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The vast hulk of Kenneth beside her whistled serenely, steadily steaming across his own deep.
The Voice said, You know, you never should have bought a memory foam mattress. It makes you so hot. Like lying in a slice of white bread. And you can never admit this now, of course, since it was your idea to buy it. Not just your idea. Your insistence. Nothing else would do. Oh no.
The blinds were still black but would start edging closer soon to gray, then a kind of gray-green, then forest green, deciduous green, the green of well-fed grass, of grass that grows on graves.
It was impossible not to imagine the worst at 3:11 a.m.
What did Theresa say?
Allow the feeling in, experience it, and let it go again. Let it move on. Let it float past.
The Voice said, Do you think little Michael will remember you? Sure, how could he? What age will he be when you go? You’ll be a kind of misty presence in his memory, at best, and maybe video or pictures will remind him, maybe. But you won’t be reading books to him, you won’t be watching him at football matches, you won’t be seeing him put on gang shows with the scouts …
The Voice would not shut up. It would not be outwitted or shouted down. You could not threaten it or bargain with it. The Voice just talked and talked, recounting the things that must be done, the things that never would be, mixing the probable and the possible, the hopeless and the endless and the pointless … The mind leapt from rock to rock. The only way to escape it was to get up and go into the kitchen and make the mind do what the body told it. Read a book or make some wheaten bread or pay the bills. Clean the grouting in the upstairs bathroom. Which is what she had intended to start on this afternoon and might as well tackle now. Why not.
She put her feet on the cold floor and the Voice said, Slippers, Judith, you’ll catch your death. Ha.
The Voice had a sense of humor, of course, and yet it was not funny. You could not call it funny. Kenneth was doing his best. She was doing her best. Everyone was trying hard to do their best but so what? To what end? You went through the day doing your utmost and smiling and telling everyone you were fine really you were coping and then the night came and you lay down and in the darkness were gripped by the million hands of terror. So, said the Voice, I said how are we doing?
Not great, Judith replied. I’ve been better.
You have, said the Voice. Oh, you surely have.
She crept up the stairs. This had been the “kids’ toilet” until her son Spencer moved out it must be almost eight years now. Overnight Judith began calling it “the guest bathroom,” which Kenneth found “a bit affected.” But as usual he misunderstood. It had taken a conscious effort to rechristen it, and it was a deliberate overwriting, part of her efforts to keep abreast of time, not fall behind it. Time snuck up on you and she’d seen some of her friends—Carol Thomson, Betty Moore—keep their children’s rooms like little shrines when they went off to their universities or jobs. She was not going to be one to wallow. As the clock moved on, so did she. It felt important—morally important—not to be caught in past attitudes. Not to be hung up on it, on what happened, on the museum of the family. There was an obligation to live your life forward. She told anyone who’d listen that she wasn’t going to be one of those grandmothers obsessed with their grandkids, looking after them every week and talking of nothing else. But then of course Isobel was born and this was exactly what happened.
Now that Isobel, Alison’s daughter, stayed with them all the time, in the little box room called “Izzy’s room,” the bathroom too had reverted to its old name, its first name.
Judith tugged on the light and the extractor fan ticked awake, too loud. It wouldn’t rouse Kenneth unless she plucked it from the wall and dropped it on his head, but its whirring was too loud for the night. There was no place for the mechanized in this darkness pulled up like a coverlet over the fields and the woods and Ballinderry River, over the garden and the hillside beyond it, its gorse and bare rocks and tussocks, and over the house, the middle one of three on the lane, that she stood in now, breathing very lightly. She tugged the bulb off and stepped into the guest room, turned on the bedside lamp and carried it to the bathroom, setting it on the lowered lid of the toilet. The plastic Tesco’s bag full of bath toys in the sink she moved to the low shelf of the wicker unit. She ran the hot tap and used her fingernails to clean Izzy’s hardened red toothpaste off the smooth enamel.
Things, being things, always wore out. They wore down. They got dirty and needed cleaning. They wanted bleaching. Over the years, the grouting in the shower had turned from white to this mouse gray. She needed to spray it first, really, with a peroxide-based cleaner, and then leave it for half an hour. It would need to be scrubbed fairly gently not to take the grouting off. Wire wool would be too harsh. A nailbrush. Even a toothbrush.
