As the train from the airport wandered into Victoria Station, Juliet’s impression of London after five months away was of a collapse of light. Her eyes had grown used to the primary-blue skies of Littlefield and the town’s clean-cut brightness and shade. It was nine in the morning, midwinter, and the unseen sun was beginning to dilute the grey. At this time of year, the movement between London night and London day was more like a prevarication than any clear shift. Perhaps this was why people tended to look as if they were walking away from rather than towards something. They lived in a city built in a basin, which might encourage them to conduct themselves as if the accountable surface of the world skimmed past overhead.
Juliet’s hearing had also retuned itself, to the elastic, shallow, percolating Massachusetts accent. As the bus conductor chided his passengers, ‘Moovahlong!’, ‘Nah standin’ on top’, ‘Chain ja fivah? Yergotter be avin’ me awn!’, she heard him as an American might, the cockney of the Ealing comedy, his voice somewhere between a cough and a jeer.
The bus swung out of the station and into the one-way system heading west. An hour later, Juliet arrived at Khyber Road. A rag-and-bone man with a large television on his cart was disappearing round the corner and a woman inched past, barefoot, impervious, her hands reaching out in beseechment. Juliet, accustomed to Littlefield’s steadfast courtesy, almost said ‘Hi, how are you.’
Walking into the hallway, Juliet experienced a further sense of contraction. In Littlefield she had large rooms, all those windows and solid walls. Khyber Road looked as if it was built of dust held together by damp. She did not remember it being so derelict.
Juliet had been vague about her return and her family, who refused to be provoked, had not tried to pin her down. ‘Tuesday-ish,’ she had told Fred, who decided that this meant Monday afternoon or Wednesday morning. It turned out to mean Monday morning. Juliet went through to the kitchen. Her first impression was that it looked completely different and then she realised that everything was the same only arranged differently: cups top down and in rows, jars out of place by inches. The jug of cutlery that stood on the windowsill had been put on a high shelf and in the drawer, tea cloths had been folded into rectangles. There were three dirty plates in the sink, traces of butter, crumbs and yoghurt, a bowl and a child’s beaker. The kettle was warm and the tiled wall behind it still veiled in condensation. Were they hiding from her? Who were they? Fred hadn’t said anything about people coming to stay. In the living room, a rug had been thrown over the sofa, a living pot plant had replaced the dead one and the blind had been left up rather than down.
She found a bag open on her bed. In it, she could see a teddy bear with a head almost empty of stuffing, a heap of cassettes and a glasses case. In Fred’s room, she caught the heel of her shoe on something voluminous, slippery and pastel – she didn’t want to look too closely. Fred had nailed more plastic over the windows and there was a paraffin heater in each room. Juliet adjusted her breathing, making it level and shallow.
‘I need this Christmas, I really do,’ Juliet said to Carlo as she filled hot-water bottles. ‘This house is never dry or warm, and it’s got rather full.’
‘You can’t mind about Mary and Bella,’ said Carlo. He settled himself in an armchair and tucked in a quilt. There was coal in the grate and a thread of white smoke.
‘Why not? They were in my room.’
‘You don’t live here any more.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘They only stay over when Mary’s singing. It’s no big deal.’
‘She’s not singing tonight.’
‘No but it’s the holidays. Are they supposed to sit alone in that flat?’
‘Fred doesn’t need them. He’s got Caroline.’
‘Let Fred be happy. He thought he’d never see her again.’
‘I’ve been back for three days and she’s been here every night. She’s married, which is bad enough but then she goes and tries to make things nice. I found some dried flowers hanging on the kitchen wall yesterday, and a spice rack and a butter dish. The place is a freezing slum and now we’ve got a butter dish. I can’t wait to go home.’
‘Back to Littlefield?’
‘No, Allnorthover: the pub on Christmas Eve, midnight mass, stockings in the morning, board games in the afternoon, and no fucking butter dish.’
‘Not this year.’ Carlo looked embarrassed.
‘What do you mean? Has Ma gone and got a butter dish?’
‘She’s going away, on a retreat.’
‘On her own? But that’s selfish!’
‘She’s still not allowed a week off?’
‘It’s not that I mind that much.’ Juliet was feeling ridiculously upset. ‘It’s Christmas and there’s Dad and Mary and Bella, they will really need her this year. There’s you …’
‘I’m going away too.’
‘You can’t.’
‘To Thailand with Jonathan Mehta.’
‘Who the fuck is Jonathan Mehta?’
Carlo did not respond.
‘This is the first Christmas without Tobias, you know.’
His face hardened. ‘Yes I know. We all know. So if our mother can’t face laying on Christmas, let her escape it and if our father wants to go somewhere where there is no Christmas –’
‘No Christmas?’
‘He’s going to Cairo, to stay with Aunt Virginia. It’s been a horrible autumn for everyone. So why shouldn’t Mary come and stay, and why shouldn’t Fred have Caroline?’
‘Because she doesn’t mean it. Can’t you tell?’
