But we’re in the middle of nowhere, said Louisa.
Which is a lot safer than a city centre on a Friday night. Richard’s voice was noticeably slower and softer than usual. She’ll be sitting in a café somewhere, enjoying the fact that we’re panicking. If we ring the police they’ll laugh and tell us to call back tomorrow. Louisa seemed short of breath. He rubbed her arm. She’ll let us worry for a while, then she’ll get in touch.
Angela was thinking, It’s your fault, and trying hard not to say so, but Dominic was impressed. How did Richard reassure everyone despite knowing nothing? Did all doctors do this?
If we haven’t heard anything, said Richard, we’ll ring her from Raglan.
OK, said Louisa, OK.
Except that she wasn’t OK, thought Angela, she was simply obeying orders, like a dog with a stern owner.
♦
Benjy stood on the flagstones of the utility space between the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. It contained a chest freezer, a dishwasher and a deep china sink set into a long wooden draining board as thick as an old Bible. The chest freezer was made by Indesit. He picked up a battered octagonal tin from the window sill. On the lid it said Dishwasher Tablets in Dymo Tape and bore an orange sticker reading If ingested seek medical attention. The tin rattled as he turned it over. On the bottom the label said Praline Cluster and Coffee Cream and Turkish Delight.
♦
Angela announced that she’d skip the castle and take the bus into Hay. There’s a bus? Richard had said, incredulously. Possibly pulled by cows, she’d replied, a little too tartly and there was a sudden chill in the room. Daisy said softly, I’ll go with Mum, because she wasn’t any keener on Richard’s company than Mum was, which meant that Dominic had to go to Raglan to accompany Benjy who never knowingly turned down a castle.
So Angela and Daisy found themselves walking down the hill to the little stone bridge, just the scuff of their boots and the rustle of their waterproofs. A dirty white horse observed them from behind a gate. Angela was angry with Daisy for hijacking her solitary expedition and simultaneously relieved that she wasn’t going on her own. So much of one’s self depended on the green vase and the rotary washing line that turned in the wind and she was slipping her moorings a little. Daisy liked silence but Angela was used to the clatter and echo of four hundred children in one building. Richard’s Mercedes passed them en route to Raglan, Dominic, Alex and Benjy waving like passengers on a steam train.
Where do you think Melissa is? asked Daisy.
But Angela had forgotten about Melissa completely.
♦
Melissa stood on the corner paralysed. Where the fuck was she going to go? Dad wasn’t going to fork out for a plane ticket to France without an explanation. Donna in Stirling? She looked around. A shop selling windchimes. A shop selling green wellingtons and crappy silk scarves like the Queen wore when she took the corgis out for a shit. Scabby public toilets. People from London pretending to enjoy the countryside. She checked her wallet. £22.68 and a debit card that might very well get swallowed by the machine on the far side of the road. God, she was hungry.
♦
Do you think Benjy’s OK? asked Daisy.
I think Benjy’s fine, said Angela.
He seems lonely.
He’s good at being on his own, said Angela. The little bus growled up a steep and sudden incline. A tiny church with a garden shed for a tower. A woman hosing a Land Rover down in a muddy yard. If you can’t be alone you join a gang, you drink instead of going home, you marry the first person who comes along because you’re scared of going back to an empty house.
Daisy thought of her mother as stupid. What other reason could there be for the constant friction? Then she said something like this and Daisy remembered that she was a good teacher, and what Daisy felt wasn’t admiration or guilt but fear, because if her mother was in the right then she was in the wrong.
The bus idled while a red Transit reversed into a driveway for them to squeeze past. Farmhouses with roses and swingseats. Farmhouses with chained-up dogs and rusted cars. A hunchbacked woman at the front of the bus, so old and ragged she must surely have come from a gingerbread cottage up in the hills.
Are you and Dad all right? She meant to sound caring but she wanted her mother to admit some small compensatory failure.
We’re…OK, said Angela gingerly.
And it came to Daisy out of the blue. Her mother was a human being. How rarely she saw it. She wanted to reach out and hold her and make everything good again but the intervening years seemed suddenly like a dream and she was five years old, going into town with Mum to do the shopping. So she turned and looked out of the window and watched the bus rise above the trees and hedges onto a kind of moorland, the grey ribbon of the road and plantations of pine across the valley like scissored green felt.
I’m sorry about Richard, said Angela.
It’s all right, said Daisy. I can look after myself. This dance she and Mum did. Reaching out and pulling back. Stroking and snapping.
He was being a bully.
I can’t believe he’s your brother.
I’m having a bit of trouble myself in that department.
♦
People counted Dominic as their friend but no one counted him as their best friend. Angela thought of it as cowardice, though she tried not to think of it very often. A failure to engage properly with the world. The mortgage arrears, the car being towed to a scrapyard. Nothing mattered enough. (In the back seat, Benjy and Alex were playing Benjy’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Wee, Poo, Sick). He thought of it as a blessing once, not being haunted by the terrible wanting that blighted so many lives, but he looked at Daisy’s screwed-up religion, Alex being carted away in an ambulance after that race, Angela trying to save some white-trash kid who’d end up in prison anyway, and he realised that all of them had reasons to be alive in a way that he didn’t.
♦
Raglan Castle was built in the mid-1430s by Sir William ap Thomas, ‘The Blue knight of Gwent’, who fought alongside Henry V at the battle of Agincourt… (Richard is reading the free information pamphlet thoroughly)…but the castle was undermined after a long siege during the Civil War and what remains is largely a picturesque ruin… Consequently it takes a dedicated historical imagination to stand on the mossy cobbles of the Pitched Court and conjure up the falconers and the manchet bread and the clatter of billhooks, and what Louisa notices mostly is the absence of a café where she might sit in the warm with a cappuccino and a magazine and rid herself of the image of Melissa naked and broken in a ditch.
Alex walks the battlements of the Great Tower, which sits at the centre of its own moat and is connected to the main fortifications by a drawbridge. A little single-engined plane is flying overhead sounding like a lawn mower. He thinks about that flight last year in the Piper Cherokee with Josh’s uncle, being frightened during take-off, then feeling smug about not being frightened any more, then enjoying it, then being rather bored because basically there wasn’t much to do apart from sit in a cramped seat watching clouds. He glances down into the big stone box of the castle’s main hall and sees Louisa pacing. Now that Melissa has gone he is beginning to realise how fit she is. She’s nearly fifty, which makes it sound pervy if you say it out loud, but she’s in really good nick and he keeps imagining her taking off that cream rollneck jumper. Big tits. All that hair.