She opened the cupboard under the sink. Cleaning products were always named to make it sound like cleaning took no time at all. In a jiff. In a flash. Everyone was so concerned with time. So worried about spending it the right way. And how much more pressing was it now. Life-limited. The phrase Dr. Boyers used. The limited life. But wasn’t everyone’s?
She spritzed the grouting until all the tiles ran with little foamy rivulets, and the chemical smell nauseated her. When she opened the window the night air came in like a cold hand on her neck. There was a smell of cut grass, manure. She’d leave the liquid to soak for a while, and go and have a look at the attic. It would need to be cleared at some point.
She found herself sitting on the bed in the guest room, staring into the deep-pile carpet, a striped affair of red and cream, and then at the curtains, a heavy red damask.
Liz had said, after her first night in here after it was decorated, that she’d felt like she was sleeping inside someone’s womb. Now what slept in Judith’s womb was monstrous. Awful.
Hello, the Voice said. Are you referring to me?
Of course it could be beaten. It was unlikely, very unlikely, but who knows what could happen? Who knows what miracles science might yet come up with?
People would say to her sometimes there are good things about getting a diagnosis, and she would smile and say, “Oh yes,” and think, How dare you. But it was true that the fact of the thing had freed her, for a bit. She’d moved into the center of their lives, hers and Ken’s, and found herself appreciated—like an ornament gathering dust in the back of a cabinet unexpectedly appraised at some fantastic value, and brought out to the light of the mantelpiece. But here too the dust alighted.
Four years, two months, and seventeen days ago she’d noticed that she couldn’t close the button of her good navy slacks. She had carried three children and now this lump. It could be benign, a benign cyst. Why not? What was the point in mentioning it to Kenneth? He had enough going on. He was making a good recovery from his surgery, and his speech was pretty good, considering the way it had been six months before. It was a Saturday night and she didn’t sleep well at all, even after several G&Ts. The next day she’d made a roast chicken for lunch and Ken’s brother Sidney came round, and told them in his halting way a long story about Lynn’s horse being stolen from a field outside Markethill and her friend Sean buying said horse back from a man in a pub in Dundalk, but she was too distracted to follow all the details, and when she tried to lift the bowls of trifle before Kenneth and Sidney had finished eating, her husband looked at her like she had two heads and said, “What’s got into you?”
I don’t know, she wanted to scream. I don’t know what’s got into me or how it got there or how to get it out. But instead she smiled and said, “Och, I didn’t sleep last night. I’m dead tired.”
The following Monday morning at 8:30 a.m. she stood at the back door of the clinic at the Westland Road waiting for someone to arrive and open up. Once inside, Judith did what she was told. It was a relief to follow instructions, to enter a system and just sit and look at a poster telling people—especially old people and children, who were apparently particularly at risk—to get flu shots, and just to sit and wait and wait and sit and know that the process, whatever it turned out to be, had started. A relief it was to pass the problem of herself to other people. They would sort it. They would know. They would do what they could.
The attic was accessed by a half-sized door—an Alice-in-wunnerland door, Izzy called it—in the wall of the small bedroom. Judith stooped and entered and tugged the light pull. Even with her slippers and terry-cloth dressing gown, the coldness felt cautionary. She was still too warm-blooded to be standing here among lifeless junk, the abandoned clothes and pictures and games and books. Heaped in the corners, hanging from makeshift rafters, filling cardboard boxes and shelves and plastic-lidded stacked bins, the grave goods. A foot away from her head, a spider, her host, shinned down its twisting filament and twirled and reconsidered and hauled itself back up.
Look at all this crap, she thought. Look at all this crap.
All the many hundred accumulated products of marriage and children. They could open a Museum of Late-Twentieth-Century Life. The History of Board Games, of Soft Toys, of Side Lamps, of Winter Coats. Maybe Isobel and Michael would want some of it. But she never showed any interest in making things, Isobel. Judith couldn’t get her to touch the Lego or jigsaws. She was all about dolls. Girls liked things with faces; no matter what the feminists thought, it was true.
She pulled out a broad hanger from which a maroon suit bag hung. A transparent window in the bag revealed thick brown fur. It was so heavy. When they’d gotten engaged over a bag of chips in Morans’ Café on Lower Merrion, Kenneth had said they would have four children, a house with a river that ran through the grounds, where he could fish—and she would have a fur coat. They’d managed three children. That took ten years. The coat took twelve … Life was both slower and faster than you expected. You saved up and worked towards … Must have been 1982. They were living in the wee Iveagh estate up in Prehen on the Waterside in Londonderry and she was working in the City Shirt Factory, in Personnel. Kenneth traveled for a while from Dublin and then got a job with Kennedy Collins estate agency, which had just opened a branch in Derry, up at the diamond.
