A SIMPLE LIFE
Rosie Thomas

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1995

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1995

Cover design Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Oleg Gekman/EyeEm/Getty Images (main image), Shuttershock.com (birds)

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007563197

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780007560516

Version: 2020-11-27

Dedication

For Paul and Jane

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

ONE

It was a pretty street in a good neighbourhood. The Stewards had seen that right away, as soon as they turned the corner from Pleasant Street into Kendrick, at the beginning of their first year in New England. The houses were a friendly distance apart, with mown grass and tidy trees between them. There were basketball hoops over the garage doors and children’s bicycles on the open porches.

‘Looks okay,’ Jack said from the back of the car. ‘Looks good, in fact.’

In fact was one of his sayings. You see was another of them, and both were copied directly from his father. Jack used them in his careful explanations of the world for his younger brother’s benefit.

‘I know that already, you don’t have to tell me that,’ Merlin would retort, conscious as always of his position as the youngest and least well-informed of his family.

‘It’s kind of neat-looking,’ was Merlin’s verdict on the house as they drew up. From the beginning he was the most determined to fit into this new world. He spooned up the language as if it were ice-cream.

‘So, what do you think?’ Matthew Steward asked his wife, after they had seen around. He was eager for her to like it. They needed a home to settle into in Franklin, a real home not a rented apartment, and Matthew wanted to have all this fixed up so that he could be free and comfortable to concentrate on his work.

‘Oh. Ye-es, I think it’s the best we’re likely to find,’ Dinah answered.

They had moved only a week ago from home in England to this stately tree-canopied college town in Massachusetts. Matthew was a scientist, a molecular biochemist. He had been invited here by the university to set up a prestigious new department and his wife and children followed behind him, bobbing in faint bewilderment in the wake of his latest success.

Dinah stood on the porch steps of the house on Kendrick Street, her head tilted as she squinted upwards. She could see snug-fitting window frames and solid timbers. Even so, the house appeared to slide out of focus and then, when she stared harder, it took on an insubstantial quality, two-dimensional, like a family home mocked up for a film set.

Jack looked from one parent to the other. ‘I like it. I really, really like it. There’s room for everything, all our stuff.’

‘Me too.’ For once Merlin did not try to argue the opposite case. The boys also wanted to feel that the decisions were safely made and that they were fixed, taking root in a place where they could leave their bikes and skateboards on the porch like these other as-yet-unknown children.

Matthew nodded his satisfaction. ‘Good. That’s settled.’

They drove back across Franklin to the realtor’s office. Dinah trailed her arm out of the window and felt the concentrated sun hot on her skin. The street had an exhausted, end-of-summer air and the cars and shops were veiled with pale dust.

The house was nice. It was white clapboard, with green shutters at the windows and a raised porch that ran all the way round. Inside there were wide pine floorboards and the family room had an open hearth. They could take their belongings out of storage. Their English furniture would look well in the house.

The Stewards became the new family on Kendrick Street.

The Kerrigans next door gave a welcome party for the Stewards, and everyone in the street came, even old Mr Dershowitz from the end house and the quartet of postgraduate students who were renting for the year while the Berkmanns were in France.

Matthew was introduced over and over as the new professor at the university.

‘What is it you do, exactly?’ Dee Kerrigan asked him.

‘I’m a molecular biochemist. My particular field is protein engineering.’

Matt grinned, the way he did. He talked about his work to Todd Pinkham from across the street and George Kuznik, their neighbour on the other side, telling them what a privilege it was to be here to set up the programme for the university.

Dinah ate the chicken with black-eye beans that Linda Kuznik had brought, and listened and smiled. There was a lot of smiling to do, and she felt the kernel of herself shifting within this shell of politeness. These people were so friendly, with their warm questions and welcoming explanations, and in return all she could feel was isolated and estranged. Home was a long way away.

No, she reminded herself, this was not like her, that was not the way to think; this is home. She could make it so.

She tried harder to be responsive. There must be a way to direct herself into the current of goodwill on which everyone else was happily sailing.

‘I did have a job, back in England,’ she said in answer to a question of Linda’s. ‘In advertising, I don’t know yet what I’ll do here. Get the house fixed up, the boys into school, do the domestic map-reading for all of us. Matt’s going to be too busy.’

‘I hear that your husband is very brilliant.’

They both looked across the room to Matthew. He was describing something to the postgraduates, and making decisive chopping gestures in the air with his capable hands as he did so. There was a ripple of laughter. At the same time Dinah noticed a rushing stream of children headed by the largest Kerrigan child. Jack was watching a little to one side, rubbing at the frame of his spectacles, where they rested on his nose.

‘Yes,’ Dinah agreed. ‘He is.’

Brilliant was the word that went with Matthew.

‘Matthew Steward is exceptional,’ people said, colleagues and supervisors and professors. ‘He is an unusually brilliant young scientist.’

