Occasionally Thomas comes into the kitchen, searches around, leaves again. Tonie, at her cauldron, brews up her red anger, her face damp with steam. She wants to scream, to throw things. Every time Thomas appears, blank-faced and diffident, searching for something, she has the desire to shock him with violence. She wants him to be brought into line. She wants him to be punished. For the first time, she wishes he were back at work. She wants him held and constricted, fenced round with regulations; she wants him corrected. Now he has the look of someone who has got away with something. He can withdraw his attention, with no fear of reprisal.
‘What are you actually looking for?’ she says coldly, when he has come in for the third or fourth time.
‘What?’ He looks up, notices her. ‘Oh, nothing.’
When she goes upstairs she finds Thomas and Alexa, all quiet and companionable, in the sitting room. She stands in the doorway but neither of them looks up. She doesn’t go back to her red sauce, which is still bubbling on the cooker. She leaves it, abandons it, goes to her bedroom. She lies on the bed. Later, Thomas puts his head in.
‘I think your sauce is done,’ he says. ‘Shall I turn it off?’
‘If you want,’ Tonie says.
He goes away again. The house is full of the red rich smell of what she has created. The room is getting dark. She can hear music playing downstairs. She lies still. She doesn’t turn on the lights.
XXII
Claudia suggests giving Lottie an allowance. Now that Lottie is fourteen, Claudia says, she should have some money of her own. She says this to Howard, who is a little remote and businesslike, as though he were being informed of some minor by-law that is about to come into force. He stands there in his suit and goes through the post.
‘She ought to open a bank account,’ he says. ‘We should open bank accounts for all of them.’
Claudia looks astonished.
‘Why does Martha need a bank account? She’s only six.’
‘Everyone should have a bank account.’
‘What, a six-year-old child should have a chequebook and pay bank charges, and get letters pouring through the door about personal loans!’
Howard opens an envelope and reads what is inside. Claudia watches his eyes moving from left to right. When he has finished he says,
‘I’m only saying that if Lottie’s going to have an allowance we should pay the money into a bank account.’
Claudia is silent: she wants to give the impression that she is thinking this proposal through. It isn’t that Howard is wrong exactly. It is that the idea of opening a bank account takes away what is pleasurable in the prospect of giving Lottie money.
‘It’s too complicated,’ she says, after a while. ‘All Lottie actually needs is some spending money of her own.’
‘It’s not as complicated as all that,’ Howard says.
‘I think it’s too soon. She’s too young.’
‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, Claude. Then she can begin to save.’
‘What does she need to save for?’
‘All of them should learn to save,’ Howard says sententiously.
Claudia feels that Howard is missing the point. What she wants to know is how much he thinks they should give her. That is what she imagined them discussing. She has already decided that Lottie’s allowance should be twenty-five pounds a month.
‘What do you think we should start her on?’ she says.
Howard muses, considering the ceiling.
‘Fifty?’ he says.
‘A month? You must be joking.’
‘Too little?’
‘Too much — I thought twenty-five.’
Howard seems surprised. He is wearing his reading glasses and he looks at her over the top of them.
‘She won’t get far on twenty-five pounds,’ he says. ‘That’s only six or seven pounds a week, Claude. Hardly enough for a stick of gum.’
‘It’s plenty for a fourteen-year-old girl.’
Claudia doesn’t remember anyone ever giving her money, though they presumably did.
‘And that’s to cover clothes too? Shoes?’
Claudia reconsiders. ‘All right, thirty. And I’ll buy her shoes.’
Claudia informs Lottie that, effective from the first day of the coming month, she is to receive a regular personal allowance of thirty pounds.
‘Okay then,’ Lottie says.
‘Not “okay then”,’ Claudia corrects her. ‘“Okay then” is for when I ask you to do something for me.’ Lottie looks at her dumbly. ‘It isn’t for when I offer to give you something.’
Lottie is silent. Claudia says,
‘I’ll still pay for your shoes, and anything you need for school.’
‘Oka — all right.’
‘Your allowance is for you to do what you want with. It’s your money. If you want to save it, you can. If you blow the whole lot in the first week, then you’ll have to manage till the end of the month without any more.’
‘I know,’ Lottie says.
‘There’s no point coming to me halfway through the month and saying you haven’t got any money. The purpose of the exercise is to teach you how to budget.’
‘I know.’ Lottie looks bored.
‘You’re obviously an expert,’ Claudia says. She recalls that she expected to enjoy this conversation. When she thought about it earlier in the day, it was with a warm feeling of pressure in her chest, as though there were something in there, something waiting to be lifted out and given, like a bouquet of flowers.
‘I’m not an expert,’ Lottie says. ‘I didn’t say I was.’
‘You didn’t say thank you, either.’
Lottie is silent. She looks to one side of her with downcast eyes.
‘Does anyone else at school get an allowance yet?’ Claudia asks brightly, after a pause.
‘Most people do.’
‘I shouldn’t think it’s most,’ Claudia says. ‘I should think it’s some.’
A week later, on the first of the month, Claudia hands Lottie thirty pounds in ten-pound notes. During the week she has experienced a kind of regression in her attitude to Lottie. She wonders whether she has spent so much time trying to see what Lottie is becoming that she has failed to notice what she actually is. In the afternoons, when Lottie comes home from school, she goes straight to the kitchen and stands there eating slices of bread lathered so thickly with jam that her teeth leave an impression in it when she takes a bite. Claudia seems fated to enter the kitchen at the decisive moment of this ceremony, to see Lottie hunched over the counter, her hair hanging over her face, her mouth clamping around the red and white slab and coming away engorged. Lottie makes strange little groans as she eats. Her body in its school uniform seems afflicted and uncomfortable. As a baby Lottie seemed uncomfortable, and afflicted by her own helplessness. Yet Claudia can feel no sympathy for her now. To pity Lottie would be to pity herself.
‘Great,’ Lottie says, when Claudia gives her the money.
*
On Saturday, Lottie tells Howard and Claudia that she is spending the day in town with Justine and Emily.
‘What about lunch?’ Claudia says.
‘I don’t know. We might get something there.’
‘Your money will be gone in one day if you start spending it on eating out.’
Immediately Lottie looks evasive. She stares off to the side, at something just above the level of the floor.
‘We’re not giving you an allowance just so you can sit in McDonald’s all afternoon,’ Claudia says.