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  He tried to hold her gaze but her eyes were flickering around the room, looking for further cause for anger. They found nothing. ‘Huh.’ She exhaled viciously. ‘Hah.’ In another few seconds, quite playfully, she tossed the knife into the sink. ‘Go on,’ she told them, roaming the floor once more. ‘Go on. Go away now. All of you. Just – leave me alone.’

  ‘I’m going to take the girls upstairs.’ When it came to moving, he did not have the nerve to turn his back on her but retreated step by step towards the door. He gathered Chalice in his arms, hustled across the hall to get Cherish by the hand and made himself climb the stairs to their bedroom at a normal speed.

  Chalice was trembling and teary. Cherish was stiff with fright, her white limbs were actually rigid as she lay in her bed. Neither of them could speak. There was a story book, a present from his mother, and he read from it with all the animation he could summon, but his daughters lay in their beds and stared at the ceiling. Outside, he knew, the sun was over the horizon and the day was already light. No one was going to sleep.

  ‘Nessun dorma,’ he sang softly, ‘che—’

  ‘That’s the football song,’ Chalice said, rolling her shadowy eyes around to watch him.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Singing is for dick-heads,’ she replied, in perfect resonance with her mother.

  He fell silent and closed his eyes, thinking of Damon, grunting in beery oblivion on the cold kitchen floor. Certainly, it was true that the boy had changed their lives. Allie had conceived him as soon as she had landed her first screen job and, in the drama of that career breakthrough, failed to notice the signs until she was so far advanced that the pregnancy could not be terminated, for all she insisted and demanded and ran from one clinic to another with her gold Amex card.

  It was then that she first entered the state of cold rage which was now normal, from which she never emerged. And it had been he, Ted, God help him, who had tried to soothe her fury by calculating that the programme’s Christmas break fell exactly a month before the baby’s due date. ‘You could only be off screen for a few weeks,’ he had pleaded. ‘I could drop the baby on the studio floor and carry on working,’ she retorted. ‘I suppose that’s what you want?’

  Damon had been born by Caesarean on December 23, much more premature than expected, destined to spend the first month of his life in hospital until his lungs were fully mature, a sad creature with loose, mottled red skin over his tiny bones. Allie, in contrast, made an excellent recovery, to no worldly purpose as her show was axed before her stitches healed.

  For ten months she had no job. Her mood descended to a burning apathy, while the baby screamed to the limit of his growing strength. Night or day, he seldom slept for more than ten minutes at a stretch. ‘He’s a high-energy kid,’ Allie announced, ‘like me. He can’t switch off.’ She went to a spa for a month. The nurse who moved in to care for Damon suggested that the boy be assessed for evidence of brain damage. Nothing conclusive was ever established.

  Allie got another job, and another, and came home later than her husband, and continued to act as if her child did not exist. Each year Damon grew bigger, noisier, more aggressive. At five, a paediatrician asked to see Ted alone, and suggested mother and child might be emotionally mismatched. ‘How can we be mismatched?’ she demanded. ‘I’m his mother.’

  At school, Damon failed consistently. His IQ was low. He made no friends. At eight, his headmaster suggested a psychiatrist. ‘I never had any friends,’ Allie told him, ‘he’s independent, he doesn’t need friends. There’s nothing wrong with him.’ At twelve, Allie sent him to an exclusive academy for over-privileged under-achievers, where three years of one-to-one educational support left him able to read and write, but often unwilling to do either. After he was expelled for urinating on the principal’s car, Allie decreed that he should attend the St Nicholas High School, on which the Family First crews descended whenever they needed playground shots. Channel Ten sponsored the new computer system.

  The first time Damon got drunk was the first time he had his mother’s attention. She watched him with delight, she fairly flirted with him. Looking back, Ted could have sworn that she actually tempted the child to drink.

  Ted suspected that his wife had maintained their sex life, and given birth to their daughters, entirely for the sake of her publicity profile. After Damon she had her next pregnancy terminated, something he discovered only when the fee appeared on his credit card statement. Cherish was born in the summer break after Allie’s first year as host of Family First. This time she went directly from labour ward to spa. There were day and night nurses, and then nannies, who lived elsewhere and often resigned. After Chalice, sex ceased.

