‘Ah! Dinner!’ Stella paused and then said ‘Wait a moment,’ and went into the kitchen. She came back with a bottle of elderberry wine she’d won at the Fête. ‘You should take something.’
Mary blushed. ‘I know. I mean, thank you.’ She took the bottle and hurried away.
When she reached the gravel drive that led to the Clock House, Mary pulled on her sandals. They were a pair Stella had thrown out and were too big for Mary, but she loved their delicate apricot-satin bands and the sudden height they gave her. She thought about Clara at the Fête, her long brown legs and how you could see their outline through her chiffon dress. You could see the strong curves of Clara’s whole body through that dress. Mary felt like a child in her shift, so straight up and down.
It was half past seven, which had seemed to Mary like the right sort of time to arrive for ‘dinner’. As she approached the house, the crash of her feet on the gravel got louder and louder. By the time she reached the front door, it was so deafening that Mary was surprised no one had rushed out to see what the racket was. She looked for a bell but couldn’t find one. The door, in any case, was open. She was about to knock when she noticed a rapid hammering sound. She turned her head towards the noise, slowly, anxious not to unsettle her contact lenses, which still felt tight and heavy. There was a motorbike and she walked over to it, expecting to find someone lying next to it. Nobody was there. Mary looked up and around, unaccustomed to taking in so much and at such a distance. Across a lawn of worn-out grass, there was another motorbike, upside-down, a sidecar, and further off, a car with its bonnet up, and something that looked like a go-kart or a small tractor. Someone had begun to take apart each of these machines. There was a single heap of wheels, and one each of engine parts and bodywork.
Mary looked back at the house and realised that she’d thought it would be beautifully kept and bright white. Three immense cedar trees cut out the light and the house’s cement frontage had a dank sheen, like the underside of a stone that had lain for years in forest darkness. The house’s embellishments, the parapets with their castellated balustrades, were clogged with moss and weed. The ivy that had crept around the doors and windows had recently been cut back so that the walls of the house were covered with its pallid imprint.
The famous clock tower was supported by crumbling buttresses and wooden joists. When Robert Newling had moved in, he had installed a clock that chimed so loudly it could be heard on the village green. He spent most of his time on the Continent and so, rather than disrupt his habits, went by what he believed to be Continental time at home as well. The villagers, who lived by the church bells, were confused to hear different hours being chimed. Robert Newling refused to adapt and it was only after his death that someone tried to turn the clock back and it had stopped for good.
‘You looking for Clara?’ A boy of about her age had appeared. His height and thinness were exaggerated by his big head and baggy overalls. He looked like a plant that had grown up in shadows. He had Clara’s big nose and black eyes but in a face with such different proportions that their effect was altogether something else. Mary was fascinated. She put out her hand but his hands were full of tools – a spanner, three screwdrivers and a hammer. Confused, she lifted her fingers to her face to take off her glasses and then remembered she wasn’t wearing them, so she waved in what happened to be the direction of the pile of engine parts. Then she had to think of something to say.
‘How do you know what belongs where?’
The boy smiled. ‘I’m building something new.’ Mary kept looking as two tortoises ambled out from between the machinery, one slowly chasing the other.
The boy walked past her into the house. ‘CLARA!’ He roared. There was a distant reply. He turned to Mary, ‘Sounds like she’s in the bath. Come on.’ Mary followed him across a large hall, tripping over toys and slipping on the parquet floor. A trail of nails and screws fell from the boy’s torn pockets. They went upstairs and along a corridor full of piles of books and open boxes in which Mary could see important-looking stone sculptures and porcelain vases alongside toy guns, records, table-tennis racquets, snorkelling masks. They passed a guinea-pig cage on a polished walnut side table that was shoved up against a set of chipped white shelves. The boy pushed open a door, and Mary saw Clara lying in a deep bath, her hair in a knot, a cigarette in one hand.
‘Bit early,’ Clara’s mouth snapped momentarily into a smile.
‘Don’t be a cow,’ the boy said and grabbed the bottle from Mary’s hand. ‘She brought you this.’
Clara sat up so suddenly that the water crashed against her back and ran down her front. Mary retreated, shocked by Clara’s nakedness, her long neck and strong shoulders, her jutting dark nipples and muscular breasts. Mary tried to make sense of the tiny flowers scattered over the peeling wallpaper. The boy put the bottle down on the floor and went behind Mary, opening an airing cupboard. Clara pushed on a tap with her toes and the spurting hot water made more foamy bubbles that rose and spilt over the bath’s edge. Mary watched.
‘Wait in the garden,’ Clara sounded more friendly now. ‘Thanks for the wine. Take it down with you. I won’t be long.’ The water coming from the tap shrank to a dribble, coughed and stopped.
‘Tobias!’ she screeched. The boy emerged from the airing cupboard, holding a wrench.
‘I’ve disconnected your supply.’ Tobias handed the bottle to Mary and steered her away.
‘It’s round the back.’ Tobias left Mary where he had found her, and returned to his machines. She smashed her way across the gravel, her feet already swelling and aching in Stella’s sandals. They tipped her forward as much as her glasses ever had. Thinking about her shoes, she found she could no longer walk in them. One foot lagged behind the other and she fell.
Grateful that nobody had seen, Mary picked herself up and looked for some direction to head in, somewhere she was supposed to be or wait. In front of her was a tall hedge, behind which a number of lights flickered. She skirted the hedge and found that the lights came from candles burning inside a row of pewter lanterns that had been arranged on a trestle table set up on the floor of an empty swimming pool. The table was covered in a white cloth. There was a pile of white plates and a pile of white bowls and half a dozen glasses. In the middle of the table was a bowl in which floated red, orange and pink flowers. They were radiant, intricate, hothouse flowers, not garden flowers, and had been crammed into the bowl until they turned in on themselves.
The pool was about seven feet deep. Its dusty tiles were cobalt blue. Mary kicked off her shoes and lowered herself down into it, surprised not to feel a cool smooth floor but the scratchiness of dead leaves, seed husks and grasses catching between her toes. She waited there, alone, for an hour. She sat first of all in the nearest of the six folding garden chairs and then realised she was at the head of the table, and moved on. By the time she heard a car in the drive, she had sat in every chair, opened and shut every lantern, rucked and smoothed the tablecloth, spun the knives by their handles and rotated the glasses by their stems. Moths battered themselves against the lantern glass. Mary tried to put everything back as she had found it and when she heard shouts from the front of the house and Clara’s hooting call of ‘Darlings!’, she got up and straightened her chair. Too nervous to stand and wait, she climbed out of the pool, slipped on her shoes and hurried round to the front of the house, in the opposite direction to the one in which she’d come. She reached the drive just in time to catch sight of five – was it? – figures, one unmistakeably Daniel, disappearing round the other side of the house. Mary doubled back on herself and managed to arrive back beside the pool just after everybody else.
