Lindsay had broken Noah’s construction. She hadn’t intended to – indeed, had spent the weeks since it appeared taking great care not to – but she had been vacuuming, just before she went to bed, and had inadvertently allowed the cable to flick across the space between the sofa and the armchair, and in so doing had swept the knights and the plastic cups clean off the board and into a small chaos on the carpet.
When she realized what she had done, she had switched off the hoover at once and stood very still, hand to mouth, regarding the fallen figures and cups. She knelt down. Her first instinct was to – quietly, even furtively – restore everything to roughly the places where Noah had originally put them. But her second was to leave everything as it was and to confess. She wouldn’t touch the wreckage: she would wait until the morning and then she would say to Noah, before he went into the sitting room and saw, ‘I’m so sorry but by mistake I broke your – your – what you made,’ and then try and gauge what to do next from Noah’s reaction.
She thought he would probably cry. He didn’t cry out of rage, as Toby was inclined to do, but he cried when he was tired, or frightened, or sad, and she was very much afraid that what she had done would make him sad and also, obscurely and worryingly, frightened. But he didn’t cry. She made her sorry speech to him, and he walked into the sitting room, and surveyed the scene, and then he picked up his two knights from the carpet, and carried them into his bedroom.
Lindsay followed him.
‘Is it OK? Don’t you mind?’
‘It’s broken,’ Noah said. He crouched down beside his cardboard castle and laid the knights still on horseback down on their sides.
‘I’m so sorry—’
‘They’re sleeping,’ Noah said. He picked his red-fleece dressing gown off the end of his bed and draped it over the castle. ‘It’s dark now.’
‘Perhaps,’ Lindsay said, ‘we could make you something else?’
Noah thought about this.
He said, ‘Oh no.’
Lindsay knelt down by him.
‘I really am sorry. You know that, don’t you? I didn’t do it on purpose, I didn’t mean to do it.’
Noah looked at her.
He leaned forward and said, very loudly and clearly, as if speaking to someone hard of hearing, ‘It’s broken.’
It would have been nice, Lindsay thought later that day, to have talked to someone about Noah. It would have been nice to be able to explain how unfathomable someone so small could be, and to have another person say, Oh that’s perfectly normal, or, My goodness, Lindsay, you’re such a one for making mountains out of molehills, or even just, You ought to get out more, Lindsay, you really should. She could, of course, say these things to herself, but they were hard to believe unless authenticated by another human being. And the other human beings who might have uttered consoling versions of these things – Jules, Paula, Eleanor – were, for various reasons, not current possibilities for reassurance. So there was nothing to be done, but sit in the call-centre section of her building society office and listen to people worrying about interest-rate rises affecting their mortgages, and try to persuade herself that these telephone problems had both more reality and more validity than her anxiety about possibly having hurt Noah in a way he couldn’t explain, but which was, somehow, damaging to his developing personality.
There was, after all, no one at work she found particularly sympathetic. Perhaps it was the very nature of building societies, but her fellow employees seemed to want to do what they were paid to do between nine and five-thirty and then vanish into the life that was paid for by work, but kept resolutely separate. There was an office tradition – obligation, really – of buying cakes for everyone on birthdays, but nobody had ever suggested to Lindsay that they might have a drink together after work, or introduce their children to one another, or even share a sandwich at lunchtime. Borrowing a collapsible umbrella in a cloudburst once had been the closest Lindsay had ever got to sharing anything with anyone at work, but the money was reasonable, and the place was clean, and she wasn’t required to deal with abusive members of the public face to face, and the hours suited her, and anyway what else was she fit for? She pushed thoughts of Noah to the back of her mind and concentrated on explaining to a querulous-sounding man from Brentford that his grievance about deciding against a fixed-rate mortgage five years ago was not one she could do very much about five years on.