She unzipped the bag and a great rush of soft fur escaped from the plastic. She ran her hand down it, and static made the fur twitch as if it were alive.
She found herself reluctant to try it on. It was a different Judith who’d worn it. She smoothed a hand down the collar of the coat, with the nap and then against it. It looked dark brown this way, then black the other. It all depended. She thought of pushing her face into it for a second but didn’t. Mink? It was mink, wasn’t it? What was mink? Like an otter? More ferocious. Like a ferret. How many minks? You got a coat like this from ten, twelve animals, she thought, checking the pockets automatically. Nothing.
The things they’d done in this coat! She slipped it on and sunk her hands into the pockets lined with satin. She gave a little curtsy for no reason, and noticed in the corner another rail of clothes balanced between a rafter and the housing for the water tank. She hadn’t looked at those in years. Among the trench coats and sheepskin jackets and leather skirts, she came to a plastic bag on a wooden hanger, filled with exercise books. She worked the bag off the metal hook of the hanger and pulled out the tired orange and blue exercise books.
Liz Donnelly. P.4 English. P.4 Geography. P.4 Maths. P.4 History.
Judith opened the English book to a story written by the eight-year-old Liz from the point of view of the town of Ballyglass. Such imagination!
Each step round the chimney took her further into the past. Boxes of their own wedding presents from forty-two years ago were stacked here, and boxes of books and crockery from Kenneth’s parents’ house in Ballyshannon. There was too much of it. It overwhelmed. She moved back into the lit part of the attic, pushed with her slippered foot a plastic crate of old candles and Christmas decorations under the eaves, making a passable trail from the door to the chimney stack. The bookshelf leaning against it held all the books in the house. Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland. Dick Francis. That was Kenneth’s, and unread. Jeffrey Archer. He turned out to be a shyster, didn’t he? His poor wife. What were those boxes? Oh, the Hummel plates—they’d bought one a year for the first twenty years of their marriage. History of Hummel Plates, circa 1972 to 1994.
It hadn’t been easy. God knows. They’d fought and fought. She’d moved out once, moved into the flat above the agency for a night, and taken one of the girls with her. He was a terrible thorny old bastard sometimes, no doubt about that. Things you think you’ll always love you don’t. You really don’t. She’d wanted a nice home with nice things. On the farm there was never enough of anything. Except for work. There was enough of that.
She didn’t want the children to have to go through the boxes—she’d done it with her own mother’s things, few though they were. All her mother’s clothes had fitted in two bin bags. She found she was hugging herself now, hugging her fur-coated body. She wanted to sift her life through her fingers, to weigh the thing and not find it wanting. To find that everything was worth it in the end.
Liz would be home in nine hours—eight. She must remember to cut some hydrangea from the garden and set a vase of it in her room. She lifted Liz’s exercise book and tugged off the attic light. Back in the guest room she sat on the bed and read:
As towns go, I’m not the best looking. My spine is one big wide street running along for over a mile, dead straight. I have shops all down me and you can tell how well the shop owner did a hundred years ago by the highnesses of the building. I sit at the foot of a mountain, Slieve Gallion, which wears its white cap in winter and in summer time is brown. I was born in 1645 as a marketplace, a meeting place for all the peeple to come and buy and sell vegtables and animals, cows and pigs and horses. I was burnt down and built bak up, and burnt down and built back up. My name is also An Corr Crea, from the Irish for Boundry Hill.
There has been a lot of fighting. Everybody wants me. My MPs have been UNions and Shin Fein—the people who walk all over me are both Protesants and Roman Catholics. There are the same amounts of people of both kinds. I have nearly ten thousand people living on me like little nits in my hair.
My synbol is made up from the synbol of the county and three fish. The synbol of the county is the red hand and it comes from the story of when Ulster had no proper ruler. The men agreed that a boat race would happen and who’s hand was first to touch the shore of Ireland, would be the owner of the place. Many boats were in the race and a man called O’Neill saw that he was losing so he got a sword and chop off his hand and lifted it and threw it and it reached the shore first. O’Neill was made the king and he lives at Tullyhog fort outside the town near Christine’s house.
