Downstairs again Penny was standing looking out of the window at the little backyard. Evelyn had put some tubs out there and there had been a spring display of daffodils.
‘She wants you to say goodnight. She’s nearly asleep.’
‘Do you want to stay and have a glass of wine?’
My own children would be waiting for me at home.
‘Thanks. Not tonight.’
‘See you tomorrow, then.’
I touched Penny’s shoulder. She was much shorter than me. She had always been squarely built and now, in her contentment, she was putting on weight.
I walked home along the canal towpath. The gates that gave access to it were locked at dusk, but the railings were easy to climb. Muggers and junkies hung out down there, especially in the thick darkness under the bridges, but tonight I wanted the silence and solitude of the path instead of threading the longer way through the busy streets. Lights were reflected as broken tenements of yellow and silver in the flat water, and dripping water echoed my footsteps. The city traffic sounded muffled; the rustle of rats clawing the litter in the rough grass on the land side was much louder. I walked briskly and saw no one.
Lola was on the phone. She mouthed ‘hello’ at me as I came in. When she hung up she said, ‘Mum, that was Ollie. I said I’d go and meet him and Sam for a drink, is that okay with you?’
She had stayed in with Jack, waiting for me to come back. Having her at home in university holidays had great benefits for me, although I tried not to take advantage of this too often. And I was glad that she felt like going out with her friends tonight. She had cried enough for Ted. I smiled at her. ‘Of course it is. Where is he?’
‘He said he was going to bed.’
‘Did he talk to you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think he didn’t talk to you.’
‘Precisely.’
Lola and I have always discussed almost everything. Once she had forgiven me for leaving her father and got over the extremes of adolescent rebelliousness that followed it, that is. I feared sometimes that because I didn’t have a husband I admitted too many of my anxieties to her, but her response always was that she would rather know what affected me because whatever it was actually affected all three of us. Lola is always level-headed. In her case at least the cycle of family wrongness has been broken. And even her concern about Jack’s oddness wasn’t as deep as mine. ‘Sure, he’s kind of a weird kid. But not as weird as some, believe me. He’ll grow out of the bird thing, and the not talking. Probably when he gets a girlfriend.’
‘I’d just like him to have some friends, let alone a girl.’
‘Mum, he’s okay.’
She picked up her denim jacket now, with its badges and graffiti, and stitched-on bits of ribbon and braid. She was eager to get on her way. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ So I didn’t share everything with her.
Lola whirled out of the house. I went upstairs, knocked softly on Jack’s door and, when there was no answer, turned the knob. Sometimes he bolted it but tonight it opened. The light was out and I could hear his breathing, although something told me he wasn’t asleep. ‘Jack?’
There was no answer.
Cassie’s room had been sweet with the innocence and trustingness of babyhood, but in here all I could pick up was the darkness of rejection.
‘Goodnight,’ I whispered.
Four
He walked off up the road, very slowly, his bag slouched across his back and the soles of his trainers barely lifting off the pavement. At the corner he paused and looked right and left, but he never glanced over his shoulder to see if I was still standing in the doorway of the house. I watched until he turned left, in the direction of school, and plodded out of my sight. Only then did I go back inside and begin to put together my things for work.
I was shaking with the tension of the morning. It was the third day of the summer term and every morning so far Jack had refused to get out of bed. Then, when I finally hauled him out from under the covers, he refused to get dressed. He didn’t speak, let alone argue; once movement became unavoidable he just did everything very, very slowly.
‘Jack, you have to go to school. Everybody does. It’s a fact of life.’
He shrugged and turned away. While I stood over him, he had got as far as putting on his school shirt and it hung loose over his pyjama bottoms. I could see faint blue veins under the white skin of his chest and his vulnerability made me want to hold him, but I knew if I tried to touch him he would pull away.
‘Jack, we have to talk about this.’
‘Talk,’ he muttered finally, as if the mere suggestion exasperated him.
‘Yes, talk.’ I struggled to be patient and moderate. You could ache for him, for what he was going through, and at the same time irritation made you long to slap him. Hard.
‘Mum.’
