Читать книгу A Simple Life - Rosie Thomas - Страница 7

The road climbed as it led deeper into the woods. There were no more houses to be glimpsed between the trees, nor were there any mailboxes at the roadside.

‘Have we missed it?’ Dinah wondered as she drove, peering ahead to where oblique shafts of sun filtered through the branches. The leaves were showing the first margins of butter-yellow and crimson. In another two weeks the fall would be in full blaze.

In the back seat Merlin looked up from his GameBoy.

‘101 was miles back.’

They were looking for 102, the Parkeses’ house.

‘How do I get to the next level of this? Jack?’

‘Give it here. You’re so dumb, I’ve shown you this already. Look, there’s another sign.’

A yellow arrow stencilled 102 pointed onwards.

‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ Jack said.

‘Aw, too creepy for you? The deep dark woods are full of monsters?’

‘Too boring, in fact, Merlin. Like you.’

‘Stop bickering,’ Dinah snapped.

‘Mum, we aren’t bickering. Can’t you tell the difference between argument and conversation?’

Opposition to her was the only factor that united them, Dinah thought. Nothing was new.

‘Sandra Parkes complains that Camilla is difficult. She can’t be as bad as you two.’

‘Camilla, what a totally sad name.’

‘Sort of like some disgusting pudding, Camilla-and-custard.’

‘Pink and wobbly. I bet she’s really fat.’

The boys snorted and retched, united also by their unwillingness to make the visit to the Parkeses.

Matthew seemed to hear none of this. He had been silent most of the way, sitting with his eyes turned to the woodland flickering past.

He was thinking about his work; ever since the summer, when the present avenue of speculation had properly opened up to him, the thought of it had never been far from his mind. Even when he surfaced from sleep he was aware of it rising again through the membranes of semiconsciousness.

He was thinking about his engineered molecule now, his inner eye turning it so that it twisted elegantly, three-dimensional, a dense cluster of atoms floating free in black computer space. Which group should he change, to make the molecule more active?

Frustration and excitement simultaneously prickled within him.

The first tests were encouraging. His technicians had demonstrated that the enzyme material he had engineered was beginning to function as it should, partly binding to the surface of IM-9 lymphocytes, and so indicating that it would bind to some extent to insulin receptors on the surface of cells. The question now was which part of the beautiful structure to change, to make it work better, to make it perfect?

His eyes were unfocused but he saw the sign first. And the mailbox beneath it. Matthew pointed.

‘There, look. I thought the place would be somewhere at the top of this hill.’

The road was dipping downwards ahead of them. Dinah compressed her lips but said nothing as she swung the Jeep sharply into the driveway. There were more trees, conifers and birches pierced by airy columns of sunlight, and then they emerged into a wide space at the crown of the hill. The Parkeses’ house rose in impressive stone and timber tiers against a sombre belt of firs.

Before Dinah had parked beside Ed’s Porsche a door opened in the bottom tier and Ed himself emerged.

‘Great, so you found us okay, no problems? Come on, come on in. Sandy’s looking forward to it.’

Obediently they followed him through a hallway and into the centre of the house. The huge room soared up through complicated levels, its cool space enclosed by squares and rectangles of wood and rough stone and shimmering glass. Beyond the glass was blue air and the reckless colours of the trees.

‘Cool,’ Jack murmured.

‘This is an amazing house, Ed.’

‘You like it? I designed it myself, with a bit of help from an architect.’

Matthew looked around him, his hands in the pockets of his shabby khakis.

‘Is there no end to your talents?’

Ed turned on him, grinning and sharp-eyed.

‘Beginning, doesn’t the line go?’

Matthew was easy in the company of other men, particularly men as successful in their fields as he was in his own. He laughed now, genuinely amused by Ed’s disarming self-satisfaction.

‘That’s not what I said or what I intended. Hi, Sandra.’

Sandra appeared on one of the balconies projecting over their heads, and then fluttered down some steps to join them. Her hair was knotted close to her small skull and she was wearing a loose cream tunic that revealed the knobs of bone at the base of her throat. She kissed Matt and Dinah in turn, resting her hand for an instant on Dinah’s wrist.

Dinah and she had had lunch together the week before.

