This Must Be the Place Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Maggie O’Farrell

  The right of Maggie O’Farrell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Excerpt from ‘Snow’ by Louis MacNeice, published by Faber and Faber. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates. All rights reserved.

  With thanks to the Telegraph Media Group for permission to replicate their cover.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook in 2016 by Tinder Press

  An imprint of Headline Publishing Group

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 3030 0

  Cover images © Historic Map Works/Getty Images

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  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.tinderpress.co.uk

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Maggie O’Farrell

  About the Book

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  The Strangest Feeling in My Legs

  I Am Not an Actress

  Down at the Bottom of the Page

  It’s Really Very Simple

  How a Locksmith Must Feel

  Enough Blue to Make

  Where Am I and What Am I Doing Here?

  The Kind of Place You’d Have Trouble Getting Out Of

  Show Me Where It Hurts

  Severed Heads and Chemically Preserved Grouse

  Something Only He Can See

  The Tired Mind is a Stovetop

  Oxidised Copper Exactly

  The Girl in Question

  The Dark Oubliettes of the House

  The Logical Loophole

  A Jagged, Dangerous Mass of Ice

  You Do What You Have to Do

  When All the Tiny Lights Begin to be Extinguished

  Down the Line

  And Who Are You?

  Absolutely the Right Tree

  An Unexpected Outcome

  To Hang On, To Never Let Go

  Always to Be Losing Things

  Gold-Hatted, High-Bouncing Lover

  For Dear Life

  Footnotes

  About the Author

  Author pic © Ben Gold

  Maggie O’Farrell is the author of six previous novels, After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, which won the Costa Novel Award, and Instructions for a Heatwave, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. She lives in Edinburgh.

  Praise for Maggie O’Farrell:

  ‘Unputdownable’ Guardian

  ‘Impossible not to love’ Irish Times

  ‘O'Farrell is hard to beat’ Scotsman

  ‘Deliciously insightful’ Independent

  ‘Masterful... holds you on an exquisite knife-edge’ Marie Claire

  ‘I was entranced… what a brilliant storyteller she is’ Esther Freud, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Terrific’ Audrey Niffenegger

  ‘Exquisitely sensual’ Emma Donoghue

  ‘Beautifully written and thought-provoking’ Grazia Magazine

  ‘A masterful gift for storytelling’ Observer

  ‘An entirely encompassing and beautiful read’ Heat

  ‘Spellbinding’ Barbara Trapido

  By Maggie O’Farrell and available from Tinder Press

  After You’d Gone

  My Lover’s Lover

  The Distance Between Us

  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

  The Hand That First Held Mine

  Instructions For a Heatwave

  This Must Be the Place

  About the Book

  Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life.

  A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway.

  He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with twenty years ago, and this discovery will send him off-course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

  THIS MUST BE THE PLACE crosses continents and time zones, giving voice to a diverse and complex cast of characters. At its heart, it is an extraordinary portrait of a marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart.

  Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel is a dazzling, intimate epic about who we leave behind and who we become as we search for our place in the world.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you, Mary-Anne Harrington.

  Thank you, Jordan Pavlin.

  Thank you, Victoria Hobbs.

  Thank you, Christy Fletcher.

  Thank you, Jane Morpeth, Hazel Orme, Georgina Moore, Yeti Lambregts, Vicky Palmer, Barbara Ronan, Amy Perkins, Cathie Arrington, Laura Esslemont, Kate Truman and all at Headline.

  Thank you, Ruth Metzstein, for being my final reader, Simon Vickers, for guiding me through the mysterious world of auction catalogues, Dan Friedman, for transatlantic support, Morag McRae, for the loan of the headless lady, Louise Brady, for patience and kindness, Moira Little, for reasons she will know, Daisy Donovan, for always being ready to answer peculiar questions, Sarah Urwin Jones, for tea and encouragement, B. Marguin, for French dialogue consultancy, and Katharine Hamnett, for her generosity over the grey dress.

  Thank you to Falko Konditorei, for putting up with me for long periods of time.

  Thank you, Rob and Janet, of Lancrigg, Grasmere, for providing me with a haven, yet again.

  Thank you, Juno.

  Thank you, Iris.

  Thank you, Saul.

  And thank you, Will.

  I also owe an enormous debt, in more ways than one, to Antonia and colleagues at the Dermatology Daycare Unit in Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, who help people like Niall every day of the week.

  for Vilmos

  World is crazier and more of it than we think,

  Incorrigibly plural.

  Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’

  The Strangest Feeling in My Legs

  Daniel, Donegal, 2010

  There is a man.

  He’s standing on the back step, rolling a cigarette. The day is typically unstable, the garden lush and shining, the branches weighty with still-falling rain.

  There is a man and the man is me.

  I am at the back door, tobacco tin in hand, and I am watching something in the trees, a figure, standing at the perimeter of the garden, where the aspens crowd in at the fence. Another man.

  He’s carrying a pair of binoculars and a camera.