‘Yes?’ I said eagerly.
‘Go away if you want me to get dressed.’
‘I’ll make you some toast. Would you like an egg?’
‘No.’
‘Downstairs in five minutes, please.’
Five minutes turned into fifteen. He ate his toast very slowly while I sat waiting.
‘You’re going to be late.’
‘Oh no.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped, ‘what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with school? If you won’t talk to me or anyone else how can we help you? What’s wrong?’
Jack fumbled with a knife, then dropped it with a clatter. He looked around the kitchen as if surveying his life, and then said out of a pinched mouth, ‘Everything.’
The bleakness of this was unbearable.
I remembered how it felt to be his age, at the mercy of the world and powerless to change anything. I tried to touch his hand but he pulled away as if my fingertips might burn him.
I took a breath. ‘Jack, listen. It just seems like everything, you know. It isn’t so bad. There are lots of things you enjoy and look forward to.’ Although if he had pressed me to name them, I couldn’t have got much beyond seagulls. ‘And you’ve got us, Lola and me, and your dad as well. If we try and work out what’s most wrong, I can help you.’ This sounded feeble, even to my own ears.
There was a small silence. Then he said flatly, ‘You?’
I understood that everything mostly meant his life in this house, with me and without his father.
It wasn’t that he didn’t see Tony: the three and a half weeks since Ted’s death had spanned the school Easter holidays and the two of them had been away together for three days’ fishing in Devon. Lola could have gone too, but she had preferred to stay in London. Once or twice a month Jack went over to Twickenham to spend a night with Tony and his second family, and there were weekday evenings too when he and Lola went out for pizza or a film with him. But that wasn’t the same as having a father who lived in the same house and didn’t have to portion out his time with such meticulous care.
Everything wasn’t school and friends or the lack of them, although I wanted to believe that it was. The trouble was home, and home was mostly me. In the last few weeks and months Jack had gradually stopped communicating, had withdrawn himself from our already dislocated family, but he had never let me hear the roots of his unhappiness as clearly as in that one word, you?
I wished just as much as he did that he had a live-in father. I wished he didn’t have to live with just two women, or that he and Lola were closer in age, or that he had been born one of those children who found it easy to make friends. And I wished that I had been able to break the cycle that began with Ted and me, and rolled on with me and Jack, in the way I had apparently been able to break it for Lola.
The silence extended itself. The need to cry burned behind my eyes, the pressure of years of denied weeping swelling inside my skull, but I didn’t cry and my inability to do so only increased my sense of impotence. Unwitting Jack, my unlucky child, was the focus of this mighty powerlessness. I couldn’t make the world right for him, I couldn’t even make the dealings between us right. Sympathy for him was squeezing my heart so I could barely speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.
He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Going to school,’ was his only response.
I went with him to the door and watched him until he was out of sight. I longed to run after him, to go with him and shield him through the day, to turn his everything into nothing that mattered and let us both start again, but I couldn’t. It was hard to accept that after all the promises I had made to myself when they were small, about always being close to my children and never letting them down, there was still a breach between Jack and me. Ted was dead and gone but somehow his damned legacy was right here in our house with us.
I was angry as well as impotent. I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, so hard that the pain jarred through my wrist bones, but nothing changed and my head still hurt with not crying.
I snatched up my bag and went to work. It was too late now to walk, even along the canal. I had to drive, in a 9 a.m. press of buses and oversized trucks, and when I arrived I made a mess of cutting some endpapers out of some special old hand-marbled paper that Penny and I had been saving. I had to throw the ruins away and use a poor substitute. Penny kept her head down over her work and although I could sense Andy and Leo glancing at each other, I didn’t look their way.
When I got home again Lola had already gone out to her bar job. In two days’ time she would be going back to university and she was trying to earn as much money as she could. Jack was sitting in front of the television, still wearing his outdoor jacket and his school tie. He looked grubby and utterly exhausted.
‘How was your day?’ I asked. I was going to make shepherd’s pie for supper, his favourite.
‘All right.’
‘What lessons did you have?’
‘The usual ones.’
