The evening of the Fintan House meeting, Lucy phoned. Matt and I were playing a particularly violent game on his computer. Deborah still wasn’t back. Apparently she’d told Matt she had things to do in town and would come home in a taxi.
‘Sorry I missed you this morning.’ Lucy’s voice was warm and mellow; she sounded her old self again. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate me crashing in to kiss you goodbye at five am.’
‘I’d appreciate your crashing in to kiss me at any time,’ I insisted dutifully.
‘Look, I really can’t thank you enough, Jake.’
‘No worries,’ I said. ‘Forget it. Please.’
‘You will come and stay at my place when you’re in London, won’t you?’ she asked. ‘I can only offer you a sofa bed, but it’s quite a comfy one. I’ll actually be in Oslo again next week.’
‘I spoke to Bill today. Remember Bill? He and Lottie have offered me their spare room. I’ve imposed on your family too long.’
‘I think it’s us who’ve imposed.’ She had the grace to sound embarrassed. ‘Now you know why we needed you to find her.’
‘And now I know that back in October you couldn’t have cared less whether I slept in Lincoln’s Inn Fields under a newspaper and got mugged. I was just a gofer. A stooge. A runner.’
‘A saviour.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Sorry.’ She didn’t sound quite sorry enough. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t go, since she didn’t want to be found. And without Deborah, we were going to lose Grace.’ She chuckled. ‘She’s quite a regal little person. Has mini tantrums if you don’t do what she wants. She screws her face up and screams the place down.’
I gave up on being aggrieved, and suggested dinner when she got back from Oslo, and we picked a day.
‘It’s not the same without you at Stanton’s,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for a new job. Delaney’s a prick. Len Harvey’s got your job. Disastrous.’ She gossiped chattily for a while, telling me exactly how disastrous poor Len was. I’m ashamed to say that I encouraged her.
‘I’d better go . . .’ she said, in the end.
I waited. I could tell she had something more on her mind.
‘. . . But there was no need to escort her home.’
Ah. There it was. ‘Didn’t want her doing a runner, did we?’ I replied lightly. ‘After all that trouble finding her.’
‘Jake.’ A brief silence and then a sigh. ‘Word of advice. Get out while you can.’
I tried to protest, but she interrupted me. ‘She’s brought my father to his knees.’
‘I’ve got no heart to break,’ I told her.
By the time I heard a car rumbling down the lane, it was late. We’d already had supper, and Perry had disappeared off to his study. I waited for her footsteps in the hall. I found myself glancing towards the door, wanting to see her. Five, ten minutes passed, but she didn’t come in. So I went outside to find her. She was standing under the lilac tree in her long winter coat, staring bleakly up at the house.
For a moment, I lingered by the front door. A whisper of light, escaping from an upstairs window, glanced slantways across her face and shoulders; her eyes were in shadow, as though she was wearing a masquerade mask. Watching that motionless figure, I finally faced the fact that she made me feel very strange. It wasn’t just physical desire.
Deborah’s story was the opposite of mine. She’d sacrificed her youth, been an army wife, brought up children. She’d lived a lie, really, but she’d done it for more or less the right reasons. Me, on the other hand? I’d clung to my youth, avoided commitment, lived selfishly but honestly. I was even selfish in my honesty.
We were opposites. And yet, at some horribly fundamental level, I recognised something in her, a sort of kinship. A passion for freedom, perhaps. I felt as though she was a part of my past, and my future, and myself. I felt as though she was my home. But I couldn’t have her. Never. I could put that idea right out of my head.
She didn’t move as I walked up to her. She seemed stunned.
‘I never want to go in,’ she said quietly. ‘And he never wants to come out. An agoraphobic, living with a claustrophobic. Impossible.’
‘The Dog and Gun is beckoning,’ I suggested. ‘How about a swift one?’
‘I’ve already had too many swift ones.’
She had, too. Her voice lacked its usual precision. ‘I expect they do coffee,’ I said. ‘C’mon.’
She turned her shadowed eyes up to me. ‘I still care about him, Jake.’
I took her elbow. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Perry, I mean. But he doesn’t make me happy. No, he makes me very unhappy. I worry about him, and I want his approval. And I hate him.’