Dinah had once been eager to hear this praise and had treasured it, adding it grain by polished grain to the glowing heap of her love and admiration for him. She looked down at her empty glass.

‘Have you got enough liquor over here?’ Nancy Pinkham enquired. Without waiting for an answer she sloshed out more white wine from the bottle she was carrying, and then refilled her own tumbler. She blinked at Dinah over the rim as she drank.

‘So. Settling in?’

Dinah could see without looking too hard that Nancy was getting pissed, not angry as the word would mean here and at home would need the added off, but simply and eagerly pouring wine down her throat. The distinguishing of terms and the homely associations of the expression itself cheered her up, and so did Nancy’s relaxed way with the bottle.

‘Yes, thanks. I’ve found the way to the mall and I know where to buy coffee and the best bagels.’

‘And your kids?’ Nancy asked.

Merlin had appeared at Matthew’s side. His father’s hand rested on his shoulder as he talked, but Merlin was looking around for Jack.

‘When they get into school, they’ll be fine.’ That was next week. Dinah and Matthew had already met the elementary school head, and the boys’ class teachers.

‘Sure. Listen, come over one morning and have a drink. Coffee, even.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘Mm. D’you know what?’ Nancy moved closer, so that Dinah smelt her perfume and the wine on her breath. ‘One of the graduate students said to me that you were kind of surprising-looking. For a professor’s wife.’

The disclosure implied a potential for intimacy between Nancy and herself that Dinah welcomed. The room seemed to change shape, becoming more familiar, enclosing her with all these well-meaning strangers. She forgot her separateness and found that she was laughing.

‘No pince-nez or grey hair in a pleat, you mean?’

Nancy pursed her lips. ‘Evidently.’

‘Which postgrad?’

‘Sorry. Not the cute one. One of the others.’

‘Well, just my luck.’

Nancy regarded her. She held her glass rakishly tilted.

‘I guess you make your own luck, don’t you?’

‘I suppose.’ Dinah directed her thoughts away into a vacuum, and then, once they were neutralised, let them slowly return to here and now. It was a long-practised technique.

‘Have some of this carrot cake, Dinah, won’t you?’ Dee Kerrigan asked.

‘Oh, Dee’s carrot cake is famous.’ Nancy wobbled on her high heels.

The party was slowly coming to an end. Mr Dershowitz had fallen asleep with his mouth open and his knobbed hands splayed on the arms of the chair, and there was an ominous absence of children except for the Steward boys. Jack was reading a book in the corner.

Matthew came to Dinah’s side. His hand rested on her hip, transmitting the semaphore of partners: time to leave now, wouldn’t you say? I’m ready if you are …

Dinah felt her physical connectedness to him. At that moment he was utterly familiar, solid and intelligible. Her husband. He was her anchor, her compass needle steadily indicating magnetic north. Her signals went back to him: yes, we should go now. Home to our very, very, very nice house on Kendrick Street …

They summoned the boys and said their joint goodbyes. The Kerrigans’ hospitality pursued them out of the front door and into the mild afternoon with offers of sitters and recipes and telephone numbers. As the Stewards walked the few steps across the grass beneath the sugar maple to their own door, Dinah thought that they must look like a neat, bright family in a commercial. For what? Something safe – medical insurance, breakfast cereal, building society? She played with copy lines in her head: one small step, a big jump, how many miles, miles to go before we sleep, dum dum deedum. Then she remembered with a shock that she didn’t do that any more. No more copywriting, no niche of her own. She was Matt’s wife, Jack and Merlin’s mother, this was Franklin, Massachusetts. Not London. Not Sheldon, the village in Hertfordshire where they had lived.

The heat had drained out of the air at last. The end of the summer, and the afternoon was cool with a seductive, resinous breath of autumn.

‘Enjoy yourself?’ Matthew asked her.

‘Yes. Yes, I did. I liked Nancy Pinkham.’

‘Joey Kerrigan’s a schmuck,’ Merlin said.

‘Is he? Why’s that? What does it mean, exactly?’

‘Dad, he just is, I can tell.’

Merlin’s eyesight was better than his brother’s, but the two of them were very alike. Both boys were small for their age, inwardly assertive, externally wary, inquisitive and critical. They were clever, like their father, but as yet without his practised charm. Their hair kinked at the crown in the same way. Their close resemblance and their vulnerability touched Dinah, and made her heart twist with a determination that all should be made well for her children.

The front door banged shut. It had an annoying spring closure that Matthew would have to fix. Packing cases and boxes lined the hallway.

‘Can we get a dog?’ It was Jack who asked, from halfway up the stairs.

‘No,’ Dinah said, and Matthew, simultaneously, ‘I should think so, why not?’

