Читать книгу The Australians' Brides - Lilian Darcy - Страница 9

“Mum’s giving the kids some lunch,” Callan reported. “I’ve told her you and I needed to talk.”

“Thanks. We do. I don’t want to keep you in the dark about what’s been going on.”

“Sit on the bench. No hurry. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“I’m fine. I can wait.”

He’d brought her out to the garden, and it was beautiful. She’d never realized herbs and vegetables could look so pretty. There were borders of rosemary and lavender and thyme, beds of young, fist-size lettuces set out in patterns of pale green alternating with dark greenish-red, orange-flowered marigolds like sentinels at the end of each row. Shade cloth stretched overhead protected some of the beds from the harshness of the midday sun, while brushwood screens kept out the dusty wind.

The soil looked rich and dark, nothing like the red- and ocher-hued earth of the surrounding country, so it must have been trucked in from elsewhere. Beyond the garden there was a chicken run, and she could see several rusty-brown and glossy black birds scratching happily, watched over by a magnificent rooster. Carly would love a newly-laid egg each morning.

Jac whooshed out a preparatory breath, knowing she couldn’t spend the next hour admiring plants and hens. “Where to begin,” she said.

“You had a bad divorce,” Callan prompted. “But I thought that was over. Property settlement, custody, all set.”

“So did I, but Kurt has other ideas. He wants Carly.” Did he really? She still wasn’t sure what game he was playing. “Or he wants to terrorize me with the idea that he wants Carly,” she revised. “Which is working, by the way. I’m terrorized. His actions have gone beyond industry power games.”

Kurt had always loved to play those, too.

“Yeah?” Callan studied her face for a moment with his piercing blue gaze, then seemed to realize it might be easier if they both looked away, that she wouldn’t want her emotions under a microscope while she talked. He picked up some bits of gravel from under the bench and started tossing them lazily, as if they both had all the time in the world for this. Somewhere overhead, a crow cawed.

“Can I copy you with the rock-throwing thing?” Jac asked, and he grinned and deposited half his handful into her open palm. They threw gravel together for a minute in silence before she could work out how to begin. Decided in the end just to tell the story as straight as she could. “Last week, a woman that Carly didn’t know, a complete stranger, tried to collect her from preschool. And she looked just like me.”

The memory was still very fresh, and the words came tumbling out as she told Callan the full story. She’d seen the woman herself. Hadn’t thought anything of it, had just idly registered that a slender female with long dark hair was getting into the same make, model and color of car as her own, fifty yards down the block from the preschool gate.

Maybe, yes, she’d had some idea in the back of her mind that Kurt himself might try to pick up Carly one day, even though he wasn’t supposed to and the preschool staff knew it. She’d started coming ten minutes earlier than usual because of her suspicion, but she hadn’t imagined a strategy as devious as this.

She had gone inside and found the head teacher, Helen Franz, sitting at her desk pale and shaking and unable to pick up the phone to call the police. The stranger had known Carly’s name, her best friend’s name, the teachers’ names.

“This woman, this … this … me look-alike, comes past Helen toward Carly,” Jac told Callan. “She says to Helen, ‘Hi, Mrs. Franz, I’m a touch early, I signed her out on my way through,’ and Helen says that’s fine—because, you know, I have been coming early, the past few weeks—and that Carly is right here. ‘Here’s your mom, honey.’ And she doesn’t really look closely at this woman, but she has no suspicions at all and she’s all set to let Carly go. That was what made Helen start shaking, afterward, when she realized what she’d almost done. I started shaking, too, as soon as she started telling me. So Helen’s actually ready to let Carly go. ‘That’s fine, Jacinda,’ she tells this woman. No suspicions.

“Except that Carly knows it’s not me. She won’t budge. Digs in her heels. Throws a tantrum, which isn’t like her. The woman says, ‘Sweetheart, you don’t have time to finish your game.’ And she has my mannerisms. My voice. Carly starts screaming. Helen comes closer to see what the problem is. Carly screams out, ‘That’s not my real mommy. It’s an alien!’ She’s terrified. Completely terrified. Partly because the deception is so neat and close. It would have been less frightening for her, I think, if the woman hadn’t looked anything like me at all.”