‘I’ve been for a walk …’ Mary began.
‘Meet our surprise guest!’ Clara laughed. She was wearing what looked like a very beautiful nightdress made of purple silk, with spindly pink velvet straps. Her shoulders now looked delicately bony and deep brown. ‘Mary George. She’s Daniel’s surprise, actually. Say hello to your surprise, darling!’ She took Daniel by the elbow and pushed him towards Mary.
Mary turned to Clara. ‘You mean you didn’t know I was coming?’
Daniel shook Clara off and smiled at Mary. ‘Don’t worry. She said bring a friend, didn’t you Clara? I didn’t realise she’d want to vet them first.’
Clara gave a flick of her head and softened. ‘Don’t be stupid, D, Mary and I have met already, haven’t we? She’s no surprise to me. For God’s sake. Jump in, everyone!’ And the others, who had stayed out of this exchange, moved towards the pool and climbed in, introducing themselves to Mary. There were two girls, both in short black dresses. The one with the blonde bob and an oriental tattoo was called Julia, and the dark one whose hair was in dozens of tiny plaits, and who had lots of bangles on her right arm, was called something like Dora or Flora, only Mary hadn’t taken it in. Nor could she remember which of the tall skinny boys with black curls and white scarves was Ed and which one, Paulie.
Clara accepted their bottles of wine and bunches of flowers, and lined them up on the pool edge. She turned back to the table. ‘And where shall I sit?’ All the chairs were taken. ‘Looks like someone forgot I was coming!’ She pulled her dress high up over her thighs and her hair flew as she swung herself gracefully up out of the pool and marched into the house shouting, ‘Eat! We must eat!’
‘I’ll find another chair.’ Ed or Paulie made for the swimming-pool steps.
‘Clara will need a hand.’ Julia followed.
The evening was a long and complicated sequence of people following Clara back to the house, fetching and carrying, and lowering food and wine into the pool. Mary moved to get up once but Daniel’s hand on her knee stopped her. She tried to follow a conversation, even to join in, but the swimming pool’s odd acoustic blurred words and everyone was talking at the same time. The conversation was loud, fast and brittle, and veered from one crescendo to another. Daniel sat very close to Mary. He leaned forward and propped himself on one elbow, almost in front of her.
‘Where’s my plate?’ Clara demanded, once all the food was on the table and everyone else had taken the plate she’d offered them.
Daniel passed her his. ‘I’ll share Mary’s.’ He gave Clara his glass, too.
Mary was transfixed by Daniel’s proximity. Although he was turned away, because he was turned away, his body curved towards her, his back almost touching her shoulder and his propped hand loose and open, as if cupping her face. As she leant forward to pick up her glass, he straightened and her lips met his bare arm. The shock she felt was matched by a jolt in Daniel. He turned suddenly and began to talk to her.
The swimming pool was filling up with everyone’s noise and Mary could hardly hear him. Eventually, he just picked up the fork and they took it in turns to eat. Mary couldn’t remember exactly what they had. There had been some wet pink beef, and a vivid salad of something like beetroot, red cabbage, radishes, tomatoes and red peppers.
‘And now pudding!’ Clara announced. She was standing at the head of the table, with the bowl of flowers in her arms. ‘Mary!’ Mary looked at her, confused. ‘Help yourself!’ Clara thrust the bowl towards her.
‘Christ, what is this muck!’ Ed or Paulie spat their wine onto the floor. Clara looked angry. ‘I don’t serve muck, Paulie sweetie!’
He held up a bottle. ‘Elderberry? A berry?’
Clara put down the bowl. ‘Let me see.’ She snatched up the bottle. ‘Who brought this?’ Her eyes lighted on Mary and she smiled. ‘A local delicacy?’
‘I … my mother …’ Mary began, reaching out to take the bottle from Clara, to put it out of sight.
Daniel caught her hand and held it. He took the wine, poured some into his glass, picked a nasturtium from Clara’s bowl, dipped it in the wine and put it in Mary’s mouth. Everyone watched. The drenched flower weighed on her tongue. It had an unexpected sharpness. Mary swallowed it.
Paulie smiled and held out his glass.
Since the Fête, Tom had not stopped counting. The towers of cake and roads of biscuits he’d built while working out who’d won, had reawoken the part of his mind that loved numbers. His memory had once had endless room for numbers, and while other parts of his head rested, sleepy and vague beneath the blanket of the coloured capsules, numbers had begun to accumulate again. They would rush at him in elaborate conundrums that he found, to his delight, he could solve. They made beautiful patterns that he could see entire, and twisting threads he could follow all at the same time. Tom amused himself calculating the melting point of a strip of tarmac caught in the sun, or how long it would take for the blistered paint on the Chapel door to split and peel. He found some of Matthew’s old drawing paper and made intricate geometrical designs on the different-sized squares, without actually drawing anything.
He could remember. He could remember figures, shapes and sequences. He tested himself. The trees from the Chapel out along the Verges: oak, hawthorn, hawthorn, elder, oak, ash, ash, elder, elder, hawthorn. He traced their shapes like a graph, in an unbroken line. How many buttons had there been on Sophie’s white dress? Nine. The fourth one down, the one that strained on her belly, had slipped half undone.
Tom had heated a tin of soup. He washed up the saucepan and the bowl, threw away the tin and wiped the stove. He felt fine and then he didn’t. The tall, thick candles he’d found under the eaves and set to burn on the window ledges and along the shelves, helped. They made him think of the Chapel as a chapel again, or maybe a lighthouse, out here on the edge of the village, warning and guiding. But the old wooden filing cabinet that Christie had pushed into a corner was worrying him – those three deep drawers tilted and strained, and Tom knew he wouldn’t like what was inside them. He decided the cabinet had to be turned round. He leant his body against it and inched it forward a little. He pushed again, hard, and the front edge caught on a ridge in the floor, and the whole thing tipped forward with a crack and a slam. Tom circled it like one animal trying to find a way through the defences of another. He squatted in front of it, squeezed his hands under two corners and tried to lift it upright but the brass lock-fitting on the top drawer had broken open and the drawer slid hard against him. While he managed to push the cabinet back up, and it stayed up, the drawer forced him backwards. It landed at his feet. Without rising, he gathered up some of the papers scattered around him. There were letters and photographs, but his head hurt and he was holding them too close to his eyes to be able to see what they were.