Because a dog is permanent. A dog says this is where we stay. I don’t want that, to be so far away, we’ve talked about it and yet not talked, and Matthew always evades me.

‘Yesss.’ Triumphant Jack punched the air with his fist. ‘Did you hear, Mer? Dad says we can get a dog.’

Only a dog, what difference will it make? We’re here now, with this house, neighbours, school for the boys, Matt’s big job. What did I tell myself, back at the Kerrigans’? That he’s my anchor, my compass needle …

Or not?

‘I’m not walking it. Not once. Not a single bloody step. Nor cleaning up after it. Right?’

Matthew leaned and affectionately kissed Dinah behind the ear.

‘Absolutely right. My lady dog-lover.’ Then he wandered away, picking up a stack of scientific journals from one of the half-emptied boxes.

Dinah walked on into the kitchen. The sun shone into this room. There was a view from the window beyond the pine table all the way up the street to Mr Dershowitz’s. The boys’ footsteps clunked on the uncarpeted boards overhead.

Dinah stood at the window, her hands resting on the sill, looking out at Kendrick Street. Matthew’s work had brought him here, and so naturally she and the boys were with him. And in truth it made no difference, did it, wherever they lived?

Using the familiar strategy, she told herself that she had her husband and two children, the promise of novelty and the possibility of new friendships. There were boxes to be unpacked, and books and pictures and familiar pieces of furniture to be arranged in rooms that would accumulate their memories, given time.

And it might even turn out that Matthew and she were not running away at all. That their paths were parallel, not divergent, not leading away into a future she was unable to decipher.

The academic year turned with the seasons through fall and the long New England winter to spring, at last, and the heat of summer. The pattern and measure of university life as it revolved around Matthew was familiar to each member of the Steward family. Matthew appointed his team and began his ambitious research programme. Work took up much of his time, as it had done in England. The boys settled into their school, accepting or rejecting the various customs of this new place with their usual clarity. It was only Dinah, with no niche of her own beyond the house and the family, who still felt an outsider as the months passed. With an oblique view of herself that somehow did not take account of her good looks or good humour, she envisaged a tall, spare and awkwardly reserved Englishwoman who seemed to move through the unmapped thickets and coverts of Franklin in the wrong camouflage, anxious to blend in for everyone’s sake, but never quite managing to do so.

And then, twelve months after they had bought the house on Kendrick, at the same turning point of the year after the summer vacation but before the fall semester began, there was another party.

The Berkmanns were back from their year abroad, and the Pinkhams were having a barbecue evening to welcome them home. Dinah had offered to help Nancy make some desserts. In the morning she drove to the Stop’n’Shop and prowled the aisles, moving deliberately out of sync with the remorseless muzak that washed over her like nausea. From time to time a disembodied voice thanked her for shopping at Stop’n’Shop and begged her to check out the week’s supersaves. Dinah read the shelf-screamers and placards and found herself thinking of grocery campaigns she had worked on in the past. It seemed very long ago, and distant, and exotic. As she stood at the checkout she wondered if she wore the same drugged look as the other shoppers.

Back home the boys pitched balls outside in the yard while she made lemon tarts and meringues for Nancy.

The house was quiet except for the dog, Ape. Matthew and the boys had chosen a barrel-bodied creature with a rough coat and beady eyes. His toenails clicked on the pine boards as he roamed the house and occasionally his tail thumped meatily against a door. Dinah knew that he stared expectantly at her back as she worked.

‘No,’ she told him without looking round. ‘Go away.’

Her voice cracked the silence. The solitude was oppressive. She looked around; the kitchen was orderly with utensils stacked in the sink and the finished desserts were laid out waiting for the evening. Dinah longed for company, for the solace of talk, with a longing that dried her throat like thirst. But Nancy would be busy with her two little girls and Dee would also be occupied with children. All the children in the neighbourhood flocked to the Kerrigans’, even Jack and Merlin. Dinah knew plenty of other people in Franklin now, but there were none she could count on in just this moment of need.

It was three-thirty.

She could drive over and call in on Matt at the lab. She smiled at the thought of surprising him. It was a while since she had dropped in there. She heard his accounts of how the research was progressing, but she wasn’t quite sure of the latest developments.

The idea took hold. She could say hi to the team, most of whom she knew, and then perhaps Matt and she might even go for a coffee. Years ago, before the children, she sometimes used to look in on him at his lab in London. Through one of the portholes in the swing doors she would catch sight of the back of his head and his shoulders hunched over a rack of test-tubes or a set of DNA sequences. He would look up and see her and wave her over. Then they would walk downstairs to a canteen, and laugh and drink urn tea at a table decorated with chipped formica and a crinkled tin ashtray.

Outside, Dinah called across to the boys.

‘I’m going over to see Daddy for an hour. Don’t leave the street, will you?’

‘Yeah, Mom.’

