want to have to go to Baird every time I need some information.’
‘It’s all in my bag in the car.’
‘One more thing. This situation is ridiculously vague, so I want to be firm about one thing. I’m going to tell you and I’m going to tell Baird that I want a strict time-limit for all of this.’
Daley looked taken aback.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If things work out, there’s the danger that we’ll become a replacement family for Finn in her new life. That’s no good. What’s the date now, January the twenty-fifth, isn’t it?’
‘The twenty-sixth.’
‘I’m going to be clear with Finn that whatever happens, however things go, this arrangement is until the middle of March – let’s call it March the fifteenth – and no more. All right?’
‘Fine,’ said Daley. ‘I’m sure it will be less than that anyway.’
‘Good. So, shall we join the ladies?’
‘You think it’s a joke, Sam. You wait until you get invited for dinner by the neighbours.’
‘I’m looking forward to it. I’ve already got my face-powder ready.’
Nine
I turned to face the girl. I hadn’t looked at her properly until now. Her pale oval face, behind the swing of dark-brown hair, was perfectly expressionless. Under her neat thick eyebrows, her brown eyes were unfocused. She was attractive, she could be lovely in different circumstances, but hers was a face from which all character seemed to have been wiped.
‘Let me show you round the house,’ I said. ‘Though that won’t take long.’
She stooped to pick up the small suitcase which was beside her, although she looked too weak and listless to carry anything at all.
‘Here, let me take that for you. We’ll start with your bedroom, though you’ve seen that already.’ She flinched as my hand touched hers on the handle of her case. ‘Your hands are cold; I’ll put the heating on in a minute. Come this way.’
I led the way up the stairs, Finn following obediently behind. So far, she had not said a word.
‘Here. I’m sorry about all the boxes; we can move them into the attic later.’ I put her suitcase by the bed, where it stood, forlornly small in the high-ceilinged room. ‘It’s all a bit bare, I’m afraid.’ Finn stood in the middle of the room, not looking. Her arms hung by her sides, pale fingers loose as if they didn’t belong to her at all. I gestured vaguely at the wardrobe and small chest of drawers that Danny had found for me in a nearby village. ‘You can put your stuff in there.’
I led the way back into the corridor. I saw something small and white and angular on the floor. I crouched and picked it up delicately between two fingers.
‘And this, Finn, is a paper bird created by my semi-detached partner, Danny.’ Was he still my semi-detached partner, or had he become quite detached? I pushed the thought away for later. ‘Look, I can make it flap, sort of. Lovely, don’t you think? After living in this house for a few days you will start to find these little creatures among your clothes, in your hair, sticking to you, in your food. They get everywhere. Men, eh?’
I was talking to myself largely.
‘That’s my room. And this’ – she walked two feet behind me and stopped when I stopped – ‘is the room of my little girl, Elsie.’ The door jammed on a jumble of blonde-maned Barbie dolls, pencil cases and plastic ponies. ‘Elsie is short for Elsie.’ I looked at Finn and she didn’t laugh – well, what I had said wasn’t particularly funny – but she gave me a little nod, more like a single convulsive jerk. I saw the plaster around her throat.
Downstairs I showed Finn my study (‘out of bounds to everyone’), the living room, the kitchen. I pulled open the fridge door.
‘Feel free to take whatever you want. I don’t cook but I
I pointed out tea and coffee and the hole where the washing machine would be and I told her about Linda and Sally and the routines. ‘And that’s about it, except of course that’s the garden’ – I pointed out of the window at the soggy undergrowth, the mulched heaps of leaves that hadn’t been cleared, the frayed edges of the balding lawn – ‘ungardened.’
Finn turned her head, but still I couldn’t tell if she saw anything at all. I peered into the fridge again and pulled out a carton of country vegetable soup.
‘I’m going to heat us up some soup. Why don’t you go and get freshened up in the bathroom, then we can have lunch together.’ She stood, stranded in the kitchen. ‘Upstairs,’ I said encouragingly, pointing, and watched as she turned slowly round and made her way up the broad shallow steps, one at a time and stopping on each step, so slowly, like a very old woman.
Sometimes I see trauma victims who don’t speak for weeks on end; sometimes words pour from them like a great muddy flood with no barriers. Quite recently a middle-aged man came to me after being in a train crash that he had been lucky to survive. All his life, he’d been reticent, buttoned up. In the crash he’d emptied his bowels (his phrase, through puckered-up lips) in shock, something that seemed to affect him as deeply as all the deaths he had witnessed. Afterwards, when he was released from hospital, he became incontinent with speech. He told me how he would stand at the bus stop, walk into a shop, stand at his front door, and tell anyone who came near him what had happened to him. He played the scene over and over, yet got no relief from its telling. It was just like scratching an unbearable itch. Finn would speak in her own time; when she spoke I would be there to hear, if it was to me she chose to speak. In the meantime she needed to be given a structure to feel safe in.
I looked at her as she lifted very small puddles of soup in her spoon and carried them carefully to her mouth. What would she say if she could talk?
‘Elsie gets back here at six,’ I said. ‘Some days it might be earlier; often I collect her from school myself. She’s excited that you’re coming. I will tell her only what we’ll tell other people: that you’re a student who is staying with us. Fiona Jones.’
Finn got up, the chair scraping noisily against the tiles of the floor in the kitchen that was too quiet, and took her bowl, still half-full of soup, over to the sink. She washed it and balanced it on the draining-board among all the other dishes, and she sat down at the table once more, facing me and not looking at me. She put her hands around the cup of tea I’d made for her and shivered. Then she raised her velvet eyes to mine and stared at me. It was the first time she had done so and I was unaccountably startled. I felt as if I could see into her skull.
‘You’re safe here, Finn,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything unless you want to; you don’t have to do anything. But you’re safe.’
The second-hand on the kitchen clock, the glowing green digits clicking over on my radio clock, the deep metronome of the grandfather clock’s pendulum in the hall, all agreed with me that it was a long, slow afternoon. Time, which had always hurtled through my days, slowed to a painful dawdle.
I ran Finn a hot bath, which I filled with my favourite bath oil. She went into the bathroom, locked the door, and I heard the sound of undressing and of her getting in, but she was out again and dressed in the same clothes as before in under five minutes. I asked her to help me choose curtains for her room, and we knelt by the piles of fabric that I pulled out from under my bed where I’d stored them, and she watched as I held up pleated lengths and said nothing. So I chose her something cheerful in dull red and yellow and navy, though it was much too long for the small square window, and hung it up. I left her in her bedroom so she could unpack, thinking she might like to be alone there for a bit. Before I left the room I saw her looking into her open case at clothes which were all still in their packets. A few minutes later she came downstairs again and stood in the doorway of my study where I was tidying away folders. I took her out into the garden, hoping that the bulbs the previous owner was sure to have planted had poked through the neglected soil, but all we found were a few snowdrops in a cracked flowerpot.
We went back inside and I lit a fire (mostly consisting of firelighters and tightly crumpled balls of
