As the sun dipped behind the hills, the dozens of photographers and reporters showed no signs of leaving. Hannah went upstairs and into her bedroom without putting on a light. Peering out behind the edge of the curtain she could see the drive was still full of vans and cars, and could just make out the shapes of people moving between them. There was a low rumble of voices, punctuated by the occasional laugh. Every now and then, a glowing cigarette winked in the gloomy half-light.
Being trapped inside like this was awful: she felt like an animal in a cage. She remembered again the brightly coloured birds they’d seen in the market, cheeping in desperation and fluttering their wings frantically against the stainless steel bars.
Back downstairs the others were still in the kitchen, but had decided it was safe to open the French doors, since the press pack had moved to the front of the house. A welcome breeze wafted in, tickling the tassels on the lampshade that hung above the table.
‘We don’t dare risk lighting a barbecue, in case they smell the smoke and come round to this side again,’ said Lizzie, as Hannah walked back into the kitchen. ‘So, I’m going to cook up some chicken with rice, and make a salad to go with it. Is that okay?’
‘That would be great.’ Hannah sank down on the bench and looked over Jimmy’s shoulder. ‘What are you drawing?’
‘Death.’
‘Jimmy, that’s a bit morbid.’
‘It’s Death coming to this house to take away some people. The first person he’s going to take away is the man who was in our pool – look, that’s him in the blue water there, with his Adidas trainers on. After that he may take away all these other people over here. They’re the men with cameras who saw me running into the fence.’
Nick leant across the table to look. ‘Wow, that’s pretty detailed, Jimmy. What’s that big black thing on the left?’
‘That’s the tank. It belongs to Death. He’s going to drive them away in it.’
‘Right. Of course.’ Nick looked across at Hannah and raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, that’s very creative. It’s a great picture. How about you add a crane onto the tank so that Death can lift up the bodies. And maybe a stun gun as well?’
‘Daddy, he’s not going to kill them with a stun gun, that would be stupid,’ said Jimmy. ‘He’s going to chop them in half with a big knife, I’ve already drawn that!’
‘Ah, yes, I see it now, down there on the right.’
Hannah grinned at them both. Nick had always been better at relating to what the children were doing: he was naturally interested in the extraordinary things their minds conjured up. There was no way Hannah would have worked out that the long black squiggle at the bottom of Jimmy’s piece of paper, was a knife that could be used to take out a bunch of reporters.
She adored her own children, but wouldn’t have had the patience to work with other people’s. ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she frequently said, as Nick staggered in from another day at the chalkface. ‘You’re a saint.’ Her own job as office manager at the catering company was relatively dull, but gratifyingly easy. It didn’t keep her awake at night, or follow her home. When she closed the door behind her each evening, she shut away a desk piled with invoices, orders and spreadsheets – all of which could be forgotten about until the following day. Childcare and teaching didn’t work like that.
‘I want to do something exciting with my life,’ Alice often said – the implication being that her mother didn’t. But Hannah was happy that way; one stressful career – peppered with behaviour reports, Ofsted targets, educational assessments and stroppy parents – was enough for any household.
Lizzie served up plates of fried chicken and rice, with a bowl of tossed green salad and yet more baguette.
‘I’ve never eaten so much bread,’ said Hannah. ‘Why aren’t the French all the size of houses?’
They ate what was on their plates, then accepted more from the huge cast-iron pans. Wine was poured for the adults, Coke for the children and, when the bottles were opened too quickly, brown sugary foam gushed onto the table before glasses could be filled. It was fun. Hannah found herself relaxing as she poured more wine, the stresses of the day melting away as the alcohol seeped through her veins.
Marcus was telling a story about a client, whose wife, on discovering he was having an affair, packed some of his clothes and personal possessions into a suitcase, arrived unannounced at his office, and proceeded to open the case and throw it all out of the window. ‘One thing at a time,’ he said. ‘First a pair of jeans, then a shoe, then some boxer shorts. It took ages.’
The girls were loving the story, their eyes wide with glee at the prospect of a relationship going so terribly wrong.
‘His office was on the eighth floor. The people on floors one to seven saw all these things floating past their windows: trousers, socks, shirts, books. She even threw out his iPad!’
‘No! That’s awful,’ said Suzy.
‘Couldn’t he stop her?’ asked Alice.
‘What’s an affair?’ asked Jimmy.
‘That was the funny thing,’ said Marcus. ‘He wasn’t even there – he was out at a meeting. No one else dared go into the office, she was in such a crazy mood.’
‘Did he get back while she was doing it?’
‘Is an affair like the school fair we have in the summer?’ asked Jimmy.
‘I think his secretary called, to warn him.’
‘Was the wife still there when he got back, waiting to see his reaction?’
‘No, she’d stormed off by then, but of course every single member of his team had seen what happened, so knew what he’d been up to.’
‘That is so funny!’ said Suzy.