When Tom sat up, the things he’d been holding fell from his hands, unnoticed. He looked at the cabinet with its odd empty space, the fallen drawer, the mess, and was frightened. He wanted Christie.
Christie had said, Come to the Arms on a Saturday night, I’ll pick you up. But this Saturday, he’d been working on the other side of the county and wouldn’t be back till late. He might have got back by now, though. Tom set off into the village. It was getting dark and the High Street was empty, or seemed empty, till he noticed shadows and then voices calling softly, whispers and a bray of laughter. Some of the houses he passed were lit and had their windows open. There were more voices, a bored half-formed call, a repetitive imprecation, an angry command, a nervous continuum, the rapid fire of television shows and the tinkling chatter of guests. All this made him anxious as it always had done, only now the anxiety was displaced. He felt the wave of panic precisely, but it was no longer at his core. This gave it limits, a shape, a form. He could watch it rise and fall, and survive it.
Christie wasn’t in The Arms. The public bar was full of noise and smoke, and Tom almost turned back at the door but a big man with a red familiar face, a Lacey of almost thirty, clapped him on the back and hauled him into the room. The Lacey was with a number of younger men, all dressed in dazzling blue-white shirts or t-shirts, who filled the middle of the room, surrounding a billiard table. They were in their early twenties, earning but not yet married. They wore the latest heavy watches with dim, digital faces and dropped their chunky, laden keyrings on the table as they sat down. Most of them had driven in from other villages and their cars were parked untidily along the Green. The fuel crisis had not affected their journeys. There was always somebody with a siphoning hose and a canister, and more than one villager had found their petrol tank unexpectedly empty. It had happened to Father Barclay twice.
In a little while, these young men would be driving into Camptown, to Blazes the nightclub, or just on to another pub where there might be a lock-in and they could go on drinking past closing time. Their well-shaven faces were sharply scented. Those with curly hair were relieved by the fashion for a mop of ringlets that made them feel like Continental football players, and the rest styled theirs in tame versions of what was called a ‘rooster’, a pop-star cut with spiky strands on top and long layers over the shoulders and ears. The overall effect was flamboyant, even effeminate, although they would never have seen it in themselves. They didn’t think about what suited them or look in the mirror and see spikes or curls. What they saw was, to their relief, a face that fitted in with those of their friends.
Older men, and one or two of their wives, sat at tables or along settles around the edge of the room. It had last been decorated thirty years before with cream and gold striped paper that had faded and thinned to greaseproof. Where the plaster had warped, it had bulged and split. The four-foot pike in a glass case over the bar was almost as old and colourless. It was supposed to have been caught in one of the nearby River Mund’s deep pools by a great-uncle Kettle who’d been the landlord here, only some claimed he brought it home ready stuffed and framed. Although the hunt drank its stirrup cup outside The King’s Head, The Arms had three of its foxes in this bar and several in the saloon. Their desiccated fur didn’t polish up like their new glass eyes, and had faded to sour orange. Fixed in a staid trot, they looked persistent but down on their luck.
As Tom made his way into the room, people nodded and grinned. Florrie Stroud patted the bench beside her and he sat down. She said something about Iris which he didn’t catch, but he smiled. Three pints of bitter were set in front of him.
Tom watched as the Lacey continued his game. When he saw him hesitate over lining up a difficult shot, he rose and studied the table. His mind ran lines between the balls, computed angles. He walked along the side of the table and placed a finger on its edge.
‘About here,’ he said, shyly.
The Lacey looked up, frowned, then relaxed. ‘Says you were always a dab hand, Tom,’ and he took his shot, bouncing the cue ball off the exact spot Tom suggested, and potting the red he wanted. There was a round of muttered approval in the bar, more smiles and nods, and Tom stayed standing, watching the game. He liked the bar, its solidity and crush. He drank his three pints quickly and when two more appeared, he passed one over to Lucas in the corner.
When the Lacey had finished his game he pulled Tom down into a seat beside him. ‘Says you’ve a head for numbers.’
Florrie Stroud leaned over. ‘Iris’s boy has the memory of an elephant!’
‘That so?’ The Lacey smiled. He reached over to the table in front of Lucas and scooped up a dozen dominoes. Lucas mumbled a protest which the Lacey ignored. ‘A quid says you can’t tell me what these add up to.’ He slammed them down one after the other and then collected them back up. Tom closed his eyes, keeping his gaze fixed on the white dots on black rectangles, two patterns, two numbers, per tile.
‘A hundred and two.’ Tom was sure but he didn’t like this game. Quite suddenly he felt drunk, not pleasantly so, but floppy and dizzy.
The Lacey laid the tiles back down on the table, slowly, adding them up as he went along. He shook his head, laughing, grabbed Tom’s hand and slapped the pound note into his palm.
‘Drink?’ Tom offered back. The Lacey laughed approvingly, and threw an arm round Tom’s shoulders, yanking him up out of his seat and towards the bar.
‘It’s on him,’ he said, handing over the engraved pewter tankard that was kept for him on a ceiling hook. Seeing Tom scan the bar, he spun him round and said, ‘Another quid says you can’t tell me all the shorts and that, along the bar, in the right order.’
Tom trembled, and someone called out, ‘Leave alone, Trevor. And stop throwing your money around!’
There were mumbles of agreement but Trevor took no notice. He grasped Tom’s arms and shook him, like a farmer trying to shake fruit from a tree. ‘Good game, eh?’ All the boredom of Trevor Lacey’s life had taught him to find a game and to make people play.
Tom wanted to please. The room slipped but his mind, that part of it, was still sharp. He nodded, and Trevor turned him round to face the bar again, just for a second or two, and then back. It was there, just behind his eyes, the inverted bottles with their tinted optics: ‘Beefeaters, Gilbey’s, Black Grouse, Jameson’s, Naval Rum, Smirnoff, Remy Martin’. Beneath them on the counter, the heavy, dark, sweet drinks: ‘Cherry brandy, advocaat, sherry, crème de menthe’; and then the cordials, ‘orange, blackcurrant, lime.’
There was a cheer from the men sitting along the bar. Someone tapped Trevor’s shoulder and offered him another game of billiards, and he pushed another pound at Tom and turned away.
‘Can you remember like that, from far back, like? Not just this minute?’ It was someone he didn’t recognise, an old man on a stool, drinking from a tankard like Trevor’s.