They were old enough now. Jack was ten and Merlin nearly nine.

She drove her Jeep along Pleasant and turned across Main under the traffic lights, and from there swung into the central square. There was a wide green with handsome trees enclosed by solid, pinkish brick buildings. Franklin was proud of its history, and there were a number of tasteful shops on the green selling souvenirs and pamphlets about the original settlers and notable sons of the town. The campus of the University of Massachusetts at Franklin extended from the far side of the green, beyond a pair of tall stone pillars and a ponderous statue of the Founder. The buildings were dignified, with stone steps and massive doors and pediments with clocks that reflected the sun in discs of gold. There were libraries and chapels and memorial theatres facing each other across inevitable smooth lawns; this was the face of the university that was featured in prospectus photographs.

Matthew’s part of the foundation was housed in one of a series of big, glassy blocks discreetly separated from the photogenic old buildings by a belt of trees. These newer facilities were a world away from the mousy warren of stairs and ancient cubbyholes where he had worked in London, although Matthew seemed barely to notice the difference.

Defiantly she left the Cherokee in a convenient space labelled faculty members only, and strolled across the grass towards the science blocks. The steps and lawns and student parking lots were deserted and somnolent in the sun. It would be another week before the students came crowding back in time for Registration Day. The clock on the James Randall Hallett Library struck four behind her, triggering a series of associations. The church clock in the village, back at home. Vicarages and English tea. Gardens with roses and honeysuckle. Fields with gates, and white-laced hawthorn hedges.

Dinah walked faster, digging her hands deeper into the pockets of her skirt. Her hair was pulled into a thick plait that felt weighty and hot at the nape of her neck. No, not plait, braid. Bangs. She marshalled the different words, distracting herself by doing so.

The road curved through the shadow of the trees. There were huge, elegant conifers here with branches like trailing skirts that looked black in the bright light.

There was more grass in front of the new buildings, a curving bank of it, and across the grass a scatter of people. The senior members of the various faculties pursued their research throughout the year, so there were more parked cars here, and the doors of the dining commons were open.

Dinah headed diagonally across the lawns. In front of Matthew’s building a handful of people were playing frisbee. She watched a boy in a baggy white shirt leap up and twist in the air to make a catch. Several voices called out and then the disc floated on from his hand in a smooth arc. All the figures were leaping now, their hair and clothes rippling and Dinah imagined how a director might freeze the frame to capture a single image, a blurred smiling face in a swathe of hair and an outstretched hand to signify, what, youthful abandon, confidence, freedom?

For the life that you live.

Perfume, trainers – sneakers – or low-fat yoghurt?

She was smiling with pleasure at the sight of the frisbee players when she realised that one of them was Matthew.

He was wearing khakis and a blue shirt that had pulled loose, and a peaked baseball cap she had never seen before. It was jammed low over his forehead to keep the sun out of his eyes and his hand was reaching up in a salute as he called out.

‘Sean! Over here, look.’

Sean Rader had been part of Matthew’s old team in London. It was part of the agreement Matt had made that he should be able to bring two of his key people over to New England with him. Dinah had met Sean often, back in London. He was a small, tense man with a corrugated frown. And now he was out in the four o’clock sunshine playing frisbee and shouting. These were all people who worked with Matthew. The boy in the white shirt was a technician, and there was a little dark-haired woman PhD and Jon Liu, Matt’s deputy director, and half a dozen others.

The frisbee skimmed again on a long curving path towards Matt. He caught it two-handed and as he leapt in triumph he looked to Dinah so taut and springy, and so unquestionably comfortable within himself and in his place, that the coloured lenses of familiarity fell from her eyes.

The naked vision made her shiver in the afternoon’s heat.

How was it that she had driven across town needing to talk to this man rather than that one, or another altogether? She was gazing at a stranger, a man she didn’t know in any way, who lived a life with which she was unacquainted.

Disorientation rocked her. She put out a hand to steady herself in the rushing air.

Someone had sent the disc spinning away on the wrong trajectory. There was a chorus of jeers and the players ran after it in an eager pack. The woman PhD stumbled on the bank and landed on her outstretched hands, but she pushed herself up again and ran on, anxious not to be left out. The shadow of his cap’s peak cut sharply across Matt’s face.

Dinah did not want him to see her here. She could only think of getting away before anyone noticed her. She shrank backwards, two or three steps, then turned and fled for the shelter of the trees.

‘It was only a frisbee game,’ Nancy said. ‘Why are you so angry?’

They were in the Pinkhams’ yard, laying out cutlery and paper napkins. Nancy had had her hair cut in the summer and it stood out in a cottony floss around her face, making her look not many years older than her little girls. ‘Even Todd plays it.’

