Читать книгу Every Woman Knows a Secret - Rosie Thomas - Страница 7

Ian was in the dining room laying the round table for dinner. He found the white cloth in its usual drawer and shook it out over the table. The stubborn creases revealed that it had been folded away for a long time. Probably Danny and Jess had eaten their meals in the kitchen, if they had eaten together at all. It was almost three years since they had shared a meal in this room as a family foursome.

The understanding never again weighed like a stone beneath his heart. He swallowed, in a confused attempt to dislodge it.

Ian lifted a pair of carved wooden candlesticks off the dusty mantelpiece and set them on the cloth. It seemed important to mark the day of Danny’s funeral with proper ceremony. When he had laid five place settings he stood back. The dining room looked almost the same as it had on the day he’d left. He remembered that he had put his two suitcases down in the hall and glanced in, briefly, as if to check that nothing of himself remained. Then he had put the suitcases in his car and driven away to Michelle’s flat.

Years before that, Jess and he had papered this room together over a week of his summer holiday. Today the Laura Ashley pattern of tiny brown flowers looked dingy, and the matching curtains hung limply beneath their gathered pelmet. The brown carpet was worn, and so were the green tweed seats of the second-hand Sixties Scandinavian wooden chairs. Jess had made no changes or improvements to the home they had created together; Ian clumsily understood that she had probably lacked the emotional energy as well as the money.

From the kitchen drifted the scent of frying garlic. James was cooking dinner, and the three women were upstairs somewhere. Ian was glad of the interval of quiet. The house had been full of people for hours.

Everyone had come back to the house from the crematorium. They had eaten the food prepared by the caterers that Lizzie swore by, shaken hands with Ian and Jess and whispered their assurances that if there was anything, anything at all, they only had to ask. There had been a parade of faces: neighbours Ian had almost forgotten, teachers from Danny’s school, and friends of Jess’s, including a woman from her work who had brought flowers picked on the nursery – viburnum and winter jasmine and strong-scented daphne. And there had been solemn, tongue-tied mates of Danny’s whom Ian had last seen as little boys. Dozens of faces, and none of them Danny’s.

Ian swallowed hard on the sensation within himself that was not quite a yawn, not quite nausea. He didn’t know how to express his grief for his son. He hadn’t cried, yet. Crying was for women. The acknowledgement made him think of Michelle, who cried as easily as she laughed.

‘When are you coming home?’ she had asked him. The telephone strengthened her Australian vowels, or maybe his ears were already re-tuned to the Midlands accent.

‘I’ll be on the Qantas flight the day after tomorrow, love. I want to get back to you, you know that.’

‘I’ll come and pick you up at the airport,’ she’d said at once.

‘Do that.’

He missed her. Life with Michelle was comprehensible, comfortable. From the beginning, that had been one of the problems with Jess. He had never felt that she gave herself to him; there was always a little distance, a measure of holding back that was at first tantalising, and finally disappointing.

Ian clicked his lighter to the candles. Points of flame flickered and then steadied in the still air. He watched them for a minute before walking through to the kitchen.

James was standing at the cooker. He looked up and waved a wooden spatula at a pan on the heat. He said, ‘It’s a bit hit and miss. I wasn’t sure where to look for things.’

James enjoyed cooking and was good at it; Lizzie could barely fix a sandwich. It was one of the ways they fitted together. He had tied Jess’s striped apron over his unfamiliar dark clothes.

‘I’m sure it’ll be good,’ Ian said automatically. He thought James looked like a poof, fannying around in his pinny. But he knew enough about Lizzie to be sure that couldn’t really be the case. For an actress, Lizzie had always been quite definite about liking proper men. For a year or two, long ago, when she had been spending a lot of time in and out of their house and Jess had begun to withdraw, Ian had fancied her himself, although it had never come to anything. It would have been too difficult, that.

‘Drink?’ James nodded at an opened litre of red wine.

‘Scotch for me,’ Ian answered. He took a bottle of Bell’s out of the usual cupboard and poured himself a full glass. James opened a tin of tomatoes and slopped the contents into a pan. Once he had stirred down the splutter of it, he reached for a cloth and busily dabbed the crimson speckles off the margins of the stove. Tidy, Ian noted.

‘Jess still resting?’

‘I suppose,’ Ian said. ‘Do her good.’

After the last mourners had gone Jess and Beth had separately retreated into their bedrooms. Lizzie had given Sock his bath and put him to sleep on the living-room sofa. No one went into Danny’s room.

Ian sat down at the table and drank his whisky. He couldn’t think of anything else to say to James.

