Chloe lies on her bed and cries.
Chloe refrains from running back into the kitchen and uttering all the retorts, taunts and insults which she could so easily deliver.
Chloe is conscious of a certain sense of victory, having put Oliver so firmly in the wrong. Oliver has behaved badly. There is, for once, no possible doubt about it. Even he must see it. If she had not picked up the knife her conduct would have been perfect. Still, Oliver damaged her hand, thus neutralizing her offence. So long as he sees it like that.
It does not occur to Chloe that perhaps Oliver means what he says. He has said it before, and hasn’t meant it.
Oliver, poor Oliver, has cried wolf too often.
Chloe falls into a half doze. Her misery drifts with her; the house seems to fall in upon her, its beams eaten through with distress.
Grace once ran to Chloe and Oliver in the middle of the night, in such a state as Chloe is now, but with rather more reason.
Picture it. Oliver and Chloe in the front of the car – their first car, a Ford Anglia – reasonably rational and kindly people. A happy and loving couple, though with the pleasure of their days now disturbed by the distress of their friend, Grace, who huddles in the back of the car, gasping and sobbing with hatred and grief.
They are on their way to Christie’s house in Kensington to retrieve Piers and Petra. Christie took them out of school that afternoon. Stole them.
Christie and Grace are separated. Grace lives with the children in a cheap two-roomed flat (‘cooped up’ Christie claims in Court. ‘A normal home’ Grace maintains, though through a free Legal Aid solicitor, who has not the flair of Christie’s team of legal advisers). The battle over the children wages to and fro: files thicken; writs fly. He doesn’t want the children. Grace maintains. All he wants is her unhappiness. She’s unfit, he maintains. A whore. A criminal lunatic, she says, but who’s going to believe that? He doesn’t love the children, she repeats.
And indeed little Piers and little Petra, rocks in two languages, shrink even further back into themselves when Christie appears, bearing gifts for which he expects to be thanked by formal letter. Christie believes in healthy discipline and a clear organizational framework as the key to successful child rearing. Their little anxious eyes peer out from beneath furrowed brows. Piers sulks and Petra whines. It is as if they have decided that their best defence against their parents’ battles is to present themselves as a prize scarcely worth the winning.
Nevertheless Grace loves them immoderately.
Now he has stolen them. Grace has been to the police station but they will do nothing for her. That afternoon Christie, unbeknownst to her, became their legal guardian. He has already, forestalling her, been to the police and shown them the Court Order, properly signed, properly witnessed, properly come by. Grace can appeal if she wants. Another six months, at least, during which time Christie has care, custody and control.
Oliver, Chloe and Grace reach Christie’s house. It is in a quiet, almost remote avenue in Kensington. Here the rich live, enclosed. The house is, allegedly, burglar proof. It stands on a corner, its windows set in a stuccoed concrete face, its garden enclosed by a high brick wall. It was built at the turn of the century by a dishonest industrialist with a paranoiac fear of thieves. As their car parks outside, guard dogs in the garden begin to bark.
Grace rings the bell. The dogs stop barking, begin again. No-one comes.
Oliver, standing on the roof of the car, can see into the high windows, brilliant with light.
He can see pictures on the walls and the backs of chairs and people moving inside. It seems warm, cosy and prosperous in there, and so it is. If the curtains are left undrawn it is from sheer indifference to the outside world.
Oliver, Chloe and Grace ring and ring the door-bell and bang upon the knocker. Still there is no response. Oliver goes to the corner phone-box and telephones the number Grace, her fingers trembling, writes down for him. When the phone rings, someone lifts the receiver off the hook. That’s all.
The top window opens and closes again. Christie’s hand, Grace swears. Something flutters down, and falls at Grace’s feet, as she clutches the railings and screams and shakes her fist. No-one from all those other houses comes to see or intervene or help. They remain closed, and silent, and shut, as always, to the implorings and imprecations and dying desperations of those outside. All’s well within.
Grace has tears pouring down her cheeks. She seems scarcely human.
‘Petra, Petra,’ she shrieks. ‘You bastard,’ she cries. ‘You bastard. Christie, you murderer. I’ll kill you.’
‘If she behaves like this,’ says Oliver wretchedly, ‘perhaps Christie’s right, perhaps she’s not fit—’ but he knows himself, how else can Grace behave?
What fluttered down is a narrow strip of yellow ribbon. Petra’s hair ribbon. Christie’s token of mirth and victory.
Oliver thinks Grace will have a heart attack. She has collapsed on the ground. She is screaming.
‘Get an ambulance, for God’s sake,’ Oliver says to Chloe. ‘That bastard Christie, it’s too much. We’ll all be locked up—’
Chloe phones. Grace picks herself up, crawls towards the house, scrabbling at the cream stucco until the walls and her hands are pink with plaster and blood mixed.
When the ambulance comes she seems surprised to see it.
‘I don’t need that,’ she says. ‘Why should I need that? I’m perfectly all right.’
The ambulance goes away. Grace stays the night with Chloe and Oliver. In the morning Grace seems composed, even cheerful.
‘The children are much better off with Christie,’ Grace says. ‘I can have a much better time without them, can’t I. That little flat is dreadful.’
And so it is, and so she can, and so she does. It’s as if part of her brain has been burnt out.
Later, when Grace becomes pregnant by Patrick, it is Chloe who persuades her not to have an abortion. She believes vaguely that the burnt out parts will be reactivated, but of course they aren’t – what’s dead is dead, and childbirth may be a miracle for the child but it is not for the mother. And this is why Chloe now feels Stanhope to be her responsibility; her fault.
And indirectly, why Chloe feels responsible for Kevin and Kestrel, whose mother might still be alive, if it had not been for Stanhope’s birth.