‘Only until—’ she’d said to Lucas. ‘Only for a few weeks.’
He’d shaken his head.
‘You shouldn’t—’
‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I? Because of her? Because of her and Dad and’ – her voice thickened ominously – ‘their privacy?’
‘No,’ Lucas said. ‘Because of you.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean you’ll never go forward if you keep taking yourself backwards.’
‘I’m not,’ Dale said. ‘I’m just being sensible.’
‘She doesn’t know the meaning of the word,’ Amy said later. ‘She can’t do anything unless there’s some great emotional doodah hanging off it. Everything she does has to be a big deal – she can’t even pick up the dry cleaning without it being a three-act drama.’
Lucas said nothing. Amy had spoken out of turn, of course, and broken the rules of the uneasy truce that had existed between them since they’d had that major row about Dale. It had been late at night, late the night Amy had been to London to interview for the film job she didn’t get, and he’d been almost asleep and she’d woken him to describe to him, mostly at the top of her voice, all the things she’d ever thought about Dale, all the elements in Dale’s behaviour she couldn’t take. He’d tried to calm her, he’d tried to tell her that he well knew the difference between loving a sister and loving a future wife, but she’d shrieked that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that anyone who called their sister ‘cupcake’ and ‘pumpkin’ like some third-rate American soap-opera character had a serious problem with arrested emotional development, let alone something worse, something much worse, and then she’d slammed out of their bedroom and spent the rest of the night where he was now lying, on the sofa.
There’d been a ragged reconciliation in the morning. He’d found her making tea, still in her clothes from the day before, and put his arms round her and said he was sorry, he never meant to upset her.
‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘It’s her. And maybe your attitude to her.’
‘Then we won’t talk about her.’
‘We have to!’
‘No, we don’t. Why do we?’
‘To get it sorted—’
‘There’s nothing to sort,’ Lucas had said. ‘There’s just the fact that she is my sister and nothing you or I can do will make that fact any different. So I suggest we just don’t talk about it. We just stop.’
He didn’t find it difficult. Dale was there, but she didn’t have to be part of the whole of his life, only the part that related to her, to family. She preoccupied him when she was troublesome, as anything else did, as work was preoccupying him now with all the uncertainties attendant upon the radio station being sold to another company. He knew that it was unlikely he would ever have an entirely quiet mind about Dale, but he wasn’t going to let her and her problems expand to fill all the space available in his mind and heart. He loved her, certainly, but not as the number-one priority, not to the exclusion of all else. One of the easiest ways, he found, to reduce Dale and her demands to manageable proportions, was not to think about her too much, and to speak of her even less. But, it seemed, Amy couldn’t do this, Amy couldn’t push Dale out of the foreground into the background. Amy’s feelings for Dale were like lava: they seethed away underground, barely contained, and every so often, a stream of something molten, red-hot, would erupt into the air and scald both of them. There were times, in the last few months, when Lucas had felt like walking out, just abandoning the clamorous mess of emotions for a simple, physical, anonymous life on a building site, a road construction, even a factory floor. But he hadn’t done it. He told himself that he hadn’t done it because he knew that the burden of emotional baggage is not a matter of geography, but of attitude, but in his heart of hearts, he knew he hadn’t gone because he hadn’t yet reached a point where, to survive, he simply had to. Maybe he never would. Maybe – and this he feared more than anything – he would be afraid to seize such a moment when it came.
He opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling. He had painted it himself, when he and Amy moved in together, and he had made the bookshelves and sanded the floors. He was good with his hands. He held them up and inspected them. He reflected on all the things they had made, all the surfaces they had touched, all the functions he required them to perform without consciously asking them. They were, his father said, the same shape as his mother’s hands, just as his colouring was hers, and not his father’s. He didn’t often think about his mother now. There’d been a time when he thought about her, secretly, all the time and held long, angry, lonely, onesided conversations with her, but he’d come to realize that he was having these conversations with someone he imagined, rather than with someone he remembered, and the urgency of them had faded. And then, as time went on, he found he was surrendering Pauline’s memory to Dale, partly because Dale wanted it so much but partly because he didn’t need it. He often thought how wonderful it would have been if Pauline had lived, how different their lives would have been, but he only thought it, he didn’t try and long for it. His father, after all, was a great father, and he hadn’t minded his first stepmother – except for the pain she caused by leaving – and wasn’t about to mind the second one either. All he minded, just now, was the doubt that hung over his job, the lack of harmony that clouded his relationship with Amy, and his apprehension that, if everything fell apart and he turned to his father for help, his father wouldn’t see him because of being turned in the opposite direction, looking instead at Elizabeth.
The telephone, in ugly contrast to Stan Getz, began ringing the far side of the room. Lucas sat up slowly and stretched. Then he padded across the floorboards he had sanded and waxed and picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Lucas?’ Elizabeth said.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hi.’
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you—’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not. I wasn’t doing anything much.’
He sat down in the chair by the telephone and balanced the ankle of one leg across the knee of the other.
‘What can I do for you?’
Elizabeth said, slightly hesitantly, ‘I’m in a bit of a quandary—’
‘Oh?’
‘I expect you know, don’t you, that Dale is planning to move back into her old bedroom here?’
‘Yes.’
‘I rather wanted,’ Elizabeth said, ‘to know what you think about that.’
‘What I think—’
‘Yes.’
Lucas began to revolve his balanced foot, round and round, slowly.
‘What does Dad think?’
There was a beat and then Elizabeth said, ‘I very much want to do the right thing.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘When I suggested, some months ago, offering my house to Dale, your father thought I shouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be a good idea for Dale or for us to live so closely. But now she is actually proposing to move back into this house, he doesn’t seem to see things the same way.’
‘Have you talked to him about it?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said that it was only for a few weeks and that I must keep a sense of proportion.’
‘I see,’ Lucas said. He lowered his turning foot to the floor and lifted his other one, to balance it across his knee. ‘So why are you telephoning me?’
‘To see if there is some piece of the jigsaw I’m missing, to see if there is something really obvious I haven’t got—’
‘You don’t want Dale to move in?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said quietly.
Lucas closed his eyes. He thought of his father. He thought of his father’s eternally complex commitment to Dale, and he thought of Amy and the possible insecurity of his future and the uncomfortable emotional intensity of his present. He opened his eyes again. He liked Elizabeth, he really did, but she’d have to find her own way out of the wood otherwise she’d only get drawn back in again, and be ultimately lost.