“I can understand that,” Callan muttered. He stretched his arm along the garden bench. He’d finished with the gravel. He looked skeptical, but interested. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s … yeah … scary if someone looks right and wrong at the same time. It really gets to you.”

“Meanwhile, Helen’s still one step behind, at this stage. She looks up to find the woman heading out of there, just quietly slipping away. But fast. As if she’s been given instructions to abort the mission the moment she’s seriously challenged. She had my style of sunglasses, an outfit like one of mine, my hairstyle. She was really well rehearsed. Coached, Callan.”

He looked at her, eyes narrowed in the bright light, and she saw the doubt still in place. Dropped her bits of gravel. Grabbed his arm with dusty fingers. “Yes, I know it sounds paranoid … crazy. But my ex-husband is a big-time TV producer. He has access to desperate actresses, expert makeup artists, wardrobe people, acting and movement coaches. He could pull it off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I can put you in touch with Helen Franz if you want to hear it from her. We never called the police, in the end, because nothing actually happened, but she wrote up a full report. There were two other teachers in the room who witnessed the whole thing from a distance. It did happen, Callan!”

“I—I guess I’m not doubting it. But who would have gone along with something like that? It was a kidnapping attempt!”

“Kurt wouldn’t have called it that when he hired the actress. He would have called it a reality TV show with hidden cameras, or a method-acting audition for a big movie role. He would have paid in five figures. And he’s Kurt Beale. So people listen. Desperate actresses sure listen! They listen to anything! And they believe him. And they do what he says. He has the power, he has the control. He loves to use it. He’s Kurt Beale,” she repeated.

“Yeah?” Callan said. Then he gave a slow grin. “Well, I’ve never heard of him.”

She closed her eyes. “I know. That’s exactly why I’m here.”

She told him about not being able to write anymore, about being scared the inspiration might never come back, about resigning from Heartbreak Hotel for Elaine’s sake, about fleeing to Sydney and getting all those hang-up calls at Lucy’s.

“And panicking,” she added. “I know I’m panicking. I do know it. Overreacting, obsessing over worst-case scenarios. Do you know what a curse it can be, a writer’s imagination? But there’s no place I can draw the line, Callan. If you seriously asked me, is Kurt capable of taking Carly and hiding her somewhere so I’d never see her again? Is he capable of stalking me in the entertainment industry so that I’ll never write again? Is he capable of murder, that kind of if-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-can awful thing that some men do? There’s no place I could draw the line and say, “No, I know Kurt, and I know he wouldn’t do that.” He could do it. Any of it. I know it.”

“Hey … hey.”

“Yeah, enough about me, right?” she tried to joke. “You look like you’re thinking six hundred thousand acres isn’t going to be big enough for both of us.”

“No, no, the opposite. I wanted to tell you that six hundred thousand acres is big. We’re isolated. You’re safe here. For—well, for—”

He wanted the bottom line. How long did she want to stay?

“A month, okay?” she told him quickly. “Our return flight is in a month. I’ll have something worked out by then.”

I’ll know if there’s a chance I can ever go back to writing.

I’ll decide on somewhere Carly and I can safely live. Texas, maybe. Vermont, or Maine. Somewhere like this, where there’s space and air, and where Kurt has no power.

I’ll have talked myself out of the panic attacks, and Carly won’t sleepwalk anymore.

“Carly sleepwalks,” she blurted out.

“Does she?”

“Yes, I should tell you, and the boys, and your mom. It started a couple of months ago, before we came to Sydney that first time. The doctor thought it might be the stress of the divorce and all the conflict, Kurt’s games. She doesn’t do it every night. Maybe once or twice a week.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, but it’s unpredictable, and she can get upset if she’s woken up in the wrong place or the wrong way. I’ve been sleeping pretty lightly, though, so I always hear her getting up. If she’s handled gently and not startled in any way, I can just lead her back to bed.”

“I can’t think how it would be a problem from our end. The boys are pretty sound sleepers. And Mum’s in the other house.”

“Yes, it’s probably fine, but I thought you should know.” They both sat silently for a moment, then she added, “You say Mum, not Mom.” She imitated the clipped sound of the word, compared to the longer American vowel.

“Yep. Short and sweet.”

“I like it. What should I call her, by the way, your mom?”

“Just Kerry.”

“And Carly?”

“I’d say keep on calling her Carly.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Might confuse her if you changed it to Goldilocks, at this stage.”