‘Some … I don’t know …’ Tom felt nervous and thirsty, and even though he knew he’d drunk enough, he was glad when his remaining pint of beer was passed across the room and put in his hand.
The man patted the empty stool beside him and Tom sat down to listen. ‘I know the place better as it was than I do now.’ He sounded friendly but he wasn’t smiling. There was a long silence, and the man looked sad. When he spoke again, it was abruptly. ‘I knew your mother when she was in the dairy. I was delivery boy for Garnett the grocer’s, next door.’
Tom shook his head vehemently. ‘Not next door, Garnett’s. Opposite.’
The man sat back. ‘What’s that? Opposite? Sorry, lad, I remember right as rain. I worked there for years!’
Tom shook his head again. The man looked angry now. He raised his voice, addressing the group sitting playing dominoes with Lucas. ‘Weren’t Garnett’s next to the dairy, boys?’
‘Was that the butcher’s?’
‘Don’t be daft. The butcher was Maynard’s, on the corner.’
‘Garnett’s. Oh, yes. Garnett’s was right across from the dairy.’
‘Garnett’s!’ Florrie Stroud caught the name out of the air. ‘Right across, that was it.’
The name was passed round the room, as some remembered and some didn’t but all agreed that it was opposite the dairy.
The man kept shaking his head. ‘Well, I never.’ He crumpled down on his stool again, bent over his drink. Tom didn’t notice: the names going round the room had captured him.
‘Garnett’s, then the hardware, Freans, and the Co-op,’ and he was back there, thirty years ago, on errands for his mother. ‘Then the cottages, your cottages, Florrie, with the Post Office on the end, across Hoop Lane and the smithy.’
‘That blacksmith! The noise!’ Florrie was with him, and Lucas, ‘Collecting up iron railings in the war’, and others, each remembering a part of the village as it had been, all talked at once, to themselves as much as to each other, about characters and shops and horses, romances and scandals and accidents, the Big Freeze and the Spanish Influenza, what chicken used to taste like, and hare and rabbit, and pheasant poached from the estate.
Trevor Lacey swept up his cigarettes and his keys. ‘Bloody hell! You all make it sound like one of them Saturday matinées!’ And so they began to remember the films, Whisky Galore, Brief Encounter, The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp. Trevor and the boys pushed their way out of the door, mocking and chuckling. Florrie began to sing.
Every person, place and drama mentioned, even those he could never have known, rose in Tom’s memory, painfully vivid and unreachable. He needed something to concentrate on, to take his mind off it, ‘Test me! Try me again!’ he called and, partly to pass the last hour of the evening, and partly to humour him, they gathered a collection of small objects out of their pockets onto a tray. He was allowed to study them for thirty seconds; first ten things, then twenty, then thirty. Tom remembered every detail, the holes in a button, the initials on a handkerchief, the nick in a pipe. He grew more and more excited, but the drinkers were tired and finding him tiring now. They began to leave. ‘Test me again!’ Tom called after them. Only Lucas and his fellow domino players remained and they had kept out of it, keeping their backs to the fuss and getting on with their game. Tom saw them as his remaining and so most eager audience. He grabbed their dominoes with both hands but clumsily, so some fell on the floor. He laid the rest out flat on the table, ran his eyes over them once and turned away.
‘Add them up! I tell you, it’ll be 82! You’ll see!’ Hunched with anticipation, his fists clenched and his eyes tight shut to keep the number in his head, Tom heard the click of the tiles being gathered up. Nobody spoke. Chairs were scraped back, and then the door was opened.
Lucas touched him on the arm, ‘Says you’re right, Tom. But there’s an end to the evening and folks are too tired to be doing sums.’
Tom opened his eyes to find himself alone in the room. John Kettle, the landlord, was ringing the bell in the Saloon and chanting mournfully, ‘Time please!’ Billy’s elder sister Valerie came through to the Public to clear glasses and was startled to see Tom still there, staring at nothing.
‘You look lost!’ She bit her lip. She knew who he was.
Tom brought his gaze to rest on her – a delicate elf. She lifted the side of the bar and walked towards him. She held out her hands and touched his face, and the numbers and names and places subsided. ‘I’m Valerie Eyre. You wouldn’t remember me but I remember you. I’ll walk you back, if you like.’ She returned to the bar and Tom stared at the space she left behind her, wondering how he had summoned this sprite who looked as if she might break between his hands but also as if she were strong enough to hold anything she wanted to. Eyre: a family of slender, ethereal children came to mind. Could she really remember?
Valerie returned with a heavy bag that she hoisted onto one shoulder. ‘John will lock up.’ She took Tom’s arm and he followed her carefully.
By the time they reached the Chapel, ten minutes at most, Tom dreaded her leaving him. He offered to walk her home too, but she laughed and shook her head. She looked intently at him and said, ‘You need to rest. I’ll come in the morning, if I may?’ Then she slipped away.
Tom’s heart was beginning to patter and thud. The voices of those in the bar raced round his head, overlapping and running into one another, beginning in the middle of an anecdote and ending on half a word. He got himself to the outhouse and, as his stomach contracted and released, vomited up in great hawking acid splashes, the beer with which the villagers had welcomed him.
Tom laid his head on the stone floor, too weak now to think of numbers or to hold back what lay beneath them. He could not tell if he was dreaming or remembering but what he could not keep from his mind was Iris’s last winter, his last at home, the snow and the talk of water.
On that Christmas morning, Iris Hepple’s sister, May, got Father Barclay to drive her into Camptown. On the way, she asked him to stop at Ingfield Dip, to ‘pick up the boys’. May knew that Tom hadn’t left the house for years and wouldn’t now, even though his mother was dying, and that Christie, for god knows what reason, simply refused to go. But May had an idea that if she turned up with the priest, not asking but simply expecting them to come along, perhaps they would. Father Barclay’s tinny Triumph skittered along the icy track and shook to a halt outside the house just as Christie was coming out of the door.
Father Barclay leapt out, pulled his seat forward and gestured Christie into the back. ‘Well timed, Christie! Season’s greetings! Jump in before you freeze!’
Christie muttered something and then caught sight of May. Father Barclay smiled and rocked, banging his arms against his sides and shaking his head at the weather.
Tom appeared behind Christie in the doorway. The priest knew him well. He and Tom had had many discussions about the mind, about good and evil. Tom brought him visions of heaven and hell that were so abstract and intense that Father Barclay had done all he could to remove religious significance from the world for him.
‘Tom,’ he tried now. ‘Come with me to see your mother today. The roads are empty, no one else will be in town. All’s indoors.’
