The Red House

5: Tuesday

Louisa had woken just after two. Halfway along the landing a sliver of light vanished from between the floorboards. Or was it her imagination? She waited, listening. Nothing. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep if she didn’t check, and there was no way she was going to wake Richard, not now, so she made her way downstairs, the oak creaking under her feet. Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, more alive then he ever was during the day, black table, black sideboard, the glowing grey circles of the plates on the dresser, as if a whispered conversation had been interrupted. The cry of a bird outside. She stepped into the kitchen and saw a silhouetted figure in the shadows at the far end. Jesus H. Christ. She flipped the light to find Angela standing beside the fridge, eating a bowl of Frosties, an open bag of caster sugar on the chopping board.

I didn’t want to wake anyone.

Louisa could see now that the shabbiness was symptomatic of a bigger problem.

Comfort eating, said Angela.

You scared me rigid.

I was embarrassed. Angela put the bowl down delicately, as if she were stepping away from an angry dog. So I turned the light out.

Angela…? Was she sleepwalking?

I’ve been feeling a little unsettled. Something oddly formal about this. I had another child. Before Daisy. Her name was Karen. She was stillborn.

Louisa was sympathetic to friends who were depressed but this was something stranger and more worrying.

It’s her birthday on Thursday, said Angela. She’ll be eighteen. Would have been eighteen. She rolled and crimped the top of the sugar. I’m going back to bed now. She walked carefully round Louisa and out of the kitchen.

In other circumstances Louisa would have washed the abandoned bowl but she couldn’t dismiss the idea that it was charmed in some dark way. She waited for the muffled clunk of a door overhead then followed Angela back upstairs, turning the lights on as she went so that there was no darkness at her back.

♦

That’s wonderful. Richard had approached so quietly and Melissa had been so absorbed in her drawing that she didn’t hear him till he was standing behind her. I didn’t know you could draw so well.

I am a woman of many mysteries, Richard. She turned and saw that he’d just returned from a run. Are those new shoes?

♦

They meet you at the other end, said Alex, and drive you back to your car.

I’ll come, said Benjy. Canoeing is cool.

Which meant that Dominic had to come, too, for Health and Safety reasons.

Count me in, said Louisa, because last night’s anger had softened into a sense of superiority. Richard was normal, and she had been released from a childish respect she should never have felt in the first place.

Alex was running his hand slowly over the map, as if he could feel the texture of the land under his fingers. Contour, castle, cutting. We can stop for lunch at the Boat Inn, Whitney.

Angela?

You must be joking. She was ferrying a bouquet of dirty coffee mugs to the kitchen. Drop me in Hay. I’ll get some stuff for supper. She caught Louisa’s eye and looked away.

Louisa wondered if she should tell Dominic. Or Richard. Did Angela need help or was it a secret they should keep between themselves?

We’ll stay here, said Daisy.

You go and do boy things, said Melissa.

You two sound as if you have a secret plan, said Dominic.

That’s for us to know, said Melissa, and for you to find out.

♦

Richard swilled the pan, flipped the brush over and used the wedged rear to scrape the cooked egg off the pitted aluminium base. They were experiencing a minor difficulty and he was making a hash of it, that was all. He rinsed the little tattered rags of cooked egg into the sink where they collected in the poker wheel over the plughole. He lifted it free and banged it clean on the edge of the bin. He’d run several hundred metres up the road that morning then been forced to walk, having underestimated the incline and overestimated his fitness. Ashamed of returning to the house, he had walked up to Red Darren where he sat half appreciating the view and half pretending to appreciate it and being horribly aware of the stupidity of this combination. He squeezed a worm of lemon washing-up liquid onto the pan and waited for the water to run hot. He remembered the first time they had made love, the bulge of flesh above her waistband, plump and creaturely, the little fold where the curve of her bottom met the top of her thighs, the way she lay propped on her elbows afterwards like a teenager making a phone call. He moved the brush in swift circles and zigzags and figures of eight, each calligraphic figure swiftly overwritten by the next. Those images. Two days ago they’d been a treasury of golden coins through which he could run his fingers, but now? Of course I love you. At this precise moment he felt only a dirty panicked entanglement.

Dominic appeared in the doorway. Ready to rumble.

He dried his hands. Two minutes.

♦

The Mercedes pulls away and the sun is out. Angela climbs the steps to the ugly block that contains the tourist information office and the public toilets. A goth girl with Halloween hair and a pierced lip is pushing a young man in a wheelchair. Cerebral palsy, perhaps? I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet. One of her mother’s gems. But in what kind of bizarre accident did you lose your feet? She’d never thought about that. Theo with Down’s, the cheeriest kid in Year 8. So you couldn’t assume anything. Though God knows how he’d cope when the hormones and the tribal stuff kicked in. Some ghastly special school, no doubt. She was trying hard not to think about the encounter in the kitchen. Handing Louisa so much ammunition in one go. The crazy lady with the imaginary daughter. She is going to buy some books. The Yellow Sun thing still unread at the bottom of her case. Hasn’t read a book properly for months, come to think of it. She remembers being ten years old, jammed into that triangular recess behind the sofa with a tattered paperback. The Log of the Ark. My Name Is David. Stig of the Dump.

♦

You have to wear this by law, young man. Mike handed Benjy a lifejacket of tatty orange rubber. Wiry and suntanned, workboots, ponytail. And I strongly suggest that the rest of you wear these. He took four more from the back of the Land Rover. But as long as they’re in the boat when you drown I’m in the clear, legally. He put his hands on his hips. No swimming from the boat. No extra passengers. No alcohol. Give me a call half an hour before you need picking up. If I hear nothing by three I put out an APB. The mobile rang in his back pocket. God bless you and all who sail in you. He extracted the phone. Brian. What can I do you for?

Benjy put the lifejacket over his head. It smelt of mildew and the air inside a balloon. Richard dragged the green Osprey into the shallows, Alex the Appalachian. I’ll take Benjy. In truth he wanted to take Louisa, but he could still prove himself by paddling faster than the two men paddling together.

Dominic chucked the map into the boat. It was like a greasy-spoon menu. Water had seeped under a corner of the dog-eared laminate, blurring the ink. He turned to Louisa. Willing to place your life in the hands of two rank amateurs?

She stepped in. A disbelieving wobble then she was airborne. Waterborne. Holding her breath slightly. The faint tremor of magic. Like climbing into a loft, or vaulting the orchard wall.