Jac laughed. “Well, Goldilocks is in fact her middle name, but I take your point.” The moment of silly humor was nice. Unexpected. “No, I meant—”

“I know what you meant. What should Carly call Mum? Just Kerry. Or Gran, like the boys do. She won’t mind either way.”

“Thanks. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this, Callan.”

For seeming so relaxed about it.

For making her laugh when she wasn’t expecting to.

For not being Kurt.

“Does she have any grandmothers of her own, your Carly?” he asked.

“No, she doesn’t. Kurt’s mother died just before he and I met. Mine, when I was twelve. My dad lives back east.” She stood up, didn’t want to talk about any of that, right now. “I love those chickens.” She walked toward the wire mesh that separated them from the vegetable garden and called back, “I never realized their feathers would be so beautiful. The black ones are almost iridescent on their breasts.”

“And they’re good layers, too.” His tone poked fun at her, just a little. Iridescent feathers? These birds weren’t for decoration. They had a job to do!

“Is egg collecting something Carly and I could handle? She’d love it, I think.”

“Sure.” He stood up and came over, and they looked at the chickens side by side.

“Do they … like … bite? I’m good with horses. Kurt and I used to ride on his ranch.”

If you could call six thousand acres a ranch.

She had, once.

But she’d seen Callan’s place, now.

“But chickens …” She spread her hands. She didn’t know anything about chickens. They hadn’t fit with Kurt’s image.

“They’ll peck at anything that looks like it could be something to eat,” Callan said. “Shoelaces, rings. But they’ll stop when it doesn’t taste good. And they’re not aggressive. You can pet ’em and feed ’em out of your hand.” He pulled some leafy sprigs of parsley from a garden bed and gave half of them to her, then bent down to hen level and stuck his parsley through the wire. A red-brown bird came peck-peck-pecking at once. “See? Try it.”

She squatted. “Well, hi there, Little Red Hen.”

“The boys have names for them. They can introduce you and Carly properly after lunch.”

“Her ex-husband was stalking her,” Callan told his mother. “Professionally and personally. She needed somewhere safe, and far.”

“Well, Arakeela should be both,” his mother said.

They stood on the veranda, watching the two female figures in the chook run—the adult and the little girl. Their clothing was bright in the midafternoon light and their hair glinted where the sun hit, one head dark and the other blond. Lockie and Josh had introduced Carly and her mum to the rooster, Darth Vader, and the hens, Furious, Gollum, Frodo, Shrek, Donkey, Princess and Hen.

Carly thought those names were great. Callan and Kerry could both hear her little voice saying, “Tell me which one’s Frodo, again, Mommy?”

“Well, I know it was one of the black ones ….”

The boys had gone, now, having shown Jacinda and Carly the chooks’ favorite laying places. They were working on the quad-wheeled motorbikes in the shed, changing the oil. Most outback kids of their age got to ride quad bikes around the property when they helped with the cattle, but Callan was pretty strict about it. If Lockie and Josh were going to ride, they had to know how to take care of the bikes and they never rode one unless he was there.

“How long are they staying?” Kerry asked.

“Their return flight is a month from now, she said. I don’t know how it’s going to work out, Mum, to be honest, but I couldn’t say no.”

“Of course you couldn’t! Do you think I’m suggesting it?”

“You seemed a bit doubtful.”

“I could tell something was wrong, that’s all. That she wasn’t just a tourist friend wanting an outback stay.”

“She’s been having panic attacks. That was what happened with Lockie’s book report before lunch. She doesn’t know what she’ll do for an income instead of writing, if the … you know … drive and hunger and inspiration never come back.”

He knew nothing about writing. Couldn’t imagine. How did you create a plot and action out of thin air? How did you dream up people who seemed so real that they jumped off the page or out of a TV screen like best friends? How did you string the words together, one by one, so that they added up to a story?

And yet he understood something about how she felt. He knew the same fear that the drive might never come back. He knew the huge sense of loss and failure, now that the hunger was gone. He had the same instinctive belief that without this certain special pool inside you, you were physically incomplete, even though the pool wasn’t something tangible and solid like a limb.

“She probably just needs to rest her spirit,” Kerry said. “Take the pressure off and forgive herself.”

“I guess,” he answered, not believing it could be that simple. Not in his own case.

