‘Steph, of course you can’t go with him.’
Michael said, ‘You’ve got things to do here. You have to stay here and wait. If they come, you’ve got to be here to tell them. You tell them Mr Brookes stayed all morning but he left before lunch. He spent the morning with Charlie, right?’
Steph stared at them both for a few moments. Then she said, ‘With Charlie and me. He wasn’t used to babies. He just watched. We were outside on the playmat; me and Charlie played with his cars and the blue rabbit.’
‘Mainly he watched. But he did put on the Cookie Monster glove puppet and did some funny voices for him,’ Jean suggested.
‘Charlie hates that puppet,’ Steph said. ‘Mr Brookes just watched. He didn’t seem very happy.’
‘Yes! You’re right, he did seem withdrawn. Perhaps he was depressed, but we hadn’t met him before so we thought it was just shyness,’ Jean said. ‘He said very little. He didn’t say anything about his holiday. But he read to Charlie out of one of his books.’
‘Yes, he read him The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Then he carried Charlie round the garden and showed him the flowers. Oh, yes, and he gave him his bottle,’ Steph said, with finality. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Now you’ve mentioned it,’ Jean said, ‘yes, I think I do.’
‘We said to ourselves when he’d gone, what a nice man.’
‘Very serious, and quiet, but nice. And we noticed how he said goodbye to Charlie, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, oh yes. We noticed-what?’
‘How he whispered in his ear and held him tight, and for such a long time. How his eyes were watering when he handed him back, as if he were leaving for the other side of the world! After he’d gone, we said, well, he clearly adores that grandson of his.’
‘We said, lucky little Charlie.’
‘So we did.’
‘And we thought no more about it.’
Michael put on gumboots, found goggles, heavy gardening gloves, a long gardening apron. Jean found two rolls of plastic bin liners and a bag of carefully folded supermarket carrier bags that she had saved from Michael’s shopping trips. He fetched the chain saw and took it, with bin liners and bags, to the pool pavilion. Carefully he closed the French windows behind him, entered the bathroom and closed that door too. A little later, when Steph and Jean heard, faintly, the cough of the motor, they did not remark upon it to each other. They were busy. There were the clothes from yesterday to burn, including shoes and a panama hat. There were the clothes Gordon Brookes had packed for his holiday, the backpack itself, his walking boots and anorak, too. Together they carried armloads down between the vegetable rows to the patch of ground behind the walled garden. Michael had forbidden them to use petrol, so Jean scattered a whole box of firelighters under a heap of kindling, sloshed a bottle of methylated spirit over it and flung in a match. She and Steph stood back and watched as flames whirled upwards, sucking breath out of the air that began to tremble against the sky. It was still early, but presently it would be time to fetch Charlie. Steadily they began to feed the fire. It would smoulder for at least a day and a night, giving off the choking smells of charring and melting cotton, canvas and plastic, but without discussing it, Jean and Steph both knew that they wanted the first and fiercest blazing of Gordon Brookes’s belongings to be over before Charlie came. They wanted to give him a nice, ordinary day. They all needed it, and they would try to make it so, despite the edgy smell of burning that would hang in the air, and the constant background noise of raw grating, as a chainsaw blade some distance away met and sliced into something solid, yet wet-sounding.
The surface of the day passed. In the house the hours and minutes presented themselves and were filled conventionally. Outside it clouded over and rained for a short time, reducing the fire to sullen smoking and keeping them indoors. Charlie was now eating variously coloured forms of creamy slop that Steph prepared for him, and he slept off his lunch of mashed banana and avocado while she began on a drawing of a jar of honeysuckle that she had picked and placed on the kitchen table. But even after the rain the day remained close and muggy. Steph’s head began to ache and she fell asleep.
Jean fussed around over unnecessary jobs in the house, with a set look on her face. Late in the afternoon, after Steph had left to take Charlie back, she began to assemble and wrap sandwiches, cake and fruit. She filled flasks with tea. She brought down rugs, and folded clean clothes for Michael and put them in his backpack. It soothed her to have such sensible, innocuous things to do. An aspiration to wholesomeness felt important and necessary now, so as she worked on the preparations she kept well to the back of her mind the actual purpose of the journey. And she curbed a wish to whirl round tackling six things at once, and forced herself to move slowly, concentrating on doing everything that a good mother should to ensure that Michael would be as comfortable as possible in the circumstances.
But she was fretting about Michael’s being disqualified to drive, and the van’s being uninsured, details that he had overlooked so often in the past that it seemed to Jean that perhaps it was pernickety to worry about them now. She had not worried, had she, the countless times he had gone off in the van with her careful shopping list in his hand, smiling and pretending not to hear the last minute things she would be reminding him about at the door. ‘Only get asparagus if it’s English, don’t forget. Oh, shampoo! Shampoo, I forgot! Oh, just anything, as long as it’s for dry hair. No, get Wella. Or Pantene, but make sure it’s for dry hair. Oh, anything will do.’ But those trips had been short and local. Then there was the van itself. It was perfect in one way, being solid-sided. But it was old, a liability on a long journey.
Among the keys in the teapot had been sets of car keys. Jean had never even looked properly inside the double doors of the old stable buildings farthest from the house, but now, with the keys in her hand, she made her way across the gravel, past the log store and outbuildings flanking the courtyard, round to the line of disused stables. She unlocked the doors and hauled them open. There were three cars. She dismissed the sports car at once. There was a large jeep-like thing that looked new and tough, just right for a long journey, but it was full of seats and had windows all the way round it. There seemed to be no boot to speak of. The other car was a more ordinary-looking thing- a Mercedes, Jean thought, knowing little about cars- that seemed solid and safe. Most important, it had what looked like an ordinary boot. Satisfied, Jean returned to the house.
Michael emerged from the pool pavilion that evening at around eight o’clock. He pulled off the boots and stripped, and wearing only underpants, walked straight into the pool. He did not swim, but simply stood twisting his hands in the water, scooping it up over his shoulders and torso, rubbing cupped handfuls of it over and over his face. He plunged his head under for a few moments and when he brought it up again, he was shivering. Still he stood with his arms clasped round himself, his eyes clamped tight shut and teeth clattering. It was early July, but when the sun had set it had taken all the heat from the air, leaving a coolness in the sky that claimed the evening for itself. He tramped out of the water and back to the house, looking pinched; a stooped, walking ache, Jean thought, watching him through the kitchen window. She handed him a towel at the door, because he would not come inside.
And still he was not finished. He went back to the poolside through the greying light, and got dressed. He once again put on the gumboots and then unhooked from the wall the hose that was used for cleaning the pool, and took it into the pavilion. Inside, he snapped on the lights. A brash yellow glare spilled through the windows onto the grass outside, and as he moved around, daggers of light and shadow lurched and split on the surface of the pool. In the bathroom he ran sharp jets of water up and down the walls and ceiling, and over and around the sealed bags on the floor. He lifted the circular drain cover, and then he shot blades of water into every corner of the bathroom, every surface and angle, until he had sliced and whipped every crumb of salt, every hair, every shard and unnameable remnant of Gordon Brookes down into the drain, and watched them disappear. Then he returned to the poolside and replaced the hose, pulled off the boots and clothes and waded in again, where he lay, floating, shivering and weeping with cold and shock. This time when he came back to the house Jean demanded that he go upstairs and get in a hot bath. Afterwards he tried to rest, but could not sleep. Later Steph tiptoed in with a tray, but he could not eat. Jean picked up his soaked, stained clothes from the poolside and put them in a bag to burn later.