At Sandra’s suggestion they had met in one of the potted-fern-and-scrubbed-boards café bars that were popular in Franklin. They sat at a window table looking across the green towards the campus. Students streamed past in pairs and groups, on their way between morning and afternoon classes.

‘Would you like to be that age again?’ Sandra asked.

Dinah made the conventional response without thinking about it. ‘Only if I could be forewarned and forearmed against making all the same mistakes.’

‘Did you make so many?’

Dinah could not look at her. She felt an instant of fear that this woman was a threat. She might come too close and Dinah would not be able to fend her off in the way that she could keep Nancy and Dee Kerrigan and the others at bay. She heard herself laugh, a false high-pitched denial.

‘No, not really. What about you?’

Sandra turned her wineglass full circle on its stem. A spilled drop broke into shining globules on the polished table top. Dinah’s deflection of her question had been too sharp. She hesitated, on the brink of offering some truth of her own, and now thinking better of it. They looked at each other, suspecting an opportunity missed before they had even become properly aware of it.

Sandra said, ‘Mistakes? I couldn’t lay claim to too many, could I? Ed’s a good man, as well as a very successful one. I have everything I want. A husband, a daughter I adore …’

Family, wealth, travel, ease, luxury, Dinah silently supplied for her. Only Sandra did not have quite everything she wanted, evidently. Not her own freedom, perhaps, from her husband’s dictates. Dinah wanted to ask her why they had only one child. But she could not. The ripples that the question would make might stream back and rock her own precarious equanimity.

‘How is your daughter?’ she tried instead. Sandra had said the child was difficult. Fourteen …

Sandra drank her wine. ‘Milly’s quite unusual. Very strong-willed, very certain in her opinions. And we’ve probably spoiled her. But I expect most of the difficulty is just to do with her age, isn’t it?’

‘I should think so,’ Dinah murmured. ‘I daren’t think what will happen when Jack gets there.’

That was all. The spectre of intimacy had shivered between Dinah and Sandra and they found that they had somehow brushed it away. After that they talked about missing England, and all the places Ed and Sandra had travelled to when Camilla was smaller and more tractable.

Now, a week later, they were all in the Parkeses’ gleaming glass castle in the woods. Ed was herding them towards the drinks.

‘C’mon, honey, what’s going on? Are Bloody Marys okay for everyone? I don’t believe in these orange juice brunches. Take this glass and let’s fill it up for you. Listen you guys, the pool table is through there. You don’t have to hang out with us if you can find something better to do.’

Jack and Merlin sidled away, not needing to be told twice. Dinah and Matt were caught up and washed along like twigs in the full flood of Ed’s hospitality.

‘Now, you want the house tour? Outside or in first? Perhaps we’ll do outside after we’ve eaten, maybe we can get some kind of a walk. The property stretches a good distance, way down into the dip out of sight of here. I want to take you in my study, Matt, show you the setup I’ve got in there, maybe you can tell me something about computer modelling, I’ve got this idea I want to kick around? Dinah, what do you think of this bathroom?’

He led them through his house, flicking taps on and off and clicking remote controls of lights and blinds and screens into choreographed display. There were twin studies, a vast creamy bedroom with twin bathrooms, an exercise suite with every conceivable machine and a shipsized deck with a spa tub overlooking the descending panorama of trees. There were pictures everywhere, covering the limited wall space, excellent modern pictures. Ed had a good eye.

Matt and Dinah tried not to look at each other because they feared a descent into giggles. They suddenly felt like children, awed and irreverent in the face of such purchasing power. The house was beautiful, but in its sheer opulence and abundance it was also comical.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Ed himself. The energy of him was invigorating.

‘Quite a place,’ Matt murmured. Ed seemed to expect no more.

One corridor on the upper north side of the building was left unexplored. Dinah glimpsed at the end of it a door, firmly closed, and guessed that this must be Camilla’s territory. Because every other nook and cranny had been so freely displayed and demonstrated, she was left with the sense of something brooding, almost sinister, contained within the open geometry of the house.

Ed led them away from the corridor without comment and back to the big room. Sandra was setting out food and cutlery on a huge refectory table in a slate-floored annexe.

