She should have had two children. Or three. Or four. Melissa would have been a different person, surely. Sixteen years of ruling the roost, it couldn’t be good for anyone. Forty-four. She wasn’t old, was she? She could still have a child, with Richard. Was that an absurd thought?
♦
Richard sat down on the bench and handed Melissa a mug of tea. That ridiculous cane. Like someone’s grandad. She took the tea only because it would have seemed childish to refuse. He let the silence run for ten seconds. You want to be successful, you want to be rich, you want to have a good job.
And…? She didn’t need any more of this stuff, not today.
You can offend some people. In fact, you have to offend some people if you’re going to get things done. He should have talked to her like this a long time ago. He should have done many things a long time ago. But you have to admit when you’re wrong.
I haven’t done anything wrong. He refused to answer. She told you, didn’t she? Thanks, Mum.
People are scared of you, Melissa. That’s how you get them to do things. And you can do that at school but it doesn’t work in the long run. You have to learn how to make people like you.
It caught her off guard. She was waiting for a lecture about knuckling down and toeing the line, but she was holding her shield in the wrong place and he had slipped a blade in under her ribs, because the shameful truth was that she wanted to be like him. The salary, the respect, the achievement.
A little column of midges rose and fell in the centre of the lawn as if contained in a big glass tube.
Richard rubbed his face. You have to find something you really care about, then everything else falls into place. But I’m not sure you’ve found anything you really care about.
I care about…But what did she care about? Out of nowhere she was crying. Sailing boats and women blowing glass. She would never be an artist, she would never love someone, she would never be loved.
Melissa…?
But she was standing up and running towards the house, her spilt tea dripping through the slats in the bench.
♦
Daisy was passing through the kitchen when Louisa held out a glass of wine in a way that clearly meant, You’re staying.
So Daisy clinked the glass against the chunky handle of the big knife Louisa was holding. What happened in there, by the way?
Washing machine. Louisa swept the carrot peelings into the bin. Alex fixed it. Your dad mopped the floor.
Sounds about right.
I’m sorry Melissa was horrible to you.
So, everybody knew.
I ought to come up with some sort of excuse, her being my daughter, but she can be an utter shit sometimes.
It was my fault, really.
Many boys have made the same mistake.
Daisy realised that they were talking about the kiss.
She should carry a government health warning, that girl. The kettle clicked off and Louisa poured the boiling water into the biggest pan.
Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. And Louisa was on her side, Louisa of all people, Louisa who picked tiny pieces of fluff off Richard’s jumper. The jar of honey and the jar of olives.
It happened this week, didn’t it? Louisa slotted the kettle back on to its stand.
We went for a walk up Black Hill.
I didn’t mean that. Louisa dried her hands on the tea towel and looked at her. It’s like there was a big knot inside you. And someone’s untied it.
God, she stumbled through life failing to understand everyone. Louisa. Melissa. Jack. Lauren. Herself most of all. How did you know?
You’re a good daughter, said Louisa. I don’t think they’re proud enough. She halved the tea towel and hung it over the rail on the Aga. Now. What do you think? Shall we pull out the stops for the last night?
Good idea, said Daisy, because that was it, wasn’t it? Nothing more to be said, nothing more that needed to be said.
♦
There are no flowers so Daisy makes a collection of holly and grasses and a budding branch she can’t identify and arranges them in the handpainted Spanish jug which she places in the centre of the table. Paper serviettes folded and rolled, a bishop’s hat in every place. Two candles in wine bottles, flames multiplied in the wobbly glass of the leaded panes. Marks & Spencer’s Chablis, the salmon cut and shut so deftly on a fresh sheet of silver foil that no one notices, flecks of grass green in the white of the sauce, asparagus, beans and carrots.
Why does it make your wee smell funny? asks Benjy.
Methanethiol, said Richard, and some sulphides whose names temporarily escape me.
Fresh bread, half the loaf sliced so the slices curled away like in an advert. The little bone-handled butter knife stuck into the pale yellow slab. Whisper Not, Dominic’s choice. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette.
They’re both solicitors, said Alex. It probably counts as animal cruelty. The dogs are shut inside ten hours a day. I take them to the park and they go ballistic.
Angela is drinking too much in the hope that it will calm her, though she can see, too, that it is loosening her grip on the real world.
Once more, Benjy is picturing the centre of the table as a city on an alien planet, the condiments, the wine bottles, the handpainted Spanish jug transformed to towers and gun ports. The two candles become refinery flares, an empty wicker mat the landing stage for which he aims as he weaves through the heavy laser flak in the scout vehicle.
How often is Angela like this? asks Richard quietly, because he had learnt over twenty-five years of being a doctor that normal was a very broad church and pathological too easy a diagnosis.
Just forming the word never in his mind makes Dominic realise how serious this is. His silence speaks for him.
I suspect she needs to see someone.
You’re right, says Dominic, though he had lost the right to advise her on all but the most trivial matters after losing his job. As if one paid actual money for such rights. I’ll see what I can do.
Louisa and Daisy are talking about swimming. It was just a thing I was really good at.
But…?
In the end it’s just going up and down a pool. I think it’s better doing something actually fun that you’re not so good at.
Like?
How rarely she asked the question. Acting. I liked acting.
Louisa rested her knife and fork at half past six. And your friends in the church?
I’m not sure they’ll be friends any more. What would she do? Walk away, like she’d walked away from Lauren?
It might be good for them. She sipped her wine. There’s a lot of troubled people out there.
She was right, wasn’t she? Meg, Anushka. Who could tell? So many ways of being saved. So many cold dark places.
Richard turns to Melissa. I remember you saying you’d got a dodgy Oberon.