by Alice Castle
Delving in the bread bin, she made the unwelcome discovery that she only had white sliced, which she was pretty sure Katie equated with crack cocaine. More horrifying still, one slice had a tiny fleck of blue on one edge. Mould! Hastily chopping off all the crusts and hurling them in the bin dealt with that problem. And penicillin was good for you, right? Inwardly, though, she was chastising herself. She only had the two of them to look after – and Harry as an occasional third when they were on speaking terms. For heaven’s sake, why couldn’t she just learn to get the basics of life under control? No-one expected her, at this point, to morph effortlessly into Katie and source cruelty-free samphire at the drop of a hat, but staples like their daily bread? That really shouldn’t be beyond her, as a responsible adult in charge of a growing child.
Once the bread had been toasted to a golden brown, piled with beans, and had a scattering of hastily-grated cheddar cheese on top for good measure, Beth felt a tiny bit better about her mothering skills. She slid the plates in front of the expectant boys, and both dug in happily.
‘Some for you, Katie? Or another tea?’
To Katie’s credit, there was no evidence of the shudder that Beth was pretty sure she was suppressing at the thought of eating beans, and she agreed gracefully to more tea instead.
‘I’m so glad you’ll be coming tomorrow,’ said Katie. ‘Though Kuragin is madly, um, interesting,’ she said hurriedly, as the boys downed forks for a second and listened in, ‘he’s quite intimidating. I’ll be glad to have you there for support.’
Beth, still feeling bad about the blue bread and watching the boys rather anxiously as they chomped away, was very touched. ‘That’s lovely to hear, Katie. You know I’m always on your side. Any time. But you’d be absolutely fine without me there, you know that really.’
Katie smiled. ‘And now, boys, while we’ve got you here, let’s practise a bit of general knowledge.’
Charlie immediately hunched over his plate but Ben, unsuspecting, put his head on one side. ‘Is that about war and things?’
Katie looked baffled, but Beth smiled quickly. ‘No, love. Nothing to do with soldiers, it’s not that sort of general. It’s more, erm, things you should know about the world.’
‘I think I know everything I need to know, thanks,’ said Ben, turning back to his beans. Charlie gave him an admiring glance. But as he seemed to realise all too well, this part of his mother’s dinnertime patter wasn’t optional.
‘What do you think about Brexit then, Ben?’ said Katie brightly.
‘Um, I think he might be quite good in goal,’ mumbled Ben.
Beth suppressed a smirk. She was pretty sure he did know what Katie was on about and was just trying to deflect her. At least, she sincerely hoped he did.
‘What about President Trump, how do you think he’s doing?’ Katie leaned forward earnestly.
‘Uncle Josh said that “trump” means fart,’ Ben said brightly, and both boys erupted.
‘I’ll be having a word with your Uncle Josh when I next see him,’ said Beth.
‘Why, Mum? You laughed so much when he was telling us that tea came out of your nose,’ Ben remonstrated. Beth decided to fall back on the timeless strategy of speaking very loudly and pretending she hadn’t heard what her darling boy had said.
‘Right then, everyone. There’ll be ice cream for people who’ve finished up everything and help take their plates to the sink,’ she said, then took a swift look at Katie’s face and added, ‘with lovely bits of fruit on top.’
Taking the least wizened apples from the bowl on the table, Beth peeled and chopped a couple quickly and studded them over the chocolate chip ice cream in what she hoped was a healthy and responsible way. She hoped Katie wasn’t too horrified at this appalling blip in Charlie’s nutritional programme. She was probably giving him all kinds of Omega 3 supplements to make sure his synapses were firing correctly for the interviews, so maybe they’d counteract the effects of this little smattering of junk. To give her friend credit, she was sitting there calmly and watching Charlie ingesting it all with a patient smile on her face.
‘What are you cooking for lunch tomorrow? How are you going to get round your usual conundrum?’ Beth asked, raising her eyebrows at her friend.
