The safe house

newspapers), and she sat a while in my only easy chair, staring into the erratic flames. I sat near her, on the rug, reading through chess problems I’d saved up from the week’s papers. Anatoly clattered through the cat flap and into the living room, and he pushed his moist jaw against my hunched knees a few times and then lay between us. Two women and a cat by the fire: it was almost cosy.

Then Finn spoke. Her voice was low, husky.

‘I’m bleeding.’

I looked in horror at her neck, but of course she didn’t mean that. Her eyebrows were puckered in a kind of vacant puzzlement.

‘That’s OK.’ I stood up. ‘I’ve got plenty of Tampax and towels and stuff in the bathroom. I should have thought to tell you. Come on.’

‘I’m bleeding,’ she said again, this time almost whispering. I took hold of her thin, chilly hand and pulled her to her feet. She was several inches shorter than me and she looked terribly young. Too young to bleed.

‘This,’ said Elsie, ‘is a shoulder.’ She plunged her thin rectangle of toast into the runny yolk and sucked it noisily; it slipped down her chin like yellow glue. ‘Do you have shoulders?’ She didn’t wait for a reply; it was as if Finn’s silence had loosened her own guarded tongue. ‘We had chicken nuggets today and Alexander Cassell’ – she pronounced it Ale-xxonder – ‘put his in his pocket and they squished together.’ She gave a squeal of appreciation and sucked her toast again. ‘Finished. Do you want to come and see my drawing?’ She slithered from her chair. ‘This way. My mummy says I draw better than her. Do you think that’s true? My favourite colour’s pink and Mummy’s is black but I hate black except I like Anatoly and he’s all black like a panther. What’s yours?’

Elsie didn’t seem to notice that Finn wasn’t replying. She displayed her picture of her house with a front door up to the roof and two crooked windows, she showed her how she could do somersaults, crashing into the legs of the chair, and then she demanded a video and together they sat through the whole of 101 Dalmatians, Finn in the chair, Elsie on the rug, both staring at the screen full of puppies, Finn vacantly and Elsie avidly, and when I took Elsie up for her bath (‘why do I always have to have baths?’) Finn stayed staring at the blank screen.

Evenings would be the worst, I thought: stretches of time with just the two of us and no structure and Finn just sitting and waiting, but waiting for nothing. I thought of the way she’d looked at me. I rummaged through the freezer: Marks & Spencer steak and kidney pudding, Sainsbury’s chicken kiev, a packet of lasagne (serves two), spinach and cheese pie (serves one). I pulled out the lasagne and put it in the microwave to defrost. Perhaps there were some frozen peas. I wondered where Danny was; I wondered who he was with, and if he had sought comfort and pleasure elsewhere, taking his rage to a different bed. Was he with someone else now, as I nursed a mute invalid? Was he laying his roughened hands on someone else’s compliant body? For a few moments, at the thought, I could hardly breathe. I suppose he would say that I’d been unfaithful to him, in my fashion. Finn, sitting passively in the next-door room, represented a kind of treachery. I wished he was here now and I was heating up lasagne and peas for him instead; then we could have watched a movie on the telly and gone up to bed together and pressed up against each other in the dark. I wished that I could banish Finn, and my foolish and hasty decision to take her in, and return to the past of two days ago.

‘Here we are.’ I carried the tray into the living room, but Finn wasn’t there. I called upstairs, at first not loudly, then with greater impatience. No answer. Eventually I knocked at her bedroom door, then opened it. She lay, fully clothed, on her bed. Her thumb was in her mouth. I pulled the duvet over her, and as I did so her eyes opened. She glared at me and then turned her head to the wall.

And so ended Finn’s first day. Except later that night when I’d gone to bed myself and outside it was quite dark in the way that only the countryside can be dark, I heard a thump from Finn’s room. Then another, louder. I pulled on my dressing gown and padded along the chilly corridor. She lay quite asleep, both hands covering her face like someone hiding from an intrusive camera. I went back to my warm bed and heard nothing more except the hoot of an owl, the sigh of the wind, horrible unfiltered country sounds, until morning.

Ten

Finn was a chilly presence in the house. I’d see her out of the corner of my eye: slumped somewhere, shuffling somewhere. In all the debates about safety and status, what hadn’t been discussed was what she was actually meant to do in my house from hour to hour. In the first couple of days she was with us she woke early; I heard the slap of naked feet on the bare boards of the landing. At breakfast-time I knocked on her bedroom door, asking if I could bring her anything. There was no reply. I saw nothing of her until I returned from driving Elsie to school. She would be sitting on the sofa watching daytime television, game shows, public confessions, news broadcasts, Australian soap operas. She was impassive, almost immobile, except for worrying at the plaster on her neck. Fidget, fidget, fidget. I brought her coffee, black with no sugar, and she took it and cupped her hands around it as if to draw its warmth into herself. That was the closest to human contact for the whole day. I brought her toast but half an hour later it was untouched, the butter congealed.

When I encountered Finn, I would talk to her casually, in the sort of spirit that you might speak to a patient in deep coma, not knowing whether it was for your benefit or theirs. Here’s some coffee. Mind your hands. It’s a nice day. Budge up. What are you watching? The occasional questions came out by mistake and provoked awkward silences. I was embarrassed and furious with myself for being embarrassed. I was professionally as well as personally discomfited. This was supposed to be my field and I was behaving absurdly, as well as ineffectually. But it was the situation itself that was disastrous, not my behaviour within it. Admitting a severely traumatized woman to my home, establishing her in the context of my own family, such as it was, was contrary to any normal procedure. And I was missing Danny in a way that took me by surprise.

As I drove to Elsie’s school in the afternoon of Finn’s third mute day, I went over possibilities in my mind. I walked into Elsie’s class and found her engaged in a picture almost as large as herself. She was glaring with ferocious concentration and gouging a few final touches into it with a black crayon. I knelt beside her and looked over her shoulder. I could smell her soft skin, feel her cotton-wool hair against my cheek.

‘That’s a good elephant,’ I said.

‘It’s a horse,’ she said firmly.

‘It looks like an elephant,’ I protested. ‘It’s got a trunk.’

‘It looks like an elephant,’ Elsie said, ‘but it’s a horse.’

I wasn’t going to let this go.

‘I look like an ordinary woman. Could I be a horse?’

Elsie looked up at me with a new-found interest.

‘Are you?’

I felt a stab of remorse at what I was allowing to be inflicted on this cross little flaxen-haired goblin. I should be doing something for her. I had to do something. Straight away. I looked around.

‘Who have you been playing with, Elsie?’

‘Nobody.’

‘No, really, who?’

‘Mungo.’

‘Apart from Mungo.’

‘Nobody.’

‘Name one person you’ve been playing with.’

‘Penelope.’

I went to the teacher, Miss Karlin, a teacherly dream in a long flowery dress and wire-rimmed spectacles, her hair carelessly tied up, and asked her to point out Penelope, and she told me that there was nobody in the class or,