They had met a handful of times at the end of the awkward period before Ian went to Australia with Michelle. James was naturally defensive of Jess; Ian assumed that Lizzie had spared her new boyfriend none of the details about Jess’s husband’s misbehaviour, but he had felt too embattled to bother trying to justify himself. Moreover, Ian never felt quite at ease with men who were more successful than himself, and he knew that James headed his own accountancy firm. He also knew that when he had married Lizzie James had bought her a substantial Victorian house in a prosperous village surrounded by rare unspoilt countryside. Ian hadn’t seen the house but he imagined a cedarwood conservatory, a quarry-tiled kitchen and acres of pale sculpted carpets. His own home, Jess’s home now, seemed to reproach him with its relative shabbiness.

To his relief, he heard Lizzie emerge from the bathroom upstairs. She crossed the landing and tapped gently on Jess’s door.

‘They’ll be down in a minute.’

James nodded. ‘This is ready now.’

The three women came downstairs together.

‘He’s gone off properly at last,’ Lizzie explained, about Sock. ‘I thought he wasn’t going to.’

‘Have a drink.’ Ian picked up the uncapped Scotch bottle and poured a measure.

‘Thanks.’

‘Beth?’

‘Give Mum one.’

Jess leaned against the dresser, obediently nursing the glass he put into her hand. Lizzie put a set of dishes to warm and Beth scraped potato peelings into the pedal bin. They were each of them occupying themselves with the tasks to hand, in order to contain the mess of grief. Realising this brought the sudden tears to Jess’s eyes. She pressed the back of her hand into her face.

‘Sit down, darling. Here, come on.’

Lizzie guided her to a chair. In the folds of her clothes as they held each other Jess smelled cigarette smoke. Lizzie had succumbed.

‘Thanks,’ Jess murmured. She saw Beth’s white face and shadowed eyes, and the way Ian’s thin hair had crept back from his forehead. They had loved Danny too; how could they not have done?

She said, ‘Thank you for being here tonight.’

‘Where else would we be?’

Lizzie’s jacket was broad stripes of scarlet and black satin, like a winter deckchair. She had worn it that afternoon at the funeral, with a black fedora hat pulled down to shield her eyes. A costume.

‘I can’t wear black for him,’ she had whispered to Jess. ‘As if he was old.’

Jess hadn’t thought about her clothes until an hour before the cars came. Although incongruously while she was still married to Ian she had sometimes imagined how it would be if he were to die and leave her a widow. Picturing herself at the graveside, the cut of her black dress.

She had read somewhere that women in unfulfilling marriages fall in love with their sons.

She bent her head, drank some of her whisky.

‘Let’s eat,’ James said.

At once there was a little rush to fetch plates and carry serving dishes.

They sat down in the dining room. Beth tilted her head as if she were listening for something. She was thinking that the front door should slam now to announce that Danny was home. He would push his way into the room, shrugging his coat off his shoulders, and wolfishly peer into the dishes to see what there was to eat. They were still a family around the table. They couldn’t begin to miss Danny yet because he was still so vividly with them. She was afraid of the real start of missing him.

‘Do you remember that party he had?’ she said quickly. ‘You left me in charge of him and all his little mates?’

Jess put down her fork. ‘I’ll never forget the party. He made us go out for the evening, Ian, do you remember? We came back to find the house detonated. Wreckage strewn everywhere. Like a bombing.’

Ian nodded. ‘We walked in through the front door at eleven thirty. To see some kid puking into the phone.’

‘Dad, he was trying to call a taxi. I’d told him he had to go home.’

‘That was Danny’s sixteenth birthday,’ Jess said. ‘It took us a week to clear up. Don’t ever let Sock have a teenage bash in your house, Liz.’

James put out his hand to cover Lizzie’s.

Nobody spoke for a moment. The scrape of knives and forks grew loud. Then Jess said gently, ‘He will be all right. It doesn’t mean anything will happen to Sock.’

But for all the affection that underlay her attempt at reassurance, she felt a bolt of anger wildly shooting through her. It clenched her fingers and tightened her throat. Why her boy, why Danny, who meant so much to her, and not some other woman’s son, even – the guilty black whisper of it – her own sister’s?

Lizzie began to cry. Her face turned into the mask of tragedy before the tears began to run. She sobbed, ‘This is so awful. It’s so final and such a waste.’

Ian and Beth glanced at each other. When she was still quite small Beth had asked her father, ‘Why does Aunt Lizzie make such a show of everything?’

