ALL DAY I have a sense of loss that I can’t precisely explain, as though Dominic has taken something precious from me. I consider ringing Karen, but I know that she’d be horrified. I can hear her voice in my head. No, Grace. Please don’t tell me you’ve gone and seen the Rat again . . . She’d say I was crazy to do this, to open myself to this hurt. And of course she’d be right, but I don’t want to hear it from her. Sometime I’ll tell her—not yet.
We don’t have many customers. The rain beats down all afternoon, deterring all but the most determined shoppers. I keep myself occupied tidying up, sorting the shelves where we display our gifts and garden accessories—wildflower seeds in brown paper packets, bottles of lavender linen water, candles that have a scent of figs or licorice. I have a lump in my throat, like when you’re trying not to cry.
Once or twice I see Lavinia looking thoughtfully at me. She’s about to go out for her smoke when she comes and puts her hand on my arm.
“Are you okay, Gracie?” she says.
“Sort of. Well, I did a stupid thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was really stupid.”
“D’you want to talk about it?”
“Not really. Sorry. I don’t think I can.” My face is hot. The shame I felt in the café hangs about me. “I was trying to help Sylvie—well, that was what I told myself. But perhaps it was just an excuse.”
Her quiet gray eyes are on me. She has a knowing look, and I feel that she’s guessed what I did. But she doesn’t pursue it, and I’m grateful.
She gives me a quick, warm hug.
“Sometimes life’s a bitch,” she says.
I cling to her for a moment. I know I should tell her that we’ve lost the nursery place, but I can’t face it, not today.
When I go to my car at the end of the day, I look inside the envelope, count the money. He’s given me two hundred pounds.
On the way to pick up Sylvie, I turn off for Tiger Tiger. I shall buy her the dollhouse she wants, that I’d thought I couldn’t afford anymore, now that our future is so uncertain. This will be a good use for the money—this indulgent, extravagant gesture.
The shop assistant, a stylish young woman in glossy dominatrix boots, packs the house up in a box with lots of whispery tissue paper. I wonder again why this one is Sylvie’s favorite, this simple whitewashed cottage, when it’s so much less elaborate than all the other designs.
I choose a Barbie for Lennie, whose birthday it is on Sunday, just two days before Sylvie’s, and I find some figures and furniture for the dollhouse. I take them to the counter. The marionettes still hang from the ceiling, the princess in her wisp of silk, the witch with hair like cobwebs. They twist and seem to shiver in a little movement of air.
The woman smiles. “This dollhouse is gorgeous,” she says. “This is going to make somebody very happy.”
The shadows of the marionettes move over her hands as she closes the box.
“It’s for my daughter,” I tell her. “She’s wanted it for ages.”
“Well, she’s going to love it,” says the woman. She gives a small, nostalgic sigh. “I adored my dollhouse when I was a kid. It was my best thing, really. You get hours of play from a dollhouse . . .”
In spite of myself, I feel a flicker of pleasure thinking how excited Sylvie will be.
After supper, when Sylvie goes to play in her bedroom, I unpack the dollhouse and put it out on the floor.
“Sylvie! I’ve got something for you.”
She comes back into the living room. She looks at the house and gives a small, pleased smile. Then she turns to me, a little perplexed. “But it’s not my birthday,” she says. “It’s not my birthday till Tuesday.”
“It’s an early birthday present,” I say.
“Why, Grace?”
“Just because. Because you’ve always wanted it. Because you wanted it so much.”
“Thank you,” she says rather formally.
I kneel to hug her.
She waits till I take my arms from her, then goes to examine the house. She runs one finger along the the roof, touching it so delicately, as though it’s made from eggshell.
“It’s my house, isn’t it, Grace?” she says. But she’s a little hesitant now—somehow less certain than when she saw it in the window at Tiger Tiger.
“Yes. It’s the one you wanted. Isn’t it lovely?”
“Yes,” she says.
But there’s something puzzled in her expression.
I put out the little doll figures and furniture I bought for her. She plays with the house all evening, walking the dolls through the rooms. She seems happy enough, but it’s not how I imagined it. There’s something a little reserved in her play. I have a sense that the house is not quite satisfactory for her, as though it hasn’t delivered what it promised. The front of it was always closed in the window at Tiger Tiger, and perhaps it seemed more real to her when she couldn’t see inside. Perhaps it’s not as she’d envisaged—these neat, empty rooms, the plywood partitions, the scraps of polka-dot wallpaper on the walls.
I have a sad, incomplete feeling. I’d been looking forward so much to this moment, looking forward for months. But now I feel a faint regret that my gesture hasn’t worked out, that I spent all that money on it when I should have been saving it up. It enters my mind that perhaps I bought the house for the wrong person—for myself as much as for Sylvie—wanting her pleasure in it to assuage all the unhappiness I feel.