Elizabeth began to stroke Basil’s warm plushy side.
‘Surely your company will mend your car for you?’
Dale pulled a face.
‘I’ve exceeded my repair allowance already and I’ve used it a bit more privately than I’m supposed to. I don’t think it’s serious but there’s something knocking and you can get a bit wound up about that sort of thing on motorways. Dad gave me a carphone, thank goodness, only last week, and that’s made a huge difference.’ She spooned tea into the teapot – too much, Elizabeth noticed, and said nothing. ‘Do you know how long Dad will be?’
‘About another hour, I should think.’
‘The thing is,’ Dale said in a confidential tone, ‘I rather want to ask him about something other than the car—’
‘Oh?’
‘I want to move,’ Dale said. ‘I want another flat.’ She poured boiling water into the teapot, and then pulled a chair away from the table so that she was close to Elizabeth. ‘In fact, I’ve seen one.’
Elizabeth glanced at her.
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. It needs everything doing to it. I mean everything.’
‘But your father’s an architect—’
‘So handy, isn’t it? But it’s money again, really.’
Elizabeth thought of her house which, although she no longer wanted it, she felt an absurd responsibility for, because of what it had brought her. She steeled herself.
‘There’s my house—’
Dale smiled. She leaned over and patted Elizabeth’s arm, then she got up to pour the tea.
‘Thank you. That’s really sweet of you. In fact, I’ll confess I went and had a bit of a snoop. But it’s a bit permanent for me, a house. A bit committed. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Don’t you want to feel permanent?’
‘Not till I’ve got somebody to be permanent with me. I thought, you see—’
‘I know. I’m so sorry.’
Dale carried the two mugs over to the window seat and held one out to Elizabeth.
‘Dad’s been so supportive. And Lucas. Have you met Lucas?’
‘Not yet. We are having lunch with him and Amy tomorrow.’
Dale’s face changed.
‘Oh. Are you? I didn’t know—’
Elizabeth took a sip of tea. Time for another small display of conscious generosity. Without looking up she said, ‘Why don’t you come?’
‘Why didn’t Dad say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I spoke to him yesterday. Why didn’t he say?’
Elizabeth looked up at her. The smiling composure was gone.
‘My dear, I don’t know. But come along, come along and join us.’
Dale stared at her tea, her face dark. Then she retrieved a smile.
‘Yes. Yes, of course I will. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go and fossick about upstairs for some things I need.’
‘Of course.’
Dale moved over to the door. By it she paused, looking back over her shoulder. Her voice was very kind.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said.
Upstairs, it didn’t look to her as if anything had changed. Tom and Elizabeth were presumably sleeping together – that was something, Dale decided, simply to avert one’s mind from – but Elizabeth appeared to have left not so much as a toothbrush. When Josie had started sleeping with Tom, Dale remembered, she’d arrived wholesale as it were; her clothes in his cupboard, her pots and bottles in his bathroom, her shoes kicked off on the floor in front of the television. Dale had once found a long red hair stuck to the side of the kitchen sink. She had wanted to be sick.
But Elizabeth was different. Climbing the stairs to the top floor and taking her keys out of her pocket, Dale told herself firmly that she must remember – and make the effort to remember – how different Elizabeth was. She had even made herself say so, as proof of her good intentions, to Lucas and Amy.
‘I may not want her,’ Dale had said. ‘I may not want Dad to marry again, ever, but if he’s going to, she’s OK. She’s different.’
‘What kind of different?’ Amy said. Amy had liked Josie, who had been kind to her and allowed her to practise new make-up techniques on her. They’d had a lot of laughs together, up in that bathroom. Josie had been fun.
‘A quiet professional,’ Dale said. ‘Very decent. And not clinging. She isn’t all over Dad all the time.’
Lucas said, teasing, ‘There wouldn’t be room for two of you.’
Dale ignored him.
‘I feel better, now I’ve met her. I really do.’
‘She sounds pretty boring,’ Amy said.
‘She is. But that’s fine. Fine by me.’
Lucas had looked at her, a long, hard look.
‘She’ll still be his wife, Dale.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Wives come first.’
‘No—’
‘They do.’
‘Not always. Not necessarily. Only if they insist on it.’
She put the key into the lock on her bedroom door, and turned it. She could never see her bedroom without emotion, never enter it without a rush of remembering enveloping her, all those years of remembering, intense years in which she had battled with so much, with grief, with longing, with the knowledge that she must one day leave home, and the terror of doing it. When she had met Neil, she had packed up half the room in an extraordinary spirit of release, only taking one photograph of her mother and nothing from her teenage years. She had been exhilarated, proud of herself, congratulating herself on taking only things that would contribute to the future, not detain her damagingly in the past. But even then, even when she left to live with Neil, she had taped up the keyhole and locked the door behind her. Josie wasn’t a snoop but she wasn’t on Dale’s side, either. In any case, Pauline had to be protected from Josie who was openly jealous, Dale told Neil, if you can believe that it’s possible – or seemly – to be jealous of a woman dead at thirty-two when you’re alive yourself. And Dale’s bedroom was full of Pauline.
She went over to her dressing table, her teenage dressing table flounced, at her thirteen-year-old request, in pink-and-white, and laid the key on the glass-covered top. She looked round her. Composedly, from many angles, her mother looked back at her. Elizabeth Brown was nice, Dale was certain of that; she was nice and decent and a bit boring but for all that, she was marrying Dale’s father and in consequence, Dale’s bedroom would have to stay locked. Not just for present privacy, but to safeguard the past, Dale’s past: Dale’s childhood.
Chapter Ten
‘But this is the third time,’ Clare’s form teacher said. ‘The third time this week you’ve said you couldn’t do your homework.’
‘I can’t,’ Clare said. She was wearing the approximation of school uniform that most of the kids wore, and the hem of her skirt had come down at one side. She didn’t seem to have noticed.
‘Is there somewhere at home you can do your homework?’ the teacher said.
Clare thought of the kitchen.
‘There’s a table.’
‘Is it quiet?’
It was quiet, Clare reflected, if her mother wasn’t in the kitchen but was upstairs in her studio making clay coil pots which were her new passion. There was clay everywhere. The bottom of the bath was gritty with it.
‘Yes.’
‘Then really you have no excuse. Your brother and sister have homework, don’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where do they do theirs?’
Clare considered. Becky spent angry half-hours on the floor of their bedroom with music on so loudly it made Nadine scream, and emerged announcing the shitty stuff was done. Rory never seemed to do any homework at all. He took his school bag into his burrow, but Clare didn’t think he even opened it. They both gave Clare the strong impression that, not only was it not cool to do homework, but that it was utterly pointless to do it. Homework was for nothing, it was just some meaningless discipline devised by teachers for their own obscure ends. Clare was not sure she believed this. Something in her didn’t mind homework, no doubt part of the same thing that didn’t mind school, either. It was nice belonging, it was nice going somewhere every day that stayed the same, that treated you the same as everyone else. It wasn’t rebelliousness that prevented Clare from doing her homework, but hopelessness. Every night, she got her books out and put them in the space she’d cleared in the remains of the last meal that was almost always still there, and sat down in front of them. And sat there. She sat and stared and could do nothing. She couldn’t look at words, she couldn’t pick up a pencil.