Green Grass by Raffaella Barker Page B

imperative that Laura should the one who walks behind, picking up the pieces, but it’s fine, she is good at it, and she has her own passions which can occasionally be indulged. Or she used to.
    Wondering if she can remember what she really enjoys, Laura stops by the duck pond and chucks a stick into the grey water, its surface broken already by the evening breeze. A crashing splash indicates that Diver sees this as a game, then a beating rush of wings heralds three ducks flying up in perfect formation, quacking outrage as they vanish into the dusk. Laura can just make out the darker blob of Diver’s head as he glides silently through the water, the stick borne high above the surface.
    â€˜Come on, boy, let’s go back.’ Laura turns towards home, frowning in concentration, trying to recall any pleasures that don’t involve children, Inigo or work. What does she like? What makes her laugh? All she can come up with are dogs and country and western music – not that any of those songs make you laugh, but they offer incomparable solace. Laura has often felt her interests to be inadequate. With both parents historians and a classicist brother, her degree in film studies always seems lightweight and not worth taking seriously, and with Inigo, it is essential for a bearable life to let his passions come first. Thus Laura knows a great deal she doesn’t want to know about sport,and has been known to resort to reminiscing about her childhood to make it seem that she has hidden depths. Not that she needs them really, as Inigo has so much to say about himself and it’s easier to think about him.
    Ruefully she remembers a conversation with her friend Cally when Inigo gave up smoking. Enunciating slowly at first then speeding into a rant, Cally said, ‘I can’t believe this. When you gave up, you didn’t think it was worth mentioning, and I didn’t find out for months, but now you’ve actually rung me up to tell me Inigo’s done it. Honestly, Laura, I keep telling you – get a bloody life.’
    Cally’s right; there should be something more to mark the passing years. If Laura were a man, she would label this her mid-life crisis, and perhaps buy a red sports car, or take up the gym. As a woman, social pressure suggests a face-lift or a toy boy, but she cannot imagine herself with either. But what can she have? Can anything physical staunch this sensation of loss and panic, or would it be better to have counselling? Back at college, twenty-year-old Laura would have known that all she needed was happiness. Her older self thinks what she needs is change.
    Walking across the barnyard on her way back to the house, she peers through a doorway and into the big barn. Inside, the cavernous space is emptyaround one small, ancient tractor. Its tyres are almost flat, and dust and cobwebs have given the smudged blue panels a ghostly blur. Inigo would love it; it might distract him from going back to London. Laura hastens back to the house to fetch him to look at it.
    The sitting room has traces of Inigo: his computer disks are stacked neatly in two piles, the cushions have been balanced along the sofa back, and a tennis player is thwacking a ball vigorously but silently across the television. Inigo, however, is not here. Nor is anyone else. Laura walks through to the hall to shout up the stairs, sensing more than hearing the pulsing beat of Tamsin’s stereo system far away in the attic and wondering where Hedley and Fred have got to. The telephone rings. Laura picks it up
    â€˜Hello?’
    â€˜Hello, this is Guy. I wonder if I could speak to Hedley?’
    â€˜Guy. Yes. Hello. How odd. I don’t…’ Laura tails off, obscurely embarrassed, suddenly tonguetied and desperate that he doesn’t realise it is her, although she doesn’t know why, and there is no reason why he should.
    â€˜Hello, hello, are you still there? Please could I speak to Hedley?’