‘I bet you slept like a top,’ Nadine said bitterly.
‘I didn’t sleep at all,’ Matthew said. ‘I haven’t slept for nights, not even after we found her. Or, at least, the police did.’
‘The police!’
‘She hitched a lift. I think maybe she was aiming to get to Herefordshire, but she was found outside Stafford, in a lorry drivers’ café. They brought her back last night. She’s OK.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘In bed.’
‘Get her! Get her for me! I’ve got to speak to her!’
‘She’s sedated. She was fine but very tired, so the doctor’s given her something—’
‘I must talk to her!’ Nadine shouted.
‘You can’t, just now. She’s to sleep until she wakes.’
‘I demand it! I’m her mother!’
‘She’ll ring you the moment she wakes up—’
‘I’m coming. I’m getting in the car and I’m coming.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘You can’t stop me, I have every right, especially in the face of your neglect, your carelessness, your obsession with your new life which means you can’t even—’
Matthew put the phone down.
‘Bastard!’ Nadine yelled into her receiver. Then she slammed it back onto the telephone. From its box, the lamb, still fixing Nadine with her bright, insistent gaze, began to bleat.
‘Shut up!’ Nadine said. She was beginning to shake. She put out one unsteady hand and picked up the telephone receiver again, and then, with the other hand and with difficulty, dialled Tim’s number.
‘Come quickly—’
‘What’s up?’
‘Come quickly. Come and take this lamb, I can’t cope, I can’t manage—’
‘Stay there,’ Tim Huntley said.
Nadine nodded. She let the receiver slip from her grasp, and then she slid down the kitchen cupboards she had been leaning against until she was sitting on the floor.
‘Becky, oh Becky, poor Becky, poor—’
She gathered her knees up in her arms and put her head down on them and, still watched intently by the lamb, began to shake and whisper to herself.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Josie said.
She sat on the edge of Becky’s bed, towards the foot, as if to sit any further towards the head implied an intimacy she felt she had no right to. Becky lay quite straight, in exactly the position in which she had woken, after sleeping for nineteen hours, with her head turned away from Josie and her gaze fixed on the wall.
‘I really am. I apologize unreservedly. Whatever either of us said, I should never, ever, have hit you and I regret it so much. I am truly sorry.’
Becky didn’t move. She lay as if she were wholly unaware of Josie, as if Josie simply didn’t exist for her, as if she had never spoken. Josie looked at her face – very pale – and at the dark tangle of hair on the pillow, and then, diffidently, at the long line of Becky’s body under the duvet. The police had said Becky had had a bit of a scuffle some time in the two days and three nights of her absence, probably with one of the truck drivers who had given her a lift, but that it hadn’t been serious, Becky hadn’t been harmed. The doctor who sedated her said that she was a little bruised across the chest and shoulders, but otherwise all right. Becky said nothing. Whatever she had told the police or the doctor, she had declined to repeat to Matthew or Josie. She didn’t seem relieved to be home, merely resigned, as if she’d suspected that this was how a gesture of spontaneous defiance would end anyway, as if her heart had not really been in it, because of that.
‘Are you hungry?’ Josie said. ‘Would you like something to eat?’
Becky gave the smallest shake of her head. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, she wasn’t, at the moment, conscious of any of the usual appetites but only of a curious, weightless, detached calm.
‘Becky,’ Josie said, ‘will you speak to me? Will you at least accept that I am really sorry for what I did?’
Becky neither moved nor uttered. Slowly, Josie got off the bed and stood up. She had told the police that she had struck Becky and they had reacted as if smacks to the head followed by a child search were hardly out of the ordinary to them.
‘It happens,’ the sergeant had said. ‘It happens all the time. First sign of an adult stepping out of line, and the kids do a bunk.’
He hadn’t looked at Josie while he said it, but at Matthew, and Josie had felt obscurely reprimanded, the one who couldn’t cope, couldn’t keep a hold on her temper, couldn’t rely on her supposed maturity. When the police rang, almost thirty-six agonizing hours later, and she answered the telephone, they asked to speak to Matthew.
‘Mr Mitchell, please,’ they said, ‘the young lady’s father.’
‘But have you—’
‘Mr Mitchell, please. Becky Mitchell’s father. At once, please.’
Matthew had wept when he heard Becky was safe. So did Josie, and Clare. Rufus and Rory sprawled on the stairs and kicked the banisters. Matthew had taken Clare on his knee and then Rory had climbed over Rufus to come and stand by his father and sister and Matthew had put an arm out and pulled him in.
‘I’m in disgrace,’ Josie thought. She went into the kitchen and cried into the sink, holding on to the stainless-steel rim and letting her tears splash down in big drops like rain. Rufus came into the kitchen and leaned on the cupboards beside her.
‘You didn’t do it on purpose,’ he said.
‘I did at the last minute. At the last minute, it was definitely on purpose—’
‘You can’t help the last minute,’ he said. ‘No-one can.’
Josie shot him a quick grateful glance.
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s true,’ he said.
It was a woman police officer who had escorted Becky into the house, and then a woman doctor had come from the Sedgebury practice Josie wasn’t yet very familiar with. They had both been very matter of fact. Becky had had an escapade from which she had escaped physically unharmed at least. That was all they needed to know: anything else was Matthew’s business, Becky’s business and, to a much lesser extent plainly, Josie’s business. Matthew and Rory had moved the mattress of Clare’s bed to the space on the floor between the beds in the boys’ room, and Becky had showered, in silence, and had then taken her prescribed sleeping pills and closed her own bedroom door behind her. Josie had put clean linen on her bed – a futile gesture, she knew, but what could she do just now that wasn’t futile – and Becky had climbed in and slept and slept and slept. Before they went to bed, Josie found Matthew sitting on the base of Clare’s bed and gazing at Becky intently, while she slept. There had seemed to be nothing to say to him, just as there seemed, now, nothing to say to Becky.
‘Come down, when you want to,’ Josie said. ‘Or stay there. It doesn’t matter. You do what you want to.’
She looked round the room. Becky’s boots lay on the floor, beside Clare’s babyhood blue-nylon fur teddy bear and a torn chocolate-bar wrapper.
‘Sorry,’ Josie said again.
‘Hello,’ Matthew said.
Becky turned her head very slowly on the pillow.
‘Hi.’
He came to stand beside the bed, looking down at her. All that sleep and almost nothing to eat had given her a luminous look, almost one of fragility. Beside the bed, on the floor, was a tray bearing an untouched bowl of soup and an uneaten sandwich.
‘Josie brought you lunch, I see.’
‘I didn’t want it.’
‘But you’re eating chocolate.’ He glanced at the sweet wrappers scattered on the carpet.
‘So?’