‘How are the drinks? Here, Matt, let me freshen you. What hardware have you got in that department of yours? Are we ready to eat, baby, those boys will be starving.’

‘Yes, everything’s ready,’ Sandra said.

The boys came in from the pool table at the first summons.

‘Where is she?’ Ed growled. The creases in his face were no longer genial.

Sandra picked up an intercom and pressed a button.

‘Milly? Brunch is ready, darling.’ She replaced the handset. ‘She’s coming,’ she said.

The six of them were standing behind their chairs, as if waiting to say grace.

A door slammed shut on another level. A moment later a girl appeared framed in one of the upper windows and stared down at them. There was a silence, and then an awkward clatter as they all pulled back their chairs and hurried to sit down. The girl was coming slowly down the stairs.

There was nothing pink or wobbly or plump about Camilla Parkes. Nothing so familiar or explicable.

She was thin and dark and her small pointy face was dead white. Her lustreless hair was matted and spiked and knotted into dreadlocks that hung around her cheeks and down her thin neck. Her eyes were painted with thick black lines and her mouth was outlined in vicious crayon. Her clothes were layers of shredded knits and torn and faded black drapes, and her spindly legs were thickened by black woollen tights with holes at the knees. On her feet she wore huge Doc Marten boots with steel toecaps. Her right nostril was pierced with two small silver rings.

Camilla did not look at any of them, or at Sandra’s scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and bagels and the baskets artfully heaped with raisin breads and croissants. She went to the fridge and took out a small dish covered in clingfilm, tore off the film and screwed it into a ball and aimed it towards the sink. Then she sat down at the far end of the table and began to eat, spooning up a gluey mixture of rice and beans without lifting her eyes from the dish.

‘Camilla is a vegan,’ Sandra explained. ‘Milly, please say hello to Professor and Mrs Steward.’

She raised her head briefly. Her eyes were full of anger.

‘And this is Jack, and Merlin. Some company for you.’

Milly didn’t favour the boys with so much as a glance.

‘Where do you go to school?’ Jack asked, refusing to be intimidated into silence.

‘Milly doesn’t go to school right now. A teaching assistant from UMass comes here to tutor her.’

Milly put down her spoon. There were dirty silver rings on every finger of both hands and her nails were painted black. She turned her burning stare on her mother.

‘Why do you answer everything for me, as though I’m a moron? Why do you think I can’t speak for myself?’

Her voice was pure glottal North London.

‘If you can speak, why don’t you?’ It was Ed who asked, with surprising forbearance. There was a flush of colour mottling Sandra’s lovely face.

Dinah had been watching Milly with terrible fascination, half-greedy and half-apprehensive. But as soon as the child opened her mouth familiarity embraced her and Dinah smiled, without thinking.

‘You make me remember London. It’s like hearing a piece of home.’

Oh, what a crappy thing to say, she reproached herself immediately the words were out.

But Milly only shifted her gaze in her direction.

‘Where you from?’

‘London.’

‘Yeah. London’s okay.’

‘Did you go to school there?’

‘Camden. Only I got expelled.’

Dinah and Milly looked at each other. In the child’s face, as she made her boast, Dinah read the habits of defiance and aggression, and also saw from the soft and uncontrollable pout of her lower lip that she was vulnerable, and deeply unhappy. Milly was very young, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise.

‘Tough,’ Dinah said.

But she was already becoming aware that Milly and her assumed disguise – fourteen-year-old part-punk, part-Goth and part-Dickens street-urchin – called on some hungry instinct ineffectively buried within herself. She was drawn to the child, and she also felt a cold stirring of fear brought on by the intensity of these feelings.

Merlin put down his bagel. ‘Ben Burnham was expelled from my old school. He used the phone in the secretary’s office to call the Fire Brigade. He told them the science room was on fire, and two fire engines came with ladders and hoses and about twenty firemen.’

The adults laughed and Jack sighed, but Milly gave no indication that she had heard the story. She ate the last grains of rice from her bowl and then left the table as silently as she had come. The tails of her wraps flapped behind her as she mounted the stairs and disappeared the way she had come.

‘Do you see what I mean?’ Sandra murmured to Dinah. ‘Somehow it’s easier just to let her …’

Ed shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up in a rakish crest on top of his big round head.