‘It wasn’t the game. I’m not angry.’ Dinah couldn’t express to Nancy the failure of recognition and the confusion that had come with it, or the sense of loss at being excluded from a closed circle of shared interest and common purpose that mocked what her marriage had become.

Matt was happy here.

How had that obvious fact somehow escaped her? She was lonely; Matthew was considerate and careful of her, almost as if she were an invalid, but on his own account he was happy.

‘Damn it. Nancy, I sound a miserable shrew, don’t I?’

‘Uh-huh. You don’t deserve him. And oh boy, are you a misery. You never come over here and make me laugh when I’m ready to scream, do you? You aren’t funny or cute or a great mom or anything?’

‘Aren’t I?’

‘Shit, Dinah, what’s wrong? You know you are.’

Simple. On the face of it.

Dinah shook out a gingham cloth and twirled it like a matador cape. The boys were up in the trees hanging candle lanterns from the branches. Todd had lit the barbecue and there was the scent of charcoal. Later there would be a full moon.

‘I miss home,’ she offered pathetically, trying to explain something away. She patted the cloth over a table and smoothed the wrinkles.

‘Sure you do. Anyone would.’

‘About Matt, you know? There’s all this talk of how busy he is, and the research, and all the other administration work to keep up with and the travelling to lectures and conferences and the pursuit of funds. And then I go round there and they’re all playing bloody frisbee?’

‘Listen up. That’s the way it is. You have to let them have their importance. It’s the same with Todd, the hospital hours and the crises and being the only one who can do anything right. They have to show us they’re out there hunting and gathering. They’re men, aren’t they?’ Todd was an intern at the local hospital.

Nancy’s plump-cheeked face was smooth and shining within the halo of hair. Dinah felt a surge of affection for her and ashamed of deflecting her friendly concern with only a sliver of the truth.

They had not become close friends. Nancy made Dinah feel cynical and partial and foreign. They spent a good deal of time in and out of each other’s houses, and Dinah was sparky and ironic in her company, but it was as if with her clothes and manners and eccentric theories of motherhood she was playing the role of a certain kind of Englishwoman to meet Nancy’s expectations.

‘You’re right, darling. Men are men and all too explicable, and woman are supreme beings full of wit and insight and beauty. Now then, where shall we put all this bread?’

‘French loaves, if you don’t mind. Maria Berkmann has only been back for four days but I think if I have to listen to any more about Lyon and Côtes-du-Rhone and TGV pronounced tay jay vay, I shall start hollering.’

‘Thanks for the warning. Otherwise I might have put the noise down to the hopelessly unGallic Californian Chardonnay.’

Laughing together, the two women went on laying out plates and knives.

When they finished Nancy said, ‘You don’t want to worry about Matt. Just let him get on with what he wants to do because he’ll do it anyway, regardless.’

That much was true. Matt always got what he wanted. He worked out in his methodical way precisely what it was, and as soon as he had identified it he went ahead and got it. He was never blurred, never impetuous or unconsidered. Dinah knew him so well, and yet he could reveal himself to her as a total stranger.

‘You’re probably right.’

‘I know I’m right.’ Pleased with herself, Nancy gave a little affirming nod. ‘I’ll tell you something else. You should do something for yourself, instead of just for your husband and kids. You should get yourself a job.’

‘Right. Hillary Clinton could probably use a little help. I’ll call her.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Nancy, I know you are. Thank you.’

Todd appeared dressed in a lemon-yellow Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. Nancy turned to him at once.

‘Todd, are you planning to barbecue tonight or do I have to do everything?’

Dinah went home to change her clothes and tidy the boys.

‘Clean T-shirt, Jack.’

‘I don’t want to change. I don’t think it’s necessary, in fact. This one’s good enough.’

‘All right.’

‘So if Jack doesn’t have to, then I shouldn’t have to either.’

‘All right.’

‘When’s Dad getting home?’

A minute later they heard his Toyota drawing up, and Matthew banged through the front door. The spring was still not fixed. His blue shirt was tucked in again and he was bare-headed. The boys leapt at him and he looked over their heads to Dinah.

‘I like that dress.’

She smoothed the bright yellow linen with one hand. She had dressed carefully, but Matt had seen the outfit a dozen times before.

‘Busy day?’ she asked.

‘Yep, pretty busy. The usual.’

‘You’ve got time to shower before the party.’

We are so careful of each other, Dinah thought. Solicitous, as if we have some sickness between us that is never mentioned, even though the pain gnaws.

Matt groaned. ‘I’d forgotten the party.’

He made for the stairs, with a child hopping on either side. Watching him, Dinah saw that his shoulders were hunched and there was a prickle of grey in his hair. She remembered the lithe man across the grass who had seemed a total stranger to her, and tried to knit together the two images. They made an uncomfortable hybrid. We are Matt’s responsibility, she thought. He shoulders the weight dutifully. And work is his resort and comfort. When did it happen, this switch?

