I pedal Freda away from the nursery in the child seat on the back of my bike and drop her off at her home, the tiny terraced house that Ellie, my elder daughter, and her husband, Ben, are not quite managing to pay for on two teachers’ salaries. I stop long enough to commiserate over Nico’s earache, to give an account of the afternoon’s festivities and to impress on Ellie, at Freda’s insistence, the unparalleled panache of her performance of ‘Auntie Monica’.
‘I’m sorry I missed it,’ Ellie says, and she means it. I feel bad. I should have offered to stay with grizzly Nico while Ellie went to watch Freda. ‘There’ll be other times,’ I say feebly.
I get back on my bike and head for home, wondering whether a salad would be a good idea for supper, after all that cake and jelly. I know that there is something wrong the moment I turn into my road and spot, outside my house, an acid green Smart car which belongs to my younger daughter, Annie, and, behind it, a beaten-up Volvo with a flat front tyre. I know what this is and I feel a fool. A couple of people to stay for a couple of days, Annie had said, and I gave a breezy agreement when twenty years’ experience of Annie’s talent for manipulation and dissimulation should have warned me to demand details – names, dates and terms of residence, not to mention setting a few house rules. I get off my bike and take a look at the Volvo, which looks alarmingly roomy. How many of them are there?
The house is quiet as I enter but, dazzled for a moment by coming in from bright sunshine, I trip over several backpacks artfully arranged in the hall. Rubbing a bruised shin, I go down the hall to the kitchen, find the back door wide open and see, sprawled on the grass outside, a group of five, lounging together in a rough circle, wine glasses and cigarettes in hand, two bottles and a couple of packs of Kettle chips nestling among them. I take a deep breath and step outside.
‘Hello,’ I call in a tone that neatly combines greeting and challenge. They turn to look at me, Annie’s eyes bright with reciprocal challenge, the other faces bland and smiling. They are under the impression that they have been invited, aren’t they? They are envisaging clean beds and regular meals for however long Annie has offered them. I move down the garden towards them and one of the boys jumps politely to his feet, which is disarming enough, but when he then says, ‘Would you like a glass of wine, Mrs Gray? I’ll get you a glass,’ and speeds back to the house, I am ridiculously charmed even though I know quite well that it is my wine they are drinking.
‘The drive down from Oxford was vile so we really needed a drink,’ Annie says defensively, as if reading my mind, ‘and we did buy the crisps ourselves.’
The others laugh uncomfortably so that the lifetime habits of hospitality force me to say, ‘Oh, you’re welcome to the wine. It’s lovely to see you all,’ thus wrecking any possibility of establishing dates, terms of residence or house rules. I do get names, however, though I’m not sure I shall be able to attach them reliably to their owners. There is a Dominic and a Matt and a Lauren and a Kate – nice middle-class names for nice middle-class young people – and I should probably explain to you why they’re here. They are fellow students of Annie’s at Oxford, and the week after next they’re going up to the Edinburgh Festival to perform – on the fringe of The Fringe – a play written by one of them – Matt, I think. It’s a three-hander, I gather, and it’s about love and sex, treachery and trust, life and death, hope and despair and the search for identity – as these things generally are. Annie is taking part in it and she has persuaded our local theatre, the Aphra Behn, to let them put it on next week in their small, sixty-seat studio theatre. There was a meltdown at the theatre about eighteen months ago and the new stage manager is a young woman who was a couple of years ahead of Ellie at school, so Annie has got a foot in the door. I assume they’ll be staying with me till that’s over and they’re heading for Edinburgh.
I must get Annie on her own and ask what arrangements they’re proposing to make about eating because I’m not going to cook for six every evening, but I sip my glass of wine and they start talking about the play and the problems they need to iron out, and I make some suggestions which they take up with flattering alacrity, and I have another glass of wine and eventually hear myself say, ‘Is pasta all right for supper?’ and I toddle indoors to find the ingredients for pasta con tutto giardino. Annie used to call this my Ma forgot to shop supper, since it involves raiding not so much the garden as the vegetable rack and the fridge for edible vegetables. They don’t need to be in their prime; even the wilting and withered can be put to service when thrown into a good tomato sauce. Annie had better not complain.
Everyone is very appreciative of supper, in fact; more wine is drunk and everyone helps to clear up in a slapdash sort of way. Then they go off to the sitting room to watch television and I stay behind to restack the dishwasher because nobody knows how to stack someone else’s dishwasher, and then I can hear that they’re watching something with a lot of hysterical studio audience laughter, which I shall hate, so I stay in the kitchen and sit at the table and read the paper until I’m roused by a shout from Annie. She puts her head round the door and says, ‘Murders on the Eastgate estate. On the national news.’
I follow her into the sitting room in time to see the pictures on the screen: a school photo of a girl and a slightly blurred holiday picture of a young woman. ‘I saw them,’ I say. ‘I saw them this afternoon.’ And then, stupidly, ‘How can they be dead?’
‘… Believed to be those of Karen Brody, a part-time student at Marlbury University, and her seven-year-old daughter, Lara,’ I hear, and then the picture changes to one I also recognise. This one is live, though. It’s Detective Sergeant Paula Powell of the Marlbury police, smartly dressed in a crisp shirt and jacket for the telly, saying, ‘This is just the beginning of the police investigation. At this stage we are treating the deaths as unexplained. We don’t know, as yet, whether anyone else was involved.’
So, with David still away in London, Paula’s in charge. Good luck to her. She’ll want to get a result before he comes back and stamps all over her case. I ought to help. I look at the others, who are all staring at me now, rather than at the screen. ‘I’m going to ring the police,’ I say. ‘She was there this afternoon, at the nursery. With a dog. And a little boy.’ I look at the television screen as though I might conjure up his face too. ‘He’s called Liam. What’s happened to him?’