The bus was empty and Darlington was stark, almost Gothic as they slipped in through freezing fog.
He was surprised by the reflection of his own face. He had forgotten about the make-up, and now registered how natural it made him look. He still wasn’t quite sure why he had done it. In the small bag he was carrying, he had packed the leather case. It was a kind of talisman, because he had been given it just before the disaster.
The make-up was also a means of going incognito tonight. As if this were a spying mission. He barely recognised himself.
There was also another possible reason for it. But he pressed that down as soon as he thought it: the notion that he was making himself look as much like his old self as possible. Tony would remember him the way he was before the tattoos were completed. And suddenly Mark realised what Peggy and Iris hadn’t said. The words they hadn’t dared to speak as he left tonight had been clearly etched in lines of worry.
They thought he would end up going back to Tony. The suggestion had hung in the air of that kitchen. They thought it was obvious that, faced once more by an ex-lover, off he would go.
But the idea had never occurred to him. It had never seemed real enough to become an idea. He was concerned with Sally. It was Sally he was going to see, it was his daughter he was out to find tonight. If he started thinking now about seeing Tony again, it would be too much to handle. This trip was for Sally. He couldn’t see Sally and Tony in the same scene at all, not at all, not yet. Their existences were mutually exclusive, just as a multiple-choice question couldn’t have two answers ticked. He couldn’t picture Sally and Tony together, not even on a train station platform, waving him down.
Preoccupied with Sally, Mark had given little thought to the questions of why Tony wasn’t in prison, how he had found their house, how he had managed to abduct the child. Sally’s absence was the only real thing. Mark had been devastated by the sight of the scattered books on her bedroom floor, the dawn light fingering their dust covers on Christmas morning, her bedclothes mussed up.
To Mark tonight, Tony was merely the vehicle of this disaster. Not a real person; nothing to do with this person Mark used to know, used to love. For the moment, Tony was nothing more to Mark than the sneezing and grinding of the bus as it crawled into the station stop in Darlington.
“WHAT A CHRISTMAS!” PEGGY SIGHED AS SHE SAT DOWN. SHE HAD WASHED everything in sight in Iris’s kitchen. They had completed a dispirited meal. This was the first time in years that Iris’s cottage had seemed unfamiliar to Peggy. Washing everything in sight seemed a way to reassert her ownership and to quell the bouts of panic.
Sitting still for the first moment since Mark had left for Leeds, all she wanted was to turn things back.
To before Christmas, say, when they were at the pantomime together. To before Sally was born, even, so they could have all those years again; have her novelty and newness, the bewildered charm of her. And even, if they could, turn time back to before Sam and Mark married, before that accident, before Iris and Peggy were together, when Iris was alone in her own home. So many wrong turnings they’d be able to reroute. How much effort would it take to achieve all that?
Yet it seemed that all the effort in the world was being wasted right now, by Peggy herself, holding her tears back.
“Oh, God, don’t cry,” Iris said. “I thought you were keeping strong for us.”
“Just shut it for now, would you, Iris?”
Iris put the telly on. Christmas programmes. Something brash on ITV, foreign cartoons on Channel Four, opera on Two, and on One a sitcom Christmas special shot abroad. She turned down the sound and listened attentively.
“He’ll be on the train by now,” Peggy said.
On the coffee table between them stood the teapot, cooling slowly, and the phone.
SAM TRIED, BUT SHE COULDN’T SEE HERSELF FINISHING WORK EVERY DAY and coming back to Bob’s bleak kitchen with its cracked lino. And who would pick up Sally from school? A policeman couldn’t stand each day at the gates. He had odd hours. He’d never consent to being the househusband Mark was.
She still couldn’t see a life without Mark. The future had come down like venetian blinds. Bob’s venetian blinds covered every window—it seemed fitting for a policeman, she thought—and their slats were bent and buckled by his impatience when opening windows.
The house had no reverberations for her. Not like the warm pinks of her own kitchen. The air here was dank, chilled. Was Bob mean with the central heating? That wasn’t a good environment for bringing up a kid. Sally would catch her death.
He had come into the kitchen after her. She heard his footsteps, hesitant, respectful, on the yellow lino. This was his house; she could imagine him alone, crashing heedlessly from room to room. He put his arms around her.
“What are you doing?” His voice dripped with pity.
Her spine stiffened slightly. Patronising bastard.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Putting the kettle on?”
“We’ve drunk gallons of tea today.”
“Some Christmas,” she said. “I’m sorry, Bob.”
“If this hadn’t happened, we’d never have spent Christmas together at all.”
“It’s not how I would have wanted it.”
Bob said, “We’ve smoked nearly eighty fags between us, all day.”
“Just hold me for a bit,” Sam told him.
As he did so, clumsily, she thought: No, I can’t live here, not like this. Sally wouldn’t stand for it, anyway. She’d never like it here. But her thoughts went twisting round. Oh, she’d put up with it. She’d have to. She has to be