A shadow fell across her desk. She glanced up. The new manager, who was called Derek Sherlock, was standing looking down at her. He didn’t seem in the least threatening, but it flustered her all the same to have him listening to her trying to be patient with the man in Brentford. She even said, ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ to conclude the call, which they were not supposed to say when the customer was very evidently in the wrong. They were not, ever, supposed to say anything that might implicate the building society in the faintest possibility of unwarranted responsibility.
Lindsay looked up at Derek Sherlock.
‘Sorry—’
He smiled at her.
‘One of those?’
She nodded. She smiled back.
She said, ‘He just wished he had a fixed-rate mortgage—’
‘They all wish that,’ Derek Sherlock said, ‘when the rates go up. And wish the opposite when it goes down. Human nature.’
She nodded again.
‘I suppose so—’
He folded his arms. He was, Lindsay noticed, wearing a nice suit. It fitted him properly, and the cuffs of his shirt were ironed properly too. He was obviously the kind of man whose wife paid attention to the details, to haircuts and cuff-ironing and brushed shoulders and …
‘Are you OK?’ Derek Sherlock said.
Lindsay blinked.
‘I’m – I’m fine—’
‘I’ve noticed,’ he said, ‘that you are an excellent timekeeper, that you are never late and that you don’t clock-watch like some of them. But you look under strain sometimes. You look as if you had something on your mind.’
Lindsay glanced round her. Nobody had ever spoken to her like this in all her working life, and she was afraid that some of the other girls could hear and would think that she had somehow invited, encouraged, Derek Sherlock to single her out and be nice to her. But everyone else, headphones on, was engaged with their own man from Brentford, and nobody was looking her way. She tried to look at Derek again but failed somehow, and looked back at her computer screen.
‘How’s your friend?’
‘My friend—’
‘Your friend in hospital. The friend who had a fall.’
Lindsay recovered herself.
‘Oh, she’s fine, thank you. She’s back at home now. She’s – well, she’s being looked after by my sister—’
‘That’s nice.’
Lindsay swallowed.
‘You haven’t seen my sister.’
‘I’d like to,’ Derek said. ‘I’d like to see your sister.’
Lindsay looked up at him again.
She said, suddenly losing her awkwardness, ‘You don’t know what you’re asking.’
He laughed. He put his head back and laughed.
Lindsay said, without meaning to, ‘She’s one of the things I worry about.’
Derek Sherlock stopped laughing. He looked down at Lindsay. He was very good-looking, Lindsay thought abruptly, very good-looking in a tidy way, a kind of controlled, ordered way that Paula wouldn’t have liked but which she, Lindsay, found really rather…
‘Good,’ Derek said. ‘That’s more like it. Now we’re getting somewhere.’
If Paula had known the letter was from Gavin she probably would never have opened it. With its blandly typed envelope and Central London postmark, it might well have been perfectly harmless. But it wasn’t. It was an unpleasantly formal letter from Gavin saying that he was about to take legal action to gain greater and more regular access to his son.
‘And as I have, by steady and generous payments, and by frequent visits, demonstrated my commit
ment to the responsibilities of fatherhood, I am reliably advised that I have a strong case to make and an excellent chance of prevailing.’
There had been letters in Paula’s life which had, frankly, frightened her very badly, letters about tax, letters about unpaid bills, letters about eviction and credit withdrawal and dismissal. But this letter, she thought, staring at it as it lay in a pool of light on the breakfast bar among the rest of the scattered envelopes that had arrived in the mail that day, was the most truly menacing she had ever received because it managed, somehow, to deprive her of all initiative. Gavin was not suggesting that there was a problem, as far as he was concerned, with her relationship with Jackson, and thus with Toby, that might be resolved by discussion and compromise; he was simply, baldly, saying that, as he didn’t like her choice, he was going to punish her for both making it and persisting in it.