Take the pressure off? Rest the spirit? Forgive yourself?

Was that all it took?

His mother didn’t know.

Hell, of course she didn’t! And Callan would never tell her.

He hadn’t breathed a word about the freckled blonde at the Birdsville Races three years ago. When he’d gone down to chat to the Scandinavian backpacker camping at the water hole a few months later, Mum had thought he was only protecting their land. He’d reported that he’d told the young woman about where it was safe to light a campfire and where best to photograph the wildlife that came to drink at the water hole at dusk.

Mum had no idea that he’d seen a phantom similarity to Liz in both those women, and that the women themselves had picked up on the vibe. As Jacinda had said before lunch, however, when she’d told him about the woman at Carly’s preschool, it was more terrifying to confront the differences when someone bore a passing resemblance to the person you loved.

They hadn’t been Liz’s freckles, her kind of blond, her skin, her body, her voice.

Why had he gone looking for something that he could never find?

No one, but no one—not Brant or Dusty, no one—had known about the Danish girl’s open-eyed seduction attempt, or Callan’s failure. No one ever would.

“We got eggs!” Carly shrieked out, coming out of the hen run. “Look, guys, we got eggs! Six! Mommy has four and I have two because my hands are too little. I have one brown one with white speckles and one brown one with brown speckles.”

“Carly? Don’t run so fast, honey,” said her mum, coming up behind her, “because if you trip and fall, they’ll break.”

“But I want to show ’em to Callan and—” She slowed and looked back at her mother for guidance, asking in a stage whisper, “What’s the lady’s name?”

Jacinda looked at Callan and shrugged, asking a question with her face. Kerry or Gran? They’d discussed it—that joke about Goldilocks—but Jacinda clearly didn’t know what to say. She had that vulnerable look about her again—the loss of grace, the slight slouch to her shoulders. It made her look thinner. And it made him want to give her promises about how he’d look after her that she would be bound to read the wrong way.

Before he could answer, Kerry stepped off the veranda.

“It’s Gran, love,” she said, in her usual plainspoken way. As she spoke, she leaned down to admire the eggs that had made Carly so excited. “You can call me Gran.”

Jet lag crept up on Jacinda and Carly a short while after the evening meal. Jac tried to hide her yawns and droopiness, but Carly wasn’t so polite. “Mommeee! I’m so tired! I wanna go to bed right now!” They were both fast asleep before eight o’clock.

At midnight, according to the clock on the table beside the bed, Jac woke up again. At first she couldn’t work out why, then she saw the pale child-size shadow moving near the door. Carly was sleepwalking, and subconsciously she’d heard her daughter’s familiar sounds.

She caught up to her in the corridor and tried to steer her back to bed. Carly wouldn’t come. “Honey? This way … Come on, sweetheart.”

“Butter banana on the machine in the morning.” She talked in her sleep, too, and it never made any sense.

“Let’s turn around and come back to bed,” Jac repeated.

Carly’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t awake. She had a plan. She wanted something. And as always when sleepwalking, she was hard to dissuade. “I’m coming in the morning up,” she said, pushing at Jac with firm little hands.

“Well, let’s not, honey.”

“No!” Carly said. “Up in the, in the out.”

Maybe it was best to let her walk it off. The doctor had said that it wasn’t dangerous to waken her, contrary to popular myth, but it did always end with Carly crying and talking about bad dreams that she would have forgotten by morning if Jac could get her back to bed while she was still asleep.

“Okay, Carly, want to show me?” She took her daughter’s hand and let her lead the way.

They crept along the corridor, through the big, comfortable living room and out of the front door, first the solid wooden one and then the squeaky one with the insect-proof mesh. Oh, that squeak was loud! Would it wake Callan and the boys? Jac tried to close it quietly behind her.

Carly looked blindly around the yard, while Jacinda waited for her next move. An almost full moon shone high in the sky, a little flat on one side. It didn’t look quite right, because it was upside-down in this country. Even with the moon so bright, the stars were incredible, thousands of pinpoints of light against a backdrop of solid ink. No city haze.

Carly went toward the steps leading down from the veranda, and Jac held her hand more tightly. She didn’t stand as steady on her feet when she was asleep, even with her eyes open. She could easily trip and fall. At the last moment, she turned. Not going down the steps after all. There was a saggy old cane couch farther along the veranda, with a padded seat, recently recovered in a summery floral fabric with plenty of matching pillows, and she headed for that.

