Spare

We spent those last days of March 2020 exploring, unpacking. Trying to get our bearings. Halls, wardrobes, bedrooms, there seemed no end of spaces to discover, and niches for Archie to hide.

Meg introduced him to everything. Look at this statue! Look at this fountain! Look at these hummingbirds in the garden!

In the front hall was a painting he found especially interesting. He started every day locked on to it. A scene from ancient Rome. We asked each other why.

No clue.

Within a week Tyler’s house felt like home. Archie took his first steps in the garden a couple of months later, at the height of the global pandemic lockdown. We clapped, hugged him, cheered. I thought, for a moment, how nice it would be to share the news with Grandpa or Uncle Willy.

Not long after those first steps Archie went marching up to his favorite painting in the front hall. He stared at it, made a gurgle of recognition.

Meg leaned in for a closer look.

She noticed, for the first time, a nameplate on the frame.

Goddess of the hunt. Diana.

When we told Tyler, he said he hadn’t known. He’d forgotten the painting was even there.

He said: Gives me chills.

Us too.

81.

Late at night, with everyone asleep, I’d walk the house, checking the doors and windows. Then I’d sit on the balcony or the edge of the garden and roll a joint.

The house looked down onto a valley, across a hillside thick with frogs. I’d listen to their late-night song, smell the flower-scented air. The frogs, the smells, the trees, the big starry sky, it all brought me back to Botswana.

But maybe it’s not just the flora and fauna, I thought.

Maybe it’s more the feeling of safety. Of life.

We were able to get a lot of work done. And we had a lot of work to do. We launched a foundation, I reconnected with my contacts in world conservation. Things were getting under control…and then the press somehow learned we were at Tyler’s. It had taken six weeks exactly, same as Canada. Suddenly there were drones overhead, paps across the street. Paps across the valley.

They cut the fence.

We patched the fence.

We stopped venturing outside. The garden was in full view of the paps.

Next came the helicopters.

Sadly, we were going to have to flee. We’d need to find somewhere new, and soon, and that would mean paying for our own security. I went back to my notebooks, started contacting security firms again. Meg and I sat down to work out exactly how much security we could afford, and how much house. Exactly then, while we were revising our budget, word came down: Pa was cutting me off.

I recognized the absurdity, a man in his mid-thirties being financially cut off by his father. But Pa wasn’t merely my father, he was my boss, my banker, my comptroller, keeper of the purse strings throughout my adult life. Cutting me off therefore meant firing me, without redundancy pay, and casting me into the void after a lifetime of service. More, after a lifetime of rendering me otherwise unemployable.

I felt fatted for the slaughter. Suckled like a veal calf. I’d never asked to be financially dependent on Pa. I’d been forced into this surreal state, this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground. (Once, at Eton, on a theater trip.) Sponge, the papers called me. But there’s a big difference between being a sponge and being prohibited from learning independence. After decades of being rigorously and systematically infantilized, I was now abruptly abandoned, and mocked for being immature? For not standing on my own two feet?

The question of how to pay for a home and security kept Meg and me awake at nights. We could always spend some of my inheritance from Mummy, we said, but that felt like a last resort. We saw that money as belonging to Archie. And his sibling.

It was then that we learned Meg was pregnant.

82.

We found a place. Priced at a steep discount. Just up the coast, outside Santa Barbara. Lots of room, large gardens, a climbing frame—even a pond with koi carp.

The koi were stressed, the estate agent warned.

So are we. We’ll all get along famously.

No, the agent explained, the koi need very particular care. You’ll have to hire a koi guy.

Uh-huh. And where does one find a koi guy?

The agent wasn’t sure.

We laughed. First-world problems.

We took a tour. The place was a dream. We asked Tyler to look at it too, and he said: Buy it. So we pulled together a down-payment, took out a mortgage, and in July 2020 we moved in.

The move itself required only a couple of hours. Everything we owned fitted into thirteen suitcases. That first night we had a quiet drink in celebration, roasted a chicken, went to bed early.

All was well, we said.

And yet Meg was still under loads of stress.