Christie moved forward as Tom slipped away back into the house. ‘He does what he can, Father.’
‘Ah.’ Father Barclay clapped his gloved hands and rubbed them together. His sigh plumed in the cold air. He shook his head, shrugged, and opened and shut his mouth with a pop.
Christie looked up at the sky and down at the ground. ‘No, I won’t. Our mother’s not to think of us, now. She’s to think of herself.’
‘Her days must be long,’ the priest began, folding his arms.
‘I can’t think she knows one day from the next any more. Nor a son from a stranger.’
May had had enough. She punched the horn and the priest, still smiling, waved elaborately and that got back into the car.
At the hospital, May wanted Iris to know that she’d tried to bring her sons more than she wanted her not to know that they wouldn’t come. With some difficulty, she held Iris’s hand. Those tiny bones and that papery skin – it was like a reptile’s wing.
Iris Hepple felt herself always moving now, travelling through tunnel after tunnel of pain: long, curving, dark holes she was hurled into and had to force her way through as they pressed inwards, and then, when she thought she could not bear it and they would crush her, she was out. Then another one began. Even when she had had her injection, she could not rest. The tunnels still came, although they were light and cool for a time. She did not know it was him, but when Matthew held her, she felt still. Someone was here with her now. She knew because she could feel warmth on her hand and a voice saying, ‘They won’t leave the house.’
At this, Iris opened her eyes and said, quite firmly, ‘Will … will …’ Then her eyes closed again and she turned her head from side to side, as if trying to shake off the pain. ‘Sing to me,’ she whispered. May got up and left.
Iris Hepple died three days into the New Year, when no one was with her. Christie went to the mortuary and the undertaker’s. He spoke to Father Barclay about the service and to May about the tea. Tom held Christie’s hand as they threw earth onto her coffin. Tom stayed in the graveyard rather than going to the tea.
The day was extraordinarily clear. The snow was packed hard underfoot. People walked in careful steps that left no mark. There was no wind, just a high-pressure stillness in which sound carried far. A single bell was rung before the service and after the burial, and each toll resounded so powerfully that some felt its metal travel through them. Most of the village came to the funeral. Matthew, Stella and Mary George were among them.
A week later, Christie came to the Chapel. ‘You’ve to come to Hepworth’s for the reading of the will, tomorrow at three.’ He turned to go almost before finishing his sentence but, in any case, Matthew had not looked up from his plans.
The next evening, Mary found it hard to eat her supper. Her mother was watching her father. What did she think he might do? He wouldn’t speak or look up from his plate. Mary got nervous and Stella shouted at her for humming, only Mary hadn’t known she was doing it. It occurred to Mary that something had got stuck and that it might be helped if she got out of the way. She took herself off to bed but the house was so small, she could not help but hear.
‘The house?’ Her mother’s voice flared. A low sound came from her father. Stella continued, ‘Their home …’ More low sound then an explosion, her mother’s jagged laugh and a higher, sharper voice than she had heard from her before. ‘But, think of Tom!’
They were in the hall now, and the front door had been opened. Mary crept to the head of the stairs. She could see her father. He was walking out of the door and as he did so, he said, ‘It means nothing. It’s going anyway.’
What Tom remembered or dreamt of this was very little. He saw his mother as he’d last seen her, when they’d still tried to manage her at home with the tubes, the nappies and bibs, and the district nurse and Dr Burgess coming in and out. He’d tried to help but couldn’t get it right and Matthew was always round, like he lived with them again, and Iris would be quiet then, lean her head against his and whisper. Now Tom knew that she must have been telling Matthew of her plans, although Matthew never said a word, just stroked her hand, nodded and cooed in that odd way of his, a noise that could have been a mating call or a warning, but that Iris responded to as if it were a lullaby.
Christie couldn’t stand to see it, but Tom made himself stay and watch. It was a lesson to him. When she could still shout, his mother had shouted, not exactly at him, but about him, ‘… useless … broken … stuck …’ And before she’d had the drugs all the time, there had been moments of nakedness, somewhere between consciousness and sleep, when she had gone on about his being so pointlessly afraid, saying he had to go out into the world, Christie too, not ‘stay and suck’.
‘Not like lover boy!’ Christie had retorted once and she had changed colour and withered somehow, right there in front of them. After that she rarely spoke, except in a cool moment after one of Doctor B’s injections when she had giggled and slurred out a promise that if she hadn’t been sick, she would have gone and got some dynamite and blown them out of the house herself. Sophie, who was bitter at having spent the first eight years of her married life living with Christie’s family, had laughed right along with her, ‘Good for you, Iris, good for you!’
Everything changed when they took her in. Tom had known to stay in the house, that that was where he should be, so she’d know where he was and not worry. It was no time to be leaving, however much good she thought it would do him. Christie had gone to the hospital at first, but he’d come home more angry each time. After his last visit, he’d cleared out Iris’s room for June, saying it was ridiculous that he and Sophie were sharing a bedroom with a seven-year-old child, and her six months gone with twins. When Tom had got upset, Christie shouted that the house was going anyway.
The first talk Tom heard of water was from St John Newling, the local MP. He had come to Allnorthover to open the Brownies’ Christmas Bazaar, a year before. Somehow, he had threaded his speech with talk of water, of thirsty fields and parched machinery and taps running dry. There had been two consecutive dry summers during which restrictions had been imposed. St John Newling invoked them, making water into the element of freedom, money and the future. He warned against the wrong kind of rain.
From then on, Tom noticed talk of water everywhere. In the local paper, Parish Councillors, farmers and manufacturers gave warnings. They talked of the land as a thin skin, but they built and dug and grew more each year. St John Newling had a field of soft fruit under plastic and had sold off several acres outside Camptown for a sports complex, including a swimming pool. There was a new industrial estate and the Council was building houses on the edge of the village. Tom became agitated. From where would they get their water?
Ingfield Dip was a natural basin in which there were three houses, a tenant farm and a church; fifteen people at most. Nearby, two rivers drew close together, the Mund and the Soley. The rivers were known locally as the Black and White Waters, as the Mund was stained, deep and slow, and the Soley was shallow and clattered over flint boulders.
There was passing talk of a reservoir, but much of it was contradictory or unbelievable. Tom heard of a plan to run a pipe from the Black Water into an underground holding tank on the Newling Estate, from where the water would be sold in times of drought. Somebody insisted that the White Water was getting shallower each year and that it was already being diverted. There was talk in the pub of filling the Dip but also of every inhabitant being made a millionaire, so nobody believed it. As the talk thickened Tom began to worry more, but everyone was too busy to bother about it. Iris was sick, and Christie had a young family and his business to take care of.
