A Simple Life

She turned and left the room, aware that Milly was testing her for something, and that she was failing miserably.

It was another hour before Milly came downstairs. She skirted around Ape and made for the kitchen. She found the bread and cut herself two doorstep slices, then smeared them thickly with raspberry jelly. She wouldn’t talk, although Dinah offered her the most neutral of openings. She turned on the television and sat in front of it, her eyes fixed on the screen as if to let them wander elsewhere would be to betray vulnerability. Dinah couldn’t persuade her to leave the house, and Ape’s demands for exercise were becoming impossible to ignore. In the end Dinah took the dog for a walk and left her.

It was a raw afternoon with a taste of fog in the air. Ape ploughed through the undergrowth beside the river path while Dinah shivered and stared into the grey-white rush of water. She was glad when the moment came to turn back towards Kendrick Street. There were plenty of logs on the back porch. If she lit the fire perhaps Milly might even enjoy something improbable like toasting marshmallows.

As soon as she came back into the house she sensed that Milly’s mood was different.

She was waiting in the kitchen, holding back the knots of her hair with one hand so that her face was completely exposed. It was small, triangular, almost pretty under the disfiguring paint. The silver rings in her nose glinted.

‘You were gone a long time.’

‘Only an hour.’

‘Seemed like longer.’ Milly’s eyes were very bright.

‘Glad you missed me. Would you like some tea?’ There was something different about the kitchen, a detail that Dinah couldn’t quite place.

‘Nah. I thought I’d go out for a bit.’

‘Out?’

‘That’s right. See some friends. You know? Be back later.’

‘Milly, I can’t let you do that. You’re not old enough to go wandering off on your own in the dark. Wait. I’ll drive you, if you’re going to someone’s house, if you’ll tell me who so I can call the parents first …’

Milly grinned. ‘No thanks. Don’t need a chaperone. I can look after myself. Promise.’

‘That’s not the point. I promised Sandra I would look after you.’

Milly was demonstrating deafness. She had her satchel slung over her shoulder, was moving towards the door. Dinah scrambled after her, realising that the child would walk out. She caught hold of her arm and tried to pull her back. At the same time the detail that had nagged at her revealed itself. Matthew kept three bottles on a small wooden tray at the far end of the work surface, one of gin, one of whisky and one of vodka. The vodka bottle was missing.

‘Have you been drinking?’

The shrug inflamed Dinah. Her grip on Milly tightened and the child began to struggle in her grasp. Her arms felt like sticks, but she was surprisingly strong.

‘You can’t keep me here.’

They were wrestling in earnest now, Dinah’s hands clamped around Milly’s wrists. It was absurd to fight with her, as well as misguided, but Dinah’s sense of proportion deserted her in a tide of panic that burst out of some closed reservoir within herself. They lurched backwards, struggling against each other.

With Milly’s weight falling on her the edge of the worktop dug into Dinah’s side, winding her.

She would not be able to hold her much longer. Milly would break free; she would disappear. The knowledge was fearful and the fear came out of somewhere long ago, unacknowledged and more terrifying for it.

Dinah felt that she would choke. She realised that she was crying.

‘That fucking hurts,’ Milly spat at her, enraged. She disengaged one leg, drew it back and kicked Dinah square in the shin with her steel reinforced toecap.

Dinah yelped in pain and at the same time Milly ducked her head and bit hard into the back of Dinah’s hand. Dinah jerked the bitten hand to her mouth and swung out with the other. She slapped Milly satisfyingly across one cheek, and was rewarded by a flash of astonishment and respect in her pale eyes before fury blotted out everything else.

‘You hit me.’

‘Milly, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that …’

Milly was out of her grasp and she darted away while Dinah hesitated. The kitchen door slammed and an instant later the front door swung and banged shut on its troublesome spring. Ape barked at the empty air in Milly’s wake.

Dinah walked slowly across the hallway to the front door. It seemed to vibrate still with the force of the crash. It was dark outside, and Kendrick was deserted. Milly had vanished. I should run after her, Dinah thought. I should catch her and bring her back.

But she only checked the door, making sure that it was on the latch so that Milly could come in again when she was ready. Dinah couldn’t chase after her now, for even if she caught up with her she would not be able to force her to come back. She had been clumsy enough for one day.

