When Phil went out to play that evening Helen packed a suitcase and a bag and caught a bus with the children to go to where her mother lived about three miles away across the city. She could only carry enough for one night; she even left behind the pushchair, which was too heavy and too difficult to fold down. She didn’t mean, though, ever to go back to Phil. She had no idea of what lay ahead in the future, although she did think that if only she could get back her old job at the dance school, then perhaps her mother would look after the children while she worked. This wasn’t likely, however, as the management at the dance school had changed and she didn’t know the new people. She and Phil had eaten the tea she cooked in silence; they hadn’t said goodbye when he went out. Helen had thought, as she always thought when he left to play, that he might be killed that night and she might never see him again: he would be driving home when he was tired and had been drinking, on unknown roads in the dark. She always pictured these roads as twisting through forest or bleak moorland, shining and treacherous with wet. But even then she didn’t run after him. The clamour of his footsteps on the staircase died away. She heard him open the garage door and drive out the car, then stop and get out and close the garage door behind him. Then he drove off.
The clouds that had muffled the day like a fleece broke up in the evening and floated as pink wisps in a high sunny sky; a thrush was joyous in the garden as they left. Helen had Sophie on her leading rein, and could just manage the suitcase as long as she would walk. She didn’t care if the Underwoods saw her go. The little girls loved catching buses. They had to get one down to the centre and then change; Helen was only afraid that as it got past Sophie’s bedtime she would grumble and rub her eyes and want to be picked up. But the girls seemed to understand that this evening didn’t exist inside the envelope of ordinary time; they cast quick buoyant wary looks at their mother, as if they mustn’t make too much of anything. Nia, who had seen Helen throw the brush, practised an air of easy adaptation. Sophie held on to the chrome rail of the seat in front and bounced. When Helen clenched her fist on the rail, so that if the bus stopped suddenly and Sophie flew forwards she wouldn’t hit her face, she was surprised to see she was still wearing her engagement and wedding rings, distorting lumps under her glove. All that seemed left already far behind.
Helen’s father had died three years before; her mother had sold the big house where she had lived for thirty-five years and gone to live above a hairdresser’s. Socially, she had come down in the world. Her husband had been retail manager for one of the big department stores; she had used to come to this hairdresser’s as a customer, to have her hair washed and set, preserving a proper dignified distance from the staff. Now she even worked as a receptionist for them several afternoons a week, drawn deeply and happily into the world of their gossip and concerns. The only entrance to her flat was through the hairdresser’s; Helen had to ring the doorbell, then her mother peered down from between her sitting-room curtains to see whoever was calling at this time. She didn’t have a telephone, so Helen hadn’t been able to warn her. A few minutes later they could see her feeling her way along the row of dryers in the dim light from the stairs behind; she didn’t like to use the salon lights because they weren’t on her bill. No one knew that Nia’s dreams were visited by dryer-monsters with blank skin faces and huge bald egg-shaped skulls in powder blue. The glass door to the salon, hung inside with a rattling pink venetian blind, had ‘Jennifer’s’ stencilled across it in flowing cursive script, and underneath that a pink silhouette bust of a lady in an eighteenth-century wig.
Helen and her mother weren’t very alike. Everything about Helen had always been poised and quiveringly defiant; her mother seemed in contrast compliant and yielding. They didn’t look alike: Helen had her father’s stark cheekbones and strong colouring, her mother had been pinkly pretty and had faded and grown plump. But Helen was aware of a stubbornness deep down in her mother’s softness; when you pushed, she didn’t give way. When Helen was a teenager she and her mother had fought over every single thing — over dancing, over make-up, over Phil — as if one of them must destroy the other before it could end; Helen’s father, who had always appeared to be the stern parent, could only look on in perplexity. It was through the birth of the babies that they had been reconciled; as if that blood sacrifice had satisfied both their honours. Now, as soon as she had undone the bolts and opened the salon door, Nana Allen seemed to know intuitively what had happened.
— You’ve left him, she said. — He didn’t hit you, did he? Has he been drinking?
Helen gave a little bleat of laughter and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. — I hit him. I threw something at him and hit him on the side of the head.
— A scrubbing brush, explained Nia solemnly.
Nana Allen laughed then too.
— Oh God, these children saw it, Helen said; and then for the first time tears spilled out from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
— Sophie didn’t see it, Nia corrected.
— Get them inside, her Nana said. — Come on in, my little lambs. Come and get warm in Nana’s flat. Have you eaten anything? I’ve got some casserole.
Nia got past the egghead dryers by clinging on to her nana’s skirt and burying her eyes in the familiar comfortable-smelling cloth. Helen couldn’t believe these tears, now that they came; they hadn’t been part of how she had imagined her exit, or her austere altered life. She hadn’t even known she had inside her whatever deep reservoir of sorrow the tears poured from, flooding out of her, wave after wave, so that she was sodden, sobbing, helpless to speak. Her mother made her sit down in the corner of the sofa, wrapping her up in the old wartime quilt from home that she put over her knees in the evenings against the draughts (before Helen came she had been sitting reading her library book). She made cups of milky sweet tea for the children, made Nia a pickled-onion sandwich, gave them the biscuit barrel full of lemon creams; she had a special pronged fork for the pickled onions, with a pusher on a spring to press them off on to your plate. Helen eventually was able to drink a cup of tea too. The women together put the children to bed: Sophie in Nana’s bed because it was wider and she was less likely to fall out of it, Nia in the bed in the spare room, which they had to make up first. They left the doors just open, in case the children called out. Then they sat and talked together for hours. Helen’s mother held her hand while they talked, and stroked her hair, and brought a cool flannel for her to wipe her face. Nia could just hear their voices, although she couldn’t hear the words. She fell asleep and the voices became a kind of loose safety net into which she fell, drooping and stretching under her, bearing her up, letting her go.
— I hate him, Helen said adamantly at some point that evening. — He hates me. We’re killing each other. It’s horrible. But I’ve seen through the whole thing, now. I couldn’t ever put myself back inside it.