Josie came all the way down to Bath, to collect Rufus. She’d offered to, almost as if Tom were an invalid, when she heard about Elizabeth’s leaving.
‘I’ll come,’ she’d said. ‘It’s no bother. The last thing you want is that awful lay-by, just now.’
He’d let her. He’d been grateful. She’d arrived with her stepson, an unfinished-looking boy of perhaps thirteen whom Rufus had been suddenly very boisterous in front of, as if he were extravagantly pleased to see him, and couldn’t say so. They’d gone up to Rufus’s room together, Rory holding Basil.
‘He’s great,’ Rory said to Josie. ‘Isn’t he? Why can’t we have a cat?’
‘I expect we can—’
‘Soon, now—’
‘Maybe—’
‘When we get back,’ Rory said. ‘Can’t we? A kitten?’
‘Two kittens,’ Rufus said.
‘Go away,’ Josie said, shaking her head, but she was laughing. Tom made her coffee. She was very nice to him, sympathetic, but her sympathy had a quality of detachment to it.
‘I don’t want you to be sorry for me—’
‘I’m not,’ she said, ‘but I’m sorry it’s happened, I’m sorry for Rufus.’
Tom flinched slightly. He couldn’t say how awful it had been, couldn’t admit to Josie how Rufus had longed for her arrival, his bag packed for twenty-four hours previously, his microscope wrapped up in layers and layers of bubble wrap. And Josie didn’t ask him anything much. He didn’t know if she was being tactful, or whether she guessed so much she hardly needed to ask. She looked around the kitchen, but only cursorily, and not at all in the examining manner of someone eager to observe every change, every shred of evidence of someone else’s occupation. She was pleasant, but a little guarded, and only at the end, when she was getting into the car and the boys and Rufus’s possessions were already packed inside, did she say, as if in fellow feeling, ‘Don’t be deluded. Nothing’s as easy as it looks,’ and kissed his cheek.
He went back into the kitchen after the car had driven off and looked at their coffee mugs, and the empty Coca-Cola cans the boys had left. Rufus had said goodbye hurriedly – lovingly but hurriedly, as if the moment needed to be dispensed with as quickly as possible because of all the unhappy, uncomfortable things that had preceded it. He hadn’t talked about Elizabeth’s fleeting visit much; indeed, had rebuffed Tom’s tentative attempts to explore his feelings about it, leaving Tom with the distinct and miserable impression that Rufus held him at least partly responsible, but was avoiding overt blame by simply not mentioning the subject.
Tom sat down at the table. Dale had put a jug of cornflowers in the middle of it, cornflowers and some yellow daisy things with shiny petals. She had put lilies in the drawing-room, too, and poppies on the chest of drawers in Tom’s bedroom. He wasn’t sure he had ever had flowers in his bedroom before, and they made him uncomfortable – or perhaps it was Dale’s intention, in putting them there, that caused the discomfort. They were also very brilliant, pink and scarlet with staring black stamens. It was a relief to see that they were shedding their papery petals already. Perhaps Dale, after this first flush of happy reassurance, would feel no need to replace them, no impulse to point out to him, yet again, what he and all he represented meant to her. Perhaps she would, unthreatened, calm down again, calm down to a point where she might again venture on a love affair and this time, oh so devoutly to be wished, with someone who could handle her, could skillfully convert her fierce retrospective needs into, at last, an appetite for the future.
‘Until then,’ Tom had said to Elizabeth, ‘I’m responsible. I have to be.’
She’d said nothing. She’d given him one of her quick glances, but she hadn’t uttered. She had, she made it plain, no more sympathy left for his abiding sense of guilt about Dale, his conviction that, not only was the burden of Dale naturally his, as her father, but that he couldn’t, in all fairness, offload it on to anyone else, who didn’t actively, lovingly, seek to relieve him of it.
He stood up, sighing. Basil, stretched where Rory had left him, on the window seat, reared his head slightly to see if Tom was going to do anything interesting, and let it fall again. Slowly, Tom walked down the room, past the sofa and chairs where, at one time or another, all his children had sat or sprawled, where Josie had kicked off her shoes, where Elizabeth had curled up, a mug in her hand, her spectacles on her nose, to read the newspaper. The door to the garden was open and on the top step of the iron staircase was a terracotta pot, planted with trailing pelargoniums by Elizabeth, pink and white. Tom looked past them, and down into the garden.
Dale was down there. She was crouched against the statue of the stone girl with the dove on her hand, crouched down, with her arms around her knees. She was waiting, just as Pauline used to wait, for him to come and find her.
Chapter Twenty
Karen walked slowly up Barratt Road. It was hot, for one thing, and for another, she had offered to collect some dry cleaning for Josie, and although it wasn’t heavy, it was uncooperative to carry, slithering through her arms in its plastic bags, or sticking to her skin in unpleasant, sweaty little patches. Anyway, she hadn’t bargained on her car breaking down again and needing to spend three expensive days in the garage, forcing her to take the bus to work and her feet everywhere else. It reminded her of what it was like when she and Matthew were small, and the only car her parents had was her father’s work car which he wouldn’t use for family outings after she was sick on the back seat once, from a surfeit of heat, ice-cream and temper.
She hardly ever lost her temper now. Josie had remarked on it, had said how equable she was. Maybe that was true. Maybe she’d realized, living with her mother, that temper never achieved anything much for the person who lost it, beyond that first, brief swoop of excitement when you opened your mouth to begin. She’d told Josie quite a lot recently, about her and Matthew’s mother, as well as about her job and the love-hate relationship she had with it, and about Rob, the Australian dentist, newly arrived in Sedgebury, who was displaying the kind of interest in her nobody had shown for ages. She found that Josie was very easy to talk to, much easier than she used to be.
She’d cut her hair off, too. Karen had been amazed. One day there’d been that heavy, coppery mane that seemed almost to be Josie’s trademark, and the next day it was gone.
‘How could you?’
‘I had to,’ Josie said. ‘I just had to. I feel extremely shy about it, now I’ve done it, but I had to.’
‘What about Matt?’
‘I think he likes it.’
‘You look about fourteen.’
‘That’s not why I did it—’
‘No, I know. What did the children say?’
‘Nothing,’ Josie said. ‘They all just stared as if I’d grown a second head. Rufus asked where all the hair was and I said in the hairdresser’s dustbin. They keep sneaking looks at me. Especially Becky.’
Two weeks later, Becky had done the same thing. If Karen had been amazed about Josie’s hair, she was absolutely astounded at Becky’s.
‘Is that a compliment, or what?’ she said to Josie.
‘I don’t know. I’m trying not to work that kind of thing out because I always get the answers wrong. But she looks good, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Karen said. She was gazing out of the kitchen window at the square of patchy grass that passed as a lawn, where Becky was playing with the new kittens and a golf-practise ball on a length of knitting wool. ‘Yes,’ she said.