nightdress.
– What’s up?
– I’m really sorry, Susan, Pia said. – I didn’t think you’d be sleeping over here. I didn’t want to wake you. I wanted James.
– Did you now!
The woman’s intelligence came awake behind her eyes and darted between Paul and Pia’s face blotched with tears, her swollen shape. Behind Susan Willis the hallway and staircase had the neutrality of a holiday let, with no comforting accretion of belongings or mess.
Paul was helpless to stop himself sounding English and effete. – I tried to persuade Pia that it was an unreasonable hour. But she was adamant.
Adamant wasn’t a word he even used.
– Is he here? Pia persisted, desperate.
At that moment James appeared on the stairs in boxers and saggy T-shirt, bare legs fuzzy with blond hair, face bloated and blinking from sleep, missing a couple of steps in his fuddled state and only just saving himself from falling headlong by grabbing the handrail. Susan Willis was still staring at Pia, calculating, bemused – but not preparing to be outraged or devastated, Paul thought. He’d only seen her in passing before; he’d spoken to her once or twice when he was sent to buy ice-cream and she was serving in their shop. He hadn’t recognised then this reserve of irony in her. Perhaps she was sleeping in the annexe to be apart from her husband.
– She says she wants to talk to James, Paul said. – But we could come back in the morning, if you’d rather she didn’t stay.
– She can stay if she likes, said Susan warily. – If it’s what James wants.
– What? James said. – What’s she doing here?
– She wants to talk to you. It looks like you might have something to talk about.
– It’s nothing to do with me, said James.
– No, it is, Pia said.
– This is what she told me, Paul said, – in the car on the way down here.
– I pretended it wasn’t to do with you. I almost came to tell you the truth once. I bought the ticket at Paddington and then I didn’t get on the train. I got on and got off again, at the last minute.
– I don’t believe you, James said.
He was rubbing his fists in his eyes, shocked out of his deep adolescent sleep, doubting and resistant. Pia looked shocked too, as if the revelation wasn’t going the way she had pictured it in advance.
– It’s a girl, she said shyly. – Apparently it’s a girl.
When Paul was born, his mother had been expecting a girl, they had had a girl’s name ready. There was some old wives’ tale: you dangled a ring on a thread over the unborn child, watching to see if it spun clockwise or anticlockwise. So much for old wives’ tales. Evelyn hadn’t been disappointed, she’d been relieved. She’d said to him once when he was still living at home that she hadn’t wanted a daughter, to be born into drudgery. A son could get away into a different life. Perhaps she had felt otherwise about it later, when Paul in his different life had left her behind – didn’t visit often enough, didn’t know how to turn over on the phone with her the interminable, essential detail of her everyday. A daughter might have been a better bet.
Paul sat for a while in his car after Pia had been swallowed up inside the Willis’s house. Evelyn, when she was alive, would have hated the idea of Pia pregnant and unmarried; she wouldn’t have understood why they were all taking it so calmly, as if it wasn’t momentous. The world turned and the old forms, which had seemed substantial as life itself, were left behind and forgotten. There wasn’t any place he could go now to remember his mother. Perhaps her name was written in a book in the crematorium – or did they only do that in churches? – name after name in neat black calligraphy, with an embroidered bookmark on the opened page, furred with dead moths and dust. He preferred to think about her in the dark. She had been visiting him again, since he came home – but with less ferocity than at first. In her dead self, in his dreams, she could even seem forgiving, the knots of her anxious fearfulness loosened. Paul was so tired, he almost fell asleep there in the car. He didn’t want to drive the last quarter of a mile.
Searching everywhere inside the house, he wasn’t sure what to expect. Was Gerald here somewhere, with Elise? Party mess was piled up in the kitchen, dirty plates, sleazy regiments of bottles, leftover food not put away in the fridge. Upstairs, the spare mattresses were dragged out onto the girls’ bedroom floor, extra children were curled heaps under duvets or in sleeping bags. All of them were asleep amid signs of wild play cut short, the toy box upended, dressing-up clothes trampled on the floor where they’d been thrown off. He touched the door to the bedroom across the landing, which stood open as always: swinging back soundlessly, it revealed only the landing light trapped in the mirror, the expanse of white counterpane on their bed undisturbed, Elise’s make-up bag on the dressing table disgorging pencils, tweezers, pots of colour. The open window rattled on its catch; the flurry of rain had stirred up smells of earth and growth in the garden. Moths batted inside the luminous paper globe on the landing behind him.
Elise was extravagantly absent.
Were all these children safe, alone in the house without her?
From the window he thought he saw pale shapes moving in the meadow. He went downstairs again, deliberately clattering, running the tap noisily in the kitchen, calling out of the back door for her. Coming from the lit indoors, when he stepped out into the yard and then across into the garden it felt as if he pressed against a skin of darkness and then broke through it, having to step cautiously and lift his knees, wading in a thicker medium, not sure where he was putting his feet down.
– El? Where are you?
She seemed to break through something, too, when she was suddenly ahead of him, the night thinning out around her form. She must have pulled a jumper over her shirt when it turned chilly, but he knew from her height in relation to his shoulder that she was still barefoot. He intuited across the space between them her intensely familiar sceptical scrutiny, invisible in the night.
– Paul? Is it you? What have you done with Pia?
– I’ve left her at Blackbrook. She wanted to be with James.
– That’s good, because there are children on all the mattresses. What was it all about? Is she all right?
Paul told her more or less what had happened, Pia’s deception and escape, waking Susan Willis in the middle of the night. – I can’t believe we’re mixed up with the appalling Willises now. Actually genetically mixed up with them. It’s a nightmare.
Elise said she’d thought there was something funny with Pia’s dates. She had looked too big in the pictures she sent Becky.
– Was it a good party, after I’d gone?
– It was a drunken party. We drank too much.
– Fun drunk or hazardous drunk?
– Anyway I’m sober now. I’ve been sober for hours. I went out to walk under the apple trees by myself. It’s amazing what you can see and hear in the dark. Your eyes get used to it. It was lovely there.
– Did Gerald turn up?
She answered airily, lightly. – He did turn up. But you know what he’s like. He doesn’t say anything in company. He just sits there – exasperating really. You’re wondering all the time whether he’s judging everything, or just oblivious to it.
– He doesn’t like parties much.
– Someone brought the speakers outside and we danced, but Gerald wouldn’t join in. Then I looked round and he’d gone. I suppose he caught the last train. But I’d told him he could stay. I mean, this was almost his home for weeks, when he was ill. We were very close, when he was here and I was looking after him. One night I had to hold onto him for hours, Paul, he had such an attack of horrors. Nothing happened, you understand, except that I held him.
Paul took this in.
– Never mind, he said. – You know what he’s like. That’s what he does, he comes and goes. He lives in his own world.
Garden flares stuck in the plant pots had burned out hours ago, the yard was dark. They peered in through the window at the lit-up kitchen: the piles of dirty washing up, the greasy leftovers, the chairs displaced, bunches of