Katie had evolved an elaborate and time-consuming way of feeding the two demanding men in her life – one who would willingly eat no vegetable matter at all; and the other who had no choice but to eat mounds of the stuff, at least until he moved out at eighteen.
‘Oh, I’ll just do my MasterChef trick – balance the meat on the veg. Works with Michael every time,’ said Katie calmly, slightly out of the corner of her mouth in case Charlie cottoned on. Beth got the hint and changed the subject a little.
‘And what do Russians eat, anyway?’
‘He’s not an alien, Beth. I expect he’ll be fine with anything.’
‘You’re not cooking borscht or something, in his honour?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that, but it does involve loads of beetroot. Maybe I should,’ said Katie, brightening up until she heard a very audible groan from Charlie.
‘Not beetroot, please, Mum.’
‘I’ll give it some thought,’ Katie said with a sweet smile at her son, and Beth knew that soup would not be on the menu tomorrow after all. Her friend might be on a mission to improve her boy in every possible way, but she had a heart softer than the ripest organic avocado.
Once Katie and Charlie had left, and Beth had done the minimal tidying up required by such a low-effort meal, she settled down at the freshly swabbed kitchen table. Ben was allegedly brushing his teeth and getting into pyjamas, but was almost certainly reading one of the gaming magazines her brother had brought over on his last visit. They saw Josh so infrequently that she didn’t like to remonstrate with him too much over his dodgy choices for a ten-year-old. At least he wasn’t bringing him Playboy yet – though, knowing Josh, it wouldn’t be long.
Opening up her laptop and looking in a desultory way at the freelance projects piling up inexorably in their folder, like mountains of washing begging for the machine or the crumpled arms of shirts drooping from the ironing basket, Beth immediately found her mind wandering.
Her first worry was Harry. She still hadn’t heard a word from him since they’d parted ways on Peckham Rye. Was it normal for a relationship to be this bitty, to have no real continuity, and to exist in a series of blips and dips caused by catastrophic rows? Was she enjoying it at all?
She thought hard about it and, unbidden, a picture of Harry in his perpetual pea coat sprung into her mind. The coat, which he seemed welded into at times – and at other times, excitingly not – summed him up. It was rugged, the material was stiff, it was uncompromising, heavy… rigid, restrictive, unyielding. But inside, she knew there was an unexpectedly lovely, quilted satin lining, soft and comfortable, and immensely warm. Sometimes she snugged up under it on the sofa and felt she had come home.
She could see why he was upset that she had become a bit of a murder magnet. No-one wanted their girlfriend, or boyfriend for that matter, to be hanging out with corpses the whole time. But he did, and she was fine with it. Mind you, he had official status, and she’d always known what he did for a living, from the moment he’d breezed into Wyatt’s on what had seemed like the worst morning of her life. Nowadays, of course, there were the memories of other dark events clamouring to overtake it.
Beth shook her head. There was nothing she could do about Harry and his views. She knew from experience that probably the best thing was to leave him to stew for a bit. Depending on how angry he was, he’d either lie low for a few days, or appear at her doorstep to shout at her a bit more, which could sometimes turn into an equally passionate, but slightly quieter, encounter upstairs. With that thought, she checked her phone one last time just in case she’d somehow missed a text. This was very unlikely. When they were rowing, her ears became supernaturally attuned to her phone’s alerts, and she knew nothing had come in for a long, l
ong time.
Oh well. Best not to think about it. Work was much too boring, so her mind turned to Ben. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she thought back fondly to the way he’d dodged Katie’s questions over the supper table. If he didn’t get into Wyatt’s, maybe a career in stand-up comedy beckoned? Or maybe, given the school’s fantastic theatre and drama staff, he’d flourish even within Wyatt’s fiercely academic system.
She wondered if there was anything she could do to brush up on his knowledge levels without making him want to slam on the brakes any more than he already had over their beans. Maybe some sort of interactive quiz? There must be a website that catered for this – and if there wasn’t, maybe she should make her fortune creating one. She had a desultory look online but couldn’t find anything that wouldn’t leave both of them slumbering peacefully through the entire interview process.
