‘Sorry,’ Lucas said.
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I can’t do anything.’
He thought he heard a faint sigh.
‘No,’ Elizabeth said.
Lucas smiled into the receiver, to convey as much warmth as he could.
‘See you soon,’ he said. ‘Bye.’
Duncan Brown made himself some soup in a mug. It really was most ingenious, the way a small foil envelope of fawn-coloured powder, faintly speckled, became, with the addition of boiling water, a mug of mushroom soup, complete with little dark chunks of actual mushroom. He stirred it thoughtfully. His late wife, Elizabeth’s mother, had always, meticulously, made mushroom soup in a saucepan, starting with mushrooms and flour and butter and going on with stock and milk, the whole process involving time and attention and washing-up. It would have troubled her to see Duncan’s foil packets, though it mightn’t have surprised her to see them. ‘Oh, Duncan,’ she’d have said, and her voice would have been exasperated and indulgent all at once.
‘Am I like my mother much?’ Elizabeth had said to him today.
‘Only to look at, really. Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t seem to remember her as very maternal—’
‘She wasn’t.’
‘And I want a baby so much!’ Elizabeth had cried suddenly, and then burst into tears.
Duncan carried his soup mug and a half-eaten packet of water biscuits into his sitting-room. The air smelled faintly of cinnamon, on account of a spray Shane had taken to using which he claimed kept the dust down. Duncan made his way to his particular chair and sat down in it, holding his soup mug carefully level and putting the biscuit packet down on a nearby pile of books. It was on the small, broken-springed sofa opposite that Elizabeth had been sitting when she had said – quite violently for her – that she wanted a baby so badly.
‘Why shouldn’t you have one?’ Duncan said gently.
Elizabeth blew her nose fiercely.
‘Tom doesn’t want one.’
‘Ah.’
‘He’s had three. He says he’s too old. He doesn’t seem to see that I’ve never had one, that I badly want one and that I, miraculously, don’t seem to be too old at all to stand quite a good chance of having one.’
Duncan got up and poured two generous quantities of sherry into a couple of rose-pink Moroccan tea glasses. He held one out to Elizabeth.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But I don’t really like sherry—’
‘I know you don’t. But drink it all the same. It’s so strong, it’s distracting.’
‘It’s like talking to someone who can’t hear me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘First Dale, and now this. No, he says, smiling and kind and immovable, no. No baby. We don’t need a baby, we have each other, we have our work, we have Rufus whom we both adore – true – and we don’t need a baby.’ She took a gulp of sherry and then said, more wildly, ‘But I do! I want home and hearth and a baby!’
Duncan turned the tea glass round in his fingers.
‘Do you imagine the present difficulties with Dale—’
‘Oh, don’t talk about them,’ Elizabeth said, blowing her nose again. ‘You can’t imagine, you can’t conceive of how demanding she is and how passive he seems to me in response! And I have to behave so beautifully, I have to be so restrained and careful and courteous and tactful, and never expose my true feelings while Dale thrusts hers in your face because she always has, no one’s ever told her not to, she believes she has every right to impose her own needs and desires all over everyone else, and insist upon our sympathy, all the time, about everything, because once upon a time she lost a mother whom I am beginning to detest with an intensity that amazes me.’
‘Goodness,’ Duncan said.
Elizabeth took another gulp of sherry and made a face. ‘It’s such a relief to say it.’
‘And the brother?’
‘I rang him,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I probably shouldn’t have, but I was at the end of my tether and I had this mad idea of asking him to stand up for me in this business of Dale moving back in. But when it came to it, I couldn’t ask him, I couldn’t say. He—’
‘What?’
‘He sort of implied I’d got to sort it out for myself and of course he’s right.’
‘But can you?’ Duncan said. ‘Can you disentangle all this if Tom can’t help you?’
Elizabeth sighed. She reached out and put the tea glass, still half full of sherry, on the copy of Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary that Duncan used for newspaper crosswords.
‘I love him,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I see how hard it is for him, I see how torn he is, I see how he is burdened with this sense of responsibility he’s had ever since Pauline died. I just wonder – if he can see how hard it is for me, too.’
‘I expect he can,’ Duncan said. ‘And doesn’t know what to do about it.’
She looked at him.
‘Did you do that? With Mother?’
He smiled.
‘Why do you keep bringing her into it?’
‘Because I keep wondering what she’d do in my place, what she’d tell me to do.’
Duncan watched her. The glow he’d noticed at Christ mas, gilding her like a nimbus, had dimmed a little.
‘I said to Tom,’ Elizabeth said, her voice a little hoarse, as if tears were still not very far away, ‘I said, “Can’t you see, we are all lonely in this about-to-be family? There’s a sense in which we’re all excluded from something and another sense in which we’re all powerless to change things. But we’ve got to try, we’ve got to put the past behind us and try.”’
‘What did he say?’
Elizabeth picked up the pink tea glass again.
‘He said you can’t alter the past, but because of the past, everything that comes after is altered. Something happens, a deed is done, and the consequences just go rolling on. He made me feel—’ She stopped, bit her lip, and then she said, ‘That I had lived too sheltered a life to know.’
‘A little patronizing, perhaps.’
‘But true, too. I’ve been a bit like a book on a shelf that no-one’s really wanted to take down and read avidly until now.’
‘Elizabeth,’ Duncan said.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re in a corner, aren’t you, up a cul-de-sac—’
‘Yes.’
‘My dear. What are you going to do?’
She lifted the tea glass and drained all the sherry out of it in two swallows. Then she put the empty glass back on the dictionary.
‘I’m going to ask him,’ she said. ‘Ask him to stand up for me.’
Chapter Seventeen
The Huntleys’ farmhouse rose redly out of the red Herefordshire earth as if it had, over the centuries, just slowly emerged from it. It was built on a slope, with carelessly arranged barns here and there beside it, and a stream between it and the lane over which Tim had laid a crude bridge made of old railway sleepers. As Becky crossed the bridge, two sheepdogs tethered with long, clattering lengths of chain just inside the entrance to the nearest barn raced forward, barking and leaping. They couldn’t reach her by yards, but all the same, Becky kept to the far side of the bridge and made at speed for the gate into the little farm garden. She didn’t like dogs.