WHEN SYLVIE IS in bed, I curl up on the sofa, wrapped up in my duvet because the flat is so cold, and flick through the TV channels. On Channel 5 there’s one of those house makeover programs. The presenter must have had lots of Botox, her face is far too still. The program features a couple who don’t like the feel of their home, and they have a color consultant and a psychic to advise them. The psychic has earrings like chandeliers, and her voice is emphatic and fruity. She says she feels a ghostly presence haunting their utility room, and she will burn some sage leaves to encourage the spirit to leave. I change channels rapidly.
I hear a slight sound from Sylvie’s room and go to look through her door. She’s lying on top of her covers, and at first I think she’s asleep—that sleep came on her abruptly, before she got into her bed. Then she moves her head, and I see that she is awake. She’s crying silently. Her wet face shines in the lamplight. She has the picture of Coldharbour pressed against her chest.
I go to hold her. She leans her head against me. Her weeping is quiet, despairing. Her sadness tugs at my heart. I’m so angry that I let myself be taken in by Adam, let him stir all this up in her.
“Sweetheart, what’s the matter? Is it something Adam said?”
She shakes her head. “I want them back,” she says through her tears.
“Who do you want back, sweetheart?”
“I want my family back,” she says.
“But this is your family, Sylvie. Me and you together.”
I’m not sure that she can hear me.
“I want my house and my family. I want them, Grace.”
There’s a little dull ache in my heart, but I’m desperate to comfort her.
“We’ll find the answer, sweetheart,” I tell her. I rock her gently against me. “Somehow or other, we’ll get there. We’ll make things better somehow . . .”
She seems so far away from me. She goes on crying silently, and there’s so much grief in her face.
Later, once Sylvie has cried herself to sleep, I ring Adam. I know I have to end it once and for all, my brief flirtation with his impossible theory.
He answers straightaway.
“Grace. Hi. Good to hear from you. We were going to fix an appointment . . .”
There’s music playing in the background, languorous jazz piano. I wonder about that whole life of his, which I know nothing about. Perhaps he is with his girlfriend, the seductive biophysicist.
“The thing is,” I say, “I’m not so sure anymore—not sure it’s right for Sylvie. You know, what we’ve been doing. Not sure it’s going to help her . . .”
There’s a brief silence.
“You have to do what you think is right,” he says.
I know he’s disappointed. He’s being so carefully reasonable, but I hear the sag in his voice. I think of how he seemed when we left him in the corridor—that gaunt, stretched look he had. I feel uneasy, that I’m being so ungrateful.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says a little too hastily. “I have to admit I’d have loved to work with Sylvie. But it was good to meet you both anyway.”
“Yes, it was,” I say vaguely.
I stare into the dark of my garden through the gap in my curtains, where light from my French windows spills across the lawn and gilds the twigs of the mulberry. I feel stuck. I don’t know how to finish this conversation. Hearing his voice, all the warmth in it, my anger seeps away, and it enters my mind that it’s too abrupt to just end our connection like this—with this quick, embarrassed phone call—when he’s been so kind to us. That really it wouldn’t be polite. That I owe him something more than that.
I clear my throat.
“I wonder—could I come and see you? I’d really like to explain. Just me without Sylvie—perhaps in my lunch hour or something?”
It isn’t what I’d planned to say.
“Yes, of course,” he tells me.
He sounds surprised. I imagine him—how he pushes his hand through his hair so the hair sticks up, gives him that startled look, like everything amazes him.