Copyright © Foxglove Entertainments Ltd 1979

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

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 in Great Britain in 1979 by

William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

This eBook edition first published by Tinder Press in 2023

An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

‘The Man I Love’, music by George Gershwin, words

by Ira Gershwin © 1924 Harms Inc. (Warner Bros.)

Reproduced by kind permission of Chappell & Co. Ltd

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 8993 3

Author photograph © Alex Ramsay

Design by Patrick Insole and all illustrations are images from shutterstock

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About the Author

Deborah Moggach, OBE, is a British novelist and an award-winning screenwriter. She has written twenty novels, including Tulip Fever, These Foolish Things (which became the bestselling novel and film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), The Carer and The Black Dress, as well as the short story collection Fool for Love. She lives in London.

Praise for Deborah Moggach’s novels

‘Full of warmth and humour, as well as blistering truths’ Daily Mirror

‘Moggach is at the height of her powers’ Sunday Times

‘By turns compelling and surprising – her nuanced characterisations make the subject matter really come alive’ Observer

‘Behind the normality of people’s lives there often lies an extraordinary story. It’s this that Moggach tells with insight, acute observation of character and mordant humour’ The Spectator

‘Moggach addresses an all too common nightmare with ruthless honesty and sublime wit’ Kate Saunders

By Deborah Moggach

You Must Be Sisters

Close To Home

A Quiet Drink

Hot Water Man

Porky

To Have and To Hold

Driving in the Dark

Stolen

The Stand-In

Smile (short stories)

The Ex-Wives

Changing Babies (short stories)

Seesaw

In the Dark

Tulip Fever

Final Demand

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (previously These Foolish Things)

Heartbreak Hotel

Something to Hide

The Carer

The Black Dress

Fool for Love

About the Book

Kate Cooper has been married to James for six years, and is trying very hard to be the model wife while he enjoys his high-flying career, but there’s always something she feels she doesn’t get quite right, whether it’s her inability to remove their toddler son’s pencil squiggles from the freshly painted walls, to the grubby button holes on her new blouse. Then she meets aspiring novelist Sam, her next door neighbour, a man who shouldn’t, but does, have time on his hands. And he makes her laugh. But what about his wife, and their daughter Marion, dreaming her way through adolescence?

Close To Home is a novel of one hot summer, of passion and dislocation, and of lives converging in unexpected ways.

Introduction

My first two novels were pretty autobiographical – You Must Be Sisters (also reissued) and this one, Close To Home. It was written after the long, hot summer of 1976, during which the British were quite transformed. Day after day the sun beat down, the drought cracked the earth, it was like living in a foreign land. There was a magical, Midsummer Night’s Dream sense of liberation in the air. We behaved out of character. We became impulsive and continental. At night, those of us with gardens dragged our bedding onto the lawn and slept outside. And the next morning, and indeed every day, the sun shone as if it would shine forever.

I was living in the house depicted in the novel, with my then-husband and two tiny children. It was a tall, narrow, early Georgian house on a busy road in Camden Town, but out the back it had the most wonderful long garden, rustling and mysterious, with sycamore trees at the end. It was a golden age. We knew all the neighbours, and children climbed over the walls to play with each other. We were all very close. Anyone housebound with two babies knows how the world shrinks so that it’s almost impossible to imagine a life beyond one’s own tiny domain, or indeed the life one had beforehand, so this was my only source of inspiration and I decided to mine it.

My son is now in his mid-forties but his toddler life is there in Joe’s; so is my daughter Lottie’s, who was then a baby. No wonder this book is close to my heart. That time is over all too soon. Despite its suffocating boredoms and frustrations, its resentments and loss of identity, I remember those as the most intensely joyous years of my life, and this novel is a sort of diary of my years simply because I couldn’t write about anything else, and I wanted to set it in print for ever.

It’s quaint to read it now, with its outdated references, but its feelings ring true. Though its heroine Kate might seem a creature of the 70s, ironing her husband’s shirts and servicing his needs, her feelings are the feelings of women everywhere, even now. And, to be fair, so are the feelings of her husband. Whatever our gender, we’re either imprisoned by our children, guilty of neglecting them for our work, or a volatile stew of the two. It’s a dilemma that will never go away.