The family Donnelly live in the south part of me, on the Lissan road. They are a happy family and there are five of them. Mummy and Daddy and Liz and Alison and little baby Spencer. The mummy makes rice krispy buns and cherry scones. The Daddy sells houses to people who need places to live. Alison and Spencer are OK.
My businnesses are to make cement out at the Cement works and to make sausages at the Bacon Factory. Sometimes out in the playgground of the primary school you hear the pigs squealing in the factory as they’re being brought in or put down. They cut their throats, but quick so it doesn’t hurt. And sometimes there is a bad smell from the factory sweet and rotten both.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_e795f206-f2e6-539c-a46e-bec9ae1dc0d6)
She was in no doubt at all; she could handle this. The embarrassment inside her had been turned way down—it still burned merrily and brightly like a gas ring left on, but it was bearable. She could bear it. It had not been a serious enterprise. She knew that. And there had been precedents. There were incidents pertaining, sure. The party in Brooklyn Heights where she had walked into the kitchen and “a good friend” had been hugging Joel from behind. Little folds of time. You can quicken memory and scatter it and thread the incidents together.
She felt a bubble of new anger rising through her and reached for her phone, then put it down again, sat back against the plastic seat, and concentrated on the view as her train rattled through the industrial edgelands of Newark. Concrete grandeur, a thin scrim of light rain. Unaccomplished graffiti on abandoned railcars. She looked at the phone. She wanted very much to be able to hurt him, and she realized that one of the things bothering her about this was that she wasn’t sure she could. She decided to send the text: You broke my heart.Inadequate, self-harming, momentarily satisfying. Nor did it feel remotely true even as she typed it, but what with the renewed steady movement of the car, and the rain, and the dilapidated splendor of New Jersey’s manufacturing heritage, she tried to think herself into a space where it might be true, and stared out the window, and for a moment thought she might cry again, if she kept still and stared hard enough at the particulars of night coming on.
Her phone vibrated, but once more it was her sister. Lovely weather here today. Izzy outside on bike all day! We looking forward to seeing you. You sort car hire OK?
Liz’s family had downsized their role in her life since she left home, of course, but not in the way she’d expected. They were like a village she had once lived in that had been shrunk down to miniature. The relationships didn’t loosen to old friendships; they contracted over the years, but retained all the same angles and shapes, the same functions of shame and despair and joy. It was like a scale model she lived in—and it still functioned. The little train ran, the signs swung outside the little shops, tiny people went from room to room, turning on and off the lights. Interacting with her family was like entering the village as an adult—outsized, and trying to crawl under the arches and bridges and flyovers, trying not to put one’s size-fives in the miniscule flowerbeds.
She spoke to her family every other day or so. Is this healthy? That was one of Joel’s lines. Is this healthy? Possibly, she’d reply. It’s possibly healthy.
She texted Alison back: Didn’t hire car yet. Any chance of a lift? Why you still up?
The reply came after a minute.
Up when M’s up. He’s feeding, mostly screaming. I’m giving him a bottle and watching Downton Abbey with earphones. I’ll get Stephen to pick you up. I have a final dress fitting. They messed up the zip.
Liz considered for a second, and replied:
Awful show! Btw just came home to boyfriend in bed with someone. Not feeling too chipper tbh.
She knew the phone would ring. She watched the display light up with ALLY HOME, and considered whether this conversation would make her feel better or worse. Liz always felt like the black sheep; her mother and father and brother and sister were their own club, and Liz was invariably outside the circle. But there was nothing more rewarding, in some lights, than a conversation with her sister. If Liz were a plaintiff in the court of some anecdote, Alison would quickly side with her and adopt on her behalf the prosecutor’s wrath. She was loyal as a pit bull, but then you don’t want a pit bull in the house, ideally. In phone conversations Alison would frequently crown a line offered by her elder sister with a stinging, cryptic, catchall phrase: Well, that’s typical of you. Or: You’re never going to grow up, are you? And once, astonishingly: That’s what you get for crying wolf your whole life.
She pressed the TALK key.
At once her sister’s tone, accelerated but contained, suggested she could somehow take control of this situation and fix it up nicely. She could see her three thousand miles away, drooly fat infant slumped across one shoulder, the phone wedged between the other and her ear, her blue eyes shining with the ecstatic confirmation of someone else’s pain.
She said, “I can’t understand how he could do that to someone.”
