‘Yes—’
‘Well. The same reason is true now. I can’t work because of you children and where we are forced to live. And you have no right to ask me to, no right at all.’ She leaned forward. ‘Why are you asking me?’
Becky said, to the tabletop, ‘Other mothers work—’
‘Hah!’ Nadine shouted again. She slammed her fist down on the table. ‘So that’s it, is it? That’s what you’re getting at! She’s got a job, has she? She’s got everything that should be mine and a bloody job, too?’
‘No, she hasn’t. Not yet. But she’s going to—’
‘Becky—’
Becky closed her eyes.
‘Becky, how dare you speak to me about her? How dare you even begin to make comparisons when you think what I’ve done for you and she’s destroyed? How dare you?’
‘I wasn’t comparing—’
‘Weren’t you? Weren’t you?’
‘I was just telling you. You asked if she’d got a job and I was just telling you—’
‘You should be ashamed of even mentioning her in my presence.’
‘I didn’t. I never do mention—’
‘Shut up!’ Nadine yelled.
Becky pushed her chair back from the table, tilting it to get away from Nadine’s furious face.
She said, persisting, ‘I’m thinking of you—’
‘What?’
‘You ought to get away from here. You ought to see other people than us. You ought—’ She stopped.
‘What ought I?’
Becky cried wildly, ‘You ought to use your energies for something else than just hating Dad!’
‘Right,’ Nadine said. ‘Right. That does it.’
She marched round the table and gave Becky’s tilting chair a swift kick. It lurched and toppled, sending Becky on to her knees on the kitchen floor. She put her hands down to steady herself and waited, on all fours, for the next thing to happen.
‘You have no idea about pain,’ Nadine said. Her voice was odd, as if she was restraining a scream. ‘No idea about suffering, about being rejected, about the end of love. You have all your life before you and what have I got? Nothing. Seventeen years’ investment in a relationship and what do I have at the end? Nothing. Nothing.’
Very slowly, Becky sat up on her heels. She looked up at Nadine. She had no idea why she wasn’t giving in, why she wasn’t retreating into the silence that had always been, in the end, her only defence. But she wasn’t. She was sick with fright, but she was going to say it, she was going to.
‘You could have something,’ she said. Her voice shook. ‘You could have something, even now, if you wanted to. You could have had something, all along. But you wouldn’t.’
There was a small, stunned silence, and then Nadine leaned down and slapped her hard, across her cheek. Becky gave a little cry. Nadine had never struck her before. She’d screamed and shouted and ranted and slammed her own hands or herself against walls and furniture, but she’d never hit Becky before. Or the others. Hugs, yes, violent cuddles and kisses, and when she was in a good mood, tickles and squeezes, but not blows. Never blows. Becky put a hand to her cheek. It was stinging.
‘Oh my God,’ Nadine said. She yanked the chair upright and collapsed on to it, putting her face in her hands. ‘Oh my God. Sorry. Oh, sorry—’
Very slowly, Becky stood up. She leaned on the table. She felt slightly sick.
‘That’s OK—’
‘No,’ Nadine said. She stretched out one hand to Becky. ‘No, it isn’t. Come here. Let me hold you—’
‘Can’t,’ Becky said. Her voice was hoarse.
‘Please—’
Becky shook her head. Nadine raised hers from her remaining hand and looked full at Becky.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Can’t you see? I should never have done it, I should never have hit you. It’s just that I get so wound up, so angry—’
‘I know.’
‘Can’t you understand?’ Nadine said. ‘Can’t you see what it’s like to have made such a mess of everything and then to find that you’re stuck?’
Becky sighed. Her face was beginning to glow now, and to throb faintly as if a bruise was gathering itself up ready to form.
‘Whatever—’ She stopped.
‘Go on.’
‘Whatever it’s like,’ Becky said, looking down the leaning length of her body to her boot toes, ‘you shouldn’t take it out on us.’
The kitchen door opened. Clare, wearing her Disney tracksuit and an old Aran jersey of Matthew’s, came in holding the headphones of her new personal tape player.
‘Rory’s gone.’
Nadine swivelled on her chair.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘He’s not upstairs and he’s not downstairs.’
‘He’ll be outside—’
‘It’s raining,’ Clare said.
‘Perhaps he’s in the car, seeing if it’ll start—’
‘I’ve looked,’ Clare said. She had been impelled to go and find him because of the sudden silence from his burrow under the eaves. He was in one of his refusing-to-speak moods, but Clare had seen him, a couple of hours ago, tunnelling into his bedding with his new Swiss Army knife and a small log from the pile Tim Huntley had brought. For some time, Clare could hear chippings and whittlings and then she put her headphones on and could hear nothing but the soundtrack from The Sound of Music which she only played when alone for fear of being mocked for listening to anything so creepy, so sentimental, so pathetic. But she loved it, she loved its sentimentality and its portrayal of a family as a safe haven, a happy unit, loving, unthreatened in their togetherness. When she had heard to the end, she took the headphones off and noticed that the woodcarving noises had stopped. She put her head out on to the landing and saw that Rory’s leather jacket – it was only a cheap one from Sedgebury Market, and the seams were beginning to split – had gone from where he’d dumped it on the floor. She went across to his burrow.
‘Rory?’ she said.
There was no answer. She crawled in. The bedclothes were scattered with little chips of wood, and they were cold. On his pillow lay the log. He hadn’t been carving it, he’d just hacked at it. It was full of gashes and slashes, as if he’d just tried to kill it with his knife. She reversed out on to the landing and did a tour of the upstairs and then the downstairs. Then she went out into the drizzle and looked in the lean-to and the awful shed where a stained old lavatory crouched in the corner like a toad. Then she went back into the cottage and sought her mother in the kitchen.
Nadine looked as if she was about to cry.
‘I can’t face it—’
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Becky said. ‘Don’t panic. He can’t be far.’
‘I must go and look for him—’
‘If he isn’t back for lunch—’
‘What?’
‘We’ll go and look for him if he isn’t back for lunch.’
‘But—’
‘He’s twelve,’ Becky said. ‘He’s nearly a teenager. Anyway, what could happen to him round here with nothing for miles except cows?’
Nadine glanced at her. Then she looked at Clare. Then she took a deep breath and pushed her hair off her face.
‘I hope you know,’ she said, and her voice shook a little. ‘I hope you both know how much I love you? All of you?’
‘Hey,’ Tim Huntley said. He’d come round the corner of the Dutch barn with the tractor to cut more maize for feeding, and a movement had caught his eye. It was a quick movement, someone on top of the great maize stack, someone not very big. And then the someone had moved again, and revealed itself to be the kid from what Tim and his mother called No-Hope Cottage. The boy kid. He was crouched up there looking down at Tim as if he expected to be shouted at.