The weirdest thing is how truly close to home this novel turned out to be. My husband, like James, travelled abroad for his work and was hardly ever at home. Kate’s mixed feelings about his brief visits are my own. So are her longings. My husband was an undemonstrative man and I hungered for someone who would chat to me and make me laugh. Sam is an invention, but he turned out to be only too prescient, for after the book was published I fell in love with a chatty man – shorter than me, Jewish, blissfully funny – and ran away with him.

To make things even stranger, when the novel was first published the jacket photo was shot in our street. It showed a blonde woman emerging from one front door and a man going into the neighbouring one, like figures in a Swiss clock. The man was wearing my husband’s dressing gown and the woman, a model, had arrived wearing the exact copy of a dress in my wardrobe, and smoked roll-ups like I did. Spooky or what? She was my Kate and yet so was I. Where did we begin and where did we end?

My subsequent novels have not been so autobiographical. Their narrators have been coach drivers, boozy old bearded actors, the proprietor of a boarding house in the First World War, a young wife in Vermeer’s Amsterdam . . . I’ve inhabited the most various cast of characters but in this novel I turned in on myself, because I simply couldn’t imagine any other life than the precious, wildly emotional, painful and joyous one I was living. Those of you who have experienced this might find that it is, indeed, close to home. Maybe too close for comfort.

Deborah Moggach, 2021

One

‘Sorry about this.’ Kate’s carry-cot bumped into someone’s legs. ‘It’s all the handles,’ she said, as a body pressed against the wall. Motherhood had turned her into a woman who was always apologizing.

Here in the ladies it should be better. Beyond the doors she could hear the loudspeaker booming. Flight arrivals, flight departures. Here, off stage, amongst these hygienic tiles one could draw breath. Fewer bodies to bump into; in this room of clicking powder compacts and small repairs one could relax. The carry-cot, resting amongst purely female legs, seemed less of an embarrassment.

Could even be an asset. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t he, and only four months?’ Women would bend down and inspect Ollie. ‘Isn’t he big,’ they would say, or ‘Isn’t he tiny.’ ‘He’s just like you,’ friends would declare, or ‘Isn’t he the picture of James.’ Baby comments, though kind, always struck Kate as arbitrary.

Today though, Ollie was grunting irritably. Today he would be. Squirmy he was, tetchy. A mottled leg had escaped from the blanket, it jerked up and down. In the mirror Kate could see, sitting in a chair, an attendant. She was wearing an orange sari covered in little sequins. Always characterful attendants at Heathrow; their strangeness never failed to startle her, like finding jewels in a fridge.

Ollie let out a yell. She could see his purple hands, fretful, clasping and unclasping themselves. Tax demands, union confrontations – his face wore its crumpled businessman’s look, comic on one so young. Kate tried to meet the attendant’s eye in a rueful, us-women look, but the Indian lady stared at the white wall. Kate gave up and turned back to the mirror. She was wearing a new blouse. Already its buttonholes were grubby. Hungry baby, was there no end to the buttoning and unbuttoning? She wondered if James would notice the buttonholes; he was the sort who would. And today she was trying to look cool, intriguing, a wife to be reassessed. When he returned from Brussels she liked to present him with a small shock, a new appraisal of herself and their marriage. This time it was a crisp-bloused, efficient look, most unlike her. For a moment standing at Terminal 2 Arrivals she would be no longer the messy wife but the woman he had once married, the secretary with her own extension on the office phone and her wallet full of Luncheon Vouchers. Except, she thought, staggering towards the swinging doors, secretaries don’t lug carry-cots. As a general apology to James, to the legs she had bumped, to something superior about that Indian lady, she clattered 10ps into the saucer.

‘Flight SN 607 from Brussels . . .’ Kate liked standing here at Arrivals, sharing the return of strangers, watching the smudges behind the frosted doors marked HM Customs: No Entry. Then the doors swinging open and faces appearing with that momentary hesitation, that expectant look that they wear even though they know they are not going to be met. It touched her, that. Some of them wheeled luggage; some held children; some – must be IB 894 from Palma – had suntans. Before the doors swung open each of the taller smudges could be James. She tensed.

She always tensed. Silly, after six years of marriage, but waiting made her nervous. Each time James returned she had to get used to him again. Two weeks away in the corridors of the Common Market returned him to her changed – a tall man with a slimline briefcase, a sleek airport stranger. Do all wives feel this? she thought, stiffening as each smudge darkened and the doors swung open. These occasions made her shy.

‘Yes, shy,’ she said, as he walked up to her. ‘I shouldn’t be.’