She took a step or two away from the breakfast bar to the sink, and ran water into a tumbler. It was hard to swallow. She stood there, holding the glass and trying to breathe in the deep, steadying manner she had once been taught in long-ago yoga classes. She put her other hand on to the edge of the sink and gripped it. One, two, she said to herself, three, breathe, four, breathe, he can’t do this, five, he’s just trying to frighten me, breathe, six, he’s using Toby to deal with the fact that, breathe, he can’t cope, seven, with my …
‘What’re you doing?’ Toby said.
He was standing by the breakfast bar, holding the photocopied sheet of paper of his nightly spellings.
Paula let her breath go.
‘Breathing.’
Toby flapped his paper.
‘Will you test me on my plurals?’
Paula nodded.
‘In a minute—’
‘You always say that,’ Toby said. ‘Always, always.’ He imitated her voice, shriller and sillier than she ever sounded: ‘Can you stop me falling out of this window? In a minute. Can you stop this terrorist shooting me? In a minute. Can you stop this gangster cutting my head off with an axe? In a minute.’
Paula whirled round.
‘Shut up!’
Toby took a step back. He flapped his paper again.
‘Keep your hair on—’
Paula swooped towards the breakfast bar and seized Gavin’s letter. She brandished it at Toby.
‘D’you know what this is?’
He shrugged.
‘No, I—’
‘It’s a letter,’ Paula said furiously. ‘It’s a letter from – from your father. It’s a letter full of threats, it’s a letter accusing me of being a bad mo—’
Toby slapped his hands over his ears.
‘Stop it!’
Paula threw the letter into the fruit bowl. She put her hands flat on the breakfast bar, hunching her shoulders, her head bent, breathing deeply.
‘Don’t talk about it,’ Toby said.
The intercom sounded.
‘You go,’ Paula said, not moving, still breathing hard.
Toby shuffled across to the tiny lit screen of the intercom.
He said flatly, ‘It’s Jackson.’
Paula began to cry.
‘Let him in—’
Toby did not pick up the interconnecting telephone, he simply pressed the button that opened the building’s exterior door four floors below. And then he waited, still holding his spelling list, staring at the floor.
When the lift doors on the landing outside the flat clunked open, Toby put a hand out, and opened the front door just wide enough for Jackson to walk in. As usual, he carried nothing more than his laptop case and, in the other hand, a paper cone of dark-purple freesias. He halted just inside the door and glanced from Toby to Paula.
‘You two had a row?’
Toby said nothing. He took two steps backwards and then turned and scuffed his way across the floor, past the sofas and the zebra rug to the ladder that led up to his bed platform.
Jackson dropped his laptop case on the floor and went across to Paula. He put the freesias down on the pile of half-opened mail.
‘What’s going on?’
Paula wheeled round and flung herself at him, winding her arms round his neck. He put both hands up and disengaged her.
‘Start at the beginning,’ Jackson said. ‘What’s happened?’
Paula reached across to the fruit bowl and whipped out the letter.
‘Look!’
Jackson took the letter in one hand and put the other arm lightly round Paula. He read the letter through quickly and then he put it down on the breakfast bar.
‘Not for me, babe.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean,’ Jackson said, ‘that I don’t get involved in stuff like that.’
‘But—’
‘Look,’ Jackson said, ‘look. The guy’s probably bluffing.’
‘He wants custody of Toby!’
‘No, he doesn’t.’
‘He does, he does! That’s what he’s threatening!’
‘It’s what,’ Jackson said, ‘he wants you to think he’s threatening.’
Paula glanced at the letter.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Paula bent her head.
‘Sorry.’
Jackson grunted.
‘Sorry,’ Paula said, ‘sorry. He just makes me so wild, he just knows exactly which buttons to press.’
Jackson took his arm away and picked up the freesias.
‘Maybe I do too.’
Paula gave a little giggle.
She said, ‘If you’d come earlier, this wouldn’t have happened. If you’d been here when I opened the letter, I wouldn’t have lost it.’
Jackson held the flowers out.
‘I was on a mercy mission.’
‘Lovely,’ Paula said. She held the cone of flowers up to her nose and closed her eyes. ‘Lovely.’