In the den, on a low table beside the dented sofa cushions, Dinah found the vodka bottle. The level in it, as far as she could remember, had hardly dropped at all. Bravado, Dinah thought. A child’s bravado. She sat down and rested her head against the cushions. The back of her right hand showed an inflamed ring of crimson teethmarks.

Ape heaved himself on to the sofa beside her, and Dinah twisted her fingers in his rough coat. She sat and waited for Milly to come back again.

As the time crept by Dinah dismembered their argument over and over again in her mind. She was shamed by the evidence that she had done everything wrong. She had let her own needs and anxieties bleed out into her dealings with Milly. Where she should have been detached she had been demanding. Instead of encountering a cool, dispassionate adult Milly had met a creature as unstable as herself.

With a shiver of fear, Dinah realised that the tight seals she had kept on the past were straining and threatening to give way. At home in England she had been able to contain herself with familiarity and routine. But in Franklin she was out of her place and adrift, and her awareness of this intensified with time rather than diminished.

Then Milly had come, and her age and her fury and fragility had all touched a rawness and longing in Dinah that was frightening, and always increasing, and now threatened to overwhelm her.

Dinah grew cold and stiff with sitting. She stood up and walked the length of the room and back, and the dog raised its head to look irritably at her. It was two, nearly three hours since Milly had run out of the house. The night was bitter, and she had been wearing only the usual layers of ragged woollens. Where had she gone? Was she outside in the darkness, wandering by herself, or was she in some dangerous warm place, shut in and at even greater risk?

She was only fourteen. A child, a little girl. Her responsibility, entrusted to her.

Dinah ran to the front door and jerked it open. Cold air met her, and the scent of woodsmoke, and the sight of the cosy curtained windows of her neighbours’ houses. The wind carried the irregular hum of distant traffic.

She closed the door again, pressing the night away behind it. Denied images rose up before her eyes, making her roll her head in an effort to dispel them. None of her old methods of deflection would work any longer, because Milly had unlocked the sealed place.

Dinah ranged through the rooms of the house, looking for somewhere to hide and collect herself, but there was nowhere. The tidy defences of possessions and pictures and an ordered life looked irrelevant now. Guilt emerged from its lair as tangible as another human being until she thought that she could hear its breathing, smell the rankness of its sweat.

She could stay in the house no longer, she would have to get away from this foetid personification. She snatched a coat from its peg and pulled it on. She called to Ape and he came bounding eagerly towards her. The sight of him gave her an idea and she ran up the stairs to Milly’s room. At first it looked bare of her minimal possessions, but then she saw a frayed and shapeless garment discarded on a chair. Dinah bore it downstairs, and gave it to Ape to sniff.

‘Find her,’ she ordered. ‘Seek, there’s the boy.’

When she opened the door for him he set off up Kendrick, tail waving like a plume. Dinah ran behind him.

The dog thought it was a good game. He ran in a diagonal line across Pleasant, and plunged into the dark area between two houses. Dead leaves crackled under Dinah’s feet as she followed him. There were garage doors with basketball hoops, fences and paved yards and silent porches. Ape ran her until she was gasping for breath and then circled back to twist between her legs, panting and slobbering. She could have kicked him for his amiable stupidity. Milly was nowhere in these quiet streets, why should she be? The peaceful suburban darkness only emphasised her fears. But still she walked on, with the dog now scuffling at her side. She threaded up and down the neighbouring streets, peering at each house as her shadow reached ahead of her and then fell back again between the blue-white auras of the street lamps.

Dinah knew that she could walk all night and not have a hope of discovering where Milly might be.

A need to return home as urgent as the one that had driven her out took hold of her. She swung round and began to walk, faster and faster until she was running, into Kendrick and across the grass to the steps of her house. The door was still on the latch, as she had left it. She knew as soon as she stumbled inside that Milly had not returned.

It was after midnight.

Dinah picked up the phone and dialled the Parkeses’ home number. The answering machine picked up, Ed’s confident voice. If Milly was there she wouldn’t answer. Dinah quickly hung up.

Whom to call? The Parkeses were staying at the Bel Air Hotel, Ed had told her that twice and Sandra once. Not yet. She couldn’t call them yet.

The police? What to say, that a difficult teenager had banged out of the house to sulk for a few hours?

Matthew?

No, not Matt. Not Matt, most of all.