  A birdwatcher, I am telling myself as I pull the frail paper along my tongue, you get them in these parts. But at the same time I’m thinking, really? Birdwatching, this far up the valley? I’m also thinking, where is my daughter, the baby, my wife? How quickly could I reach them, if I needed to?

  My heart cranks
into high gear, thud-thudding against my ribs. I squint into the white sky. I am about to step out into the garden. I want the guy to know I’ve seen him, to see me seeing him. I want him to register my size, my former track-and-field-star physique (slackening and loosening a little, these days, admittedly). I want him to run the odds, me versus him, through his head. He’s not to know I’ve never been in a fight in my life and intend it to stay that way. I want him to feel what I used to feel before my father disciplined me: I am on to you, he would say, with a pointing finger, directed first at his chest, then mine.

  I am on to you, I want to yell, while I fumble to pocket my roll-up and lighter.

  The guy is looking in the direction of the house. I see the tinder spark of sun on a lens and a movement of his arm that could be the brushing away of a hair across the forehead or the depression of a camera shutter.

  Two things happen very fast. The dog – a whiskery, leggy, slightly arthritic wolfhound, usually given to sleeping by the stove – streaks out of the door, past my legs and into the garden, emitting a volley of low barks, and a woman comes round the side of the house.

  She has the baby on her back, she is wearing the kind of sou’wester hood usually sported by North Sea fishermen and she is holding a shotgun.

  She is also my wife.

  The latter fact I still have trouble adjusting to, not only because the idea of this creature ever agreeing to marry me is highly improbable, but also because she pulls unexpected shit like this all the time.

  ‘Jesus, honey,’ I gasp, and I am momentarily distracted by how shrill my voice is. Unmanly doesn’t cover it. I sound as if I’m admonishing her for an ill-judged choice in soft furnishings or for wearing pumps that clash with her purse.

  She ignores my high-pitched intervention – who can blame her? – and fires into the air. Once, twice.

  If, like me, you’ve never heard a gun report at close range, let me tell you the noise is an ear-shattering explosion. Magnesium-hued lights go off inside your head, your ears ring with the three-bar high note of an aria, your sinuses fill with tar.

  The sound ricochets off the side of the house, off the flank of the mountain, then back again: a huge, aural tennis ball bouncing about the valley. I realise that while I’m ducking, cringeing, covering my head, the baby is strangely unmoved. He’s still sucking his thumb, head leaning against the spread of his mother’s hair. Almost as if he’s used to this. Almost as if he’s heard it all before.

  I straighten up. I take my hands off my ears. Far away, a figure is sprinting through the undergrowth. My wife turns around. She cracks the gun in the crook of her arm. She whistles for the dog. ‘Ha,’ she says to me before she vanishes back around the side of the house. ‘That’ll show him.’

  My wife, I should tell you, is crazy. Not in a requiring-medication-and-wards-and-men-in-white-coats sense – although I sometimes wonder if there may have been times in her past – but in a subtle, more socially acceptable, less ostentatious way. She doesn’t think like other people. She believes that to pull a gun on someone lurking, in all likelihood entirely innocently, at our perimeter fence is not only permissible but indeed the right thing to do.

  Here are the bare facts about the woman I married:

  – She’s crazy, as I might have mentioned

  – She’s a recluse

  – She’s apparently willing to pull a gun on anyone threatening to uncover her hiding place.

  I dart, in so much as a man of my size can dart, through the house to catch her. I’m going to have this out with her. She can’t keep a gun in a house where there are small children. She just can’t.

  I’m repeating this to myself as I pass through the house, planning to begin my protestations with it. But as I come through the front door, it’s as if I’m entering another world. Instead of the grey drizzle at the back, a dazzling, primrose-tinted sun fills the front garden, which gleams and sparks as if hewn from jewels. My daughter is leaping over a rope that her mother is turning. My wife who, just a moment ago, was a dark, forbidding figure with a gun, a long grey coat and hat like Death’s hood, has shucked off the sou’wester and transmogrified back to her usual incarnation. The baby is crawling on the grass, knees wet with rain, the bloom of an iris clutched in his fist, chattering to himself in a satisfied, guttural growl.

  It’s as if I’ve stepped into another time frame entirely, as if I’m in one of those folk tales where you think you’ve been asleep for an hour or so but you wake to find you’ve been away a lifetime, that all your loved ones and everything you’ve ever known are dead and gone. Did I really just walk in from the other side of the house or did I fall asleep for a hundred years?

  I shake off this notion. The gun business needs to be dealt with right now. ‘Since when,’ I demand, ‘do we own a fire-arm?’

  My wife raises her head and meets my eye with a challenged, flinty look, the skipping rope coming to a stop in her hand. ‘We don’t,’ she says. ‘It’s mine.’

  A typical parry from her. She appears to answer the question without answering it at all. She picks on the element that isn’t the subject of the question. The essence of sidestepping.

