When she had reached the door of the workshop she had worried that Archie would start to bark so she spoke his name softly as she went down the dark garden. He was waiting, standing up and wagging his tail, and he bumped himself against her when she went inside. She put her bag down on the bench and sat on the floor beside him and the Labrador came and lay beside her and licked her hands. He smelled doggy and his body was heavy and very warm.
It was only when she felt safe, settled in beside him, that she let herself think. Her mother would go upstairs and might open her door and say goodnight, or might just call from the landing. Before, she had always come in. They had talked. It had been a good time of the day. Before.
No one had talked properly since. There had been terrible whispered conversations from which she had been excluded, and brief words if she had asked questions; not talking. Since her father had died it had been worse.
The dog leaned forward and snuffled her face with his wet nose.
Before, she had known David was the most important, more loved, of more interest to them, but she had not minded. It had been true. He was interesting and lovable. But once he had gone she ought to have moved up into the space he had left and instead she had been pushed down and down until, in the end, she had become invisible.
She had loved the house. Now she hated it. There was a thick grey silence everywhere, as though no air or daylight had come into it from that day. But her own room was the same and so she stayed there.
She reached for her bag and took out the biscuits, though she was not hungry. But she had brought them and so they were to be eaten, and anyway, it was something to do. She could see a little now that her eyes were used to the dark.
She hadn’t worked out exactly how long she would stay in the workshop. They might find her. They might never find her. She could come out when she chose.
After a while, the dog lay down and she lay down with him, pulling the blankets from his bed over them both. She talked to Archie then. The dog gave great sighs from time to time and she went on talking until everything she had thought and felt was out there, in the quiet dark spaces of the workshop among the tools and the pictures of fighter planes.
She slept for a short time.
The lights wakened her first, and then the sound of the cars. Archie stood up ready to bark but she quietened him.
She supposed eventually people would find the workshop.
There had been no lights on in the Prices’ house when she had crept down the garden and their car had not been in the drive.
But no one came. Lucy opened the workshop door and listened. She heard more cars, and voices out in the street. Saw the lights go up, like the floodlights at the sports ground. She felt a flutter of excitement in her stomach.
Archie lay down. After a while, so did she, and then slept again, her arms round the dog’s neck.