Dinah went into the kitchen and slowly, deliberately made herself a cup of tea. As an afterthought she tipped a measure of Scotch into it. She stood by the uncurtained window and stared out into the darkness of the yard as she drank the peaty tea. She began to see faces other than her own mirrored in the black glass.

At one a.m. she called Nancy Pinkham. Nancy answered the phone after two rings but her voice was thick and bewildered with sleep.

‘I know I’ve woken you up,’ Dinah said.

‘I’ll be right over,’ Nancy answered, when she had explained.

Ten minutes later she was sitting in Dinah’s kitchen in her blue terry robe. She drank the whisky that Dinah poured for her and rubbed her smeared eyes.

‘Listen, don’t you worry. Not yet, anyhow. I’m certain the kid will be back when she’s ready, when she thinks she’s done enough mischief. Don’t you think?’

Dinah nodded, Nancy’s prosaic common sense like a buoy to catch at in a riptide.

‘Yes, I guess so. But I’m so scared something’s happened to her, that it’s my fault …’

‘Sure you are. Who wouldn’t be, with any imagination? But it isn’t your fault, okay? The kid’s a monster, how can you be responsible for that?’

‘She isn’t, it’s not that …’

Nancy took her arm and the whisky bottle and drew them into the den.

‘We’ll just make ourselves comfortable here and wait for madam to get back.’ She looked shrewdly at Dinah as they both sat down. ‘I’m more worried about you than her.’

They drank some whisky. Nancy punched the television remote and found an old Clint Eastwood movie that had only just begun. They watched it to the end and then dozed a little in the grey light from the screen.

Dinah woke up with a shudder. The television light had been replaced by the beginnings of daylight, and Nancy was standing over her.

‘She’s back. Coming down the road, large as life.’

Dinah jumped up. Through the window, she saw Milly swinging up the path to the porch steps. She looked no more dishevelled than usual.

‘Where’ve you been? Do you know we’ve sat up all night, you thoughtless little tramp?’

It was Nancy who began shouting as soon as the door opened. Dinah had never seen her so angry. ‘How d’you think Dinah felt? If you were mine, I can tell you, I’d cane your ass.’

Milly walked straight past her into the kitchen.

‘Shit. I’ll leave you to it,’ Nancy muttered. ‘If there’s nothing else I can do?’

‘Nothing. Thanks, Nancy. You’re a good friend.’

‘Do the same for me sometime. Although, Jesus, if Laura and Brooke turn out like her …’

Milly scowled in the kitchen when Dinah came wearily in.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Go on where?’

‘Say your piece, like mother tightarse out there.’

The softness of relief was wrapping itself around Dinah. The kitchen, and its everyday instruments looked sweet and wholesome in the strengthening light.’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything. Only that I’m pleased you’ve come back.’

Milly suddenly smiled, the merry, upward-slanting smile that transformed her face. Her shoulders dropped and her head lifted. ‘Well, great. Yeah. Thanks.’

Dinah wanted to hug her, but remembered in time that Milly didn’t like to be touched. She asked her instead if she was hungry.

‘Starving.’

‘There are some English muffins.’

‘Why are they called English? They aren’t English, are they, they’re bloody American.’

Dinah toasted the muffins and spread jelly on them. She made rosehip tea and gave Milly a mug, and Milly wrapped her black-varnished fingers greedily around the warmth. Dinah noticed for the first time a clumsy tattooed flower in the vee between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Did you go to friends?’ she asked at length, when Milly had drunk two mugs of tea and eaten the muffins.

‘What?’

‘You said you were going to see some friends. Last night, before you went out.’

‘I haven’t got any friends here.’

She said it coolly without inviting sympathy but Dinah’s heart still twisted for her.

‘So where did you go?’

‘I walked around a bit. Then I remembered some people Sandra and Ed know, across the other side of Main Street, they’ve got, like, this big barn thing at the side of their house. They keep all the garden furniture and stuff in it. The door, wasn’t locked so I just went in and slept on a kind of padded seat thing. It was fine. I can look after myself.’

‘Yes, I suppose you can.’

Milly was studying her tattoo.

‘I’m sorry about last night, right?’

‘I’m sorry I slapped you. I shouldn’t have done.’

Milly laughed. It was the first time Dinah had heard her laugh and it was as attractive as her smile.

