— Oh, Toby dear, she said, your mother will be so delighted to have you back.
— Shall I wake her? asked Clare.
— I don’t know. Maybe. Has Tamsin told you, Toby, that Naomi’s staying with us for a while?
— I did phone the Leigh Mills number and spoke to Angie, but she was pretty weird.
— You didn’t mention that your mother might be here?
— I didn’t say anything. She hung up.
— It’s better if she doesn’t know Naomi’s here for the moment.
— Shouldn’t I wake her? said Clare. Wouldn’t she want us to?
Marian shrugged. You can try. I’ll make a pot of tea.
Toby followed Clare up the stairs. Halfway up, on the little landing, she turned and clutched his arms and looked desperately into his face.
— Oh, Toby, my life’s such a mess — has Tamsin told you? Bram and I have separated, and I’m living here, and I go there to look after the children on weekends. I haven’t managed to sort out anything else yet, because I’m so miserable, everything’s more hideous and horrible than I ever could have imagined.
— Separated? Toby felt himself blushing; he wasn’t used to Clare’s taking much notice of him, she could be condescending and overbearing. I don’t believe it.
Her face distorted in a silent ugly spasm, her nose and eyes reddened, and her cheeks were wet with tears.
— I know. But I can’t talk about it now.
— But you and Bram—
— No, she said, wiping her face on her sleeve resolutely and continuing up the stairs. Not now. We’ve got to go and wake up Naomi.
He stepped through the spare-room door into the thick familiar soup of his mother’s smells: incense and aromatherapy oils and sweat and drink, the warning smell of drink, rich as Christmas pudding. Naomi was snoring; she was a mound under a duvet with only a swirl of black hair showing on the pillow: when Clare switched on a bedside lamp whose shade was swathed in a purple silk shawl, the mound snorted and protested and a hand tweaked the duvet protectively over her oblivion. He would have known it was his mother’s room even if she hadn’t been in it because every surface of Marian’s sensible spare-room furniture was laden with Naomi’s intimate clutter: bangles and rainbow candles and perfume bottles and scarves; a stone painted with Inuit designs; a Victorian coffee cup with a gold rim and no saucer; paperback books with pages furry and splayed and turned down.
Clare sat down on the bed beside the mound.
— Naomi, she called. Wake up! Look who’s here, who’s come back. It’s Toby!
The mound didn’t stir. Clare looked at Toby. She’s been drinking a lot, she whispered. There’ve been terrible things with Angie. It’s like the other times. She picked up an empty wine bottle from the floor. She brought this up to bed half full. And she’d already had most of another bottle.
Toby nodded. He crouched down beside where the mound’s head must be.
— Mum? Are you in there? It’s me.
— Toby? There was a disturbance under the duvet, and then came the thickened false wooden voice that always seemed to him to be his mother’s counterpart to the ugly little anxiety manikin that sat in his chest. What are you doing here?
— I’ve come home.
— Where’ve you been?
— Oh, you know, all round India, and then Nepal. I flew from Nepal the day before yesterday.
Naomi pushed back the duvet and then heaved herself around and up onto her pillows, frowning in concentration as if she were balancing something heavy and slippery that rolled inside her. Her makeup was smeared under her eyes like ashes; her skin had erupted across her cheekbones in a brick-colored rash. She had gone to sleep in dangling earrings, one of which was twisted back to front, and a black satiny slip whose border cut like a band across one bulging breast exposed almost to the dark nipple. Clare tugged up her petticoat strap until she was decent.
— Did they tell you I wasn’t feeling too good tonight? Do you know about what happened with Angie?
— They told me something.
— I fouled up again.
— It wasn’t you, Mum.
— Marian’s so kind. I’m such a nuisance.
— That’s not what anybody thinks, said Clare.
— I’ve let everybody down again. I’ve let Toby down. I didn’t want him to come back to this.