He didn’t take his eyes off the screen but I didn’t think he was really watching it. There was wariness in the hunch of his shoulders and his fingers curled tightly over the arms of his chair.
‘What did you do in the lunch break?’
‘Nothing.’
I threw three potatoes in the sink and began peeling. ‘So, it was a pretty uneventful day, then?’ He twisted his shoulders in a shrug. But when I started browning the meat and vegetables, and he assumed my attention was elsewhere, he let his head drop back against the cushions. Then, when I glanced at him again, he had fallen asleep.
We ate dinner together – at least, Jack sat at the table with me, but he had a bird book open beside his plate. I was, temporarily, too tired of the battle to make any protest. He ate ravenously, though, as if he hadn’t seen food since breakfast time.
But the next morning, to my surprise, he put up less resistance to getting up and getting dressed. When the time came to leave, he shouldered his bag and silently trudged away. Maybe he was beginning to accept the inevitable, I thought. Maybe the tide had turned.
That day Colin came into the bindery. He lived with his mother, somewhere on an estate that lay to the east of Penny’s house, and he was a regular visitor. He pushed the door open, marched in and laid a heavy carrier bag on the counter. Penny was working on a big case for a photographer’s portfolio and Leo was trimming boards at the guillotine. Andy was on day release and in any case it was my turn to deal with Colin. We took it roughly in turns, without actually having drawn up a rota.
‘Morning!’ he shouted. He had an oversized head that looked too heavy for his shoulders and his voice always seemed too loud for the space he was in.
‘Hello, Colin. How are you today?’
‘All the better for getting this finished.’ He began hauling a mass of papers out of his bag. Penny and Leo were suddenly completely absorbed in their jobs.
My heart sank. Colin had been writing a book ever since he first came in to see us, and would regularly turn up with fragments of it that he wanted us to discuss. It was going to be a cookery book. He had chosen us, he announced, to be his publishers. Penny and I had often tried to explain to him the difference between binding an interesting collection of personal recipes and publishing a cookery book, but he took no notice. The sample material, in any case, usually consisted of recipes torn from women’s magazines and annotated with drawings and exclamatory scribbles in a variety of coloured inks, so we hadn’t worried too much about the day of reckoning. Now, apparently, it had finally arrived.
‘I have to have the books ready soon, of course. Mum’ll want to give one to all her friends, won’t she?’
A tide of magazine clippings, jottings on lined paper, sketches and headings like ‘A Good BIG Dinner’ blocked out in red felt-tip capitals spilled over the counter. They were accompanied by a nasty smell. Some of the papers were very greasy and I spotted a flaccid curl of bacon rind sticking to the reverse of one of them. I stopped myself from taking a brisk step backwards.
‘Colin, we’re not book publishers. I told you that, didn’t I?’
He gazed around him with an ever fresh air of surprise and bewilderment. ‘Yes, you are. I know you are. Look at all your books.’
‘We just put covers on them. We restore old books, we bind people’s academic theses, we take care of books that have already been published.’
‘Exactly.’ Colin nodded triumphantly. One of the most exhausting aspects of dealing with him was the way he agreed with your disagreement and just went on repeating his demands. ‘So you can put covers on mine. I’ll pay you, you know. I’m not asking for something for nothing, not like all these refugees coming over here and expecting to get given money and big houses. It’s not like that, you know.’
‘I know, Colin. But we aren’t publishers. Putting a cover on … on your manuscript here, that won’t get it into the bookshops like Smith’s in the High Street where people could buy it. That’s a completely different process. You have to … well, you have to have the text edited and all these recipes would have to be tested. Then artists and marketing people would have to look at designs for it, and thousands of copies would have to be printed by a big commercial printers, and then salesmen would have to sell it to booksellers …’ I felt weary myself at the mere thought of all this effort.
‘Exactly.’
‘But we don’t do any of these things, Colin.’ I reached out for his plastic bag and very gently began putting the rancid pages into it. From past experience I knew and feared what was likely to come next.
He watched me for a second or two, then he grabbed the bag from me and began hauling the contents out again. ‘It’s my book.’
