It was Saturday. Brodie and Flook, who had now joined him at King Henry’s School, met us at the bus-stop in Norwich after lessons and Dad drove us all to Liza’s house in Suffolk.
The Glade stood beyond a quarry. We drove off the road, through gates topped with barbed wire, and followed a sandy track past great cranes, arrested, swinging silent in the wind until work would begin again on Monday. Yellow diggers perched dusty at the edge of deep pits, long rootling necks drooping like tulips. Brodie and Flook twisted their heads in fascination until the last scrap of rusted metal was lost from sight and we came to a green thicket, a tiny island marooned in the sandy desert. In the middle of the thicket was the Glade, a little house made big by the way Liza lived in it. We walked in through the Book Room. Even the ashtrays stood on stacks of books. More books spilled across the floor, covering the carpet, sliding, jostling, flapping their leaves in the draught, vying to be read.
Liza had a big round table in a room where you couldn’t see out of the window because of the roses thrusting their way in. We children had supper and then wound through meandering paths in the garden to the Summer Palace, a concrete air-raid shelter transformed by Liza’s green fingers into a tumbling scented bower of honeysuckle and wisteria. Inside the Summer Palace a television flickered on to a green leather sofa.
All Liza’s children were there that weekend. Dominic had shed his suit and donned a pair of mud-encrusted boots, and was building a trellis outside the back door. ‘Brodie, come and give me a hand,’ he yelled when he saw us, and Brodie scrambled through a hedge to help him. Helen and Theresa sat with Mummy in the garden, glasses of green-white wine in their hands, shaded from the evening sun by decaying straw hats they had found heaped in the kitchen. They looked like three sisters, all pale-skinned, dark-haired and slender. Theresa’s eyes were the same blue as Mummy’s and she sat forward on her chair, gesturing with her hands to explain something just as Mummy always did. Helen leaned back and turned her face up to the sun. ‘I’m so glad to be here again,’ she said. ‘I want to move back.’
Helen lived in Ireland and I had not seen her or her children for several years; Zoe and Vinnie were hard to recognize at first. Zoe was fifteen, her curling dark hair fell down her back and she looked like a gypsy princess with her gold hooped earrings and mass of clattering bracelets. I laughed when she said, ‘Do you realize that even though I’m six months older than you, you are my aunt and so is Poppy?’
Vinnie, tongue-tied and confused by her ever-increasing family, stuck her thumb in her mouth and crouched on the grass at Helen’s feet. ‘Vinnie shouldn’t suck her thumb,’ whispered Dan. ‘She’s twelve, and when I was seven Mummy said mine would drop off if I went on sucking it.’
We closed the curtains in the Summer Palace so the grownups couldn’t see Zoe and me smoking cigarettes. I pretended to inhale, the acrid smoke prickling my mouth.
Vinnie came in, a goldfish writhing and slipping on a wooden spoon in her hand. ‘Fish soup tonight,’ she giggled, and we ran out aghast. Around Liza’s mossy pond little orange chips fluttered and flipped. Vinnie had scooped all the baby fish out of the water. We rescued them, our hands stroking the earth, trying to find every one in the gathering dusk.
In the house, Daddy and Liza stood talking at the fireplace. Music swooned from a pink tape recorder. Mummy was upstairs putting Dan and Poppy to bed. ‘Is Liza your mother?’ Dan asked her.
‘No. She’s Helen’s mother.’ Mummy tucked Poppy up and took Dan to brush his teeth. ‘Liza’s my friend and Daddy’s friend.’
‘How was Daddy old enough to have Helen and Dominic and Theresa?’ Dan was determined to understand his family tree. I had been defeated trying to explain to him earlier. ‘Ask Mummy. She told me,’ I had suggested finally, exasperated by my lack of vocabulary for such complexities.
Zoe and I, Brodie, Vinnie and Flook were allowed to stay up later at Liza’s than at home, and we played Scrabble in the kitchen, interrupted by shuffling adults.
Liza sat down with us, laying a blue packet of cigarettes and a glass in front of her. ‘Can I play?’ We gave her a space, but she wasn’t concentrating, and she couldn’t make a word. ‘God, if I had the wits of you lot, I’d be a different creature, not half so scatty and hopeless,’ she said, swaying into Zoe.
‘Gran, you’re not hopeless, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Zoe, and Liza leapt up, grabbed Flook and waltzed round the kitchen with him. ‘They’re always like this when they drink,’ Brodie sighed.
‘Your mother has tamed Patrick,’ Liza gasped, prancing past the blackened stove, Flook gamely keeping up as they danced across the flagstones. ‘She’s saved him from himself. She is remarkable. I take my hat off to her. Do you?’ Flook nodded, biting his lip, concentrating on steering Liza between sharp-edged objects. The rest of us decided to go to bed. Grown-ups drinking in their own room, being quiet and good, was one thing, but when they came and interrupted us, waffling drunkenly and interfering in our games, it was unbearable. Flook extracted himself and pounded up the stairs. We took off our shoes and climbed into bunk beds in the dormitory at the head of Liza’s stairs. We were too tired to argue about who got the top bunks. Downstairs, the grown-ups were singing.