He put down his briefcase and smiled; she embraced him and smelt his aftershave, the James that commerce had given her. He picked up the carry-cot and they walked towards the Exit. She looked down at his polished shoes walking beside her own and was flattered, as always, by his obedient homing, by everyone’s obedient homing. All those businessmen, all those thundering networks of buses and taxis and planes, all to return to one particular front door, one bed. She looked at James: was she worth it, so thoroughly explored, so grubby-buttonholed? So many other front doors, other beds.

She did not tell him these thoughts; he would consider them fey. Instead she asked:

‘Lots of meetings? How did the agriculture committee go?’

She used to ask ‘Did you have a nice time?’ and silly questions like that; the messy wife might ask them but for the moment she was trying not to be this particular person. For the same reason she refrained from asking him what he thought of her blouse. Why indeed should he notice that it was new?

‘Alitalia flight 232 from Naples . . .’

James’s answer was drowned by the loudspeaker.

‘L 07 Polish from Airlines Warsaw . . .’

Kate felt expanded. Naples . . . Warsaw . . . the airport made her feel larger; through its keyhole she peered beyond into space and distance. Coming from a house of children, of things pressed up close, needing her, it was a relief to wander through these polished halls that echoed with the names of far cities.

‘I shall carry your briefcase,’ she said.

As always, this expanded feeling lasted all the way back along the motorway and enabled her to converse with James about large, impersonal things. Ignoring the whimpers from the back seat, they talked in the way she suspected he would like them to talk more often in their married life: about politics, and the government’s attitude to the particular section of Britain’s EEC policy with which James was concerned. Ahead the wide motorway; on the horizon, glinting, the fins of planes. These drives home were drives through limbo, as yet uncluttered by the domesticity that lay ahead in the tall narrow house. Views were passed from Kate to James, from James to Kate, in the clear, courteous manner of two people who have just met at a cocktail party. There might be the occasional silence, but Kate knew better than to fill it with the blocked drain and collapsed TV aerial that James, all too soon, would discover for himself.

‘So that’s what the Dutch,’ he said, ‘are planning to do.’

‘But don’t the French object?’ She tilted her head intelligently.

He changed gear as they swung off the motorway. ‘The French can’t, can they; not the way things stand . . .’

As he answered she looked down at his trousered thigh. In its businessman’s charcoal flannel it looked the limb of an unknown man. There was no doubt that this was exciting; soon this unknown man would be taking her to bed. Nevertheless it also rebuffed; she found it disconcerting that six years of marriage and all her caresses could leave no visible change on a body which, like all men’s, remained his, complete and contained within itself in a way that hers, belly softened by childbearing, breasts achingly full, could never be.

‘And then,’ he went on, ‘we had to have another meeting about the tomatoes.’

‘Oh yes! Tell me about the tomatoes.’ Secretly she found the intricacies of EEC policies on the boring side; the mention of something as friendly and juicy as tomatoes always enlivened her. James’s job was concerned with marketing restrictions, how many Golden Delicious one should be allowed to pack into a box, how much water should be contained inside a chicken. Mention would be made of milligrams and cubic metres. In the more abstract parts of these conversations she had been known to drift off, only to be jolted into life by the sound of something homely like a plum.

‘And how’s Joe?’ asked James.

‘Strapping and busy. I left him at home. Marion from next door said she’d sit with him. Too bothering to bring him to the airport.’

‘Elly, Joe. Joe joggle the elly. Look.’

With one hand Marion was bouncing the rubber elephant up and down. With the other she was turning the pages of Honey. Each hand moved independently, like an automatic motor; she could run them both concurrently.

And she was thinking neither of Joe nor of Honey, with its printed confidences and glossy girls. Lying on the scratchy wool of the Coopers’ sitting-room rug, she was thinking about Ron.

‘A useful girl,’ said Kate. ‘That Marion.’

They were driving now through the London streets. Shiny in the sun, parked cars slid past the window. It was a bright Saturday in May, the pavements were crowded with shoppers. They drove down the Marylebone Road, nearing home.

They turned into the High Street. Passing the familiar shops, Tesco plastered with luminous offers, baskets of cut-price plastic sandals outside Philips Footwear, Kate experienced the draining away of that large, expanded feeling. She fell silent. Should she tell him about the aerial first, or wait until he turned on the TV and puzzled over the snowstorms? And what about the boiler?

‘Any catastrophes,’ asked James, ‘while I’ve been away?’

Only about fifty. ‘None,’ she replied, smiling at him, ‘that I can think of.’