‘Actually that was kind of funny. It felt like we were two kids fighting. Let’s have a look.’

Dinah realised that she meant the bite on her hand. Obligingly she held it out to show the red weal. Milly sighed.

‘Maybe you should get a tetanus shot. You know, I asked Sandra if she could fix it for me to come here this weekend. After that time I met you I thought you were kind of okay, and I liked you. Only when I like someone I can’t believe they could like me or anything because I’m so shitty, and then I have to be like, really as bad as I can be so they won’t like me and then everything’s sort of proved for me so that I don’t have to speculate.’

It was the speculate that touched Dinah. With an effort to find the right neutral voice she said, ‘I think I understand. But why were you so determined not to go to LA with your parents?’

‘Because that’s what they always do. Or what he does and she lets him do. He just announces that we’re going somewhere, to suit him, and up and off we go. Franklin, Zermatt, London, back to bloody Franklin. For his writing. As if it’s some kind of art, instead of crap paperbacks with swastikas on the front.’

Milly paused, trying to arrange her words. ‘And it’s like, that’s how she needs it to be. She wants him to act that way so she can, I don’t know, accommodate him. It’s like a deal between them.’

Yes, Dinah thought. That’s what it’s like. We all have our different deals.

‘Anyway, I didn’t want to be taken like some parcel and left to sit in a hotel. I thought of asking to come here. Like I said, I do like you.’

And showing her liking, however grudgingly, was an added way of attacking Sandra. Milly was no fool.

‘Thank you,’ Dinah said. She would not make the mistake of offering clumsy reciprocal assurances just yet. The conversation was about what Milly thought and felt.

‘Is there any more tea?’

‘I can make some.’

While her back was turned Milly said, in a rush of words, as if she wanted to get it out while no one was looking at her, ‘I’m adopted, you know. They couldn’t have any kids of their own so they got me.’

Dinah moved carefully, not letting her surprise show. She put down the refilled teapot and took her place again opposite Milly at the table.

‘I didn’t know that.’

Sandra might have told her, she realised, that day in the café bar. But somehow the as-yet unmade friendship had developed a flaw, like a pattern going awry. They had become suspicious instead of intimate.

She thought of Ed and Sandra and their castle in the woods, but a different perspective made them seem smaller, farther off, while new questions and associations hung between Milly and herself, pricking her, hooking into her skin.

‘Yeah. They told me all that shit when I was a kid, they talked about it all the time in churchy voices, about how I’m special. They got me from the adoption services in London. Specially chosen, they wanted me so much, you know? I never believed a word of it. I don’t think they do nowadays, either. How could they, seeing what they ended up with was me?’

The small pale face with the angry make-up mostly rubbed away by the night in a barn. The lower lip pushed out, simultaneously aggressive and tremulous. Eyes fixed on Dinah’s face, greedy for attention and affection and reassurance, as well as routinely defiant. Another woman’s child, her history compacted within her. God forgive me, Dinah thought.

‘I had a daughter too.’

Milly gaped at her, silenced for once.

‘She’s fourteen, the same as you. Only I haven’t seen her since she was a little baby. I gave her up for adoption.’

There was a long pause. Milly picked reflectively at the smaller of her nose rings, turning it in its reddened puncture. Dinah could almost follow her thoughts down through their faltering spirals. Finally she breathed the question, ‘Are you saying, like, I could be your daughter?’

‘No. I know you couldn’t be.’

‘How do you? Why did you have her adopted? Was she, kind of, somebody’s she shouldn’t have been?’

‘No. She was Matthew’s baby too.’

It had been a long time, such a very long time since Dinah had allowed herself the luxury of words to vent the pressure. Silence had contained everything like a cold crust over molten liquid. She felt the pressure increasing, cracking the crust and pushing words into her mouth. They were ready to spill out of her mouth now. It was wrong that it should be Milly to hear them, Milly with her own pressing needs. Wrong, but right also.

‘Why, then?’

Dinah turned her head. Through the window she saw the Berkmanns driving off to their Sunday morning tennis game. Kendrick Street, Franklin, Massachusetts, coming alive once more.

‘I’ll tell you, if you like.’

‘Yeah. I’d like. Make a change from going on about me.’

Awkwardly at first, then fast, Dinah began to talk.

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