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Within a few minutes the boys were squeezing into the booth with them.
‘D’you mind?’ one of the girls pouted. ‘This is a private celebration.’
‘We don’t object to a bit of privacy, Dan, do we?’
‘Not at all. What are you celebrating? We’ll help you out, if you want.’
The dark-haired one said, still looking at Dan, ‘It’s Zoe’s birthday.’
Rob clicked his fingers. ‘That’s no problem. It so happens that birthdays are our real speciality, and Zoe’s birthdays are what we do best of all. Waiter, bring flowers, ice, champagne.’
‘You’ve got a bit of a cheek,’ the plainest girl said, and one of the others laughed.
‘Champagne? In this place? Two teas one teabag, more like.’
‘We’re going to a club later,’ the dark one told Danny. The girls always gravitated towards him. He had an air of tender vulnerability, which Rob did not. Danny nodded seriously.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Cat.’
‘What sort of name’s that?’
‘Cat. For Catherine, you know.’
Jess was driving the twelve miles home from the nursery, along a route so familiar to her that all the features of it had been smoothed away. Ditchley was in the middle of England; it was neither southern nor northern, and whilst it was some distance from Birmingham or Sheffield or Nottingham, it was no longer just a country town. Jess had grown up there, and she had seen the surrounding countryside eaten up by new housing estates, and out-of-town shopping developments, and garden centres. The open fields had shrunk and had been hemmed in by roads, so it seemed now that she lived on an island triangle bounded by motorways. The town itself was prosaic and middling as it had always been, but the last years had smeared it with tacky modernity. It now appeared brave but increasingly discomfited under its pedestrian centre and multi-storey car park, like a middle-aged matron making an effort in an outfit too young for her.
Jess’s face tipped into a sudden wry smile. It wasn’t Ditchley that was middle-aged, but herself. Am I so dull? she wondered. To have spent so much of my life in one place, and to have ended up disappointed in it, as well as in myself?
Deliberately, to avoid the question, she turned her thoughts to Joyce. Joyce had gone home, as she did every night, to relieve her mother’s day nurse and to look after the old woman until the nurse came back again in the morning, setting Joyce free once more for her work in the shop. Jess’s sympathy for her colleague made her feel ashamed of her own trivial worries. She dismissed her anxiety about money, and the future, and the faint but persistent loneliness that lived inside her like a disease, and tried to be positive.
This was her good time of the day. For all its tedious familiarity the journey home was soothing. She liked the way the road unwound through a dark twist of fields towards the orange-rimmed straddle and loop of the motorway, and on to the choreographed knit and unravel of a pair of roundabouts and through tidy streets to the cul-de-sac where she lived.
Her house, when she reached it, was in darkness behind its unkempt hedge.
Jess let herself in, switching on the lights. She glanced at the brown envelopes thrown on the hallstand and passed on into the kitchen without picking them up. Automatically she brushed a scatter of crumbs off the table and dropped them in the sink, and put the butter dish back in the refrigerator. She opened the door of the freezer compartment and stared at the neat stack of ready-made meals, then slammed the door shut again so the rubber seal made its meaty reverse-kissing sound.
The living room was tidy, and warm because the central heating had clicked on an hour before. The room was green with plants, weeping-leaved Ficus and palms and pink and purple-starred Saintpaulias. Jess moved from one pot to the next, touching the soil under the thick leaves with the tips of her fingers. The telephone rang.
‘Darling, it’s me. How’s your day been?’
It was Jess’s sister Lizzie. Jess smiled, looping the cord of the telephone away from the receiver and sitting down in the armchair, her feet tucked beneath her.
Lizzie was in her own home, twelve miles away. The sisters always tried to talk to each other every day, even when the differences in their lives kept them apart. Once it was Jess who had made the calls, mothering and reassuring her more exotic sister; now it was Lizzie’s turn to ask the probing questions.
Lizzie slumped on her sofa, massaging her neck with her free hand and staring at the mess of toys on the carpet. There was a glob of baby food drying on her black jersey and she frowned, picking at it. She was the younger by four years. When Lizzie had been working as an actress, precariously balanced between waitressing jobs and the promise of making it big, Jess was already married and a mother. The home that Jess had made with Ian and their children had been a second home to Lizzie, whenever she had needed to crawl back to it after disappointment over a part or in love.
Now, their roles were reversed.
‘My day was pretty ordinary. Not bad. It’s rather nice in the greenhouses this time of year.’
Lizzie’s frown darkened. Jess needed to get a hold on her life.
‘All on your own, with soil and flowerpots and roots and muck?’
‘Compost. And that’s for outdoor work, you don’t bring it in the greenhouse. I like peace and quiet.’
‘Jess. I wish you’d get out of there.’
‘I’m all right where I am.’
Lizzie tried to muster enough energy to renew her campaign for brightening Jess’s life, but she felt too tired tonight. It had been a long day with a baby of twenty months. He was asleep now, pink and fragrant from his bath, and the delicious thought of him suddenly blotted out her concern for Jess.
