He glanced down at Lucy. She was looking up at him patiently, trustingly. She seemed very young, for a moment, younger even than her seven years.
It was no use. Silence would be the worst response of all. He was going to have to tell her
‘Well …’ he began. ‘Well, every night, the fairies come out, with their little paint brushes and their pots of green paint …’
God, he hated himself sometimes.
Caroline and Miranda had finished preparing lunch some time ago, and were relaxing at the kitchen table, a bottle of red wine sitting between them, already half- emptied.
‘You see,’ Caroline was saying, ‘the trouble with Max is …’
But there lay the problem. What
She sighed, giving up – as usual – the struggle to put her finger on it. ‘I don’t know … He just doesn’t seem very happy, that’s all. There’s something about his life … about himself … Something that he doesn’t like.’
‘He’s very quiet,’ Miranda conceded. ‘But I assumed he was always like that.’
‘He’s always been quiet,’ said Caroline. ‘But it’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I can’t seem to get a word out of him. I suppose he talks all day at work.’ Changing tack, she said: ‘I wonder what he and Chris have in common. They’re such different people, and yet they’ve been friends for so long.’
‘Well, that counts for a lot in itself, doesn’t it? Shared history, and so on.’ Miranda could sense something bearing down upon Caroline, some weight of apprehension. ‘Lots of couples go through difficult times,’ she said. ‘And Lucy seems very close to her father.’
‘You think so?’ Caroline shook her head. ‘They
‘It’s not too late, is it?’
Caroline smiled. ‘I’m not too old, if that’s what you mean. But it’s probably too late in other ways.’ She reached for the bottle, refilled their glasses, and took what was more than a sip. ‘Ah well.
How much further this conversation would have progressed, how much more dangerously confiding Caroline might have become, they would never know. At that moment the back door of the farmhouse was flung open. They could hear the distressed voices of children and adults from the garden, and now Chris rushed purposefully into the kitchen, looking harrassed and short of breath.
‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Where’s the First Aid box?’
Miranda jumped to her feet.
‘What’s happened? Who’s hurt?’
‘It’s Joe, mainly. Lucy a bit as well. Baking soda – that’s what we need. Do we have any baking soda?’
‘But what
Without waiting to hear the answer, Caroline ran outside on to the lawn, where a scene of chaos was awaiting her. Joe lay stretched out on the grass, motionless: at first she thought that he was unconscious. Max was kneeling beside him, a hand laid tenderly on his brow. Lucy came running to meet her mother, and flung herself at her, clasping her fiercely with bare arms which, she could not help noticing, were mottled and livid with angry crimson blotches.
‘What have you done to yourself, love? What happened?’
‘It was the nettle game,’ Lucy told her, between sobs. ‘The dare. We came back from the castle and then started playing it and Daddy was pushing Joe on the rope. He was swinging really hard and then he fell off and landed right in the middle of the pit. I climbed in and tried to help him out.’
‘That was brave of you.’
‘It really, really hurts.’
‘I bet it does. Don’t worry. Chris and Miranda will be out here, any second now. They’re finding some stuff to put on it.’
‘What about Joe? He was wearing shorts and everything. His legs …’
Caroline turned to look at the figures of Joe, stretched out on the lawn, and her husband at his side. In just a few seconds Joe’s father and mother would have reached their son, tending to him, ministering to his needs. But in years to come, it would not be those next few minutes’ confusion and frantic activity that Caroline would remember. It would be this one moment of stillness: the tableau (as she would always recall it) she saw laid out before her as she turned. The prostrate body of Joe, lying so still, and so reposeful, that one might even imagine him to have died. And kneeling beside him – crying, too, unless Caroline was mistaken – her husband, fixated by the pain and distress not of his own daughter, but of another man’s child. And the strange thing about it was that, after watching Max so closely, and with so much bewilderment, during the last few days, after tormenting herself with the riddle of his unhappiness, his maladjustment, his sense of being forever ill at ease in the world, at that moment she saw him