrian, ‘on the train?’

‘Well, it’s a train. I go on it.’

‘I mean… how are you finding it? The commute? Do you enjoy it?’

‘Does anyone?’

He went to bed just after nine thirty and was often curt with her. But when they went out for a walk in the sunshine on Saturday he said, ‘This is what it’s all about, you know. This is it.’

‘What?’

‘Life,’ he said, raising his voice slightly. ‘This is what life is all about.’

And gradually Paula found that it was. The first surprise was how much she loved being alone for twelve hours a day; how much she resented the people pressing in on her when she went to the supermarket or into town. She moved slightly away to avoid being touched, sat in the café drinking her coffee alone, watching them and feeling as if she belonged to some other species than theirs. She did not feel hostile, just detached. Different. She lived in an invisible shell.

The cottage was quiet, apart from wind in the leaves. Rain on the leaves. Rain on the glass roof of the lean-to. A distant tractor in the fields. The postman’s van. Birdsong.

The days slid into one another and in the afternoons she sometimes felt a mist of tiredness settle on her like a cobweb, and she would sleep, on the couch or the bed, or, now that the days were warmer, on the grass. She woke gently, to lie still, not thinking, listening, watching the shadow of the leaves moving across the bedroom ceiling or the sun’s brightness on a sheet of white paper.

It was on one of the fine, warm afternoons, when she had been sleeping on the grass, that she woke more suddenly than usual, because of a different sound: a shuffle and then a half-stifled murmur. She opened her eyes and saw the children. There were only two of them this time, the tallest and the smallest. The girl was standing under the hanging bird feeder, extracting peanuts one by one and handing them down to the small boy, who put them quickly into his pocket. In between hiding them, both children were eating nuts as well. Occasionally, the girl glanced round quickly, but her hands were deft and swift and as Paula watched the nuts in the feeder went down, until it was empty.

She was going to jump up and challenge them, partly annoyed about the theft, but also with concern. Weren’t peanuts meant for birds ‘unfit for human consumption’? But almost as the thought came into her mind the children were gone, vanishing like shadows when the sun goes in, soft and swift of foot, down the path and out not through the gate but through a neat gap they had made in the hedge. The shrubby branches closed behind them and the garden was empty.

The next thought in her mind seemed urgent. She would not tell Adrian. Must not tell Adrian. Why was that so important?

She got up and re-filled the nut feeder and for the rest of the day was alert for the slightest sound or sight of the children. But they did not come back.

Not that day. Not the next, and then it was the weekend and they went for more energetic walks and still she did not tell him. When they were not walking or grocery shopping, Adrian slept. Paula had started to tackle the jungle that was the garden, slashing back, raking out, digging up, while he slept on. She did not mind. She liked her own company after all.

The fine weather settled in.

‘My mother wants to come,’ Adrian said.

‘She wouldn’t like it here. Yvonne likes the town. Shops. Stuff like that.’

‘Stuff like that.’

‘I just meant – what would she do all day? I’ve only done half these illustrations. I can’t leave it.’

‘She’ll come on Tuesday. You can go out with her in the afternoons, can’t you? You don’t work all day, do you?’

‘Well… most of it.’

She had not told him about the sleeping.

‘There you are, then. And take her for some walks. Do you both good.’

‘Be part of the natural world.’

‘Exactly! You see?’

His face was an open beam of satisfaction. He had taught her something. He liked to teach people.

‘Tuesday, but she wouldn’t get here till lunchtime. Give you a morning for work, won’t it?’

She was not taking Yvonne to the supermarket. ‘You need this. You don’t tell me you manage without that? You don’t tell me you have never bought…? …No, Paula, you shouldn’t ever buy that brand, they force-feed Third World babies with bottle milk… Put it back, pure waste of money, the own-brand is fine… But Adrian doesn’t like sausages…’

She went alone on the Monday morning. It was quiet. A few mothers with babies perched in the trolleys wheeled slowly round in pairs, chatting. Paula shopped without a list, without a system, enjoying the wander from aisle to aisle, looking at books and DVDs and make-up she would never buy, before homing in on all her usual stuff. She had coffee, filled up with petrol, bought a newspaper and chocolate from the kiosk. Sang on the way home.

Yvonne would be here tomorrow, but she had done the shopping without her.

Slowly the cottage had stopped being the cottage and become home. Things had found permanent resting places, the smell of mice had faded, the curtains hung straight. Adrian fell asleep during television programmes. She had begun to tame the garden. But whereas a house stayed as you left it, a garden ran away with you and after a week of hands burning from nettles and thumbs scratched with thorns, Paula lost heart and just mowed enough grass to sleep on. The rest ran riot.