Jac thought, Okay, honey, we can sit here for a while. There was a mohair blanket draped over the back of it.

Carly nestled against her on the couch. “Yogurt, no yogurt,” she said very distinctly. Then her face softened and she closed her eyes.

“No yogurt. I’ll carry you back to bed in a minute,” Jac whispered.

She unfolded the blanket and spread it over them both because the night had chilled considerably from the moment the sun had dropped out of sight. The blanket was hand-knitted in bright, alternating squares of pink and blue, and it was warm and soft. No hurry in getting back to bed. So nice to sit here with Carly and feel safe.

Callan found them there several minutes later. He’d heard that screen door, had guessed it was probably Jacinda, unable to sleep. They didn’t lock doors around here at night. If anyone showed up with intentions good or bad, you’d hear their vehicle a mile off and the dogs would bark like crazy.

Still, after thinking about it and feeling himself grow more and more awake, something made him get up to check that everything was all right.

Yeah, it was fine. The two of them were dead to the world, snuggled together under the blanket. The fuzz of the fabric tickled Carly’s nose and she pushed at it with her hand in her sleep. He moved to go back to bed himself, but the old board under his foot creaked and, coupled with Carly’s movement, it disturbed Jacinda and she opened her eyes.

“Was she sleepwalking?” he asked.

“Yes, and we ended up here. I didn’t mean to fall asleep myself. Did we waken you?” She looked down his body, then back up. He wore his usual white cotton T-shirt and navy blue pajama pants—respectable, Dad-type nightwear that couldn’t possibly send the wrong message.

“I heard the screen door,” he confessed.

She was wearing pink pajamas, herself, in kind of a plaid pattern on a cream background, and her dark hair fell over her shoulders like water falling over rock. Her skin looked shadowy inside the V of the pajama front, and even when she smiled, her lips stayed soft and full.

“Why does your mother sleep over at the little cottage?” she asked.

“Oh … uh …” He had no idea why her thoughts would have gone in that direction. “Just to give the two of us some space. She moved in there when I married Liz.” Newlyweds … privacy … he didn’t want to go there in his thoughts, and continued quickly, “She’ll sleep in the main house if I’m away, of course, but she works pretty hard around here and sometimes she needs a break from the boys.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Why did you ask?”

She blinked. “I don’t know. Gosh, I don’t know!” She looked stricken and uncomfortable.

They stared at each other and she made a movement, shifting over for him, finding him a piece of the blanket. Without saying anything, he sat down and took the corner of the blanket. Its edges made two sides of a triangle, across his chest and back across his knees. A wave of warmth and sweetness hit him—clean hair and body heat and good laundering.

The old cane of the couch was a little saggy in the center, and his weight pushed Jacinda’s thigh against his. Carly stretched in her sleep and began to encroach on his space, which stopped the contact between himself and her mom from becoming too intimate. This felt safe, even though it shouldn’t have.

“Well, you know, ask anything you like,” he told her. “I didn’t mean you had to feel it wasn’t your business.”

Silence.

“It’s so quiet,” she murmured.

“Is it spooking you?”

“A little. I guess it’s not quiet, really. The house creaks, and there are rustlings outside. Just now I heard … I think it was a frog. I’m hoping it was a frog.”

“You mean as opposed to the notorious Greerson’s death bat with its toxic venom and ability to chew through wire window screens to get to its human victims?”

“That one, yes.”

“Well, their mating cries are very similar to a frog’s, but Greerson’s death bats don’t usually come so close to the house except in summer.”

She laughed. “You’re terrible!”

“We do have some nice snakes, however, with a great line in nerve toxins.”

“In the house?”

He sighed at this. “I really want to say no, Jacinda, but I’d be lying. Once in a while, in the really hot weather, snakes have been known to get into the house. And especially under the house.”

She thought about this for a moment, and he waited for her to demand the next flight out of here, back to nice, safe Kurt and his power games in L.A. “So what should I tell Carly about snakes?” she finally asked.

“Not to go under the veranda. Not to play on the pile of fence posts by the big shed. If she sees one in the open, just stand still and let it get away, because it’s more scared than she is. If she gets bitten—or thinks she might have been, because snake bites usually don’t hurt—tell someone, stay calm and stay still.”