He had answered, ‘Because that is what she does.’ And Beth had understood that her aunt’s life was acting, just as acting was her life. Her failure to partition the two had probably meant that her career had never been as glittering as she wished, and her life the same, until James came along. Beth turned watchful eyes on her mother. Jess was always so calm in her gestures and direct in her words. You knew what she meant, as if you could read her mind. If you could act that, you would be the greatest. And Jess was strong, even today.

Beth realised how much she needed her mother to be strong. The fingers of dread squeezed at her heart, making her breathless. What if something should happen to her mother now, how would she bear that? She wanted to run to her and hide her head in her lap.

‘Did you see him?’ Lizzie was asking them all. ‘That boy was there this afternoon.’

Jess had stopped eating. One by one they abandoned the pretence of wanting food, but they drank the wine. Ian refilled the glasses. Lizzie rubbed her fingers across her cheeks, leaving black streaks of mascara that James tenderly stroked away for her.

Jess said, ‘Yes, I did see him. I thought it was right for him to be there.’

She had only caught a glimpse. Rob was sitting alone at the back of the chapel. It had been no more than a noting of his presence along with all the others.

‘I bloody well didn’t.’ Ian’s face reddened. His pained eyes were bloodshot. His grief could only express itself in noisy belligerence. ‘If I had done, I’d have got rid of him. Dan’s killer, sitting there with all of us? Why should he be free to have another piss-up tonight and slaughter someone else’s kid?’

The police had explained to Jess and Ian that once all the evidence and statements had been collected, a report would be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, with a recommendation of the charge that should be made against Robert Ellis. The process might take six weeks, or maybe a little longer until his first appearance in the magistrates’ court.

‘And until then he walks around as free as I am?’ Ian had demanded.

That was how it was, they were told.

Tonight Ian had had wine on top of plenty of whisky, but he wasn’t drunk. He just looked exhausted and baffled, like a large animal in a pen. Beth stared at the tablecloth. Jess leaned across the table to Ian.

‘Don’t be angry. Not tonight.’ Ian had been angry too often, all through their marriage. With her, with their children, with the disappointments of his life in Ditchley. At least he had put that behind him now.

‘He didn’t come back here, lucky for him. I’d have found it a bit hard to pour a drink for him.’

To divert the conversation from Rob Jess asked, ‘Was today the way these things are supposed to be?’

Jess couldn’t remember any funerals except Ian’s parents’, and her mother’s, who had died of cancer when she and Lizzie were in their twenties. Their father had made the arrangements for that one. He was still alive, but he was in a residential home near York. He had been ill, and was too frail to make the journey to Danny’s funeral.

The wine had made Jess’s head swim. Her thoughts skittered back and forth, as if there was too much pain for them to be pinned for long in any place.

The service had been simple, just a reading and a hymn and two or three of Danny’s friends who had offered their memories of him. The priest, who had not known him, had said kind, vague things intended to console without raising the controversy of God or an afterlife.

And after that the gathering in the house, and the inching progress through this evening. After this was over, what would come next?

It was James who answered. ‘It was just as it should have been. And you were brave, Jess. All of you were.’

James had shown his unobtrusive strengths in the last days. They had all relied on his cooking and telephone answering and attendance on Sock. ‘And I also think it was brave of the boy to turn up.’

Jess smiled her gratitude and affection at him. Seeing his greying hair and plain features, and his kind eyes behind his glasses, she felt envy of Lizzie’s happiness twisting the thread of her own loneliness. She began quickly to gather up the congealed plates. She wasn’t brave herself, unfortunately. She only felt that she must appear to be, and that was quite different.

Beth stood up. She was shivering because the room was cold, and she was still listening for Danny to slam the front door, and the reality of what she knew refused to dislodge the longing expectation.

‘Let’s talk about him, not the funeral. Let’s get the photos out or something. I’d rather think about when he was alive.’

Lizzie swept her arms around Beth. ‘You’re right, darling. All the photos. The christening and the infants’ play and the Cornish holidays, the whole lot. Shall we do it, Jess?’

‘Yes. Yes, why not?’ She bumped softly against a chair in her laden circuit of the table, glad of the muzzy distance that alcohol laid over the sharpness of loss. If she drank some more, might it briefly obliterate the pain? She became aware that Ian was watching her; it seemed incredible that he had once been her husband, that they had shared this house and the responsibility for two children. He took the pile of plates out of her hands.

‘I’ll get the photos,’ Jess said.

Rob rang the doorbell and when there was no answer he pressed his thumb viciously against the plastic button and held it there. A train passed up on the embankment beyond the high wire fence and he turned his head to catch a glimpse of the chain of light as it threaded away. The door swung open without warning, making him jump. There was a black girl in high zippered boots and a short skirt.

