Fetching Hermione home from hospital occupied an afternoon – an afternoon that Annie could ill spare from work but Tom had announced he wouldn’t be around.
‘What do you mean you won’t be around? Whose mother is she? I’ll have to take a half-day holiday.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He took one of her hands. ‘I wouldn’t do this to you if it wasn’t important.’
‘It’s like the old days,’ she accused him.
‘No, no, Annie.’ His grip on her hand tightened. ‘I promise. It’s not.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I will tell you, but not now.’
‘You mean you won’t.’
‘Just trust me?’
She searched his face. ‘Now, why would I do that?’
Hermione was restless, fretful and weak. The discharge procedure took for ever and they waited even longer for her medication to arrive from the pharmacy. By the time Annie manhandled her up the stairs to her bedroom, which she and Emily had cleaned within an inch of its life, Hermione was white and sweaty.
Settled in bed, she lay back and closed her eyes. Concerned by her apparent weakness and lack of interest in her homecoming, Annie moved around the room unpacking and stowing clothes, magazines and pills. ‘You see that Sheila’s sent you a get-well plant?’ It was a particularly uninspiring pink miniature rose in, of all things, a hat box. But because it was awful and Sheila had tried so hard, Annie felt it deserved special care. She tried again. ‘There’s someone waiting to see you.’
Hermione murmured from between white lips, ‘Not now.’
‘I think you’ll want to see him.’
Running downstairs, she liberated Rollo from the back room where he had been shut up, carried him into Hermione’s room and placed him (breaking your own rules – satisfactory or not?) on the bed.
Contrary to what Annie expected, Rollo did not bark or wag his tail. He was silent and had adopted his most mournful expression. Annie had spent some time grooming him but the mismatch between his shaggy, wiry coat and the small body underneath it seemed particularly marked.
‘You know, “Rollo” doesn’t really suit him,’ she said. ‘He needs a smaller name.’
Hermione opened her eyes. Rollo dropped his muzzle and closed his eyes.
‘I think he’s cross with you for leaving him, Hermione.’
Rollo remained motionless but was now staring at Hermione. She looked down at him. He emitted a noise, half snuffle, half whine, and cocked his ears. A tear slid out the corner of one of Hermione’s eyes. ‘Rollo?’
He raised his head and Hermione took the full brunt of his tragic, liquid gaze. Very slowly, she raised her hand and touched his paw. Rollo quivered.
‘Oh, Rollo,’ said Hermione, and her hand shook. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Here,’ said Annie, and wiped Hermione’s eyes with a tissue. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’
When she arrived back upstairs with a tray, it was to find that Rollo had whisked up closer to Hermione and was tucked into the crook of her good arm, his nose on her torso. At Annie’s approach, he kept his eyes firmly closed. You do not exist.
‘You won’t take him away?’ Hermione held Rollo closer.
Annie surveyed the pair of them. ‘No.’
Hermione was a rotten patient. Why would Annie have expected different? Jake did his best to run up and down stairs with her many requests, but he was preoccupied and had his hands full with Maisie. Emily could only help out in the evenings. Tom did a lot but on a couple of occasions he did his mysterious vanishing act. More than once, Annie arrived back in the evenings to the sound of Hermione’s bell.
It was at full peal when, at the end of a long week, she let herself in and discovered Jake (ignoring it) at the kitchen table with a glass of wine.
‘Something up?’ Anxiety struck. ‘The report? Is it un favourable?’
‘Don’t know. But Jocasta has flown over to be grilled by Reginald Brown. She’s asked to see me afterwards and I’m thinking about it.’
‘Right,’ said Annie. She glanced up at the ceiling. ‘I’d better see to your grandmother before we go mad.’
Hermione was angry and restless. She was sitting in her chair by the window and Rollo was in the basket that Annie had triumphantly bid for on eBay. The television was on, but the sound had been turned down. As it was now well into autumn, the sun slanted into the window at a lower angle, revealing that the room, once so fresh and sparkling, had disintegrated into unkemptness. Several weeks on from Hermione’s arrival back from hospital, the rose in the hat box looked miserable and was shedding petals like spoor on the savannah.
Hermione announced, ‘I haven’t seen anyone all day.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Annie straightened the bedcover and picked up a cushion from the floor. She fetched a dustpan from the cupboard and crouched to sweep up the petals.