Instead, she decided to look up this Kuragin that she’d be meeting tomorrow. That way, she’d be ready to ask some vaguely competent questions about the art market, and perhaps worm a bit of information out of him about poor Mark Smeaton – what sort of person he was, and, of course, why on earth anyone would have wanted to stab him so many times in broad daylight.
Thinking of Smeaton reminded her suddenly of something the man had left behind – Colin. She looked up from the Wikipedia page on Kuragin which was just loading. The dog had been quiet for ages. If he’d been Ben, she’d have said he was much, much too quiet. Did that go for elderly Labradors, too? Was dormancy a sign of quietly nefarious behaviour that would need a major telling off and hours to put right?
She got up quickly and ran into the sitting room, expecting to see signs of canine havoc. But when she paused for breath in the doorway, she was rewarded by a spectacle she’d never thought she’d see. Colin and Magpie were on the sofa together. At opposite ends, but with every appearance of accord. All right, neither of them was technically allowed on the furniture – though that was a battle Beth lost with Magpie on a daily, almost hourly basis – but it was still a very sweet little tableau. Colin, giving her a bit of a hangdog look, seemed to know he’d transgressed, but convinced her with his sad brown eyes that he was much too tired and old to move. Magpie, though, acted as if she’d been caught in flagrante, and leapt off her cushion like a cartoon cat being electrocuted and careered down the hallway. The last thing Beth heard was the resounding crash of the cat flap as the moggy threw herself out into the crisp Dulwich night.
‘Right, missy. So that’s the end of you pretending I’ve done you a terrible wrong by inviting Colin into the house,’ said Beth in the general direction of the cat flap, while patting the dog’s head fondly. If he could worm his way under Magpie’s impressive strategic defences, then there was surely no fortress impregnable to this gentle old chap.
But that didn’t mean he was maintenance-free. Even as she looked at him, he started wriggling in a way she recognised. There had been days when Ben would swear blind for hours he didn’t need the loo, only to find – once they were nowhere near any – that one of them was right, and one was very, very wrong. Ben hadn’t done this for years, of course, and she was hoping it was a one-off from Colin, too. All she needed was a dog with prostate issues. She fetched his lead and slipped on her boots. Up to the end of the road and back would have to suffice. She didn’t want to leave Ben alone for too long. Nothing would happen, she was pretty sure, but if he woke for any reason – a rare but not totally unknown phenomenon – she didn’t want him to feel he’d been abandoned.
Colin made it as far as the gatepost before taking his first comfort stop. Beth tried to avert her eyes, and was hoping he was marking his territory rather than the distance his bladder could now travel, when she saw a familiar figure sauntering up the road towards her.
‘What are you doing out at this time of night?’ said a gruff voice with just the faintest tang of an Irish accent.
‘Oh, I thought I’d abandon my son and run off into the sunset – with this dog you lumbered me with,’ said Beth acerbically.
‘Don’t be like that, darl. It’s been a tough old day, I can tell you,’ said Harry York, his arms coming round the diminutive figure in front of him and all but engulfing her.
Beth slid her arms under his coat, feeling its silky lining and breathing in the scent of tired male. How come this was now the only place in the world where she felt really safe? She breathed in again, and with her exhalation, all her doubts and fears seemed to evaporate on the night breeze. Here was one of the few people in London who could legitimately say their job had been murder. And, despite his exhaustion, he’d come home – to her. She buried her cheek in the rough navy wool and hugged harder.
Chapter Eight
Beth’s first call of the morning, after a solid eight hours in bed – if not asleep – was to Katie.
‘You know you were asking whether I’d be bringing Harry today?’ she asked, feeling that she was sidling up to her friend like a cold caller on commission.
‘Oh, is he coming? That’s great,’ said Katie, as usual making Beth’s life much easier.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind? We can bring anything you like, if you haven’t got enough…’
‘Absolutely not. When have I ever under-catered? Just bring yourselves. Looking forward to seeing you.’
