The night after the accident, Richard was at home with Rosie, while Eleanor stayed with Isobel at the hospital. He got Rosie ready for bed, struggling with the feeling that he was performing the task inadequately. She fell asleep quickly, but he didn’t think it would last long. They’d tried to keep her occupied and protect her from their anxiety, but he was sure she’d picked up on it. He settled in his study with the baby monitor. He just hoped she wouldn’t have another terror; he didn’t think he could cope with it on his own.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the scalding. He told Eleanor compulsively and strenuously that it was just an accident, that it couldn’t have been prevented, and his parents had supported him. At the hospital, Lorna complained about the nurses and the waiting room, but she made a point of telling Eleanor jolly stories about the time Jessica rolled off the sofa or Richard touched a hot iron. ‘These things happen, Eleanor,’ Hugh said. ‘I’ve seen much worse in clinic.’ Eleanor had just smiled weakly and stared straight ahead.
He couldn’t understand why she would have reached for the coffee when Isobel was struggling in her arms. He remembered Eleanor describing her illness: I feel like there’s a screen between me and the world. I feel like I’m doing everything on a slight delay. He hadn’t properly taken it in: he felt sorry for her, but he’d never imagined that something like this would happen. He thought about when she’d said she wanted to move; how he’d shut it down in a panic. Maybe if he’d listened . . . He replayed the accident in his head until it became less like a memory and more like a nightmare: the table sliding, coffee cups live and swarming. Nothing felt safe any more.
It was ten o’clock and the house was empty. He knew, because Zoe had left her laptop open on Friday and he had read her emails, that she was meeting Adam tonight; she wouldn’t be home. He thought about going to look round the basement. He wanted something to soothe him and thoughts of paint colours or door handles only provoked panic these days. He wanted to spend some time in someone else’s world. He picked up the baby monitor and went downstairs.
He went into her living room first. It was dark; he switched the light on and surveyed the room. There was a pile of her clothes on the armchair and from the arrangement, he could tell she had peeled them off and left them there. She did this sometimes; he never understood why. Getting undressed in the living room – it seemed perverse. There was a bowl with the sediment of cereal gathered at the bottom and an empty crisp packet on the sofa. He moved towards the writing desk.
Then he heard the door go and feet in the hall. He was temporarily paralysed. There was no time to get upstairs. Besides, the room would be lit up like a stage set; he was visible from the street. He heard Zoe’s footsteps on the stairs, slow and cautious. There was an interminable wait, when he could hear her breathing, rapid and frightened, outside the door. Then it opened and she yelped.
‘Oh God! Sorry, sorry! I didn’t know it was you. I just saw this person through the window and . . . I freaked out. I’m really sorry.’
‘Zoe, no, I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have come down here, it’s just there’s been this leak . . .’ His tongue had gone thick; he had no idea what he was saying.
‘A leak?’
‘From the dishwasher . . . And I just worried it had come down here, so I wanted to check, but I should have asked, I’m so sorry.’ Was he apologizing too much? She was looking confused. ‘I just didn’t want it to damage your things . . .’ he said, weakly.
‘Oh, right, thanks. That’s nice of you,’ she said, distracted. She was looking round the room, trying to work something out. There was something different about her; he wasn’t sure what. Her face seemed more fluid and malleable; she was jumpy, animated.
There was a pause, while she kept staring at the room. He tried again, desperate to get them back on safe ground.
‘I should have waited till you got home and asked you. This is your room; it’s unforgivable.’
She seemed to pull herself together. ‘Don’t be silly, it’s your house,’ she said, vigorously. She smiled. ‘It’s just funny seeing you down here.’
He allowed himself to smile back. It was as if he’d forgotten how to – his mouth felt wide and horrible and he left it in place too long. ‘It’s funny being here,’ he said.
He knew he should go back upstairs. He just couldn’t leave the situation alone; he wanted some assurance that he was safe. He had already realized that the dishwasher was above her bedroom, not her living room. He wondered whether Zoe would work this out too and if she did, when. He didn’t know whether to embellish the story, try and make it more convincing, or leave it opaque.