‘I find it hard not seeing anyone.’ Hermione addressed the space over Annie’s head.
‘Didn’t the physio turn up? She should have done.’
‘She cancelled.’
Annie grabbed the side of the chair and hauled herself upright. ‘You never minded when you were living on your own.’
‘Ah.’ With her good hand, Hermione bent over to pick up a stray petal. ‘Then I was in charge of my life. It makes a difference.’
‘I must get Tom to see if there are any spaces in the bridge group in the street,’ said Annie. ‘I forgot to remind him.’ She slotted the brush back into the dustpan. ‘There’s Mrs Connor in the basement next door. She lives alone and might like to come over for a cup of tea.’
‘She wears white shoes,’ said Hermione, as if that clinched the matter.
Annie bit her lip.
Hermione read her thoughts. ‘You think I’m an old woman and out of touch. You’re also thinking that you have enough to do without having to worry about me.’
Oh, God, not now, thought Annie, wearily.
‘I wish.’ Hermione’s eyes misted over. ‘I wish … oh, I don’t know what I wish. Except that I wish it wasn’t now.’
Supper. Laundry. Change the sheets. Annie threw away her inner list and sat down in the chair opposite Hermione. She looked across to the portrait of sweet, filmy, supple young Hermione, dreaming in her yellow dress. Wasn’t everyone, even the most trying and demanding of us, entitled to the comfort of others? To be soothed by music and food, to have the peace of living among your own people and your own things acquired over a lifetime and to die among them?
She reached over, grabbed the remote and snapped off the television. ‘In hospital you were telling me about Max.’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Hermione focused on the portrait of her young self and frowned. ‘I’d never seen a man’s bare chest before,’ she said, as if that explained everything.
But then, Annie reflected, it probably did.
‘Max was the gardener’s eldest son. The family lived in a cottage not so far from my father’s house. In fact, if I craned out of my bedroom window, I could see their front door. I think I must have been about eighteen.’ She cradled her bad arm with her good hand. ‘I was too happy, and silly with it.’ Her voice sank very low. ‘We didn’t have much time, as it turned out, before he went to Korea and the war there.’
‘And?’ Annie was very gentle.
‘I can only remember bits and pieces. I try to pull them together but they won’t do it. I would like to remember everything but … I sometimes wonder if not remembering everything is my punishment.’
‘Max was set to clearing the riverbank … the river ran through the bottom of the garden. It had rained all winter but the spring was hot. At least, I think it was. I was walking there one day, and there he was. He hadn’t seen me, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken off his shirt, but he did … and that was that.’ There was a long pause. She added, ‘Bill was very suitable, you know.’
‘But what happened to Max?’
‘I was very young. Younger than my years – girls tended to be then. And I didn’t understand the problems, though he did.’
‘What problems?’ Annie felt she was watching a performance on a stage so badly lit that the drama was lost.
Hermione frowned. ‘As I said, he was the gardener’s son. Now do you see?’
‘But did he come back from Korea?’
Hermione’s eyes were bright with tears – or it might have been a trick of the light. ‘No, he didn’t.’
‘But if he had it might have been different.’
Hermione relapsed into irritation. ‘You don’t understand.’
Annie refused to rise to the bait. The women exchanged glances and Annie could have sworn that Hermione was begging her to look beyond the wrinkled face and crossness to the girl who had yearned and wept and lost.
‘I’ll get supper,’ she said.
She felt sad thinking about it as she got ready for bed. She had seen contemporary photos of the period Hermione had been talking about and the contrast between the well-fed bodies of today and the pitiful, half-starved men of the post-war period would strike anybody with an ounce of sensibility. (What must they have felt, those innocent boys, who, having grown up during the Second World War, and having congratulated themselves at missing the fighting, suddenly found themselves packed off to eastern jungles to die in droves?)
She fought with a tangle in her hair, wielding the brush with such ruthlessness that it made her wince. It was extraordinary the obstacles that men and women put in the way of their happiness. It was almost as if they didn’t wish to be happy. A gardener’s son and the daughter of the big house: it was ridiculous they considered themselves irrevocably divided. But if you did, you did.
The bathroom was now full of Tom’s paraphernalia. Extra tins of shaving foam. Plastic razors. A telephone soap-on-a-rope that Maddie had given him on leaving and which he had unearthed a few days ago. In the old days it would have been put into the charity box. No longer. Tom lurched in as Annie was stroking night cream into her neck.