‘Yeah? D’you have to ring like that?’

‘Cat. Is Cat in?’ He couldn’t remember her other name.

The girl shrugged her indifference and walked away, leaving the door open. Rob closed it behind him and tramped up the stairs to the door he remembered as being Cat’s. He hesitated, then knocked.

Her head appeared, wrapped in a towel, in a shaft of yellow light that shone down the dingy hallway.

‘It’s you.’ Her eyes darted past him, looking for help.

‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

Slowly her gaze returned to him. ‘What do you want? What are you doing here?’

‘To talk to you for five minutes. It’s important.’

She hesitated, chewing the corner of her lip. He hated the fear of him that clearly showed in her face. At last she said, ‘Wait a minute.’

The door closed and he heard the bolt slide. He waited in the dark hallway. When she opened it again she was dressed in jeans and a jersey. The door was on the chain.

‘Well?’

‘I can’t talk about anything through this gap.’

‘You think I’m going to let you back in here again?’

‘Please,’ he begged. He could see her struggle with herself for a moment. Then reluctantly she unchained the door, holding it just wide enough for him to edge past. It was trusting of her, he thought.

He remembered the room. Only it looked ordinary and smaller now, with things like knickers and tights hanging on a little plastic line by the sink, and a portable television on the table. She had been watching Brookside.

‘I heard what happened,’ she said. ‘The police told Zoe and me, and we read some more in the paper. It was today, wasn’t it? The funeral?’

‘Yeah. It was.’

Neither of them knew what to say next. Cat looked younger and more vulnerable than she had done in the club and afterwards. Her eyelashes were colourless without mascara and there were tiny crusts of chapped skin on the full curve of her lower lip. Her damp hair hung in coils against her neck.

To break the silence Rob made a stab at saying something. Anything. ‘How long have you lived in this place, then?’

She hunched her shoulders, expressing indifference. ‘Bit of a dump, isn’t it? I was living with my boyfriend from home, we had a flat together. I came up here from Croydon, you know, to be with him while he was at college. Got a job word processing in the estate agent’s in Galloway Street. And then I find out what a loser he is, don’t I? So I got this place and moved out again. I didn’t fancy going back home. It’s all right here. Friendlier than London, isn’t it?’ She stood with her head on one side, appraising him. ‘You want a coffee?’

‘All right. Thanks. I thought I hadn’t seen you around before.’

‘Know everyone, do you?’ She was taunting him but he answered her straight.

‘It feels like it. I’ve been stuck here all my life. What do you expect?’

Cat took two mugs out of the sink and spooned Nescafé into them. ‘Why don’t you go somewhere else, if you don’t like it? What work do you do?’

‘Carpentry. Kitchens, cupboards. Not building site work. It’s word of mouth and local contacts, mostly. Hard to start up from nothing in a new place.’

She was looking more closely at him. Then, to his surprise, she reached out and touched the empty sleeve of his leather jacket.

‘What happened to your arm? Was it in the crash?’

‘Yes. Cracked elbow.’

‘Why did you come here?’

Rob began haphazardly, ‘I’m going to be charged with causing death by driving under the influence of drink. Lucky I hadn’t had any of Danny’s spliff or anything else that night, or I’d be up for that as well. I could get five years as it is.’

Her mouth crimped at the corners, showing her concern.

‘What do you want with me?’

‘I want to know what you told the police. About what happened before we left here.’

She turned away, her head bent.

‘Listen.’ He stopped himself from reaching out to shake her. ‘You know what happened. What did you tell the police? Am I going to be done for assault, as well?’

He regurgitated the events as he recalled them, brutally pushing the facts at her, wanting her confirmation that, yes, that was how it had been.

Not looking at him, Cat said, ‘Zoe doesn’t remember it the same way as you.’

‘It wasn’t me who did anything,’ Rob insisted. At the same time he felt that he was betraying Danny.

Cat nodded. ‘I suppose not.’

Rob picked up his coffee and drank it, hardly noticing that it was much too hot. He was glad that he had come here, to make even this rudimentary contact with another human being. In the two weeks since the accident the rhythms of his old life had faltered and then ceased altogether.

He had not worked because his van had been taken apart by the police vehicle examiner and was in any case too seriously damaged to be repaired, and because his tools had been held by the police, although the coroner’s officer had now informed him that he could reclaim them, and because his arm was in plaster. And more than for any of these reasons, he had not worked because he could not bring himself to think of the steady everyday business of constructing dovetail joints and fitting sweet brass hinges, and planing and sanding wholesome wood until it was satin smooth after the destruction he was now guilty of.

