How could they do this?
Another step, and she saw Richard’s eyes dart to the glass above their heads. Would he have raised the hoe and smashed that too? With one final blow? The sky glittering down on them, glass breaking, falling, cutting boys’ skin? Glass in their eyes. No, tears. Tears in all of their eyes.
He’s gone, she said. Now come in and have tea.
They left the ruins without a word.
They need a father figure, her friends had said.
But they had their figure.
There was a figure, a shadow, a voice that echoed through the spaces of the house. That caught the imaginary cricket balls they threw, or batted them back. Or missed.
Howzat?
That September the boys went away to school. That was what people did, in those days. It made so much sense, people said, for the two of them to go, and together. It’ll be good for them, people said, they’ll be just like all the other boys when they’re there. People always had things to say. People tried to press you into the normal. To imitate the normal even if that wasn’t what you were. They wanted you to live whatever pattern it was that they themselves lived. If you weren’t a whole family then you had to live always in the lack of it.
No, it wasn’t correct to say that they went. She sent them. She drove them to the school and left them there.
The hall of the school was huge. There were other mothers hugging sons goodbye. Some fathers too, but more mothers than fathers. Richard cried. Jonny didn’t. It’s all right, one of the other mothers said, he’ll be running around and playing soon enough, soon as you’re out of sight.
This she must believe, that her son would have another life once he was out of her sight. Her two sons, everyone, they all had other lives when you did not see them. Like their father had done. Some other life, out of sight.
She drove away from the school, the tall brick building with all its windows and chimneys, away down the drive and along the road, and turned off the road into a lay-by and herself cried. It was some time before she was ready for the drive home. She took a handkerchief from her handbag and dried her face. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself, tidied her make-up and put on lipstick, though there would be no one but herself to see her, tightened her lips one against the other, sighed, and drove on. It was late afternoon. The school would be feeding them tea. She imagined the mass of boys, her boys in the mass, their shorts, their long socks striped at the tops, their bare knees, their tousled hair. Somehow she could not see their faces. She drove the twenty miles home. Driving was slow in those days though there was scarcely any traffic on the road. It was almost dusk by the time she got home. A pity, she thought, because she might have done some gardening. As it was, she got home and unlocked the door, and let Jess out, Jess impatient to be out, and she walked the garden watching the dog, still holding the key that she had not thought to put down, and in the nice shoes that she had worn to go to the school though the ground was wet.
One noticed as it got dark how the yellows stood out. The yellow flowers held their colour as other colours dulled, the yellow flowers and the first yellow leaves. She always remarked on that, how in autumn as the sun grew low some colours seemed to hold its light, the last of the goldenrod and the rudbeckia and then some asters that were just coming out, a particular variety of aster that had pale mauve petals and a yellow centre that shone out in the dusk. Something to do with the spectrum, Charlie had once told her, and whatever type of ray of sunlight it was that bent over the curve of the horizon, some piece of science which she had never quite bothered to understand. What need to understand what was there before one’s eyes? She walked until the last hint of colour was lost. The dog was back at the door before her.
She woke in an empty house. Did the chores of the morning downstairs, not going back up. She would have Mrs T clean the boys’ room when she came on Tuesday. She would leave it till then. Until then she could not bear to enter it.
It was as if they were out with Charlie. He had come and taken them away. Hey, boys, do you want to come out with me, shoot some rabbits, there were a hundred rabbits on the Five Acre today, we need to scare them off, but come quickly while I’ve got time – no, don’t tell your mother, she’ll fuss over your coats, it’s not cold, come as you are – and they’d gone out, the three of them with Jess. But Jess was home in the kitchen, on the rug in front of the Aga. Jess hadn’t gone. They weren’t out there on the Five Acre, the tall man and the two boys, the man and the older of the boys carrying guns and the younger one the lead to the golden dog (but only to give him something to do, because the dog was well trained and needed no lead at a