‘She makes herself clear and after that it’s up to him. Anyway, there’s a complication. It appears that little Mary may be making a play for Fred …’ and Carlo told her the story of the night when Fred babysat and Mary stroked his thigh, only he forgot to mention that Bella had been on Fred’s knee, and he may have embellished it a little.
Juliet was struck by something. ‘Christmas might not be so dull after all if she and Caroline do battle …’
‘Caroline’s off to her parents’ tomorrow.’
‘And what about our parents? Have I really got to start worrying about them as well as the rest of you?’
‘You mean you don’t already?’
Juliet looked away and Carlo studied her. There was something different about her, something and nothing: small changes of shape and texture which might be due to one of those accelerations of age or some other chemical shift, natural and inevitable, or not. He pulled an arm out from under the quilt and pulled her towards him.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we might as well argue that because we all lost him, we are the last people to look after one another.’ It had just occurred to him: ‘We need others.’
‘Even so, we are our own trees, aren’t we?’ mumbled Juliet as she fell asleep because it was only just dawn in Littlefield, ‘And once we’re gone, there can’t be any clearing …’
‘Talking of trees,’ said Carlo, ‘I’m going to stick one of the kitchen chairs on this fire.’
On Christmas Eve, Juliet went back to Allnorthover with Fred, Mary and Bella. Clara picked them up at the station. They were already outside on the pavement and, not expecting to see them there, Clara glimpsed them as strangers. They looked like minor characters in a family portrait: Juliet, the crop-headed second son, turning away; Fred, the unlikely late arrival, sporting ringlets and trailing the sleeves and hems of a grown-up’s clothes; and Mary bending over the push-chair, her face hidden, her back resisting, who was she in this tableau? By the next evening, when Clara retreated to the roof – furious and shaken – she had decided who Mary was: the chatelaine, the keeper of the fucking keys.
As they drove the three miles between Ingfield and Allnorthover, Juliet complained. ‘Now I know what it’s like to live with a decent amount of light. The snow is dazzling, and there it looks like Christmas only no one can really be bothered while here, well look … No wonder we all ran off to London and began guzzling whatever we could.’
‘I live here, remember?’ Clara said.
‘Your place is different. You always have light.’
Clara looked pleased. ‘Yes. My light.’
‘It doesn’t belong to you –’ Juliet began but was stopped by Fred who was sitting in the back and who leaned forward to gather the blaze of Clara’s hair in both hands.
‘No, it comes from you, Clarissima,’ he said, twisting a strand through his fingers as he remembered a childhood game, ‘and I am going to uncurl your hair and get it.’
‘I’m curly too,’ said Juliet, surprising the others with her plaintiveness.
Fred ran his free hand over her head.
Clara dropped them off at the Clock House, where they stood uncertainly in the hall as if waiting for something to rush towards them igniting the atmosphere and restoring a world that was its own machine.
‘This is the wrong house,’ said Fred.
‘It’s a ghost home,’ said Juliet. ‘I’m going to make a fire.’
‘Looks like Ma left you something to burn,’ said Fred, pointing at the piles of typewritten sheets that covered the warped table-tennis table. These were parish-council papers awaiting collation, a task Francesca Clough asked her children to take care of in the ten pages of notes she had left on the kitchen table. These notes also referred to compost, mildew, mouse traps, a leaky tap, boiler pressure, a jammed window and a bucket placed under a hole in the roof.
Bella was asleep in her push-chair, so Mary carried her up – where else? – to Tobias’s room. Mary was in the habit of doing things with the Clough family rather than her own. Her parents had left the village years earlier and were either needy or remote, demanding permission to change or reassurance that they hadn’t. Mary preferred Tobias’s parents; they had always simply been there.
That evening, Juliet burst into tears because Fred laid the table for eight and Mary complained that Bella wouldn’t settle with such loud music playing and the television left on with no one watching it and that someone kept turning on all the lights. Juliet realised that she had cooked too much spaghetti and burst into tears again. Neither Fred nor Mary had ever seen her cry so they sat her in a chair by the fire and brought her whiskey. To cheer things up, Fred made another fire in the rarely used fireplace in the hall.
The brother and sister started fights and games, and trailed from room to room as if looking for something when what they were really after was their three, no two siblings. Mary opened the kitchen door and looked out into the night.
‘I can’t stand it any more,’ she called to the others. ‘Let’s go to the pub.’
‘But Mary –’ Fred began.
‘Why not? It’s what we usually do.’
‘There’s Bella …’
‘I meant … I mean … why don’t you go? I’ll be fine.’
They did not even pretend to hesitate.
Mary went upstairs to tuck Bella up, hurrying past rooms she had never known to be empty. She turned on each light, bringing the absent family into being through whatever caught her eye: a prayerbook and a pomander on a bedside table; the words ‘broken knowledge’ scrawled on a mirror in nail-polish; a houndstooth-check scarf she had seen worn by the doctor, wrapped round Clara’s hair, dangled from Carlo’s wrist and knotted round Fred as a sash.