He had telephoned the woman whose kitchen was half completed and told her abruptly that he would not be coming back. She had not been pleased. He had not earned any money for more than two weeks, and as a self-employed carpenter Rob did not have very much saved.

As the days after the accident went by his regular contacts with people grew less frequent. At the beginning he had seen one or two of his friends, but, whatever they said, he believed or imagined that Danny’s death had shocked them and altered the easiness of their friendship. He took to walking long distances to pubs he had never visited before, and sitting over a single drink, listening to the mutter of the television over the bar. He went to the gym and worked obsessively on his legs. A sweaty cloth twisted round his neck supported his plastered arm while he did set after set of leg and calf raises. He avoided conversations with the other weightlifters, and the sight of his own reflection in the wall mirrors. In the last day or so he had stayed in his room, speaking only to shop assistants when he went out to buy something.

Then there had been the funeral, and Danny’s mother had seen him sitting there, and had quickly looked away again.

Cat’s face had changed. He half believed she might have followed and understood something of what he was thinking. She hesitated, then said, ‘It’s awful for you. But it was an accident.’

It was not as bad for him as it was for Danny.

Rob came up against the same truth everywhere. This was what had happened, this was what he had done. There was a death in his past a long way back before this one and he knew that old endless finality. The obscene, shameful and mocking irrevocability of someone being alive one minute and dead and gone the next.

That was what he thought about when he looked at Danny’s mother.

‘I can’t remember what happened. Not the actual moments before,’ he said vaguely.

‘You didn’t seem that trashed. He was, I knew that.’

‘Danny. His name was Danny.’

‘I know.’

‘Say it then.’

‘Danny.’ Her mouth stretched at the corners making the word.

He wanted to get away now, before this girl worked out too much about him. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Rob said, standing up.

As he reached the door Cat said, ‘You can come back some time, if you want. You know, if you need to talk.’

‘Yeah, I might do.’

James came out of the living room carrying Sock wrapped in a blanket. Jess stretched over to kiss the baby’s head and breathed in the sweaty damp scent of his hair and scalp. Then she stood back to let James carry him on out to the car.

‘Will you be all right?’ Lizzie asked, repeating herself.

‘Yes, I will.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I’ll be all right. Ian and Beth are here, aren’t they?’ A flutter under her diaphragm, like fear or the beginning of sickness.

The sisters kissed each other and Jess cupped Lizzie’s face in her hands.

‘Don’t worry about me.’

She loved Lizzie, and was much more used to looking after her than the other way around.

‘I do. Will you call me? Any time, the middle of the night, whenever? I’ll come straight away.’

Jess tried to smile. ‘I know. Thank you.’

They hugged again and Lizzie stumbled out after James.

Jess went slowly up the stairs. Beth was in bed, lying curled on her side with her hand beneath her cheek, in the way she had done when she was a little girl.

Jess sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the framed photographic prints on the wall.

‘I don’t think it’s properly sunk in yet,’ Beth whispered.

‘I know.’

‘He didn’t seem the kind who was going to die, did he?’

‘No. Danny was always interested in getting a bit more life.’

Beth’s face was hidden. She demanded suddenly with a spurt of bitterness, ‘Have you been wishing it could have been me instead?’

‘How can you ask that? No, I haven’t. You’re mine. You and I have to go on living now.’

She did not know how: she thought that tomorrow would be like setting out from the beginning of time with the necessity to relearn the world in the absence of Danny.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve always known you loved him best.’

‘No, I love you both the same,’ Jess lied. Beth had always been the vulnerable one and Danny the brave. She cared for Beth, and protected her, but she knew that she failed her too.

‘I love you, Mum. And Dad as well. I wish you weren’t divorced.’

‘I know you do.’

Jess held her hands and rubbed them between her own, thinking how narrow the margin was that separated her adult daughter from childhood.

‘I just meant that if you weren’t divorced you would have someone to look after you now, when you really need it.’

‘You and I and Lizzie all have each other, don’t we? We can look after one another. Take it in turns.’

Beth nodded. ‘I suppose.’

‘Can you sleep, do you think?’

Beth lay back and Jess drew the cover over her shoulders and smoothed the thin fine hair back from her ear and cheek. Jess kissed her and turned out the light, as she had done so often.

‘Sleep well.’

When Jess came downstairs again Ian was tidying the photographs into the boxes and envelopes in which they had been stored. They had never been an album family.

‘Is she all right?’