Water loosening something in all of them. Jacques Cousteau. The Man from Atlantis. The twang and clatter of the diving board on its rusted roller.

Louisa is lying in the paddling pool at Mandy’s house. Compared to the balcony Mandy’s garden feels like a country park. She is seven years old and there is just enough water to lift her clear of the bottom. If she squints a little she can no longer see the pine tree or the roof of the chapel or the pink starfish on the pool’s rim. Then she waits…and waits…and finally it happens. She floats free, neither her head nor her feet touching the plastic. The world has let her go and she is flying up into that burning edgeless blue.

♦

It’s so boring. Melissa blew a smoke ring. So dreadfully boring.

Daisy stood demurely with her hands crossed in front of her. Surely, madam…But she couldn’t think of what to say.

You have to say, ‘My lady’. Melissa fixed her with an icy look.

My lady.

Melissa took another sip of Richard’s brandy. I was so very dreadfully bored yesterday that I ordered the stable boy to pleasure me in the rose garden.

Daisy burst out laughing. You’ve got this out of a book or something.

The icy stare again. You have to do this properly. It was the exercise they’d done at school. Because there was no way she was going to be blind or deaf or limping. Carriage wheels on the gravel. Pok…Pok…The gamekeeper shooting rabbits.

Was it satisfactory, my lady? Because Daisy was good at this game, too.

I’m afraid not. She turned and held Daisy’s eye. He whacked my bottom and shouted, ‘Tally-ho.’

There was an ecstasy in not laughing, like stubbing your toe and closing your eyes and letting the pain rise and die away. But it was Melissa who choked first, dropping her cigarette and rolling sideways onto the bench. It was like being with Lauren, but different, Melissa’s self-sufficiency, not quite knowing the rules, seduction almost, just a hint of danger.

Melissa sat up. OK, now I really am dreadfully bored, darling. She handed Daisy the last few dregs of the brandy. Let’s walk up that hill over there.

Wow, said Daisy. You’re really getting into this whole countryside thing.

I am a woman of many mysteries.

♦

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white…Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack… Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages…the hatcheries of the moon…the earth in my father’s mouth…

♦

They were on a ferry. Richard was eight or so. He has no memory of the location, only that it was a chain-link ferry and this seemed extraordinary, the idea of being guided by underwater machinery. Rusted metal, sheer bulk and sea spray. He can’t see his father but he knows he is there because of that radiation that throws all his needles to the right.

He has three photographs in a tattered brown envelope in the bottom drawer of his desk. He should have brought them along to show Angela. His father leaning against the bonnet of the Hillman Avenger, his father pushing a wheelbarrow in which both he and Angela are sitting, his father on a beach with a concrete pillbox in the dunes behind his right shoulder as if he is posing during a lull in the D-Day landings. Sideburns, burly arms in rolled-up sleeves, a cigarette always. Richard remembers the camera’s soft brown leather case, the rough suede of the inner surface, the saddle smell.

In spite of everything he had been rather proud of having a father who died prematurely, because all the best adventures happened to orphans, though he can think of no incidents from his childhood which might count as adventures per se. He told other boys at school that his father had been a soldier, that he was a spy, that he had a false passport, that he had killed a man in Russia. He remembers a conversation with the headmaster. If this becomes a habit you will find yourself in great difficulty later in life. The only moment he had ever felt genuine shame. Aftershocks every time he remembers, even now. It never occurred to him to tell anyone what was happening to his mother. It would be different nowadays, of course. Taken into care, possibly, which was an astonishing thought.

There was a gull. Was this part of the same memory? It landed on his head and he screamed and his father was laughing in spite of his tears. The scratches bled and scabbed and for days he kept finding crumbly nuggets of dried blood in his hair.

♦

Benjy is trailing his hand in the water, watching the glitter and flex of the light, the silky fold in front of his fingers. He wonders if there’s anything down there that might bite his fingers, a pike perhaps, or a crayfish, but it is a small fear and he’s learning to be brave.

When he was six he had an imaginary friend, Timmy, who had shaggy blond hair and a Yorkshire accent and the sandals Benjy coveted in Clarks with green lights that lit up when you stamped. He was over-sensitive, which annoyed Benjy sometimes, though at others Benjy liked having someone he could take care of. Because adults forgot how porous that border was, the ease with which you could summon monsters, and find treasure in any basement. Besides, adults talked to themselves. Was that any more rational? And on the glacier, when the ends of your fingers are black and your companions are gone into the howling dark? You open your eyes and see to your surprise that there is a person sitting calmly at the other end of the tent. They seem familiar, but this is such a long way from anywhere. You know your brain is starved of sugar and oxygen. You know your hold on reality is slipping. But that green duffel coat. You thought they’d gone away, but you realise now that they have been waiting patiently through all these years for the moment when you needed them again.

XIX

i went out for a walk

under the canopy of high trees

and waited upon the firemakers

restlessness

uncertainty

ice dissolves in the ponds

that warm wind rising

it begins

the savannah bubbles and overflows

60 million stars babbling in unknown tongues

gooseberry wild plum peppermint

every cell on fire

hoops and carols and coloured eggshells

the raven stiff-legged dancing

and the hatcheries of the moon

blown open

How sad they must be, those only children. Growing up in a house of adults, outnumbered, outgunned, none of that unbridled silliness, no jokes that can be repeated a hundred times, no one to sing with, no one to fight with, no one to be the prince, to be the slave. But siblings can be cruel, and companionship refused is worse than loneliness, and you could cast your eye over any playground and not tell who comes from a brood of seven or one. But later, when parents fall from grace and become ordinary messed-up human beings and turn slowly from carers into people who must be cared for in their turn, who then will share those growing frustrations and pore over the million petty details of that long-shared soap opera that means nothing to others? And when they are finally gone, who will turn to you and say, Yes, I remember the red rocking horse…Yes, I remember the imaginary bed under the hawthorn tree.

