Lucas had not occupied his room for six or seven years. He had moved out when he went to university, only using it as a parking space for the detritus of his life — cushions, music equipment, ski boots, lamps, a tennis racket, posters in cardboard tubes – between academic terms and the long wandering foreign trips he took each summer. With his first job had come his first flat and he had removed almost all his possessions except for the cushions and posters, since his taste had by then progressed from primary colours and politics to monochrome and culture. The room felt raw and unused and there was a patch of damp above the window which looked down into the charming little courtyard garden below and, either side of it, neighbouring gardens of equal charm. But it was a pleasant room, a benevolent room. It was a room that might, in time, become – a nursery.
Elizabeth went out on to the landing. A faint sound from below caught her ear. She leaned over the banister rail and peered down.
‘Tom?’
Silence. A motor bike in the street outside was kicked into angry life and the windows, as they always did in response to sudden and uncouth sound, shuddered elegantly. Elizabeth moved across the landing and turned the handle of Dale’s closed door. It was locked.
‘Nonsense,’ Elizabeth said aloud.
She turned the handle again, and shook it. She turned it the other way. It was locked, most decidedly. Elizabeth looked at it. Rufus’s door had stickers on it, Lucas’s, for some reason, a small brass knocker shaped like a ram’s head. But Dale’s had nothing. The smooth white paint stared back at Elizabeth as if defying her to guess what was beyond it. She crouched and put her eye to the keyhole. It was quite black, as if taped up from inside. Nothing could be more plain than that Dale regarded this room as her territory, as the place she had always had, as hers, all her life, and the place she intended to keep as hers, whatever.
Elizabeth stood up. Tom had told her about Dale, about the effect of her mother’s death on a personality already volatile and needy, about the scene in the shadowy bedroom with Dale hysterical on the bed and Lucas, white-faced with fear and grief, looking on in stunned silence. Elizabeth had felt sorry for Dale, sorry for Tom, sorry for Lucas, all of them plunged into an abyss by the abrupt removal of the lynchpin of their family life. She had listened with respectful sympathy. Her own life had never had any such drama in it: there had been silences – especially between herself and her mother – but never scenes. She had never felt, as she was now beginning to feel, entering the world of Tom’s past and Tom’s present, much rawness of emotion, much violence, the kind of atavistic human passion she had previously associated only with Greek tragedy, with Shakespeare. She looked at Dale’s locked door and felt, for the first time, a tiny twinge of apprehension that some things – emotional things – might not be capable of being dealt with just by calm and reasonableness. She gave herself a little shake. Don’t, she told herself in the voice her mother used to use to her, be melodramatic. That door is locked because Dale did not get on at all with her first stepmother. She has, on the contrary, been nothing but nice to you.
She turned away from the landing and began to go slowly down the stairs. You can’t be too careful, a colleague at work had said to her the previous week; you can’t go too slowly, you can’t be too patient. But I must, Elizabeth thought now, be myself, too, I must be allowed to be Tom’s wife in my way, to live in this house as my house. She paused outside the drawing-room. I must make that room mine, not Pauline’s. Even if one remembers the dead, and with love, one shouldn’t live with them as if, somehow, they weren’t really dead at all.
She straightened her shoulders. She would go down to the kitchen and start making plans for her fireplace, for, perhaps, rather less aggressively modern chairs than the ones Josie had chosen, and she would also go down into the garden and poke about among the unswept leaves from the previous autumn, to see what was lurking there and beginning to stir to life. She descended the last flight of stairs to the hall and went into the kitchen. Dale, in a navy-blue blazer and sharply pressed jeans, was standing by the table, reading Tom’s post.
‘Dale!’
Dale looked up, smiling. She didn’t put the letter in her hand down. She looked absolutely at ease.
‘Hi!’
‘How did you get in? I didn’t hear the bell. Perhaps Tom didn’t latch the door—’
‘Key, of course,’ Dale said. She dipped a hand in her blazer pocket and produced a couple of keys on a red ribbon. ‘My keys.’
Elizabeth swallowed.
‘Do – I mean, do you often do that?’
Dale was still smiling, still holding a letter of Tom’s in her other hand.
‘What?’
‘Let yourself in—’
Dale said, laughing, ‘When I need to. This is my home after all.’
Elizabeth went over to the kettle, so that her back was towards Dale.
‘Would you like some tea?’
‘There isn’t any. I’ve looked.’
Elizabeth said quietly, ‘I bought some Lapsang this morning.’
Dale looked surprised.
‘Where is it?’
‘Here.’
‘Oh, but tea doesn’t live there. It lives in that cupboard, by the coffee.’
‘That seems a long way from the kettle—’
‘It’s always lived there,’ Dale said. She put the letter down. ‘I see Dad’s got across the planning boys again.’
Elizabeth opened her mouth to say, ‘Should you be reading your father’s correspondence?’ and closed it again. She ran water into the kettle.
‘Is Dad out?’
‘A site meeting—’
‘Damn. My car’s playing up.’
‘Do you want him to have a look at it?’
‘No,’ Dale said. She was grinning. ‘I want him to pay for it.’
‘But—’ Elizabeth said, and stopped. She plugged the kettle in and picked up the packet of tea.
‘He started when I was a student and he’s just sort of gone on. Look, I’ll make tea. You sit down.’
‘I’m fine—’
‘You shouldn’t be doing the work,’ Dale said. She came past Elizabeth, opened the cupboard, took out a teapot Elizabeth had never seen before, and went back, past Elizabeth again, taking the tea packet out of her hand. ‘Were you looking at the house?’
‘Yes—’
‘The drawing-room’s lovely, isn’t it? It was the only room Mummy had really finished when she died. The portrait was painted by a friend of hers who was just getting famous, a Royal Academician and all that, and just after he’d finished it, he was killed mountaineering in Switzerland. I’ve always thought it was kind of prophetic, especially as he was in love with her.’
‘Was he?’
‘Oh yes,’ Dale said airily. ‘Everybody was.’
Elizabeth went over to the window seat, and nudged Basil to make room for her.
‘Did you have a good week?’
Dale sighed. She began to bang mugs and cupboard doors about and to clatter noisily in the fridge, looking for milk.
‘So-so. I was just a bit tense about the car, all those miles. I had to go to Jersey and Guernsey on Wednesday – that’s always rather a lark. But the rest was South Wales. I don’t know what they read in South Wales but it certainly isn’t what I’m trying to sell.’