‘What?’
‘I find I’m desperately hunting for traces of her. Anything, anything, tissues in the wastepaper basket, magazines she bought, the mug she liked drinking out of—’
‘Don’t, Dad.’
Tom gave himself a little shake.
‘Quite right. Most unfair, to say such things to you.’
‘I don’t think,’ Lucas said gently, ‘we were quite in the same league of love.’
‘No. Perhaps not.’
‘Will you see her again?’
Tom lifted his glass and drained it, as if he were drinking water.
‘Next week. When Rufus is back.’
‘Rufus—’
‘Yes,’ Tom said. He put his glass under the bench and stood up. ‘Yes. She’s coming down next week, to see Rufus. She wants to tell Rufus herself.’
Dale had made osso bucco. She had Elizabeth David’s Italian Food propped up ostentatiously against the coffee percolator, and she was chopping garlic and parsley and lemon rind with a long-bladed knife as she had seen television chefs do. The smell was wonderful. She hoped, when Tom came back from this mysterious drink with Lucas, he would say how wonderful the smell was, and not, as he had done the last few days, appear not to notice the effort she was making, the way she was trying to show him that she knew he was in pain, and was sorry. She was sorry, she told herself, chopping and chopping, of course she was sorry. It was awful to see him hurt again, heartbreaking in fact. It was as if the air had gone out of him, the energy, the vitality. But it would come back, of course it would, when he remembered, when he was reminded. She heard his key in the lock, and began to chop faster.
The kitchen door opened.
‘Hi!’ she said, not looking up.
Tom came slowly over to the table and dropped his keys on it with a clatter.
‘How’s Luke?’
‘You know perfectly well,’ Tom said.
Dale paused in her chopping for a second.
She said quietly, ‘You mean about Amy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe,’ Dale said, ‘maybe in the long run, it was the right thing to do?’
Tom pulled a chair out from the table and sat down heavily in it.
‘Put that knife down.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
Carefully, Dale laid the knife beside her green-speckled mound on the chopping board. She looked at Tom. After a moment he raised his head and looked back at her with an expression she did not recognize.
‘Satisfied?’ Tom said.
She was truly startled.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said are you satisfied?’ Tom said.
‘What d’you mean?’
He leaned forward.
He said, in a voice so raised it was almost a shout, ‘You’ve seen off Elizabeth, you’ve seen off Amy. Are you satisfied now?’
She gasped.
‘It wasn’t me!’
‘Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Making it perfectly plain to a nice girl and a wonderful woman that your brother and father would never belong to anyone but you?’
Dale was horrified. She leaned on her hands over the chopping board, breathing hard.
‘I didn’t, I never—’
‘The keys?’ Tom demanded. ‘The invasion of this house? The little deceits and subterfuges? Your bloody possessions staking your claim louder than words could ever do? Making Elizabeth feel always and ever the outsider, the intruder, and Amy, too?’
‘Don’t,’ Dale whispered.
Tom rose to his feet, leaning on his side of the table, his face towards her.
‘You’re not a child,’ Tom said, ‘though God knows your behaviour would disgrace most children. You’re a grown woman. You’re a grown bloody woman who won’t accept it, who won’t accept the loss of childhood, the need to make your own home, your own life—’
‘Please,’ Dale said. ‘Please.’
Tears were beginning to slide down her face and drip on to the chopping board.
‘And because you won’t accept those things, you want to make Lucas and me live out the past with you, over and over, never mind at what cost to us, never mind the suffering, never mind losing probably the best person – do you hear me, the best person – I have ever known, never mind, never mind, as long as you, Dale, have what you think you want.’
Dale began to sink down behind the kitchen table, crumpling softly on to the floor, her arms held up around her head, wrapping it as if to hold it on.
‘Please Daddy, don’t, don’t, I never meant—’
‘What did you mean then?’
‘I didn’t mean anything,’ Dale said unsteadily. ‘I only meant not to drown. I didn’t mean to hurt, I didn’t, I didn’t—’
‘But you did hurt!’ Tom shouted. ‘You caused terrible, deliberate destruction. Look at what you did!’
Dale unwound her arms and leaned against the nearest table leg. Her hair had escaped its velvet tieback and swung over her face, sticking here and there to the damp skin.
‘I wasn’t doing it for that,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t doing it to hurt someone else. I did it because I couldn’t help it, because I couldn’t breathe otherwise.’ She heard Tom sigh. She said in a steadier voice, ‘You don’t know what it’s like, what it’s always been like. For me. I don’t want it, I’ve never wanted it. I’ve fought and fought, I’ve tried not to be—’ She stopped, and then she said, ‘Sorry.’
There was a silence. She glanced sideways under the table and saw her father’s legs, planted slightly apart, cut off across the thigh by the tabletop.
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes,’ Tom said. His voice was tired.
‘It’s true. It’s true what I’m saying about myself, about what I’m afraid of, what I’ve tried to do.’
‘Yes,’ Tom said again.
Dale swallowed.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
Tom sighed again, a huge gusty sigh, and his legs moved out of her sight, across the kitchen towards the window to the street.
‘Oh Dale—’
Slowly, she got to her knees, and held the edge of the table, pulling herself up, peering over.
‘I didn’t want to break you and Elizabeth up, I just couldn’t bear—’
‘Please don’t talk about it.’
She watched him. His back was towards her, his hands in his pockets.
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes.’
She held the table edge hard and whispered fiercely across it. ‘Don’t leave me.’
Rufus sat up in bed. He had been surprised, but not very, not to find Elizabeth in the house when he arrived. Tom explained that she sometimes had to work late and thus had to get a later train, on Fridays. What had surprised him, and not very pleasantly, was to find Dale there. Dale was in the kitchen, where he had expected to find Elizabeth, in a dress he disapproved of, with almost no skirt at all, frying sausages. She said the sausages were for him. She said this in a very bright, excited voice, as if he ought to feel pleased and grateful, and then she kissed him and left the smell of her scent on him which he could still smell now, even though he’d scrubbed at the place, with a nailbrush. After he’d eaten the sausages – which were not the kind he liked, being full of herbs and stuff – Tom offered to play chess with him, which was very peculiar and rather elaborate, somehow. They’d played chess for a bit, but it hadn’t felt right and then Dale had come prancing back in even more scent and announced in a meaningful voice that she was going out now until much, much later.
It was better when she had gone. Tom poured a glass of wine and gave Rufus a sip and Basil managed to lumber on to the chessboard and knocked all the pieces over. Rufus kept yawning. He didn’t seem able to stop, and yawns kept coming and coming like they did sometimes in assembly in school. Tom had asked, after a while, if he’d rather wait for Elizabeth in bed, and, although as a general principle he liked to hold out against bed as long as possible, he’d nodded and gone upstairs and washed without being reminded, using some of Dale’s toothpaste as one small act of defiance and failing to replace the cap on the tube as a second. Then he’d climbed into bed, lying back against the headboard, and wondered, with a dismalness that dismayed him, why the contemplation of his new curtains and his red rug and his desk didn’t seem to fill him with any satisfaction at all.