‘That’s a mess,’ Adrian said. ‘When are you going to start on it?’

‘It’s nature.’

He turned away.

Five minutes later he was in bed, asleep.

There was a full moon. She sat out on the grass, looking at the pale, ghostly light on some white phlox which had appeared by the hedge. There was a night scene in the children’s book she was illustrating. She looked carefully at the white petals. Her bloodless white hand. The silver stones on the wall. Something barked. Something rustled low down among the bushes.

She felt happy.

‘I heard something,’ Yvonne said. She wore a black satin dressing gown with a scarlet dragon in raised embroidery on the back.

‘It’s always quiet here at night. Did you sleep well?’

‘Bit too quiet. You get used to traffic noise; I suppose it lulls you to sleep. But whatever it was woke me up and it was barely six o’clock.’

‘Adrian is up at twenty past.’

‘It wasn’t Adrian.’

‘What sort of noise?’

‘I wouldn’t have said it was a noise. A sound. More a sound.’

Paula set the coffee pot down on the kitchen table.

‘But you slept all right on the whole?’

Yvonne reached for the sugar. Her fingernails were painted navy blue, but the edges were chipped. Paula thought that if you wore nail varnish in startling colours you had to maintain them.

‘Adrian looks very washed out.’

‘It’s a long commute.’

‘Up so early, home so late. I don’t understand it.’

‘He loves being in the country.’

Yvonne gave her an unpleasant look.

‘We’ll go for a walk later. I have to finish something off that I left to dry last night.’

‘Oh don’t pay any attention to me. I can amuse myself.’

‘No, but we will. Go for a walk I mean.’

Paula noticed at once, as soon as she walked into the workroom. The drawing board had been moved, only slightly, but she would have noticed even a centimetre. And the side window was slightly ajar.

It was not until later that she noticed that the chocolate had gone. She had eaten two squares and folded the paper over the open end of the bar. It had been on the table, to the right of her pencil pot.

Yvonne wandered in.

‘Oh heavens, sorry, sorry. I always forget that you don’t.’

She dropped the cigarette on the brick floor, crushed it to and fro under her heel and left it there.

Paula said nothing. Adrian would, when he came home and smelled smoke in the house. She would leave it to Adrian. She was his mother.

‘Shall we go out, then?’

Yvonne lit a fresh cigarette the moment the front door closed behind them. Paula said nothing, only picked up the spent match from the path where her mother-in-law had thrown it.

‘We generally go this way – past the houses and down into the wood. Well, not much of a wood but, you know… I love trees.’

It was warm, slightly damp. Misty.

‘I’d go mad,’ Yvonne said. ‘Never seeing anybody.’

‘I like it. I like my own company.’

Yvonne looked at her sideways.

‘What do you do at the weekends, when Adrian’s home?’

‘Go for walks. You know.’

‘What will it be like for him in winter? Out of the house in the dark, home in the dark. Not much fun, you know.’

‘Moving here was his idea,’ Paula said.

Yvonne grabbed her arm as the track sloped down between the trees.

‘Where does this lead?’

‘We come out at the bottom into a clearing, then cross the field.’

‘With animals?’

‘With…’

Rabbits, badgers, foxes flitted through her mind.

‘Cows? Bulls?’

‘Oh no. It’s perfectly safe’

Yvonne stopped to light another cigarette.

‘I’m not much of a one for fields. Shall we go back?’

She walked quite smartly once they were on the level again, so that she reached the cottage gate first, just as all four of the children were sneaking round from the back. The eldest, in front, had her hands full of something; the boy behind was cramming a handful of cornflakes into his mouth from the open box he carried. The small ones came up behind. One held a packet of biscuits.

‘Oh my God!’

Paula pushed past Yvonne and put out her arm to catch hold of the girl at the front.

‘It was you,’ she said, without any anger. ‘You came and took the chocolate.’

The eyes were wary and also defiant.

‘Who on earth are these children? Do you know them, Paula? Where are they from? What are they doing coming out of your house? Why aren’t they in school? Have you been stealing? Why aren’t you at school?’ Yvonne spoke loudly, as if the children were deaf. ‘I’m going to call the police.’

‘No.’

‘They’ve been in your house. They’ve been stealing, it’s perfectly clear. Don’t just let it go, Paula. You turn a blind eye and they’ll be back.’

‘Will you please leave me to deal with this, Yvonne? Go into the house.’

The children were now pressed together as a single unit, like small animals. Their hair was matted, their faces dirty.

