Love Under Lockdown

by Michael Estorick

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

"Very funny and original . . . I read it in one evening and laughed much of the time" SALLY EMERSON

"Consistently intelligent" FINANCIAL TIMES

"This beautifully observed tableau of an increasingly feverish English can be read in one enjoyable gulp" COUNTRY LIFE

Bill and Pete, best friends since school, are approaching 70 and now retired, but still meet regularly to chew the fat about sport, politics, their stagnant love lives, mutual friends and, increasingly, Bill's fractious relationship with his rebellious son Ivan.

Spanning the four years from the Brexit Referendum to the end of the first Coronavirus lockdown, we watch these characters, last seen in About Time, stumble their way through chaos, mistrust, generational differences and blossoming relationships, finding new life and unexpected happiness in uncertain times.

Release date: August 24, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 162

Sample

1

‘What do you think?’ Bill asked, for once wanting his oldest friend's opinion.

‘Very artistic,’ Pete said.

‘No, seriously.’

‘I am serious. I’m impressed. But what exactly are they?’

The two men were standing over a group of large black and white photographs of circular abstract patterns, taken by Bill.

Early on Midsummer morning, unable to sleep, Bill had gone down to the cellar to pick out a bottle with which to celebrate or drown his sorrows, depending on the outcome of the Brexit Referendum. On the landing outside there had been a smell of damp and at the bottom of the steps wine labels were strewn across the floor. Overnight, water had surged up through the sewers and then drained away, leaving large grey marks on the concrete.

‘I think they’re beautiful.’

‘They are,’ Pete said, and meant it.

‘Of course, there's no way they’re accidental.’

Oh God, Pete thought, not Bill and his crop circles again.

‘They’re too perfectly symmetrical.’

‘Bill, they’re just shapes made by water swirling around. That's all they are. Really.’

‘It's no accident it happened right before the Referendum, like that terrible storm on the eve of Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658. An augury, if you like.’

Pete looked sharply at Bill, who knew Cromwell was his pet subject; or rather Richard, his son and successor as Lord Protector, commonly known as ‘Tumbledown Dick’, the only British ruler ever to give up power voluntarily and live to a contented old age.

‘Not just a leak from the mains then?’

‘Definitely not!’

‘A leak from the Main Man, showing what he thinks of us – well, you anyway – by pissing on us from a great height?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Pete said, shaking his head.

Bill was given to all-consuming passions, and before his ‘awakening’ five years earlier (‘Trust Bill to big-up a plain old mid-life crisis,’ his late wife Carol had said) would strenuously argue that crop circles were a con, two fingers stuck up at credulous New Agers by mocking farmers or smart-arse students. Extensive on-line research had subsequently persuaded Bill that they could only have been made by exceptionally intelligent extra-terrestrial visitors; and when, later still, his original view was vindicated, he perversely insisted that they must be the product of some supreme overarching intelligence by which the universe in all its particulars, both infinitely large and infinitesimally small, was ordered. Carol had never tolerated unscientific claptrap, any more than it would have occurred to her to vote, as Bill had just done, to leave Europe. Though he missed his wife every day and had barely moved a thing of hers since her death three years earlier, he was relieved she wasn’t around, for he knew it was an argument he could never have won; nor, in all likelihood, despite all they had been through together, would their marriage, like so many others up and down the country in the wake of that historic vote, have survived it.

‘Well, they make jolly nice snaps.’

‘Snaps?’ Bill said, feigning annoyance. ‘Them's bleedin’ art mate. The real effing deal. None of your conceptual bollocks.’

‘Indeed,’ Pete said.

‘As a tribute to you I’m calling them Closely Observed Stains.’

Closely Observed Trains was Pete's favourite film. Pete bowed.

‘I didn’t know you were into photography.’

‘There's a lot you don’t know about me.’

‘Not that much,’ Pete thought, but said nothing

Pete liked to think he knew Bill better than Bill knew himself. They’d met 55 years before, aged 10, at a school entrance exam and been friends ever since. Though at times both had wondered what they saw in each other, neither had ever felt any need to explain or define a relationship which was a bouillabaisse of habit, shared experience, prejudice, insight, self-delusion, envy, competitiveness and general wear and tear. There had been long periods when they’d seen little of each other, and others when they’d been inseparable. Bill was given to teasing Pete, and probably enjoyed Pete's company more than the reverse, but it was invariably Pete who made any arrangement to meet. Both were now retired, Bill after successfully selling his advertising agency; Pete, if an artist can ever be said to retire, unexpectedly forced out of teaching by a new art school principal keen to give jobs to his mates. Bill had been married to Carol for over 30 years and had two daughters and a son. Five years earlier, aged 60, Pete had married for the first time (to Sarah, to whom he’d been introduced by Carol, thus becoming a step-father to seven-year-old Jack), but for reasons Pete claimed not to understand, they were no longer together. Bill was given to temporary enthusiasms and fads; Pete, a printmaker by training and vocation, steadier in his pursuits, though in their private lives the opposite was true: Bill, until his mid-life crisis, a devoted husband and father; Pete, before his late marriage, a loner as promiscuous in his affections as he was protective of his heart. After Carol's death from cancer and Pete's separation from Sarah, the two men had briefly shared Bill's spacious house in Wimbledon. Bill had then fallen for Andrea, a rapacious American divorcee, to whom he’d been introduced by Pete, but to general relief – Pete's especially – she had stood him up at the altar. At the time of the Brexit Referendum in June 2016, both Pete and Bill were single and living alone, though they met for lunch every Tuesday at the Fox & Grapes by Wimbledon Common.

