Nick waved a fly off the plate of uncooked steak and rummaged at the burning coals with the barbecue fork. Their undersides were ash-white, almost ready for cooking. Away from the barbecue, it was almost chilly, one of the evening winds having picked up. He thought with a start of guilt about the loose window shutter, but then remembered he had fixed it months before. On the day Kat said their emails had to stop. A grey July day he would never forget. And now it was December. A sudden gust whipped at the fire. Nick blinked as a scattering of hot ash-dust blew upwards. Wind or no wind, Donna would want to stick with her plan of eating outside and he knew better than to suggest otherwise.
A few yards away, in the alcove facing the pool, she had laid out the usual extravagant array of salads on their big outdoor table: green leaves and yellow peppers in a blue dish; farfalle pasta, tomatoes and basil in a yellow dish; a creamy potato salad in a red dish. Nick sighed. These three would already have been far too much. Both the girls were at party sleepovers. The only people coming were Donna’s parents and their nearest neighbours, Mike and Lindy Scammell. What’s more, the steaks were rib-eyes the size of books, and Donna ate sparsely, with great attention to her calorific intake. Yet Nick knew there were two further vast side dishes being prepared, one containing cucumber, sweetcorn and tuna, and the other a dense concoction of pulses that he could tell at a glance he wouldn’t like.
Donna’s parents had just arrived and were still in the kitchen. He could see the heads of the three of them bobbing in the window across the pool, talking intently. About him, Nick guessed grimly, his thoughts skittering to the days when he had imagined his in-laws to be friends.
Catching Jim Cruick’s eye, he raised the barbecue fork in a salute, getting a head-nod in return. He guessed the Scammells would be late. They usually were, in spite of living only a couple of miles away on a similar gated plot with garden and pool. They had a daughter called Meryl who was in the same class as Natalie, which meant the convenience of sharing the thirty-minute drive to the girls’ school. They were not kindred spirits by any means, but decent enough people. He hadn’t seen Mike for weeks, but he would be back-thumping and cheerfully noisy, Nick knew, charged already with a couple of beers. Lindy, meanwhile, would be overdressed, in something a little too short, the heels a little too high. She would come and stand next to Nick at the barbecue and light her first cigarette of the evening, saying in her low smoker’s voice that he was her favourite doctor because he never lectured her about her bad habits.
For all their families’ interactions, Donna maintained she didn’t like Lindy very much. Because the woman was in love with Nick, she claimed, blatantly chasing after him at every opportunity. That Nick wasn’t interested in the advances of their neighbour, or any other female for that matter, was never of any relevance either to his wife’s train of thought or the viciousness with which such accusations were flung out. Donna’s bullying certainty about Nick’s desire to be unfaithful had formed early on in their marriage, quickly establishing itself as an ugly and unrelenting thread in the tapestry of their arguments. The implausibility of the candidates and Nick’s dogged efforts to convince her otherwise never did any good. Lately, he had stopped trying. Which was ironic, Nick mused, and possibly even connected to the fact that, for the first time in sixteen years of matrimony, Donna might actually have had some dim grounds for complaint. If exchanging a few emails counted as grounds.
Nick stirred the coals, bringing the outer ones into the middle and then spreading the whole lot flat. But it was over, he reminded himself. Whatever ‘it’ had been. He jabbed at the coals again, ruining the smoothness. He had half hoped his most recent missive – sent from his office the week before – might prompt a reply, in spite of its protestations to the contrary. He was still glad he had written it, Nick decided stubbornly, glad that Kat at least could now be in no doubt that he wasn’t, and had never been, clinging to some rose-tinted version of the past. Deep inside himself, however, he knew her silence was right. It was that knowledge that had helped him delete every word of their stop-start correspondence, up to and including his most recent message. What was less understandable was the hole this appeared to have left in his life. In fact, most hours of most days, Nick was starting to feel as if someone had bulldozed the ground from beneath his feet.