‘Well, to be honest, I think it serves him right,’ said Lizzie. ‘If you play with fire and all that…’
‘Do you play with fire at an affair, like those men who eat it at the circus?’ whined Jimmy. ‘I don’t really understand…’
‘Did he get all his things back?’ asked Hannah, not sure why it mattered. The man didn’t sound like he deserved any sympathy.
‘No idea, but it must have been funny seeing him run around picking up boxers and socks from the pavement.’
‘Just goes to show there’s nothing like a woman scorned,’ said Nick.
‘His poor wife had every right to feel like that,’ said Lizzie. ‘What a bastard. He got what he deserved.’ She was frowning, her arms crossed in front of her chest; the only one not enjoying Marcus’s story.
Hannah wasn’t surprised. There was an old wound inside both of them that had never healed properly, and ached when they were reminded of Derek’s affair. More than thirty years later, she could still see Jean’s tear-streaked face when she sat them down at the table in the cold little kitchen and told them Daddy was going away and wouldn’t be living with them again.
‘But where has he gone?’ Lizzie had asked, bewildered. She had been about Jimmy’s age, too young to understand, but old enough to sense that her mother’s pain was something out of the ordinary. ‘Will he be back for tea?’
Full of terror, although she didn’t understand why, nine-year-old Hannah had run upstairs and shut herself in the bedroom she shared with Lizzie. ‘Go away!’ she screamed, when Jean tried to come in later. ‘I hate you! I want Daddy to come back. Why did he go?’
She couldn’t remember exactly what happened over the next few days, or how long it took before she finally realised Derek wasn’t coming home. She must have gone through a gradual process of acceptance, and now – so many years later – she realised that process would have been helped by Jean’s pragmatism.
‘We will be fine, my lovely girls,’ she had said, hugging them both to her as they sat on the sofa. ‘It’s just the three of us now, but we will get through it.’
By the start of the summer holidays, it no longer felt strange to see Derek’s empty place at the breakfast table, and Hannah slapped down Lizzie’s continuing lack of comprehension. ‘He isn’t coming back to live here anymore. Don’t you understand that?’ she said bitterly, when Lizzie asked if Derek might be going on holiday with them to Cornwall. ‘He went away because he doesn’t love us anymore. You’re such a baby. You don’t know anything.’
Three weeks later, unable to get to sleep in a strange bed in a dismal boarding house in Newquay, she had cried silently into her pillow as she remembered last year’s holiday, when Derek had taken her to a fireworks display – on her own as a special treat, because Lizzie was too young to stay up that late.
They never met Anne, the woman with whom he’d had the original affair. Many years later Jean told them Anne had left Derek and gone back to her husband. She had relayed the news with a certain amount of satisfaction.
Over the next few years, they had been introduced to two more of Derek’s new lady friends. The first tried to be jolly and win the love of the little girls, showering them with sweets and cheap make-up.
The second treated them with indifference, listening to their chatter with a smile that didn’t stretch quite wide enough, smoking and staring out of the window of an Italian restaurant while Derek watched them twirling spaghetti around their forks, splattering red bolognaise sauce over themselves and the white tablecloth. He’d had a strained smile on his face and asked them about school, but there were long silences in the conversation.
Hannah, then just thirteen, had been acutely aware of the awkwardness of the whole thing and covered up her embarrassment with anger.
‘Did you have a lovely birthday, Hannah?’ Derek had asked, at one stage.
‘What do you care?’ she’d muttered, sullenly. ‘You didn’t even remember it!’
He’d looked confused. ‘But didn’t you get my present?’
She hadn’t believed him. ‘Can we go home now?’
As the girls got older, occasional visits became infrequent ones, and it was only many years later that Hannah realised they must have been as uncomfortable and upsetting for their father, as they were for her and Lizzie.
By the time Hannah left home to go to university, contact with Derek had virtually come to an end. Until the day of the funeral, she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d seen him.
Lizzie, still trying to keep everyone happy, had invited Derek to her wedding, although Marcus's brother gave her away. But Hannah and Nick hadn’t invited him to their wedding and, since they had a civil ceremony, there was no need for someone to officially give her away.
‘Just as well,’ she’d joked at the time. ‘He gave me away years ago.’ It was easier to pretend it didn’t hurt if she made a joke out of it.
Now, Marcus was making a joke about some stranger’s affair and the impact it must have had on his family, and Lizzie’s lips were pursed tightly.
Suzy and Alice were shrieking with laughter and begging Marcus for more details, eager to hear how the man’s colleagues had reacted to such an acute revelation of his infidelity.
Hannah leant across and gently rubbed her sister’s arm, wanting to show she understood how she felt. Did Marcus’s client and his wife have children, she wondered? If so, perhaps they would grow up with a similar lesion deep inside them, as a result of their father’s indiscretion and public humiliation. Lizzie was right: the straying bastard had deserved to get his worldly goods thrown out of an eighth-floor window.