She looked round. ‘Do I deduce you finished the bottle? Or is it just high spirits?’
Having returned from his mysterious outing, Tom was in a peculiar mood. He had insisted on opening a bottle of wine to go with the oxtail stew and remained in the kitchen after Annie had gone upstairs to settle Hermione for the night.
‘Yes.’ Unrepentant. ‘Nice.’
She regarded him with some suspicion. ‘Tom, what’s going on?’
‘Wait and see.’ He was owlish and, she realized, really quite drunk. He leaned experimentally against the shower. ‘How about a holiday, Annie? Like we used to do? Yes? No? Very cheap. Shanks’s pony.’ He paused. ‘Remember walking in Umbria?’
‘Hm,’ said Annie. ‘That was a huge success. You refused to talk to the group during the day. And after a day on my feet I didn’t want to talk to anyone in the evening.’
Tom grinned. ‘Pointless to chat up people you were never going to see again.’
She retired to the bedroom and, after some crashing and splashing, he reappeared. The soap-on-a-rope dangled from his neck, a detail he had apparently forgotten – he made no move to take it off as he tried to get into bed.
‘Tom. Come here.’ Annie removed the soap. He looked up at her, rueful and shadowed by the events of the past year. ‘Last time you were like this was just before you lost your job.’
He put a hand up to his eyes. ‘My job.’ And there was a world of grief in the words.
‘Here.’ Annie pushed him down on the pillows, covered him up and switched off the light. ‘Sleep.’
Obediently he closed his eyes. ‘World going round.’ He smiled schoolboyishly. ‘It’s been some time.’
She had no idea what he meant. She regarded the prone figure. Why had Tom chosen now to get drunk? Suspicion rose. He couldn’t, he couldn’t, have gone betting on the stock market again? It was financial mayhem out there … and now he would almost certainly never get a job. Yet of late he had been more cheerful and the rapprochement between him and Jake almost made her cry. Tom hunched over. A snore escaped. The outline of his body plumped out by the duvet, he was substantial and solid – not like those poor vitamin-deprived boys who had gone to Korea to be picked off in the jungle.
Snaffling the soap, she returned it to the dish in the bathroom – cheap, but still white – that had replaced the one Tom had broken. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she sat down on the edge of the bath.
Very soon, the year would have gone, slipping away like a ripple in the water – and the jaws of economic uncertainty snapped even harder for everyone. What good would she have done, or achieved? What sense would she have made of events? She and Tom had been lovers once, proper lovers with all the pleasure and sweetness of being so, and she had hoped it would last. But time and wear and tear – terrible wear and tear – had altered that. They had changed, become parents. The people they had once been had disappeared and she had allowed that important strand of her life to be swamped by grief and anger.
There was nothing so sad and wasteful as stupidity, or to be taken prisoner by your own worst side. And there was nothing so noble as to stand up against the menace of passing years and final oblivion when all would be silent and done.
The edge of the bath was uncomfortable to sit on and she got up and turned off the light.
Mike did not like the fact that sometimes she did not ring him back. It was not that she didn’t wish to, but there were reasons. Emily found it awkward to marry the Mike who directed operations in the office with the Mike who (very generously) carried her off to dinner and the theatre, made her laugh and took her to bed.
It was complicated and possibly rocky – and this from the girl who yearned for passionate engagement and for the story of her life to begin. ‘I’ll lead where my own nature might be leading.’ The truth was – and Emily submitted her feelings to painful scrutiny – that mixed into her exhilaration were notes of doubt and apprehension. Would she be up to dealing with this? With Mike?
‘Are you playing games?’ Mike asked, when he finally got through to her.
‘No. But I’ve been sorting some things out.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’m moving out of my parents’ house. I’m going to live in Hoxton with a friend. We’ve just signed the lease. It’s nice. Two bedrooms, tiny kitchen, but reasonable sitting area. Quite near the square. We’re lucky to have got it.’
‘I’m interested, you know.’
‘I wasn’t sure.’
Mike was in a taxi on the way back from the airport because he had been away on a conference – Management Strategies for a Green Future. A team had flown to Barcelona and stayed in a very nice hotel, thank you. ‘Next time, I’ll see that you get on it, too,’ he said.