Perhaps much had gone on that he hadn’t noticed that winter. It was white and quiet. The snow-filled Dip was a bowl, so sealed and smooth that Tom could see how the Mund and the Soley might pour into it and how it wouldn’t spill a drop. After Iris’s funeral, he had walked down to the bottom of the Dip, to the little church that was unused now, except for Father Barclay’s monthly service. As it grew dark, the pressure in the atmosphere lifted and it began to snow again. Tom had lain down and looked up into the thick fall, not feeling cold or even wet, except on his face where the snowflakes caught and melted, gently, without any sting. He forced his eyes to stay open and stared up into the sky, feeling himself buried a long way down. When he had gone back to the house, his hands and face were burning; inside he was frozen.
What happened next? Christie was reading papers and letters, and walking to the phone box. Men had turned up with measuring tapes and quadrants, sinking rods into the ground and scooping earth into glass test tubes that they corked. Christie didn’t explain anything to Tom, but sometimes he gave him a look, as if to say he must know what was happening really and that he, Christie, was only trying to keep the worry from him.
Around the time of the thaw, when the constant, ticking drip of melting ice from under the trees and eaves and window sills made Tom feel as if he were living under a siege of clocks, Christie had said it. ‘We’ve to move.’
‘But you’ve refused it, haven’t you?’
‘Refused what?’
‘The compensation.’
Christie had laughed. ‘We’ll get none.’
‘We don’t want it, do we, anyway? We’ve said from the beginning of this talk, we’ll not be made to go!’ The subject had not been discussed between them.
‘I’d not leave for them to fill the Dip with water …’ Christie began.
Tom grasped him by the shoulders. ‘We’ll stay, won’t we?’
Christie would not meet his eyes. ‘We, Sophie and me, and June, we’re renting one of the houses in that new close off Back Lane.’
‘Then I’ll stay.’
‘You can’t. It’s not ours. Ma left it to Matthew George.’
Tom’s mind, racing into several possible futures all of which involved staying put, and perhaps some great battle with the authorities, could not absorb this piece of news and so leapt over it. ‘Then it’s still in the family! Matthew’s safe hands!’
‘He’s not blood.’ Christie shook him off. ‘As far as I’m concerned, this is your home. You stay if you want to. I’ll not help them but I will help you, as far as I can. Any compensation that’s going will be Matthew’s now, even though he’s only owned the house for five minutes. He may have grown up with us but he’s not blood and he and Ma, well you saw how that was. Just don’t expect much when there’s money in it.’
When Mary could wait no longer, she pushed back her chair and stood up. Without looking at Daniel, she made for the pool steps and climbed out. Returning to the cooler air, she did not hear when someone called after her. She stepped through an open French window and into a large, lit, empty room. The house was quiet. She pulled off Stella’s shoes but still tipped forwards and knew, regretfully, that she was drunk.
She made her way up the stairs and along the dark corridor, to where she remembered there to be a bathroom, feeling her way slowly past the still half-unpacked boxes. When she reached the door, the light was on. She knocked and it opened. It wasn’t the bathroom. A boy of about ten, with red curly hair, and wearing just a pyjama top, held out his hand. ‘Freddie,’ he said. She glanced past him. His room was painted black. There were luminous stars on the ceiling and a large bolt of lightning glowed on one wall. ‘Would you like to see my rain dance?’
Mary shook his hand. ‘Mary. No thanks, just the bathroom.’ Looking crestfallen, Freddie nodded to the right and shut his door.
She blinked out her lenses and after a couple of fumbles, got them into their case. Coming back through the house was no more difficult now that she couldn’t see. At the bottom of the stairs, she made out a light and a silhouette. Assuming she was unseen, Mary moved towards the room, which was the kitchen. She squinted at the woman, who she realised must be Clara’s mother. Mary moved towards her, getting near enough to make her out properly. She didn’t realise that this meant she had entered the room and was standing only a few feet away from Francesca Clough, who wondered what was wrong with this frowning, stumbling girl with screwed-up eyes.
She waited the few moments it took for Mary to collect herself and smile. Francesca nodded and smiled back, but continued laying a long table for breakfast, with what looked like a dozen places. There were at least six boxes of cereal, a huge bowl of fruit, and several pots of jam and honey. Behind her was a heap of dirty saucepans, bowls, knives and spoons that must have been used in the preparation of Clara’s dinner. She finished, looked up and smiled at Mary who saw she was beautiful and tired. She was wearing a long, loose dark dress that looked old and intricately stitched. Her head was framed by a heavy coil of grey, waving hair and her eyes were ringed with dark circles.
Mary faltered. ‘Thank you … for having me, for having us,’ she managed.
Francesca shrugged and smiled again. ‘Our pleasure.’ Her voice was accented and light. She turned away again but Mary lingered, feeling powerfully drawn to this woman’s calm. Mary wanted to stay, to be fed by her, not by Stella or Clara, and not to have to deal with empty swimming pools and edible flowers. Francesca gestured outside. ‘Please.’
Daniel was standing on the gravel path and as Mary started towards the pool, he stopped her. ‘Let’s not.’ So they set off across the grass, away into the darkness, at a lazy pace as if taking a stroll, only they were solemn and tensely aware of one another. As they reached a row of low, knotty trees, Clara’s scornful laughter followed them. Mary leaned into the deeper shadows of the tangled branches and broad leaves.
‘You want to be gone,’ Daniel said. It was not a question. To look purposeful, Mary reached back and was surprised to find the trees were not as deep as they seemed, but were espaliered, nailed and spread against a wall like the thin, submitting trees her mother cultivated. These looked as if they’d grown undisturbed for a hundred years. Mary almost said something and then thought Daniel would have noticed or known this already. She raised her arm up under the leaves and found a fruit so full and soft and thin-skinned, that it almost burst in her hand. She twisted it off its stem and held it out to Daniel, who smiled and shrugged. Did he not know it either? Mary ran her nail along the purple skin and pulled it back. She held the fruit close to her eyes, and studied the red flesh. A fig – something she’d only known dried and chewily sweet. Fresh, it was so beautiful, it had to be far more delicious. She broke it in half and held one piece out to Daniel. He watched her eat and then ate too. The fig was tasteless, a mouthful of hair and seed. Daniel turned and spat, making Mary blush both for his lack of grace and the disappointment.