‘I was actually going to make myself a nightcap,’ she said. ‘Do you want one?’
‘I don’t want to disturb you . . .’
‘No! It would be great!’ She walked over to the mantelpiece. He watched her pick up each of the wine bottles and peer at them before she selected one. She lifted up one of her water glasses and held it in front of her face, looking at the red grains stuck at the bottom for slightly too long, and then took two glasses into the bathroom. Every movement was slow and effortful and slightly uncoordinated. He realized she was drunk. He was relieved – maybe she wouldn’t remember this – and then fearful: perhaps when sobriety set in, she would start to suspect, talk to Eleanor . . .
She came back, drying the glasses with a bath towel, and poured Richard some wine. There was a red hair clinging to the top of the glass she handed him. He wanted to remove it, but didn’t know how to do it inconspicuously, so he turned the glass round and took a sip from the other side. The hair made him feel sick. He didn’t know if he should wait to be asked to sit down; it was his house, as Zoe said, but also her room. There was an awkward pause while they both stood facing each other.
‘Sorry, sorry! Sit down!’ she said, bundling up her clothes on the armchair and throwing them onto the floor. She picked up the cereal bowl and stood indecisive for a moment before putting it down on top of her papers on the writing table. She shunted the crisp packet down to the other end of the sofa and sat opposite him. She took a big gulp from her glass.
‘Is everything OK then?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘With the leak? Is it all OK?’
‘I think it’s fine. It hasn’t come through the floor.’
‘Cos actually I just thought: I found this damp patch on the carpet the other day, by my bed, so I thought that could be something to do with this, maybe . . .’
Richard buckled inside.
‘But the ceiling looked OK and it was a few days ago, or maybe a week . . . or two, I can’t remember . . .’ She looked strained and then seemed to give up on the train of thought. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll— That’s not good. I’ll look into it. I’m sorry you had to deal with it.’
‘It’s OK – I just didn’t know what it was. Thanks for checking things out tonight.’
‘No problem,’ he said. They sat in silence for a moment.
‘Have you had a nice weekend?’ she asked, careful and polite.
He thought about not saying anything; if he told her about Isobel, she would feel sorry for him, and the idea of using it to distract her or get her back on side felt horribly low. But it seemed stranger to avoid it. ‘Well, actually, I was going to say – there was an accident last night. Eleanor—Well, we don’t know how it happened, but some coffee got spilt and Isobel got burned. She’s in hospital.’
Zoe looked genuinely upset. ‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry! Is she OK?’
‘We were lucky in all sorts of ways: there was milk in the coffee, my mum and dad were there and knew what to do . . . There’s every chance it’ll heal completely. And the worst of it was at the top of her arm. She could wear sleeves when she’s older . . .’ He felt his voice catch and then he recovered. ‘They’re keeping her in the burns unit tonight, but she’ll be home tomorrow. It was just a shock for all of us. Eleanor’s staying with her, so I’m manning the fort.’
‘Oh well, look, if there’s anything I can do . . .’ She looked down at her glass. It was particularly unconvincing.
‘Thank you, thank you. We’ll manage.’
He took a sip of the wine. It was horrible – cheap or off or both – but in some ways, the harshness was pleasing. He looked around the room. Now that he was inhabiting it, rather than mining it for clues, it seemed squalid and cold: the springs in the chair had gone and it tipped him back uncomfortably. Zoe actually lived here. There was a rustling sound and a little moan, and he jumped and then remembered the baby monitor. Zoe looked round, alarmed, and then saw what it was.
‘Sorry. I just have to keep it with me,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ They listened to Rosie murmur, Richard on tenterhooks, but then the noise tailed off. He sagged with relief. There was another pause. He couldn’t think what to say. Most of what he knew about her, he’d found out through deceit. She was looking at her wine glass, pensive. She’d probably only offered him a drink to be polite; it was stupid of him to say yes. But now he was here, he didn’t see how he could go.
‘You’re home early,’ he said, for something to say.
‘Am I?’ She looked puzzled and he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to know where she had gone.
‘I just meant, it’s only ten, Saturday night – Sunday! Sunday night. The weekend, anyway, and you’re young, so . . .’