“If she gets bitten, what happens?”

“She won’t get bitten. I’ve lived on this land my whole life, apart from boarding school, and I never have.”

“But if she does?”

“We put on a pressure bandage, keep her lying quiet and call the flying doctor.”

“Which I’m hoping is not the same as the School of the Air, because I’m not sure what a doctor on a computer screen could do about snake bite.”

“The flying doctor comes in an actual airplane, with a real nurse and real equipment and real snake antivenin.”

“And takes her away to a real hospital, with me holding her hand the whole way, and she’s fine.”

“That’s right. But the pressure bandage is pretty important. I’ll show you where we keep them in the morning. And I’ll show you how to put one on, just in case.”

She nodded. “Got it. Thanks. So you’ve done some first-aid training?”

“A couple of different courses, yeah. So has Mum. Seems the sensible thing, out here.”

“And is that how you run your land and your cattle, too? Sensibly?”

“Try to.”

They kept talking. He was wide, wide awake and so was she. The moon drifted through its high arc toward the west, slowly shifting the deep blue shadows over the silver landscape. It was so warm under the blanket, against the chill of the desert night. Carly shifted occasionally, her body getting more and more relaxed, encroaching farther into his space.

Jacinda was a good listener, interested enough to ask the right questions, making him laugh, drawing out detail along with a few things he hadn’t expected to say—like the way he still missed Dad, but thought his father would be proud of some of the changes he’d made at Arakeela, such as the land-care program and the low-stress stock-handling methods.

Callan thought he’d probably spooked Jacinda more than she’d admitted to regarding the snakes, but she hadn’t panicked about it, she’d just asked for the practical detail. If it happened, what should she and Carly do?

And the fact that she hadn’t panicked made Callan think more about her panic over Kurt. The last piece of his skepticism dried up like a mud puddle in the sun, replaced with trust. Whatever she was afraid of from her ex-husband, it had to be real or she would never have come this far, landed on him like this. She wasn’t crazy or hysterical. She needed him, and even though he didn’t know her that well yet, he wasn’t going to let her down.

“Do you have any idea of the time?” she asked eventually. She hid a yawn behind her hand. “Has to be pretty late.”

“By where the moon is, I’d say around three.”

“Three? You mean we’ve been sitting here for three hours? Oh, Callan, I’m so sorry! You have work to do in the morning. I’m a guest with jet lag, I should never have kept you up like this.”

“Have I been edging toward the door?”

“No, because Carly has both feet across your knees!”

“True, and who would think she’d have such bony heels?”

The little girl must have heard her name. Her eyelids flickered and her limbs twitched. Callan and Jacinda both held their breath. She seemed to settle, but then her chest started pumping up and down, her breathing shallow.

“I think she’s having a bad dream,” Jacinda murmured. Carly broke into crying and thrashing, and had to be woken up to chase the dream away. “It’s okay, sweetheart, it wasn’t real, it was a dream, just a bad dream. Open your eyes and look at me. Mommy’s here, see? We’re sitting on the porch. The moon is all bright. Callan is here. Everything’s fine.” In an aside to Callan, she added, “I’m going to take her to the bathroom and get her back to bed, but you go ahead.”

She stood up, struggling to gather Carly into her arms at the same time.

“You’re carrying her?”

“She’ll get too wide awake if I let her walk.”

“She looks heavy for you. Would she come to me?”

“It’s fine.” She smiled. “There’s nothing builds upper-arm strength as effectively as having a child, right? Better than an expensive gym. Thanks for sitting up with me, Callan.”

“No problem.”

For some reason, they both looked back at the couch, where the mohair blanket had half-fallen to the veranda floor, then they looked at each other. And suddenly Callan knew why she’d asked that question about his mother sleeping in the cottage, three hours ago, even if Jacinda herself still didn’t.

She’d unconsciously imagined how it would have looked to Mum if she’d happened to waken and find them sitting there together, under the same blanket, sharing the warm weight of Jacinda’s sleeping child.

His mother had given him a particular kind of privacy when he and Liz had been married, moving over to the cottage. When Liz had died, Mum hadn’t moved back. Somewhere in her heart, although she never spoke about it, she must hope he’d someday need that kind of privacy again. He should tell her gently not to hold her breath about it.