♦

A torrent after winter rains but quiet now, central shallows and the banks hidden under chestnut, hazel and sycamore. Pontfaen. The salmon catch a fraction of what it once was (a fifty-one-pounder at Bigsweir in ’62 but less than a thousand every season now). Otters and pine martens. Pipistrelle and noctule bats sleeping in ancient beeches. Cabalva Stud (Cabalva Sorcerer, 1995, £ 3,000, honest, eager to please, big scopy jump). The ghosts of Bill Clinton and Queen Noor. Flat stones down the centre of the river so that if the level were just right you could skip across the water like Puck (Richard and Dominic run aground twice). The Black Mountains a smoky blue in the day’s haze. Rhydspence. A moss-greened hull upended against a tiny shed. The five arches of the toll bridge at Whitney-on-Wye. White railings at the top, twice washed away and rebuilt. 10^p for motorbikes, 50^p for cars. Inexplicably, the sound of a flute from somewhere nearby. The Church of Saints Peter and Paul. The Boat Inn. Scampi, shepherd’s pie…

♦

Dominic looked at the map. There was a road half a mile away. It seemed impossible. The swill and chatter of water, those little birds darting in and out of the greenery overhanging the banks. How many more worlds were hiding round the corner and over the hill? He remembered the big ash on the wasteground behind the junior school, climbing up into that plump crook where the trunk split, sitting there for hours with a Wagon Wheel and a Fanta, the world going about its business below.

Up at the prow Richard had fallen into a steady rhythm that calmed him somewhat, bears in cages and so forth, though people lived entire lives with this level of anxiety, not even pathological, just part of the human condition. Alex was up ahead quite clearly revelling in his superior maritime skills. Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song…With falling oars they kept the time…Of course the one thing he missed since marrying Louisa was that solitary hour each day, a place of comfort and safety in which he returned to himself, Monteverdi or Bach in the background usually, turning over the day’s events in his mind, or more often thinking absolutely nothing. He wished he had kept the flat or bought himself a smaller one nearer the hospital, though the former would have been wasteful and the latter an insult to Louisa. Nor would she have understood. She liked company, she liked noise, she liked knowing someone else was in the house. He turned and smiled at her and she returned something that was neither quite a smile nor a scowl.

Louisa turned to Dominic. My go.

The boat swayed precipitously as they swapped positions. She sat on the little bench in the bow. This was more like it. Bows and arrows and dens and scrumping, the childhood she once dreamt of having, like Richard’s childhood, except not like Richard’s because his childhood wasn’t like that, was it, as she regularly had to remind herself. Incidentally…

What? said Dominic.

Last night. She wouldn’t mention the cereal or the sleepwalking or the turning out of the kitchen light. She said something about Karen. A baby called Karen. Your daughter. Was baby the right word? Was daughter the right word?

She’s having a rather difficult time, said Dominic.

But this was eighteen years ago.

I’m afraid so.

Something dismissive about his tone, and for the first time since they had arrived she felt a kind of sisterhood with Angela. Men are from Mars. All that stuff. She’d come on holiday expecting to be a spectator, to cook and help out and be good company while Richard got to know his family. But they were her family too, weren’t they, in the same way that Melissa was his family. Somehow she had never seen it this way.

There’s a dead fish, shouted Benjy excitedly. They waited and, sure enough, it floated past, huge and silvered, milky eye skyward.

Overhearing their conversation, Richard realised too late why Angela had asked him about stillborn children. He felt bad for not having pressed her further, and with this guilt came a longing for that armchair, the solitude, the empty mind.

♦

What Angela finds is not My Name Is David or The Log of the Ark but The Knights of King Arthur, a book her mother had been given when she was a child and which she in turn gave to Angela when Angela was eight or nine. The memory is so strong that when she finds the words To Kathleen from Pam, Christmas 1941 written in crabbed fountain pen on the endpaper she feels a sense of real grievance and trespass. 40^p. She’ll buy it and read it as a kind of penance.

♦

Scampi, shepherd’s pie, a stuffed pike in a glass case, polished copper bedwarmers.

You should try it sometime, said Alex. Waking up under canvas.

If you built a log fire and gave me a bottle of whisky, maybe, said Louisa. And some very thick socks.

So, said Dominic, where would we end up if we just carried on paddling?

Hospital, said Alex.

Richard could see that he was flirting with Louisa, but he had no idea how to stop it without causing grave offence, possibly to everyone around the table. He held up a spoonful of crumble. This is surprisingly good. His marriage to Jennifer had been a contract with explicit and renegotiable terms. He was belatedly realising how uncommon this was. There was an art to marriage, which depended not just on skills and rules but something more nebulous. That image of the gull and his father laughing. Why did it trouble him so much?

♦

The path was not as clear on the ground as it was on the map, the mud was surprisingly deep in places and Melissa wasn’t really getting into the countryside thing after all. I am going to get an apartment in Chelsea and the only time I am ever going to look at a field is from the window of a fucking plane.

They crossed the little stream and worked their way up the hill and were nearly at the road when Melissa slipped and spun and landed on her arse with such perfect comedy timing that Daisy laughed out loud. She offered Melissa her hand but Melissa grabbed it and yanked and Daisy yelped and found herself lying on her back next to Melissa staring into a canopy of horse chestnut leaves with damp seeping into her knickers. She imagined grabbing Melissa and rolling over, wrestling, like she might have done with Benjy.

Sod this for a game of soldiers. I’m heading back.

Ten more minutes. Daisy got to her feet. We’re nearly there.

I need a hot shower.

Come on, said Daisy, you can cope with a wet arse. She began walking up to the fence and when she opened the gate onto the road she turned briefly and saw that Melissa was following and it gave her a pleasure she hadn’t felt all week.

♦

Queen Guinevere lay idly in bed dreaming beautiful dreams. The sunny morning hours were slipping away, but she was so happy in dreamland that she did not remember that her little maid had called her long ago.

But the queen’s dreams came to an end at last, and all at once she remembered that this was the morning she had promised to go to the hunt with King Arthur.

♦

He walked to the edge of the car park to listen to Amy’s message. Dom. It’s me. She was crying. I’m really sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t ring but Andrew’s been taken into hospital with pneumonia and I’m frightened, Dom. If you get a chance, can you ring me, please?

Episode 39 of the Mother and Son show. He deleted the message. The truth was that she disgusted him, something moist and wretched about her, a child at forty-two. He couldn’t remember her once expressing real unadulterated joy, only that desperate hunger when they made love (fill me up…push it right inside me…) which was thrilling at first but which now sounded like a need to be crushed out or used up. If it wasn’t him it would be someone else. Deep down she wanted things to go wrong. If she was happy she would have to face up to all those things she hadn’t done, the law degree, the second child, New Zealand, those precious hypothetical ambitions stolen from her by a string of bad men. He loved his family. Why had he risked losing them for this?