As they talked, exchanging the small news of the day, Lizzie heard the sound of her husband’s key in the lock. When James came in she looked up, beaming, and mimed a lingering kiss. She mouthed ‘Jess’ in answer to his silent question, and James retreated. Lizzie knew that he was tiptoeing upstairs to lean over the cot and marvel at his baby son.
Lizzie was thinking, as she did a dozen times a day, that she couldn’t quite believe in so much happiness. Now aged thirty-nine, within the last two and a half years, she had at last met the right man, married him, and had a baby. And just at the time when all this was happening, Jess’s twenty-three-year-old marriage to Ian was acrimoniously ending.
‘If you say so. I can’t help thinking, you know.’
‘Liz. I know what you want. You want me to be happy and with someone and doing and feeling the same things as you. But our lives have always been completely different, why should they start to be the same now?’
‘I don’t want you to be alone.’
This was the dark spot in Lizzie’s brand-new, pin-bright happiness. If only Jess were not lonely. If only something would happen to her that would comfortably reflect Lizzie’s own good fortune. A spring of maternal tenderness had been tapped in Liz by the birth of her child, and the overflow of it washed around Jess.
‘Well, I’m not alone, am I? I’m lucky.’
Lizzie gathered her hair in one hand and artfully twisted it off her face, stretching her neck and posing as if for the camera.
‘Darling, you can’t live your life through him, it’s not healthy for either of you.’
Jess said evenly, so that they both recognised it as a warning-off, ‘I don’t live through him, or anyone else. I’ve been a wife and a mother for twenty-three years. Now I want to be just what I am.’
There was a moment’s awkward silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lizzie said.
Jess smiled into the mouthpiece. ‘For what? For being yourself?’ Briefly she became the comforter again; the balance between them tipped so easily. ‘How’s Sock? What’s he doing?’
Christened Thomas Alexander, Lizzie’s baby had been referred to in the womb as Socrates and was now invariably known as Sock.
Lizzie’s voice lightened. ‘Asleep at last, thank God. He’s been tireless today, a chaos machine.’
Sock was a source of delight to everyone. For Jess the sight and smell and feel of him, the round head and peachy fuzz of skin, brought back piercingly sharp memories of her own babies. She turned her head to look at their photographs, framed on the shelf beside her chair. To see Sock was almost to have them back again.
‘He’s learnt so many new words.’
‘What does he say?’
They could talk endlessly about his achievements. There were no complications in this.
‘James is looking after him for the whole day tomorrow. I’m going to London to do the handcream voice-over. I’m swimming in free handouts of the stuff here, do you want some?’
‘Handcream? Yes, can you take it intravenously?’
‘Probably. I just hope they don’t expect me to say so in thirty seconds. Darling, I’ve got to go.’
James reappeared, changed out of his business clothes into a sweater and corduroys. He made a little tilting movement with his fingers, asking if she wanted a drink. Lizzie mouthed, ‘God, yes.’
‘Right. Hope the voice-over goes well. Call me soon.’
‘Tomorrow night, or the day after. Promise you’re all right?’
‘Everything is fine here.’
‘Good night darling.’
James came to her as she put down the phone and slid his hands down to her hips, then kissed her thoroughly.
‘Mmm. At last. How are you, my darling?’
She curled an arm around his neck. ‘Feeling pretty fat and mumsy, actually.’
‘You look wonderful. You feel wonderful.’
‘Oh. Ah. Jim, what did my life consist of before there was you?’
Jess went slowly upstairs to the bathroom and tipped a heap of soiled clothes out of a basket. She stooped to sort them into differentiated piles and carried an armful down to the kitchen. She fed the bundle into the washing machine and slammed the round eye of the door, and while the clothes turned in the lace of suds she found a tin of soup in the cupboard and heated it up. She carried the bowl through into the living room and watched the television news as she ate.
The club was packed. It was a popular DJ night and there were surges of dancers filling the floor. In the mass of people Rob could see Danny dancing with Cat. He was smiling broadly and bouncing on the spot, up and down fast from the knees, as if he was on springs. One hand held a bottle by the neck and the other waved in the air over his head. The four girls and Rob and Danny had all had a lot to drink, the celebration of Zoe’s birthday moving on from the café to gather swift momentum in another pub and then the club. The beginning of the day seemed very long ago to Rob, at the far end of a multicoloured narrow tunnel. The music was loud, seeming to generate itself within his head. He followed the intricate cross-patterning of it in his mind, letting his eyes drift shut, then opening them again to see Cat standing in front of him. She was very pretty, he noticed for the first time. A little triangular face, just like a cat’s, with a damp fringe of hair sticking to her forehead. Smoky eyes. He knew from dancing with her that she was thin and light-boned. Catty-like. He swayed towards her with music booming in his head. She was saying something to him.
‘What?’