Emily’s immediate response was that things were either moving too fast or closing down in a way she had not quite got her head around. She rearranged a couple of biros on her desk and steadied herself. ‘I thought the point of green was not to fly. Plus I also thought we now had to tighten our belts.’
‘Even Greens have to confer in person. Shall we meet up tonight? I’ve got you some turrón.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Very sweet. Very nutty and punishing on the teeth.’
‘Sweet is good. Nutty is excellent, but not tonight. There’s something I have to do.’
‘What?’ He sounded gentle, almost tender, and her stomach performed a somersault.
Emily had not been sure about her plan until the day before. For several weeks now she had lain sleepless and uncertain as to how to handle the knowledge that had tumbled into her lap. This was unexpected. She had imagined that to possess knowledge others did not would be empowering. Instead it was agonizing and erected a barrier between her and the rest of the family. What to do? How to think through its implications and possibilities? When eventually a course of action had presented itself, she had felt shaky. On consideration, her plan cohered, crystal clear and imperative, and she would follow it through. Thus she told Mike, ‘I’m going to see my sister.’
‘But you could see your sister any time. Can’t you postpone?’
Emily reprised the long years during which Annie, and by extension all of them, had suffered from Mia’s absence, plus the painful, dislocating alienation and the gnawing sense that the Nicholsons were badly askew.
‘I don’t have to see my sister,’ she told Mike, ‘but I want to. This is a big thing, and it needs to be done.’
‘That important?’ He was a little huffy, but also disappointed.
Mike minded. That was nice. ‘That important.’ And she hung up.
Mia lived in Hackney in a street where the housing stock hailed from a century earlier than it did south of river. In general, it was smartly maintained but as Emily had headed further east in her pursuit a contagious decrepitude was evident in damaged sash windows, the peeling paint and stone of the façades.
Overflowing dustbins flanked the house where Mia and Pete lived. Emily skirted them: they smelt bad and she wondered what changes in the fastidious Mia – lack of energy? Uncaring? – had permitted this to happen. Still, the geraniums in a pot by the door were managing a last bloom, which offered some encouragement. Their bright red burned into her vision while she collected her courage before ringing the bell.
Emily’s heart thumped. Everyone yearned for happy endings, especially her – it was hard-wired into the soul and fiction was littered with them. Yet in real life, on which she was embarking, no insurer on earth would underwrite one.
The bell had barely fallen silent when the door, swollen from damp, was dragged open and Mia was poised on the step. She gasped and clung to the door handle. ‘Emily … Emily – What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to see you. Can I come in?’
Mia looked bewildered, then resigned. ‘It had to happen one day … How on earth did you find me?’
‘I found out from Kate Sinclair where you worked. The school wouldn’t give any details so I hung about outside like some grim flasher until you came out and I followed you here. Easy.’ Emily grinned. ‘Actually, it wasn’t that easy. I’ve lost my childhood tracking skills, plus I thought you’d spotted me on the bus.’
How much less technicolour and less threatening Mia close up appeared than the Mia of her imagination. The ethereal, beautiful girl floating through her dreams and memories turned out to be no bigger, bolder, flashier or prettier than most. Furthermore, this Mia’s eyes were sad and haunted where once they had been all sparkle and beauty. Emily swallowed. Despite everything, Mia and she were connected in a profound, indissoluble way and she couldn’t bear to see that her sister was unhappy.
Mia said, ‘Oh, my God,’ stepped forward and kissed Emily on the cheek. She smelt of cheap detergent with a fleeting whiff of turmeric – so alien to what Emily remembered.
‘Can I come in?’
A hesitation. Then Mia beckoned Emily in with a thin, ringless hand.
The house was divided into two flats and Mia led her up an uncarpeted staircase dotted with piles of old post and flyers. ‘Flock wallpaper,’ Mia pointed to it. ‘Very jolly and hides the sins. I like it.’ At the entrance to flat two, she turned to face Emily. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’
The bones of the flat were good and Emily looked around with interest. Big windows and original wood floors … reasonable dimensions … but the furnishings were cheap and kept to the absolute minimum – one easy chair, one sofa, which had seen better days, no pictures and, to Emily’s surprise, not that many books.
