The Friends We Keep(67)

She had loved gardening, but wasn’t interested anymore. The hedgerows were overgrown, and the topiary yews had completely lost their shape, with weeds covering half the gravel driveway.

E-mails would show up in her in-box, which she would read but somehow never get around to answering. Bills would go unpaid, and the washing machine stayed broken for weeks, her clothes unwashed. It was easier to hide in bed and watch television, wait for the world to pass her by.

Her mother was convinced it was the house, that she needed a change. “If you insist on living in that enormous house, darling, get lodgers. Something so you aren’t so lonely. Or get a job. You need something to do all day.”

Maggie could barely contemplate getting out of bed, let alone going for a job interview. And even if she wanted to work, was there anyone who would employ an almost-fifty-year-old woman who hadn’t worked in over twenty years? What could she do? She could cook, and she was still eminently presentable. She made an excellent first impression. Maybe she could be a receptionist somewhere? Each time she thought of this, she shuddered and burrowed deeper under the duvet. In theory, she knew it would be good for her—being out in the world, around people, having office workers she could lunch with. If only she could drag herself out of bed.

Her bright spot had been Jasper the cat, who used to curl up with her in bed, but Jasper had reverted to his barn cat roots and spent most of the time outside. She got up to feed the chickens, but that was it. Days went by when she saw no one, talked to no one other than her mother, and was seized by what she was refusing to think of as depression, instead calling it “inertia,” which she worried would never go away.



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    Maggie heard the doorbell from the safety of her bed and hoped whoever was ringing it would leave if she just ignored it. But by the third ring, she was forced to get up, thankful she was in her version of pajamas—sweatpants and a T-shirt—and went downstairs.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have to get up anyway. Tonight was her university’s thirty-year reunion in a hotel in London. She didn’t go to the tenth or the twentieth, but neither did anyone else she cared about. Tonight both Evvie and Topher would be there, and Topher had insisted she come. It was the one thing she had looked forward to in months. Maybe years.

But she wasn’t anticipating anyone coming over, and suspected it might be one of her neighbors. She only knew Emily and James, was friendly with them when they first moved in, but a disagreement over tree height—they had refused to cut down their cypress trees, which now blocked the views from Maggie’s house—had led to them ignoring each other.

It was probably one of the other new neighbors, complaining. She didn’t remember their names. All of them looked alike to her, bright young thirtysomethings, newlyweds, with babies and toddlers, gorgeous wives with long glossy hair, fur-trimmed parkas and Hunter wellies, all of them suddenly descending on their tiny village outside of Bath. Why were they here? It wasn’t commutable to London, but because a couple of celebrities had bought nearby, suddenly Frome, and their little village just outside, was the topic of articles in magazines like Vogue and Tatler, bringing scores of aspirational bright young things with their four-wheel-drive baby buggies, full-time nannies, and Range Rovers.

A group of them lived in the houses that led up to Maggie’s own manor house. Once it had been land belonging to the house, before it was sold off to the local farmer years ago. He built one house there, bought years ago by Emily and James, and had promised not to develop any further. When he died, however, his son immediately sold it to developers, who swiftly came up with proposals to build five large houses, in traditional style, which horrified both Maggie and Ben (during a period of sobriety when he still cared about these things). Ben was fighting it, fighting for the open space, when he died, and Maggie had neither the energy nor the will to keep on fighting once he was gone.

It was astonishing how quickly the houses went up. One day there were fields, and the next, it seemed, large stone houses with immaculate gravel driveways on which sat Range Rovers and shiny Teslas, clipped privet hedges, and little children on electric scooters in the road.

Maggie didn’t mind the children. She loved having children in the vicinity, loved hearing the peals of giggles, even the occasional cry as one fell over, and thought she had become accustomed to the houses. It was the adults that she struggled with.

They were all perfectly nice, these young women whose husbands had worked in finance in London, who seemed to have retired at an ungodly age—what, thirty-five? Younger?—to start their own businesses and move out to their dream homes in the country. All of the husbands described themselves as entrepreneurs, and all seemed pleasant enough, clean-cut, fresh scrubbed, handsome. Until, that is, there was that first knock on the door requesting if maybe she would consider trimming the hedges so the landscaping would fit the rest of the street.

Maggie hadn’t even known that they owned the actual road that led to their manor house before Ben died. Nor the hedges that abutted it. She certainly never imagined she would be dealing with these annoying neighbors. But the road itself was indeed hers, which included the hedgerow.

The hedgerow had always been wild. It was a country lane, and the shrubs and trees on the sides had been left. Perhaps twice in all the years they had lived here Ben sent a gardener to clip them back ever so slightly. But they loved the wildness; it was what made it a country lane.