‘Shall we go in?’ she says. ‘We may as well get these silly boxes over and done with.’
They turn towards the house. It is Charles who says the boxes have to go. He has them in his sights, though they have sat discreetly beneath the roof for years. Something gave him the idea of them and now he wants them gone. They are the last hidden part of her and he has found them out.
‘What’s in them, anyway?’ Thomas says.
‘Oh, just a lot of old rubbish really. Daddy says they ought to go, and I expect he’s right.’
In fact she has fought him over the boxes, and this struggle has been so bitter that it has invoked her deepest capacity for submission. He has made her see them, see them clear as day: thirty or so large boxes with her name written on, that she hasn’t opened — he forced her to admit it — since the day they first went up to the attic, where they occupy so much space that there is no longer any room to store necessities. And in the end she agreed that the situation could not continue. Truly, she felt that it couldn’t. She wept and was grateful to him. So she is surprised to see that when Thomas has brought down the boxes and retracted the ladder into the roof, there are only six of them.
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all. I double-checked.’
She remembers Charles leaving the house. Was it only this morning? He has gone to Tunbridge Wells and won’t be back until teatime.
‘I thought there were dozens,’ she says, helplessly. She sits down on the landing carpet.
Thomas opens one of the boxes and looks inside. He takes out her crumpled christening gown, her old almanac, a doll with a tartan tam-o’-shanter who she recalls — oh, the dreadful surge of memory! — is named Clarissa.
‘Daddy wants it all to go to a charity shop!’ she bursts out. ‘I can’t bear it! Don’t let him send my things away!’
Thomas looks stricken. He kneels down beside her.
‘Of course he can’t give them away,’ he says. ‘They’re your things. It’s up to you what happens to them.’
‘But I promised — I promised that by the time he came back they’d be gone!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Thomas mutters.
He is angry. But not with her. He picks up Clarissa, turns her stiff body in his hands.
‘I suppose Alexa might like to look at some of these things,’ he says.
Her voice is meek. ‘I dare say she might.’
He sighs. ‘What else is there?’
‘Not much — some books, a few mementoes. It’s a silly thing: they mean so much to me, but they’d mean nothing to a complete stranger.’
The truth is that she can’t remember what is inside the boxes. He is silent.
‘We’ve got less space than you do, you know,’ he says presently. ‘It seems ridiculous.’
She pouts and looks at the carpet. ‘Then I suppose Daddy’s right. It’ll all have to go.’
He sighs again, tormented. This is an old alliance, older than Thomas himself, for its source is her own first loneliness, when her dolls — Clarissa, she recalls, was one such — befriended her and offered her their pliant hearts. Thomas, as a baby, had something of this pliancy, this bright expectant blankness; and after Howard — greedy little brute, always thumping her with his fat fists — she rather doted on Thomas, whose round eyes followed her with such astonished love. He used to cry whenever she moved out of his line of vision.
‘All right, then,’ he says finally. ‘We’ll fit them in somewhere. Though God knows what Tonie’s going to say.’
At the mention of Tonie’s name she feels the shiver of compunction that normally only her husband can elicit. She recalls taking Tonie blackberrying once in the hedges along the road outside the village; recalls the way Tonie persisted at each bush until she had stripped it of every last one of its fruits. Her own method is to cover more ground, grazing whatever falls to her hand.
‘Oh dear — I don’t want to cause any trouble.’
‘No, it’s all right. It’s fine.’
She beams at him. She finds that she wants him to go, now that he has taken her burden of submission from her. In the end his availability grates on her. It was sweet in a child, but people cannot be children all their lives. These days she finds that after all she prefers Howard.
‘Oh, you are kind,’ she says. ‘Shall we take them down to the car? I expect you have to rush off.’
He smiles, a peculiar smile she hasn’t seen before.
‘I thought I might stay for lunch,’ he says.
‘Oh!’ she says. ‘Well, of course, you’re very welcome, if you haven’t anything else to do.’
But even after lunch he doesn’t seem inclined to go.
‘Doesn’t someone have to fetch Alexa from school?’ she asks.
He smiles again. ‘She’s going to a friend’s.’
‘Well, I was only going to take the dog for a walk. Don’t feel you have to come.’
He says, ‘Would you like me to come?’
It strikes her as a very impolite thing to say.
‘Yes,’ she says coldly. ‘Of course. That would be very nice.’
They take Flossie up the lane, and in a ditch full of reeds and brambles they find a tiny deer, dead.
‘How sad!’ she says. ‘A car must have hit it.’
She gazes at the little shrivelled muzzle buzzing with flies, the closed eyes, the tangled infant legs in their cold bed of winter grasses. It can only have happened a day or two ago. She looks up and to her surprise sees the doe, standing motionless in the shadowy lane ahead of them. She grips Thomas’s arm.
‘Look — it’s the mother. See how unafraid she is. She’s looking for her child. She knows it’s here somewhere and she’s waiting for it to come back. Oh, how sad!’
The doe lifts her head. Her large almond-shaped eyes are pools of blackness. They wear a frightful expression. Flossie barks. For a while the doe doesn’t move, but at last she goes heavily back into the trees.
‘Oh, how touching.’ She unclips Flossie’s lead. Beside her Thomas gives a sort of gasp. She turns and sees to her astonishment that he is crying.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she says.
XXI
Something has changed. Or not changed: been lost. Tonie realises it with a jump, a start, the way she might feel around her throat for a necklace and realise it was no longer there.
They are walking with Alexa to Beacon Park, where there are swings, where they have taken her a hundred times since she was born, and not one of those times has Tonie felt that something was missing in the way that she feels it now. It is Saturday. Alexa is wearing new shoes, red, the leather plump and glossy and unmarked. Thomas bought them for her. They were very expensive. Tonie would never have bought Alexa such expensive shoes, beautiful Italian shoes with white kid insoles. She can’t decide whether it is the beauty or the expense that troubles her more.
The day is cold, bright, a diamond-hard February day, and Tonie walks ahead of the others on the pavement with her hands stuffed into her pockets. At the gate she stands silently back, to let them pass through. Alexa goes first, then Thomas. Tonie notices her daughter’s small, delicate shoulders as she passes, the head turning like a flower on the fragile neck, the dark, glossy ponytail tumbling down her back. She would like to touch it. Just then, Thomas puts his own hand out and touches the ponytail, fingering its ends. That’s when Tonie realises that something has been lost. She has lost his attention.
In the afternoon she decides to make spaghetti Bolognese. She gets out the saucepans, clanging and clattering. She fills the kitchen with the fumes of cooking onions and meat. She chops things and hurls them into the pot. She is frenzied, transfixed; she is engulfed in the preparation of this red sauce which bubbles, thick and volcanic, at her fingertips. She doesn’t know what will happen when the sauce is finished. She doesn’t know what she’ll do.