I was woken by the sound of starlings on the stairs. I glanced at the clock – 5.30 a.m. Groaning, I got out of bed. ‘Just what are you two doing?’ I demanded. The twins were dressed and kitted up with their school rucksacks. ‘And what are you carrying?’
‘It’s our food for the journey,’ Felix explained.
‘Turn round.’ Felix did so, and I unzipped the rucksack. Inside I found an apple, a couple of chocolate biscuits and Blanky. The last was significant. Felix would never leave the house without Blanky. ‘Did you pinch these from the tin?’
‘It’s for our journey,’ Lucas repeated.
‘What journey?’
Felix tugged at my hand. ‘A special journey, Mummy’
I sat down on the top stair. ‘You were running away without telling me. I wouldn’t have liked that, you know.’
This worried Felix. ‘We’re going to find Daddy,’ he said.
To hide the rush of hot tears, I dropped my head into my hands. There were further starling rustles and a twin inserted himself at either side of me. I put out my arms and drew them close. What am I going to do with you?’ They knew the question was rhetorical, and neither answered. ‘I’ve told you both about Daddy. He’s gone to another place where he will be perfectly at peace. But he can’t ever come back.’
‘Oh, yes he will,’ said Lucas. ‘When we dig him up.’
I ached for their misery. My sadness was now complete, and I searched desolately for the best words, the right thing to do. ‘Well,’ I said finally, ‘why don’t we think about it in bed?’
Fifteen minutes later, they were asleep, but not before ‘I had extracted a promise from them that they would never, ever leave the house without telling me or Eve. I lay awake, borne aloft on a layer of biscuit crumbs – they had insisted in eating their provisions.
‘Minty!’ a voice called behind me, as I was dashing out of number seven on the way to work.
It was Martin. He was in his office suit, with a briefcase and a matching overnight bag in the softest leather, the kind top executives favour. ‘I was hoping to catch you. I’m sorry I haven’t been around, but I’ve been so busy. Paige tells me you’re coping… but…’ He placed a finger under my chin and tilted it up. ‘Bit pale, thinner, but that’s to be expected.’
I licked my dry lips. I had almost forgotten how to respond to human beings, let alone friends.
‘I’m afraid I need to talk to you,’ he said.
That shook me out of my torpor. ‘Trouble?’
‘Trouble,’ he conceded. ‘Have you got time?’
I glanced at my watch. ‘I’m due at a meeting in an hour.’ That would take up the morning. Lunchtime would be devoted to buying new school uniform for the twins. An afternoon meeting was scheduled with Ed Golightly at the BBC and everyone was crossing fingers for the green light. With luck and a following wind, I would make it home for the twins’ bath. ‘I have time.’
‘Coffee, then?’ Martin jerked a finger at the cafe on the corner.
We sat at a too-small table that lurched alarmingly if one or other of us leant on it. Martin blew into the cappuccino, and the resulting ruffle on the froth mirrored his frown. He looked baffled and angry. A dot of shaving cream nesting behind his left ear skewed his conformist, businesslike appearance.
‘Martin, this looks bad.’
‘It is.’ He picked up his cup and put it down again. ‘Paige and I have split up. Or, rather, she told me to go’
Naturally that was neither here nor there to Martin. He raised his eyes and looked directly into mine. ‘You know the expression “a blow in the solar plexus”? It doesn’t describe the half of it.’
A picture of Nathan sitting in the blue chair, dead, swam into view. ‘I have some idea.’
‘Yes, of course you do. I was forgetting.’ He frowned, and the hollows under his eyes deepened alarmingly. This was a man who was hoping to be mistaken, who was grappling with a mystery he suspected he had no hope of solving.
‘How long had it been brewing?’
He shrugged and took refuge in flippancy. ‘Who knows what goes on in my wife’s mind?’
I searched for a clue to Paige’s decision. Had Martin beaten her up? Demanded that she become a sex slave? I tried the obvious line. ‘You can go a bit mad after having a baby. I did. You feel so unsettled and unsure.’
Yet his bewilderment and hurt were so profound that I could almost touch them. ‘Paige feels I don’t pay enough attention to the children but apparently I demand too much from her. She says she has enough children to look after. She needs to concentrate on them and I get in the way’
Despite the sun warming my back, I felt cold. ‘Martin, Paige
‘As far as I know, but I’ve been away quite a lot.’ He pushed aside his untouched coffee. ‘It’s a battlefield at home, but Paige is sane and well. I’ve no doubt of that. Each time she gives birth she becomes… well, stronger and more implacable. Like Clytemnestra or whoever that dreadful woman was who killed her husband for fun.’
‘He’d just slaughtered her daughter.’
‘Had he? Oh, well.’ He reached down for the handle of his bag. It’s perfectly correct that I don’t devote every waking breath, or every sleeping one for that matter, to the children. I leave that to Paige.’
‘What do you want me to do, Martin?’ I asked gently. ‘Although I’m not sure what I
Martin gazed down at the table. He was searching for something to cling to. ‘Try to persuade her to do anything and you’ll achieve the opposite. But could you keep an eye on her? She’s not as strong as she thinks.’ He got to his feet. ‘Thank you for the coffee.’ Large and baffled, he hovered above me. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, Minty, at the moment, but if you could keep tabs on her? Sooner or later she’ll come to her senses. Actually, I’m not sure I want to live with her at the moment anyway – she’s so awful.’ He yanked out the expanding handle of his suitcase with some force. ‘She should never have left the bank. That’s where her energies are best deployed. Children have ruined her.’
When I tackled Paige, she was unrepentant and not at all mad. ‘Martin doesn’t fit in with the children,’ she said, as she hefted baby Charlie from one breast to the other. I noted the breast was looking less joyously abundant, and floppier than it had been. ‘He’s always coming home at the wrong time, and wanting a meal or his shirts washed.’
‘Linda can do that, or some of it, surely?’
She thought about this for a while. There was an exultant expression in her eyes, which I didn’t recognize. ‘He prevents me concentrating on the children.’
I changed my mind. Paige was unhinged. ‘Have you been to the doctor lately?’
‘No need.’ She addressed the fuzzy head of her sucking son. ‘Mummy’s fine, isn’t she? We’re doing just fine.’
‘You should go,’ I said.
There was a hum in the quiet, organized kitchen: dishwasher, washing-machine. Upstairs my twins were being entertained grudgingly by Jackson and Lara. It was only four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon but the table was already laid for the children’s six o’clock supper, and the oven timer had been primed to spring into life at five thirty.
Oddly at sea, I twisted my hands in my lap. ‘Obviously I can’t occupy the high ground on broken marriages -’
‘Obviously,’ said Paige, rudely.
‘But that’s it, Paige. I can say something because I know.’
‘Know what?’
‘How to convince yourself that what you’re doing is OK.’
Charlie thrust his head back and Paige’s nipple popped out of his mouth. ‘Oh, look!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s got a sore lip. Poor little boy’ She nuzzled his cheek with lingering tenderness. ‘Mummy will make it better.’
I didn’t often think about my mother and it’s safe to say that, while she was alive, my mother didn’t often think about me in a real, proper, motherly way. First, she was always too tired from trying to earn a living after my father
