rest of the money?” An anxious babbling came back down the line. In the kitchen the washing machine rocked and danced over the flagstones, in a creaking thumping gavotte.
Anna was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up from the
Julian began to cut himself a slice of bread to make toast. “It’s been on my mind,” he said abruptly. “That little girl in Devon, Genette Tate—do you remember, it was in the papers?”
“The child who disappeared?”
“They found her bike in a lane. She was thirteen. Some man took her away. They think she’s dead.”
Ralph came in. “Going to be one of those days,” he said. “That child, Melanie—do you remember I mentioned her? Swallows every banned substance she can lay her hands on, ran away from her foster parents, absconded from the children’s home?”
“What’s new?” Anna said tiredly. “Don’t they all do that?”
“Just got her off a shoplifting charge last week. Now she’s run away and taken our petty cash. Not that she’ll get far on it. So I was thinking … could we have her here for part of the summer?”
“That’s not really a question, is it?” Anna said. “It’s a command.”
“She really needs, you see, to be part of a normal family for a while.”
“And this is normal?” She rested her forehead on her hand, smiling. “Yes, Ralph, of course we can have her, we must have her, poor little thing.”
“I heard what you were saying just now,” Ralph said to Julian. He put his hand on his son’s head, lightly. “What’s sparked this off?”
“I told you. Well, I told Mum. This little girl in the West Country. I keep thinking about it.”
“But it was Devon. It’s miles away.”
“Use your imagination,” Julian said. “Crimes breed other crimes. People copy them.”
“Rebecca rides to school in a crowd. And back in a crowd. You ought to get behind them in a car, then you’d see.”
“Yes, but when she turns off the main road, she’s on her own for half a mile, isn’t she? It’s not fair, it’s not safe.” He moved his head irritably, pulling away from his father. “So I’ve made up my mind. If either of you will drive her, odd days, that’s okay. Otherwise I will. She’s my sister. I’m not prepared to take a chance.”
Anna looked up. “And will you be her escort for life, Julian? Thirteen-year-olds are at risk, but then so are eighteen-year-olds. So are forty-year-olds. You hear of battered grannies, don’t you?
“Anna,” Ralph said, “there’s no reason to be sarcastic. It’s just, the trouble is, Julian, if everyone thought like you no one would ever let their children out of the house.”
“Okay,” Julian said. “So you think it’s unreasonable? Look, let me tell you something. Ten years ago a boy vanished near Fakenham, he was eleven, he went up the road to see his friend and he never came back. The same year a girl was riding her bike along a track near Cromer—what do you think, is that close enough to home? April, she was called, and she was Rebecca’s age exactly. She set off to go to her sister’s house at Roughton. A man driving a tractor saw her, four hundred yards from her house, six minutes past two in the afternoon. At a quarter past two, three men who were mapping for the Ordnance Survey saw her bike in a field. There was no trace of her. She was six hundred yards from home. Nobody’s seen her since.”
His face set, he waited for their protests to begin. But his father only said, barely audible, his eyes on the table: “You’ve been studying these cases. Why is that?”
“I can’t explain any more than I have.”
“I can’t say you’re wrong. It is a dangerous world, of course.”
“There’ll be an argument every morning,” Anna said. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say to you, Julian.”
“I’m going over to Sandra’s now.” He glanced back from the doorway. Anna was gathering plates, noisily.
“Help me, please, Ralph.” Her tone was wounded, ragged. Ralph scraped his chair back. He began to clear the table slowly, with deliberation, his eyes on a plate, then a cup: anywhere, but not on Anna’s face.
Two days later Ralph went back to see Mrs. Glasse. His frame of mind was exhausted, distressed; he found it difficult to be in the same room with Anna.
Rebecca moaned and squalled; her social life was being ruined, she said. Julian explained patiently that he would drive her wherever she wanted to go; he would pick up her friends too, and see them all safe home. “I don’t want you on my back,” she snapped; Anna watched her without speaking, her face set and tense. Rain slashed against the windows; the air was thin, green, shivering toward summer. I must give the family a breathing space: that was the excuse Ralph made to himself.
And besides, he had been thinking of Amy Glasse. She was continually on his mind; she had established a hold over it, he felt, and he needed to see her again to break the hold, reduce her to an ordinary woman, naive, limited, down-at-heel. He remembered her in the doorway of the farmhouse, those white long-fingered hands flying up to drag back her hair. He thought of the dull gleam of her red-gold wedding ring, and of the curve of her mouth.
It was a finer day than on his last visit: a verdant dampness, a fresh breeze, the promise of a fine afternoon. The holiday caravans were beginning to take to the roads, and behind their flowered curtains, caught back coyly, you could catch glimpses of the owners and their miniaturized lives. Soon the coast road would be nose to tail with cars, each one with its freight of fractious children bawling, elbowing each other, complaining of hunger and boredom and heat.
Again, Mrs. Glasse was waiting for him in the doorway. “I heard the car,” she explained.
“Yes, it does have a distinctive note.”
He stood looking up at the sky. “Good day to be alive.”
