Page 75 of We All Live Here
Lila takes it all in with only half an ear. Gabriel has asked her to comefor dinner the following evening, and her brain is a hot jumble of anticipation and nerves. Because dinner is not a casual drink after work. Dinner is serious. It is an invitation into his home. It is a word laden with possibility. Dinner means they are Moving Forward.
•••
One of thethings Lila most enjoys about her new life is the scent of cooking that greets her when she comes into her house. In the early months after Dan left she could barely rouse herself to cook: she had been so hollowed out with grief and shock that normal household tasks, like cooking and cleaning, had felt completely beyond her. They had lived on toast, or takeaways, or if Lila was feeling reasonably pulled together, pasta with a jar of pesto sauce, perhaps with the addition of a handful of frozen peas if she was worried about the girls getting rickets. Bill’s arrival had brought order and home-cooked meals to their house, but the smell of steamed fish or salad had not been exactlywelcoming. Since the advent of Penelope—and perhaps even hisentente cordialewith Gene—Bill’s cooking seems to have relaxed a little into something less rigidly nutritional, and more comforting. It frequently contains carbohydrates or crispy chicken skin or even a cheesy topping, so that Lila’s kitchen is often the source of delicious aromas that prompt immediate Pavlovian hunger pangs. The girls ask, “What’s for dinner?” with genuine anticipation rather than faint dread.
Everyone is excited about the fried chicken.
Along with that, and her upcoming date with Gabriel, the other thing adding to Lila’s general sense of satisfaction is that the garden is almost completed. The area that has seemed, for months, to be a continuing eyesore of clay soil, paving slabs, and piles of dead vegetation has very gradually, then quite suddenly morphed into something elegant and beautiful. When they had moved in, the end of her garden had been a wilderness of shrubs and apparently random pieces of half-buriedconcrete, the fences covered with sprawling dark ivy, its focal point a shed missing a good portion of its bitumen roof and colonized by bristly-legged spiders so enormous that Lila had occasionally thought about charging rent.
Now the centerpiece is Bill’s carved oak bench, sheltered by a small willow tree on one side, a Japanese acer on the other, and a new, small square pond beside it. Lilac and lavender bushes for bees punctuate each side, and two small raised beds house a variety of herbs, a winding reclaimed York stone patio charting the space between them. A redbrick wall, its surface softened by centuries of weather, has been revealed by Jensen’s endless pruning and hacking, and water trickles from a wall-mounted fountain in a never-ending tinkling stream. It isn’t finished, but already it’s ridiculously peaceful. It’s the first thing that draws the eye as Lila glances out of the window, and every time she does, she feels as if she has somehow been granted the kind of garden that only other people have.
“I’ve put giant purple alliums in those raised beds,” says Jensen, appearing beside her as she looks back at the house. His fingernails are black with soil and he shoves his hands into his pockets. “They’ll come up in May, June, and be a bit of a riot. Stop it looking too tidy. I thought it sounded like your mum—some fun and chaos amid the order.”
Lila, unexpectedly, feels a lump rise in her throat. “That’s lovely,” she says. “She would have liked that.”
“And just a truckload of spring bulbs, cyclamen, daffodils, that kind of thing. She was always cheerful, wasn’t she? And you can’t have enough cheery stuff by the end of winter.” He surveys his work with quiet satisfaction, and they stand for a moment, watching the hubbub of activity just visible through the French windows.
“You said it would be beautiful,” she says, turning to him.
He rubs a hand over his head. “Well, I’m always right. I did tell you that.”
“Yeah, now you’ve ruined it.”
He laughs. “I tell you what, I’m going to be ready for that fried chicken. I’m starving.”
They start to walk up toward the house.
“You’re doing okay, though?” Jensen says. “Gene tells me you have a new book deal.”
She smiles. “Yeah. Yeah. Not quite a top-down life yet but things seem to be…settling. How about you?”
“Good. Quiet, just as I like it.”
“Quiet is good,” she says emphatically. “I’m a big fan of quiet. ‘No alarms and no surprises.’ Isn’t that what Radiohead said?”
“I think that song was about suicide. But I get your general point.”
She stops walking, is about to speak, then changes her mind.
“You were about to say I’m quite annoying, weren’t you?” Jensen says.
“Yes,” Lila says. “Yes, I was.”
•••
The fried chickenis sensational. Gene says so, at least four times, twice while he is actually chewing a mouthful, but the sentiment is so genuinely expressed that Bill seems not to mind the morsels of food spluttered in his general direction. Instead of dishing it onto individual plates, he has filled a platter with it and placed it in the center of the kitchen table. Hands frequently reach out for another piece, making the atmosphere somehow more relaxed than usual over dinner. The corn fritters are also a success, especially with Violet, who eats them with her fingers, her lips covered with grease and tomato salsa, and even the green salad that Bill has placed to the side (old habits die hard apparently) is swiftly demolished. Bottled beer and fizzy drinks scatter the table and some kind of upbeat jazz music plays gently in the background. Lila gazes at the visitors to her once-silent kitchen table: Bill and Penelope beside each other at the far end, talking animatedly about a piece ofmusic they have decided to attempt, Gene telling Violet about the events on set at the stately home, the foibles of the actors, how the director was a dick, sorry, not a very nice person, and Violet sometimes even listening, Eleanor and Jensen, who seem to have hit it off, chatting about an exceptionally grotty bar they had both frequented in Camden Town. Celie, who has been more upbeat lately, is surreptitiously feeding Truant pieces of chicken under the table, occasionally breaking in to contradict something Violet says. It is a scene of life and warmth and color, and Lila feels oddly emotional at the sight of it, as if it is only now she can allow herself to acknowledge how far they have all come.
“It’s not a traditional family,” Eleanor had said, earlier that evening, when Lila had commented on how much easier she was finding it, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not a family.”
“How long do you think before you’re completely finished, Jensen?” says Bill, across the table.
“I’m waiting on the outdoor lights. Just a couple each side of the bench,” Jensen says. “And a couple more plants to go in. And then that’s pretty much it.”
“You’ve done a wonderful job,” Bill says. “Wonderful.”
“It looks very beautiful,” Penelope says, and then, in case that’s too presumptive, “I mean, as an outsider, it all looks very beautiful to me.”
“Penelope is a wonderful gardener,” says Bill. “You must take a look at her house, Jensen, when you have a minute. She has astonishingly green fingers.”
