Kissed a Sad Goodbye

difficult to find the right mix of people. One of the worst things she’d found about divorce was the division of friends into his and her camps. Martin’s friends, of course, were out of the question, but she hadn’t dared bring her own partisan supporters into contact with Annabelle, whom they viewed as the villain of the piece. So she’d invited guests she’d felt sure would contribute to a pleasant, neutral evening—a couple who were recent clients; Rachel Pargeter, a neighbor who had been a close friend of their mother’s; Annabelle and Reg. And it had almost worked—until her son Harry had told his aunt what he thought of her.

Carefully, Jo slipped the last of the bunch of early sunflowers into the vase on the dining room table. The kitchen door slammed and Sarah’s high, piping voice carried clearly from the back of the house. “Mummy, Mummy!”

“In here, sweetheart.” Gathering up her shears and the florist’s paper, Jo headed for the kitchen. Her daughter stood just inside the door, her dark hair disheveled, her cheeks pink from the heat. She’d spilled something that looked suspiciously like Coke down the front of her tee shirt, and the waistband of her little flowered shorts had worked its way below her navel. At four, Sarah was a highly articulate and skilled tattletale.

“Harry’s in the shed, Mummy. You said he wasn’t to go in there. And I know he broke something, ’cause I heard it smash.”

Jo felt the swiftly rising bubble of anger; she clamped down on it. Sarah didn’t need any encouragement for her righteous indignation. “I’ll deal with Harry—you wash your hands at the sink. You’ve been into the Coke again, haven’t you, missy?”

Sarah glanced down at her shirt, and Jo saw the swift calculation pass across her heart-shaped face before she said earnestly, “It wasn’t me, Mummy, really it wasn’t. Harry got it out and he spilled it on my shirt.” She tugged the stained fabric away from her chest as if removing any association with it.

“Oh, dear God.” Jo closed her eyes and breathed a prayer. Her precious baby daughter was going to be an actress or a criminal, and she felt incapable of dealing with either possibility just now. She took a deep breath. “Right. When you’ve finished with your hands I want you to pick up your toys in the sitting room, and I don’t want to hear any more stories. Is that clear?”

Sarah put on her best injured face. “But, Mummy—”

Jo, however, was already pushing open the door to the garden. She was learning that the only way to manage her daughter was to disengage from the dialogue, because if she continued to participate the child would eventually wear her down. With Harry, things had been different. The slightest reprimand had been enough to bring the boy to tears, as if his emotions ran uncontainably close to the surface. And now that sensitivity seemed to have been translated into a sullen anger she was unable to breach.

The garden was quiet except for the drone of the bumblebees in the lavender, and it seemed deserted. The only signs of suspended activity were a chipped cricket bat and an old rubber ball lying in the thick grass, but at the bottom of the garden the door to the shed stood open. The small mail-order building was her retreat and studio.

She’d painted the outside a color called Labrador Blue and picked out the trim in white. Inside, she’d washed the walls with diluted emulsion, then furnished the space with bits and pieces of old furniture, a few watering cans, and books. Here she experimented with the custom finishes that were her trademark, or read, or sometimes just tried to sort out her life. And the shed was strictly off-limits to both children.

Slowly, she crossed the lawn and stepped inside. Harry sat on the floor with his back to the bookcase, his knees drawn up to his chin. Beside him lay the cut-glass jug she’d filled with roses from the garden, its handle snapped off. Water pooled on the floor and ran into the rag rug; roses lay scattered like flotsam from a storm.

Jo knelt and touched him on the shoulder. “Did it cut you? Are you all right?” When he didn’t answer she pried his hands from his knees and checked them. They were unblemished. She kept one hand in hers and tried again. “Harry, did you break the vase because you were angry with me? You know what you did last night was wrong, but maybe I was wrong to punish you instead of talking about it.”

Harry turned his head further away from her and the sunlight slanting in from the window lit his hair like a flame. What an irony it was, thought Jo, that while Sarah had inherited her own dark auburn coloring, Harry might have been cloned from her sister’s genes. And her father, who had always adored Annabelle at Jo’s expense, had fastened his expectations on Harry as the heir to, if not the family name, at least the family tradition.

“Sometimes mums can be wrong, too,” she continued. “But somehow I have to make you understand that you can’t say things like that to people. I’m sure you hurt Annabelle very—”

“I don’t bloody care.” Harry snatched his hand away and for the first time looked at her. “She’s a whore. I meant to hurt her.” He blinked and tears spilled over into his pale lashes.

“Harry, you mustn’t use words like that. You know better—”

“I don’t care! I hate her.”

“Harry, darling—”

“Don’t call me that.” He pushed himself up from the floor and stood over her. “I’m not your darling, and I hate you, too!” Then, with a slam of the door, he was gone.

THE COINS CLINKED INTO GORDON FINCH’S clarinet case in a staccato, irregular rhythm. The children tossed them, then stood as close as they dared, rapt with attention, moving their bodies unselfconsciously to the music. Both the small girls and boys were bare-chested in the heat, the definition of their ribs showing like the delicate tracery of the branching veins in a leaf. Their faces were flushed from the sun, and some held half-forgotten ice creams in sticky fingers.

He envied them their uncomplicated innocence, intact until someone came along to bugger it up for them. Thank God he hadn’t the responsibility for the shaping of a life. Caring for Sam was about as much as he could manage, and he’d been off his nut to think otherwise.

He finished “Cherry Blossom Pink” and wiped the clarinet’s mouthpiece. The children watched him, large-eyed, jiggling up and down in expectation. Their parents stood behind them, some half sitting on the knee-high iron railing that separated the flower bed from the round, brick bulk of the Isle of Dogs entrance to the foot tunnel. Lifting the clarinet to his lips again, he played a bit of “London Bridge.” The children giggled and he thought for a moment, searching his memory for tunes they might like, then improvised “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”

A pied piper with a clarinet, he slid into “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” then “When I’m Sixty-Four,” from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, and the children bounced and swayed happily. But after a bit their parents grew restive, and one by one the families began to drift away. They all had agendas, he thought as he watched them leave—places to go, things to do, people to see. Surely he didn’t envy them that as well?