‘What were you doing?’ Paula said. ‘You took the chocolate, you ate the peanuts from the bird feeder, now you’ve been in and… ,’ she gestured at the food. ‘Where do you come from?’

They were mute, staring and still.

‘You shouldn’t just walk into people’s houses. You know that, don’t you?’

The small boy clutched the biscuits to his chest.

‘Those will break,’ Paula said. ‘If you hug them.’

The mist had thickened to a drizzle, muffling the air.

No word was spoken and she did not see any signal pass between them. One minute they were standing together in their hostile silence, the next they were running, down the path and through the open gate, making almost no sound, flashing away like birds between the high hedges. A few cornflakes drifted down in their wake and settled on the ground.

‘They’ll be back, you know.’ Yvonne said. ‘You should call the police.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so. Would you like some coffee?’

‘Is it real or instant?’

‘I don’t buy instant. The police are miles away…’

‘It’s that sort of inertia they rely on. Nobody being bothered to report them.’

‘Yvonne, they’re children – young children. The last thing they need is the police involved in their lives from the very start.’

The glass of the cafetiere cracked as she banged it down. Yvonne firmed her lips together.

Adrian did not get home until after nine that night. The train line was unreliable; they had been held up by another signalling failure. There were bruise-coloured smears beneath his eyes.

‘Signalling failure. Engine failure. Driver failure – failure to turn up.’

He fell onto the sofa so hard the springs bounced.

‘We had a burglary,’ Yvonne said.

Adrian sat up.

Paula wanted to slap her. ‘Well, hardly.’

‘What else do you call it? They were stealing. They came into this house while we were out and stole things. I call that a burglary.’

‘They only took food.’

‘Oh, so taking food isn’t burglary?’

‘They’re children. They are less than ten years old.’

‘A child can be held morally responsible from the age of seven.’

Her voice was oily with satisfaction.

‘You mean you caught them at it?’

‘Only I wasn’t allowed to phone the police.’

Adrian lay back again and closed his eyes.

‘Paula?’ He sounded infinitely weary.

‘They’re children. You saw them in the wood that day. You know the ones. You said it was wonderful.’

‘What was wonderful?’

‘That they could be roaming about freely, enjoying nature.’

‘Roaming about freely thieving from other people,’ Yvonne said. ‘Where do they live, these children? You’ll need to tell their parents.’

‘We’ll see.’

Paula took the empty mugs into the kitchen, dumped them in the sink and went outside. It had rained again. The air smelled of wet leaves, wet grass, damp earth. A blackbird sang.

She went to the bottom of the garden and stood very still, wondering what she ought to do about the children. Not the police, of course, and she had no idea where they came from. She could follow them, the next time, but they appeared and disappeared like wraiths.

She had no thought of accosting their parents, but she wanted to know what their home was like and why they did what they did. Why they were not at school.

A light went on in the front bedroom, but she knew Yvonne would still be downstairs, waiting. When she had married Adrian her sister Elaine had said, ‘You do know it’s normal for mothers of only sons to hate the women they marry, don’t you? She’ll give you grief.’

Elaine’s own marriage had lasted barely two years, but as Ted’s mother was dead before they met, Paula had not understood how Elaine knew all the things about which she preached with such apparent authority. She had not thought a great deal about Yvonne in advance, but then she sometimes thought that she had not thought a great deal about Adrian, either. He had pursued her – wooed her, Elaine said sarcastically – with such ferocity and determination, such eagerness and puppy-like ardour that she had been unable to put up any resistance, unable to see him clearly, unable to imagine what their future might be like. It had been easy to let herself be swept along. She was by nature quite lazy and a sort of inertia had stifled her, blurring her usually sharp critical sense. She had been very fond of Adrian. Who could not be? He hadn’t a bone of malice in his body, never complained, always enthused, was optimistic to a fault, all of which was refreshing to someone who was inclined to occasional melancholy. Yvonne had existed, vaguely, but lived miles away from them. That her doing so meant she would come to stay for a week or more at a time was another thing Paula had not bargained for.

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.’

‘Yes, well they’re not.’

‘They ate what I gave them.’

‘’Course they did, they’re kids – what do you expect?’

‘They were eating the bird nuts.’

The woman laughed. It was hard to tell her age.

‘And berries.’

‘How long you lived round here? They’ll eat anything. Why not?’

‘The berries weren’t ripe and the bird nuts – they’re not really for humans to eat.’

The woman laughed again and hauled herself out of the chair.

‘Just leave them be.’

‘Shouldn’t your children be at school?’

But she was climbing the steps back into the caravan.

