‘Now,’ Lucas said with emphasis, moving across the room to stand over his sister. ‘Now, is a man like Dad, a man with a personality like Dad’s, with two – in different ways – such bitter experiences of the end of marriage, ever going to risk it again?’
Dale unfolded her arms and reached for her drink.
‘But he’s lonely. Now we’re living away from home and – Josie’s gone, he’s lonely.’
‘Sure. But the solution isn’t marriage, for God’s sake. The solution, for Dad, is enough work, which he has, and the companionship of a few Elizabeth Browns. All the advantages and no strings.’
Amy said, from the sofa, ‘Would you like that, Luke?’
He took no notice.
‘Dale,’ he said. ‘Dale. Dad is not going to re-marry. Do you hear me? Dad is not going to re-marry.’
Dale looked at her drink for a long moment and then she looked up at her brother.
‘Promise?’ she said.
After Dale had gone – she was plainly hoping to be offered supper, but Lucas seemed to forget to suggest it and Amy, though she remembered, certainly wasn’t going to – Amy boiled some pasta and tipped into it a tub of pesto sauce from the supermarket and laid the island counter of their tiny kitchen with two mats and two forks and a candle, to try and prevent Lucas from eating in front of the television. Amy liked television, but she didn’t like coming second best to it, as company for Lucas. She didn’t drink alcohol herself – didn’t like the taste – but she put out a wineglass for Lucas in a small attempt to compensate him for the absence of television.
Then the telephone rang. It was the producer of the late-night phone-in chat and music show at the radio station to say that the presenter’s three-year-old had been rushed to hospital with suspected meningitis, and could Lucas stand in?
‘Don’t,’ Amy said.
It was a creepy show, the late-night one. It attracted all the weirdos and the saddies, people who couldn’t make relationships in real life so they relied on phoneins and the Internet as substitutes. They were the kind of people who liked the night-time, too, and the fact that you couldn’t see who you were speaking to. Amy thought it wasn’t good for Lucas to involve himself with people who were a bit off this way, twisted.
‘Got to,’ Lucas said. He looked at her. ‘Sorry. Really. Think of the extra money.’
‘I’d rather have you here—’
‘Can’t do it. Think of that poor little kid, then, and how her parents feel.’
Amy thought how nice it would be if she believed Lucas ever considered how she was feeling. When they first met, his thoughtfulness was one of the first things she’d found attractive, but after he’d asked her to marry him and she had moved in with him, he didn’t seem to feel that considering her feelings mattered so much. It was as if he knew them now, and that his early concern for them was really only a process of discovery, which he had enjoyed for its own sake. But there were some things he had discovered, like Amy’s very difficult feelings about Dale, which he then seemed to wish he had not unearthed. If she said to him, now, ‘I don’t want you to go back to work, partly because I don’t like that show, but mostly because I want us to have supper together so I can tell you what bothers me about Dale, and Dale and you,’ he’d look at her as if he hadn’t heard her, and change the subject.
‘OK,’ Amy said. ‘You go.’
He leaned forward and kissed her.
‘We’ll go out, tomorrow, promise. Or Friday.’
She nodded. He picked up his leather jacket and a bunch of keys and the photographer’s camera case he carried his tapes and discs in.
‘Sleep well,’ Lucas said. He smiled at her. ‘Make the most of the next five snore-free hours.’
Amy went back into the kitchen and scraped the pasta off their two plates into the bin. Then she put two slices of toast into the toaster, and plugged the kettle in. On the draining board sat the mug she had been drinking from earlier, and Lucas’s and Dale’s vodka tumblers. Dale’s had a red-lipstick mark on it, very precise, as if she’d put her mouth in exactly the same place at every swallow. Amy turned the glass round, so she couldn’t see the lipstick mark.
Lucas had told Amy that Dale had been absolutely devastated by their mother’s death. She’d only been five, and a very dependent, mummy-clinging five at that, who had just, reluctantly, started school from which she emerged, every day, bowed down with the burden of separation she’d had to endure. When Tom told his children that their mother was dead, in the hospital, and would never be able to come home any more, Dale had rushed upstairs and burrowed into her mother’s side of the double bed and refused to come out. Then she’d had hysterics. Lucas told Amy he would never forget it; the darkened bedroom with only one lamp on and his distraught father bending over the screaming, twisting child on the bed and he, Lucas, standing in the shadows full of a weight so heavy he thought he might just break into pieces because of it.
Then Dale transferred her fierce affections to her father. She screamed when he wouldn’t let her sleep with him. She would creep down in the night and try and defy him by getting into his bed when he was asleep, and wouldn’t notice her. Amy had wondered, aloud, why Tom didn’t get some help with her.
‘He did. There was someone called Doris who was there after school, if he wasn’t.’
‘I mean shrink help,’ Amy said.
Lucas flinched a little.
‘He knew what was wrong,’ Lucas said. ‘It was Mum dying that was wrong. He felt—’
‘What?’
‘Well, I guess he felt it was up to him to put it right. As far as he could.’
But he hasn’t, Amy thought. Fathers can’t. Fathers don’t know how to deal with daughters because they’re men and men never grow up really whereas most women – most daughters – are born grown-up. Except Dale. You could look at Dale now, all got up with her suits and briefcase, without a hair out of place, and still see that kid on the bed, kicking and screaming and scaring the hell out of her father and brother.
Amy took the two pieces of toast out of the toaster and flipped them quickly on to the breadboard. She liked Tom Carver; she thought he was a nice bloke and he spoke to her as if he could really see her, but it didn’t get to her when Dale threw a scene at him. But with Lucas it was different. When Amy saw something in Dale affecting Lucas, affecting him in a way that distracted him from everything – everything – but his work, then that got to Amy exactly where it hurt the most.
Dale lay in the bath. The water was scented with lavender oil – they’d recommended it to her, at the alternative health centre in Bath, for stress – and there was no light except a candle, and no sound except for some vaguely New Age music coming from the CD player in the next room. Dale had her eyes closed and was trying, with a steady, rippling movement of her hands that washed the warm water across her breasts and stomach, to emulate that soothing, repetitive movement in her mind.
After she had left Lucas’s flat, Dale had driven home via the house of a friend she’d made on one of her bookshop visits. The friend was an accommodating person, a single mother of two, who kept a kind of open house in which she expected visitors to help themselves to the bread bin and the coffee jar. Dale had been there a good deal after Neil, the actor and singer with whom she believed she was building her first, deep, interesting, loyal adult relationship, had announced, quite abruptly, that he was leaving the area for London, and that, while he was at it, he was leaving Dale, too. Dale had cried buckets over her friend Ruth’s hospitable kitchen table about that, and even though she could now think about Neil without instantly dissolving into helpless tears, she kept up the habit of going to Ruth’s house several times a week.