Mia gestured to the sofa. ‘I’ll get us a drink.’ She reappeared with a tray on which sat a bottle of lime cordial, a jug of water and two cheap glass tumblers.
Emily viewed the lack of alcohol with some dismay. She needed a slug of wine. Then she transferred her scrutiny to her sister, whom she had spent far too much of her life envying and longing to be. Mia was thinner than ever, hair still cropped, and dressed in grunge, which did not suit her.
A glass of lime cordial was pressed into Emily’s un willing hand. Oily textured and acid-sweet, it puckered the lining of her cheeks.
Mia drank hers with relish, hopping from sofa arm to chair. Ultra-restless and on the defensive. ‘Needed that. Haven’t had time to drink,’ she said. ‘Too busy. Lessons one after the other.’
‘Or to eat, by the look of you,’ remarked Emily.
‘Tell me how everyone is.’
Emily précised the family news and Mia listened – greedily, Emily thought. ‘So, that’s it,’ she finished. ‘All under one roof.’
Mia fiddled with her glass. ‘Why are you here?’
Emily did not answer that one immediately. ‘Where’s Pete?’
‘Pete.’ Mia’s expression was unreadable.
Emily looked round the room for signs of another person and couldn’t find any.
‘He isn’t living here any more.’ Mia lifted a hand in warning and her eyes were huge with despair and self-loathing. ‘Don’t say anything, Em. I forbid it. It’s the usual story. He found someone else. I wasn’t prepared for him to run two women. He chose. I stayed here. The teaching goes on. I can manage. End of story.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Emily was. ‘But you didn’t think to tell us? After everything that happened?’
‘You see?’ Mia flashed. ‘You’re still judging me.’
‘Sorry,’ Emily backpedalled. ‘Sorry, sorry. But you should have said. Then it wouldn’t have been so long.’
Mia smiled, and something of the old lightness and wickedness flashed over her features. ‘To confess Pete’s buggered off when I’d invested so much in this relationship being right? Anyway, not having a family becomes a habit. You’ll see.’ She poured herself another glass of cordial. ‘I made such a point of hating them, didn’t I? Or, rather, what they were.’
‘Do you still think they’re spawn of the devil?’
Mia was quick to pick up Emily’s disapproval. ‘Dad so set himself up.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘He talked and talked about enlightenment but couldn’t stand my political beliefs. Mum wasn’t that much better.’
‘Dad was trying to protect you.’
‘Oh, well.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps. You and I never did see other’s point of view. I felt I had to make a stand – I felt I had to dig deep into what I had got myself into, but I didn’t mean it to be a long-term estrangement. But that’s how it turned out. I wish …’ The corners of her mouth clamped down but Emily couldn’t make out if it was regret or fatalism. ‘It doesn’t matter what I wish.’ She made a visible eff ort and subjected Emily to the full force of the Mia gaze, which hadn’t changed. ‘So, what have you come to say?’
‘I’m sure you’ve guessed.’
‘Well, it can’t be life and death, and I trust the parents aren’t secretly ill or anything. I’m sorry about Dad’s job, and Gran’s illness. I’d been meaning to go and see her at the home. But I didn’t.’
The casualness with which this tripped off Mia’s tongue took Emily’s breath away. Was Mia so airy and careless with people because she relied on the fact that they loved her? ‘I’ve to come to say that it’s time we sorted the situation out.’ Emily felt angrier than she wanted to be, and checked herself. ‘Do we want to continue with this estrangement?’ Was this really her talking – so much older-sounding than she felt? She met her sister’s headlamp gaze full on. ‘Mum suffers – and this might be the moment. Yes?’
Hands clasped in her lap, Mia digested the implications of Emily’s olive branch. ‘Dad told me to get out. Remember?’
‘That’s in the past. It’s what people say to each other. You lose your temper and what you say is like breathing. You don’t think about it until it’s done.’
Mia’s fingers twisted together. ‘But he should have thought about it. That’s his job as a parent. He was older and bigger than us. He couldn’t accept that I thought differently, had different politics …’
Greatly daring, Emily said, ‘Or was it just Pete?’
Mia’s eyes widened. ‘Unkind, Em.’ The old childhood nickname slipped out. Mia sighed and Emily knew she had scored a point. ‘The world is rotten, corrupt and unfair, and I had to believe in something that might make a difference. In some parts of the world if you speak out you end up as prison fodder or pig fodder, depending. I had to hold my own against Dad, and Pete was part of that.’