As regards Lindy, it was clear to Nick that their neighbour’s attentions remained innocuous. He had always found it hard to see the crime in one human being wanting to establish a teasing connection with another, even if it had faint sexual undertones. It was the choices one made about such undertones that mattered; whether they led to action or not. Nick had grown fond of Lindy’s at times off-kilter flirty remarks, but only because they made a welcome change from the usual conversational paths to dominate his and Donna’s otherwise predictable and privileged social circle, tending as they did to range between irritatingly competitive chat about the achievements of offspring, gripes over inept house-staff, and horror at rising crime stats. The pattern of it all could get him down.
It was also baffling and irksome, Nick decided, stabbing yet more chaos into the hot smooth bed of charcoal, that Donna should claim such dislike of Lindy and yet do so thorough a job of keeping the woman embroiled in their lives. Sharing the school run was an obvious tie, but beyond that there were innumerable invitations to lunch and dinner parties, with Donna rather than Lindy invariably leading the charge.
‘Why are you using that?’
‘Pardon?’ Nick had been too lost in his cogitations to notice his wife arrive at the barbecue. She was in silver-strapped heels he hadn’t seen before and a long purple silk dress that billowed on the evening breeze round her tanned ankles.
She pointed with distaste at the barbecue fork in his hand. ‘That is for actual cooking. You know it is for cooking.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘So why the fuck are you shovelling at the fire with it? Christ, Nick, as if it isn’t bad enough that you hide out here—’
‘Hide?’
‘How do you think that makes Daddy feel, or Mummy? Their own son-in-law, not even bothering to come and say hello?’
‘But I assumed you would be bringing them straight out here…’ Nick glanced hopelessly in the direction of the kitchen, noting that the heads of his in-laws had been joined by those of the Scammells.
‘I have to do everything, do you realise that? Every-fucking-thing.’
‘I’ll come in now, of course. I just thought you…’
But she was already striding away, flicking her hand dismissively over her head in the I-give-up gesture that had the sharp, double power to make him feel both furious and ineffectual. He had often thought that to be treated as purely irrelevant would have been preferable. But Donna wasn’t like that; she liked to poke him with a stick and then storm away, blocking the possibility of explanations or reconciliation. That came later, on her terms, and usually – maddeningly – without any willingness to discuss what had caused the outburst. Indeed, her most common default reaction was to behave as if the outburst hadn’t even happened, precluding the possibility of solving its root cause. Her mood simply changed and she expected Nick to change with it.
Nick stared after his wife. Her lithe body swayed as she moved, making the shape of its curves tantalisingly visible through the expensive cloth of the dress. It still astounded him that such unpleasantness could erupt out of such beauty. Early on, he had felt not only attracted to, but somehow safe with Donna’s looks; seeing them with mad subconscious logic as insurance against the possibility of ever leading an ugly life. It had taken years for the naivety of this assumption to sink in. Indeed, it was only really with the imminence of his fortieth birthday that he had started to face up to it, driven by unhappiness to the sort of introspection that he had spent a life-time avoiding.
The introspection had wrought a certain despair. Tilly had been strikingly pretty, a petite brunette who turned heads; Kat’s wild elfin beauty had been in an order all its own; on his elective in Sri Lanka there had been a sultry Spanish nurse, in possession of a healthy sexual appetite and a boyfriend in Manchester. And then there had been Donna, jigging to keep warm at an inter-hospital rugby match soon after his return, chattering about how she had just started working as a PA in London. It had been a steely day at the end of February, seeping drizzle, and she had seemed to throw light at it. Two years later they were married. Six years after that, with his father-in-law oiling the wheels on all fronts, they had made the move to Cape Town.
Did female beauty make him stupid? Was he just a walking cliché?