They walked quickly away, still following the wall, and came to a toppling brick archway overgrown with heavy-headed roses. They squeezed through and stumbled among long, dry grass. Mary stubbed her bare toes on a stone and picked it up. It was a fallen apple. Thick branches from close-planted apple trees merged above them, making a low canopy beneath which they crouched. They stopped and held one another tightly and blindly, then moved apart.
Mary began to walk backwards, ‘How far can you see me?’
She was no more than six feet from Daniel when he said, ‘You’re gone.’
She ran and crashed into his arms as he let himself fall backwards, pulling her over into the grass.
For a long time Mary lay still on top of him, feeling her pressure against Daniel’s body take shape. She kept her head buried in his neck as he stroked her legs, each stroke ending higher, lifting her dress inch by inch. When her dress was round her waist, he grasped her and sat up, pulling her legs round him. Daniel kissed her hard, pushing into her mouth so her head was forced back. She felt herself about to fall again, when he caught hold of her dress and lifted it over her head. Mary had never felt the air on her skin like this. She didn’t think about being almost naked in somebody’s garden, or even of this boy, almost a stranger still, with her breasts against him. It was too unreal, this sense of freedom that intensified to pleasure as Daniel kissed her, as if his mouth were opening her and letting in light.
He lifted her onto her feet and, kneeling, pulled down her pants. His breath against her thigh created such a hard and fast surge of desire that her body kicked. He stroked her once, very lightly, and she was wet. Daniel murmured something, almost a word, but not quite. Mary was about to ask what he had said when she realised that she couldn’t feel him near her anymore. She waited and when nothing happened, opened her eyes. She looked around and could just make out Daniel doubled over on the grass, as if in pain. Mary picked up her dress and held it against her.
‘I’m sorry, did I –?’ she began. All she had known before had been uncertain: fumblings and directives that overwhelmed any feeling she might have had with bashfulness and a notion of sex as comically lonely. She was shocked now at how her body had taken over, at its obviousness and force. I am too much, she thought.
Daniel eventually spoke. ‘Not you, me. I couldn’t … stop.’
For a moment Mary didn’t understand what he meant, and then she did and wanted to say that it didn’t matter, but didn’t know how to. She put on her dress and sat down beside him. He turned away and curled up tightly on his side.
Three hours later it was dawn, and Mary and Daniel woke together in the grass. They stood up and Daniel reached out a hand that Mary was about to lean her head into, but he was pulling grass from her hair. She straightened her dress, wiped her mouth and squinted towards the house.
‘Do you want to go in?’ Daniel asked.
‘Oh no. I’ll go home.’ She didn’t want Clara to see her so dishevelled.
They walked round the edge of the lawn, negotiating the heaps of machinery and skirting as much of the gravel drive as they could.
When they reached the road, Mary turned to say goodbye, but Daniel said, ‘I’ll walk you.’
They carried on, apart, both made shy by their dirt, sweat and sour breath. The clean air and blue light made them feel even more shabby. Neither spoke. Then, Daniel stopped and almost shouted. ‘My god! What’s that?’
Mary screwed up her eyes, trying to focus the fractured fuzzy outlines of the trees and buildings ahead.
Daniel was walking faster. ‘Come on, I think it’s a fire!’
She stumbled after him, wincing as her bare feet caught on sharp things she couldn’t see to avoid, peering and craning, What fire, where? Then she realised he was making for the Chapel and that its windows were full of white light.
As her panic rose, Daniel slowed down. ‘Oh, I see.’ They were almost at the building now and as it became clear to Mary, the light shrank and consolidated itself into candle flame. At the same moment, the last darkness slipped from the sky, and the flames were reduced to pale flickers.
The door was open and Daniel was going in. Mary stayed behind him, anxious that the place should give no clue as to who lived there, who had once worked there, who she was. Daniel walked from one window to the other, blowing out the candles that had almost, in any case, burnt themselves down. Mary trod in something warm and liquid that oozed between her toes. She gave a small blurted scream, then peered down and realised she had trodden in molten wax, and that there were streams of wax running along the window sills and down the walls, dripping onto the floor, pooling and congealing. As she drew her foot away, a sticky wad of paper came with it. She pulled it off her skin so fast that some tore.
Daniel hadn’t noticed. ‘What is this place?’
‘A workshop, I think.’ Mary was shaking. What if he was upstairs? What if he heard them and came down? ‘I want to get home.’
She moved towards the door but Daniel was fascinated. ‘Why the candles? They look like they belong in a church.’
‘A chapel.’ Mary couldn’t stand it any more. She turned and began to walk quickly on into the village.
Daniel ran up behind her. ‘Sorry. It gave you the creeps, didn’t it.’ His smile was so wide, his body so relaxed, she realised he’d sensed nothing.
‘Yes. Something like that.’ She tried to laugh but her throat was so constricted that it sounded more like a whimper. He took her hand, but she stopped and stood in front of him. ‘I’ll be fine from here. You go back to Clara’s or you’ll miss your lift.’ For a moment he looked confused, even angry, then he smiled again, as widely and easily as before, kissed Mary crisply on the mouth and walked away.
She tried to watch him, but his outline soon disintegrated, as if there were several of him, walking a little to the left and right of each other, in black suits fading to grey and fair hair dissolving completely.
Mary went to bed but woke again when the church bells began to ring in the looping, cajoling but light-hearted peals that Father Barclay favoured. The sun was high and strong again. After Stella had left for Mass, Mary ran herself a shallow bath and was startled by the grainy bruise spreading out from one nipple and the delicate graze on her shoulder. The orchard, the swimming pool, Daniel even, seemed part of an overheated dream.
She was drinking tea and still dreaming when Billy arrived. He was carrying two motorcycle helmets. ‘Sundays are shit,’ he said, flopping down in the armchair. ‘Let’s go for a ride. I’ve even got a sidecar now.’ Mary scribbled a note to her mother, found her newly mended glasses, put her keys and money and a book in her army bag, and followed him out onto the Green.
Mary was used to the motorbike. It was Billy’s father’s old Norton, black and squat. The sidecar, she’d not seen before. It was wooden, varnished and shaped like a clog. ‘Billy, I am not riding around in a shoe!’
Billy looked hurt. ‘But it’s beautiful! I saw it in Fred Spence’s yard and couldn’t resist it!’
Mary considered its absurd little windscreen and flapping plastic hood. ‘I’m not surprised!’ But she was bored and wanted to get out of the village, so she took the helmet he offered her and climbed in.
