A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
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was no sound or movement to indicate that she was even in the house.
After the meal Ed proposed a walk. He wanted to show the Stewards the full extent of the property, and some thinning and replanting that was under way in his woodland. Ed liked to be physically involved in the work. He emerged for the expedition in a lumberjack’s coat and boots with a bow-saw slung over one shoulder. Sandra had already announced that she was not much of a walker, and would stay behind to have a nap.
Ed was leading the way through his woodland garden when an outer door slammed in the house. They all turned. Milly had put on a man’s long tweed coat over her ragbag clothes. The afternoon was mild but she was wearing gloves with the fingers roughly sawn off and a shapeless knitted hat. The Dickens urchin effect was complete.
‘Great,’ Ed called to her. ‘Glad you’re coming. Which way shall we go, Deer Path or along the ski trail?’
‘I dunno,’ Milly shrugged. The route was of no interest to her. She stood pointedly waiting until her father and Matt and the boys moved on again. She was not quite looking at Dinah, but almost. Dinah resisted the urge to turn and look at whatever it might be in the air six inches to the left of her own head. Ed’s voice faded in the distance. He was explaining something about cross-country skiing. The boys were running, chasing each other, their feet in the years’ depths of dead leaves sounding like waves breaking.
‘Shall we follow them?’ Dinah asked.
‘We’ll have to, I suppose. I don’t know the way, otherwise.’
The lack of familiarity with her own home ground was deliberate, Dinah thought. Milly didn’t want to know this place.
They began to walk, not quite side by side, along a wide path through the trees. The air was still scented with resin and leaf-mould. Dinah imagined how if she were to be lifted up over the treetops she would see the undulating woodland stretching in every direction. She had seen a pattern of leaves, a carpet in chemical approximations of these colours, somewhere, a long way …
No.
She asked Milly, not waiting to consider her words, ‘You live in London for part of the year, is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
I won’t make her talk if she doesn’t want to. She may just want to walk, not necessarily with me. I’m glad she came out. The thoughts skittered through Dinah’s head. She wanted Milly to continue beside her, not to frighten her off.
They continued in silence for perhaps a hundred yards. There were birds singing, and silverbarked birches with their leaves turning butter-gold.
‘It’s very beautiful here,’ Dinah said quietly.
‘I hate it.’ Milly’s voice was so low that it was barely audible.
Dinah waited, walking with her head bent and her eyes fixed on the path in order not to intrude on Milly.
‘I hate it,’ Milly repeated more loudly after a minute.
‘Why?’ Dinah ventured.
Milly stopped walking. She half turned and made an eloquent gesture of spreading her hands an inch, opening her hunched shoulders, twisting her head against the backdrop of gilded trees and china-blue sky. And at once Dinah had a sense of her isolation in this calendar landscape, sullen and strange, adrift from the chains of healthy high-school kids she had seen dismounting from the dog-nosed yellow State of Massachusetts school buses. Milly fierce and freaky. Lost and longing to be found. And yet, she was not so different from hundreds of kids in London. She was only so different here.
To Dinah’s surprise, Milly suddenly smiled.
Her teeth were white and even, startlingly so as they appeared between the dark-painted lips. Her eyes slanted upwards, giving her a completely new expression of sceptical merriment.
‘See?’ Milly asked.
Dinah nodded. ‘Yes. I suppose I do.’
It came to her that she recalled the familiarity of London and home for Milly, just as Milly did for her. They had recognised the exile in one another. They walked on, the distance between them perceptibly lessened.
‘It will start snowing soon,’ Milly remarked.
‘Not that soon. Another two, maybe three months.’
‘Then everyone will put on their ski-suits and start poling around the trails like these clockwork people, arms up and down, two, three, legs going like stupid machines.’
Milly’s spidery black limbs jerked in cruel imitation and Dinah laughed at the image she conjured up.
‘Cross-country skiing is harmless enough,’ she protested mildly.
‘It isn’t just that, is it? It’s the woods and the empty fresh air and the kindness and health and shitty peace and beauty of it all.’
‘What would you like instead?’
Milly’s second shrug was as expressive as the first.
‘Decay,’ she murmured gothically.
Merlin appeared ahead. He scuffled back towards them through the leaves and then stood in the middle of the path.
‘What are you talking about?’ He looked from his mother to Milly with a hint of jealous accusation. His round face was shadowed. Milly ignored him, simply waiting for Dinah to deal with the interruption so they could resume their conversation. She was entirely focused on what interested her, and what was of no interest did not exist. Dinah reflected on this as she dealt with Merlin, and guiltily encouraged him to run on again to look for the men. She wanted to prolong this talk.
As soon as he was out of earshot Milly greedily reclaimed her attention. ‘Why don’t you like it here?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, you don’t, do you?’
Dinah sighed. ‘I miss … threads, connections. Nothing very specific.’ She could not explain, particularly she could not think of explaining to this child. Associations began to pile up, like nerve impulses behind the blocked synapses of denial.
‘Just plain homesickness,’ she offered lamely.
Milly walked with her hands in the pockets of her long coat. Her bottom lip stuck out; her expression was a young-old hybrid of disappointment and dismissiveness. Dinah saw that she had given an inadequate answer. ‘So what is it you miss?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. Well, everything. People, you know. Mates. That you can just be with and, like, not have to pretend to be someone else for half the time just because they think you ought to be different from the way you are. I’ve got friends in London, in Camden, who know me all the way through. Better than Sandra and Ed ever will. I’d rather be there with them than stuck here.’
The tone of her voice was withering.
‘School friends?’ Dinah asked. She felt sorry for Milly, cut off in the glass castle from children of her own age, with only her UMass tutor for company.
‘God. I told you. I got expelled from Camden bloody School.’
‘Why?’
Milly sniffed in exasperation. ‘The usual shit. Smoking. Language. Defacing school property. Bunking off. Violence to a member of staff. Actually it was only a ruler I smacked her with. Should have been an iron bar, really. Only I didn’t have one in my pencil case.’ There was a distinct note of pride in this recitation.
Dinah nodded. ‘I see,’ she said mildly.
Milly’s voice softened. ‘No, my mates are nothing to do with school. I met them down the Lock. I used to hang round there in the day, not being at school. They just do stuff, like, their own way. They’ve got a place they live in, near Chalk Farm. Caz, that’s one of them, he’s fixed it well up so there’s water and heating and everything, not like