‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘She’s in here stuffing herself with our food and she hasn’t even told you who she is?’
‘Shut up!’
He looked astonished and in his astonishment, stepped forwards.
The girl was out of the door and away, her feet soundless on the path.
‘For God’s sake, Paula.’
‘No, actually, for God’s sake, Adrian. Why did you frighten her like that? That child’s hungry – heaven knows when she last ate a proper meal.’
‘And it’s all down to us to remedy that, is it? You know what’ll happen, don’t you? Come six o’clock the lot of them will be round here and you’ll be giving them a full cooked meal, and where do you suppose it will end? Next thing, they’ll be living here.’
‘No,’ Paula said, clearing the crockery. ‘They won’t. But if they come back for more food, they can have it. Have you ever been hungry?’
‘Well of course I’ve been hungry. So have you – everyone’s been hungry.’
‘Yes and known where the next meal was coming from and when. Not the same.’
He stood at the sink, sloshing cold water over his face and shoulders. The water sprayed over the draining board onto the floor.
‘You could have a cold shower,’ Paula said.
For the week that he was home there was no sign of the children. Adrian insisted on their taking numerous walks, in spite of the heat.
‘Gypsies,’ he said one day, panting up the slope between overhanging trees. ‘They’ll have moved on. You could tell they were Gypsy kids.’
‘How?’
‘Thieving. Never at school. Besides, they had a Gypsy look.’
‘A Gypsy look?’
‘You know what I mean. Swarthy.’
‘The little boys were quite fair.’
Adrian pushed ahead of her as the path widened.
On Monday he left at seven o’clock for work and by nine two of the children were hanging about near the gate.
‘If those kids come back, you don’t feed them, OK? It’s like stray cats. Once you start…’
She made a pile of toast and took it out to them, with a bought fruitcake. They snatched and ran. Paula followed.
It was a caravan, parked in the corner of a field, hidden behind a thicket away from the road and the houses. She saw them streak along, keeping close to the hedge, and disappear inside. Through the open door she saw a table and a woman’s back against the light. After a few moments the woman came out. There was a white plastic garden chair beside the caravan steps in which she sat heavily and turned her face to the sun.
Everything went quiet. Paula went on, keeping so close to the hedge that brambles scraped her bare arms.
The caravan was quite large with a gas cylinder attached to the back and a rainwater butt. Two of the children, the boys, had come to the doorway and were staring at Paula in the usual hostile way, eyes like pebbles.
The girl appeared behind them.
‘Ma.’
It was almost a whisper, like a warning.
The woman opened her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ Paula said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
The children huddled together.
‘Creeping up like that. Who the fuck are you?’ She half-turned her head. ‘You lot get back in.’
The huddle vanished.
‘Oh, I get it. You’re the one that hands out food. What the fuck do you mean by that?’
Paula cleared her throat.
‘We don’t need handouts. We’re not charity cases.’
‘I was only – they seemed hungry.’
‘Yes, well they’re not.’
‘They ate what I gave them.’
‘’Course they did, they’re kids – what do you expect?’
‘They were eating the bird nuts.’
The woman laughed. It was hard to tell her age.
‘And berries.’
‘How long you lived round here? They’ll eat anything. Why not?’
‘The berries weren’t ripe and the bird nuts – they’re not really for humans to eat.’
The woman laughed again and hauled herself out of the chair.
‘Just leave them be.’
‘Shouldn’t your children be at school?’
But she was climbing the steps back into the caravan.
‘You sod off,’ she said without looking round.
Paula glimpsed the children behind her. The van was in full sun and she imagined them inside the hot space, crowded together, fractious, tempers short. She wondered if they were beaten. The thought was upsetting, but there was nothing she could do. Eventually she had to retreat.
‘What did I tell you?’
The heat was making Adrian bad tempered at the end of every day.
‘You’ve brought it on yourself. Of course they’re not hungry. They get every benefit going. They’re taking you for a mug.’
He went out into the humid garden with a can of beer.
If they were not hungry would they be bothered to steal food? She looked at her painting of a badger disappearing down a hole.
Why would they?
They had wolfed down the toast as if they hadn’t eaten for days. Was that what children normally did? She doubted it.
Adrian had taken off his shirt and shoes, and was lying on the grass with the beer can held to his chest.
‘Like a cattle truck,’ he said, ‘going and coming back. Worse coming back. You don’t know what heat’s like until you’ve been on that six thirty train.’
They were not eating till late on these nights and Adrian went up to bed immediately afterwards. The food lay heavy on his stomach, making him snore. Paula had taken to sleeping on a rug in the garden. Only a brief dawn chill and the dew sent her inside, an hour before his alarm went off.
She lay thinking of the girl, cramming hot toast into her mouth.
No one would eat like that if they weren’t ravenous. No child would munch bird nuts and steal half-boxes of cornflakes.
The alarm sounded.
Adrian groaned and pushed back the single sheet.
Paula woke to the sound of his raised voice coming from outside.
‘I’ll take my belt to you, do you hear me? And I’m sending for the police. We’re sick of you. Now bugger off!’
Paula raced downstairs.
‘Little sods. Opened the door and they were in here, in this kitchen. Helping themselves to that.’
The half-eaten custard tart had been under cling film.
‘You encouraged them. You started this.’
She did not go out shopping until late afternoon, when the sky had turned inky and the air was so moist she felt as if she were trying to breathe underwater. The storm broke as she was checking out, crashing directly overhead. She went to the café and sat watching the car park flood and felt as if she were waiting for something, suspended between two places, two worlds.
‘It’s unreal,’ a woman at the next table said.
Adrian sent a text to say his train was delayed: ‘f…ing line flooded’. She had another coffee.
When she got back, the lane was awash with earth and branches and stones. The front path was a stream.
But it was not the storm that had broken open the door and smashed a couple of panes in the lean-to; not the storm that had smeared her paints all over her half-finished work; not the storm that had thrown china onto the kitchen floor, deposited excrement on the worktop and left puddles of urine on the floor.
Paula sat down, shaking.
Thunder grumbled in the distance and the sky was sulphurous.
When Adrian got in just after ten she was still sitting there in the half-dark.
‘Bugger’ he said, standing in the doorway, his hair plastered to his forehead. ‘Oh bugger.’
She expected him to blame her, but he did not. He said nothing at all, just dropped his jacket onto the chair and helped her clear up, unloaded the car and put the groceries away, taped a piece of plywood over the broken windows.