Nick looked round for something to cover the meat. It had occurred to him that he needed to get into the kitchen fast, if there was to be any hope of re-establishing matrimonial peace. But the fly had returned to the plate with a cohort of followers. The steaks were sweating and succulent, so red they were almost blue. He would just have to take them with him. Nick picked up the plate and hurried round the pool. As he reached the garden room doors, Donna stepped through them, followed by their guests. Jim, her father, came first, right on her shoulder, bearing an ice bucket containing – Nick could see at a glance – a different bottle from the one he himself had placed inside it an hour or so before.
‘Nick. How you doing?’ It seemed to Nick that the ice bucket was a pretext for not shaking hands. ‘I brought something special – a Chardonnay – barrel fermented – from a Durbanville vineyard now being run by a friend of mine. Dean Cobalt. Good man. And the wine isn’t bad either. It will win awards, mark my words.’ Jim rattled the bucket. ‘There’s another keeping cool in the fridge. I brought a couple of his reds too, Cabernet Sauvignons. I’ve opened them to breathe.’
‘Thanks, that’s really generous.’ Nick forced out the gratitude and accompanying smile, marvelling that gifts could feel so like coercion. There had been countless others in the past, ranging from horses to holidays. Even work. It was largely due to pressure from his father-in-law that he now did the highly paid day of cosmetic surgery at a private clinic downtown. It would see off the girls’ university fees, Jim had pointed out sharply, when Nick had dared to express doubts about accepting the networking that had produced the possibility of the post. In the end, predictably, Donna had joined the fray and Nick had succumbed, accepting that the extra income made sense, since keeping up with his wife’s idea of living well at the same time as privately educating their daughters was already blowing large, regular holes in his domestic budgeting.
But inwardly Nick had resented the strong-arm tactics. It had made him see more clearly than ever that his father-in-law was a man forged out of granite, with his own agenda. Physically, Jim Cruick exuded a powerful force too, his Dutch ancestry having dealt him the same piercing blue eyes he had passed onto his daughter and thick sandy-gold hair, which still showed no trace of grey and which he kept cropped in vertical spikes, like bristles on a boot-scraper. He had been a rugby player in his youth, tried out for the Springboks, and still had the wide neck and a tank of a chest to prove it. Well into his sixties, he now boasted about maintaining his fitness in the gym or through horseback riding round the formidable Stellenbosch property he had acquired and extended through his success in real estate. It was where Donna and the girls kept the horses he had given them, ensuring that riding with Grandad was always a favourite weekend treat.
‘We are sorry the girls aren’t here,’ cried Lauren, his mother-in-law, her bangles jangling as she grasped one of Nick’s arms with both hands. ‘Aren’t we sorry, Jim?’ She threw the words carelessly in the direction of her husband, making the big gold loops lancing her ears swing like wind chimes. Her hair was white and expensively styled in high waves. She was wearing one of her tent-dresses, a medley of electric greens and blues designed to accentuate the lingering prettiness of her strong grey eyes and mask the swell of her sizeable midriff. Compared to Jim, she looked an old woman. The difference was almost comical.
Nick kissed her on both cheeks, feeling a burst of sympathetic affection. Living with his father-in-law could not be easy. Moving on to greet the Scammells, he was aware of the stiffening of his smile and the grit of tiredness under his eyelids. He had hit a particularly bad patch of sleeping, making trips to the bathroom just to relieve the tedium of lying in bed. Lingering in front of the basin mirror in the small hours that morning, he had found himself wondering how the years had treated the Keating sisters. Lately, he had been struggling to picture either of them clearly, even as young girls. Whenever he tried, all that came to mind, vividly, was the voice in the emails, intelligent, playful, fresh. Honest.