‘You sod off,’ she said without looking round.

Paula glimpsed the children behind her. The van was in full sun and she imagined them inside the hot space, crowded together, fractious, tempers short. She wondered if they were beaten. The thought was upsetting, but there was nothing she could do. Eventually she had to retreat.

‘What did I tell you?’

The heat was making Adrian bad tempered at the end of every day.

‘You’ve brought it on yourself. Of course they’re not hungry. They get every benefit going. They’re taking you for a mug.’

He went out into the humid garden with a can of beer.

If they were not hungry would they be bothered to steal food? She looked at her painting of a badger disappearing down a hole.

Why would they?

They had wolfed down the toast as if they hadn’t eaten for days. Was that what children normally did? She doubted it.

Adrian had taken off his shirt and shoes, and was lying on the grass with the beer can held to his chest.

‘Like a cattle truck,’ he said, ‘going and coming back. Worse coming back. You don’t know what heat’s like until you’ve been on that six thirty train.’

They were not eating till late on these nights and Adrian went up to bed immediately afterwards. The food lay heavy on his stomach, making him snore. Paula had taken to sleeping on a rug in the garden. Only a brief dawn chill and the dew sent her inside, an hour before his alarm went off.

She lay thinking of the girl, cramming hot toast into her mouth.

No one would eat like that if they weren’t ravenous. No child would munch bird nuts and steal half-boxes of cornflakes.

The alarm sounded.

Adrian groaned and pushed back the single sheet.

Paula woke to the sound of his raised voice coming from outside.

‘I’ll take my belt to you, do you hear me? And I’m sending for the police. We’re sick of you. Now bugger off!’

Paula raced downstairs.

‘Little sods. Opened the door and they were in here, in this kitchen. Helping themselves to that.’

The half-eaten custard tart had been under cling film.

‘You encouraged them. You started this.’

She did not go out shopping until late afternoon, when the sky had turned inky and the air was so moist she felt as if she were trying to breathe underwater. The storm broke as she was checking out, crashing directly overhead. She went to the café and sat watching the car park flood and felt as if she were waiting for something, suspended between two places, two worlds.

‘It’s unreal,’ a woman at the next table said.

Adrian sent a text to say his train was delayed: ‘f…ing line flooded’. She had another coffee.

When she got back, the lane was awash with earth and branches and stones. The front path was a stream.

But it was not the storm that had broken open the door and smashed a couple of panes in the lean-to; not the storm that had smeared her paints all over her half-finished work; not the storm that had thrown china onto the kitchen floor, deposited excrement on the worktop and left puddles of urine on the floor.

Paula sat down, shaking.

Thunder grumbled in the distance and the sky was sulphurous.

When Adrian got in just after ten she was still sitting there in the half-dark.

‘Bugger’ he said, standing in the doorway, his hair plastered to his forehead. ‘Oh bugger.’

She expected him to blame her, but he did not. He said nothing at all, just dropped his jacket onto the chair and helped her clear up, unloaded the car and put the groceries away, taped a piece of plywood over the broken windows.

He ate some cold ham and tomatoes, with chunks of bread torn off the new loaf. Paula ate nothing.

‘It’s them, of course,’ he said through a mouthful of pink meat. ‘You do know it’s them? This can’t go on.’

‘It could have been anyone.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

Adrian put his plate in the sink.

‘You should eat,’ he said.

She opened the back door and stood on the step. The storm had retreated, the air cooled. Water was running down the lane and dripping off the trees. What had it been like in that caravan, parked in an open field? What if the roof leaked, the windows let in water? What if their beds were soaking wet? They had taken what food there had been in the kitchen, but that wasn’t much. What if…?

Her brain swirled. The clouds parted to show a clear patch of night sky.

She went inside.

‘I think this is it,’ Adrian said the next morning. He had called in sick. ‘After last night I do feel sick, in actual fact.’ He had brought tea and got back into bed. ‘I really think this is it.’

‘What is what?’

‘To begin with, I never realised what the commute would be like. Never imagined it. Which I really should have done. You should look at a thing from all sides.’

Paula sat up. Beyond the window the sky was pearl grey and the air coming through it was fresh.

‘And you’re lonely.’

She looked round at him. ‘I’m not lonely.’

‘Of course you are or you wouldn’t have had those kids round all the time.’

‘I didn’t…’

‘I don’t blame you, Paula. I understand, actually. It’s obvious you’ve been lonely and I should have seen it. I’ve been a bit selfish.’

Her mouth worked, but no words came out. She did not fully understand him.