She thought back involuntarily and then stopped herself, pinching off the flow of recollection.

The guests arrived, headed by the Berkmanns. Max Berkmann was wearing French workman’s overalls. Mr Dershowitz was missing because he was in hospital, and the four graduate students had moved on. Dinah had never really got to know the good-looking one any better than to exchange affable nods across the street.

‘Bit of a failure,’ she had joked to Nancy.

‘Matt’s better-looking anyway, and he’s got full tenure.’

It was a good party. The moon hung above the trees, heavy and orange-tinged, and the children’s candle lanterns glowed amongst the dry leaves. The Kendrick Street neighbours were pleased to see each other after the long vacation and there was plenty of news to exchange.

Jack and Merlin went off with Tim Kerrigan. Dinah caught a glimpse of them in one of the bedrooms, sitting in a line with legs stuck out in front of them and chins sunk on their chests, watching a video. Just lately, her children had stopped making unfavourable comparisons between Franklin and home. They seemed to have stopped thinking about England altogether.

Dinah flitted from group to group, laughing and talking. She had drunk two quick glasses of wine in the kitchen with Nancy. Two or three people told her she was looking well, that her summer tan suited her. She listened to Max Berkmann describing the idyllic year in France.

‘I tell you, we would have stayed right there in Mâcon if there was any way I could have fixed it.’

‘Here, Dinah.’ George Kuznik was partial to Dinah, and he shifted to make a place beside him on the garden seat. The darkness was warm and scented and within it the lanterns made oval patches of fuzzy golden light.

George’s voice rumbled in her ear. ‘A cold beer and you. What more could a guy ask for? You know, I always think this is the best time of year. After the heat, waiting for the fall, before the cold comes.’

Talking without listening to herself, Dinah said something about not much looking forward to another New England winter. She was overtaken by a sense that this place was still utterly strange to her, and by the mysteriousness of the people around her, even her husband. The landmarks of habit and logic and certainty were dissolving. She was on the outside of all this talk, detached from the physical world even with George Kuznik’s bulk pressing against her thigh, and she was losing her ability to decode the messages that were flashed to her.

She was afraid they would notice; everyone would notice her singularity.

With a beat of panic Dinah wondered if she might be going mad.

She turned to George suddenly and took hold of his hand. Anchoring herself. His palm was moist, surprisingly soft. George’s domed forehead reflected the lantern overhead. He leaned forward and for a moment she thought he was going to kiss her. A bubble of laughter forced itself upwards but George only asked solemnly, blinking a little.

‘You all right, Dinah?’

The garden began to coalesce again around her. The fearful dislocation was passing. Dinah did laugh now, and the laughter eased her throat and slackened her face. She released George’s hand and set it back in his lap, registering the flicker of his disappointment. Beyond him she saw a big man emerge from the house and stand on the porch steps, hands on hips, his gaze panning across the garden.

‘How much have I had to drink?’ she smiled.

‘Aw, and I thought it was my charm that was intoxicating.’

Dinah kissed George’s cheek then leaned back, separating herself from him. ‘You’re a good neighbour,’ she said truthfully. They both drank, allowing the tiny awkwardness to pass.

‘Who’s that?’ She indicated the big man who was now strolling between the groups of people. His height and commanding manner gave him a seigneurial air.

‘A friend of Max’s, Todd must have asked him over. Name’s Ed Parkes. Have you heard of him? He writes thrillers. Pleased with himself, but a decent sort of guy. His wife’s British, now I come to think of it.’

Later in the evening when the party shifted indoors and the children began to reappear and rummage for leftover food, Dinah met the Parkeses. Ed had a huge handshake, and his face creased into affable crinkles while his shrewd, light-blue eyes examined her. He told her that he came originally from Detroit but he and his wife had a house in the woods outside Franklin, and one in London where they spent part of the year, and a chalet in Zermatt. He talked easily, amusingly, but in the slightly overbearing way of a man accustomed to being the focus of attention. At last, but with a suggestion that it was out of good manners rather than real interest, he turned the conversation to Dinah.

‘I don’t have a job here,’ she told him. ‘I used to be in advertising, in London.’

‘Doing hearth and home for a while?’ He was appraising her.

‘That’s right.’ She was grateful for his way of putting it.

Your husband’s the scientist, isn’t he? I must have a talk with him. I can always use special expertise.’

Dinah was amused at the idea of Matt’s work being good for nothing more than extra colour in one of Ed Parkes’s airport blockbusters. She bit the corner of her lip, and then realised that Ed had followed her thoughts as plainly as if she had spoken them aloud. He was grinning down at her.

‘You think I’m full of shit?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Not much. Hey, I want you to meet Sandra. Here she is. Sandy, this is Dinah Steward. You’ll like each other, and not just because you talk the same language.’