Rapidly and unexpectedly, the dinner party grew enjoyable. It helped that the wind, like a fan turned off at the mains, suddenly dropped, leaving a balmy warmth that caressed their bare skin. The pool, with its underwater lights, became a huge emerald mirror. On the table, the candles glinted in their vases like jewels in glass cases. The steaks were buttery-soft and Nick highly praised for his outdoor cooking skills. Jim’s wines slid smoothly over the tongue and throat, making any resentment about being forced to consume them seem churlish. When Mike got out his iPad to start making notes of the grapes and labels, Jim insisted that he would organise a visit to Dean Cobalt’s vineyard. A multi-course lunch of tastings for all six of them – it would be his treat and a great day out, he boomed, in the tone he favoured, the one that defied contradiction.
Donna floated off to the kitchen with the dirty plates and floated back again, bearing a tray of mountainous fruit salad, home-made chocolate brownies and a tub of organic vanilla ice cream. As it was the weekend they had sent their kitchen help home. After setting the food on the table, she took a detour to her own chair via Nick’s, pausing to trail her fingers up the back of his neck and under the cuff of his hair. He was being forgiven. An involuntary shiver of pleasure rippled over his skull. Maybe the forgiveness would stretch to sex. That didn’t happen often. Nick rubbed his arms, aware of the shiver of pleasure disappearing as quickly as it had come. He caught his father-in-law watching him, steel flashing in the dark blue eyes, as sharp as any sword.
After their guests had gone, and they were clearing up, the atmosphere of truce prevailed; an atmosphere that Nick, as ever, felt little inclination to jeopardise with defensive questions or recriminations about what had gone before. With Donna, saying the wrong thing was akin to pressing a detonator. Shouting, hitting. Sometimes things got thrown.
She had her back to him and was busy transferring the leftover salads to smaller containers for stowing in the fridge. The pulses had barely been touched. ‘Daddy says he is going to put one of the flats in the new Waterfront condo in trust for Sash and Nat. Like a nest egg for them. Isn’t that insanely generous?’
‘Goodness, yes. Insane.’
She spun round, her cat-eyes wide with the readiness to take affront. ‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘No. I am agreeing.’ Nick found a laugh escaping. Her quickness to take offence was absurd and yet somehow always caught him off guard.
She spun back to the fridge, restacking shelves to make room for the Tupperware. ‘With your recent midlife career crisis it makes me feel more secure, anyway. For the girls’ future, if not my own.’
‘I haven’t had a career crisis.’ Nick braced himself. He had hoped the truce might be more resilient, one of those that lasted for several days.
‘No, right. A top consultant wanting to become a teacher.’ Her tone was sneering, but she still had the pretence of a grin fixed in place when she turned round. ‘Not to mention all these sudden urges about visiting the UK.’ She wagged a finger at him. ‘Pretending you want to rush off and see your mother, whom you hate anyway, when it’s perfectly clear you’re really after a sneaky closer look at this school teacher idea, talk to some old chums.’ She gave the word a faux posh English accent, the one that once upon a time had made him smile. ‘And as for how you could even consider trading in what we have here for a life like that…’ She shook her head in disgusted wonderment.
‘I don’t hate my mother,’ Nick said levelly. ‘She’s hard work, I admit. Since losing Dad, she’s not been the same, but that doesn’t stop my sense of duty—’
‘Which is why we are going in January. I have agreed we are going to bloody England in bloody January, have I not?’ Donna’s once professed fondness for his homeland had sunk over the years beyond her own recollection, let alone retrieval. She hated the weather, the food, the traffic, quite apart from her mother-in-law.
‘Yes, you have. And thank you for that.’ Nick spoke firmly and as warmly as he could manage, resisting the urge to remind her that the January plan was the poor compromise, reached thanks to her pulling out of the original agreement to visit England in September. A suggestion that he go on his own had proved one of those unforeseeable detonator moments. She didn’t trust him, she had shrieked, throwing a mug that time; she didn’t trust him with life choices, with women, with anything. The mug had somersaulted through the air, giving him plenty of time to duck. And since Kat had been half on his mind at the time, he had climbed down with guilt for once, rather than suppressed outrage, sweeping up the broken fragments, soothing her with the idea of postponing to a visit in the New Year instead.