‘I know, but I can’t publish it for you because I’m not a publisher.’
‘My book’s important, I’m telling you. It’s taken me a long time, these things take time to do properly.’ His voice was rising. We tussled briefly with the bag, me putting in and him taking out. The bacon rind dropped in a limp ringlet on the counter. ‘I’m not stupid, don’t make that mistake. I’m as good as anyone else and I was born here, not like these blacks and the rest of them.’
Leo’s mother and father came from Trinidad. He went on lining up trimmed law reports as if no one had spoken. True to form, Colin was now shouting. And equally predictably, the phone rang.
Penny went to answer it. ‘Gill and Thompson, Bookbinders. Good morning. Oh, yes. Hello, Quintin.’
Colin was thumping the counter and shouting that we weren’t bookbinders at all, didn’t deserve the name, not when we wouldn’t do a simple job of work for an ordinary person, who had been born here, not like some of them.
Quintin Farrelly was our most lucrative, knowledgeable and exacting customer. He was the owner of the Keats Letters. Penny blocked her free ear with one finger and struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Yes, yes. Of course we can. Sorry, there’s just a bit of a noise in here.’
‘I’ll tell you what, Colin,’ I said. ‘There’s something we could do for you, if you’d like it.’
He stopped shouting, which was what I had hoped for. ‘What?’
‘Well. Let’s have a look at what Penny’s doing, shall we?’
I took him by the arm and showed him the photographer’s portfolio. It was A2 size, in dark navy-blue cloth with a lining of pale-green linen paper. The man’s name, Neil Maitland, was blind tooled on the lid. Colin examined the job with an aggrieved expression.
‘What do you think of it?’
Penny gave me a grateful thumbs-up. She wedged the handset under her ear and reached for the order book and work diary. ‘Yes, Quintin, I’m sure we can do that for you.’
‘It’s nice,’ Colin admitted, rubbing the green interior with a heavy thumb.
‘We could make you a beautiful case like this, and you can put your recipes and pictures in it, and then your mum can show it to all her friends.’
‘Can I choose the colour?’
‘Of course.’
‘And it would have to have my name on the lid, not this Neil’s.’
‘Of course.’
‘Any colour?’
‘Any colour you like, Colin.’ Including sky blue pink.
He expressed a preference for red. He left his bag of papers with us, stressing that it was to be kept in the safe whenever we were not actually working on it, and promised that he would call in again tomorrow to see how the job was progressing. Penny hung up, after asking after Quintin’s wife and the Farrelly children.
‘Christ on a bike,’ Leo muttered as the three of us raised our eyebrows at each other. ‘Anyone want a coffee?’
Jack was sitting in his armchair again when I got home from work, apparently absorbed in Neighbours. He looked dirtier, if that were possible, and even more exhausted than he had done yesterday. An empty plate blobbed with jam and dusted with toast crumbs rested on the floor beside him. It was Lola’s last night at home. She was ironing, also with her eyes fixed on the television. The forgiving winter gloom that usually hid the worst of our semi-basement kitchen had given way to a watery brightness that announced summer and showed up all the layers of dust as well as the peeling wallpaper. The place needed a spring-clean. The whole house needed a spring-clean and a new stair carpet wouldn’t have done any damage either. I let my bag drop to the floor.
‘Good day, Mum?’ Lola asked.
‘Er, not bad, thanks. What about you?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Jack?’
Just the way that he shrugged his shoulders made me want to yell at him. I took a deep breath and began rummaging in the freezer. It was going to have to be defrost du jour tonight, because I didn’t have the energy to start a meal from scratch.
As soon as Neighbours was over Jack removed himself upstairs. I sat on the sofa and watched the remainder of Channel 4’s News, and when Lola finished her ironing (leaving a pile of Jack’s and mine untouched) she brought over two glasses of red wine and joined me. She kicked off her shoes and curled up so her head lay against my shoulder and I stroked her shiny hair.
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, as I always did when she was about to go off. I did rely on her, more than I should have done, for companionship but also for the lovely warmth of her life that I enjoyed at second hand – the parties and nights out clubbing that she’d describe in tactfully edited detail the next day, the long phone conversations, the friends who dropped in and lounged around the kitchen, and the certainty that anything was possible that seemed to govern them all.