She repeated it, shouting with her mouth to his ear. Warm breath on his face. ‘Where’s Rachel?’
Rachel. Yes, the plain one of the foursome. She had been here a minute or perhaps an hour ago. He shrugged his shoulders against the waves of sound and Cat pushed away from him. Danny was at the bar now and Rob joined him. Another beer apiece, and when Danny tilted the bottle to his mouth a trail of silvery froth ran down his chin and glittered in the blue and purple lights. He wiped it away and moved his head to draw Rob closer. They stumbled together, Rob’s arm round Dan’s shoulders, a support for both of them.
‘Not a bad night.’ Dan was grinning, the angle of the lights making him seem cross-eyed.
‘Yeah, pretty good.’
‘Listen. I’m going back with her.’
‘With who?’
‘Cat.’
‘Shit. I quite fancied her myself.’
Danny’s grin widened. ‘No chance, my son. I’m in there.’
‘Who’s driving, then?’ Rob’s old van was parked outside. After the pub they had all piled into it, the girls’ legs and buttocks heaving and pressing in the passenger seat. Rob remembered laughing and gunning the clapped-out engine, and the traffic lights on sentry duty down a long stretch of wet road to the club warehouse.
‘We’ll get a cab or something,’ Dan said vaguely, his smile beatific, irritating.
‘Sod you then.’ A prickle of antagonism renewed itself between them.
‘What about what’s-her-name, Zoe?’
‘Thanks.’
Cat came back. She had pushed her hair off her face and her round forehead looked bare and vulnerable.
‘Rachel’s in the toilets. She’s not very well.’
Danny took another pull on his beer.
‘What’s happening then?’
‘We’re going to take her home.’
‘All of you? What is she, crippled?’
Cat hesitated. Her top lip crimped, making a new triangle in the inverted one of her face. ‘Wait a minute, then.’
There was beer spilt on the bar, and a slick of it underfoot. The crowd standing three deep was now dotted with familiar faces, and the sweating barman in his soaked T-shirt was a regular at the gym. The gathering seemed suddenly tribal and this and the women’s invisible crisis tipped the boys back into collusion. They turned their backs on the heaving dance floor and the barman saw them and sent two uncapped bottle slithering across. Dan clashed his against Rob’s and they drank, leaning their heads back. The blue and purple lights recoloured Rob’s sweat-darkened hair. Standing shoulder to shoulder while the surf of people and music crashed around them, they had almost forgotten Cat before she materialised again, with Zoe beside her.
‘The other two have gone.’
Danny took hold of her wrist, his feral grin showing his teeth. ‘C’mon then. We’ll drive you girls home.’
The rain had thinned into drizzle once more. In the front of the van Cat sat across Danny’s knees but her arm and shoulder and thigh were wedged against Rob. Zoe crouched in the space behind, her chin over Danny’s shoulder. They were not singing or laughing any longer. Rob peered ahead, frowning through the hypnotising arcs of the wipers. The cab of the van vibrated with engine noise, but on a different frequency each of them plainly heard the ambiguous whisper of sex.
Jess washed up her soup pan and placed her bowl and spoon in the proper slots in the dishwasher. In the hallway she glanced at the security chain for the front door hanging loose from its bolts. She checked her watch and hesitated for a minute as a dark wing of anxiety shadowed her thoughts. Then she went slowly upstairs, leaving the door unsecured. Her bedroom and the inviting bed were as she had left them. She sat on the edge of the bed and wearily reached down to undo her shoes.
Cat’s place was a rented room in a rambling mouldy-smelling house near the railway line. While Rob and Danny were waiting on the step for her to rummage for her keys they heard the muffled rumble of a goods train passing. Rob thought of heavy flasks of nuclear waste being transported from somewhere to somewhere in the midnight dark, and shivered as if a cold hand had been laid on him.
‘There isn’t much to drink. Some vodka I think, if you want that. Someone left it here.’
Cat produced a half-empty bottle from a partitioned sink cupboard.
‘I’ll have some,’ Rob said. They had begun laughing again. The two boys stumbling in the cluttered room seemed incongruous, comically out of scale. Zoe peered at her pale reflection in her handbag mirror and stretched her mouth ready to coat it with lipstick. Her hand slipped with the cylinder and slashed scarlet across her teeth instead. Her helpless giggle turned into a hiccup.
Cat gave each of them a green glass with an inch of vodka in it. Danny took his and immediately put it aside, losing it. Cat slid a tape into a cassette player and music blurted out, much too loud. She laughed and prodded at the controls, then collapsed backwards on the bed beside her friend.
Danny mumbled, ‘I’ll roll a spliff.’ He sat sideways at a tiny table and produced the pouch from his pocket, humming as he spread the papers.
Then they sat on the bed, one on either side of the girls, passing the clumsy roll-up between them. Cat’s black legs sprawled impartially. Danny touched the curve of her thigh with the tips of his fingers and began to stroke, lightly, then more insistently.