As Billy kickstarted the bike, it gave such an ancient splutter that Mim, who was panting and dozing in a scrap of shade by the front door, leapt up and howled, thinking a bus was about to arrive. Mary got out of the sidecar to reassure her and to shut her in the house. They set off along the High Street, the exhaust belching black smoke, the engine struggling and the throttle raging, the noisiest, dirtiest thing in a quiet, clean village closed down for a Sunday morning.
As they rode out through the Verges, Mary was getting used to the noise and enjoying the breeze. When Billy turned off towards the reservoir, she tried to shout to him, but he couldn’t hear her. He slowed down at the end of the lane and bumped gently along the track, stopping under the pines. They pulled off their helmets and Billy saw how nervous Mary was.
‘I saw him this morning, going into Christie’s. He didn’t look well.’ Billy shook out his long hair. ‘So he’s not going to be here. This is our place, remember?’
She wanted to agree so she followed him through the Other Gate and out along the rim of the water, to the tree. Billy lay on the bough, leaned back against the tree’s trunk and pulled out a tobacco pouch. He rolled a joint, lit it and passed it down to Mary who had stayed on the ground, crouched in the tree’s shadow. They smoked in silence, and Mary began to enjoy the peace, the open sky and brilliant water.
‘Why do we never swim here, Billy?’
‘It’s too deep.’
‘Do you think it’s true?’
Billy took so long to respond, she thought he must have fallen asleep. ‘If you kept going and believed yourself able to …’ he began.
‘I meant the house, not me!’ She interrupted him. ‘Is the house still there? I mean, didn’t they just knock everything down? The church and Goose Farm and the houses?’
‘You know they say that on a stormy night you can hear the church bells.’
‘Nonsense!’ Mary was angry now. ‘They wouldn’t have left all those buildings in a place they wanted to fill with water!’
‘Why not?’
‘They’d … get in the way?’
Billy snorted. ‘Of what? The fish?’ And the vision of pike swimming in and out of windows and through garden gates made them both laugh and then they couldn’t stop.
When the laughter finally subsided, they sat for a long time just looking out over the water, neither wanting the other to know they were looking for clues. Again and again, Mary traced a line out along the bough onto the water but there was no change of colour, no shadow or ripple. As soon as her eye let go of the tree, she couldn’t make sense of what she was looking at.
Billy and Mary drove on into Camptown, looking for something to eat and drink, something to do. The High Street was empty except for the detritus of Saturday night – crumpled cans, spilt takeaways, pools of vomit, the odd shoe. The only people around walked gingerly through all this, mostly still in their going-out clothes, fragile and awkward and eager to get home. Nobody stopped to look in shop windows at jewellery or washing machines or houses for sale. The precinct was locked away behind an iron grille. The corner shop that would sell them beer had sold its last Sunday paper and closed and the one in the bus station hadn’t opened. Billy took them back out of town, to the Malibu Motel. Outside the Amber Grill, they counted their money and went in.
‘Look what the cat dragged in!’ Julie Lacey grinned as she marched up to their table. She stroked Billy’s head. ‘A natural blonde and silky smooth! I’m so jealous, Bill!’ He wriggled away but pouted and blew her a kiss, which made them all laugh. Julie leaned down to the table and whispered, ‘Look, have what the fuck you want. Barry’s not around. I’ll just take a quid.’
So Billy and Mary, hungry after smoking the dope, passed the rest of the afternoon eating burgers in fluffy white rolls stuffed with sliced dill pickles, bacon, tomato sauce and melting squares of cheese, and handfuls of skinny, sodden chips. They drank pink, yellow and brown milk shakes that all tasted the same and came piled with rosettes of soapy cream topped with hundreds and thousands and a paper parasol. When they left, achingly full, they walked out into the glare of the sun, arm in arm, each holding a tiny parasol over the other’s head.
When they reached the bike, Mary said, ‘Will you wait? I want to phone my Dad.’ She walked off down the sliproad to the phone box by the roundabout rather than go back inside and risk having to explain herself to Julie.
Mary reversed the charges. Matthew agreed to pay and they were connected. ‘Mary, sweetheart, what’s happened?’
‘Nothing. I just …’ She thought of him in his house by the sea. Could she really hear waves and gulls? He did sound far away.
‘Well, it’s lovely to hear from you. I didn’t know …’ Mary waited but he didn’t finish the sentence. When had they last met? Easter? She had gone down to the coast, and he had taken her to the Royal Hotel and given her a glass of champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches, and had insisted that she try an oyster.
‘Can I see you?’ She found herself shaking, almost crying, and Matthew must have heard something of this in her voice, because his voice changed, becoming more definite and serious.
‘Whenever you want, darling.’
‘Now?’
‘Now?’
‘Now. I’m not at home, you know. I’m outside the Malibu Motel.’
‘Mary, I –’
It rose up in her. ‘Come now, Daddy. Come now!’ she sobbed and couldn’t hear what he said next. She put the phone down.
Billy saw her leave the phone box and revved up the bike but when Mary reached him, she explained she wasn’t coming back now, that she was waiting for her father. She knew it would take an hour for him to drive there, so she went into the Amber Grill’s toilets, washed her face and tried to smooth her hair. She felt sick and excited, and sorry that she was wearing this ripped t-shirt and tatty skirt. There was time for a cigarette, and time to sit in the shade of the back of the building, keeping the sliproad in sight. After an hour, Mary walked to the roundabout and then she walked back. Two cars came up behind her but she wouldn’t turn round. For another hour, she walked back and forth. She sat in the grass and wouldn’t look at the road directly or at her watch. He would see her. He would call to her.
At last a car slowed. It wasn’t Matthew but Stella, who left her rusty orange Mini in the middle of the road with the door open and strode across the grass to Mary. ‘That bastard!’ she spat.
When Stella was angry with Matthew, Mary felt she was angry with her. So when Stella threw herself down on the ground and held her hard, Mary felt as though she were being attacked. ‘Get off, Mum!’ Mary pulled herself free.
‘He’s not coming.’
‘He said he was.’
‘He’s not.’
‘He’s not coming?’
‘A misunderstanding, he said. He has a deadline, he said, so couldn’t possibly come. He said you’d probably realise and turn up on the bus but I wasn’t going to leave you waiting around!’
Mary still felt Stella was angry with her and she was also cross with herself. She went over the conversation with her father. He hadn’t actually said he’d come; she hadn’t really listened. She was stupid. It was her fault. He would have come if he could have, but he couldn’t and she should have let him say so.
Stella helped her up and they walked back to the car. As they drove home, Mary felt the silliness of the little car and how cramped it made them. She was incredibly tired.