‘They’re parents as well, honey. You wait, you guys,’ he warned Dinah and Matthew. ‘They get past twelve years old and all bloody hell breaks out.’

‘I’m nearly eleven …’ Jack said meaningfully.

The adults laughed again and the boys were given permission to go back to the pool table. Coffee was poured and the baskets of croissants passed round, and the mellow Sunday morning talk was resumed. From time to time Dinah found herself glancing upwards to the frame where Milly had first appeared in the half-apprehensive hope that she might materialise again. But she did not, and there was no sound or movement to indicate that she was even in the house.

After the meal Ed proposed a walk. He wanted to show the Stewards the full extent of the property, and some thinning and replanting that was under way in his woodland. Ed liked to be physically involved in the work. He emerged for the expedition in a lumberjack’s coat and boots with a bow-saw slung over one shoulder. Sandra had already announced that she was not much of a walker, and would stay behind to have a nap.

Ed was leading the way through his woodland garden when an outer door slammed in the house. They all turned. Milly had put on a man’s long tweed coat over her ragbag clothes. The afternoon was mild but she was wearing gloves with the fingers roughly sawn off and a shapeless knitted hat. The Dickens urchin effect was complete.

‘Great,’ Ed called to her. ‘Glad you’re coming. Which way shall we go, Deer Path or along the ski trail?’

‘I dunno,’ Milly shrugged. The route was of no interest to her. She stood pointedly waiting until her father and Matt and the boys moved on again. She was not quite looking at Dinah, but almost. Dinah resisted the urge to turn and look at whatever it might be in the air six inches to the left of her own head. Ed’s voice faded in the distance. He was explaining something about cross-country skiing. The boys were running, chasing each other, their feet in the years’ depths of dead leaves sounding like waves breaking.

‘Shall we follow them?’ Dinah asked.

‘We’ll have to, I suppose. I don’t know the way, otherwise.’

The lack of familiarity with her own home ground was deliberate, Dinah thought. Milly didn’t want to know this place.

They began to walk, not quite side by side, along a wide path through the trees. The air was still scented with resin and leaf-mould. Dinah imagined how if she were to be lifted up over the treetops she would see the undulating woodland stretching in every direction. She had seen a pattern of leaves, a carpet in chemical approximations of these colours, somewhere, a long way …

No.

She asked Milly, not waiting to consider her words, ‘You live in London for part of the year, is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

I won’t make her talk if she doesn’t want to. She may just want to walk, not necessarily with me. I’m glad she came out. The thoughts skittered through Dinah’s head. She wanted Milly to continue beside her, not to frighten her off.

They continued in silence for perhaps a hundred yards. There were birds singing, and silverbarked birches with their leaves turning butter-gold.

‘It’s very beautiful here,’ Dinah said quietly.

‘I hate it.’ Milly’s voice was so low that it was barely audible.

Dinah waited, walking with her head bent and her eyes fixed on the path in order not to intrude on Milly.

‘I hate it,’ Milly repeated more loudly after a minute.

‘Why?’ Dinah ventured.

Milly stopped walking. She half turned and made an eloquent gesture of spreading her hands an inch, opening her hunched shoulders, twisting her head against the backdrop of gilded trees and china-blue sky. And at once Dinah had a sense of her isolation in this calendar landscape, sullen and strange, adrift from the chains of healthy high-school kids she had seen dismounting from the dog-nosed yellow State of Massachusetts school buses. Milly fierce and freaky. Lost and longing to be found. And yet, she was not so different from hundreds of kids in London. She was only so different here.

To Dinah’s surprise, Milly suddenly smiled.

Her teeth were white and even, startlingly so as they appeared between the dark-painted lips. Her eyes slanted upwards, giving her a completely new expression of sceptical merriment.

‘See?’ Milly asked.

Dinah nodded. ‘Yes. I suppose I do.’

It came to her that she recalled the familiarity of London and home for Milly, just as Milly did for her. They had recognised the exile in one another. They walked on, the distance between them perceptibly lessened.

‘It will start snowing soon,’ Milly remarked.

‘Not that soon. Another two, maybe three months.’

