Something moved in the distance. Was it…? She had to stop this. If she talked to someone, maybe. A ticking clock and a box of tissues on the pine coffee table. She’d never asked Richard about Jennifer, why they were together, why they weren’t any more. Dominic was right. She thought of herself as someone who cared, but she spent all of that concern at school. She put her foot on the little wooden step and lifted her aching leg.
♦
We push an introductory needle into the femoral artery.
Is that in the groin? asked Benjy.
It is indeed. Richard reached over and picked up the jigsaw piece with the picture of the man being hanged. Bingo. He handed it to Angela.
Louisa was watching from the window seat. He wasn’t even thinking about it, was he? At least Craig blew up and cleared the air. Had she made a monumental mistake? The degrees, the books, the music.
This, said Melissa, staring at the jigsaw, must surely be the most boring activity in the universe. But the edge was gone.
I think I’ll save jigsaws until I’m in an old people’s home, said Daisy. The two girls. Their little freemasonry.
I’ll be in there soon enough, said Angela. Sherry at five and drama students coming in to do hits from the seventies. Except there wouldn’t be sherry, would there, given that Richard wouldn’t be paying this time round. Some council place. Dettol and the TV at Guantánamo volume.
Melissa found the man playing the lute.
X-rays are pretty harmless, said Richard. Pilot. That’s the job to avoid. Lots of breast cancer among female cabin crew.
Is this subject entirely appropriate? said Angela.
Alex came and sat beside Louisa. There. He handed her a glass of wine. He was flirting, wasn’t he? She hotched a centimetre closer so that their shoulders were touching. Richard glanced over. She clinked Alex’s glass. Cheers.
♦
Dominic sliced the florets off the head of broccoli and placed them in the steamer then opened the oven briefly to check on the sweet potatoes. How odd that it was such a manly profession now. Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay. I wouldn’t give that risotto to my fucking dog. He folded back the waxed wrapper, sliced a little pyramid of butter from the corner of the block and dropped it into the pan. Exile on Main Street in the background. Best double album in the history of popular music. Unless Blonde on Blonde was a double. Maybe second best, then. Recorded in that château the Gestapo had used. ‘Tumbling Dice’. Keith Richards falling asleep with a syringe still stuck in his arse. All corporate hospitality now and VW sponsorship deals. Bob Dylan doing adverts for ladies’ underwear. He dropped the sliced onion into the fizzy butter. He’d been vegetarian himself when he was a student. Animal fats in everything before BSE. Biscuits, ice cream. Shopping down the kosher aisle in the Stamford Hill Safeway with the Hasidic housewives and their fifties wigs. He washed the spinach in the colander and pressed it onto the onion. How odd to feel this contentment at the expense of Angela’s failings. He was going to end the Amy thing when he got home. Couldn’t see the point now. It was all about self-worth, wasn’t it, trying to make himself feel better. He didn’t need it any longer. The spinach darkened and shrank. Karen, the daughter he never had, blessing him from beyond the grave. Pint of full-fat in the microwave. But this thing with Daisy and Melissa. I kind of like her, actually. Unquote. That clumsy teenage eyes-down embarrassment he hadn’t seen for so long. He’d help Angela get back on track, make the family work again, be a real father. He poured a little cone of flour onto the buttery spinach and stirred it in. He could take some private pupils again. Earn a little extra money. That honeyed scent of the sweet potatoes roasting. Everything was going to be all right. Physical Graffiti. That was a double album, too, wasn’t it? Maybe Exile was third best.
♦
Look. Melissa paused and glanced both ways down the landing. She lifted her skirt and pulled down her knickers and there it was, a little bluebird on her buttock where the tan faded to moony white. And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes. Daisy wanted to say something complimentary but it seemed indecent. Did it hurt? Melissa was letting her look for too long and Daisy was finding it hard to turn away. He was cute so I didn’t mind too much. She pulled her knickers up. If you tell anyone…But why would she? It felt like her own transgression, not Melissa’s.
♦
Angela enjoyed anything with a Latin flavour, Orchestra Baobab, Buena Vista Social Club (she’d sat through so many assemblies that English lyrics were always accompanied in her mind by a little white dot bouncing along the words). Alex liked Razorlight, Kasabian, music you listened to on open roads with the window down, whereas Daisy loved the rich sweep of choral music so that the portable keyboard at church gave her a guilty longing to be in St Catherine’s on Christmas Eve, candles and holly-crackle, a church organ and boys like angels. But it was Benjy who listened more intently than any of them, ever since that night when he’d been sick and stayed up watching Guys and Dolls with Mum. Singing, dancing, everything squeezed into one vast sticky sugary cake. My Fair Lady. Calamity Jane. Why couldn’t you have an orchestra in real life? Sometimes he sang ‘The Deadwood Stage’ or ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’ when no one was watching, and when he was walking down the street clicking his fingers, doing wobbly little pirouettes only four people in the world knew he was doing the dance from the opening scene of West Side Story.
But now there was Monteverdi in the background. The roasting tin, battered and discoloured like Elizabethan armour. Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon. Angela sees a tiny brown mouse run along the polished wainscot. Something storybook about it here, not like a mouse in the dining room at home. She decides not to mention it. Let me guess, said Richard. The Vespers? There was something under-powered about him tonight, thought Dominic. Perhaps he and Louisa really did have an argument at Llanthony. Now that he thought about it, yes, Louisa seemed a little flat, too. And when they sat down Dominic seemed to have inherited his seat at the head of the table, along with some kind of paterfamilias role. Indeed everyone’s roles seemed to have been reassigned because Louisa was sitting next to Benjy, which wasn’t the place she would have chosen, but she asked him what subjects he liked at school, he told her how much he hated maths and she showed him how to do long division on a napkin. Daisy and Melissa were huddling and Angela and Alex were remembering the disastrous holiday in Barmouth, the food poisoning, those people cut off by the tide and screaming for help. Dominic’s pie was good. He’d sculpted a little dog from the spare puff pastry in the centre of the glazed crust which Benjy was allowed to eat. And afterwards, over coffee, while Daisy and Alex washed up, Angela found herself next to Richard and decided on the spur of the moment to tell him about Karen. An exorcism of a kind. Because she had never even told him she was pregnant, and afterwards it had seemed too fragile a fact to share with someone who was almost a stranger. But she swerved at the last minute and heard herself saying, What do they do with dead bodies in hospital?