“I mean you might lose everything, if you don’t put up a fight.”
Anna sat eating peanuts from a glass dish, looking out at the mud flats. “Tomorrow I must go back to the Red House,” she said. “Everything must be faced.”
Foulsham: “Both our parents have run away from home,” Rebecca said. “I’ll have to come and live with you, Emma.”
“Your mother telephoned, my dear. She’ll be back in the morning. She wants you not to worry, she says she knows you’re a grown-up sensible girl—and soon everything will be explained.” Somehow, Emma added under her breath.
“Till then Kit has to be a mother to me. And Robin has to be my father.”
“That’s a very nice way to think of it,” Emma said admiringly. “But it’s really only for one night, you know. And you can stay with me if you like.”
“People who run away never go for long, do they?” Rebecca’s face was bright, avid, sharp with fear. “That girl who was here, Melanie. She used to run away all the time, Dad said. But people caught her. The police.”
She is too young for her age, Emma thought; they’ve kept her that way, her brothers and her capable sister, even with all the Visitors they get, even with all that’s happened under that roof, each summer’s tribulations: “It’s not the same when people are grown-up,” she said. “You see, they have to make their own decisions about where to live. And sometimes it happens …” Emma shut her eyes tight. What must I tell her? She felt weary. Perhaps it is premature to say anything, she thought, perhaps in some way the row will blow over. She remembered Anna’s voice on the telephone: obdurate, balanced on the steely edge of tears. They’ve been married for twenty-five years, Emma thought; can it fall apart in a night?
But what do I know about marriage?
Rebecca said, “When Dad comes home I’m going to ask him if we can have a donkey to live in the garden. He’ll say no, certainly not, but I’ll keep following him round saying “Donkey, donkey, donkey,” till he gets tired and says yes all right then if you must.”
“Is that how you usually get your way?”
“You have to ask,” Rebecca said. “Don’t ask and you don’t get. Did you know Julian came home?”
“No. Did he? When?”
“He came like a highwayman at dead of night. Two nights ago, or three, I don’t remember. He came climbing up—there’s a way the boys get in, you know, like burglars?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Oh, they’ve always done it. Kit says it’s to show off and they could just as well come in by the door.”
“So didn’t your mum and dad see Julian?”
“No. He stayed in Kit’s room. Robin came down. They had a very serious talk.”
“Where were you?”
“I was sitting on the stairs with my ears flapping.”
“And what did you hear?”
“I don’t know.” She jerked her head away, and began to cry. “I couldn’t understand,” she said. “I had a dream, that I was on my own in the house.”
Emma said, “It wasn’t a dream, was it, Becky? You mean that’s what you’re afraid of”
“Yes. Because what if they all go, what if everybody runs away? Jule’s gone already. And Kit said she was going to go to Africa.”
Emma drew the child against her. “Becky, put your arms around me. Take hold of me very tight. I’m here, aren’t I? Don’t I feel solid to you? Do I feel as if I’ll run away? No one will leave you in the house alone.”
There was no more she could say. She was incoherent with love for the child and anger at Ralph and dismay at what had overtaken them. At the beginning of summer, she thought, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined such a thing; but then that’s perhaps the problem, my dreams have never been wild enough. I don’t understand what drives people, who does? I don’t understand the process by which our lives have unraveled. Why this year, and not other years? Because they are growing up, I suppose, and there had to be a turning point; Ralph met this woman, spoke to her no doubt of certain things, and after that everything must change. When a secret has been kept for twenty years, reality has been built around it, in a special way: it is a carapace, it is a safe house. When the walls have been pulled down and the secret has been let out, even to one person, then it’s no good trying to rebuild the walls to the same plan—they are walls to hold in nothing. Life must change, it will, it has to.
She wondered about going to the coast to see this woman, Mrs. Glasse. Pleading with her in some way. She would be laughed at, of course.
“We ought to be spared this scene,” Amy Glasse said.
“Yes.” Usual kinds of words came tumbling out of Ralph’s mouth, lines that she could swear she had heard on the television. For the sake of the children I really feel … Ah yes, comedy half hour, she thought.
She said, “You look weary, my dear.”
“Yes. I seem to be on the road all the time, driving about between one place and another.” He had spent the best part of a night—by far the best part—sitting at Melanie’s bedside, while she dipped in and out of the conversations that were held around her, picking and mixing as she liked. Nobody had filled in the missing hours, and so they would keep her in hospital till they were sure there was no delayed liver damage from anything she might have taken. What was most likely, given the limited means at her disposal, was that she had been inhaling some type of volatile solvent, enough to make her almost comatose when they fetched her in; but he was aware of her history, the range and type and peculiar dosages of the various means she had used to effect escape, and his greatest concern was that her broken and incoherent conversation, her apparent thought-disorder, should be seen as a possible consequence of drug abuse and not madness. He had witnessed this before, a heavy amphetamine user become agitated, hear voices, hallucinate—and then a cell, and then a prison doctor, and then the liquid cosh: and then the inquest.
