When she doesn’t say anything, he comes over and puts an arm around her shoulder. “You’re not still mad at me, are you?” he says. “I thought we were okay,” and he kisses her on the forehead.
“Philip…” she begins, but overhead a door opens, and she hears footsteps coming down the stairs. She moves away from her husband, goes to stand at the far side of the room. Becky’s hair hangs down her back in a single plait, and she no longer looks fourteen but like a child of eleven or twelve. She has washed her face and put a Band-Aid on her cheek, a square fabric dressing that covers not just the cut but the skin all around, too. She has removed all the bandages and her feet are in a pair of pink slippers.
“Hey, princess,” Philip says. “What happened to your face?” He puts down his beer and goes over to her. “Did something happen at school? If something’s happening at school you need to tell us. Janice, have you seen this?”
Becky winces as he touches her cheek. “I fell against the fence playing hockey,” she says. “It’s only a scratch.”
“Let me see,” he says, but she takes a step back.
“It’s fine, honestly,” she says, “Mum had a look already. She put some antiseptic on it.”
He throws his hands up in a gesture of defeat. “Okay,” he says. “I guess you girls have it under control.” Picking up his beer, he goes out to the living room.
Later, while Philip is watching TV, Janice goes quietly upstairs. On the half landing, she sees the crystal animals have been reassembled, the casualties glued back together, crudely but effectively, each figure back in its correct place. She stops outside Becky’s bedroom and listens. There is no noise, apart from a soft, papery sound, like pages turning. She tries the door handle but it is locked, and then even the paper sounds stop, and it is so quiet she can hear Mrs. Harding through the walls, moving around the house next door. She considers calling to Becky through the door, but doesn’t know what to say, and is afraid Philip might hear. After a few minutes, she goes back downstairs.
It has started to rain, a drizzle first that quickly becomes a slanting downpour, hammering against the glass of the patio doors. She sits at the kitchen table, looking out at the darkness of the garden, watching rainwater leak through the center join of the doors to form a puddle on the kitchen floor. She watches the puddle grow larger, not bothering, as she would usually do, to fetch a mop and bucket. It is something that happens every time it rains, a fault dating to the doors’ original installation. She has meant to get them fixed, or replaced, but it will be impossible to find a tradesperson this close to Christmas. She will wait until January, when things are quieter. She will do it then.
A man will seldom touch a bound foot. Knowing this, into the smallest of her slippers, let her sew a pouch: There she will keep her darkest secrets.
Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate
Ranelagh on a summer Saturday, the pavements scattered with blossoms, the air pulsating with the rhythmic thrum of lawnmowers. Kevin stood at the window of the Millers’ living room, watching a dozen or so little girls pose for photos in the front garden. His own daughter was among them, her blond curls straightened and pinned in a plait, so that at first, in the midst of so many other plaited heads, he hardly recognized her. The Millers lived in a red-brick Victorian near the church, and Fiona Miller had insisted on the party. It was no trouble, she told anyone who attempted to cry off. It would be a treat for the children, and she and Bob were happy to host it, knowing as they did that not everyone was as fortunate as themselves. The girls shrieked and giggled, buzzing with sugar and summer, and then, remembering themselves, they smoothed the skirts of their white dresses and raised small, careful hands to adjust veils and tiaras. “Lovely, aren’t they?” Kevin said, turning to the woman behind the drinks table. The woman frowned. She wasn’t the caterer but one of Fiona Miller’s friends, perhaps even one of her sisters, and this placed her firmly in the ranks of people who hated him. “Great that the rain’s held off,” he said, because she could hardly find that objectionable, but she began to move bottles around the table as if they were chess pieces, taking them by the necks, setting them down in their new positions with unmistakable hostility.
Sun angled through the slatted blinds, igniting the glitter of cards on the mantelpiece, bouncing off the guns of Bob Miller’s favorite model plane — a WWI Sopwith Camel — displayed on a stand beside the door. Bob’s great-grandfather had served in the London Irish Rifles, losing an arm at Flers-Courcelette. His uniform, and his cap with its badge of harp and crown, was displayed in a large glass case at the end of the Millers’ hall. Also in the case were things belonging to other dead men: bullets, armbands, and letters that Bob had purchased on the Internet. Bob liked to joke that he’d been a military man in a previous life, though in this one he was senior actuary for an insurance company. Kevin turned again to the window. His wife was in the garden also, talking, he saw now, to the man who’d once been his boss. Earlier, he and the man had exchanged terse hellos in the hallway. He’d asked Kevin — and why did everyone feel obliged to ask? — if anything had turned up yet, and with that out of the way, had retreated to a suitable distance. Kevin watched the man rest a hand consolingly on his wife’s arm, while she dabbed at her eyes with a hankie. He needed a drink. He’d hoped the woman at the table might have gone to join the others in the garden, but she remained at her post, arms folded across her chest. On his way out of the room, he touched a finger to the propellers of the little plane, sending the blades spinning into a blur of wood and metal.
He’d brought a flask of vodka for this eventuality, stashed in the inside pocket of his jacket. But he’d been relieved of the jacket as soon as he arrived by Aoife, the Millers’ older daughter. “It’s okay,” he’d said. “I’ll hold on to it. It’s a bit chilly”—though it was late May, the day warm, the air thick with pollen and silky parachutes of dandelion seed that blew in white gusts down the avenue. Aoife — outraged at being on cloakroom duty — had manhandled the jacket off him anyway, and now he felt the missing flask like a phantom limb. As he walked toward the kitchen, the front door opened and the small girls came hurtling down the hall, one of them with a parasol tucked under her arm like a bayonet. He flattened himself against the wall as they went by, a battalion of miniature brides, their white sandals clattering over the tiles. A veil brushed against his arm, the scratch of gauze surprisingly rough. At the end of the Millers’ hall, before the glass case with the disembodied uniform, the girls veered left into the music room, and from there out to the garden to race in circles around the house, their cries rising and falling in Doppler effect.
Fiona Miller was in the kitchen squeezing oranges. She was a dark-haired, tanned woman a few years his senior. “You shouldn’t have come,” she said. She was using an electric juicer, feeding plump oranges in at one end, harvesting slow dribbles in a jug at the other.
“You invited me.”
“I had to invite you. But you shouldn’t have come. What were you thinking, Kevin?”
She had always made him feel small; small and rednecked and lacking in etiquette. What about all that fucking we did? he wanted to say. Where was the etiquette in that? Instead he said, “Does Bob know?” Knowing very well that Bob didn’t.
“Don’t do this to me, Kevin,” she said. “Because if you do, I’m warning you, you’ll be sorry.” She picked up two more oranges and flung them into the juicer. She was wearing a low-cut black dress, and he couldn’t help thinking that her breasts were like two small oranges, and that the nipples pressing against the fabric were like little hard pips. He remembered how they used to feel in his hands, and when his eyes moved back to her face, he saw that she was watching him watching her, and he looked away, out to the hall where his wife was talking to one of the other mothers. She was holding several parasols, none of which belonged to their own daughter; his mother-in-law, who had paid for the outfit, thought parasols tacky. His wife glanced in his direction. It was one of the advantages of being with someone a very long time that he could tell instantly, even at a distance, that she was angry.