Squinting through the gap in the sitting-room door, Eve could just see the back of Daniel’s hair. She’d given him some Smarties and every now and then his head dipped as he shook the tube and emptied a few more onto the carpet in front of him. It was a game he always played with Smarties: he would eat all the yellow ones first, then the orange, then the green, putting the rest back in the tube each time and shaking them up before rolling them out again like multicoloured dice and picking the ones he wanted.
The programme changed on the television and Daniel began to sing along with the theme tune. Eve leant against the doorframe and closed her eyes. There was too much inside her head; too many thoughts and questions pushing and shoving against each other, desperate to burst out. How could her son be so unhappy? How had she let this precious boy become so miserable without even noticing there was a problem?
Bad mother, screamed a voice inside her head. Bad, selfish, neglectful mother. This is all your fault, Eve.
She pushed open the door and went into the sitting room, perching on the edge of the sofa behind Daniel and putting out her arms to pull him towards her into a hug.
‘It’s Andy’s Safari Adventures!’ he said, twisting round to look at her. ‘I love this one. I’ve seen it before – they’ve got zebras. Can we get a puppy soon, Mummy? Like the one I put on your birthday card?’
She smiled and ran her fingers through his hair to tame the fringe that was getting too long. He’d always had such lovely thick hair, like Ben.
‘But what will happen if you go away with Daddy?’ she said. ‘If you’re not living here, what will I do with a dog?’
Why was she even having this conversation? They wouldn’t be getting a dog whether Daniel stayed with her or went to live with Ben, so she wasn’t being fair. But she could feel herself clutching at straws: maybe Daniel would go off the idea of moving away if she promised him a puppy? He was bound to have talked to Ben and Lou like this as well; they might even have said he could get a pet if he moved with them to Glasgow.
‘You could bring it up to see us?’ he said. ‘Or if we get it soon, I could take it with me? Daddy says we might go after Christmas.’
She smiled, to stop her bottom lip trembling. But he had turned away from her again, his eyes back on the colourful images on the screen in the corner of the room. She rested her chin against the top of his head, glad he would never know how much those words had hurt her.
He hadn’t noticed her earlier, standing at the corner of the house, watching him talk to his teddy. Half a minute later, he had tossed the toy down onto the patio beside his rucksack, and ran to the end of the garden, throwing himself belly first onto the plastic swing, pushing away from the ground and lifting his legs high as he swung backwards and forwards, looking as if he was flying through the air.
Eve had watched him on the swing for a few seconds and then had gone back round to the front of the house to unlock the door, his words still ringing in her ears.
She had known Ben and Lou would have mentioned the move to Daniel – of course she had. But although she’d been thinking about little else, she herself hadn’t spoken to him about it. That would have been the sensible thing to do, the grown-up thing to do. But that would also have made it real and, in her mind, she had been fighting against this whole scenario, persuading herself it wasn’t going to happen so it was all right to stick her head in the sand and ignore what was going on. But now the cold realities were pushing themselves into her brain from every angle. Not only did Ben want their son to move away with him, but it seemed as if Daniel wanted to go too. He wanted to leave everything he was familiar with – his home, his friends, his school – and make a new start hundreds of miles away. Not only that, but he wanted to leave her.
She had watched him on the swing as she filled the kettle. By that time he was sitting on the plastic seat and pushing himself round and round so the blue ropes knotted themselves together. Then, when the twist of blue was tight above the top of his head, he lifted his feet off the ground and threw his head back as the swing rewound the other way, spinning him so fast that the hood of his coat flew out behind him.
There had been a swing very like this one, with a red plastic seat, in the garden of the house they’d moved to when Eve was eight years old. She remembered sitting on it for hours, twisting and pushing herself away from the ground like Daniel was doing now. She would stand up on the seat and grab the ropes tightly, lifting herself up and trying to somersault in the air, like they did in gym sessions at school. Flora was always terrified she would fall, and Eve remembered her running out from the house, ‘Evelyn Glover! Get off that swing right now!’
Her heart jolted as she thought about her mother, as it had done ever since she’d read those letters the other night. Was she really Evelyn Glover? Might she have been Evelyn Baker if things had turned out differently? She still couldn’t take it all in, and she certainly couldn’t think about it at the moment. There was too much else jostling for space in her head.
They had now been home for half an hour and sitting here, in front of the television, Daniel seemed fine. His normal self. It was as if their row in the car and his angry comments to his teddy, had never happened. When he came in from the garden earlier, he’d pushed open the back door and bounded across the kitchen, demanding Smarties and a drink, throwing himself into her arms for a hug. She envied him the ability to forget his worries so swiftly.
On the television, the presenter was describing how snakes shed their skins, running his hands along the smooth scales of a brown and black python that had draped itself around his neck.
‘Wow!’ breathed Daniel. ‘Look, Mummy!’
It clearly wasn’t just the prospect of living with Ben and Lou that was appealing to him – it was also the fact that a new life with them would mean he could get away from whatever was upsetting him at school.
The trouble was, without knowing what that was, she could do nothing about it. The voice inside her – the one that was refusing to face up to reality – started again: even if she couldn’t get to the bottom of what was going on, maybe he could change schools? It wouldn’t be easy: she knew, from listening to other parents talk outside the gates, that all the good local primaries were heavily oversubscribed. But she must try. She would get online tonight, once he was in bed, and do some research.
She kissed the top of his head, briefly buoyed by the thought that she might be able to do something about all this. But she knew she was kidding herself. Whether Daniel went to his current school, or another one a mile down the road, it wouldn’t change the fact that Ben was leaving and wanted to take their son with him.