He heard a rumbling clang and turned to see Mike’s Transit coming into the pub car park, the trailer bouncing and yawing behind it. He turned the phone off and slipped it into his back pocket.

♦

Angela assumed at first that her mother had started drinking again, the dirt and clutter, the mood swings, but there were no bottles and no alcohol on her breath. She might have realised earlier but their conversations had never been intimate and you didn’t ask someone to name their grandchildren or do their five times table as her GP finally did that freakish Saturday morning, the cloud so low and thick it felt like an eclipse. She expected him to set in train some boilerplate process, health visitor, social worker, nursing assistant, leading gradually towards residential care, but they stepped out into a biblical downpour with nothing more than an invitation to return when things got worse, and in two hours her mother’s terrified incomprehension had become a vicious anger at everyone who was trying to interfere in her life, Angela, the doctor, the neighbours.

She rang Richard who said there was nothing they could do. Something would happen, an accident, a stroke, something financial, something legal, and the decision would be taken out of their hands. She thought, You selfish bastard, but he was right. An icy pavement outside Sainsbury’s. Lucy at school said she should sue and Angela laughed and said, I should pay them. Hospital threw her mother completely. Who are all these people? Her mind held together only by the scaffolding of a familiar house and a routine she had followed for ten years. Two weeks later she was in Meadowfields. Beckett meets Bosch, said Dominic, and it was true, there really was screaming every time they visited. A couple of months later she was transferred to Acorn House. Grassy quadrangle, actual menu, two lounges, one without television. The previous occupant of her room had left a framed photograph of a cocker spaniel on the bedside table. Mum was insistent that it had been their dog which had recently passed away, though they had never had a dog and she was never quite able to remember its name.

♦

They crossed the little car park and began climbing the Cat’s Back, a rising ridge of grass and gorse and mud. Sweaty now, Melissa had tied her shirt and Puffa jacket around her waist and was walking in a blue vest, her freckled shoulders bare. Daisy was embarrassed to find herself in second place. You do secret sport, don’t you?

Hockey. Melissa’s enjoyment had caught her by surprise. Middle-aged people did this stuff, but she felt like a kid again. The mud, the effort, Daisy’s uncomplicated company, except that she’d never been that kid, had she, because Mum needed counselling if you spilt coffee on the carpet. Hence Dad fucking off, possibly.

The spine of the hill flattened out, the grass and mud giving way to a rough path weaving its way around little rocky outcrops, the slopes on both sides falling away so steeply that you could glance up and think for a moment that you were flying.

OK, said Melissa. This is as far as I’m going. End of argument.

They turned round, breathing heavily. All that wheeling space. The cars were Dinky Toys. Miniature sheep and miniature cows. There’s the house, said Daisy, pointing. She imagined opening the hinged front so you could rearrange the furniture and the model people.

You win, said Melissa. This is pretty cool.

♦

Angela sat in Shepherd’s eating a bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce. She hadn’t pictured herself alone at a table when she was at the counter and only when she sat down did she see herself from the point of view of customers at the other tables. Discomfort eating. She’d bought Notes on a Scandal but it refused to hold her attention. There was an exhibition of framed watercolours hung around the room which looked as if they’d been done by a talented child, a poppy field, a lighthouse. It was her, wasn’t it, the person who couldn’t be alone, who married the first man who came along because they were scared of going back to an empty house. At home she moaned constantly about the chores she had to do because everyone else did them badly or not at all. For once I’d just like to put my feet up. But she was doing that right now and hated it. She looked up at the clock. Twelve minutes past two and sixteen seconds, and seventeen seconds, and eighteen seconds. She was in Maths with Mr Alnwick again, each minute a rock to be broken.

She picked up the bag of books she’d bought for Benjy, to replace that terrifying Two Worlds thing, and opened the Tintin.

Blue blistering barnacles…

What is it, Captain?

♦

We should be getting back. Melissa puts her hands on her knees, preparatory to standing.

Wait, says Daisy. She wants this moment to continue for ever. She turns and looks at Melissa. Those freckled shoulders, sweat cooling in the wind. She can see it all so clearly now and she is both surprised and relieved. Her whole life has been leading towards this moment. She has turned a final corner and seen her destination at long last. Is time slowing down or speeding up? She puts her hand on Melissa’s forearm. And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes. Like being on a rollercoaster, no way of getting off now. She puts her other hand around the back of Melissa’s neck and pulls her close. The barn roars in the night. Daisy kisses her, pushing her tongue into her mouth, but something is wrong because Melissa is shoving her away and shouting, What the fuck…? She’s on her feet now. Get off me, you fucking dyke.

No, says Daisy. I didn’t mean…

What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

I only…Crashing back into the bright light and the hard edges of the day.

Just…Melissa takes four steps down the hill, backwards, keeping her eyes on Daisy, as if she is holding a gun. Just…stay the fuck away from me, OK? She rips the shirt from round her waist and fumbles it on, covering her flesh as quickly as she can, then the Puffa jacket. You’re weird and your clothes are shit and the only reason I was even spending time with you was because it is so fucking boring here. She turns and strides away till she is swallowed by the curve of the hill.

Daisy sits rigid. For two, three, seconds everything is very clear and quiet, as if she has dropped a china plate on a tiled floor. If she stands very still and concentrates hard she will be able to find the matching fragments and put them all together again. She got carried away. For the briefest moment she lost any sense of where she stopped and Melissa began. When Melissa has calmed down she will be able to explain everything.

Then she realises that Melissa will tell Louisa and Richard, Louisa and Richard will tell Mum and Dad, Alex will find out, everyone at school will find out and they won’t understand that it was a mistake. Because it isn’t a china plate, it’s her life and there are too many fragments and they’re too tiny and they don’t match. A woman is standing in front of her wearing a blue cagoule. Are you all right? Daisy stands and turns and runs, further up the ridge, away from the woman, away from Melissa, away from the car park, away from the house, hoping that if she runs far and fast enough she will find the edge of the world and the beginning of some other place where no one knows her and she can start all over again.

♦

Economics, History and Business Studies, says Alex.

Why History? asks Richard.

Because I like it, said Alex. And because I’m good at it.