‘We don’t have to go back to Salisbury Road. We could try a bit further in. There’s that nice new development at Ashtree.’

‘What are you talking about?’

But it was obvious. She looked at him and saw the light of determination in his eyes.

‘I’m happy here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to live on a new development.’

‘Of course you’re not happy.’

Paula repeated to herself what he had just said. How had she not understood before now? She had simply never realised.

‘And the commute is killing me. Oh, the weekends are great, going for our walks, being surrounded by…’ He waved his hand.

‘Nature.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But how much of it do I get to see otherwise? It’s OK for you.’

‘Yes,’ Paula said. ‘It is.’ Because it was and the walks had nothing to do with it.

‘I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out, but with these kids wrecking the place… We’ll have to be careful about that, by the way – not to mention it.’

‘I thought you were going to phone the police.’

‘Best left, I think. I mean, on reflection. No, I meant not mention it to prospective buyers.’

‘There won’t be any.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course there will. This is a dream cottage. That’s why we bought it. Our dream cottage.’

‘It’s still mine.’

‘You’ll be much better off at Ashtree. I’ll check out the website.’

‘No.’

‘They’re bound to have a website.’

‘I mean, no, don’t bother to check it out. Unless you want to go to Ashtree on your own. It would probably suit you.’

‘You ought to stay in bed today. You had a nasty experience. You’re not yourself.’

‘I am, actually. That is exactly what I am – myself. I’m staying here by myself. If I have to.’

‘You’re still in shock.’

‘No,’ Paula said.

Adrian moved out the following week.

‘It isn’t permanent, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s only until you come to your senses.’

He tried to put his arm round her, but she dodged it.

The night after he left she walked round the cottage, then round the garden, then up and down the lane, feeling as if she might take off and float. It was warm again but clear, the moon like a wire. Quiet. She made tea and sat on the grass, trying to remember when Adrian had started to talk about moving to the country, when she had started to take him seriously, when it had become her own want, stronger than his, but for different reasons. He had tried it on to see if it would fit, half-serious, then in panic when he found himself here. She had slipped into it as into the right skin.

The children had not been back. The damage and mess had been a gesture and once made, needn’t be repeated. It had almost certainly not been done by them anyway. They had gone home, crying, talking about policemen and the adults had taken matters into their own hands.

But now that Adrian had gone Paula felt she had permission to worry about them again. When she saw them she would say they could come whenever they liked.

She did not see them and after three days she walked up to the field, carrying a bag of crisps and some apples. If the woman was there, she would try and speak to her and explain. Apologise.

The field was empty. The grass where the caravan had been was pressed down and yellowed and there were muddy grooves, but otherwise no sign that it had been there at all. Paula scuffed the grass back into place here and there with the side of her shoe and for a moment felt as if the space that had contained them and the van in which they lived was still full of them. But it was not.

That night she boiled two eggs and set them on a plate with salad and bread and butter, but when she sat down at the table she felt nauseous and could not eat. In the morning she left her cereal untouched. Her throat constricted when she looked at it.

She drank, tea, coffee, water, ate a few squares of chocolate. Nothing else for days. The cottage was deathly quiet. She walked out sometimes, down the slope between the trees, and saw the ghosts of the children stirring the leaf soup, heard their footsteps on the path as they grabbed the bird nuts and pattered away, their pockets full. It rained, then it was hot again. She stopped working. Her paints dried up in their pots.

Adrian rang.

‘It’s a great house,’ he said. ‘Small, but it’s detached. You wouldn’t be bothered by the neighbours. It’s got a south-facing garden.’

‘Trees?’

‘Well, they’ve put some little ones in, attached to those wooden posts, you know. They’ll soon grow. Quite a few kids.’ He laughed. ‘Look properly fed, of course.’

‘Ah.’

‘How are the little Gypsies?’

‘Fine.’ Paula said. ‘They’re fine.’

‘They been round again?’

‘Oh yes. Certainly. I make them toast and cake. You know.’

‘Paula, I warned you.’

‘Yes. You did.’

‘I think I’ve been very patient.’

‘Yes,’ Paula said. ‘You have.’

‘So when are you moving over here? When are you coming to your senses?’

Paula looked out of the window. It was raining again, a soft veil of rain drifting across the grass.

‘Never,’ she said. ‘No. Probably never.’

It was joyous, dancing in the rain. No one saw her. When she was soaked through she went inside, smiling to herself and made toast. Four slices. Buttered them. Ate them, watching the rain mist the windows of the lean-to. The broken pane was still patched with the plywood Adrian had taped over it.

One day, she would get it properly fixed.