Tobias’s room was at the end of the corridor. Mary hurried on but stumbled on something and looking down found a scattering of the nails, screws, nuts and bolts that Tobias carried in his overall pockets. He had always been working on a piece of machinery, always leaving tools around and a trail like this. Perhaps someone had been clearing out his room, and had carried a box along the corridor, from which they had spilt. They had not been there earlier. Maybe Fred or Juliet had moved something.
Mary made herself go on in darkness and was relieved to find that when she crept into the room, lay down and reached out, Tobias was there. He must have come up already. It was his back that met Mary’s hand, his hair into which she pressed her face. For a second, she knew and believed it; then it was her and the child alone in the bed, in the room, in the house, on and on alone out into the world and beyond it.
Mary concentrated on the breath of Bella’s deep sleep and then left her, shutting the door firmly because, because … so as to keep her warm? Apart? To keep Tobias in? These questions came later. She hurried back downstairs to sit by the fire and stared into it, looking for nothing more than a meaningless warmth. Later, she put more wood on the fire in the hall, thinking that Fred and Juliet would look forward to its bright welcome and so would soon come back.
The Clock House was no more solid than any other home. There was a fireplace in every room and although most were boarded up, air flowed from one to the other just as water flowed through its corroded pipes and electricity through the wires in its tired walls. The smoke from the two fires rose and flowed also, or tried to.
Fred and Juliet made their way back admiring the packed sky over their heads. Relieved by their outing, they concentrated on Mary, pouring more whiskey and passing on gossip. No one wanted to move away from the fire or be alone or do anything other than conjure the past. Midnight arrived, then one, then two and they were going round in circles, speculating on the bits of news they had: that Julie Lacey, queen of the youth-club disco, had sold her reproduction antiques business, found god and given her money to the community that had bought the old manor; that her brother Martin had intimidated a couple of Belgian tourists who had gone into The Arms by setting light to his hair; that Mary’s friends Billy and June had had a fourth child but June was being kept on in hospital and no one quite knew why; and that Clara was seen on the London train, often, and without her children.
At three o’clock, Fred wished the others Happy Christmas and wondered if he might creep upstairs to put a stocking on Bella’s bed. Mary had forgotten Bella. ‘No, I’ll go. She might need a drink and –’ she rushed upstairs, not stopping this time to turn on any lights which was why at first she did not wonder why the corridor seemed misty and could not understand that what was rolling out from around the edges of Tobias’s bedroom door was not mist.
It ought not be said that Mary hesitated but before she opened the door, she paused to accept the possibility of what she might find: a choking cloud at the centre of which would be … She stepped into a room that did not make sense. There was no fire but the granulated air made everything dim and broken down, and it took all she had to reach Bella, to lift her up and carry her out, where she slipped on something – a nail, a screw? – and more or less fell downstairs, waking Bella with her screaming.
Fred settled Mary and Bella in his parents’ room and said goodnight. Juliet went up to Tobias’s room, where she sat beneath the open window. The air had cleared, just like that.
When Tobias died, Juliet had been shocked by how absolutely he had left her. He did not even visit her dreams. Since coming home, she had willed him to appear. Not that she expected to see him, but she thought that she would be able to feel him, that she ought to be capable of that.
On Christmas morning in a bungalow in the suburb of Bristol where he grew up, Jacob Dart was trying to tell his mother something. Unable to speak since her first stroke, Monica listened more carefully than she ever had before. Her daughter Sally was there looking after her, but she was very quiet. At night Monica listened to central heating and cats; in the day to cars and doors and footsteps. She recognised her daughter-in-law’s urgent clip, and had come to appreciate her weekly visits and her briskly-given lavish gifts. Monica could detect in Barbara’s tired bullish features, a sense of duty which had nothing to do with Jacob or love.
‘You see, Ma,’ Jacob was saying now that Barbara had gone outside for a cigarette. ‘There was this girl. There is this girl … What was that?’
‘Don’t,’ Monica was trying to say, but what came out of her mouth was a feeble honk. ‘I don’t want to know, you silly fool. Why can’t you just keep it in your trousers?’
‘The thing is Barbara doesn’t love me. Most nights I have to sleep in my room, this room I have to rent at the back of a gallery. Try to breathe more slowly … in … out …’
Monica strained, and Jacob tried to sit her up but did not know how and losing his balance, yanked his mother half out of bed. Barbara appeared, stepped over him and settled Monica back.
Jacob got to his feet. ‘Sorry darling,’ he said. Both women looked up. ‘I’m pretty useless, aren’t I?’
‘That’s always been your excuse,’ said Barbara.
Monica’s jaw waggled, her mouth dropped open, her tongue flapped, her eyes watered and she gave a majestic caw.
‘I made her cry, Bar,’ said Jacob, tears in his eyes.
Barbara, who spent more time with Monica than he did, knew better: ‘Don’t be silly. She’s laughing.’