Richard finds it reassuring, the swagger. It makes Alex seem like a boy again. Of course he’s flirting with Louisa. It’s only natural. Richard feels jealous, almost. Because he never had it, did he, the swagger. That sudden spurt of growth just after he arrived at university. Rugby, judo, 400 metres. Turning suddenly into a person that was never quite him, waking in the night sometimes, convinced that he was trapped in someone else’s life, heart pounding and throat tight till he turned on the lights and found the family photographs he kept in the back of the wardrobe like passports, for the route out, the route back.

Dominic is sitting up front with Mike. So, what’s it like living out here? Because he is still enchanted by the idea of the cottage and the garden and the job in the bookshop. Mike bridles slightly at the metropolitan presumption of out here so Dominic tries to be more conciliatory and asks how easy it is to make a living. Mike sucks his teeth and says he does a bit of tree surgery in the winter, and some other stuff, in a tone which suggests that the other stuff might not be legal.

So do you live up in them thar hills?

And freeze my bollocks off? They go over a bump and the trailer clanks and shakes. Got a flat in Abergavenny.

Dominic realises that he has misread the ponytail and the workboots. He isn’t Davy Crockett after all, just a chancer who props up a saloon bar and sells pills to bored kids on a Friday night.

Louisa is sitting next to Benjy. Did you enjoy that?

Enjoy what?

Did you enjoy the canoeing?

Yeh.

What did enjoy about it?

Just, you know… He shrugged. Being in a canoe.

You’re not very chatty today, are you?

No, not very.

Sorry, that was a mean thing to say.

It’s all right.

How hard it was to talk to children. They made no effort to ease your discomfort. But it was hard to talk to Melissa sometimes and at least Benjy wasn’t going to swear at her. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Don’t know.

Boys always wanted to be train drivers when I was little. What did girls always want? She can’t remember now. Married to one of the Bay City Rollers, possibly.

Some boys in my class want to be footballers, but I’m not very good at football.

What are you good at?

He shrugs. Perhaps he wants to be left alone. It’s because I don’t know you very well.

What is?

Not being chatty. Even though I know you’re meant to be my aunt.

The word moves her in a way that catches her by surprise.

Is it OK to be quiet?

Yes, she says, it’s OK to be quiet.

♦

Melissa wanted to walk back via the road but she had absolutely no idea where the road went so she had to retrace the path back through all the fucking mud. Christ. She wanted to ring someone at home. Tell them about Dyke Girl. Except they’d laugh, because if she told them about the kiss they’d be, like, How did you let it happen? And if she didn’t tell them about the kiss, then what was she being so horrified about? Just some girl fancying her. Which sounded like showing off. Because the truth was that it wasn’t the kiss that made her angry, it was the way she’d reacted. She was cool with people being gay, even getting married and having kids, and she rather liked the idea of another girl fancying her as long as the girl wasn’t ugly. So she kept rerunning the moment in her head except this time she gently pushed Daisy away and said, Hey, slow down, I’m not into that kind of thing. But she’d said all that other stuff, and now they were going to have to spend the next three days in the same house. Jesus, this fucking mud.

♦

Daisy couldn’t run any further. She came to a halt and fell to her knees, lungs heaving. She had sinned. She had wanted everything Melissa had. Now she was being punished with exquisite accuracy, that envy pushed to its poisonous extremity. For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me. People would be disgusted. She would be mocked and reviled. She looked around. Bare and bleak, no fields visible now, just high empty moorland, the further hills black under the massive off-white sky. Where was her coat? You could imagine hell being like this. Not the fire, nor the press of devils, but a freezing unpeopled nowhere, the heart desperate for warmth and companionship, and the mind saying, Do not be fooled, this is not a place.

You’re weird and your clothes are shit. Melissa, of all people. So vain, so nasty. But the fault was hers alone, Melissa merely an instrument. She had never pretended to be anything but what she was. It was Daisy who had deceived herself.

The image of Melissa telling Alex. She rolled over onto the wet grass, curling up, as if she had been punched in the abdomen. Oh please, God, help me. She was crying now, but God wasn’t listening, He had never been listening, because He knew, didn’t He? It was why the Holy Spirit hadn’t come. He had peered into her soul from the very first and seen the pretence and the false humility.

She was lying in muddy water. Cursed is the ground. Thorns and thistles and coats of skins. She rocked back and forth. She imagined stepping off a tall building or standing in front of an oncoming train, head bowed, eyes closed, and it was the sweet pull of these images which revealed her cowardice. She had to remember. The hurt was her only way out of this place, the long walk through the flames.

The taste of Melissa’s mouth, the freckles. Diamonds and pearls. How cruel time was. The future turning into the past, the things you’ve done becoming your testimony for ever. I think being yourself is punishment enough. Where had she heard those words before?

♦

Angela carries the shopping into the kitchen and starts to put everything away, sausages, cheese straws, pears. The house is silent. Melissa and Daisy must be out somewhere. £26 for the taxi, tiny round man, Punjabi Sikh. She didn’t catch his name. Talked about his sister being married to a drug addict, how he and his brothers were forced to take him in hand. She didn’t press him for details. Plastic Taj Mahal swinging on the mirror, Bon Jovi on the radio. Half an hour later and the explorers return. Benjy runs for the living room, shouting, Can I watch a video? and vanishes before anyone can countermand him. So, says Angela, did you reach the source of the Nile? Richard laughs. Not at the speed we were going. The blare of the Robots theme tune. Benjy, can you shut that door, please? Alex picks up the paper. Audrey Williamson has died. Silver in the 200 yards at the London Olympics, 1948. Melissa sweeps into the room, cleansed and fragrant. Where’s Daisy? asks Dominic. Oh, says Melissa breezily. I think she went out for a walk.

♦

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

William the Bastard forcing Harold to swear over the bones of St Jerome, the Church of Rome rent asunder by the King’s Great Matter, the Twin Towers folding into smoke. Religion fuelling the turns and reverses of human history, or so it seems, but twist them all to catch a different light and those same passionate beliefs seem no more than banners thrown up to hide the usual engines of greed and fear. And in our single lives? Those smaller turns and reverses? Is it religion which trammels and frees, which gives or withholds hope? Or are these, too, those old base motives dressed up for a Sunday morning? Are they reasons or excuses?