‘Though why your mother can’t come and see us…’ Donna started fiercely, but then let the sentence hang. This was slightly less safe ground. The last thing she wanted was a visit from Carol Wharton, as they both knew. What they also both knew was that since her mother-in-law barely ventured out of the small Cheltenham flat to which she had retreated in widowhood, there was little chance of her bluff being called.
Nick hesitated. It was always a question of picking which battles to fight. ‘Yes, well, you know how she is.’
‘Yes, I bloody do.’
‘So January it is.’
‘Yes. But only if you promise to drop all this fucking crazy teacher talk once and for all,’ Donna countered bitterly. ‘You don’t mean it, do you? You can’t mean it.’ She slammed the fridge door and turned to face him, hands on hips.
‘It was just an idea,’ Nick said quietly, regretting for the umpteenth time that he had ever been foolhardy enough to broach the subject out loud. ‘Surely,’ Nick went on carefully, ‘one should be able to have a few off-the-wall ideas and share them with one’s partner. As you know, teaching literature was something I used to want to do. And now that I’m getting past the age where…’ He paused.
Donna was fiddling with the fridge magnets which had slipped out of their usual places thanks to her slam of the door. A Barbie logo, a figure of the Little Mermaid, a plastic hamburger, a smiley face; relics of a lost time, it seemed to Nick suddenly, of lost hope, lost innocence.
‘I was just airing an idea,’ he tried again, speaking very calmly and gently to her back. ‘I love our lifestyle here, as you well know, and there is so much about being a doctor that I like too. I know I am good at it. And, as things stand, I couldn’t afford to switch careers anyway.’
‘Oh, you’d find a way.’ It was an accusation not a compliment. She turned round, the nostrils of her small neat nose flaring slightly. ‘You would go on a teaching course in England or something. You would make it happen. I know you hate it here. I know how you resent Dad – are jealous of him—’
‘I do not hate it here. And I am neither resentful nor envious of your father.’
‘The trouble with you, Nick Wharton,’ she snapped, ignoring these reassurances, ‘is you don’t love me properly. You never have.’
‘Yes, I—’
‘You don’t. Because if you did you wouldn’t even talk about going to England.’
The obvious counter-challenge, that evidence of her affection for him had grown pretty scant in recent years, would get him nowhere, Nick knew. It would produce ructions. He could already feel her anger brewing. He had run out of ways of dealing with it other than stonewalling; and that night he didn’t feel he had the strength even for that. He felt battered already, exhausted.
‘To have doubts about a career choice and own up to them has got nothing to do with not loving you,’ he said instead, speaking wearily now, while inside a deeper tiredness heaved, for the whole sorry business of what they had become. With hindsight, it was pitifully obvious that they had married barely knowing each other; fallen for notions of what each might be, rather than with any firm grasp of one another’s needs and personalities. Lately, Nick had found himself dreaming of Donna leaving him. But then, each time, he would hit the roadblock of the girls. It took no crystal ball to imagine how hard Donna would make it for him to see them, or how rigorously her parents would take her part. The notion of being deprived of contact with his daughters, not seeing them for weeks on end, not being around to catch their breathy everyday stories about this and that, all the myriad, daily disarming moments when they forgot about trying to be anything other than themselves, Nick found impossible to contemplate. The pain of anything was still preferable to that.
Somewhere deep inside his pocket, his phone rang.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ Donna’s sapphire eyes glittered. She was still teetering on the precipice, assessing her own levels of frustration and how to let them play out. She was gripping her upper arms so tightly the skin had gone white around her fingertips. ‘Or perhaps I should?’
For one mad moment, Nick feared it might indeed be Lindy – which, he decided was what Donna herself was thinking. Both their neighbours had drunk a lot and there had been no disguising the way Lindy’s soft sad mouth had landed a little too close to his as they said their goodbyes.
But the number flashing was Sasha’s, their youngest.
‘Hey, Dad, sorry to call.’
