The Banker's Niece 3: New flat, new band

Autumn 1978

Ridge Farm was five miles from Exeter, which seemed a terrifyingly long way to Jane, who’d spent all three of her years at the University of Devon living in the city, but nothing to Rick who when they first got together in January had been renting a farm cottage ten miles from Exeter and two miles from the nearest village.

    In any case they didn’t have a choice. Mrs Bell was the only landlady who didn’t put the phone down on Jane when discovering that she and Rick weren’t married. She hadn’t even asked.

     

They drove out on Saturday in Rick’s blue wood-trimmed Mini - the Mini Clubman he called it with his technician's precision - to take a look at the place. They found the turning – eventually - but as they lurched up the rutted dirt track Jane could see Rick frowning.

    ‘This’ll play hell with the suspension,’ he said.

   She didn’t know what would happen to them if Rick didn’t like the place.

    They’d moved Rick out of his cottage at the beginning of March as his housemates had all gone for one reason or another and he was paying four people’s rent. He’d then camped at Jane’s student house which wasn’t ideal for lots of reasons, the main one being that she’d had a sort of thing with Gordon, one of the other residents.

    The tenancy of that house finished in June at the end of the university term and after that, for the last three months, they’d squatted in the box-room of a house rented by Wendy with whom Rick had had a short romance. So that wasn’t ideal either.

    Most of their belongings and Rick’s cat, Cat, were distributed around the houses of friends.

    This was the point at which she could have asked her father for help. There was probably enough money floating around – whether in her name or not (he never told her) - for her and Rick to put down at least the deposit on a house and get a mortgage. Not that her father held with mortgages (they were for the poor, like hire purchase) and not that she’d ever asked him for money or ever would now, least of all for a project that involved Rick.   

    Rick brightened however as they reached the top of the track and turned into a cobbled farmyard with stone barns in varying states of disrepair. Jane could see him already eyeing up a semi-enclosed space in the lower half of one of them. She knew what he was thinking. Garage. Workshop. Somewhere to store Stuff. He’d missed that since moving out of his cottage, which like this place had been surrounded by near-derelict farm buildings.

    Mrs Bell came out of the farmhouse to greet them and Jane warmed to her at once. Youngish with untidy blonde hair and a harassed expression, she was wearing muddy wellies and a navy woollen jumper full of holes.

    ‘This way,’ she said, leading them up some wooden steps on the outside of the barn Rick had noticed. Jane glanced at him hoping they could exchange a thumbs-up or something but he seemed to be deliberately looking away. 

    The flat was on one floor with windows in two directions. Jane could see the farmyard on one side and a field of sheep the other. Painted white, and open plan except for the bathroom and two curtained-off bedrooms, it was furnished in a mixture of modern pine and antique mahogany. It was more space than either of them had ever rented.

    ‘I think we like it,’ said Jane, looking at Rick for reassurance.

    He gave a shrug.

    Was that all he could say?

    

As usual Jane was on her own, because Rick as usual had retired to the smaller of the curtained-off bedrooms – the Music Room as it was now called. She could hear him singing and playing the guitar.

    She put down her fountain pen and pulled the wheeled calor-gas heater closer to her legs. As they’d discovered soon after they moved in and the weather turned, the flat was freezing. The one heater was all they had but luckily Rick didn’t seem to notice the cold so Jane could trawl it around with her like a dog.

    She was sitting at their mahogany dining-table writing to all the publishers listed in the local Yellow Pages. She hadn’t known where to start looking for a job but she liked reading and she now - by some fluke - had an arts degree (French and Spanish), and she had all that secretarial experience from those two years she worked in London (a time best forgotten, in her opinion) so maybe she and publishing would be mutually compatible. She didn’t have a vocation. She never had. That was the trouble.

    She would much rather be spending the evening curled up on the sofa with Rick but time was short as the waitressing job that had kept her going over the summer was coming to an end and anyway Rick didn’t seem to want to curl up on the sofa with her any more.

    Apart from the snatches of music, all she could hear was the rumble of the fire and the baaing of the sheep outside. Even though she’d been brought up in the country, in Kent, she didn’t remember it ever being as quiet and lonely as this.

    She could have gone to see Rick in the Music Room but she didn’t because, firstly, there was no space. Rick had filled it with his equipment and Jane would know all about that because she’d helped him hump it up the stairs.

    One radio (‘an AM/FM tuner’ in Rick-speak). Six wooden boxes of assorted sizes (‘speakers’). An ordinary guitar (a 'twelve-string acoustic’). An electric guitar (made by Rick in his teens from an article in Practical Electronics magazine). One small black box (an 'amp’, also made by Rick). Two record players (‘decks’). One tape recorder (a 'tape deck’). One cassette player. Two hundred records.

    The second reason she didn’t go into the Music Room was because whenever she did Rick would stop what he was doing and look guilty, which made her feel even worse. When did they start having secrets from each other? Why couldn’t he tell her what was going on?

    The first thing he’d shared with her was his music. He used to put on record after record and ask her what she thought of it. Luckily their tastes were pretty similar. Both liked rock, blues and some classical. Neither liked jazz, Elvis or the Rolling Stones. Rick liked folk whereas Jane preferred country but that didn’t matter – they were happy to learn from each other. The only real sticking point was Rick’s three absolute favourites, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, all three of which Jane thought were way over the top. ‘It’s the only thing wrong with you,’ he used to joke. Or perhaps it wasn’t a joke.

The curtains drew back with a rattle that made Jane jump and Rick appeared. In spite of the cold, he was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt, black with a red dragon on the front. His wavy brown hair was getting longer, she noticed. It was shoulder-length when she met him. Now it had reached his chest and hung in curtains around his face, and for a moment she didn’t recognise him.

    He stood facing her, legs apart.

    ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

    Jane nodded. She couldn’t speak. Her throat had locked. Whatever he wanted she would go along with it. Of course she would. Why did he have to look so defiant?

    ‘I bumped into Dougie in Exeter a few days ago,’ he said cautiously, as if softening whatever blow was about to fall.

    Jane nodded again.

    She knew about Dougie even though she’d never met him as he now worked in Bristol. He and Rick had been best friends at South Molton grammar school. They’d formed a duo and called themselves the Devonians and played folk-rock all over the county, with Rick as singer and guitarist and Dougie on drums.

    ‘He’s back from Bristol and working as a car salesman,’ Rick continued. ‘Hates it.’

    Rick wasn’t too keen on his job either. He was an electronics technician in a science department at the university. It wasn’t the work itself that got him down; it was the hierarchy and the stupid rules and the stuffy academics who (like Jane’s parents) thought that people who worked with their hands were inferior to people who worked with their heads. As if technicians didn’t use their heads as well as their hands. Which, if anything as far as Jane could work out, made them superior.

    ‘And we were thinking,’ said Rick, ‘why didn’t we start a band again? Get some others to join us, take it seriously. Really try and make a go of it this time.’

    So that was it. It wasn’t so bad after all.

    Was it?

    Maybe now things could go back to the way they’d been before the summer.

For Chapter 4, click here