‘I think so.’

Silence seeped through the house. Jess sat down, letting her head fall back. Ian fanned out a last sheaf of pictures, then dropped them face down like a poker player folding a losing hand. They were wedding photographs; Jess in a white dress and a big hat and Ian in a tight-waisted suit with a huge shirt collar.

‘Are you very disappointed in me?’ he asked.

They had furnished and decorated this room together too; their mutual failure seemed embedded in the cushions and the carpets.

Wearily Jess shook her head. She knew that Ian wanted to be absolved from having left her for Michelle, for having finally taken the initiative and walked out of a marriage that had failed long before. It was not Ian’s fault, and she owed him that acknowledgement. If it was anyone’s fault, it was her own. Before Danny was born she had stopped loving Ian and in the end, although she had devoted so much energy to hiding the truth, it had become too obvious for him to ignore.

‘I miss some of our life together. I don’t want to belittle the importance of our marriage but I miss the ordinariness of it. The everyday little routines. It wasn’t a grand passion. How many marriages are? I’m sorry we failed, but I’m not sorry you’ve found someone else.’

Was that what he wanted to hear?

They had married too early, too young. That was partly what had gone wrong. Jess was nineteen when they met, and still at horticultural college. Ian was two years older, making a precocious success of a job as a photocopier salesman. After a year of spending all their time together there seemed no reason not to marry. Both sets of elderly parents had been eager for them to regularise their relationship. Jess had found a job as undergardener at a nearby estate; Ian grandly told her that she need only work if she wanted to, otherwise he would look after her.

‘Do you remember the couple from Yorkshire?’

They spent their honeymoon in Majorca, and in the hotel there had been another pair of newlyweds. On the second day the other bride had succumbed to a stomach upset and never re-emerged from their room, and her bridegroom devoted himself to beer instead. They would meet him swaying red-faced in the bar or nightclub and loudly insisting, ‘It’s dead here, it is. Tomorrow I’m renting a car and bloody driving to Madrid. See some action there. You coming with me, or what?’

Long ago. Jess smiled at the memory, grateful to Ian for offering this safe piece of their joint currency.

‘It’s like remembering two different people,’ Ian said.

‘I was younger then than Beth is now.’

Beth was born a year after the wedding and Danny three years after that.

‘We were happy. I know we were. I can remember exactly the way the world looked. Sharp, with clear edges, and bright as though the sun was always out.’

Jess had no reason to deny it because it was the truth.

For what had come after that she wanted to offer some apology, but there were no words she could think of that were not double-edged. It was simply that Danny’s coming had altered all her perspectives.

‘I’m glad we looked at all those pictures of him,’ Ian said.

‘Yes.’ Only they were mere glossy coloured images that didn’t contain more than a whisper of Danny; already she was afraid that the memories that animated them would fade and leave her with nothing of him.

Awkwardly Jess reached out, and Ian took her in his arms.

He patted and stroked her shoulders with familiar hands and the detail of his weight and shape renewed itself in her mind, bringing with it sharp recollections of how they had lived together. From being unable to imagine how he had ever been her husband, it became hard for an instant for Jess to remember that he no longer was. Would they go upstairs together, treading on the step that always creaked, reveal what each of them already knew, only now freighted with loss?

Ian was right in a way, they had disappointed one another. By slow degrees and tiny irreversible steps, imperceptibly, beginning not so long after the days in Majorca. Of course they would not go upstairs together.

If we had not parted already, Jess understood, we would have to do it now.

They held on to each other without speaking. Then Ian leaned forward and carefully kissed her forehead, and the touch itself was like an absence, a ghostly negative of a kiss.

‘Shall we divide the pictures so you can take some back to Sydney with you?’ Jess offered.

She began to sort through them again, shuffling quickly through the boxed memories, overtaken by fear that reality and truth were no longer superimposed. She wanted to tuck the truth away, behind the coarse screen of present reality, from where it threatened to escape.

Ian’s relationship with Danny had never been quite as easy as his with Beth. Ian was a flatly conscientious man, unimaginative and as intolerant as careful people often are. Danny had regularly made him angry, with his easy negligence and flashes of irresponsibility that were redeemed for most other people by his charm. Jess had sometimes seen Ian look at Danny with an expression of blunt incomprehension. So the family had divided, mother and son, father and daughter. Yet Ian had loved him. His inarticulate, unchannelled grief at the loss of him was proof enough.

She pushed the boxes towards Ian.

‘Have whatever you would like. I want you to.’

‘I would stay longer, Jess, if I thought I could do anything useful here.’