‘Then everyone will put on their ski-suits and start poling around the trails like these clockwork people, arms up and down, two, three, legs going like stupid machines.’

Milly’s spidery black limbs jerked in cruel imitation and Dinah laughed at the image she conjured up.

‘Cross-country skiing is harmless enough,’ she protested mildly.

‘It isn’t just that, is it? It’s the woods and the empty fresh air and the kindness and health and shitty peace and beauty of it all.’

‘What would you like instead?’

Milly’s second shrug was as expressive as the first.

‘Decay,’ she murmured gothically.

Merlin appeared ahead. He scuffled back towards them through the leaves and then stood in the middle of the path.

‘What are you talking about?’ He looked from his mother to Milly with a hint of jealous accusation. His round face was shadowed. Milly ignored him, simply waiting for Dinah to deal with the interruption so they could resume their conversation. She was entirely focused on what interested her, and what was of no interest did not exist. Dinah reflected on this as she dealt with Merlin, and guiltily encouraged him to run on again to look for the men. She wanted to prolong this talk.

As soon as he was out of earshot Milly greedily reclaimed her attention. ‘Why don’t you like it here?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, you don’t, do you?’

Dinah sighed. ‘I miss … threads, connections. Nothing very specific.’ She could not explain, particularly she could not think of explaining to this child. Associations began to pile up, like nerve impulses behind the blocked synapses of denial.

‘Just plain homesickness,’ she offered lamely.

Milly walked with her hands in the pockets of her long coat. Her bottom lip stuck out; her expression was a young-old hybrid of disappointment and dismissiveness. Dinah saw that she had given an inadequate answer. ‘So what is it you miss?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Well, everything. People, you know. Mates. That you can just be with and, like, not have to pretend to be someone else for half the time just because they think you ought to be different from the way you are. I’ve got friends in London, in Camden, who know me all the way through. Better than Sandra and Ed ever will. I’d rather be there with them than stuck here.’

The tone of her voice was withering.

‘School friends?’ Dinah asked. She felt sorry for Milly, cut off in the glass castle from children of her own age, with only her UMass tutor for company.

‘God. I told you. I got expelled from Camden bloody School.’

‘Why?’

Milly sniffed in exasperation. ‘The usual shit. Smoking. Language. Defacing school property. Bunking off. Violence to a member of staff. Actually it was only a ruler I smacked her with. Should have been an iron bar, really. Only I didn’t have one in my pencil case.’ There was a distinct note of pride in this recitation.

Dinah nodded. ‘I see,’ she said mildly.

Milly’s voice softened. ‘No, my mates are nothing to do with school. I met them down the Lock. I used to hang round there in the day, not being at school. They just do stuff, like, their own way. They’ve got a place they live in, near Chalk Farm. Caz, that’s one of them, he’s fixed it well up so there’s water and heating and everything, not like some stinking squat. I’ll move in there, soon as I’m old enough.’

‘You aren’t old enough yet.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. All I’m old enough for is either being towed round while Ed researches his crap books, or being left behind with some pain in the arse housekeeper. It’s no wonder nothing worked out in school, really. I was always being taken out to go somewhere else, that they wanted.’

Dinah contemplated this opposing perspective on Milly’s life.

‘I can see that would be difficult.’

Milly shrugged. She stuck her hands deeper in her pockets and walked on, looking straight ahead, as if she had already given too much away.

Dinah tried one or two more conversational openings, but Milly did not respond. They walked the rest of the way in silence, but it was a companionable silence.

When they came back to the house, having made a wide arc through the unrelenting woodland, Ed was already waving at them from the deck, the bow-saw hanging over the other arm. Sandra was watching too. Her eyes flicked from Milly to Dinah. Milly veered away from Dinah.

‘See you,’ she muttered.

It might have been a threat or a promise. Her face was closed up again, admitting nothing. She went up the steps, looking at no one, and vanished into the house.

The Stewards were ready to leave. The boys were already inside the Jeep and the adults gathered in a loose group beside it to exchange their goodbyes. Sandra stood beside Dinah.

‘Thank you for taking such trouble with Milly.’ The thanks sounded oddly formal.

‘I liked her,’ Dinah said. ‘Did you?’

It was less than the truth, but even the mild assurance seemed to displease Sandra.