♦

Benjy waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark then approached slowly and quietly, because rats could run up your trouser leg, which was why thatchers tied string round their ankles. Except that it was not a rat, nor a mouse, but something halfway between the two, with a rounder body and a long pointed nose. Some kind of shrew perhaps. It was clearly sick and not going to run anywhere fast, so he crouched down and was about to reach out and touch it when he saw that several flies were sitting on its fur. It moved again, just a twitch really. There was blood coming out of its mouth and out of its bottom. It was going to die if he didn’t do something, but if he went away some other animal might find it and kill it. A fox maybe, or a crow. He had to be quick. Mum…? Dad…?

Richard appeared in the hallway. What’s the matter, young man?

I…The words got jumbled in his mouth.

OK. Slow down and tell me. I’m sure we can sort the problem out.

He didn’t like being upset in front of someone who wasn’t proper family but Richard made him feel safe, like a good teacher. There’s an animal. An animal in the shed.

What kind of animal? Richard assumed it would be an errant cow or somesuch.

I don’t know, said Benjy, calmer now that an adult was sharing the responsibility. It’s like a mouse.

And you’re scared of it? He nearly laughed but there was something desperate about Benjamin’s reaction that warned him off.

It’s really ill.

Come on, then. He patted his nephew’s shoulder and they headed outside, and his sorrow at never having been a father was briefly equal to Benjy’s sorrow for the shrew. They had reached the woodshed. You show me.

Benjy was afraid of getting close this time. The fact that Richard was a doctor made him think of rabies. Richard squatted by the little body. It was still moving. Richard took a piece of kindling from the woodpile and poked the creature. Benjy wanted to say, Don’t hurt it, please, but you weren’t allowed to tell a doctor what to do.

Rat poison, said Richard, standing. Internal bleeding. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for the little chap now.

Benjy felt dizzy. He couldn’t see where it had come from but there was suddenly a spade in Richard’s hands. Benjy tried to shout No! but it was like being in space or underwater. Richard held the spade above the animal, aiming carefully. Benjy shut his eyes and Richard brought it down as hard as he could. There was a smacking crunch as the spade dug into the gravelly earth of the shed floor. Benjy opened his eyes, he couldn’t stop himself. The animal was in two bloody halves and its insides were leaking out. Blood and tiny broken purple bags.

Richard scooped everything up on the spade and said, Let’s give this little man a proper burial.

But there were tears streaming down Benjamin’s face and he was running away, weeping.

Benjamin…?

♦

A car was pulling up outside the house. Dominic had started to worry about Daisy and for the few seconds it took to get to the window he wondered if it was the police with bad news, but it was a green Renault and Daisy was getting out of the passenger door. He stepped outside to see the car turning and driving away.

Daisy? Her trousers were crusty with dry mud.

She looked at him. Had Melissa said anything?

Are you all right?

He didn’t know, did he. She was safe for the moment. I got lost. A white lie and therefore not a real lie. This man and woman gave me a lift. They were really kind.

You look freezing.

I lost my coat. I’m sorry. Because they’d have to pay for another.

Let’s get you inside.

The truth was that they had given her more than a lift, though precisely what she didn’t know, something between helping her to her feet and saving her life. There was a blankness, like having a general anaesthetic, coming round with no sense of time having passed. She thought for a second or two that she was holding an elderly man’s hand to stop him falling, then she realised that it was the other way round.

They paused in the hallway. Where was Melissa? I need to be on my own for a bit.

Can I bring you anything?

I’ll be fine.

Daisy?

She paused and turned and almost broke.

I’m glad you’re safe, said Dominic. Don’t worry about the coat.

Thanks. She turned and carried on up to the landing.

But he knew somehow that she was neither back nor safe. He wondered whether to tell Angela but didn’t quite trust her. He’d keep it a secret, just Daisy and him. He’d go up later and check how she was.

♦

Angela poured boiling water over the dried mushrooms. A smell like unwashed bodies she always thought, but it was the simplest vegetarian recipe she knew. Made her want to roast a pig’s head for Melissa, all glossy crackling and an apple in the mouth. Make Benjy sad, though. Earlier she had told Dominic that she wanted to go home, and thought for a moment that he might actually agree but he had slipped into the grating paternal role he’d been adopting more and more over the last few days. You’ll regret it…insult to Richard…hang on in there…Him being right made it worse, of course. Sherry, tomato purée. Risotto Londis.

Louisa came into the kitchen, placed a glass of red wine in front of her and retreated to the window seat. Some change in her aura that Angela couldn’t pinpoint. Sorry about last night.

Last night? Angela had suppressed the memory so well that it took a few seconds to unearth. I think it’s me who should apologise.

Or how about neither of us apologises?

A sense that Louisa had, what? jumped ship? changed sides? A little warmer than before. Angela poured the rice into the pan and stirred it.

Dominic said you were having a difficult time.

Are you having one, too? asked Angela, because she didn’t want to talk about herself, or Karen.

Is it obvious?

You had some kind of argument at the priory.

I am a woman with a past. She wanted a cigarette. Eleven months without, and her hands still felt empty sometimes. Richard would prefer that I was a blushing bride.

Ah. Angela felt a burst of queasiness. Richard and sex. Then it all seemed very funny. Poor Richard. She added the liquid to the rice.

In what way?

He’s getting it from all sides. Me giving him a hard time for not looking after Mum… She drank some of her wine.

Louisa wasn’t laughing. He’s facing an inquiry at work.

Dominic mentioned something.

This girl ended up in a wheelchair after an operation went wrong. Richard X-rayed her. The CEO sent her a less-than-fulsome letter of apology, the family have taken it to a solicitor and now the surgeon’s passing the buck and trying to dump him in the shit.

What might happen to him if he’s found guilty?

He’s hoping it never comes to court, said Louisa. But in the last couple of days…People make mistakes, every day, even honest people.

Angela found herself wanting to defend Richard despite knowing none of the details, blood trumping everything. She thought carefully about where to position her sympathy. I hope it works out OK. For both of you. Her hands were slippery so she handed the sun-dried tomatoes to Louisa who twisted the jar open with a satisfying pop. They were silent for several minutes. She had a genetic deformity. Karen. She wouldn’t…The foetus wasn’t viable. I have this photo album in my head. The life she never had. I can see the pictures so clearly.

That chilly subterranean hum. And tomorrow…?

I’m frightened. She turned the heat down.

What of?

