— Not her, Tamsin. That boy doesn’t stand a chance. The little cat who always lands on her feet; I like to watch her.
Euan had never been told about the dead boyfriend or the baby.
— It’s Saturday, Daddy. I told you Tamsin was singing tonight; and I’m going to hear her. That’s why I’ve put your sandwich in the fridge.
— Singing? What kind of singing?
— With the choral society. Missa Solemnis. I said, if you wanted to come, we could use the wheelchair, it’s all fixed up for that now at the concert hall. I could still phone and try for tickets.
— I don’t want tickets. What would I want tickets for? I’m too sick to go out, why don’t you ever listen to me tell you that? You try to fuss me into things, try to distract me, pretend everything is still all right, as if I was an infant. I accept, you see, he explained — with bad-tempered mock patience, as if to a spiritual defective — I accept this … this doom. I accept it.
— What’s given on earth is not final, she offered, rather offhandedly, as consolation.
He turned on her a look white with rage, discovering his precious words in her mouth. What? he spat out, what?
He screwed up his face, putting his hand to his ear in a derisive pantomime of deafness. His enunciation was icily exact.
— I have no idea what you are talking about.
* * *
ELAINE CAME to see Marian in school when Marian was busy in her office making last-minute adjustments to the timetable for public examinations. It was four o’clock and the great tide of children had receded from the site, leaving only the last flotsam and jetsam of individuals in the corridors and rooms. A greenish summer light came in the high windows of the office, propped open to their full extent, and made it aquarium-like; dapples of light floated across the backs of Marian’s hands as she pasted strips of paper across some names, wrote in others in neat black ink.
Elaine had found another job. She would work out her month with Euan, but then Marian would have to find someone else. And then when Marian said she was very sorry to see Elaine go, but she understood that her father wasn’t an easy man to work for, Elaine explained that it wasn’t simply that, there was something else; there was Marian’s daughter.
— Mark’s everything I’ve got, she said. And I don’t want to see him come to grief.
Marian ran her fingers through the liquid-seeming light on the timetable. To grief, she thought. I suppose that’s what it is.
— Why? What do you imagine is going on?
Elaine trembled with the intensity of her opposition. I’m not stupid.
— I suppose I am, said Marian. Might they not just be friends?
— Bite marks on his chest, said Elaine, and Marian blushed. I’m sorry for what happened to your daughter. But Mark’s got so much ahead of him. I don’t want him to get mixed up in anything.
Marian was afraid that Elaine would see that she didn’t want Mark to get mixed up in anything either; it didn’t seem supportive of Tamsin.
— I’ll talk to her, she said. I’ll try and find out what’s happening.
— Just so long as you’re aware of my views, said Elaine. I’d rather they didn’t meet, so I won’t be bringing Mark to Euan’s anymore, for these last weeks.
— Fair enough. Although my father will miss him.
Elaine gave a qualified grunt of assent, tucking in her double chin; she was thinking perhaps that she and her son would be better rid of the whole dangerous family.
When Elaine had gone — neat heels tapping smartly in the empty corridor — Marian had her timetable to think about, and behind that the worry about Euan and whether she could face the idea of his going into a home or whether she had to go through trying to find another housekeeper. She hardly had time to consider the bother of Tamsin and Mark; and then when she walked to get her car, the last one parked in the concrete area behind the labs, there were two dogs who had been mating and were still embarrassingly and absurdly stuck together. They stood side by side, shamedly ignoring one another, pretending they weren’t attached at their rear ends. Wherever one stepped the other had to shuffle dejectedly alongside, and both gave out little whimpers of pain when they moved. Marian couldn’t tell which one was the male. She felt responsible; was one supposed to throw cold water? But she would have to walk a long way back to get water; and what if it was cruel? She also felt slightly disgusted and humiliated; she hoped no one was around to see her seeing this and not knowing what to do. She was supposed to be so sensible and unsqueamish.
Then from nowhere came the thought of “bite marks” like a wave of heat, making her wet under the arms; avoiding the pantomime-horse-dogs’ pleading looks she got quickly into her car, drove off, and left them. Nature ought to have its own cure for such a wretched mess; it wasn’t any of her business. How problematic, how foolish, it all was. Thank goodness she was well out of it (twenty years out of it, although she didn’t confess that to anyone in case they thought she was sick or deprived): the abjectness, the pairing up, the whimpering, the wet and sucking flesh. Something for dogs and teenagers.
* * *
MARIAN OFTEN CAME IN from school to find Tamsin and Mark together in the house. She wondered at the amount of time off from work Tamsin seemed to be taking. More, she worried about Mark’s schoolwork: he used to spend all his free time in the library. They weren’t exactly furtive when she came in; they weren’t even always in Tamsin’s room, sometimes they were drinking coffee on the sofa or beer on the patio. They didn’t blush or look resentful at being interrupted. Mark would stand up politely; he still called her Mrs. Menges.
He had his hair cut differently. What a handsome pair they made; you couldn’t help thinking that, the tall fair boy with his attentive ironic watchfulness, ready to joke, the slight dark fey girl leading him after her by an invisible silken cord. If Mark began talking to Marian about work and school, then Tamsin tugged. A raised eyebrow, a low-voiced word left behind her as she exited through a door; with an apologetic glance to Marian, as though he knew she appreciated it couldn’t be any other way, Mark was pulled after. Neither Mark nor Tamsin ever offered any explanation for their suddenly spending so much time together, or any name for their relationship. Their languorous circumnavigations from TV to stereo to garden to bedroom to TV again filled up Marian’s house when they were there, and she found herself skulking in the kitchen or going into her own bedroom to be out of their way.
She dutifully told Mark that his mother was worried and wasn’t happy that he was spending all his time with Tamsin. He reassured her kindly that he was working as hard as ever, but she wasn’t any more convinced than Elaine would have been; there was a distracted dry glitter in his eye that suggested to her the phase of the overturning of goals and idols, the phase of the discovery of secret possibilities so all-altering that in pursuit of them any loyalties could be sacrificed, any assurances given. When school started up again after the summer holidays Mark resumed attending his A-level classes diligently, but while he was listening to her he was sometimes unconsciously smiling at something else.
One day as Marian came in through the front door there was a flash of crimson across the landing at the top of the stairs: Tamsin running out of Marian’s bedroom (the only room with a full-length mirror) in a crimson dress, a stunning full-length dress in clinging satin cut on the cross over her hips, long black beads (Marian’s?) whipping after her. A whirl of Tamsin like a paparazzo’s snatch of film star, loud laughter cut off, a door (Tamsin’s bedroom door) pulled shut with a bang. Left for Marian on the wrong side of the door was the not-quite-quiet of the shut out. From behind the door came, warm and thick as dove song or slow cooking, the burbling of silly talk, the up and down crooning of pleasure: not sex noises, just pleasurable intimacy. For the first time, something was being deliberately hidden from her. She couldn’t exactly stride up and throw open the door upon them, though. After all, they were allowed to do whatever they might choose to do in there.