Rachel and Lucas had spent the day in Birmingham together, helping out at a food bank in Kings Norton. She’d had the idea earlier in the week, when she’d realized that Lucas would be with them for most of a ten-day half-term and had nothing much to do apart from his schoolwork. It might open his eyes, she thought, to come into direct contact with families dealing with food poverty, and it had been an easy enough thing to set up: choosing Birmingham more or less at random, as offering a sharpish contrast to the social and ethnic mix of Windsor, she had managed to arrange it all with a couple of emails.
‘What I mean is,’ he said, stammeringly, ‘— one reads about these places — one knows that they exist — but not everybody actually takes the plunge and visits them.’
‘Well, I expect all food banks are different,’ said Rachel, ‘but at least you now have a rough idea …’
‘Well … I was talking about Birmingham, actually. But yeah, food banks, too, I mean, it’s really cool to know what they’re all about, and so on.’
‘Good. Well, you mustn’t be late for your friends.’
‘No.’
‘Where are you meeting?’
‘Not far from here. Top of Centrepoint. I’ll probably grab a cab.’
‘Well, I bet they haven’t spent the whole day making up parcels of cornflakes and orange juice and hot chocolate. Don’t forget to show them the pictures. I bet they’ll be impressed.’
‘Yeah, they’ll have a right laugh, probably. I’ll do that.’
‘OK then.’
She waved goodbye and watched as his tall, loping frame was swallowed up by the crowds of commuters.
Rachel took the tube back to Turngreet Road but got out a few stops early, at Knightsbridge, wanting to walk through these quieter, emptier streets and think back on the events of the day. Try to come to terms with their strangeness. Lucas had fallen almost completely silent after their arrival at Birmingham New Street. Maybe this was down to self-preservation, because on the local train to Kings Norton, let alone at the food bank itself, his accent would immediately have attracted unwelcome attention. But Rachel was afraid there had been more to it than that. She thought again about his friends ‘having a laugh’ as they passed around the pictures of his visit, and knew that on some level he had found the whole episode not enlightening at all, but amusing. Everything from his bottle-green volunteer’s apron to the tins of fruit and vegetables stacked on the store room shelves had struck him, she now suspected, first as exotic, then somehow quaint and endearing, and finally comical. When they had been welcomed by Dawn, the centre’s cheerful manager, he’d found her Black Country accent so hard to understand that Rachel had had to translate for him. After that, to give him credit, he’d kept his head down and worked uncomplainingly, spending most of the day in the back room making up parcels without once letting slip that in his other, secret life he attended the most famous public school in the country. Now, though, having spent the day working hard, in a less than glamorous setting, without embarrassing himself or anyone around him, he had the advantage of being able to walk away from the experience without ever thinking about it again. On the train home he’d said almost nothing, just stared fixedly at his iPhone 6, lost in some group chat or solitary amusement. She hadn’t been expecting his worldview to be overturned in the space of a few hours: just hoping, perhaps, for some wondering comment, some register of shock at the discovery that, side by side with his own protected world, places like this should also need to exist. But if the thought occurred to him, he had chosen not to express it.
As for Rachel herself, she had been at the front counter, handing out the parcels themselves to downcast, monosyllabic women (they were mainly women) in return for vouchers. And that was when the strangest thing of all had happened.
‘Two-four-one!’ she had called out, and then, as she handed over the paper carrier, she realized that she knew the person who had come up to present her voucher. It was Val Doubleday, Alison’s mother.
‘Hello, Val!’ she had said. ‘It is Val, isn’t it?’ There was no sign of recognition on her part. ‘It’s me, Rachel. You know, Alison’s friend from Leeds?’
Val had looked confused: more than confused. The shock of finding someone from another city, and her distant past, in this place and in this role seemed to render her completely speechless. What should have been a joyful reunion dissolved into a scene of terrible awkwardness. Rachel had asked after Alison; had received some stilted, unconvincing reply to the effect that she was ‘doing fine’; had scribbled her email address on a piece of card and handed it over; and had explained that she was only visiting Birmingham for the day.
‘I heard you were on TV a few years ago,’ she added. ‘I’m sorry, I missed the whole thing. I’d just arrived at uni and, you know, you don’t really watch telly in the first year … Are you singing at the moment?’
Val did not answer this question. All she said, blurting out the words as quickly as she could was: ‘I’m not getting this stuff for myself. It’s my next-door neighbour — she’s old, and she can’t get out …’
‘Of course,’ Rachel said.
‘Say hi to your mother from me, won’t you?’ said Val. And then she was gone, not looking back. In fact she had not made eye contact at all during the whole encounter.
Rachel stared after her, trying to work out what had just happened. She didn’t snap out of it until Dawn came out from the store room with the latest parcel, having finally, it seemed, found a temporary chink in Lucas’s wall of silence and self-concealment.
‘I love your friend,’ she said. ‘He’s hilarious. Do you know what he called this?’ She held up a jar of decaf coffee from the top of the parcel, and said, in a deadly impression of his sardonic drawclass="underline" ‘Bit of a Mickey Mouse drink, if you ask me.’
8
If Lucas was proving difficult to change, the twin daughters, Grace and Sophia, presented an equal challenge. Rachel did not know what to make of them at all. They were very intelligent, she could see that. Very determined, too. They were picking up their new languages quickly; so quickly, that Rachel herself could barely keep up with them. Their prep school had small class sizes, and there were regular, weekly tests in most subjects. The twins took careful notice of the results and would waste no time in telling her whether they had come first, second or third in the rankings. (They were rarely any lower than that.) They played elaborate games on their PlayStations and watched American comedy shows on their iPads, often following the dialogue with concentration rather than enjoyment. Rachel would read to them every night at the end of their lessons but she found it difficult to choose stories that would engage them, and would often be surprised by their responses. Once she tried reading them one of her favourite stories, H. G. Wells’s ‘The Door in the Wall’. How could they fail to be moved, she thought, by this tale of a young boy who, at the age of five, finds a door in the wall of an ordinary London street, and discovers that it leads to a magical garden: a door he will never be able to locate again, a garden he will never revisit, despite a lifetime of efforts and longings? She liked to ask questions as she went along, to make sure that they understood what they were hearing: and when the little boy was first expelled from the garden, was sent back into the ‘grey world’ of London again, and admitted, years later, that ‘as I realized the fullness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite ungovernable grief’, she said to them: ‘So — why do you think he’s crying?’
Sophia’s answer was hard to forget. ‘Because he’s weak,’ she said, calmly.