‘How about you?’ he says. ‘How is everything?’
‘All right.’
There is a silence. Leo looks around for Susie, but she isn’t there. He needs her. He doesn’t know what to say. He feels the silence consuming him, swallowing him up.
‘How’s the garden?’ he says.
His father looks mildly at him with his cold eyes. He wears a cravat at his throat. His snow-white hair is plastered into place.
‘Not much happening in the garden at this time of year. Just some pruning, cutting back for winter. We’re thinking about thinning out some of those trees over by the garage. The roots are starting to undermine the foundations.’
‘Really?’ Leo says.
‘The problem is that your mother won’t hear of any of them being cut down. The tree surgeon came out to explain it to her, but he couldn’t seem to make her understand. We rather wasted his afternoon, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took us off his list, which would be a pity.’
Justin and Madeleine are petting Flossie in her basket. She snaps her jaws a little, rolls over. They tickle her coarse old belly and she lies back, stiff with pleasure on her filthy blanket. Leo looks at their soft hair, their new fresh skin, feels the tension of love for them, as though in this place his love were illicit.
‘Oh well,’ he says.
At last there is a commotion at the door; the others come in, Susie smelling of cigarettes, Thomas and Tonie close behind with the breath of the world on them, of blessed modernity. They look young and clean and slim. They look eminently, relievingly competent.
‘Sorry,’ Thomas says. He puts his arms around Leo, pats his back. ‘We had to take a detour. We got here as quickly as we could.’
‘I would have had to have eaten cow,’ Leo says. Now that they are here, he can acknowledge how miserable he feels.
‘We need a drink,’ Thomas says. ‘Dads, we could all do with a drink, don’t you think?’
Madeleine looks up, startled.
‘Don’t give Mummy anything to drink,’ she says. ‘She had too much to drink last night. She was sick in the car.’
Susie rolls her eyes. She’s wearing a lot of make-up and her skin is deathly-looking, grey. She has lipstick on her teeth. Her dress is all creased down the front. Leo feels guilty. He should have let her stay at home, let her sleep it off. He worries that he doesn’t look after her properly. He worries that he’s going to wear her out.
‘Mummy had a tummy bug,’ he says sternly, to Madeleine.
Madeleine creases her forehead, perplexed. ‘No she didn’t. And she was smoking just now. I saw her in the garden.’
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Susie says, through her teeth. ‘Isn’t she everything you’d want in a daughter?’ She catches hold of Alexa, kisses the top of her shining head. ‘Now this is a nice, discreet child. This child is house-trained.’
Tonie is in the doorway. Leo sees her, sees her watching everything. She looks like she is watching a play.
‘Come outside,’ he says in a low voice to Madeleine.
She opens her mouth in protest, but she doesn’t say anything, just gets up and walks sullenly ahead of him, out into the garden. He lectures her there on the grass, in the windy grey day. When they go back in the others are sitting down, talking, drinking watery gin-and-tonics. Madeleine glances meaningfully at Susie, glass in hand, but Leo has silenced her. She goes and sits on the windowsill and stares out until Ma calls them for lunch.
Susie drinks a second gin-and-tonic, and then wine, and by three o’clock she is flushed, blowsy, her red hair cascading wildly over her shoulders. The children have left the table. Leo can hear them calling and laughing on the lawn.
‘How’s the new job?’ he asks Tonie.
She smiles mysteriously, distantly. She nods.
‘Yeah, it’s good.’
‘And the — what’s it called? — the sabbatical. How’s that going?’ Susie says, to Thomas.
There is, Leo thinks, a hierarchy, an order to these conversations, and he and Susie are at the bottom of it. It is understood that they will ask questions, will find out about the others, as they might find out about somewhere interesting they were visiting, like Paris. He is the youngest, five years younger than Thomas, seven younger than Howard. He is also the biggest, the tallest, taller even than Howard, though he doesn’t feel it, not in this house. Howard used to make him sit under table at mealtimes, when their parents were out. He kicked him if he tried to come out. He used to give him his food on the floor, like a dog.
‘I’m learning to play the piano,’ Thomas says.
‘Are you?’ Susie says, perplexedly. ‘What — professionally?’
Susie wouldn’t understand about playing the piano. She doesn’t understand any middle-class hobby. She’s always worked, looked after other people, even as a child she worked, cooking and taking care of the house. Her mother was a cleaning lady. She couldn’t read or write. Susie couldn’t either until she was fourteen and someone at school noticed it.
‘Not exactly,’ Thomas says, laughing.
Leo wants to shield her, to defend her. He wants to hit and hit until she is safe. He loves Thomas, but with a passive love, a background love. It is something he never looks at straight on. He is used to seeing it there out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t choose it, yet it’s always been there. He doesn’t really know what it is.
‘You can’t spend a whole year playing the piano,’ he says. He sounds more indignant than he wants to. It’s always the same, the difficulty of being himself with these people, his family, the difficulty of locating his own authenticity. He says things he doesn’t feel, and what he feels most keenly he doesn’t say at all.
Thomas looks surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s — it’s a waste, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Thomas says. ‘Anyway, it might be more than a year.’
‘You want to be careful,’ Dads says. ‘If you stay out too long, they might not take you back. Things move on, you know. Your experience becomes obsolete.’
‘I don’t want to go back,’ Thomas says. ‘I like being at home.’
Dads chuckles mirthlessly. ‘That may be so,’ he says, ‘but no matter how much you like it the question has to be, is it sustainable?’
Leo hears it, that tone, the way it goes over everything and mechanically levels it, like a tank. It is benign, ruthless, unvarying. He has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it: it is in the levelling persistence that the violence is accomplished. His voice has talked constantly in Leo’s head about the world and its ways since he can remember.
Thomas laughs too, slightly combative, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Ask Tonie. Ask Tonie whether it’s sustainable.’
‘I’ve always tended to the view’, Dads continues, ‘that work is life for a man, as children are for a woman.’
A ridge of silence which they all go over together, bump.
‘But work wasn’t life for me,’ Thomas says carefully. ‘As children aren’t all of life for Tonie.’
Suddenly there is something new, an atmosphere. Leo feels it, a shift far down at the bottom of things, like a rumbling of plates on the ocean bed. He feels upheaval, change, far down below.
‘Hey,’ Tonie says, in her low, husky voice that always makes the hairs rise on the back of Leo’s neck. ‘Hey, let’s change the subject.’