She recoiled. Me? N-no . . .
Zahir Leveque didn’t like his daughter because she’d told him to his face that she’d give away half his fortune. His daughter’s daughter was another matter: she’d get rid of it all. It wasn’t that Harriet Lee would fritter away the Leveque fortune; he’d almost have preferred that. He didn’t detect an above-average level of generosity in the girl, but she’d squander his wealth all the same. The trouble was she did not calculate. She did not calculate! Her stomach made the most extraordinary noises when she saw the afternoon tea he’d had laid out. Scones and buns, tarts and hot buttered toast. She didn’t eat any of it. Nor did she drink the water; she only pretended to. He let her pantomime feast go on for a bit before asking her what was going on. Not hungry?
She said apologetically, It’s because I don’t like you.
He was displeased. Fourteen is too old not to have some inkling of diplomacy. But she really did seem to wish she felt differently.
Well, my girl—do you think you’re going to like everybody you share a meal with? There are a lot of good things you won’t get to try if you go on this way.
Zahir handed Harriet a plateful of sweet pastries with a magnanimous flourish. She passed them on to her mother, her gaze lingering mournfully on the flakiest puff. But all she said was: Yes, I suppose you’re right.
To say that Harriet didn’t calculate wasn’t quite correct—she did. But there was some sort of bonfire in her brain. Her calculations were tossed onto the flames within seconds of being made, and this must be what lit those enormous eyes of hers. The pair were sent back to the wheat fields, where Simon had discovered that Margot hadn’t packed for a short visit to the city. Margot had packed as if leaving forever, and she would have done, without a word of regret or explanation. This marked the beginning of Simon’s own disillusionment with his hardship-averse wife.
“There’s something you left out just now,” Sago says fearfully. “You can’t go thinking of things and then leaving them out—I don’t like it! This is why I didn’t want to hear a bedtime story, this is why . . .” The rest is muffled, as Prim has inched over to her and covered her mouth.
“Mind telling us what it was you were thinking of?” Bonnie asks, leaf-fingers swirling over Sago’s back. She’s drawing perfect circles that spin Sago into stillness.
“I was only thinking,” says Harriet, “of something that Margot doesn’t know that I know. I had to use the WC . . . don’t know why, when I didn’t drink anything there . . . anyway, I heard them talking on the landing below. Granddad must’ve decided that somebody who’d only give away half his fortune was better than nothing. He asked Margot to stay. He told her she could remarry and have another go at bringing someone worthwhile into the world; I gathered from that that if she agreed, I’d be sent back to the farm on my own. Margot didn’t even pause. Granddad made his suggestion, and she said—”
Harriet’s sentence goes unfinished long enough for Perdita to cover a page of her notepad with question marks.
“Sorry, I was just wondering whether or not to come up with something that sounds like a Margotism so that you would feel you’ve understood something about her. Something that helps you conclude that relationships are more important to her than money.”
“But?” asks Prim.
“But . . . Z. L. wouldn’t have bothered saying what he did if the odds hadn’t been in favor of her taking him up on it. Money actually is a priority for my mother . . . you’ll see later on . . .”
“So the truth is?” asks Sago.
The truth is that when Zahir Leveque suggested Margot stay and Harriet go, Margot simply said: Bye then. Unfortunately it was impossible to leave immediately, as Harriet hadn’t yet come back downstairs. So Margot made a little conversation.
By the way, where’s Mum? I wanted to see her.
She’s in prison.
Prison?!
Yes, for tax evasion, the greedy little minx.
That’s just the way things turn out for you if you ask the likes of Zahir Leveque for a divorce. The mother hadn’t mentioned her change of address in her letters, and the daughter never looked at postmarks. The divorce was going ahead, though. Mrs. Leveque had told Margot that much. Margot talked about the weather for a while; then a new question occurred to her.
Who’s in charge of the farm I live on?
Zahir told his daughter the name of the theoretical person named on the farmstead company letterhead.
No. You know what I mean. The owner.
It was funny Margot had brought this up, as the owner was actually a relative of sorts . . . There’s this distant cousin of your mother’s . . . three times removed, or something like that . . .
And that cousin owns the farm?
No, his wife does. Clio Kercheval.
Home was seventeen long credential checks and a short train ride away. It was good that they’d brought such massive trunks along, because all the seats on the train were full. Harriet looked out at factory after fenced factory. The fences were low, so it didn’t seem as if the factory owners were that bothered about people escaping.
Mother, what do they make in the factories?
Almost anything you can think of.
Margot asked Harriet to write down the names of everybody who worked alongside them at the farm—she said she wanted to think about them all, and she was sure Harriet would remember. She’d felt guilty for having put Harriet through the ordeal of learning to read and then not providing adequate reading material. There was Zola, and there were farmers’ almanacs, and that was it. Harriet took to both; they were actually respectable options as far as variety was concerned. This is why, as an adult, she drives Perdita up the wall with her constitutional inability to discuss fiction without making reference to Les Rougon-Macquart. Worse still, poetry, plays, and nonfiction never escape comparison to the farmers’ almanacs. Harriet read more voraciously than Simon and Margot ever had. They discouraged this; she’d be so bored once she ran out of texts that were new to her. She surprised them with the discovery that once an avid reader runs out of books, she reads people. Harriet read everybody she met, and when she met them again, she reread them.
Harriet was none too impressed by Margot’s appraisal of her, having seen and heard plenty of parental overstatement on the farmstead. Still, not wanting to disappoint her mother, Harriet listed farmstead names. Some of them were made up, just for fun, and when she’d finished Margot crossed out all the made-up names, then read the list again.
You haven’t forgotten anybody; they’re all there.
Harriet was greatly relieved by this, though she couldn’t have said why. But back at the farm, as they passed the cottages where the Cook family lived, the jack-in-the-box sprang out for the first time in ages, his peeling skull pummelling the air: HA HA HA, HA HA HA. And later that night Harriet’s list was in Simon’s hands, accusing him and keeping him from sleep.
Margot had told him she’d come back because she had nowhere else to go. There was the cottage and there was the mansion and no place in between. He answered: But I thought we . . . I thought we could . . .
As he spoke, her mouth moved too, only barely suppressing mimicry. I thought we, I thought we could. With each generation the Lees grew poorer and more dutiful. So did their co-farmers, the Parkers, the Coopers, and the Cooks. They didn’t know how to change anything. They only knew how to continue.