‘Committees,’ he said. ‘All those committees. It’s nice to be home. To actually relax.’

When should she tell him about the drains? And Joe’s Biro squiggles: when would he notice those?

James said: ‘Every time one sets foot in Brussels it seems they’ve invented a new department. The paperwork!’

The thing about the Biro squiggles, as with most of Joe’s misdeeds, was less the damage in itself than the evidence it gave of her own neglect that must have led up to it. Sooner or later James would go into the sitting-room; sooner or later he would open his precious desk diary and find the scrawls – not, however, just on one page which could be excused, but on every single page from 21 May, at which he had left the diary open, to 31 December when it finished. What would he say, the rest of his year in confusion? His desk was sacrosanct; what a brain is to a body, his desk was to the house, and Joe was forbidden anywhere near its shiny mahogany surface.

‘One is fighting against chaos,’ said James. ‘Bumpf breeding bumpf.’

The fact that Joe had got all the way to December showed plain as plain that Kate had not been in the room at all – had actually been down in the kitchen, busy feeding Ollie with one arm, answering the telephone with the other and also deep in a particularly engrossing chapter of her library book where the husband was just climbing into bed with his au pair, an eighteen-year-old Nicaraguan nymphet. How could she move? And as usual, James’s exasperation with Joe would be as nothing compared to his unspoken disappointment with Kate, the neglectful mother. James was much more watchful with his babies. But then he could afford to be, couldn’t he? He was not with them all day.

They turned down towards Brinsley Street. It was an ordinary terraced street of four-storey houses, some neglected with yellowing lace curtains, some smartened up with Venetian blinds and William Morris prints. Though the fronts were unremarkable, the backs of the houses led into secret and surprisingly rural gardens, long and narrow and shadowed by sooty sycamores.

James parked outside number twenty-three. Kate realized that there was no longer any chance of his noticing her new blouse, for he was gazing past her with a frown.

‘Why are all the rubbish bags still out?’

‘Oh, some dustmen’s go-slow. They haven’t collected for two weeks.’ Seeing his continued frown, she added brightly: ‘Don’t you think it’s instructive? We can see what all our neighbours have been throwing away.’

He received this remark in the silence it deserved and started getting the things out of the car. At the same moment Ollie, who had been lulled asleep, woke with a yell. Kate bundled him out. It was true that the street did look messy with all its bulging bags and overflowing cardboard boxes, but why did James have to notice those before noticing either her new blouse or the row of red geraniums she had planted in their window box? Why the rubbish first?

But then he straightened up and smiled. ‘Never mind, it’s nice to be back.’ She smiled, warmly. It was, of course, nice. It was just that her pleasure at his homecomings was inclined to be mixed with anxieties, more and more of them lately. So often she was nervous of her husband.

Searching for the door keys, she whispered: ‘Look. Next door’s in full spate.’

James turned to look on the steps of number twenty-one, where a transparent rubbish bag bulged with paper. All of it was typewritten, most of it crossed out. It was well known that Samuel Green, their next door neighbour, was engaged on the definitive novel.

‘There seems an awful lot of it,’ said James. ‘Perhaps he’s given it up in despair.’

Kate laughed and squeezed his arm. They were confederates. Then he added: ‘Good thing too. Then perhaps he might exert himself to support his family.’

Kate let go of his arm then, as that sounded pompous. She could not bear him when he was like that.

They opened the front door. Kate wondered how Joe would greet him. She longed for him to totter forward crying ‘Daddy!’ But usually he just looked elaborately unconcerned and went on playing, though with more studied concentration. It took him a while to get used to his father after these absences.

Joe was sitting on the floor with Marion. He glanced up and clambered to his feet. Kate brightened. He went up to his father and pulled up his jumper. ‘Tummy,’ he said. He walked over to Kate and showed it to her, his proud pale globe.

‘He’s got a thing about it lately,’ Kate said. ‘He’s always showing it to people.’

James picked up Joe; Joe politely put his arms round James’s shoulders but looked across at Kate. Kate felt a pang; so many stages Joe passed through – tummy stages, other stages. So many of these stages his father missed.

She said: ‘When Joe shows it to him, the man at the dry cleaners . . .’

Her words trailed away for two reasons – the sudden thought that Marion must be paid, but how much? And the realization that James, the progenitor, had shared less in Joe’s current unveilings than the small bald man behind the counter of Sunlight Same Day Service.