The beast Despair prowled behind the chemical stockade her two Xanax had erected. Liz’s real self could see it perfectly well in the distance, waiting for the barriers to come down, waiting to enter Lizville, ransack it, raze it to the ground.
Liz replied and Alison said, “I mean do it to you, obviously. I don’t understand how anyone could do that to another person.”
An inability to comprehend the bloody obvious—Alison often expressed this to Liz. Was it real or an act? It was the easiest thing in the world to understand how someone might have sex with someone else. It was the easiest thing because it was pretty much the only thing, the one reliable force in the world, universal human gravitation. Every scandal was confirmation of it. It made everyone act crazy, risk their jobs and lives and families … Oh, someone might pretend—or really have—an interest in, say, sailing or the opera or growing cabbages. But there, beneath it all, was the thing happening, every fleshy particle in the universe attracting every other one … Now and at all times, nearby, very close, people were being pulled towards each other. Bodies tending towards other bodies. Someone was entering, someone was getting entered. Liz loved and hated the sex hum of cities, manifested in a million tiny glances and gestures, in its streets, its cafés, its libraries. It kept everything electric. Alison, mother of two, had had sex presumably at least twice, though she always spoke of it as something distant or alien or beyond her. Or at least she always did to Liz. And now, as Liz, against her better judgment, tried to sketch the details—replacing Alison’s assumed gender pronoun with the correct one—she found herself cut off midsentence, like a student who has given the wrong answer.
“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear all that. Bad enough he was ten years younger. And gay, as it turns out. Okay, whatever. Bi,” said Alison over her sister’s barks of protest. “Nine years younger. You want to split hairs? Sometimes I think you want to be unhappy.”
There it came. The great expected wash of tiredness ran across her. She leaned forward and rested her head against the cool leather of the seat in front. Her body relaxed into sadness and she swallowed hard. She wasn’t going to start crying again. She leaned down and tickled Atty’s head as Alison continued, warming to the theme of Liz’s general fecklessness:
“You haven’t seen Izzy in what? Nine months? Ach, you won’t believe the change in her. She’s up to my chest now. She was just moved up in her reading group. And sure Michael was tiny. Oh, we’re so excited. Izzy hasn’t talked of anything else all week. And there’s Stephen! You’ll get to meet Stephen!”
Two hours later and they were up, away, climbing. The lights in the cabin dimmed and she put the bag on her knees and covered both it and herself with the staticky polyester blanket. Atty popped her head up and panted and panted and finally calmed down, as Liz let her rest her muzzle in her hand. The Ambien that Yahoo Answers had advised her to give the dog kicked in, and Atty fell deeply asleep for the entire flight while Liz periodically worried that she’d killed her. She marked her student essays on mate choice and marriage finance with mostly random tics all the way through their two double-spaced pages, and wrote “Excellent!” at the end.
Goodbye Shirlita Goddard, she thought, and your repellent staccato laugh.
Goodbye Hector Martinez and your outsized silly quiff.
Goodbye Steve. Steve Something. Yellow polo shirt, psoriasis.
Repeatedly she slid her hand into the bag and placed her fingertips on the dog’s chest and felt the little reassuring tom-tom of its effort.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_12a43151-700e-5de2-9610-e28fba487b7a)
When you found yourself hissing at your baby to shut up, to please for God’s sake just shut up for a bit, it was important to set said baby down delicately in his cot and leave the room. That was Rule Number One in Alison’s Big Book of Parenting. It was true that nothing gave her more joy than to look in Michael’s huge cornflower-blue eyes, which even now at 3 a.m.—especially now—radiated curiosity and attention, and to stroke his smooth fat cheeks, and feel his whole life force settle itself as she held him to her and pressed his small hard skull against her chest. But who wants to feel joy at this time of night? She wanted to feel sleep, to feel nothing, to be unconscious for eight or nine blissful hours. She had left him to cry for twenty-three minutes and then given in and got up again. Exactly the opposite of what you’re meant to do. Maybe if she’d waited twenty-four minutes he might have stopped. This was the infinite puzzle of parenting: You never could know for sure what might have been avoided, what inevitable. The crying wasn’t even the worst of it; he interspersed that with a kind of porcine grunting that intensified and lessened and intensified again, as if he were working out with tiny baby dumbbells.
Rule Number Two: Carry concealer. Apply it each morning in natural light to the deep shadow rings under your eyes.
