She bites her lip, mops up the wine.
She drops the wine-soaked Kleenex in the pedal bin and leans her back against the worktop. She pulls back her hair, but can’t find anything to tie it with.
‘Shit,’ she says.
Luther’s in a kitchen chair, his elbows on his knees. He’s looking away from her at the interlocking geometric pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen floor; black, white, ten shades of grey. ‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing. I lost it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Why do you think? You were busy.’
He winces at her unexpected cruelty.
‘Look, there’s nothing to tell,’ she says. ‘I was pregnant, then I started to bleed and then I wasn’t pregnant. I spent the afternoon in hospital. You didn’t come home that night.’
‘I thought you’d had a termination.’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Because you were pregnant and then you weren’t. And you didn’t tell me.’
‘You didn’t give me the chance.’
‘You never wanted them. Kids.’
‘Neither did you.’ She trails off. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she says. ‘The bear.’
She’s talking about the big, plush teddy bear she found sitting at the bottom of Luther’s wardrobe.
‘You told me that was for Rose’s granddaughter.’
‘What am I supposed to say?’ he says. ‘It’s for the baby you secretly had aborted?’
‘What did you do with it?’
‘I didn’t know what to do with it. I took it to Oxfam.’
She stands there.
He sits. Both of them look at the interlocking shadows on the floor.
‘God,’ she says. ‘What a mess.’
Luther laughs an empty laugh.
Zoe reaches for her coat.
He says, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I don’t know. Out.’
‘Are you coming home?’
‘I think it’s best if I don’t.’
‘So where will you sleep?’
‘At my mum’s, probably.’
There’s a tiny flex, a comma at one corner of her mouth, and he thinks she’s lying. But he doesn’t trust his judgement; he’s angry and tired and bereft. He may be seeing lies where there are none. And if he goes down that road now, then however bad it might be right now, it’ll only get worse.
He watches her put her coat on and smells cigarettes and knows she’s not going to her mum’s or to her sister’s or to her friend’s or to anywhere else he knows.
More than anything, what he wants is for Zoe to stay here, in this house, the house with the red door, the house with both their names on the title deeds, John and Zoe Luther.
How proud they’d been, the day they moved in. Their first real house, too big for just the two of them. The area was a bit rough, but it was up and coming and anyway who cared? Luther used to fantasize about being an old man, dying in the room upstairs; it would be a library by then, with leather armchairs. And he’d be the one to go first; she’d come in one morning with a cup of tea in a china cup and few biscuits on a plate and he’d be dead in his leather armchair with a book in his lap, a good book, much loved and well read.
And now she’s belting her coat, waiting for him to say something.
He says, ‘There’s no need for you to go anywhere.’
‘If I stay, we’ll fight.’
‘Look,’ he says, and he wonders if she can hear the desperation in his voice. ‘Look,’ he says again. ‘I’m not going to relax tonight. With all this, waiting for the phone to ring. I’m going to go mad if I hang around the house. So you stay here, okay? You stay here and I’ll go.’
He reads a flare of disappointment in her eyes. And there’s a dizzying lurch inside him to think that even now, at the teetering edge of their marriage, he’s disappointing her.
She stands with her coat buttoned and belted. And because of that, because she’s ready to walk out the door, he says it again, ‘I’ll go.’
She nods slowly, once. ‘Okay.’
He goes to the kitchen door. Hesitates. ‘Do you want me to call you? Let you know how it goes?’
She doesn’t answer. When he turns to ask again, she’s crying.
He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know how to say the right thing.
He says, ‘Lock up properly. Lock the doors and windows.’
He steps outside. He shuts the kitchen door and walks away and is lost.
He thinks about dropping round to see Reed. But if he does, he might have to talk about it. And he doesn’t want to talk about it.
But he’s got to do something, he’s got to go somewhere. So he stops off to buy a bag of chips and goes to see Bill Tanner.
He’s holding the chips in soggy paper, smelling faintly of vinegar, when Bill opens the door and gives him a big, bright denture smile.
Luther knows something’s wrong.
He walks in, automatically ducks his head.
They eat chips out of the paper on the Formica table. Bill slathers his chips in brown sauce from a glass bottle. There are snotty clogs of sauce round the thread of the screw top.
Bill says, ‘I saw you on the telly.’
‘Oh yeah,’ says Luther. ‘Did I look fat? The camera adds ten pounds, apparently.’
‘Are you all right, son?’
Luther considers telling the old man how not all right he is. Instead, he says, ‘You got kids, Bill?’
‘Four. Although they’re not kids no more.’
‘Grandkids?’
‘Great-grandkids, mate. Hundreds of the little sods. Like tadpoles.’
Luther chuckles. ‘Where are they?’
‘Who knows? When you get so old even your kids are in homes, you realize there’s nobody in the world who gives a tinker’s cuss if you live or die. So there you go. Rule number one: don’t get old.’
‘There’s not much hope of that.’
‘Ah. We all think that.’
‘I could find them for you,’ says Luther. ‘Your grandkids. Let them know what’s been going on.’
‘My eldest grandson’s in Australia,’ Bill says. ‘Went out as a plumber, back in the early nineties. They were crying out for tradesmen back then. He asked me along: Come and live with us, Granddad. But his missus didn’t want me there. You can tell.’
‘And the others?’
‘I couldn’t even give you their addresses.’
‘Eat your chips,’ Luther says. ‘They’ll put hair on your chest.’
Bill looks down at his chest. His shoulders shake.
Luther says, ‘Bill? Are you okay, mate?’
The old man just clenches and unclenches his crippled fists.
Luther goes to the sink to wash the chip grease from his fingers, dries his hands on an old tea towel, a souvenir of a long-ago day trip to Blackpool. Then he kneels at the old man’s side, pats his back. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Hey. Hey.’
When the crying is over, Luther says, ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’
Bill sniffs, wipes his nose on his hand. ‘There’s whisky in the cupboard.’