Sandra Parkes was in her mid to late forties, tall and pale and thin, and very beautiful. She had the kind of flawless finely featured face that make-up artists and cameras fall in love with. Dinah didn’t dare to squeeze her hand when she took it in case the pale skin bruised.

‘What’s he said?’ Sandra asked.

‘Nothing you can’t contradict if you wish, honey.’ Ed sauntered away. His made-to-measure shirt sat comfortably across his massive shoulders.

‘Nothing worth contradicting,’ Dinah told the woman coolly. Sandra was wearing a complicated outfit of layers of gossamer fine wool and chiffon and slippery satin. Dinah had often wondered, as she flicked through the fashion magazines, what colour greige might be. It came to her now that this was it. It was so subtle and refined that it made her cheery yellow linen look by contrast like the flowering of some tenacious garden weed.

‘It’s never worth disagreeing with Ed,’ his wife murmured. ‘He believes that he’s right and he almost invariably is. I think it’s the act of believing itself that does it.’

Dinah smiled. Surprisingly, but distinctly, she felt herself warming with interest in Sandra Parkes. It was not her clothes, or the way she looked, or even what she said. It was the sound of her faint English voice and the half-swallowed, descending semitones of irony and deprecation.

Ed Parkes might look like a bull elephant and sound like a hick, but he was as quick as a whip. The stirring of empathy was not a matter of sharing a common language with Sandra, nothing as obvious as that. By the bare movements of her lips and the darting little gestures of her fingers, Dinah knew where Sandra came from. She could read the text of Sandra’s background just as surely as Sandra could read hers.

Within a few moments the women were perched side by side on the scrubbed pine of Nancy’s kitchen table, exchanging the common currency of their histories in a way they would never have done at home in England, or even in New York or Los Angeles. Whereas the links would have been taken for granted there, here they seemed surprising, remarkable. They had both grown up in the Home Counties, the only children of career servicemen. Sandra’s father had been in the Navy, Dinah’s in the Army. There had been overseas postings, and then from the age of eleven, good safe girls’ boarding schools within a sensible radius of London. After boarding school there had been long interludes of rebellion. And then for both of them, marriage to men from backgrounds entirely different from their own.

The Parkeses lived for part of the year in London, Sandra explained. Ed liked to be there when he was writing. Zermatt was for a month or six weeks at Christmas and Franklin was where he claimed to feel most at home.

‘But Ed gets bored quickly. In a month he’ll be fidgeting, working out a trip to somewhere.’

‘And you?’ Dinah asked.

Sandra sighed, looking sideways at Dinah through the pale and silky bell of her hair. ‘I would like to feel …’ her elegant fingers shaped a box in the air ‘… located.’

Like me, Dinah thought. Correctly located. It must be this need in both of them that Ed Parkes had recognised. Talking to Sandra had stirred a hundred associations within her. Her Englishness called up the inessential details of home and history, but it was not those details Dinah felt severed from only what they contained. A secret, embedded in England like a fly in amber. She couldn’t explain the severance to Nancy or Dee or George Kuznik or anyone else, nor could she talk about it even to Matthew.

Most of all, not to Matthew.

She couldn’t even think about this. She had to keep them sealed away, all the connected threads, or they would snake loose and whip and whistle around her.

‘Do you have children?’ Sandra was asking.

Yes.

‘Yes, two boys. They’re here somewhere.’

‘Of course. I met them earlier. One of them said to me “You see, dinosaurs had tiny brains relative to their bulk.”’

‘Jack. The younger one is Merlin. And you?’

Sandra plucked at the filmy top layer of her draperies. An odd wary note sounded in their talk. Each of them heard it and interpreted it for herself, without wondering if the other did the same.

Sandra said, ‘One. A girl. She’s fourteen now.’

Fourteen.

Dinah felt a jolt, and the tidy focus of her attention scattered like beads in a kaleidoscope. She made herself say smoothly, ‘You must bring her over, the boys would like it.’

Sandra’s narrow shoulders lifted. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps. She’s quite difficult …’

Impulsively Dinah put her hand on Sandra’s arm. ‘Aren’t they all? Listen, why don’t you come and see me? One day next week. We’ll have lunch, just the two of us. Will you?’

There was some connection between them, not yet identifiable, beyond the mere similarity of their histories.

‘Yes. All right, I’d like that. I’ll come while Milly’s with her tutor. She doesn’t go to school just at the moment. Ed travels so much, and I like us both to go with him …’

For a second, Sandra’s pale eyes held Dinah’s imploringly.

From across the room, Matthew was watching them. He saw Dinah touch Sandra’s arm. It was okay, he thought. Good. Dinah needed a friend over here and the writer’s nervy wife might be the one. He had liked the writer himself, for all his bullshit. But there was a shiver of impatience with Dinah. She was needy, and once she had been strong. He had drawn on her strength, of course. Made himself with her help.

