In the first week after the children’s departure, she had been frantic. She had cried and cried, wandering from room to room and making a chart on one of the kitchen walls, to enable her to cross off each day that intervened before she would be able to have them back, for some, at least, of the school holidays. She paced round the telephone, willing them to call her, which they seldom did – prevented from doing so, no doubt – and in a fit of zeal turned out their bedrooms and took all the duvets and sleeping bags and blankets to the dry cleaner’s, a great fusty multi-coloured mound in the back of the car, giving herself an extraordinary brief sense of happiness and achievement in the process. Then the tears and the energy were followed by gloom, days when she sat at her kitchen table staring out at the moist, milky Herefordshire light, making cups of coffee she didn’t drink, and waiting, like a princess in a tower, for Tim Huntley to come down, as he often did, with a covered dish of something his mother had made, and tell her she’d got to eat it, or else.
Tim Huntley had been a lifeline. He was, as a person, almost everything Nadine found incomprehensible – politically traditional, socially conventional, ill-read, obstinate and practical. His manner to her was not dissimilar to his manner to his cows, as if she, Nadine, was a living thing that had to be kept going with regular doses of the right diet and enough simple, foolproof instructions to keep her from swerving off the rails again, getting herself into a situation she couldn’t manage, like a cow on a motorway. He didn’t flirt with her in the least, although she had felt, once or twice, seeing his bulk occupying such a reassuring amount of her kitchen, that she would slightly have liked him to. Instead, he found her the second-hand kiln he had promised, would only take twenty pounds for it, and showed her the way to the commune he had promised, too, where thirty or so people, mostly women and children, lived in organic harmony in a roughly converted barn, growing their own vegetables and weaving blankets of Welsh wool. They made Nadine think not so much of her erstwhile women’s protest groups, as of the peace marchers of her childhood and adolescence, putting flowers in the mouths of guns and lying down outside the Ministry of Defence in white T-shirts, unarmed and unintimidating. They looked kindly at Nadine’s pots and told her they would be happy to see her any time, whenever she wanted, and that she must bring her children, too, when she had them with her.
Gradually, the gloom lifted. As long, she discovered, as she didn’t allow herself to think too much about the children nor – even more to the point – about the situation in which they were now living, presided over by the two architects of her own unjust and deprived circumstances, she could manage, she could get through the days, she could even begin to notice the spring coming, leaves unfurling, a clump of small, intensely frilly wild daffodils in the unkempt garden behind the cottage. She even walked up to the Huntleys’ farm, to find Mrs Huntley in her kitchen, dosing two lambs with something in a couple of baby’s bottles, and thank her for all those covered dishes.
‘It’s nothing to me,’ Mrs Huntley said. ‘As long as you eat them.’
‘I do—’
‘How’s that boy doing then?’
Nadine looked at the lambs. They were packed in a cardboard box together, sucking and sucking on the bottle with a fervour close to ecstasy.
‘He’s going to school, I think—’
‘That’s something.’
‘But they don’t sound very good on the telephone, they don’t like it there, they don’t like their stepmother.’
Mrs Huntley pulled the emptied bottle away from one lamb with a small rubbery explosion.
‘Who did? Who ever liked their stepmother?’
‘This one—’
‘Now, now,’ Mrs Huntley said. ‘No tales.’ She took the bottle away from the second lamb. ‘Would you like to give these two their second halves?’
Nadine found she liked it. She hadn’t much liked breast-feeding her own babies, but this was different, less intimately demanding, less emotionally complex, and the lambs were so comical and endearing in their single-minded obsession with food. Two days later, Tim brought a third lamb down to the cottage, and dumped it in a box on her kitchen floor.
‘What’s that?’
‘Something for you to look after. She needs a week of hand-feeding.’
‘But—’
‘You do it,’ Tim said. ‘You can.’
‘What if something happens?’
‘Then you ring me.’
Nadine sat on the kitchen floor and looked at the lamb.
‘She lost her mum,’ Tim said. ‘You be good to her.’
‘Hello,’ Nadine said to the lamb. She put a hand on her hard little fleecy head. ‘Which of us is supposed to benefit from this?’
‘Both,’ Tim said.
When he had gone, Nadine mixed the formula he had left and fed the lamb. For the first bottle, she fed her in the box as she had done up at the farm, but with the second one, she scooped the lamb up on to her lap and held her there, feeling her hard little hooves against her thighs and every muscle solid with concentration. Then she put her back in the box. The lamb wriggled and bleated.
‘No more,’ Nadine said. ‘Not now. Later.’
She put a hand out and the lamb seized the nearest finger and began to suck, surprisingly strongly and roughly.
‘No,’ Nadine said. She took her hand away. ‘I’m only your foster mother, I’m afraid.’
The telephone began to ring. Nadine got up from crouching over the lamb and went to answer it.
‘Nadine?’ Matthew said.
She turned, holding the receiver under her chin, so that she could see the lamb, peering at her bright-eyed over the edge of the box.
‘I’ve got a lamb here—’
‘What?’
‘I’ve got a lamb,’ Nadine said. Her voice was proud. ‘Here in the kitchen. I’m looking after it.’
‘Oh—’
‘The children would love it. It’s only about the size of—’
‘Nadine,’ Matthew said. ‘I rang to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s OK now, we’ve found her, but Becky went missing—’
‘What!’ Nadine shrieked, spinning round to face the wall, gripping the telephone.
‘She – well, she ran off. She ran away—’
‘Why? Why did she? What happened, what happened to her?’
‘It doesn’t matter what happened—’
‘What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Of course it matters! It may not matter to you, but it matters to me, what causes my daughter to run away!’
‘Nadine—’
‘What did you do to her?’ Nadine screamed.
‘If you won’t let me talk and tell you what happened I’m putting the phone down.’
‘No!’ Nadine cried. ‘No!’
‘Then shut up and listen.’
Nadine closed her eyes. She wound her fingers into the telephone cord and pulled it tightly until the flesh went white.
‘There was a row,’ Matthew said, ‘a family row in which Becky participated—’
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘In which Becky participated as much as anyone and which resulted in her leaving the house to go round, I thought, to see a friend—’
‘Did you check? When she’d gone out, plainly distressed, did you bother to check where she might be?’
‘I thought, to see a friend, but it transpired that she didn’t do that, she didn’t go anywhere near anyone she knew—’
‘Oh my God,’ Nadine said. She disentangled her fingers and shook them to get the circulation going again. ‘Oh my God, how could you, how could you?’
‘She went clubbing,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s a new club in Sedgebury and she went there. I didn’t even know it existed, or I’d have gone to look. I thought she was staying away just to scare me.’