‘And Mum?’
There was a long, painful pause. ‘Guilty by association. She never replied to a letter I wrote her. I thought, maybe, she might say or do something …’
‘The point is, Mia, you don’t know if she did or didn’t. You didn’t stick around to find out. You have no idea what she’s been through.’ Emily inspected her practically untouched cordial. ‘You don’t have any wine, do you?’
‘God, no. Far too expensive.’ Mia jumped to her feet and, paced around the room like a cat, picking up a biro and putting it down, nudging a newspaper towards the wastepaper basket. ‘How’s the twin?’
‘Jake? Struggling with the divorce. Jocasta wants to take the baby to the US and Jake is fighting it. She’s over at the moment for the psychiatrist’s interview and getting re acquainted with her daughter. Naturally, while Jocasta is here she wants to see Maisie, and he hates handing her over.’
Mia fiddled and paced. ‘What’s she like, this Jocasta?’
‘Jocasta aims to rule the world. Chillingly efficient. Funny, though, I grew to quite admire her. She abandoned Maisie, which was dreadful, but she’s regretting it and fighting like a tiger to get her back. It isn’t fair on us but proves she isn’t a monster.’
‘She’s Maisie’s mother.’ Mia shut the window with a snap and returned to her perch on the arm of the sofa. ‘And we know that mothers cherish their daughters.’ She twisted her finger. ‘Not.’
‘Stop it, Mia.’ Mia’s restlessness felt like the wash from a fast boat.
Mia turned her head away. ‘Sorry.’
‘Didn’t you find it difficult not being in touch with Jake?
‘No …’ The word was pulled from Mia. Aha! Her sister was more torn and equivocal than she was going to let on. ‘No. Yes. I was so used to us being bigger together than apart. You know what I mean? The sum of our parts … I don’t think it was very healthy, actually, because you came to believe that you were extra powerful and invincible. Pete didn’t like it much. Jake made him feel sidelined and I understood. When you’re in a relationship, you make sacrifices. Jake was one of them.’
Emily said, ‘I always thought he fell so heavily for Jocasta because you’d gone. There was a hole in his life.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Mia, you could put an end to this.’
There was a long silence.
‘It’s too late,’ burst from Mia. ‘I can’t find my way back. How can I? Oh, what the hell!’
Emily put her arm around Mia. ‘Try.’
Mia submitted to the embrace. Her fingers interlaced with Emily’s. ‘It’s too late.’
Emily tightened her grip. ‘Mia,’ she said, fired up by the spirit of her enterprise. If she could pull this off, she could lay claim to having done something, rather than written it. ‘Think about it. Come and see the baby.’ She glanced up to see if there was anything, anything, of Pete in the flat. And, as far as she could see, there was nothing. ‘Is Pete in contact at all?’
‘No, and it’s better that way. I don’t moon over him. I don’t regret him, but I certainly don’t want him back,’ Her eyes blazed with defiance – and bitterness. ‘Life’s on hold in that department.’
‘So,’ Emily concluded, ‘you’re free to do something.’
For a long time Mia remained silent. Then she stirred and said, in a flat voice, ‘What’s done is done.’
The last few days had helped to restore Tom’s faith – the notion of a new strategic and executive strand in his life had set his blood humming. He could put it this way: finally, he had exhumed the repair kit and was embarking on essential repairs to himself.
Part of it was that he had been dealt a simple act of kindness by Roger Gard. True, it was an old-boy network and not open to everyone. That he would have to think about later but it certainly wasn’t going to stop him acting on it. The gesture – a text – had been out of proportion to the extent that it had helped him. Incalculable.
Part of it had been Annie’s tears. They had run through him too, cleansing and sweeping away things that were best lost.
Fallen leaves swished about his feet as he made his way along the street to number twenty-two and he kicked up one or two as he went. The old responses were surging back to life. One of the many things that had frightened him in the jobless state was the fear that that side of him had died – which did happen: he had only to think of Richard ‘Goldenballs’ Gilbert further down the street, one day lording it in the bank, the next a shuffling has-been. Balls cut off.
He was aware that Annie was perpetually worried and overworked – and still hated the mess in the house (mostly Maisie’s stuff). ‘But it’s OK,’ she had said to him when he mentioned it. ‘I’m training myself not to mind.’