That I might turn a corner and see her standing there. Melissa’s voice a couple of rooms away, briefly audible above the Handel. Or the opposite. That she’ll disappear completely. You know. Eighteen. Leaving home and so on. And I don’t know which is worse. A longer silence.

Well, that’s cheered us both up.

It has actually, said Angela. The gentlest bubbling now. She put the lid on the pot, leaving a gap so that it didn’t boil over. I don’t talk about it much. Which is not good, perhaps. But cheered up wasn’t the right phrase. She felt…engaged. Talking to Louisa, finally something to grip in this great sliding nothing of this forced leisure.

Louisa got up and walked over and laid her hand on Angela’s shoulder and left it there for three or four seconds. A low-rent laying on of hands. I’ll go and warn the troops. Twenty minutes, right?

♦

Alex had no real interest in the arts. He liked some music, a few paintings and the occasional poem, but it all came down to taste, and taste seemed like a pretty pointless thing to teach at school. Languages were important, but you could move to Italy or Poland and be halfway fluent in a couple of months. As for maths and science, he always imagined that if he needed these skills later in life he would hire someone who had them. But history…It had been sheer pleasure at first, plastic knights and horses giving way to Airfix models of Avro Lancasters giving way to TV documentaries about Galileo and Hadrian’s Wall. Something murder mystery about it, answers you could dig out if you knew where to look, lost in attics, buried in fields, Roman roads across a map, obscene carvings under pews. He had a Penguin Atlas of Early European History that he loved. The ebb and flow of Celts and Saxons and Vikings. Something solid with something fluid moving over it, which seemed like a good model for pretty much everything, stuff you could rely on interacting with stuff you couldn’t. Facts and opinions. Feelings and thoughts. Because he still didn’t really understand that this was only one way of looking at the world, and that there were people who looked around and saw no fixed landscape whatsoever, only an ebb and flow over which they had no control.

♦

Dominic put the bowl of risotto on the chair and sat on the edge of Daisy’s bed. She was still wearing her jeans. Pink mud on the blanket. Her eyes were damp and sore. I told everyone you were ill.

Thanks.

But you’re not ill, are you?

Dad…

What’s wrong?

Daisy closed her eyes.

If there’s anything I can do…

There’s nothing you can do.

I’m worried about you.

She mustn’t lie. That was how she’d got into trouble in the first place. I did something bad.

I can’t imagine you doing something bad. It was true. Are we talking bad in the eyes of the church?

Please…

Has this got something to do with Melissa?

Something about the way she curled up tighter, trying to move further away from him. It has, hasn’t it?

Real fear now. Don’t say anything to her. You have to promise me. She could ask this favour, couldn’t she, because it wasn’t being selfish. It was protecting others.

If Melissa has hurt you in any way…

It’s not her fault. Please, Dad, you have to promise me.

He wanted to lift her up and hug her like he did when she was tiny. He put his hand under her face and she rested the weight of her head on his palm. I would never do anything to hurt you. You understand that, don’t you? Because he couldn’t make the promise, because if Melissa had hurt Daisy he wouldn’t let her leave this house unpunished. Have some food, OK?

I’ll try. The thought of eating made her feel sick.

I’ll bring you a cup of tea later on.

♦

Richard raised his glass at one end of the table and caught the attention of Angela sitting at the other end. A superlative risotto.

You’re welcome. She turned to Dominic. I should go up and see Daisy.

She’s all right. She just wants to be on her own.

I thought you said she was ill.

This was a ridiculous game. She asked me to say she was ill. She’s feeling really upset about something.

About what?

I honestly don’t know.

I’ll go up and see her after supper, said Angela.

Angela…

So, we’re going to leave her up there on her own?

No.

She’s my daughter.

Melissa glanced over at Mum and Richard. They looked as if they were in different rooms. Richard had found out, hadn’t he? She just knew. Still that child’s shameless radar for the weak point. Blood in the water. She wondered how it would pan out.

Do you believe in reincarnation? asked Benjy.

Course not, said Alex. I mean, can you remember who you were last time round?

It was the wrong answer. He needed Alex to say, Yes, yes, of course I believe in reincarnation. Because Benjy wanted to come back as a panda or a gorilla, but he would agree to come back as anything if he could only be assured that he was coming back. He didn’t want to think about what had happened to the shrew, what had happened for Granny, so he stopped listening to what Alex was saying and wrote his name using risotto to stop himself crying.

Melissa brought in the two plates on which the treacle pudding bowls sat upturned. She placed them in the middle of the table and removed the bowls like a conjurer revealing rabbits.

Skinny jeans, for example, Louisa said to Alex. I just don’t get it. There, you see? That’s the middle-aged frump talking.

But I think you look really sexy, said Alex.

She looked at him, assessing whether this was just politeness.

Was Louisa doing it to spite him? Richard wondered. He forced himself to turn to Angela so that he did not have to watch the spectacle. I have an apology to make.

For what? said Angela.

Last night. You asked me a medical question. Should he explain how he knew? You never told me that you’d had a miscarriage.

Why should I have? Did that sound harsh?

Objection sustained. He took a spoonful of the treacle pudding. It was oddly dry. He rather wished he could mash it up with the vanilla ice cream like Benjy was doing. But it’s still a problem for you.

I talked to Louisa earlier. I’m not sure I can talk about it twice in one day.

I understand.

He and Louisa weren’t talking, were they? Angela could sense his sadness at being cut out of the loop.

He changed the subject. I’m assuming you don’t have any photographs of Dad.

I don’t have photographs of anything. Mum threw them all away. Or maybe they got carted off with everything else. I’m afraid I didn’t make a huge effort to hang on to stuff.

I have three.

Three what?

Photographs of Dad, said Richard. I’m no longer entirely sure how they came into my possession. I thought you might be interested. I should have brought them with me.

A little explosion of, what? excitement? pleasure? fear? She is trying to imagine what the pictures might be like but panicking because she is unable to do this. Stems and slime, that empty doorway.

Remind me and I’ll post them to you next week. To be honest, I’m not terribly fond of them, but I’ve always been chary of throwing them away. This fear that he would be angry with me. Absurd, isn’t it?

Throwing them away? Without telling her? She gets to her feet. I’ve got to go and check on Daisy. See how she’s doing.