I steered her down the shadowy drive. ‘Mind the pothole.’
‘And I pity him, and I resent him because I pity him. He has a power over me . . . but it’s black magic. That’s why I had to get clean away.’
We walked along the road. Once in the pub, she folded herself into a window seat while I went to the bar. Same barmaid, bigger tee-shirt. When I returned, I saw that Deborah had closed her eyes. There was a deep line running vertically down the middle of her forehead. My mum used to look like that when she had a migraine.
I perched on one of those little plush stools and gestured to her coffee. ‘Headache?’
‘The prison gates are clanging shut.’ She pressed a hand to her mouth as though she’d just been told she had a week to live. There were purple shadows like bruises around her eyes. ‘Sorry, Jake. You hate it, don’t you? Emotion. Not your thing at all.’ She blinked slowly and forced an unconvincing smile. ‘I gave myself a day alone, to think.’
‘And? What did you decide?’
‘She’s beautiful.’
‘She . . . ?’
Deborah’s gaze slid past me to a hunting print on the wall. ‘They had her in the back. A lime-green room. Ugh. Why lime green? There was a huge mirror, obviously a two-way job. I bet Imogen was on the other side, watching beadily and taking notes.’
‘Jeez. Hard to relax when you’re being spied on.’
‘Mm. But Matt was there.’ She smiled. ‘Holding her in his big arms as though he was a butler and it was his duty to provide a comfy place for Her Highness to lay her royal head.’
I caught myself grinning goofily. I’d have liked to have seen that.
‘Matt is so proud,’ she said. ‘He’s my Matt again, you know? My son. The one made of pride, with his shoulders back and his chin up. Fatherhood has had quite a profound effect on him. Mum, Grace . . . Grace, meet your granny.’
‘I suppose she looks pretty much like a baby?’
‘One of her hands was clenched around his little finger.’ Deborah held up a fist. ‘Imperiously, like this. Dark eyelashes, fuzz of hair, mouth like a little red heart. She’s perfect.’ She cradled her cup. ‘Well, except for the fluffy pink cardigan. Looks like coconut ice. It has to go.’
I chuckled at that, and she sighed into her coffee. ‘I’d forgotten that baby smell.’
‘Yuck!’
‘No, no, it’s not yuck, Jake. Just you wait ’til you’ve got one of your own. It’s captivating . . . washing powder and milk and brand-new life.’
‘Pheromones,’ I said sourly. ‘Even ants are driven by pheromones.’ I wasn’t enjoying this conversation. It was like hearing all about somebody’s dream holiday in a place you couldn’t possibly get to, ever. ‘Was she asleep the whole time? Bit boring.’
‘No. She smiled at me.’ Deborah’s tired eyes creased too, at the memory. ‘Matt handed her over, and she lay on my lap, burbling and chewing her toes. Matt knows all about mixing bottles—can you believe that? He pottered off to the kitchen, and as soon as she started to whimper, he had one ready.’
‘Man of many talents.’ I downed the last of my half.
‘He got me to feed her. Haven’t done that for donkey’s years— wasn’t sure if I still had the knack. But she stopped squalling and started filling her face, looking up at me with those great big eyes. I could hear the air rushing into the bottle . . . I could have cried. It all came back. That feeling.’
‘For God’s sake, what feeling? Get real, Debs. You legged it from domestic life, remember?’
Her eyes weren’t focusing at all; she was thinking about that wretched little pink blob. She seemed entranced.
‘They’re vulnerable,’ she murmured. ‘And they trust you.’
I had no idea what she was talking about.
‘If Grace had arrived in ten years’ time, I’d have been overjoyed,’ she said. ‘She’s truly bewitching. It’s just that she’s . . .’
‘A disaster?’ I prompted heartlessly.
‘A disaster.’ She twisted her mouth. ‘Precisely.’
There was a burst of laughter from the bar. Some sort of Celtic pipe music started trickling out of the loudspeakers.
‘Matt’s crazy about her,’ she said. ‘He asked me what I thought, and I told him she was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. And she is, Jake. She is.’ Deborah nodded several times. ‘I didn’t have to lie. She’s glorious. She’s my family.’
She sighed. Drained the coffee. ‘And she needs me.’
‘Poor Rod,’ I said.