‘If I thought you could I would ask you to.’

They bent their heads simultaneously to the photographs.

‘Would you like to come out to Sydney for a couple of weeks’ holiday? Over Christmas or something? I’ll handle the airfare.’

His offer touched her, but she didn’t want to go. She couldn’t imagine doing anything except staying here, in this house.

‘Are you sure you won’t?’ Ian persisted. ‘If Beth came too?’

‘I’m sure. But I think it would be a good idea for Beth. Ask her, anyway.’

The pictures were fairly divided. They sat for a few moments longer in the shabby armchairs on either side of the hearth.

‘Danny,’ Ian said, on a long breath.

Jess feared the spillage of his grief. She kept her own balanced within herself, lapping the edges of her self-control. She stood up now, touched Ian lightly on the shoulder.

‘I’ll let you go to bed.’

He had slept every night on the sofa. Upstairs there was only the big room they had once shared, and Beth’s, and Danny’s. Jess thought of his dark bedroom now, and the darker outlines of the furniture and his belongings held frozen within it and the thin veil of dust over all the things he would never pick up again.

‘Good night then,’ she said abruptly to Ian.

When she looked in on her, Beth had fallen asleep, her arms tidily at her sides. Her breathing was inaudible; carefully Jess leaned over her until she felt the faint warmth of an exhalation on her cheek.

The day after Ian flew back to Sydney Jess drove Beth to Ditchley station. They peered through the streaming rain at the strings of coloured bulbs twisting in the wind that funnelled through the shopping precinct. Stronger gusts lashed the branches of the early Christmas tree mounted on the roundabout. It had been raining for days. Jess drove slowly, her eyes fixed on the road and the back of the mud-splashed bus ahead.

Ian would be safely in Sydney by this time, in the bungalow with a view of the blue harbour.

In the station car-park they struggled with Beth’s suitcase and an umbrella that the wind snatched and tore into a tangle of black ribs, then stood side by side on the platform to wait for the London train.

‘Are you sure you’re ready to go back to work?’

‘I can’t think what else to do. Can you?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll come home at the weekend.’

‘If it’s just for my sake, you know, you don’t have to …’

‘Mum. I want to come home.’

‘Good. It’ll be good to have you here.’

Even their voices sounded thinned out, drained of conviction.

Jess began carefully, because Beth had always been reticent about her private life and because she had been warned off the subject before, ‘Isn’t there anyone in London, anyone, you know, to look after you …?’

‘There’s no one at the moment,’ Beth said flatly. ‘Here’s the train now. Will you be all right, Mum?’

You have to be.

‘Yes. I will.’

They clung to each other, the constraints dissolving for a moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jess whispered.

‘For?’

‘For not being able to change anything.’

‘I don’t want you to say sorry for anything. It makes me feel worse. Look, I’ll be home on Friday night.’

‘Take care.’ Empty words.

After Beth had gone Jess drove home to the empty house.

Sam Clark sat in his office, half turned from his desk in his padded swivel chair. It was dark outside and he could see himself partially reflected in the plate glass of the window wall. Subconsciously he admired his well-cut but longish hair, cobalt-blue shirt and loosened Armani tie. He was talking to his wife, who was also at her desk in the features department of one of the tabloid newspapers. They were arguing, in reasonably good humour, about who should go home to see their three children for an hour before they met up again at a literary party.

‘I’m up to here, darling,’ Sam said pleasantly. ‘I’ve got an author coming in tomorrow first thing and I haven’t read his book yet. If I whip through it now I won’t have to do it later, and I can take you out to dinner after the party. Would you like that?’

‘You’re a snake, Sam. You manage to make ducking your turn to go home sound like you’re giving me a big treat.’

‘Where do you fancy? Ivy? Caprice?’

Sadie Clark gave a short laugh. ‘Christ. All right, I’ll go back tonight but do try and remember you were there at the conception all three times. They’re your kids as well as mine.’

‘And I’m almost as proud of them as I am of you.’

‘Christ,’ Sadie groaned again before she hung up.

As soon as she let herself into her flat Beth stepped over the scatter of mail on the doormat and went to the telephone. She dialled a number and while she listened to the ringing tone she stared unseeingly at her own face in the gilt-framed mantelpiece mirror.

‘Sam Clark, please.’

The receptionist trilled, ‘Who may I say is calling?’

Using the formula she had agreed with Sam, Beth murmured, ‘Sarah Sharpe, Forward Communications.’