Number Three. What would number three be? Not to run out of Baileys Irish Cream.
Number Four was not to feel guilty about feeding your baby formula or rusks, or your toddler fish fingers or an Easter egg, or letting them watch telly or do any of the necessary activities that other parents—other mothers—tried to make you feel guilty about. The one-upmanship of the whole thing had to be ignored.
Rule Five was to make yourself laugh madly when one of your wee bairns boked on your black party dress just before you left the house for your bimonthly night out, or when one of them wet the bed, or when Izzy tugged the eight-inch purple vibrator the girls had given you on your hen night out from under the bed and started smacking it against her cheek.
Maybe you made rules in your head because there was no other way to feel in control. You had to keep churning the events of your life and try to skim some sense from them. It all slipped through your fingers otherwise. And what was “it”? Time. Children ate time. Before, days moved at a walking pace, routine and predictable. You could liken time to some natural state or process, a backdrop to events, not an event in itself. But once Isobel came, and now Michael, time itself changed. The minutes hardened into objects that could be counted and traded like money, and she always came up short.
At Izzy’s birthday party last week in the café at the leisure center, as she was planting the four pink candles in the cake shaped like a football, which was the only children’s cake left in Tesco’s and would just have to do, it struck Alison that she was going to be sticking candles in cakes every year for at least the next eighteen, which would take her up to the age of fifty, and the conclusion made her sit back for a second on the edge of a radiator. Judith was slicing open a packet of paper plates with a pearlescent fingernail and Alison had managed to turn to her and say, “Can you believe that Izzy’s four?”
“It just gets quicker and quicker,” her mum had replied, smiling her wisest, most insufferable smile.
Michael’s breathing regulated and Alison inched forward to the edge of the tub chair. Slowly, slowly she stood up. He raised his head and she began swaying in their nightly slow dance. He gave a curt, liquidy burp, hot on her ear, and then settled his cheek into her shoulder.
Even as she was telling Liz how excited they all were to see her, she felt a protective wariness. She didn’t mind Liz with the kids—when she actually saw them, she was great with them—but she didn’t particularly want her sister to meet her soon-to-be second husband. And Liz’s presence introduced a stress to the household that was paralyzing. Kenneth and Liz had not actually come to blows since school—but the needling and riling that Liz considered normal made everyone around her tense. Liz was the star of the family, and her mother’s clear favorite. She was so sure she had the answer to everything. But she just had different questions. Normal people, real people, who had to get up and go to work and come home and make dinner, found answers enough in the repetition, in the dull, rough ceremony of cooking, and bathing the kids, and reading three stories, and downing a large glass of chenin blanc, and turning off the television, and double-locking the door, and heading up to bed, amen.
Educated to the nth degree—but so what? To what purpose? Liz knew a lot about some things, sure, but nothing about how to live. She was one of life’s tenants—she rented: flats, people, cars. Trying them out, using them up, breaking them down, moving along. Liz was older, twenty-one months older, but as soon as Alison could speak she’d adopted the responsible role. Had Liz got money? Had she got tissues? Had she remembered her packed lunch? Alison could never have told her, of course, but it was clear as day that Liz would never become an adult till she had children of her own—climbing over her, lying on her, needing her at three in the morning. And not until she became a solid fact in someone else’s life would she start to understand her own parents. She still had the worldview of a child. She faced upwards. She hadn’t yet forgiven Kenneth and Judith—not that there was so much to forgive. Alison knew that Liz pitied her, still stuck in Ballyglass, still stuck with their parents, the business, but in turn Alison pitied her right back, pitied her harder, longer, louder.
The laptop was still showing Downton Abbey on the wicker stool, and she closed it and exited the room, shutting Michael’s door softly. Typical Liz to be snobby about a TV show she didn’t even watch. How could it be offensive? It wasn’t as if it didn’t show the servants to be just as wise and just as confused as the masters. Just that everybody knew their place back then. They weren’t lost in wanting more. Now everyone thought they deserved to have everything at every moment. She was a great fan of the individual, her sister, while hating any actual person she ever had to meet. Liz liked the concept of people but not the reality. That’s why she couldn’t hold onto a boyfriend. Alison stood for a moment on the landing. A soft, repetitive clicking that took her a second to identify as the tap dripping into the bath. It had started again. How amplified a sound became at night. She’d mention it to Stephen.