  She was different with the girls. Designer babies were in vogue the year Cherish was born, models carried them down the runway at Calvin Klein. Allie cuddled her baby on camera throughout a report on breastfeeding; Cherish, who was bottle-fed like her siblings, had to be sedated for the event. The Catholic Broadcasting Union gave Family First the award for Most Outstanding New Show On TV. The readers of Woman’s Life voted Allie their top TV personality. The following year, she was The Women’s Caucus Working Mother of the Year.

  The girls became her accessories. They were her living dolls, always being dressed and painted and posed for the world to admire. Their room was filled with gigantic toys, life-sized stuffed animals and a fantastic playhouse created by a fashionable sculptor. A lurid circus mural coloured the walls. Gushingly, Allie praised her daughters for looking pretty and being underweight. They were listless, unresponsive children, prone to nightmares, afraid of many ordinary things and frequently ill.

  Ted felt he was as good a father as any, and better than quite a few, but he had nothing by which to judge him self. Wealth had moved him into a new dimension. His own plain, milk-and-biscuits childhood was a redundant model. His own mother would have dissociated to atoms rather than raise her voice to his father, much less a knife.

  Allie alleged that he had abandoned her with Damon, so he tried to pay his daughters extra attention and found that she blocked him. He was not to give them food in case they got fat, or play games with them in case they got hurt, or watch TV with them in case they absorbed whatever it was about him that was so hopelessly unsatisfactory. ‘You’re a man,’ she condemned him. ‘You can’t possibly understand.’ The simplest childhood pleasures were booby-trapped; from one of his country surveys he brought home tadpoles in a jampot and Cherish screamed in a frenzy of terror at the sight of them.

  He was at first frightened by their frailty, and now alarmed by it. Guiltily, he compared them to the Lieberman girls, who seemed so sturdy and individual. Gemma said bluntly that Chalice and Cherish were abuse victims. He yearned to talk to Gemma; she did not want to talk to him. There had been no answer to his letter. Had he expected one? Sitting with his wretched daughters, tasting blood in his mouth, anticipating the threat of a new day, he could not remember his mood at the time.

  7. Hot and Cold Water to Every House

  ‘She’s impressive.’ Marcus masked his face with the menu. ‘Of course, I made it clear that the job was only on a temporary basis, until Stewart’s … uh …’

  Stephanie made an encouraging face at him. I’m hurting all day, Marcus. I am suffering without my husband; be nice to me, please. The restaurant was not designed to induce relaxation. It was the kind of place that executives in creative professions favoured to express their cutting-edgeness. The tables were jagged slabs of glass and the lights grew up from the floor on snaky metal stalks. The other clients were brash women with shirts clinging to their ribs and men with bristly hair and pastel jackets. ‘This must be the place,’ she observed brightly.

  ‘Yup.’ Marcus was still in hiding. ‘Look, believe me, I didn’t want to do it. We need another architect. Business is coming in. The home market’s pretty exciting. Things are hotting up right now.’

  ‘When is she starting?’

  He gulp
ed air. ‘A week today.’

  It was a Monday. Monday, Stephanie recalled, was the day when you scheduled your tough bananas. Monday was the day for no more crapping around, the day when you chose to grit your teeth, bite the bullet, get your shit together and just do it. ‘So – you need his desk. And you’d like me to take his stuff home?’

  ‘That’s not why I asked you to lunch …’

  Yes it is. She dragged out a smile. But – aha! I too have my agenda. ‘I was going to ask you, actually.’

  ‘Uh?’ He blinked like a startled rabbit. ‘Yes. You’ve sent me a client or two …’

  ‘The least I can do, Steph.’ Magnanimous, avuncular.

  ‘Why don’t you give me my old job back?’ There, she had done it, the proposition was out in the open. She felt she might have coloured up but the place had black mirrors so it was hard to tell. The waiter arrived to take their order, giving her time to get composed. ‘I heard your landscaper is leaving after the summer.’ Was it smart to give that away? Yes, of course it was; her business reflexes must be stiff from disuse.