From time to time Bill's son Ivan, now in his mid-20's, would turn up unannounced, suitcase and heart in hand, and re-install himself in the bedroom in which he’d grown up. Or not, as Bill insisted to Pete, who was his godfather. A couple of days after the vote, Ivan appeared, accompanied by a young woman called Melanie, with gold rings through her nose and eyebrow, and an indecipherable tattoo above her breasts which Bill couldn’t take his eyes off.

‘Don’t say anything, Dad. It's nothing like that,’ Ivan insisted, when she went to the lavatory.

‘Like what?’

‘Mel and me, we’re like just friends, OK?’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘And stop salivating. It's disgusting at your age.’

‘I was trying to read her tattoo.’

‘Sure you were.’

‘How long's she staying?’

Ivan shrugged.

‘For a bit. She needs somewhere to hang.’

‘Hang what?’

Before Ivan could explain, Melanie came back into the room.

‘They’re fascists,’ she announced, to no one in particular.

‘Who?’

‘My progenitors.’

‘Your what?’

‘Her parents, Dad.’

‘Oh, right. Sorry.’

‘Mel couldn’t stay at home after the way they voted. Well, how could anyone?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Bill said.

‘So it might be a few days or a few weeks. All right?’ Ivan added, more a statement than question.

‘Sure. Make yourselves at home.’

‘Great. Thanks.’

Mel didn’t open her mouth again, but as they went upstairs Bill noticed they were holding hands, and grinned lasciviously.

‘I’m hardly surprised,’ Bill told Pete. ‘I’m not saying I expected it, but Brits don’t like being told what to do, especially by bloody Yanks. It gets our blood up. The funny thing is, although I wanted us to leave, on hearing the result I felt rather flat. But winning's like that. You think it's going to feel like nothing on earth, when all it is is better than losing.’

‘It must be nice having Ivan back,’ Pete said. He was very fond of his godson and, unlike most people, had no interest in talking about the Brexit Referendum. Bill had always found his son a mystery and would often ask Pete for advice, even when he had no intention of taking it.

‘He must know how I voted.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t care. Or likes his creature comforts too much to rock the boat. How about Mel?’

‘Little Miss Tattoo behaves as if I don’t exist. The fridge is now stuffed with the most awful vegan muck, and when-ever she sees me eating a ham sandwich she makes these appalling gagging noises. That's about the extent of her conversation.’

‘They mean well,’ Pete said, for he had always had a soft spot for students.

‘Bollocks. They just want us to pack up and die.’

‘Not really.’

‘Yes, really. The other day I caught Ivan wandering round the house photographing everything on his phone.’

‘Did you give him any tips?’

‘It isn’t funny.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I was too gobsmacked. But he knew what I was thinking. As for little Miss T, I don’t think it's quite as platonic as he makes out, if the noises coming from his room are anything to go by. The funny thing is, she’d be a pretty little number if she didn’t always look as if she’d just stepped out of the Amazon rainforest.’

‘Bill, you can’t say stuff like that these days. It's totally unacceptable.’

‘Who says? This is still my house, isn’t it? An Englishman's home…’

‘Not for long, evidently!’ Pete said, grinning.

2

Pilgrims had been on the road since dawn. Coffee in hand, Guy would watch them from the battlements, their backs bent under heavy packs, the occasional lone figure breaking ranks as he strode on ahead, crook in hand, towards the nearest town and breakfast.

In earlier years, pilgrims had straggled on an overgrown path across the field towards Guy's tower, but historic rights of way had been sold off and nowadays they kept to the road: a reciprocal deal between landowner and local government, from which Guy had gained or lost a few metres, he could no longer remember which, and cared even less.

In need of fresh water or a lavatory, one of them would occasionally call up or bang on the heavy front door. Guy, reluctant to be bothered, would peer down through one of the arrow slits. If the pilgrim was pretty he might open up; otherwise he refused to answer. On market days, he drove his old Peugeot dangerously close to the pilgrims, furious when they didn’t move over; on his return journey, fresh baguette, farm eggs, goats cheese, a spit roasted chicken or rôti de porc, bouncing on the back seat, hypocritically raising a hand from the steering wheel in greeting. Guy despised organised religion and everything he imagined the pilgrims believed, but he envied them their freedom, even if it was only from an office for a couple of weeks a year. Now in his mid 60's, he more than ever missed the open road, wandering in remote places without guide or destination, having never imagined that a tumbledown tower, spotted through an overgrown hedge more than 40 years earlier, would one day become the only home he ever owned.

By midday it was too hot to walk. Pilgrims would be stretched out under the trees, eating or dozing or playing with their mobile phones. Guy took his second cup of coffee and tin of roll ups, and climbed the forty-two slippery stone steps. . .