Toby thought his mother might be dead.
Then, while Angie hung over her, weight balanced on her arms, Naomi turned herself over in one movement, face down onto the floor, wrapping her arms around her head, crying abandonedly.
— You see? said Angie, thumping down on her again, making Naomi bounce and give out a sobbing grunt. Didn’t I?
Then Toby saw, very clearly, a package lying on the carpet beside the two women, wrapped in soft thick opaque plastic, real with the banality of real solid things. He looked at it without recognition for a few seconds, but curiously, wondering what it had to do with the scene. As soon as he remembered what it was and was properly astonished at seeing it there, it disappeared.
Angie was rocking more gently now on top of Naomi, back and forward and from side to side. The crying grew duller and quieter. Angie bent forward and spoke in a different, coaxing, tone into the hair on the back of Naomi’s neck.
— So what are you going to do? she said huskily, as if it was a tease Naomi would enjoy too. What are you going to do with him? Come on.
Toby retreated down the steps. He tried not to crunch the gravel on the path to the front of the house. The leaves of the trees dappling the bright sunshine as he made his way through the suburban street reminded him of what he’d just been watching, as if he were seeing it on film.
— That neanderthal, Angie had also said. The graduate. You’ve got to be joking.
It occurred to him that from inside the shadowy room the doorway must have been a brilliant oblong of light, and that when he stood blocking it he must have cast a deep film-noir shadow, changing everything inside. His mother might have had her eyes closed all that time. She might have. But Angie had surely known that he was standing there.
A CORRIDOR ran the length of the big house, from the top of the stairs at one end to a tall arched window at the other end, looking out over a sloping field down to the lake. Five bedrooms opened off each side of the corridor, and the last room before the arched window was a bathroom, the only bathroom. The bath had feet and thundering taps and peat-brown not-quite-hot water; the toilet had an overhead cistern and a chain to pull. The children had never had a chain to pull before, and they all wanted to use it. Only Coco was tall enough to reach by himself; Clare had to lift Lily up and help her give the sharp tug that emptied down more peat-brown water (they thought it was dirty). Then Rose balanced anxiously, gripping with her hands on the edge of the big wooden seat, and dribbled her tiny wee into the bowl. They waited for the cistern to finish its slow self-absorbed water music and be full again for her turn.
This was County Clare, Ireland.
There were enough rooms for everyone staying there that summer to have slept alone if they had wanted; but out of lack of experience in such solitude-bestowing living space, they all clustered together into the four bedrooms nearest the bathroom. Even Bram’s two sisters, aged twenty-seven and thirty-one, slept in a twin bedroom together, saying they needed to “catch up on their gossip.” Clare and Bram’s bedroom had damp-stained 1960s orange- and pink-flowered wallpaper, a green satin bedspread, and orange striped curtains in a felty synthetic material that floated rather than hung and kept out no light at all.
You could see the lake from their window too. When Clare woke early, earlier than she ever did at home — by nature she was sluggish in the mornings and clung to the warm odorous den of sheets and blankets — she got up and stood in her nightdress in the window recess behind the floaty curtains. She saw dawn, she heard the dawn chorus, she saw mists lying like a layer of white milk on the fields and water, she heard the day start up outside with the multitudinous lives of animals and birds and plants, hours before the humans stirred inside the house. The cold climbed up inside her nightdress from her feet on the bare boards. She stood in a kind of ecstasy until her feet got so cold she was uncomfortable; then she put socks on and retreated back to bed to warm herself up against Bram.
This ecstasy of hers was probably absurd, in relation to the man she was obsessing about (she couldn’t call him her lover, he wasn’t that yet). As far as she knew, he — David — wasn’t in the least interested in natural things; he liked London and cars and sound technology. It was Bram her partner, and not David, who was the early riser, the birdwatcher and morning-lover and fresh-air enthusiast. David’s taste as far as she knew (she hadn’t been to his flat yet) was austerely urban and contemporary. Austerely: she felt a quiver of pleasurable chastisement at the thought of how he would cut through the half-considered shell of her homemaking with its cozy clutter.
David’s preferences excited her as if they were personal messages. At home she had taken to watching all the television programs he had said he liked; she had brought on holiday with her the tapes of music he had recommended, obscure jungle and drum and bass, types of music Clare had hardly known about three months ago. Whenever she got a chance to drive the car down to the shop on her own she played them, imagining him watching her to the soundtrack of the music, imagining him taking pleasure in the competence of her driving and the chic of her sunglasses. There was a moment’s dislocation when she turned off the ignition and the music stopped: a flicker, like shame, of self-consciousness left high and dry.
It would be a fine day. They were incredibly lucky with the weather on this holiday. The mini-market was cavelike, dark, humming with freezers, thin on temptations, odorous with cauliflower. They only seemed to sell one flavor of crisps; when she wanted a pound bag of flour, they opened a three-pound bag in spite of her protests and weighed out a third for her; they sent presents of sweets up for the children every time. Usually Clare was exaggeratedly deferential on her holidays, scrupulously aware of her outsider’s ineptness. She knew enough about Irish history to have felt apologetic for her English yawing vowels and her problems understanding what was said to her, and to have felt wincingly what reverberations might be touched off by an English family renting a Big House, even a small Big House, for their holiday. But that summer she felt licensed in her privilege, lordly in her assumption of the pleasures of the place. (Because of it she was probably friendlier and better liked.) She imagined she was responsible for the fine weather, too.
* * *
GENEVIEVE VEREY had been so disgusted by the burden of romance in the name her mother gave her that when it came to names for her own children she simply looked up surnames in the Times deaths column and chose something. So her son was Bramford and her two daughters (one older, one younger than Bram) were Tinsley and Opie. Clare could imagine Genny getting over the whole business of the births with the same pragmatism, the same slightly theatrical gestures of contempt for other people’s fuss. She had seen photographs of the young Genny, recognizable — in spite of the white hair and the thickened flesh that had come since — because of that bright scornful readiness in her expression. The old-fashioned kind of childbirth would have suited her, enema and shaved pubes, jollying injunctions to be a good girl and not make a row, new baby taken off to a nursery so mother could get a decent night’s sleep. It was impossible to imagine her in the midst of all the palaver of Clare’s generation, beanbags and water births, bonding and demand feeding; impossible to imagine hers as one of those middle-class households thrown into a kind of slack excruciated martyrdom for years on end by sleep problems and the crisis of belief in adult authority.