  ‘Steph, have you thought about this?’ Avuncular no more, he was giving her his pleading look, begging mercy for his pitiful insensitive chromosome, the look that said: don’t hate me for hurting you. Stephanie was well acquainted with that look. People hated to hurt her, which meant eventually they hated her for being hurt.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ve thought about it, Marcus. I need a job. I’ve got to be realistic, we don’t know how long it will be until Stewart comes back.’

  ‘But your own business—’

  ‘Means I spend half my time chasing invoices and the other half chasing deliveries. I need a proper job. Corporate accounts, not the back-yard jobs. You know what I mean.’

  ‘But your little boy?’ Had he forgotten Max’s name? It seemed likely, he had that beamed-up look in his eye which meant he had mentally removed himself from this distressing conversation.

  ‘Goes to school full time in September. I was planning to go back to work then in any case. We have childcare already.’ Let him choke on that ‘we’. This is your partner’s family, your best friend’s family, your only friend’s family. The truth was her plans had been for another baby, but now Marcus was wriggling on the hook she found herself unwilling to give him an advantage.

  ‘Look, Steph, we’re a young firm, our clients expect absolute commitment. This is the nineties. The bottom line is: I can’t hire someone with small kids. That’s it.’

  Stephanie said nothing, waiting for it to dawn on him that the small kid in question had not been a flaw in Stewart’s professionalism, but it did not happen. Instead, their food arrived and he waded into his soup as if the matter had resolved itself naturally. In the silence, she looked warily at her salad; it had been splattered with a viscous white dressing that resembled semen, as she remembered the stuff.

  ‘You had any news?’ he asked at last, gulping the final spoonful.

  ‘No,’ she answered flatly. ‘The FO call every day.’

  ‘What do the people want?’

  ‘The kidnappers? They’ve made no demands.’

  ‘Do we know he’s …’ He paused, watching her entangle rocket leaves with her fork as if she had exceeded the time limit for the task.

  ‘Alive. Yes. They put pictures over occasionally.’ She had them around her desk, harshly lit blurred images of Stewart sitting on a stone wall with his two partners in misfortune, some sort of tree casting a shadow behind them. Apart from Max, the pictures were the only comfort she had. The rest of her life, at that point, was just auto-anaesthesia. The reproduction in the photographs was poor and the eyes were just sockets so the heads were horribly skull-like. Except for the characteristic way Stewart had his hands, with the right holding the left wrist, the figures could have been anyone.

  ‘It’s crazy,’ Marcus said without deep interest. He might have been criticising a new building regulation. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stephanie agreed, resenting the wasted afternoon, the work not done, the effort of persuading Rachel to have Max, and of coercing her son to play with the Carman boys, for the futile purpose of appealing to Marcus’s supposed humanity.

  They disposed of the remainder of the meal quickly and returned to the offices of Berkman & Sands, where Marcus’s secretary apologetically showed her her husband’s possessions already packed into three storage crates. ‘And he had some personal files in our system.’ Her voice was muted, as if at a funeral. ‘I copied them on to a disk for you.’ The disc was labelled ‘S Sands – Personal’and decently preserved in a perspex case.

  They carried two of the crates down to the car park and loaded them into the Cherokee. As Stephanie went back for the last crate, Marcus reappeared from his office to see her on her way. He followed, letting her struggle with the load.

  ‘You’re still running the Jeep?’ he asked, bright-eyed in the gloom of the car park.

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’ Stephanie was puzzled at the question. She heaved the crate into the vehicle. Marcus had his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Things must be pretty lonely,’ he observed, suddenly looking animated.

  ‘I have my work,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Well, if you need anything, give me a call, huh?’ And he patted her backside. His hand, as if moving automatically and having nothing to do with him, removed itself from his pocket, drifted sideways and made contact with her flesh in the feeble fashion of an essentially cerebral man pretending sensuality in order to get sex. She wanted to slap him, but she was still holding the crate. Marcus then walked away to the exit, mumbling a preoccupied goodbye.