‘She doesn’t often go out for a walk. You were honoured,’ Sandra told her.

‘Great, great, we must do that,’ Ed was saying to Matthew. ‘I’ll call you and we’ll fix it.’ He crossed in front of the Toyota to Dinah’s side, taking something out of his wallet as he did so. Dinah watched him, noting the set of his head on his neck and the forward thrust of his chest and shoulders. He was a bully, she thought. An amiable one, but still a bully. She wondered how the Parkeses lived together when there was no call for the polish of hospitality.

Ed was talking to her. ‘Di, you said you were thinking of looking for a job of some kind? Sounded like a good idea …’

They had discussed it, only very briefly, over lunch.

‘Well …’

Ed had taken out a card. He passed it to her now through the open window. ‘This woman’s a good friend of mine, an employment consultant. Now, don’t look like that. She’s the best, and I’ll call her about you. Go see her, won’t you? Can’t do any harm.’

‘No, it can’t do any harm,’ Dinah agreed. It was not easy to deny Ed.

The car rolled down the driveway leaving the Parkeses with their arms around each other, waving, against the backdrop of their woodland castle. Dinah wondered if Milly was mutely watching from some window slit.

‘I rather like Ed,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s something about all that energy.’

Matt liked him because he reflected himself, Dinah thought. Matt was full of his own kind of energy, and he was capable of the same self-absorption.

‘Odd child, wasn’t she? Why do they let her behave like that? It’s almost as if they’re afraid of her, of what she might say or do.’

‘Camilla-and-custard,’ one of the boys murmured from the back of the car.

‘Or the wild witch of the woods.’

Dinah thought of the streetwise shell and the vulnerable core she had glimpsed within the carapace of clothes and cosmetics, and suppressed her impulse to jump to Milly’s defence.

‘What did you talk to her about on the walk?’ ‘Home,’ Dinah said.

Matt sighed. He would not pursue the conversation, and a space of silence admonished them both. Dinah stared ahead at the trees and the dipping road and then the gas stations and parking lots as they drove back into Franklin.

A little later, when the boys were back in school and her days were no longer superficially occupied with their needs and demands, Dinah crossed town in the Jeep on her way to an appointment with Ed’s employment consultant. Dinah had concluded that it could not do any harm to see her, as Ed had pointed out at the beginning, and the woman had sounded pleasant and businesslike on the telephone. Dinah’s résumé and some examples of her work were in the unfamiliar briefcase on the passenger seat beside her.

The town lay quiet under a pallid, sunless sky. The trees that lined Main Street brandished their fall colours, but less noticeably against the backdrop of dignified clapboard houses and the rosy brick-built façades across the green. The windows of some of the tackier shops were already displaying Hallowe’en masks and costumes. There was little traffic in the wide streets and she arrived too early for her appointment. She parked the Jeep and sat waiting, thinking.

There was an uncomfortable pressure weighing on her, and the sense of it made the colours of the day seem sickly and caused the clean resinous scent of the air to scrape in the back of her throat. Dinah felt that the gap between the capable laughing wife and mother she pretended to be and the real woman who crept within herself was growing wider and wider.

Only Matt sensed it, and she could barely talk to Matt at all.

She checked her watch again. Still a few minutes before time, but she needed to get out of the Jeep. She felt shut in, panicked by claustrophobia, fearful of the two women who slid uncontrollably apart beneath her skin.

She scrambled her belongings together and stepped out into the cool air. She dropped her purse and bent down to retrieve it, and as she straightened up again dizziness assaulted her.

Forcing herself to breathe evenly Dinah walked up the shallow steps to the door of the building. It was a new low-rise, with glass curtain-walls reflecting the whitish sky. Two men came out of the doors as she tried to go in and they glanced curiously at her as she edged past them.

The building was multi-occupied, there was a long list of tenants in the small lobby. Dinah searched for the consultant’s name, reading the list twice before she located it.

It was a corner office on the second floor. In the little anteroom there were two chairs and a table with neatly arranged business magazines.

‘Jenny shouldn’t be more than a minute or two,’ the consultant’s secretary smiled. Dinah opened her briefcase and stared at the typed résumé in her lap. Who was this woman? Was this who she had once been, defined and held in place by these qualifications and this much work done?