Most especially, he was looking forward to seeing her face and watching her reactions.
He let himself into the house, picked up the post and called up to his mother, ‘Hermione – hallo. I’ll bring you up some tea.’
The post included two hefty bills for electricity and the phone and a back-dated tax demand.
Hermione rang her bell.
For God’s sake, he thought, staring at the figures, and some of his exhilaration drained away. The job at Carbon Trust was not quite in the bag – he was waiting for the phone call – and the bills were a reminder of his financial mess. His stupidity. How long ago and far away the days were when Tom, nourished and plumped on an overblown BBC salary, expenses and staff back-up, had cast his credit card on to a restaurant table and thought nothing of it. Listen, you fool. Understand this: the Nicholsons are never, ever going to be affluent again.
But they had a roof over their heads. Good.
Tom laid a tray, made the tea and carried it up the stairs. ‘Sorry, Hermione.’
At his entrance, Rollo lifted his head. Tom placed the tray on the table, and rubbed the smeared surface with his handkerchief. ‘How are you feeling?’ Hermione sighed and murmured that she was fine, considering. He poured a cup and handed it over. ‘I’ll take Rollo out before Jocasta brings Maisie back.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll join you in a minute. There’s something I’ve got to do.’
He ran up the stairs to the top storey and clicked the mechanism that released the retractable ladder allowing access from the landing into the attic. It was some time since he had hauled himself up it and he was stiffer than he had imagined. Not so good.
He flicked on the light and, summoned from dark relegation, the silent, dusty objects, some shrouded, some stowed any old how – a chair, a mirror with a broken frame – sprang to view. As he picked his way through myriad boxes, tea chests and superannuated suitcases, taking care his foot should not slip between the laths, he could hear Annie saying, ‘Tom, we must clear it out.’ And how many times had he replied, ‘Don’t fuss’? But, she was right. No one should have all this stuff. They should clear it out and start out again, clean and unencumbered.
Aware that Hermione was waiting, he did not linger but made for the corner where the children’s discarded toys were stacked and exhumed a shape wrapped in a dirty piece of sheeting. He sneezed twice as he unwrapped it to reveal a half-finished doll’s crib, patchily painted in a tooth-wrenching saccharine pink.
He held it up and, ridiculously, felt a lump come into his throat. Incomplete and rather ugly, it represented something beyond taste and aesthetics. Actually, beyond price. ‘If you cut that bit there, Jake … If you glue the join here …’ And: ‘What do I do next, Dad?’ Echoes from the past, the child’s treble chiming with his adult tones, stirring up nostalgia and regret. They had been close then, father and son, and he had neglected to see how that closeness could be carried on into Jake’s adolescence and beyond.
But not too late? He brushed off the dust and reflected: there was so much one did in life without truly understanding – until one looked back.
Once upon a time and long ago. Intended for Mia, the crib had never been finished because … well, because Tom had never been there and Mia had grown up.
‘Tom, are you coming?’ Hermione’s querulous demand floated up to the attic.
‘Coming.’ Clutching the crib, he made his way down the ladder and slotted it back into place.
Five minutes later, he was pouring a second cup of tea for Hermione and one for himself. She accepted it more or less gracefully. ‘The phone went several times while you were out. I managed to get to it.’
‘You should let it ring,’ said Tom. ‘They’ll leave a message.’
Hermione examined her bad arm and said, in a low voice, ‘I need to be of some use, Tom.’
‘OK. What was the message?’
‘It was Jocasta to say that she planned to keep Maisie overnight. And not to worry.’
‘Oh.’ Tom drank his tea.
Hermione talked at him. Jocasta and Jake were never really suited. She’s a smart girl. Such a pity they went ahead with a family … The occasional nugget of common sense and insight broke through. But one can’t order one’s emotions. Jake does his best –
He interrupted her. ‘What time did Jocasta say she would bring back Maisie tomorrow?’
Hermione wrinkled her brow. ‘She said she would let us know, and repeated we were not to worry.’
But, ran the logical part of Tom’s brain, Maisie didn’t have her clothes or her Blanky and the things she needed. What was Jocasta playing at? With a sickening clunk, Tom realized exactly what Jocasta was doing and leaped to his feet. ‘I’ve got to ring Jake.’