Howard looks stricken. ‘We’ll make more time,’ he says. ‘You should have all the time you need. We’ll sort it out.’
‘The problem is’, Claudia says to the others, ‘that you don’t make any money out of painting. Other people would have to make sacrifices. And they simply wouldn’t do it.’
She disappears into the house. Howard’s eyes follow her beseechingly.
‘Poor Claude,’ he says. ‘She’s too unselfish. All you women are too unselfish.’ He goes after her to the door and puts his head in. ‘Darling!’ he calls. ‘Is there a drop of wine we could offer our guests? And is there any of that avocado gunk left from last night?’
He sits, pulls up a chair for Tonie and rubs his hands together, happy again.
‘These are good times,’ he says. ‘These are beautiful days, all of us together. Aren’t we lucky to have this?’
Tonie smiles. She likes Howard in this mood. ‘We are,’ she says.
‘And the children — look at them! Look at the lucky little sods. Think what their lives could have been like somewhere else. I was at our factory in Bombay last week. I saw little children, no more than two years old, picking food out of the gutter. Little girls, half the size of Martha.’
His brow abruptly darkens. He reaches for Tonie’s hand and clutches it between his own.
‘They’re probably working in your factory,’ Thomas says drily. ‘You should pay them more.’
‘I’ve told Howard I’ll leave him if I find out he’s been using child labour,’ Claudia says, re-emerging with a tray. ‘I’ll just pack a bag and go.’
‘We’re not allowed to use child labour in our own house,’ Howard says. ‘Ours don’t even make their own beds.’
‘They’re spoilt,’ Claudia says. ‘Selfish and spoilt.’
Down on the lawn Lewis has got the bike upright again, and is holding it at the front so that Alexa can get on. He turns and looks enquiringly at the adults. Alexa sits herself on the saddle, white-faced and uncertain. Thomas waits for Tonie to intervene, but she does not. Instead she picks up one of Claudia’s antique glass goblets from the tray and revolves it carefully in her hands.
‘Where did you get these?’ she says.
Howard is rising, moving down the steps towards the lawn. Thomas hears him say,
‘Actually, it’s got a surprising kick on it, for a toy.’
He is still saying it as the bike bolts from Lewis’s grasp. Alexa is carried jolting over the grass. Her eyes are screwed shut. She makes no attempt to steer. Almost immediately the bike hits the trunk of Howard’s apple tree, head-on. Alexa is thrown forward. Thomas sees the impact from behind, then her face full of blood on the grass. Howard gets there first, running and wobbling like a bear. He picks Alexa up in his arms. When Thomas comes he surrenders her silently, and then turns to excoriate Lewis, who stands there with downcast eyes, nodding dolefully at every accusation.
‘— bloody idiot! Totally irresponsible to let her —’
Alexa does not cry. Her eyes are wide with shock and blood trickles around the rims. Claudia comes running out with water in a bowl and a cloth. While Thomas holds her she carefully mops away the blood. The other children stand round silently.
‘Get ice!’ Claudia commands, pointing towards the house.
It is Tonie who obeys the order. Thomas glimpses her beside the apple tree, her face startled, aghast, as though Claudia’s pointing finger were accusing her of something. Then she runs inside. The blood is coming from a single cut; presently it stops. In the same way that he wonders how Claudia could have got the water so quickly, so he ruminates blindly, disjointedly, on Tonie’s absence. Finally she comes. She gives the ice to Claudia. Then she stands beside Howard. He hears her say,
‘I thought she was dead.’
He sees Howard put his arm around her. He sees her cover her eyes with her hand.
*
In the kitchen Claudia serves out roast lamb. Alexa is lying under a blanket on the sofa, with a glass of lemonade and a plaster on her forehead. There is Lego all over the kitchen floor and piles of paper everywhere. Lottie, the eldest, is at the table, eating an enormous mound of ice cream slathered with chocolate sauce.
‘Lottie, put that away now,’ Claudia says. ‘We’re about to have lunch.’
‘I don’t want lunch.’
Lottie is thirteen, sullen and thickset. She has narrow light blue eyes which she looks out of uneasily, uncomfortably, as though they were chinks in the prison of her pale, plump body.
‘— gorging yourself on ice cream and then refusing to eat the healthy lunch I’ve provided,’ Claudia is saying, banging the oven door. ‘Howard, will you speak to her?’
Howard isn’t there: he is in the hall, talking loudly on his phone.
‘Anyway, I’m vegetarian. I told you.’
‘Vegetarians eat vegetables,’ Lewis says. ‘You’re not a vegetarian. You just eat cake and stuff.’
‘She’s a cake-arian,’ Martha says.
‘Fatarian,’ Lewis says, laughing. ‘Just some fat for lunch, please, with a side order of, um, fat.’
Lottie shrieks. She picks up a book from the table and flings it across the room at Lewis.
‘Stop it!’ Claudia bellows, enveloped in clouds of steam from the cooker.
Tonie is getting knives and forks out of a drawer. She gets plates from the wooden dresser. She is reserved, acquiescent, efficient, as she is in the mornings when she goes to work. Thomas sees that she has returned to this mode as a way of managing the day’s disorder.
‘I feel we’re completely out of control,’ Claudia says to Howard, when he comes in. She stops what she is doing, leaves the lamb steaming in its dish of fat, the vegetables cooling in their saucepans. She leans against the cooker and folds her arms.
Howard looks concerned. He puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we Claude?’
‘How can you say we’re all right!’ Claudia exclaims fiercely. ‘We’ve got one child with a head injury, the rest are fighting like wild animals, and we can’t even get lunch on the table by half past three! It’s bloody selfishness — just utter bloody selfishness!’
She is tearful. She rubs her eyes with her fists. Howard looks miserable.
‘A child only has to come into this house,’ Claudia resumes, ‘and she’s concussed in the first half-hour!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says, to Tonie. ‘It was my fault, I gave them the bloody thing. I should never have let her go near it.’
‘It was an accident,’ Tonie says.
‘It should never have happened. Please forgive me.’
Tonie, in black, is suddenly the priest, the confessor, and Howard and Claudia — red-faced, dishevelled — her penitents. Claudia embraces her, wiping her eyes. Howard, absolved, ranges around the kitchen bellowing orders at the children. Thomas senses that Tonie is relieved: her own conduct has been lost in the general commotion. But in the car on the way home it seems to return to her. She turns around often in her seat to look at Alexa, who is silently gazing through the window. She reaches back for Alexa’s hand and holds it.
‘It felt like it was my fault,’ she says.
‘It was nobody’s fault,’ Thomas replies, though secretly he agrees with her.
‘It felt like it was because I’d lost control of her.’
Thomas is silent. He thinks they shouldn’t discuss such things, with Alexa there. It used to be Tonie who had the finer sense of what was appropriate, and now, all at once, it is him. It is as though Alexa has become less real to Tonie and more real to himself.