“I’ll phone,” Colin said. “You see to them.” He stumped off downstairs. He took deep breaths. Self-command, he thought, control, order; he realised, amazed, that this upset had dismissed Isabel from his mind for at least fifteen minutes. But he could not arrange to live in a permanent row. “They can bring their sleeping bags, tell her,” Sylvia shouted after him. Here was material for reworking, for weeks and weeks of quarrels. Colin could hear the children shouting each other down above the noise of the TV set. I’d be more adept at feeding lions, he thought, or giving rabbits to pythons.
Florence sounded doubtful, mildly shocked. “But the beds aren’t aired, Colin. It’s such short notice.”
“Sylvia says they can bring sleeping bags.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound very suitable to me, but I do admit it might be the lesser evil.” Oh, cut it out, Colin thought, yes or no? “They can’t sleep in beds that aren’t aired,” Florence said.
“Okay, but if we bring the sleeping bags, and listen Florence, they’ve been fed, and I’ll be over for them first thing tomorrow.”
He put the phone down, relieved. He would have felt such a fool, making his excuses to Frank; Frank seemed to have smart intellectual friends who would not have problems like babysitters, and he would probably not understand. He had been looking forward to this evening, relying on it to take his mind off Isabel. He would rise above his situation tonight, he would be witty and carefree and relaxed, and not, he vowed, not have too much to drink, so that Sylvia gave him warning glances in front of everybody and nagged him all the way home about the breathalyser.
All he had to do was change his shirt. He ran a comb through his hair and was ready by a quarter to eight, standing expectantly in the hall. Sylvia had painted her eyelids with a luminous stripe of sky-blue, and her eyes beneath, rather bloodshot, appeared angrier than ever. Fuming quietly to herself, muttering under her breath, she dumped bundles and baskets in the hall, marshalling the children with little pushes and taps on the backs of their skulls.
“What are you standing there looking so useless for?” she demanded. His brief ebullience vanishing, Colin took her by the arm, steering her into the kitchen for a little private row.
“I do wish,” he hissed at her, “I do wish that you could manage not to talk to me like that in front of the children. How do you expect them to have any respect for me? What are they going to think about me, if you speak to me like that?”
Sylvia glared at him. Then she dropped her eyes and disengaged her arm from his grasp. “What does it matter?” she said tiredly. She swerved past him and back into the hall.
“You undermine me,” he shouted after her. “You’ve got enough stuff there for an Antarctic expedition. One night, they’re going for, woman, not a bloody month.”
The children were complaining at being dragged away from the TV. They had been looking forward to bullying their babysitter and getting the better of her, and forcing her to let them stay up long past their usual bedtime. Florence was an unknown quantity; she alternated with them between doting and frigidity, and she had no TV set. Packed into the back of the car, they became instantly fractious. They flailed their legs and jostled for room, jabbing each other with their elbows. Karen began to sniffle, and Suzanne took out a pencil she had about her person and dug it into her brother’s leg.
“For God’s sake, will you stop it?” Sylvia twisted round in her seat to deliver slaps left and right.
“How can I drive?” Colin demanded. “How can I concentrate on the traffic? There’ll be an accident. You’ll cause an accident if you go on like this.”
“Oh, Dad, Dad, Dad,” Alistair wailed. “She’s made a big grey hole in my knee. It’ll go septic, Dad. I’ll have to stay off school.”
At the traffic lights Sylvia lurched over the back of her seat and snatched the pencil from Suzanne. She wound down her window and hurled it out. It struck the windscreen of the car drawn up next to them with a noise like a gunshot and rolled with an astonishingly loud clatter down the bonnet.
“My God,” Colin said. People in other cars were staring. Scarlet with embarrassment and breaking out in a sweat, he accelerated away from the green light.
He drew up in Florence’s driveway, under the dark shapes of the dripping trees, and took out his new clean handkerchief to mop his forehead. “Well, we’ve made it.”
Sylvia swivelled her legs out of the car. “These damn mouldy leaves,” she said. “My evening shoes will be ruined.”
Florence appeared immediately, looking apprehensive. She must have been watching from the front room, standing in the dark. Sylvia propelled the children towards the house and Colin followed, his arms loaded with their baggage. A sleeping bag escaped from his grasp and unrolled itself like a serpent on the wet path. He dragged it after him, hoping no one would notice. Sylvia was saying, “They’ve been fed, they’re to get straight to bed, they don’t want anything.”
“But what if they do?” Florence said. “I mean, what will I give them, and in the morning—”
“Look, you don’t need to give them their breakfast even, we’ll come for them,” Sylvia said.
“I’m not unwilling to give them their breakfast,” Florence insisted. “It’s not that, don’t think that, Sylvia, but I don’t know what they’re used to, for instance if they have fresh bread or stale.”
“Stale bread? What would they have stale bread for?”
“Yuk,” Suzanne offered. “I’m not eating stale bread.”
“Well,” Florence said, “when we were children we never had fresh bread. Children didn’t have it. It’s bad for them. They can’t digest it.”
“Go on.”
“It’s no joke, Sylvia. You ought to be careful what you give them.”
“Sylvia, it’s gone half-past eight,” Colin said. “We’re late.” Florence turned to him, looking stubborn.
“Perhaps you can convince her, Colin, as she doesn’t take any notice of what I say.”
