Charles has gone out for ice. ‘You going to keep me company?’ Mrs Upsilla says, still busy with her cooking. ‘You’ll trip on those laces,’ she says, allowing the electric mixer to operate on its own for a moment. A nasty accident there could be, and she ties my laces. Always double-tie a shoelace, she says, and I go away.
In the drawing-room the bowls of olives and tit-bits are laid out; the fire is blazing, the wire net of the fire-guard drawn down. I watch the raindrops sliding on the window-panes. I watch the people in the square, hurrying through the rain, a woman holding an umbrella over her dog, Charles returning with the ice. The cars go slowly, the street lights have come on.
I sit in the armchair by the fire, looking at the pictures in the books, the old woman who kept children in a cage, the giants, the dwarfs, the Queen’s reflection in the looking-glass. I look out into the square again: my mother’s friend is the first to come. He waits for a car to pass before he crosses the square, and then there is the doorbell and his footsteps on the stairs.
‘Have one of these,’ he says in the drawing-room: cheese straws that Mrs Upsilla has made. ‘Time for your dancing lesson,’ and he puts the music on. He shows me the same steps again because I never try, because I don’t want to try. ‘How are they?’ he asks and I know he means Davie and Abigail; ever since my mother mentioned them to him he asks about them. I might have told him they were there that afternoon, but instead I just say they’re all right. Then other people come and he talks to them. I hate him so much I wish he could be dead.
I listen from one of the window-seats, half behind the curtain. A man is telling about a motor race he has taken part in. One of these days he’ll win, a woman says. In his white jacket, Charles offers the drinks.
Other people come. ‘Well, goodness me!’ Mr Fairlie smiles down at me, and then he sits beside me. Old and tired, he says, not up to this gallivanting. He asks me what I did today and I tell him about the dolls’ museum. He manages on his own, Mrs Upsilla told me, since his wife died. My mother went to the funeral, but he doesn’t talk about that now. ‘Poor old boy,’ Charles said.
You can hardly hear the music because so many people are talking. Every time Charles passes by with another tray he waves to me with a finger and Mr Fairlie says that’s clever. ‘Well, look at you two!’ a woman says and she kisses Mr Fairlie and kisses me, and then my father comes. ‘Who’s sleepy?’ he says and he takes me from the party.
It will be ages before he goes away again: he promises that before he turns the light out, but in the dark it’s like it was in the dream. He’ll go away and he won’t come back, not ever wanting to. There’ll never be the picture gallery again, our favourite picture the picnic on the beach. There’ll never be the café again, there’ll never be the dolls’ museum. He’ll never say, ‘Who’s sleepy?’
In the dark I don’t cry although I want to. I make myself think of something else, of the day there was an accident in the square, of the day a man came to the door, thinking someone else lived in our house. And then I think about Mr Fairlie on his own. I see him as dearly as I did when he was beside me on the window-seat, the big freckles on his forehead, his wisps of white hair, his eyes that don’t look old at all. ‘A surgeon in his day,’ Mrs Upsilla told Charles the morning my mother went to the funeral. I see Mr Fairlie in his house although I’ve never been there. I see him cooking for himself as best he can, and with a Hoover on the stairs. ‘Who’d mind being cut up by Mr Fairlie?’ Charles said once.
The music’s so faint it sounds as if it’s somewhere else, not in our house, and I wonder if they’re dancing. By ten o’clock the party will be over, Mrs Upsilla said, and then they’ll go off to different restaurants, or maybe they’ll all go to the same one, and some will just go home. It’s that kind of party, not lasting for very long, not like some Mrs Upsilla has known. ‘Here?’ Charles asked, surprised when she said that. ‘Here in this house?’ And she said no, not ever an all-night party here, and Charles nodded in his solemn way and said you’d know it. He’ll stay for an hour or so when everyone has gone, helping Mrs Upsilla to clear up. I’ve never been awake then.
Davie says it was some kind of game. Fun, he says, but Abigail shakes her head, her black plaits flying about. I don’t want to talk about it. A Wednesday it was, Mrs Upsilla gone off for the afternoon, Charles tending the flowerbeds in the square.
I try to think about Mr Fairlie again, having to make his bed, doing all the other things his wife did, but Mr Fairlie keeps slipping away. My mother’s dress was crumpled on the floor and I could see it when I peeped out, her necklace thrown down too. Afterwards, she said they should have locked the door.
The music is still far away. The noise of the people isn’t like people talking, more like a hum. I push the bedclothes back and tip-toe to the stairs to look down through the banisters. Mrs Upsilla is dressed specially for the party, and Charles is carrying in another tray of glasses. Mrs Upsilla goes in too, with two plates of tit-bits. Bacon wound round an apricot she makes, and sandwiches no bigger than a stamp. People come out and stand about on the landing. My mother and her friend are there for a moment, before she goes into the drawing-room again. He stays there, his shoulder against the wall by the window, the red curtains drawn over. ‘The child’s on to it,’ was what he said the day before my father came back.
I don’t want to go back to bed because the dream will be there even if I’m not asleep, Mrs Upsilla saying my father’s gone for ever, that of course he had to. When I look for it, the leather suitcase he takes on his travels won’t be there and I’ll know it never will be again. I’ll take out the Egyptian handkerchief and I’ll remember my father spreading it on the café table, showing me the pattern. ‘Our café,’ he calls it.
My mother’s friend looks up from the landing that’s two flights down. He waves and I watch him coming up the stairs. There’s a cigarette hanging from his mouth but he hasn’t lit it and he doesn’t take it out when he puts a finger to his lips. ‘Enough to make them drunk,’ Charles said when he saw the bottles opened on the kitchen table, and I wonder if my mother’s friend is drunk because he takes another cigarette from his packet even though he hasn’t lit the first one.
When he sways he has to reach out for the banister. He laughs, as if that’s just for fun. I can see the sweat on his face, like raindrops on his forehead. His eyes are closed when he takes another step. Slowly he goes on coming up, another step and then another and another. There’s a fleck of spit at the edge of his mouth, the two cigarettes have fallen on to the stair carpet. When I reach out I can touch him. My fingertips are on the dark cloth of his sleeve and I can feel his arm beneath, and everything is different then.
There is his tumbling down, there is the splintered banister. There is the thud, and then another and another. There is the stillness, and Mrs Upsilla looking up at me.
*
I watch them from my window, coming separately to the table they have chosen for breakfast in the garden of the hotel. They place their gifts by my place. They speak to one another, but I never know what they say in private. I turn from the window and powder over the coral lipstick I have just applied. On my seventeenth birthday nothing of my reflection is different in an oval looking-glass.
Downstairs, the salon I pass through is empty, the shutters half in place against the glare of sun that will be bothersome to the hotel guests later in the day.