♦

Dirty orange street lights in the not-yet-dawn as she walks across the wet black tarmac of the Wheelan Centre car park. Wet air and the clang of lockers, the flash of a blue verruca sock, pound in the slot, slam shut, keyband twisted out. She walks through the footbath into the hard white light of the pool, pushing her hair up into the rubber swimhat and snapping it down over her ears. The shriek and whistle of that ringing echo. She spits into her goggles and licks the rubber seal before flipping the elastic over the back of her head and sitting the lenses just right over her eyes. She stands and stretches beside the stack of red polystyrene floats, arms over her head, fingers laced, palms towards the ceiling. The black second hand ticks on the big white clock.

Getting in is like sliding feet first through a ring of cold. She dips down into the blue silence, looking up the pool to where the deep end vanishes in the chlorine blur, the air a ceiling of mercury studded with the red balls of the lane ropes. Someone kicks off beside her, trailing bubbles like silver coins. She stands and re-emerges into the noisy air. Sanderson is on the side wearing the world’s worst shell suit, mauve and blueberry, bright yellow whistle. People, people. He claps and the building claps back. Eight lengths warm-up. Let’s wake those legs and arms.

She pushes off, that first glide like slow flight, four butterfly leg kicks, then she breaks the surface, right arm arcing over, breathing behind that little bow wave the head makes. One, two, left. One, two, right. She tumbles at the end, flipping the world like a pancake. And Lauren is swimming beside her, that long stroke, the dolphin ease of it. They tumble together and swim in perfect unison. She is a bird of prey now, swimming up into the blue distance of the valley. The green of Lauren’s Speedo. That tiny tractor. Tumble, push, glide. Four lengths, five. Still the muffled secrecy of underwater but they’re no longer swimming, or are they? The air is warm and she can hear traffic. Or surf, maybe? The smell of cocoa butter suncream. They’re on an island. Kings and their judgement far away. Lauren leans back and snaps her swimhat off, shaking her long red hair free. Freckles on her shoulder and blue veins so clear under the skin that you could trace them with your finger.

Hey. Lauren turns and holds her eye. Crazy hazy Daisy.

♦

Alex is alone in the kitchen standing over the kettle, waiting for it to boil, when Richard comes in and walks over. Richard is never easy to read but Alex knows instantly from his expression what he wants to talk about and how he feels about it. He halts and pauses briefly, like a conductor, baton suspended before the downstroke. Stop flirting with my wife.

I’m not flirting.

Don’t lie to me. Richard had expected Alex to crumble. He is surprised by his own anger.

I didn’t mean… He had been concentrating on Louisa. I think you’re really sexy. It never occurred to him that Richard might have been listening.

I don’t give a damn what you meant or didn’t mean. This in a forced whisper so that no one hears it in the dining room. Richard is frightening himself but there is a relief too which is blissful. You’re flirting with my wife and you’re doing it in front of everyone and you’re making me look like an idiot.

Richard’s hand is raised and for a second or two neither of them is sure whether this will become physical. Then Richard lowers his hand, takes a step backwards and breathes deeply several times. He looks like someone watching a horror film and perhaps this is precisely what he is seeing in his mind’s eye. He turns and leaves the room.

Alex is shaking. The memory of Callum’s leg being broken rears up. Show some fucking respect. The fear that Richard is going to come back into the kitchen carrying that length of scaffolding. Richard the doctor, his uncle, the admirable man. Fixed landscape turning into ebb and flow. Fear turning to anger. He marches out of the kitchen. If he bumps into Richard he really will punch him in the face and fuck the consequences, but only Mum and Dad are sitting in the dining room and Dad says, Alex…? and the ordinariness of this is enough to restore a kind of sanity. Yeh. Sorry. I’m fine. He goes out of the front door, closes it behind him and punches the stone wall hard so that all the knuckles on his right hand bleed.

♦

When Angela got upstairs Daisy was already asleep, still clothed, white socks with grubby brown soles, holding a teddy bear Angela hadn’t seen for a long time. The Art of Daily Prayer and Neutrogena hand cream on the bedside table. Let’s get you into bed or you’ll wake up freezing in the middle of the night. She eased the duvet from beneath Daisy’s hips then turned her onto her back so she could unbutton her dirty jeans and slide them off, like she was five again. Flu, chickenpox. Daisy half woke and said something Angela couldn’t quite make out. Almost done. She flipped the duvet back over Daisy and straightened it. There. Daisy turned to face the wall. Angela sat on the chair opposite. She was ill, that was all. Dominic was being over-dramatic, playing the old game, concocting a story that threw a little charmed circle around the two of them. That bear. Harry? Henry? She had to sew a leg back on after it was torn off in a fight, by Alex, presumably.

Was she warming to Louisa? Or did she just like taking sides? Was that little confession about Karen simply the price she had to pay to show her loyalty? It was a fault of hers, she knew, comfort in conflict, black and white, us and them, knowing where one stood, none of that muddy moral ambiguity. The relief at work when Helen finally slapped that boy in her class after years of just being a crap teacher.

Laughter downstairs and the chime of crockery. A brief Christmas feeling then a memory of sitting in her bedroom listening to Mum shouting in the lounge. Except it was Dad shouting, wasn’t it, his voice suddenly so clear after all these years. Why didn’t he come upstairs and say hello? Why was he so angry? She wanted to run downstairs and have him turn and see her and break into that big smile and sweep her off her feet.

Then she was back in the present again, Daisy’s hands moving as if she were fending someone off in a dream. Angela got to her feet and stood beside the bed. She touched the side of Daisy’s head and waited till she was calm again, then retucked the duvet and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her.

♦

He was sitting on the edge of the bed. She was standing leaning against the chest of drawers with her arms folded. This is not about you, Richard. She closed her eyes to regather her thoughts. I don’t know who I am, sometimes. I’m not sure I’ve ever known. I’ve tried so hard to please other people, my parents, Craig, Melissa, you. I listen to your music, I go to your plays, I watch your films. And it’s not your fault. I chose to be the person who fits in with your life.

Are you saying you don’t want to be married to me?

I’m saying…What was she saying? She was saying, Let me think. She was saying, Give me space. Just for once she wasn’t rushing to reassure him. Perhaps he was right, perhaps she didn’t want to be married to him. She wanted to turn this extraordinary idea over in her hand, like a shell she’d found on the beach, run her fingers over it, knowing that she might very well simply put it down again. I’m saying I need to get some sleep. I’m saying we both need to get some sleep.