When his mother had been drinking, Toby always felt as if he was in contact with a simulacrum, a mere unsatisfactory representative of her real self. She didn’t look quite like the real Naomi; she sounded louder, as though her volume control knob had been cavalierly twisted up at some interior party. Her thoughts were pretend thoughts, her emotions were ones an impersonator might have guessed at and acted. This simulacrum must be soothed and propitiated but at the same time ruthlessly shut out; he was expert at this deception.
— Now I’m home, he said, everything’ll be fine. I’ll be able to look after you.
— Clare’s got troubles of her own, she said. She doesn’t want to be bothered with me.
— Don’t be silly, said Clare. We’re both in the same boat.
— I’ve got a good son, haven’t I? He’s a good boy. I must have done something right.
— You haven’t done anything wrong, said Toby.
* * *
MARIAN IN dressing gown and slippers made up a bed for Toby in the dawn light.
Clare had offered to sleep on the mattress in Tamsin’s room so that Toby could have the sofa bed in the study.
— No fear, said Tamsin. I’d never get any sleep, holed up next to the fountain of eternal sorrow. Toby can come in with me. It’ll be like the old days.
— I suppose it’s all right, said Marian.
— Oh, for God’s sake, Mum.
When Tamsin and Toby were little they had shared a bedroom for several years in the house in Kingsmile where their father lived then with Naomi. (Tamsin and Clare used to go to Marian’s on weekends.) Their room was a wild place at the very top of the four-story skinny Georgian house: painted white, bare of furniture except their mattresses on the floor, out of earshot of the adult life that washed around in the rooms downstairs. They developed an elaborate ritual of games and magics and taboos that no one outside the room knew much about: invisible uncrossable lines on the floor divided up their space, in the ceiling that came down at odd angles under the roof there were lucky cracks to touch, there was a cursed corner with a dirty broken baseboard they must not even look into. Whatever lived and groaned up behind the ornate cast-iron flap that closed off the chimney from the little empty fireplace must be propitiated with offerings stolen from downstairs: currants, dry pasta, lentils, salt. Certain games must be played at certain times of day or year or on particular occasions. They had a torture game where one of them thought of a secret and the other one had to try and persuade the first one to tell, by rubbing strong toothpaste onto the tongue, say, or giving Chinese burns, or eating chocolate without offering any. Clare was sometimes allowed to join in this one but she went too fast and hurt too much too quickly, not appreciating the point of the long-drawn-out exquisite contest of endurance. Some games were self-consciously childlike, too young for them, commemorative of previous phases of their lives: a game of trains, for instance, played ritually on the day that guests departed.
There was a game for when there was a grown-up dinner party on downstairs. Tamsin and Toby would get into the same bed, sitting up with the sheet draped over their heads like a tent, and in a mixture of telling and acting and urgent sotto voce planning, they went through adventures featuring Han Solo and Luke Sky-walker against the evil amphibian Mr. Beale, who led an army of seals. Tamsin and Toby were not Han Solo or Luke Skywalker themselves, they were only involved with them; Tamsin tended and consoled them when they were injured, crooning to them and stroking their invisible faces. If the party downstairs was a full-blown party, things got crazy; Clare joined in too and any other children who were staying over. They would barricade off the top floor with mattresses across the top of the stairs; they sent foraging parties down to spy on the grown-ups, to return with reports on who was drunk, who was dancing, who was kissing, who was quarreling or crying. They brought back stolen food and drink. They kept guard, with a system of Red Alerts to warn of any adults advancing too far up the stairs. The sense of immediate infinite possibilities snatched the breath out of their lungs, infected them with a heady energy they didn’t know what to do with, so they screamed and ran about and threw themselves onto the beds and on top of each other, panting; they stole makeup and clothes and dressed up, boys and girls, and danced and sang in lurid mockery of their parents down below, waggling their hips and rolling their eyes. Children from nice quiet homes whose parents didn’t let them do things went craziest. It was they who dragged mattresses, who drank vodka. Clare and Tamsin and Toby would watch them (there was no need to encourage them) with a certain satisfaction, as if this wildness that lay just under the calm surface of life was something all children ought to be initiated into, for their own safety.