‘Stop staring,’ Becky said.
Josie gave herself a small portion of pasta and went round the table to the place she had deliberately laid for herself between Becky and Rory. She sat down.
‘Could you pass me the pepper, please?’
No-one seemed to hear her. All eyes were on Becky’s mittened fingers, unravelling the last of the knot. Then, very slowly, she peeled back the sides of the carrier bag and tipped on to her plate, with enormous care, a lump of greyish rice studded with smaller lumps of orangey red and soft-looking black.
Josie stared at it.
‘What’s that?’
‘Risotto,’ Becky said. Her voice was proud. ‘Mum made it.’
She glanced at Rory and Clare, daring them to object, daring them to say that, when Nadine had cooked the risotto the previous night, they had all flatly refused to eat it and there’d been a row about that, and then another row a bit later when Nadine had found Clare and Rory under the eaves with a plastic bag of sliced white bread, cramming it wordlessly into their mouths in great, hungry, unchewed bites.
‘I thought you weren’t hungry,’ Josie said, looking at the mess on Becky’s plate.
‘I said I didn’t like spaghetti.’
‘I see. So while we eat this hot, newly cooked food, you are going to eat cold risotto?’
‘Yes,’ Becky said. She looked across the table at Rufus. ‘I’ve got more,’ she said to him. Her voice was conversational, almost pleasant. ‘I’ve got enough to last me till I go home again. I don’t need to eat anything here.’
Chapter Six
Shane, the part-time bartender, said that cleaning Duncan Brown’s flat was like being in a lady’s boudoir after dealing with the jakes at The Fox and Grapes.
‘I would like,’ Duncan said, ‘my daughter, Elizabeth, to hear you say that.’
Shane winked.
‘Women have terrible trouble with their standards. They never understand priorities. Now, in my view, dust is not a priority. I’ll get the kitchen and bathroom clean enough to lay a new-born baby in, but I’ll not be troubling with the dust. Nobody ever died of a bit of dust.’
Duncan looked at the carpet. Even he could see that the pattern on it, a pleasingly asymmetrical Afghan pattern, was largely obscured by crumbs and bits of fluff and ends of thread. Where, he wondered, had the threads come from? He had never had a needle in his hand in his life.
‘She did say something about hoovering—’
Shane looked at the carpet, too.
‘Did she know?’
‘I don’t seem to remember about a plate, when I eat water biscuits—’
‘Tell you what,’ Shane said. ‘Because we’re not wanting to waste my time or your money, now are we? I’ll run the hoover through this little path here and skim it along over there and spray a bit of that remarkable stuff that settles the dust about, and hey presto.’
‘She said something about mice—’
‘Now, I like a mouse,’ Shane said. ‘A home isn’t a home to me without a mouse or two.’
Duncan was growing tired of the conversation. Domesticity had never seemed to him a subject on which much could be said, being, by its very nature, something that required action, not words. He didn’t mind talking to Shane, but he would have preferred to talk to him on topics that were equally familiar to Shane, like horse racing or the effects of alcohol on the human frame, but also more interesting to Duncan.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Just do what you can. It’s just that she’ll be down for Christmas in a couple of days, and I don’t want to be ticked off.’
‘I’ll do the windows,’ Shane said. ‘There’s nothing like a clean window to distract the eye from the dust.’
Duncan looked at him. He was an odd-looking, small man, somewhere in his late thirties, with the eyes and skin of someone who lived in an atmosphere steeped in beer and tobacco.
‘What have you got against dust?’
Shane grinned. He picked up the two-litre bottle of bleach he had brought with him.
‘It’s not the dust I object to. It’s the dusting,’ he said. ‘Now, that is woman’s work.’
‘Dad,’ Dale said, ‘we’ve got to have a tree.’
Tom Carver took his reading glasses off.
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t need a tree. Four adults on Christmas Day don’t need a tree.’
‘Yes, we do,’ Dale said. ‘Adult or not, we’re still a family. At least, we are except Amy.’
‘And she soon will be. Dale—’
‘Yes?’
Tom put his glasses back on.
‘You may not like me saying this, but I don’t want a tree, because of Rufus.’
‘But Rufus isn’t here.’
‘Precisely. But last year, he was. Rufus and I went out to a place near Freshford and chose a tree and brought it back and set it up down there by the garden door and decorated it together. That was only, and almost exactly, a year ago.’
Dale stopped fiddling about with the liquidizer. She was making a great performance out of blending soup, insisting that her father needed it, as if she were a nanny making him take medicine. She came to sit at the table opposite Tom.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘May I point out that you’ve still got us? Lucas and me? Your first-born children?’
‘I know. And nothing and nobody will ever replace you. But Rufus is my child also, and since he was born, I have never had a Christmas without him and—’ He stopped.
‘What?’
‘I’m not looking forward to it.’
‘Thanks a million,’ Dale said.
Tom reached across the table for her hand. She removed it just far enough away for him not to be able to touch her.
‘He’s eight,’ Tom said. ‘He’s still a little boy. Little boys – and girls for that matter – give Christmas another dimension. You know they do. And another thing. It’s just too soon for me to feel that Christmas is as Christmas was.’
‘Was?’
‘When Rufus was here.’
‘Well,’ Dale said. She could feel her voice hardening and was not, somehow, able to stop it. ‘Well, it may be too soon to play at Christmases again, but it doesn’t seem to be too soon to play at having a girlfriend.’
Tom lifted both hands to his face, took his spectacles off again and folded them on the table in front of him.
‘Elizabeth Brown, I suppose you mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Friend, not girlfriend.’
Dale said nothing. She got up and ladled a scoop of chopped leeks and vegetable stock into the liquidizer.
‘How do you know about her?’
‘I looked at the plans in your studio. I heard you on the telephone. And you haven’t been here on three nights when I’ve rung. You’re always here, always. I always know it’ll be you and Basil listening to opera or snoozing in front of the telly.’
‘Dale,’ Tom said, ‘did I ever question your right to your relationship with Neil?’
Dale gave the liquidizer switch a flick on. Above the roar of its motor, she shouted, ‘No. In fact, I sometimes wondered how much you cared.’
Tom said, steadily and loudly, ‘I cared very much. Switch that thing off.’
She obeyed him.
‘I have had two meals with Elizabeth Brown,’ Tom said. ‘And she has come down from London on three weekday evenings, once for a concert, once for the cinema, and once for a private view of a painter friend of her father’s, which was very indifferent indeed.’
Dale rocked the liquidizer a little, and the thick greenish liquid swelled against the sides.
‘But you’ve never even done that before.’
‘No. Because I was married. I went to concerts and the cinema with Josie and you didn’t like that much either.’