Beth put the phone down with a happy smile. Katie was a constant reminder of the right way to do things – with a cheerful acceptance and a firm belief that things were going to go her way. That wasn’t to say that Katie, or her life, were perfect. Her recent troubles with the dreadful Teddy were testament to the fact that a fly could land in even the best ointment. But once she’d got round Michael enough to sign the puppy up for boot camp, Beth was sure that Katie would swat even that pesky threat to her equanimity.
When the little trio turned up at the imposing door on Court Lane, though, Beth realised she’d been rather optimistic. As the chimes of the bell died away, all she could hear was an increasingly frantic barking and, if she was not mistaken, Michael’s deep voice raised in what had to be anger. In all her long acquaintance with the family, she’d never heard this sound before, and it was quite impressive.
She exchanged glances with York. He was trying to look as off-duty as possible in some rather rumpled chinos that he’d left at Beth’s on a previous unscheduled stopover, and his shirt from yesterday, topped off, of course, by the pea coat. A long shower had done much to soothe away his stresses from the day before and reinvigorate him after a surprisingly busy night. Beth smiled up at him fondly. It was just as well that she wasn’t into snappy dressers. But then she couldn’t talk.
As usual, she was in jeans, jumper, and a jacket, with her pixie boots, and her old faithful handbag slung over her shoulder. Ben was probably the smartest of them all, though his newish trackie bottoms were looking short already. That was another thing Beth had to sort out before the dreaded interview, which was looming so close now that she could almost feel it breathing down her neck.
The moments passed, gradually stretching to seem more like hours, as the three of them looked at each other, eyebrows beginning to rise. Beth was glad they’d decided not to bring Colin with them. He’d been slumbering so peacefully on the sitting room rug that they hadn’t had the heart to drag him along. Maybe he and Magpie would continue to develop their clandestine friendship away from the gaze of interested human eyes. And Colin had definitely seemed too tired to cope with Teddy’s exuberance today.
Actually, Beth felt pretty much the same way. Inside, the barking continued, and Beth’s heart sank a little. Teddy was just about okay in a park, but in Katie’s house, during a nice meal? This wasn’t quite going to be the relaxed Sunday lunch she’d been hoping for.
A shout came again from the recesses of the house, though this time it sounded a little farther away. Beth had her finger on the bell, ready to press again and for longer this time, when suddenly it was wrenched open and Katie stood on the threshold, her blonde hair standing up like a
halo all round her head. It was obviously going to take her a lot of yoga to get into her calm place today. There was a strong smell of burning wafting ominously from the kitchen, where all the doors had been flung open, despite the chilly day.
From the doorstep, Beth could see all the way into the garden, where a figure at the far end seemed to be shaking a fist at a black ball which she was willing to bet was Teddy, doing his best impression of a contrite puppy. It lasted about a second, and then he was jumping up and down again as though on springs.
Katie looked at them all a little blankly for a moment, as though she’d forgotten why she’d even opened the door. Then she snapped into hostess mode and stepped forward to hug each of them very briefly, then make a palaver out of taking scarves and gloves and bags, and hanging them up. Beth automatically started taking her boots off – Katie was fussy about her floors – but her friend shook her head at her.
‘No need. We’ll probably be out in the garden at some point,’ she said in a rather downbeat way.
At that moment, the door of Katie’s very grown-up sitting room swung open. This room was permanently off-limits to Charlie and Ben, and was so smart that even Beth always felt like a wobbly toddler let loose with a beaker of Ribena on the few occasions she’d set foot in it. The lilac damask sofas and silky Persian rugs were terrifyingly beautiful, not to mention the astrakhan and sheepskin cushions, the glass and marble coffee tables, and the shelves of priceless first editions. It was Michael’s room, really, and wasn’t compatible with small boys – and definitely not with dogs. It was the kind of room that Beth partly envied and partly shied away from, knowing she would never have the space or budget to create such a rarefied sanctuary and could definitely never live up to the décor even if she did.