‘No problem. Is everything okay?’
‘I didn’t want to try Mum in case she was asleep.’
‘Quite right. Good girl.’ Famously within the family, Donna was a delicate sleeper – easily woken and finding it hard to drop back off once disturbed. Nick’s doctor’s training meant he was the opposite, or so Donna had always told the girls once they were old enough to process and pay heed to such information. That this was not the case, that Nick too was, and always had been, a light sleeper, was one of the countless small deceits and disconnections that had threaded its way between them over the years, harmless in itself, but not so harmless in conjunction with everything else. Working the long hours he did, Nick had in fact been happy to let the myth ride, taking whatever opportunities he got to be a father, even if that meant being the first to soothe night terrors, strip bedding or hunt for a thermometer.
‘It’s Sasha,’ he mouthed, in response to Donna’s questioning look. She was at his side in an instant, clutching Nick’s arm and trying to get her head near enough to hear the conversation. He eased Donna’s hand off his arm and switched his phone to speaker mode so she could hear without straining. She was a good mother, he reminded himself. It was just him she had difficulty with. She needed to be able to let go, she had confessed once, a rare moment of candour piercing the calm that had followed a particularly bad explosion. She had thrown a butter dish that time. It had caught his cheekbone, leaving a red lump. It was because she trusted and loved him, she said, which meant being able to show her worst. And what if he were to show his ‘worst’, Nick had growled on that occasion, cupping his throbbing face, the shock at her behaviour numbing him as it always did, while inside the optimist in him wondered if so rare a disclosure might mean they had reached a turning point at last. For, in those days, he had still believed that every situation had its rock bottom from which good might yet emerge.
But Donna had expertly flipped the dynamic, as she so often managed, visibly shrinking from him and asking in a terrified whisper, ‘And what exactly do you mean by that… your worst?’ She had fumbled for her mobile, keeping big scared eyes pinned on his as she pressed the numbers – whether to call an emergency service or her father, Nick had no idea – the threat in itself being enough to make him backtrack.
Sasha’s words were muffled, delivered with her hand over her phone, by the sound of it. She was feeling sick, she said. In spite of it being gone midnight, Nick could hear the dull thumps of the sleepover, which had been for her best friend, Adrienne’s, thirteenth birthday, still going on in the background. She didn’t want to make a fuss, she said, but could she be picked up and taken home. Nick said, of course, that he would be there as quickly as he could. Adrienne lived in Muizenberg, a good forty-minute drive away.
‘I’ll phone Mia, say you’re on your way,’ said Donna, patting a yawn away as she bent down to retrieve her silver shoes.
Nick had drunk too much to drive, but neither of them referred to it. It was a relief for both just to have the spotlight shifted from their own dysfunction, to step back into the safe world of parenthood.
‘Drive carefully,’ Donna called from the doorstep, waving Nick off as he nosed their hefty four-wheeler through the gates; as if they were any ordinary couple, who trusted and loved each other.
‘You just say if you need me to pull over, okay?’ Nick glanced sideways at his youngest. She had her head out of the car window, like a dog on a hot day. Her long hair, a sandier brown than his, streamed off her ears and neck. The mountain was a hulking shadow behind them, Cape Town a pincushion of lights, twinkling through the red alders flanking the road. ‘What was it, too much chocolate cake?’
Sasha flashed him a scowl that quickly became a sheepish grin. ‘No it was not.’ She pulled her head into the car and then threw herself back into her seat with a sigh.
‘Mind if I close it?’
‘Sure.’ She turned on her side to face him as the window whirred up, folding her legs onto the seat and making a pillow of her hands under the headrest.
‘Just tired?’
‘Dad, I’m not going to throw up in the car, okay?’
‘Good.’ Nick smiled. ‘Because that is all I am worried about, as you well know.’ He reached out and touched her forehead with his palm, relieved to feel the coolness of her skin, but saying teasingly, ‘Whatever it is, I think you’ll live, Ms Drama Queen.’