She waited with the breath catching in her throat. Sometimes, in his egalitarian way, Sam answered his own phone. If his assistant intervened, doing the job she had once done herself, it was always much more difficult. Her face suddenly sprang forward out of the mirror’s murk, white and tense, the anxious eyes narrowed against the possibility of disappointment.

‘My darling. My poor little girl.’

The blessed warmth of his familiar voice. Beth relaxed a degree.

‘When did you get back?’ Sam asked.

‘Today.’ She wouldn’t admit to only two minutes ago.

‘How are you? I’ve hardly stopped thinking about you. Imagining what you must be feeling.’

She didn’t want to talk about any of these things on the telephone, although sometimes the telephone was their only connection for days at a time.

‘Can you come round?’

She heard the intake of breath and saw as clearly as if he were sitting in front of her his frown as he made the quick calculations that would enable them to steal an hour together.

‘Beth?’

‘I’m still here.’ Of course.

‘Expect me about six. It’ll only be an hour, darling. Sadie’s got us down for some drinks do later on.’

Beth had met Sadie two or three times in the days when she still worked for Sam. She was American, abrasive in manner, always impeccably turned out in tailored jackets and red lipstick. Beth was too intimidated by her style and success to feel much guilt about deceiving her with her husband.

While she waited for him, in the flat he had helped her to find, Beth showered and changed her clothes. She put a bottle of the white Sancerre he liked in the fridge, lit the gas coal fire and put on some music. As she took out the wine glasses she was thinking that it was at these times, when she knew for certain that Sam would be here with her soon, that she was happiest of all. Perhaps they were the only times when she was really happy. His actual arrival only foreshadowed his inevitable departure.

But while she was waiting for him she thought that she could bear everything else, even that Danny was dead.

It pleased her that the two men had met, just once. On his visit to London she had persuaded Danny to come to the theatre with her, knowing that Sam and one of his authors would be in the audience too. They had bumped into each other in the stalls bar during the interval, and Beth had introduced them.

‘Seemed like a nice bloke,’ Danny said afterwards.

‘He is,’ she agreed. Beth did not tell him that Sam Clark was her lover.

At ten past six he came in from the rain in his big coat. Taking her two hands between his and rubbing them gently, he led her into the lamplight.

‘Let me look at your face. My poor girl.’

Beth was comforted but she wanted more. She wanted to wind herself around him and have him hold her and tell her that he would never let her go. But she made herself look directly back at him and smile.

‘You’re wet, darling. Give me your coat. Now, here’s a glass of wine. Sit here with me.’

When he was comfortable she let herself cuddle up to him, resting her head against his chest. The demands she permitted herself to make were rationed out like food in a famine.

‘Do you want to tell me about it, or just talk? I can’t believe he’s dead. He was so incredibly young and vital. How old was he exactly?’

She had told him before. ‘Nineteen.’

Sam shook his head. ‘My God. It’s so tragic.’

With his arms around her and the wine in her hand, and the tidy flames to gaze at, Beth did tell him a little. She talked about her mother and father and what the funeral had been like. Sam listened with his mouth against her hair, and then she felt his shoulder and arm make the small movement that told her he was freeing his wrist in order to glance at his watch.

‘What time is it?’

They were always counting the minutes.

‘Six thirty-five. I wish I didn’t have to go anywhere tonight.’

There was always somewhere he had to go, with Sadie or for business or with Alice or Justin or Tamsin, their children.

Beth twisted and tilted her head so that she could look up at him. Their mouths were almost touching. She curled her arm around his neck and shifted herself in his lap.

Sam sighed longingly and closed his eyes. When he kissed her his fingers slipped to the buttons of her blouse and undid them. He looked down at the exposed quadrant of one breast.

‘You don’t want this now.’

She didn’t, and she did. She wanted to be absorbed, overwhelmed, made not to think. She couldn’t bear to be left alone yet and the only way she could ensure that Sam stayed a little longer was through sex. He was close to her; she could see the glitter of grey and even silver in his thick dark hair, a patch of rough skin at the corner of his nose, the dark colour of his full mouth. She didn’t answer, but loosened the knot of his tie and then moved quickly so that she sat across his lap, her back turned to the fire.

She bent her head slowly so that he couldn’t see the clock.

Sometimes Sam would lift her up and half carry her through to her bedroom. Tonight he undressed her where they sat, and they slid awkwardly and greedily, halfway between the cushions and the floor.

Afterwards he was late, and hurried. Beth pulled her clothes around her again and watched him blankly as he made ready to go.

‘I know. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he mumbled when he kissed her again. ‘I’m going to make something happen soon. I promise you. Listen.’ He tilted her chin with his finger. ‘Do you hear?’