This statement of intent had the effect both of incensing Janie and of bringing about, at the heart of her tantrum, a form of submission. Somehow Adam got her coat on and then we were walking back up the road. Several of the women looked at us as we passed. They appeared to disapprove of us.
‘You’d think it would be easy, but it’s not,’ Adam said, when Janie was walking ahead. ‘It’s not like it is with your own child. You get all the responsibility and none of the pleasure. Lisa says I try to control her too much.’
‘I want my mummy!’ bellowed Janie, activated by the mention of her mother’s name.
‘The problem is, if you can’t be in control, what are you left with? You’re left with being a saint. You become a sort of victim in your own life. Every time I look at her,’ he added in a low voice, ‘I see her father. I can’t help it. I see his face looking out of hers. I feel like I’m living with a rival.’ After a while, he added: ‘The baby’s been really good. It’s helped us all to feel we’re more of a family.’
When we got back to the house Janie stepped over the baby in order to get out into the manicured back garden, where she spent the rest of the afternoon jumping over a broomstick she had laid horizontally across two chairs, her ponytail bobbing, tapping her own flank with a little riding crop each time she made the approach. I took Hamish down to the harbour to look at the boats. The tide was out and so they lay on their sides in the mud. Their naked, round underbellies dried helplessly in the wind. Rope and rigging and faded orange buoys clung to their sleeping forms. There was a little stone pier and I sat there on a bench while Hamish played with some green fisherman’s nets that were lying tangled against a wall. Because the tide was out there was no water around the pier either, just a vacant drop on all sides. The wind blew relentlessly. Presently Adam appeared on the esplanade. He waved his arm, clutching his coat around himself. As he came up the pier the wind blew his clothes flat against his body and I noticed how broad and formless he had become, as though he had grown rings around himself, like a vegetable left too long in the ground. His coat was square and brown and padded. His fair hair stood sideways in the wind. He looked like a less fortunate relation of the Adam I had first known. He sat down beside me on the bench.
‘Lisa’s back at the house. She’s made some food for Hamish.’
‘That’s nice of her,’ I said.
‘She’s a rock,’ Adam stated, into the wind. After a while he said: ‘Do you mind if we stop at mum’s on the way back? I want to see if she wants a lift to the hospital. It’s visiting time at six. There’s no point in all of us going separately.’
‘Not at all.’
‘I can’t get hold of Vivian. She must have set off on her own.’
We walked back up the pier and into the middle of Doniford. The shops were all closed. Most of them were charity shops: as we passed their darkened windows I could see the shapes of old furniture and shelves indistinctly cluttered with bric-à-brac, and ghostly racks of clothes, all in deep tents of shadow like little museums of abandonment. We turned down an alleyway and then emerged on the seafront again, where a terrace of grand Regency houses looked out over the brown, drained harbour. Adam stopped at one of these houses and banged the brass knocker. I noticed in the window a little poster facing out on to the street, fixed to the glass. It said ‘57 % Say No!’
‘No to what?’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
I pointed at the poster.
‘Fifty-seven per cent say no to what?’
The door opened. A man stood there.
‘Well, well,’ he said.
It was Adam’s uncle David. He was wearing a plum-coloured silk robe tied around the waist with a shirt and tie and trousers on underneath.
‘We won’t keep you,’ Adam said. ‘I just wanted a word with mum.’
David arched an eyebrow. Behind him I could see a very elegant hallway, whose most striking characteristic was that everything in it was white. The walls were white and the floor was tiled with white marble and a white chandelier hung overhead. There was a little antique bureau and chair, also white, on top of which stood a bowl of white roses.
‘Actually, she’s flown the coop,’ he said, standing back to allow us in. ‘Some guru she knows about is talking at the town hall in Taunton. The five pliers of something, what was it, there’s a leaflet about it somewhere — did I say pliers? I meant pillars. Five of them. Something to do with a quest for enlightenment. Self-esteem and whatnot. She’s gone with all her friends. No doubt there will also be a quest for refreshments afterwards.’
He led us through the hall into a large room where, again, everything was strikingly white, the sofas, the carpets, the curtains, the tables and chairs. There was a bowl of white stones in the fireplace.
‘What an extraordinary house,’ I couldn’t stop myself from remarking.
‘You not been here before?’ said David. ‘Yes, well, it’s not everyone’s thing. A friend of mine says it’s like being inside a marshmallow. It’s the same upstairs, you know. Audrey did it all herself. She says she likes it because it doesn’t remind her of Egypt — take that how you will. It isn’t a house for children,’ he added, glancing at Hamish. ‘At least, that was the idea. Audrey rather blanked out thoughts of the next generation. She’s got away with it so far but she can’t keep them out for ever. I think we’ll be fine so long as nobody calls her “granny”.’
‘I thought she might want to see dad,’ Adam said.
‘What? Well, you’ll have to thrash that out with her. I try to keep out of her plans. I’ve got work of my own to do. I’m writing a book,’ he said, to me. ‘It’s fascinating stuff, but you really have to pull up the drawbridge, if you take my meaning, otherwise it never gets done. Audrey and I are ships in the night. Marvellous phrase, that, isn’t it? I wonder who came up with that. Some scribbler who couldn’t pay the gas bill no doubt.’
I was standing by the white-painted mantelpiece, where white-framed photographs stood in a line. I looked at the photographs in turn, all of which, I presently realised, depicted Audrey. In most of them she was laughing. In one of them she was lying on a bed shrouded in white lengths of gauze.
‘Do you think she might have gone to the hospital on the way?’
‘No idea,’ said David delightedly. He tapped the side of his head. ‘Not a clue! Have we met before?’ he asked me.
‘A long time ago.’
‘Thought so. It was the beard that foxed me. I never forget a face. You were one of Adam’s university chums. Chemistry, wasn’t it?’
‘History.’
‘That’s it! I’m an historian myself, you know.’
‘I remember.’
Hamish had squatted down beside the fireplace and was removing the white stones from their bowl and placing them on the carpet.
‘Call him off, will you?’ said David, with a tormented look in his eyes. ‘Only Audrey’s such a stickler — I’ll get into all sorts of trouble.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. I detached the stones from Hamish’s warm hands and replaced them in the bowl.
‘To resume,’ said David. ‘I’m doing a little work into family trees at the moment, absolutely gripping stuff, you can imagine, Doniford having once been an active port. We’ve got all sorts here, Jews, Slavs, Albanians who jumped ship, half the East End of London. I’m trying to make a link between racial ancestry and violent crime, of which Doniford has a particularly high incidence. It’s amazing what I’ve uncovered — you could almost spot the villains at birth! The Hanburys have a Latvian link,’ he said, in my ear. ‘Real slashers and burners. Have you boys got time for a drink?’
‘Afraid not,’ Adam said.
‘That’s a pity. While the cat’s away and all that.’