‘Am not. Just felt rubbish. I really did.’
‘It’s fine, I know you did. I’m glad you’re a bit better now.’ Nick drove faster as the road levelled out, enjoying the emptiness, keeping one eye on his mirrors for cops and one eye on her.
‘Dad, can we get a dog, like as a Christmas present to the whole family?’
‘An Alsatian, by any chance, like Adrienne’s?’
‘Bruno is the greatest dog. Ever. But no, it could be any kind of dog. Mum always says we can get one, but then it doesn’t happen.’
‘That’s because Mum knows all the work of looking after it would fall to her.’
‘It wouldn’t. Nat and I would do it.’ She yawned.
‘And what about those other four-legged pets you lot keep at your Grandparents – Geeno and Lester and Impi? How would you have time to keep them exercised too?’
‘A dog could come for riding at Grandad’s – it would be perfect.’
‘Except your grandfather doesn’t believe in dogs as pets, does he? He just has his for guarding. And I’m not sure how those horses of yours would react either. You know how Impi likes to have you all to himself, doesn’t he?’
Sasha smiled, as he had meant her to, temporarily defeated. The subject would be raised again in due course, Nick knew. It was because Donna hadn’t said an outright no but kept them dangling with promises. It maddened him.
‘Hey, Dad, it’s not because of maybe going to England, is it? Because Mum says you want to make us all leave here and that you want to be a teacher instead of a doctor. Is that true?’
Nick reeled. This was low, even for Donna. ‘No. Those were just thoughts that crossed my mind one day. Mummy was wrong to tell you about them.’
‘Don’t you like being a skin doctor?’
‘I do like it.’ Nick patted her leg, smiling. ‘But we’ve each only got one life and sometimes I think about trying out other things too, things that being a doctor doesn’t give me time for.’
‘But you play tennis a lot.’
Nick laughed. ‘Yes, I do, and I enjoy it very much, especially when you lot are off riding.’
‘So what else do you like doing?’
‘Books… reading. You know I like that.’
She snorted. ‘Yeah, you’re always reading.’
Nick couldn’t help laughing again at the derision in her voice. ‘Yes, mostly boring medical stuff.’
‘So what would you teach?’ For a moment she sounded as scathing as her mother.
Nick knew it was time to stop the direction of the conversation, make her feel safe. ‘Nothing. It was just something I mentioned to Mummy one day. She shouldn’t have bothered you with it. And when we go to England it will just be to visit Granny.’ As Nick spoke, a vivid, unsettling image of the young Kat chose the moment to burst back into his mind; the mad frame of alabaster curls; the scores of faint freckles, invariably concealed under a layer of powder that had tasted like some strange dusty soap; the eyes, blue bottomless pools, drawing him in but then never seeming to take him anywhere, no matter how desperately he had wanted them to. He shuddered, relief coursing through him. The sudden certainty of a bullet dodged.
For a moment the big car seemed to drift out of his control. Nick wound his own window open to clear his head. Sasha had fallen asleep. He glanced at her, finding solace in the fatherly love that flooded his body like warmth. She had shifted into an endearingly gormless pose, her cheek squashed against her pillowed hands, her mouth wide open, showing the very slightly gappy teeth of which he was so fond but which the orthodontist – and Donna – insisted would soon be clamped into brace-tracks.
Nick sped on, keeping a close eye in all his mirrors. He must get home safely. Make sure Sash really was all right. Sleep. Get up. Go to work. Christmas was barely three weeks away. There was a lot to do. There always was. And the secret to a smooth life, as he had been in danger of forgetting, was taking one step at a time, resisting gawping over one’s shoulder at what might have been, or straining to see too far ahead. That was when the trip-ups came. It was like playing good tennis, Nick warned himself: the key was to stay balanced, to keep one’s eye on the ball instead of the place where one wanted to hit it.