‘Yeah,’ she said, still staring at her glass. Then her head snapped up. ‘Sorry if I’m being weird,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit drunk. Sorry.’
‘No, no—’
‘And I was with someone tonight . . . Well, someone I was kind of seeing. And we just broke up.’
Richard pulled himself forward in the chair. She’d broken up with Adam. This was amazing. It was like spying but in real time.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He wondered why he was speaking like this: over-formal, condescending.
‘No, don’t worry. It was doomed from the start really. He had a girlfriend. That wasn’t me, I mean. Another girlfriend. It was a bit complicated.’
She tipped her glass back and drained it. She picked up the bottle and held it out towards his glass; it was still full. She filled hers anyway.
‘I feel like such an idiot. I knew, all the way through, that it wouldn’t last. But you just carry on, don’t you. Stupid.’
‘Yes,’ Richard said, carefully. He paused. ‘Why— How did it end?’
She drained her second glass and lay on her back on the sofa, with her knees up, her head on the arm, hair falling down the side. Her denim skirt was riding up. There was a hole in the top of her tights.
She began to talk, about how Adam had let her down by not being who she thought he was, how he had lied to her about what his girlfriend was like. She said how upset she was that it had ended and how good it was that it had because it would never have worked out anyway. Then she began to talk about someone called Rob, who she’d been with for six years.
This was new information and it was surprisingly disappointing. Six years. She said she’d met Rob at university. He’d just assumed she’d always had an entirely different existence to him: a round of drunkenness and casual sex with artists.
He felt pressure to respond, but he couldn’t think what to say; he reached for a cliché. ‘Perhaps you just haven’t met the right person yet.’
She sat up and looked perplexed. ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that. I mean, it’s got to be more complicated than that, right?’
‘I don’t know. I just think if he was with someone else, he can’t have been giving you everything. And I think you – you deserve more than that.’ He was still repeating platitudes, but the conversation had turned without him realizing. They looked at each other, confused.
‘It’s just so, so disappointing.’
Her face started to shift: her lips wobbled and her eyes were shiny. Richard grew fearful.
‘I know everyone feels like this after a break-up – “I’ll never love again” and all that – but I really don’t think I will find someone else.’
I’m sure you will. Should he say that? Richard saw another version of himself go and sit next to her on the sofa. I’m sure you will, he’d say and touch her hair; she’d turn her face towards him and he’d kiss her. It would be stupid and destructive, and almost repellent, but it would be brave. It would disrupt everything, and he had been longing for something to change for fifteen years. Richard watched himself do it, the way every morning at Dalston Junction station, he watched himself jump in front of the oncoming train. It would never happen, but he would never quite be rid of the image either.
Then she started to cry. Loudly, unattractively.
‘I just don’t think I believe in love any more.’
Richard got up, searching the room for something he could give her. He knew he ought to comfort her, but he had no desire to be in this room any more. All at once, he was tired: he had seen enough.
He suddenly missed Eleanor acutely. He saw how stupid he had been. If Eleanor came back now and found him in Zoe’s room, her drunk and lying on the sofa, she would misunderstand. He still had no idea if Zoe would wake up tomorrow morning, wonder what he’d been doing in her room, start to interrogate his story . . . He didn’t want to disrupt his life any more. He wanted one more chance at it.
He remembered lying in his single bed in Cambridge, towards the end of their third year, holding Eleanor, and becoming intensely afraid of dying. He thought about death a lot, sometimes making himself incapable with fear imagining the few seconds before you died, trapped in the awful circle of trying to comprehend being nothing. But in that moment, the fear was different: he was afraid because mortality meant that one day he would have to see Eleanor for the last time and the idea was almost physically painful. And when he was dead he would lose access to this – this particular mixture of joy and contentment that came from feeling the skin of her back against his cheek.
The baby monitor jerked into life and he could hear Rosie calling out. He turned round. ‘Zoe, I’m sorry, I’ve got to—’ he started, but she was asleep, foetal, on the sofa. Richard had never felt such relief. He ran upstairs to his daughter.