  I rally. I’ve had more than enough practice. ‘Since when do you own a firearm?’

  She shrugs a shoulder, bare, I notice, and tanned to a soft gold, bisected by a thin white strap. I feel a momentary automatic mobilisation deep inside my underwear – strange how this doesn’t change with age for men, that we’re all of us but a membrane away from our inner teenage selves – but I pull my attention back to the discussion. She’s not going to get away with this.

  ‘Since now,’ she says.

  ‘What’s a fire arm?’ my daughter asks, splitting the word in two, her small, heart-shaped face tilted up to look at her mother.

  ‘It’s an Americanism,’ my wife says. ‘It means “gun”.’

  ‘Oh, the gun,’ says my sweet Marithe, six years old, equal parts pixie, angel and sylph. She turns to me. ‘Father Christmas brought Donal a new one so he said Maman could have his old one.’

  This utterance renders me, for a moment, speechless. Donal is an ill-scented homunculus who farms the land further down the valley. He – and his wife, I’d imagine – has what you might call a problem with anger management. Somewhat trigger-happy, Donal. He shoots everything on sight: squirrels, rabbits, foxes, hill-walkers (just kidding).

  ‘What is going on?’ I say. ‘You’re keeping a firearm in the house and –’

  ‘Gun, Daddy. Say gun.’

  ‘– a gun, without telling me? Without discussing it with me? Don’t you see how dangerous that is? What if one of the children—’

  My wife turns, her hem swishing through the wet grass. ‘Isn’t it nearly time to leave for your train?’

  I sit behind the wheel of the car, one hand on the ignition, the cigarette from earlier gripped between my lips. I am searching my pocket for an elusive lighter or box of matches. I’m determined to smoke this cigarette at some point, before the strike of noon. I limit myself to three a day and, boy, do I need them.

  I am also shouting at the top of my voice. There’s something about living in the middle of nowhere that invites this indulgence.

  ‘Come on!’ I yell, secretly admiring the volume I can produce, the way it echoes around the mountain’s lower reaches. ‘I’m going to miss my train!’

  Marithe appears unaware of the commotion, which is commendable in one way and irksome in another. She has a tennis ball or similar in a sock and is standing with her back against the wall of the house, counting (in Irish, I notice, with a ripple of surprise). With each number – aon, dó, trí, ceathair – she thwacks the socked ball off the wall, dangerously close to her body. I watch, while shouting some more: she’s pretty good at it. I catch myself wondering where she learnt this game. Not to mention the Irish. She is home-schooled by her mother, as was her elder brother, until he rebelled and enlisted himself (with my clandestine help) at a boarding-school in England.

&
nbsp; My schedule is such that I often spend the working week in Belfast, coming back to this corner of Donegal at weekends. I teach a course in linguistics at the university, coaching undergraduates to break up what they hear around them, to question the way sentences are constructed, the manner in which words are used, and to make a stab at guessing why. I’ve always concentrated my research on the way languages evolve. I’m not one of those traditionalists who lament and breast-beat about how grammar is deteriorating, how semantic standards are slipping. No, I like to embrace the idea of change.

  Because of this, within the extremely narrow field of academic linguistics, I retain an aura of the maverick. Not much of an accolade but there you are. If you’ve ever listened to a radio programme about neologisms or grammatical shifts or the way teenagers usurp and appropriate terms for their own, often subversive use, it will probably have been me who was wheeled in to say that change is good, elasticity is to be embraced.

  I once said this in passing to my mother-in-law and she held me for a moment in her imperious, mascaraed gaze and said, in her flawless Parisian English, ‘Ah, but no, I would not have heard you because I always switch off the radio if I hear an American. I simply cannot listen to that accent.’

  Accent aside, I am due, in several hours, to deliver a lecture on pidgins and creoles, based around a single sentence. If I miss this train, there isn’t another that will get me there in time. There will be no lecture, no pidgins, no creoles, but instead a group of undergraduates who will never be enlightened as to the fascinating, complex, linguistic genealogy of the sentence: ‘Him thief she mango.’

  I am also, after the lecture, due to catch a flight to the States. After extensive transatlantic pressure from my sisters, and against my better judgement, I am going over for my father’s ninetieth birthday party. What kind of a party may be had at the age of ninety remains to be seen, but I’m anticipating a lot of paper plates, potato salad, tepid beer, and everyone trying to ignore the fact that the celebrant himself is scowling and grumbling in a corner. My sisters have been saying that our father could shuffle off his mortal coil at any time, and they know that he and I haven’t always seen eye to eye (to put it mildly), but if I don’t come soon I will regret it for the rest of my life, blah, blah. Listen, I tell them, the man walks two miles every day, eats enough pulled pork to depopulate New York State of pigs, and he certainly doesn’t sound infirm if you get him on the phone: never does he find himself at a loss when pointing out my shortcomings and misjudgements. Plus, with regard to his much-vaunted potential death, if you ask me, the man never had a pulse in the first place.