Irene put Alexandra to bed in a nice bright attic room with eaves, its own television, a bathroom with fluffy pink towels and a view of the golf course. She gave her daughter buttered toast and Marmite, hot chocolate and two sleeping pills. Sascha plodded up the stairs and climbed in beside his mother. She held him in her arms and went to sleep.
She slept for fifteen hours until Sascha woke her by prising her eyes apart. He told her about the eight kittens. She told him Ned had died, gone to heaven, gone for a walk in a forest to look for God. Sascha asked if they could have one of the kittens. Alexandra said no, dogs didn’t like kittens and kittens didn’t like dogs. Sascha said yes they did. Couldn’t they send Diamond to go for a walk with Ned in the forest and not come back like Ned? Alexandra said yes, that wasn’t such a bad idea. She found she’d quite gone off Diamond.
Then she thought of Lucy Lint’s marmalade cat and said she’d only have a kitten if it was a tabby. Sascha cried and stamped.
Alexandra looked at Sascha and thought he was very like Ned. Really he was a stranger to her. She found it difficult to believe they were intimately connected, in the way people said. The fact was, she seemed to have suddenly un-bonded with Sascha. She hadn’t known that this was possible.
She presumed it would pass. It would have to. In the meantime she could act as she was trained to do. She would play loving mother.
‘Poor little Sascha,’ she said, ‘but never mind. We’ll see Daddy again in heaven.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Sascha. ‘I want to stay here for ever, with Gran and the orange kittens.’
‘But don’t you want to go home and see The Cottage and Diamond and all your friends?’
‘I don’t have any friends,’ said Sascha. ‘They take my toys and you make me share and then they get broken.’
‘There must be some grown-ups you like,’ said Alexandra.
‘I like Lucy,’ said Sascha. ‘She gives me toffees in the morning. You never do. She keeps them under the pillow especially for me. Oops.’
‘Oops, what?’
‘I wasn’t to say. There’s ghosts under the bed. They keep bumping in the night.’
Alexandra left Sascha doing somersaults on the bed, shrieking for joy in a way which would make social workers shiver, and crying, ‘Watch me, watch me!’ and went down to breakfast.
‘I told him,’ Alexandra said.
‘How did he take it?’ asked Irene. She wore a yellow track suit and had been out jogging. She was stirring honey into yoghurt. Her husband Abe, the banker, sat stolidly reading the Telegraph. They seemed a very happy couple.
‘I’m not sure he took it in,’ said Alexandra.
Sascha came down and said, ‘Ned’s gone for a walk in a forestand he isn’t ever coming back, so I don’t have to go home. I can stay here. I don’t like Theresa. She’s too big. ’He went out into the garden.
‘There’s no way,’ said Abe, ‘that Sascha can go home with you now, not in the state you are.’
‘What sort of state is that?’ asked Alexandra.
‘Bad,’ said Irene. ‘Come back and collect him in a week, when you’re ready. We’re not trying to steal him from you.’
‘I believe you,’ said Alexandra. ‘I think.’
She drove back to The Cottage. She liked driving. She turned on the radio and thought of nothing. Then she heard a programme called ‘Theatre in London Today’ and they were talking of Daisy Longriff’s performance in A Doll’s House. There was a discussion about art and nudity. Someone said it was like listening to Hamlet in Australian, and someone else said it was the most ravishing and intense performance he had ever seen. Someone said the theatre would be dark on Monday in remembrance of Ned Ludd, that Great Man of the Theatre, whose funeral was on that day: someone else said that was a rumour, to promote ticket sales. It was, they said, that Alexandra Ludd, probably the best serious female actor the country had, natural successor to Vanessa Redgrave etcetera, etcetera, was so prostrate with grief in their country home she might not be returning to the role. Well, thought Alexandra, now the bare-tits award goes to Daisy Longriff: I get to be serious. At last. But she didn’t think much. She switched to another programme. It was easier.