She sat up. It was hopeless. She was colder than she’d been when she came upstairs.
‘Clare?’
There was no answer. She might be asleep, or just faking being asleep, but in either case, Becky wasn’t going to get an answer. She pushed the duvet back and put her feet on the floor. They were so cold, even inside her boots, that the soles felt lumpy. She stood up. She’d go downstairs and see if she could find something, somewhere, to make a fire with. Nadine hadn’t let them light the fire in the sitting-room because she said the chimney smoked, but Becky didn’t care about smoke. Smoke didn’t matter at all beside the prospect of a hot flame or two.
She opened the door. The landing and narrow staircase were in darkness, but peering down, there was a line of light still under the kitchen door. She went down the stairs, stiffly, and paused at the bottom. The thing with Nadine – always true, but never more so than in this last year – was that you never quite knew what to expect. Becky put her hand on the kitchen door handle and turned it cautiously.
‘Mum?’
Nadine was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in an old rug. She hadn’t cleared away their supper things, nor their chocolate mugs. In fact, she didn’t seem to have moved except to get up and find the rug. She was sit ting with her head in her hands and her long dark hair falling unevenly over them and over her shoulders, and she was crying. She was crying in a way that made Becky think she had probably been crying for a very long time.
‘Mum?’
Slowly, Nadine looked up. Her face was wretched, drowned.
‘I thought you’d be asleep.’
‘I couldn’t. I’m so cold—’
Nadine said, ‘It’s awful, isn’t it, the cold. I’ve never been so cold either.’
She pulled up a corner of the rug and blotted her eyes with it.
Becky came further into the room.
‘D’you want some tea?’
Nadine said, ‘There isn’t any milk.’ She found a tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose.
‘You could have it black.’
‘Thank you,’ Nadine said. She was shivering, from crying so much.
Becky went past her and ran water into the kettle. It was a grotty kettle, choked with lime on the inside and all its shine gone on the outside. Heaven knows where it had come from. It wasn’t in the least familiar to Becky.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nadine said.
Becky said nothing. She leaned into the sink and stared hard at the water running into the kettle.
‘It’s just—’
Becky waited.
‘It’s just that it’s so awful and I get so angry because I’m so powerless. This horrible cottage—’
Becky turned off the tap.
‘You chose it,’ she said.
‘I did not!’ Nadine shrieked. ‘I did not! It was the only one we could afford!’
Becky closed her eyes for a moment, and swallowed. Then she opened them again, fitted the plug into the kettle and switched it on, staying by it, while it spluttered into life, her back to Nadine. She shouldn’t have said that, she shouldn’t have answered back. It would just start everything off again. No matter that she was right, no matter that she and Nadine and Rory and Clare had driven round and round Herefordshire for what seemed like weeks, looking at cottages for rent, with Nadine saying, ‘No, no, no,’ to every one, even the decent ones with proper bathrooms and bus stops nearby, and then at last, when they’d pulled up in dismay in front of this utterly doomed place which looked like the witch’s house in a fairytale – there were even mushrooms growing on the roof – miles from anywhere, she’d said, ‘Yes.’ They’d all groaned, wailing with incomprehension and horror. ‘Yes,’ Nadine had said again, ‘Yes.’
‘Did you hear me?’ Nadine said. Her voice was calmer.
‘Yes,’ Becky said.
‘It’s true. This is the cheapest and the cheapest is what we had to have. You know why.’
Becky said nothing. She thought of the car, which Nadine had also spent a long time finding, with its rust patches and holey floor, parked outside in a mouldering lean-to of planks and corrugated iron. It was frightening to think that something so fragile was her only link back to the outside world, a world in which, at this precise moment, even school seemed attractive. She thought, briefly, of her father’s car and then switched the thought off again, abruptly, bang.
‘I know it’s awful for you here,’ Nadine said. ‘I feel really badly about it. It’s awful for me, too. I’ve never lived like this, not even as a student.’
Becky put a teabag in a mug, poured boiling water on to it, squeezed the bag against the side of the mug with a spoon and fished it out. She turned and put the mug down in front of Nadine.
‘Could you get a job?’
‘How?’ Nadine said. ‘How? With no-one to get all of you to school and back but me?’
Becky tried not to remember all the cottages they’d seen on bus routes.
‘Could you get a part-time job, in Ross or somewhere, while we’re at school?’
‘Shop girl?’ Nadine enquired sweetly.
‘Maybe. I dunno. I wouldn’t mind a Saturday job in a shop.’
‘You’re too young. Anyway, how would you get there?’
Becky shrugged.
‘Bike, maybe.’
‘And where will you get a bike?’
Becky opened her mouth to say, ‘I’ll ask Dad,’ and closed it again, too late.
‘From your father, no doubt,’ Nadine said. ‘Your honey mooning father with his nice new house to come home to.’
‘It’s not very new,’ Becky said.
‘But rather,’ Nadine said dangerously, ‘newer than this.’
Becky was suddenly very tired. She put her hands on the table among the dirty plates and let her head hang, feeling her hair swinging down, heavy and dark, like Nadine’s.
‘I wish—’
‘What do you wish?’
‘I wish – you didn’t hate him like this.’
Nadine took a swallow of tea, and made a face at it.
‘What would you do, in my place?’
Becky said nothing. She observed that her black nail varnish had chipped, and resolved that she would just let it chip until it all came off of its own accord, bit by bit. Then she’d paint them green.
‘If the person you loved and had been married to for seventeen years – seventeen – suddenly told you he was marrying someone else, and that you would have to go and live somewhere else on almost no money, how would you feel?’
Inside Becky’s head, a little sentence formed itself and hung there. It read: It wasn’t like that. She said, ‘But we’ve got to see him. We’ve got to go on seeing him.’
Nadine looked at her. Her light-blue eyes were wide with fervour.
‘Exactly. Exactly. And can’t you just use one ounce of imagination and see how agonizing that is for me to bear?’
In the morning, Nadine drove them all to school, Clare to the nearest junior school and Rory and Becky to the comprehensive where Clare would join them, when she was eleven. They had been at their new schools for two terms, ever since it became plain that Matthew really did mean to marry Josie and Nadine had decided that it was intolerable for her, and the children, to stay in Sedgebury. Matthew had wanted her to stay, so that the children at least had the continuity of school and friends and grandparents, but she had refused. She had been in such violent pain that she had believed, passionately, that the only way she could possibly assuage it was by getting out, getting away from everything that was familiar, and was now denied to her. The children had complained bitterly – they complained a lot more then, she had noticed, than they did now – but she had told them it had to be. Nobody wanted this new life, but they had to live it.