Elizabeth extricated herself from Tom’s embrace. She said tiredly, ‘I don’t believe in Ruth.’
‘She exists.’
‘Oh,’ Elizabeth said, ‘I believe that.’
‘Sit down,’ Tom said.
He pulled a chair out on the side of the table where Elizabeth usually sat, and pressed her gently down into it.
‘I bought skate. Skate wings. I knew you liked them.’
‘I do.’
‘Was it a good week? At work?’
‘It was uneventful, thank you,’ Elizabeth said politely.
Tom put a bowl of salad on the table and a yellow pottery dish of new potatoes. The potatoes were freckled with parsley. Elizabeth looked at them. She wondered, with a kind of detachment, if it was normal to remember to garnish potatoes with parsley or if, and particularly this evening, it had a significance, a subtle message from the parsley chopper to the parsley consumer about the extra trouble taken and all that that implied, about love being expressed in practical details because it was sometimes so impossible to express it more straightforwardly. Did Tom, when he cooked – which he did often and excellently – always remember the parsley?
He put a plate in front of her. The skate lay on it, darkly glistening, beside a wedge of lemon.
‘Eat up.’
‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It looks lovely.’
He sat down opposite her.
‘You look so tired.’
She picked up her knife and fork.
‘That’s crying.’
He said, with warmth, ‘You’re wonderful about Rufus.’
‘It isn’t hard.’
‘All the same—’
‘Tom,’ she said, cutting carefully into her fish, ‘let’s not talk about him. Let’s not talk about children, any children.’
He smiled.
‘Of course,’ he said. He picked up the wine bottle and reached through the candles to fill her glass. ‘This chapel I saw, the one I saw this week, so fascinating. It’s rather classical in design, pedimented and so forth, and it was built by a fervent but unquestionably dotty lady aristocrat to house a sect she had espoused who believed in the exclusive spirituality of women.’
‘Good for them.’
‘It was founded by a man, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘He wouldn’t let any other men in. He persuaded Lady Whatnot that she needed his physical and mental strength to keep the polluting effect of other men at bay. It’s a lovely building, full of light, all grey-and-white panelling. Badly decayed, of course.’
Elizabeth took two potatoes out of the yellow dish.
‘Can I see it?’
‘Of course. I’d love to show it to you. It’s listed, so we have to make practical rooms out of the vestry and back quarters and leave the chapel itself as a living space.’
‘Does it need to be de-consecrated?’
‘I don’t think,’ Tom said picking up his wineglass, ‘that God ever came into it much. I think the founding father saw to it that no-one else shared centre stage. I’d love to know what actually went on.’
Elizabeth looked up suddenly.
‘What was that?’
‘What—’
‘Something,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The front door—’
Tom half got up. There were quick footsteps in the hall and then the kitchen door opened.
‘Hi!’ Dale said.
She was smiling. She carried her handbag and keys in one hand and a bunch of stargazer lilies in the other. She swirled round the table and pushed the flowers at Elizabeth.
‘For you.’
Elizabeth took a breath.
‘Oh—’
Tom was standing straight now.
‘Darling—’
‘Hi, Daddy,’ Dale said. She spun back round the table and kissed him.
‘You didn’t say you were coming—’
‘I didn’t know,’ Dale said. She winked at Elizabeth. ‘I didn’t know until I got back and found that Ruth’s hot date from last night was still there, wearing nothing but a bath towel. Ruth didn’t exactly say push off but she hardly needed to. Hey, don’t stop eating your supper.’ She bent briefly towards Elizabeth’s plate and sniffed extravagantly. ‘Smells wonderful. What is it?’
‘Skate,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Dale,’ Tom said. ‘We are having supper together, Elizabeth and I—’
Dale bent forward again and lifted the lilies from Elizabeth’s lap.
‘I’ll put those in water for you.’
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
Dale ran water noisily into the sink. ‘I’m not going to interrupt you,’ she said. ‘Honestly. I’ve had some soup, I’m fine, and I’ve got so much to do upstairs you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Tonight?’ Tom said. ‘Now?’
She turned from the sink, the lilies dripping in her hands, her hair and teeth and eyes shining.
‘Honestly,’ she said again. ‘Honestly, Daddy. Have you even seen it up there? I promise you it’s going to take me a couple of hours just to make enough space to sleep.’
Amy hadn’t turned the lights on. She sat slumped on one of the pale sofas in the sitting-room of the flat with her feet on the coffee table, nursing a mug of tea balanced on her stomach and watching the daylight fade above the roofs of the houses opposite. In a while, maybe in only a few minutes, the street lights would come on and the sky would instantly darken in contrast, as if it were offended by being eclipsed. The mug of tea on Amy’s stomach was her third. She’d drunk them slowly and savouringly, one after the other, working her way round the top of the mug until there was a completed circle of lipstick marks, like a stenciled pattern on a wall.
While she drank her tea and stared at the sky, Amy had been thinking. Or rather, she had lain there and let thoughts wash through her mind, or round and round it, while she had a look at them. It occurred to her, after a while, that the thought that persistently swirled slowly through her brain was how tired she was, not physically tired, but emotionally tired, weary with strain and frustration and the awful boredom of realizing that human beings don’t change, really, and that, if she was going to love one of them, she had to learn to love things in him that she’d never even countenance putting up with in someone else. It was when she was spooning sugar into the third mug of tea that it came to her – with relief rather than shock – that she couldn’t really be bothered. ‘I’m tired of love,’ she told her reflection in the kettle and then, a second later, emboldened by a sweet, hot swallow of tea, ‘I’m tired of trying to love Lucas.’
This thought had then overtaken previous thoughts of weariness. Amy went back to the sofa and replaced her feet not just on the table, but on Lucas’s prized book of photographs of the temples of Angkor Wat, and realized, with a slow surge of energy, that the very idea of leaving Lucas made her feel different, better, less hopeless. It made her feel sad, too, unquestionably, sad enough to bring tears to her eyes, because of all she had invested in their relationship, because of all their hopes, because – above all – of Lucas’s lovableness. But despite the sadness, there was a sensation of wonder, too, a realization that a small new hope lay in a decision that would effectively give her her own life back, that would restore her to the centre of things after all these months of circling unheard, she often felt, unseen, round the edges.
The street lights, outside the window, went on and the rooftop view changed abruptly from something real to something theatrical. Amy sat up and put her mug down on the table and swung her feet to the floor. A girl at work was going up to Manchester; she said there were good opportunities in the north because so many people still wanted to come south, still believed that the energy drained out of the media world anywhere north of Birmingham. Why shouldn’t she do that? Why shouldn’t she go north and start another kind of life with herself in charge of it? It might be lonely, of course, certainly to start with, but she was lonely now, living with Lucas who always seemed abstracted, preoccupied with something that wasn’t her. She’d said to him, over and over again, that she didn’t want all his attention, but she did feel she was, as his future wife, entitled to at least some of it.