This was the umpteenth time he’d stayed overnight, but only the third or fourth time he’d done it with the kids here and not at Judith and Kenneth’s. You couldn’t say the evening hadn’t gone well. She’d made a proper roast chicken dinner and Stephen lit the fire. The kids were pretty good, and after dinner, when she bathed them among the ducks and frogs and foam letters that Isobel still refused to spell her name with, he’d slid Bill’s old red toolbox out from between the turf basket and the coal scuttle under the stairs and fixed the loose shelf beneath the sink. Back when Bill was around, she’d have nagged him for weeks, and he’d have botched it anyway, if he ever did it. But Stephen would be a different kind of husband: He could do stuff. He’d be a great dad, and Isobel and Mickey would soon think of him as the only father they’d ever had. She hadn’t heard from Bill in almost two years. Stephen was far from perfect, God knows, what with his sullenness, his gift for switching off, leaving the room but not through the door or the window. Stephen, Stephen, Earth calling Stephen, and he’d turn back towards her and smile a little shyly.
The kids went down easy and they shared a second bottle of Tesco’s finest Italian red, and watched TV and cuddled on the sofa. Upstairs, in bed, they did it twice, once quickly and then, twenty minutes later, again but slowly. She didn’t come but she wasn’t far off the second time. She wore a new nightie from M&S, a classy white satin thing, and he liked it, or said he liked it.
She looked in now to check on Isobel. Her daughter’s darling head was pressed against the wall, the hair covering her face entirely so that for a second she couldn’t tell which direction she was facing. One bare foot came out from under her Tinkerbell duvet. She gave a little moan and shifted her legs, taking a step. What went on in her head? When she came home from school now she was silent about it, just said it was “good.” Alison knew already the inner life of her daughter, at four years old, had closed up to her, was newly zoned and fortified and she couldn’t visit. She might tell Isobel her life was one long carousel ride of being fed and entertained and washed and soothed, but she’d seen her daughter nervous, embarrassed, tense. You can’t protect them from everything.
Everyone sleeping, Alison felt like a ghost wandering the house, benevolent, visiting the much loved, the much missed. She put an ear to Michael’s door, but it was silent. In her own bedroom Stephen lay splayed across the duvet, his white T-shirt riding up his narrow back, revealing the scatter of a few moles. At the nape of his neck the hair whorled in such a way that it came down into a perfect point. She slipped in under the duvet and felt his warmth and the lovely new security of a breathing human body in her bed. And then he spoke, surprising her.
“Was Michael all right?”
“Yeah. Just wanted a cuddle.”
There was a long pause, and just when she thought he’d gone back to sleep, he spoke again.
“Wouldn’t mind one of those myself.”
He turned towards her and draped one of his skinny arms across her waist. A few minutes later, Michael started again. Stephen and her lay perfectly still. Michael grew louder, the pitch rising and rising until he was wailing in utter despair. He started making a hacking, sobbing sound. She set a hand gently on Stephen’s chest and whispered, “I’m going to leave him. He needs to learn to settle—”
Stephen’s whole body jerked awake and backwards in a panic, as if she’d flicked a switch. It was intent on repelling her, hell-bent on defending himself—the side of one hand caught her on the cheek, the other grabbed her by the throat hard.
Something awful possessed him. His eyes stayed closed and she screamed and tried to pry his fingers from her neck. He raised his leg and kneed her in the thigh. Then he was looking at her but his eyes were strange and hard and far away and he was shouting, “Fuckoff, fuckoff” in a voice high pitched and different, sharp with fear. Then it was over—but what had it been? She was crying and hitting at him and he hugged her as she tried to pull away. “It’s me, it’s me,” he kept saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry. I was dreaming. I was dreaming. I’m sorry.”
Ten minutes later she sat in the empty bath, her knees pulled up. Stephen passed her a bag of frozen sweetcorn from the freezer and wrapped it in a tea towel. She held it now to her eye.
“Go on back to bed, you. There’s no point in us both being up.”
Stephen perched on the toilet lid and sighed repeatedly, as if he were the one thumped in the face. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It wasn’t that she thought he’d done it on purpose. He’d have been out on his ear with the door banging his heels if she’d thought that. It was not deliberate, and that was the point, wasn’t it? But another point, another really very pressing point, was that it hurt.
“Go on, really. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“I am so sorr—”
“Honestly, it’s fine.”