  His touch lingered like slime on her skirt. Stephanie roared the Cherokee out into the street. She was shocked, she was disappointed, she was so angry at Marcus it felt like spontaneous combustion.

  Waiting out the old familiar gridlock leading to the 31, she felt the grip of the future squeezing out her breath. Max would go to a new school without his father. He would pass his next birthday without his father. Tomorrow, she would look for a job – any job. Never trust a man who wears short-sleeved shirts. Damn Marcus, what was the matter with him? He knew they needed help. Bearing up under the new weight of responsibility for Max, she felt murderous towards the man who called himself her husband’s friend and yet abandoned his child and made a move on his wife. And let her carry crates. When they had considered christening their son, Stewart had proposed Marcus as a godfather. She was glad now that they had let the fast-running tide of new parenthood carry the idea away.

  Back in Westwick, she detoured to Elm Bank Avenue to collect a resentfully silent Max from the Carman home. At home she carried the crates of Stewart’s possessions into the house and up to the study by herself. I’ll beat this, I’m stronger than people think.

  While Max was in his bath she sent off a stack of faxes confirming arrangements for a planting which she had to do on Thursday.

  Smouldering anger at Marcus kept Stephanie awake into the night. She sat up sorting through the crates, trying the points of pencils Stewart had sharpened, following the lines of his sketches with her finger, turning the pages of catalogues in the hope the they would exhale the smell of him. She looked at the disk labelled ‘S Sands – Personal’but it seemed inert, not capable of offering the kind of comfort she needed.

  Tuesday, in Stephanie’s sentimental calendar, was always a pretty day. She put Marcus out of her mind and prepared to have people to dinner, on Wednesday. Lately, people had not been asking her to dinner. The good families of Westwick shuttled around each other’s houses in the energetic exchange of hospitality which gave the neighbourhood a reputation for village atmosphere and kept the mascarpone and truffle oil turning over at Parsley & Thyme, but this year, with a tragedy in the house instead of a husband, she was definitely out of the loop. There had even been strong suggestions at The Cedars and The Magpies that she was now ‘too busy’to serve the Events Committee and the PTA, and could decently
resign.

  ‘Perhaps people feel awkward, darling, with a woman on her own,’ her mother had suggested brightly. ‘They don’t know how to react to you, they might think you don’t want to go out. Take the initiative, invite them. You’re so good at dinner parties – I’m sure they’ll respond.’

  This summer was happening as usual for her friends, but not for her. The realisation skewered her painfully. Her mother’s enthusiasm, as usual, foamed over her like a tidal wave. ‘You really think I should?’

  ‘Yes, darling. Don’t forget, you get out of life what you put in. Don’t you have that helicopter thing to raise money for?’

  The Helford Hospital Helicopter Ambulance Appeal had indeed instituted a series of fundraising dinners, themed by national cuisines. The hostess made a small charge, the guests each cooked a dish for the buffet, the company had a delightful evening and took away a comforting sense of civic participation.

  Of course I should entertain, she argued with herself, writing invitations on hand-laid cards. Just because I am by myself for a while there’s no reason not to live normally. Stewart would want me to do exactly what we always do. It will make me feel better. A little party. Something to look forward to.

  For a theme she chose French, because it seemed easy to her and she was aware that the culinary illiterates could buy their contributions at Parsley & Thyme. Josh and Rachel, the DeSouzas, that couple I’ve just been doing a terrace for, and those people with the rose garden, Allie and Ted … Her hand hesitated over the P pages in her address book. The Pikes. Perhaps not, not after that victim support business. It might be childish to bear grudges, but she did. They would not be offended; Chester was always travelling and his status set them above the rest of community.

  She looked at the final list and saw herself partnerless among the couples. Should she ask an extra man to balance the genders? Not Marcus, after yesterday. Not one of The Crowd: he would stall the conversation by expecting to talk about films or art or politics. No, better to be as she was, just by herself.