Nadine went over to the dresser on the far side of the kitchen and unhooked the last clean mug. She spooned coffee powder into it and filled it up with water from the kettle. Then she found a hardened cellophane packet of muscovado sugar and chipped off a piece with the handle of the teaspoon, stirring it round and round in the coffee with fierce concentration until it finally melted. She took a sip. It tasted strange, sweet but faintly mouldy, as almost everything had tasted during those uncomfortable but exhilarating months in the women’s protest camp in Suffolk.
Holding the mug, Nadine went back to the kettle and with her left hand poured the contents awkwardly over the dishes piled in the sink. Then, cradling the mug in both hands, she went out of the kitchen, down the hall past the ticking meter, and up the stairs to the landing. All the doors were open on the landing, revealing piles of clothes on the floors, and rumpled beds and the plastic carrier bags of nameless things that the children carried about with them. In the bathroom, the lavatory seat was up, and there were lumps of damp towel by the bath and the rickety shower curtain had come down, halfway along, drooping in stiff, stained, plastic folds.
Nadine went around the landing, and closed all the doors. What she couldn’t see, she might not think about. Then she stooped down, and holding her mug of coffee carefully so as not to spill it, crawled into Rory’s tunnel of duvets under the eaves and buried herself there.
‘We’ve been waiting nearly an hour,’ Becky said. She climbed into the front seat beside Nadine. In the driving mirror, Nadine saw Rory slide in next to Clare, his face shuttered as it always was when he didn’t want anyone to interfere with him, ask him things.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said, ‘I went to sleep. I didn’t sleep much last night, and I went to sleep this morning, by mistake. For too long.’
She glanced in the driving mirror. Clare was yawning. Her hair, which she had wanted cut in a bob, needed washing, and fronds of it stuck out here and there, giving her a neglected look.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said again. ‘Really. I was just so tired.’ She put the car into reverse. ‘Had a good day?’
The children said nothing. Nadine gave them, as she turned the car, a quick glance. They weren’t sulking, she could see that. They just didn’t know how to reply to her in a way that was both truthful and wouldn’t upset her. The car was moving forward again. Nadine gave Becky’s nearest thigh a quick squeeze.
‘Hungry?’
‘You bet,’ Becky said.
‘We’ll stop at the village shop,’ Nadine said. ‘I found a fiver. We’ll buy potatoes and eggs and have a bit of a fry up. Egg and chips. What about that? Egg and chips.’
There was a pause. Rory was gazing out of the window and Becky was staring at her chipped nail polish. Then Clare said, ‘We had egg and chips for lunch. At school.’
Chapter Four
Dale Carver parked her car with great competence in a space hardly bigger than its length, almost underneath the first-floor windows of her brother’s flat. She fixed the steering-wheel lock, got out, pulled the back window screen over the car stock she carried all the time as a publisher’s travelling rep, and locked the car. She glanced up. The curtains were pulled across the windows of Lucas’s sitting room and there were lights on inside. At least he was home. He’d said he’d try and be home by seven, but that so many people at the local radio station where he worked had flu, he might have to stay late and cover for someone. Or maybe the lights meant that Amy was there. Amy was Lucas’s fiancée. She was the head make-up girl for the nearest television station and they had met in the course of their work. Dale knew that her father, Tom, while liking Amy – ‘Sweet,’ he’d say. ‘Very nice. Sweet’ – felt that Lucas’s choice of future wife was, to put it mildly, unadventurous.
Holding a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and the proof copy of a new American novel for Lucas – Dale found she couldn’t help giving him these slightly intellectual presents in front of Amy – Dale climbed the front steps of the house and rang the middle bell. There was a crackle, and then Lucas’s voice said, ‘Dale?’
‘Hi.’
‘Come right up.’
‘Ten seconds,’ Dale said.
It was a game between them, to see how fast she could race along the hall – it depended upon what she was carrying – and up the stairs, lined with old prints of Bath and Bristol (there was a penalty if she knocked one off), to Lucas’s front door where he’d be standing, counting.
‘Eleven,’ he said.
‘It never was!’
‘Nearly twelve.’
‘Liar,’ Dale said.
He kissed her. He was wearing a black shirt and black trousers and an open, faintly ethnic-looking waistcoat, roughly striped in grey and black. Dale indicated it.
‘Cool.’
He winked.
‘Present from a fan.’
‘Hey. Does Amy know?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Amy said. She appeared behind Lucas, her blond hair in the curly froth round her face which Dale sometimes privately wondered how Lucas could bear to touch. It had a faintly woolly look to it, like a poodle.
Lucas winked at Amy.
‘It’s better than knickers. Or condoms.’
Amy pulled a face.
‘Shut up.’
‘I’ve brought these,’ Dale said to Lucas, holding out the book and the bottle. He took them, peering at the book’s title.
‘Wow. Great.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ Dale said. ‘You think you never want to read another word about Vietnam, but this is different.’
‘Thanks,’ Lucas said, still looking at the book. ‘Thanks.’
Amy took the wine bottle out of his hand.
‘I’ll chill this.’
She was wearing leggings and ankle boots and a big T-shirt.
‘He’s an amazing guy,’ Dale said to Lucas of the author of the book. ‘He had an awful childhood with almost no education but he’s just a brilliant natural writer.’
Lucas smiled at her.
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
From the kitchen off the sitting-room, Amy called, ‘Want a coffee?’
‘I’d rather have a drink,’ Dale said. She moved into the centre of the sitting-room, between the twin sofas covered in rough pale linen. ‘A drink drink. I’ve been down to Plymouth today. The traffic was vile.’
Lucas picked a vodka bottle off the tray inserted into a bookcase and held it up, enquiringly.
‘Lovely,’ Dale said. ‘The very thing.’
‘Why,’ Lucas said, pouring vodka, ‘don’t you get another job? Why don’t you do something that doesn’t mean all this travelling? If you want to stay in publishing, why don’t you go on to the editorial side or something?’
‘It would mean going to London,’ Dale said. ‘I don’t want to go to London.’
Amy came out of the kitchen holding a mug.
‘I thought you liked London.’
‘I do. To visit. Not to live there.’
‘It’s funny,’ Amy said, ‘the way you two always want to stick around your dad.’
Lucas handed Dale a tumbler of vodka and tonic and ice.
‘We don’t,’ he said, ‘not deliberately. It’s just happened, because of the areas we got jobs in.’