She realised that she was looking past the sheets of paper at her own knees. They made bony protuberances under the matt black stuff of her leggings. Solid enough. Yet she was afraid to touch them in case her fingers met emptiness. The fear of it ballooned in her chest like nausea.

Dinah’s head jerked up again and she focused on the view from the window. The buildings in the block opposite. A sugar maple, fire-tinted leaves. Back on Kendrick Dee Kerrigan would be laying out after-school bread and cookies in her kitchen. Nancy would be lifting her little girls out of the back of the station wagon, wondering as she did so if it was too early to have a glass of wine. Not knowing that Dinah was out she might well call over to see if she wanted to join her.

Normal things.

Were they normal, or did they seem strange to her only because of her distance from them?

Dinah straightened her legs. Her feet looked odd, disjointed.

Am I going mad?

‘Hi. I’m Jenny Abraham.’

The consultant had emerged from her office, was holding the door open for Dinah. They shook hands and Dinah obediently followed her. She sat down in the chair facing the desk, fanning out the paper evidence of herself before handing it over for scrutiny.

‘Thanks. That’s all very professional-looking. I’ll check through it in a moment, but we should talk a little first. It helps if I can get a kind of a feel for the person you are.’

Ms Abraham smiled encouragingly. They began to talk about the kind of work Dinah might do. Dinah knew that her body language was all wrong, but still she could not make herself unlock her knees and arms. She doubted that there was much in advertising outside New York or Boston, and even if there were there would surely be plenty of home-grown talent. Who would want a precarious Englishwoman? She wondered vaguely if she could teach. Almost everyone in Franklin seemed to be some kind of a teacher.

‘Good. That’s very interesting.’ Jenny Abraham managed to purse her lips and shake her head at the same time. She was writing busily in the spaces on a long form. The little stabs of her pen seemed sharp enough to puncture Dinah’s skin. There was a big coloured Peanuts poster on the wall behind the woman’s desk.

This was a bad mistake, Dinah was already thinking. Why had she let Ed Parkes bully her into it?

‘Let’s talk a little bit about the real you, Dinah.’

Ms Abraham leaned back in her swivel-chair and steepled her fingers.

‘Tell me, what are you proudest of, amongst all your achievements?’

Dinah started to talk too quickly, to fend the woman off. The words came out jumbled up. She said something about a campaign for a children’s charity she had once worked on and then contradicted herself, mentioning her boys, her family.

‘And most ashamed of?’

No.

I should have heard that before she said it. I should have guessed it was coming and forestalled her.

Who is she, to sit in her big chair with a smile and eyes like glass chips and ask me about shame? It was only a job I wanted. Some little occupation to divert my mind. Perhaps make me feel fixed here like Matt, even Jack and Merlin, instead of skidding over some huge inhospitable polished surface with no landmark, no harbour.

Only there is no diversion. How could I have imagined there would be? I have to get away from here first. Then I can think.

Dinah made an answering smile, just by stretching her stiff lips. She leaned forward and took her papers off the woman’s desk, squared them neatly by tapping the edges and slid them back into her briefcase.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve been wasting your time. I don’t really need a job. I’ve just realised.’

Somehow, she was standing up. Ms Abraham’s face showed a real expression, surprise. Dinah gathered her belongings awkwardly in her arms. Anger carried her out of the room and past the secretary in her cubicle, and back down in the elevator to the lobby. The Cherokee was where she had parked it, across the street.

She was driving, unseeingly following the route that led across town, before the fortifying anger drained away. It left her weak and disorientated so that she blinked through the windscreen at the white clapboarding of the Franklin Hotel on the south side of the green, and the line of cars waiting to turn at the lights. The driver of the station-wagon behind her hooted, and Dinah slid the Jeep into a parking space. She was shaking now.

Surging out of the dark place that she kept shuttered all her waking hours came a black wave of pain.

What was she ashamed of? That was what the woman had asked her. Not the woman’s fault, of course. Just a crappy pop personality-test question to make everyone think they were getting a slice of a real person in the answer.

