It had all happened in five days. Elizabeth had, as was her custom, gone back to London on Sunday evening, and had, as was also her custom, spoken to Tom several times a day throughout the working week. He had said nothing about Dale, nothing about Dale’s possessions. Elizabeth hadn’t been surprised. One of the agreements they had reached at the end of a long, difficult and distressing conversation about Dale was that Tom would indeed do something about her, but must be left to do that thing, whatever it was, in privacy.
‘I can’t talk to Dale,’ Tom had said, ‘if I feel I then have to report precisely back to you.’
‘But it concerns me, too! Because it concerns us—’
He’d frowned. She’d watched him closely, trying to see what he was really thinking, what he really feared.
‘I have to be left alone,’ he said. ‘I have to deal with Dale as I always have, alone. If she can’t trust me, I won’t get anywhere, and she won’t trust me if she thinks I’m relaying everything to you.’
On Friday night, Elizabeth had returned to Bath. Tom, as usual, came to meet her at the station. He looked tired. His manner was guarded. He said, trying to make light of it, ‘I’m afraid I’m not doing very well. But at least it’s only temporary.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You’ll see,’ he said.
She went straight upstairs, when they reached the house, straight up, not even pausing to transfer her bag from her shoulder to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. She knew what she’d find when she reached the top and sure enough, she found it, except that it was bigger than she had anticipated, and its orderliness was somehow more assertive than she had bargained for, more settled, more impervious. She stood, slightly out of breath, and looked, with something that encompassed both rage and despair, at the blatant, unmistakable evidence of Dale’s relentless purpose.
She glanced at Rufus’s room. Lucas’s skis and poles and his tennis racket were piled on the bed and Rufus’s new red rug was almost obscured under a haphazard clutter of splitting bags and broken boxes. The order that prevailed among Dale’s own possessions was plainly not a courtesy extended to anyone else’s. Dropping her bag on the floor, Elizabeth ran into Rufus’s room and somehow, despite their weight and bulk, manhandled the television and video recorder out into the small remaining space left on the landing. Then she began to seize the bags and boxes randomly, almost running in her breathless hurry to get them out of Rufus’s room and dump them, anywhere, anyhow, among the symmetrical piles on the landing. She started to throw things, hurling them out of the door and letting them clatter and slither where they fell, pictures and books, plastic sacks of clothes and bedding, a shoebox of old cassette tapes, a hockey stick, folders of photographs and letters, a collapsible wine rack, a set of carpet bowls in a green cardboard box. Then she grabbed the skis and the tennis rackets in a great unwieldy armful and, staggering out of the room with them, flung them, banging and thumping, down the stairs.
‘What in hell’s name is going on?’ Tom said.
He stood at the foot of the topmost flight of stairs and looked upward. Elizabeth chucked the final cushion.
‘What do you bloody think?’
Tom stepped over a tennis racket and moved a ski from where it lay, jammed crosswise across the staircase.
‘Dearest—’
‘What about Rufus?’ Elizabeth shrieked. ‘If you can’t care about me, I’d at least have expected you to care about Rufus!’
‘Sweetheart, Rufus isn’t here—’
‘Don’t call me sweetheart!’ Elizabeth yelled.
Tom stopped climbing the stairs.
‘Dale isn’t living here,’ he said. ‘Please don’t be so melodramatic. She isn’t living here. She’s living with a friend. It’s just that she’s got nowhere to put anything until she finds a flat, so I said—’
‘Oh!’ Elizabeth cried in exasperation. ‘Oh, don’t tell me what you said! I can imagine exactly what you said! You said all the reasonable, placatory, surrendering things you have so disastrously said to Dale for twenty years. What d’you mean, she isn’t living here?’
‘She isn’t.’
Elizabeth gestured wildly towards Lucas’s bedroom door.
‘She’s going to!’
‘No, she’s living with a—’
‘Then why make a sitting-room of this? Why do expressly what Rufus didn’t want, the minute his back is turned? Why keep her door locked? Why be so utterly, bloody provocative if she doesn’t actually intend to move back in here and watch you and me like a hawk?’
‘Elizabeth,’ Tom said. He closed his eyes briefly, as if summoning the patience to deal with the kind of unreasonableness that no civilized man should ever be required to deal with. ‘Elizabeth. Will you please listen to me? Will you please stop screaming and simply listen? I have spoken to Dale, as you requested—’
‘As we agreed!’
‘As you requested, and she asked if she might just store things here for a few weeks until she finds a flat. She is living with a friend called Ruth, with two young children, in Bristol. She has looked at three flats this week and is viewing two more on Saturday, tomorrow. I understand Rufus’s wishes quite as well as you do, but the invasion of his room, as you see it, is only very temporary, and his room will be absolutely restored before he next needs it.’
‘Huh,’ Elizabeth said.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean huh, Tom Carver. I mean you are a fool if you believe any of that. And you’re not only a fool, but you’re weak.’ Her voice rose. ‘D’you hear me? Do you? Dale can do what she bloody well likes with you because you are completely, pathetically weak!’
He looked up at her. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly but empty, as if he didn’t recognize her, as if her insults meant nothing to him because they were, in fact, perfect strangers to one another. Then he turned, extricating himself from the clutter round his feet, and went, with great dignity, downstairs. Elizabeth watched him go and when he was out of sight round the curves of the staircase, waited until she heard him, with the same measured tread, cross the ground-floor hall. She looked down. Her bag lay where she had dropped it, opened by the vigour of her gesture, spilling keys and a cheque book and a small plastic bottle of mineral water. Automatically she stooped to retrieve the spilled things, to tidy up. Then she stopped, and straightened up, and, stepping over the bag and the trailing leads of the television and the scattered contents of various bags and boxes, crossed to Rufus’s bed and lay down on it, face down on the Batman duvet cover he so strenuously wished to exchange for something more sophisticated and held on to it, for dear life.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said.
He had laid two places, opposite one another, at the kitchen table, and lit candles. There was an opened wine bottle, too, and a warm buttery smell. He took Elizabeth in his arms.
‘I really am sorry.’
She laid her face against his shoulder, against the dark-blue wool of his jersey. She waited to hear herself say, ‘Me, too.’ It didn’t happen.
‘It was unforgivable of me,’ Tom said. ‘Especially on a Friday night with you tired and me cross with myself.’
Elizabeth sighed. She looked at the soft light of the candle flames and the wineglasses and the black Italian pepper grinder you could twist to grind coarsely or finely.
‘How did it happen?’
‘When I was out,’ Tom said. ‘On Wednesday. I was out, meeting a new client who wants to make a house out of an eighteenth-century chapel, and came back to find a note. Then she came the next day and sorted things out a bit, and told me about Ruth.’