‘I know, Mum. I’ll miss you too. But I’ll be back for the weekend in a couple of weeks.’
‘So you will. Is there any more of that red? How does he seem to you, the last couple of days?’
‘He’ was always Jack in Lola’s and my conversations.
‘Very quiet.’
‘But he’s been making less fuss about school the last couple of days. I think maybe the worst’s over.’
Lola said, ‘I hope so.’
Jack ate most of the dinner, finishing Lola’s portion even after he had devoured his own second helping, then wiping his plate clean with chunks of bread torn off the loaf.
Lola tried to tease him about his appetite. ‘Hey, bruv. Is school food getting even worse?’
‘I was hungry, okay? What’s wrong with that?’
‘I never said there was anything wrong. Sorry I asked.’
After dinner Jack retreated again and Lola went out to meet some friends. She had left the ironing board folded but hadn’t put it away. I did the obligatory brief two-step with it as if it were a reluctant dancing partner and finally managed to set it horizontally on its metal strut. I took the first of Jack’s school shirts out of the basket and began pressing a sleeve. The steamy smell of clean laundry instantly filled my head. The olfactory nerve is the largest of the twelve cranial nerves; smell is the swiftest as well as the most powerful of the senses. My eyes stung, then filled up with tears and as I bent my head they dripped on to Jack’s shirt, making translucent islands of damp in the white polycotton. I finished the shirt and began another but I was crying so hard I couldn’t see properly. I hadn’t been able to cry for weeks on end and now I was sobbing over the scent of clean laundry just because it reminded me of the way home should smell, of cleanliness and care and therefore security.
‘The ironing? Don’t do the bloody ironing,’ Mel said when I called her.
I sniffed, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. I didn’t properly understand the tears, that was the worst part of it. If I had been thinking of Ted, it would have been different. But in the last month whenever he had come into my head it was with a numbness that cut me off even from the relief of missing and loving him. I thought with dry precision instead about our life apart.
‘Are you there? Sadie?’
‘Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. I really don’t know what this is all about.’ I could hear Mel at the other end lighting up a Marlboro and exhaling.
‘Your dad died. You’re grieving for him.’
I was going to say, I almost did say, ‘It’s not like that.’
Mel had told me how bereft she felt when her adored father died and that wasn’t how it was with me.
‘Do you want me to come round?’ she asked.
‘No. Yes, I do, but it’s late.’
‘Then let’s have dinner tomorrow.’
‘Lola’s going back to Manchester in the morning. I can’t leave Jack.’ I didn’t want to leave Jack, in any case. He needed me, even if he didn’t want me.
‘I’ll come to you. I’ll cook something for the three of us. Don’t be late home, dear.’
Jack didn’t answer when I knocked on his door. I called goodnight and told him to sleep well.
Lola saw Jack and me off in the morning and said goodbye. She would drive herself north later in the day.
Colin came in twice to the bindery, and on the second visit he was aggrieved to discover that we hadn’t even started work on his box.
‘There are twelve other jobs ahead of yours in the line,’ Penny told him, it being her turn.
‘Why isn’t mine as important as theirs?’
‘It’s not a matter of importance, it’s just that you can’t jump the queue. We’re busy here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ She was brusque, but Colin tended not to notice subtleties like that.
‘Well. I’ve had some more thoughts about how I want it.’
‘Don’t you want to hear our estimate first of what it’s going to cost?’
I was trying to signal to her to go easy, but Colin was grandly insisting that cost didn’t matter to him. His money was as good as anyone else’s. The phone rang and as I was nearest I picked it up. A voice I half recalled asked for Mrs Bailey.
‘Speaking.’ At the same time I was frowning because although Jack and Lola went under Tony’s name, after the divorce I had deliberately reverted to my own. To Ted’s, that is. I had been happy to accept Tony’s when we married, but once I had rejected him I didn’t deserve the shelter of his name, did I? I went back to being just Sadie Thompson again.