Dinah’s hands gripped the steering wheel until the bones of her knuckles showed their reddened cleft. Shame and guilt were her constant companions. Sometimes they hid their faces, dissembling as craftily as she did herself, but still they were always with her.

She didn’t see the fake-rustic Franklin Inn sign swinging in front of her eyes. Instead Dinah was thinking of home, picturing the rain-smeared streets of a small town in Norfolk. She had never even been there, although to hear its name or see it written made her catch her breath.

I have to go home, she said aloud, knowing that she must look like a madwoman mouthing in the sanctuary of her car. I have to go back home and start searching.

Matthew sat at the end of the big kitchen table with some papers spread out in front of him. The boys were in bed and the house was quiet except for Ape snoring and twitching in his basket under the window.

Matt liked this time of the evening. The day trailed in a wake behind him and there were still hours beckoning, subterranean chambers below the chipped surface of the working day, before he need think of bed. Matthew never slept before the small hours. There was too much else to do, to think about, to waste time on sleep. Dinah was different, always had been. She needed eight hours and firmly believed, like her mother, that one hour before midnight was worth two after.

Matthew was reading columns of figures, following a pattern through them that was as vivid to him as a picture. He didn’t hear Dinah come in, but he looked up when she sat down in the chair opposite him. She was wearing her bathrobe, splashy red print on a white background.

‘Hi.’ He had been drinking a glass of wine, a Californian Cabernet recommended by Todd Pinkham. ‘Want some of this?’

Dinah shook her head.

Resignedly Matt took off his reading glasses. ‘Tell me about your day. What did happen with the job woman?’

He had asked the question earlier and she had turned it aside, pressing her lips into a thin suffering line as she did so.

‘Nothing happened. I just decided it was a bad idea.’

‘Okay, so don’t talk about it.’

Irritated, although he had resolved that he would not be, Matt replaced his glasses and began reading again. He wanted to slip away from Dinah and the difficulty that she had become, and re-enter the cool lofty place in which she had disturbed him.

Dinah sat in silence. She was aware of the comfortable structure of their home enclosing them, filled with pictures and furniture and all the insulating drift of their joint possessions. How many things, she wondered, remembering the packing cases in which they had been shipped to Franklin. How many cups, and scarves, and books, and teapots.

Matthew turned a page. She watched the way he reached out unseeingly for his glass, his fingers quivering a little until they connected with the stem.

Dinah looked at her husband and wondered, do I love him or hate him? Did I do it alone, this thing, or did I do it because it was what Matt wanted?

‘Matthew?’

He rubbed the inner corners of his eyes, sighing, working his middle fingers under the lenses so that the frame bobbed over his nose.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m all adrift here in this place. I want to go back home, to look for her.’

His face hardened. His flexible mouth became a slit and the planes of his cheeks and forehead turned boxy.

‘You can’t do that, Dinah. Why torment yourself?’

‘Why not be like you, you mean? Indifferent?’ Her voice whipped him.

‘I’m not indifferent.’

The telephone rang. For three, four rings neither of them moved, and then Dinah slowly got up and lifted the receiver. Even from where he was sitting Matt could recognise Sandra Parkes’s high insistent voice. Dinah listened as it nibbled on, saying yes, yes okay, nodding as she spoke.

‘Of course we can,’ she added at length. ‘If Milly’s happy with that we’d be glad to have her.’

There was another high-pitched torrent of talk. And then Dinah said, ‘Friday, then. Yes, yes. That’s fine.’ She replaced the receiver.

‘Ed and Sandra have got to go out to the coast for three days. Something to do with a movie deal for one of Ed’s books. Sandra wondered if Milly could come to us.’

‘I’m taking the boys up to the cabin in Vermont for the weekend. Had you forgotten?’

Max Berkmann had promised a loan of their summer cabin. Matt was going to take the boys fishing and hiking, although neither of them had shown much enthusiasm for the prospect.

‘Yes, I had,’ Dinah admitted. ‘It doesn’t matter. Milly and I will be okay here.’

She hesitated for a moment, but Matt was shifting his papers, ready to immerse himself in them again. He had closed off her plea with his hard face. Not now, she told herself. Don’t try to talk about it now.

‘I’m going up to bed,’ she said at last.

‘I’ll be up soon,’ he told her, although she knew he would not be.