Jackson leaned back against the breakfast bar. He folded his arms.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘an SOS and no one to answer it but me. Your friend Karen.’
Paula’s head jerked up.
‘Karen!’
‘Why not?’
‘But why should Karen send you an SOS?’
‘Her systems had crashed. Why do people ever send me an SOS? All the boys were out so round I went. Odd little set-up.’
Paula said, ‘You went round to Karen’s office?’
‘Yes,’ Jackson said reasonably. ‘That’s where the computers are. I thought my offices were small but that one is seriously—’
Paula looked away as if she was battling something inwardly, and then she said brightly, ‘They make a lot of money—’
Jackson said nothing. He looked past Paula for a while, as if he was contemplating something, and then he looked back at her. He smiled.
He said with real engagement in his tone, ‘Do they?’
When Lindsay rang, Eleanor was propped against the kitchen table, eating scrambled egg out of the saucepan with the wooden spoon she had used to stir it. When she had asked Jules to buy eggs, she had assumed that Jules would return with a standard carton of six. But Jules had come back with two dozen. She had also bought a bale of lavatory paper designed for a family of six, and mere twos and threes of the fruit and vegetables Eleanor had listed. Two potatoes seemed particularly bizarre.
‘I shall have to specify,’ she said to Jules.
Jules, dazed by the effort of even semi-conventional shopping, shook her head. ‘Whatever.’
‘Are you all right?’ Lindsay said.
Eleanor put the spoon back in the pan.
‘Over-egged but fine otherwise.’
‘Is Jules—’ She stopped.
Eleanor looked round the kitchen. It looked no more streamlined than usual, but if there was more muddle, which there seemed to be, it was not a worse muddle.
‘It is all very manageable—’
‘I’m afraid,’ Lindsay said, ‘that she eats such awful rubbish.’
Eleanor began to manoeuvre h
erself round the table towards a chair.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I take no responsibility for that. I have wondered whether she has any idea what a knife and fork are for, but then’ – she paused a moment, lowering herself into a chair and glancing at the spoon sticking out of the egg pan – ‘I am in no position, sometimes, to comment on her habits.’
‘I just – I just don’t want her to annoy you.’
‘No,’ Eleanor said, ‘nor do I.’
‘I mean coming in late and being untidy and not washing up—’
‘She does all those things,’ Eleanor said. ‘But then, those were things I was prepared for her to do.’
‘I don’t,’ Lindsay said, ‘want her to take advantage of you.’
Eleanor shifted in her chair.
‘She won’t.’
‘But—’
‘Lindsay,’ Eleanor said, ‘dear, kind, anxious Lindsay, we have made an arrangement.’
‘An arrangement?’
‘Yes,’ Eleanor said, ‘I am charging her for living here. Not much, but I am charging her.’
There was a silence the other end of the telephone.
‘You disapprove,’ Eleanor said.
‘No, I – well, I suppose I just always think of her as my little sister—’
‘Well, she isn’t my little sister,’ Eleanor said. ‘We have a somewhat unorthodox friendship but it is a friendship, and in order to retain its value and dignity, it’s important we don’t allow it to slide into the wrong kind of dependencies. So we sat down with paper and pen – no simple task, as you of all people will appreciate – and we made at least a guess at what Jules earns each week and agreed that out of that amount Jules should give me a small proportion.’
There was another silence. Eleanor picked up a pen and drew a neat grid on the blank margin of a nearby newspaper.
Then Lindsay said, ‘How much?’
Eleanor added some dots to alternate spaces in her grid.
She said, pleasantly, ‘None of your business.’
‘No,’ Lindsay said, ‘sorry.’
‘I am not in need of funds,’ Eleanor said. ‘I live quite frugally, because I always have. But Jules won’t mature unless she begins to understand that the world – especially the working world – is a practical place.’
‘I’ve tried so hard,’ Lindsay said.
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