The equation was different now. He was concerned for her, for Dinah separately and the two of them together. But still there was the chafe of exasperation, the raw edge of worn-out patience rubbing the smoothness between them.

The boys were in bed and asleep at last. Even Ape had given up his clicking and thumping and settled in his basket in the laundry room. In her bathrobe, Dinah sat in front of her bedroom mirror brushing her hair. When she was a little girl her nanny had taught her to brush her hair every night, just so, counting the strokes. Not that she did it, then or now. Why tonight? Because of the associations crowding in on her? Dinah remembered her parents coming into her bedroom while she sat at her dressing table, her mother in a cocktail dress with a stole round her bare shoulders, her father resplendent in his uniform. A kiss on the top of her brushed head. A cloud of Arpège and her mother’s hands resting on her pyjama shoulders. Their two faces reflected one above the other, a blurred half-formed version under the poised lipsticked one. Eleanor always so perfect. Yet they were alike, hair and eyes and colouring.

That mother-daughter link broken. Eleanor, long widowed, in England, in a bungalow on the south coast. Elegant, bridge-playing, lonely probably. Herself with her two boys. Tufty hair, their father’s, an odd whorl at the back of three heads.

‘Are you coming to bed?’

Matthew was already there, propped up with the inevitable scientific journal.

Dinah untied her robe, and slipped under the covers. Matthew put his reading aside and turned out the light.

In the darkness he asked, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

She had not mentioned the frisbee game. Scientists’ wives often feel excluded. Someone had warned her, at the very beginning. The Prof’s wife, back at UCL, that was it. It’s like a very exclusive club. The exchange of ideas, the stimulus, the sheer thrill of it all. Most of them enjoy it more than sex, dear.

It wasn’t the obviousness of her own exclusion from the club that had hurt her, though. It was the sight of Matthew’s unclouded happiness. And as she thought this Dinah felt a stab of self-disgust like a spike driven into her neck.

He reached out for her now. She knew that they would make love and they did, in their tender and considerate way that masked other feelings nothing to do with tenderness or concern.

Afterwards Matthew mumbled sleepily, ‘I love you, you know.’

‘I love you too,’ she answered. And thought that the divide between love and hatred was a very fine and fragile one.

Dinah dreamed of England. It had become a place of steep hills, each hill revealing another beyond it, all of them with pale roads winding to their rounded summits like illustrations in a child’s picture book.

TWO

The road climbed as it led deeper into the woods. There were no more houses to be glimpsed between the trees, nor were there any mailboxes at the roadside.

‘Have we missed it?’ Dinah wondered as she drove, peering ahead to where oblique shafts of sun filtered through the branches. The leaves were showing the first margins of butter-yellow and crimson. In another two weeks the fall would be in full blaze.

In the back seat Merlin looked up from his GameBoy.

‘101 was miles back.’

They were looking for 102, the Parkeses’ house.

‘How do I get to the next level of this? Jack?’

‘Give it here. You’re so dumb, I’ve shown you this already. Look, there’s another sign.’

A yellow arrow stencilled 102 pointed onwards.

‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ Jack said.

‘Aw, too creepy for you? The deep dark woods are full of monsters?’

‘Too boring, in fact, Merlin. Like you.’

‘Stop bickering,’ Dinah snapped.

‘Mum, we aren’t bickering. Can’t you tell the difference between argument and conversation?’

Opposition to her was the only factor that united them, Dinah thought. Nothing was new.

‘Sandra Parkes complains that Camilla is difficult. She can’t be as bad as you two.’

‘Camilla, what a totally sad name.’

‘Sort of like some disgusting pudding, Camilla-and-custard.’

‘Pink and wobbly. I bet she’s really fat.’

The boys snorted and retched, united also by their unwillingness to make the visit to the Parkeses.

Matthew seemed to hear none of this. He had been silent most of the way, sitting with his eyes turned to the woodland flickering past.

He was thinking about his work; ever since the summer, when the present avenue of speculation had properly opened up to him, the thought of it had never been far from his mind. Even when he surfaced from sleep he was aware of it rising again through the membranes of semiconsciousness.

He was thinking about his engineered molecule now, his inner eye turning it so that it twisted elegantly, three-dimensional, a dense cluster of atoms floating free in black computer space. Which group should he change, to make the molecule more active?

Frustration and excitement simultaneously prickled within him.

The first tests were encouraging. His technicians had demonstrated that the enzyme material he had engineered was beginning to function as it should, partly binding to the surface of IM-9 lymphocytes, and so indicating that it would bind to some extent to insulin receptors on the surface of cells. The question now was which part of the beautiful structure to change, to make it work better, to make it perfect?

His eyes were unfocused but he saw the sign first. And the mailbox beneath it. Matthew pointed.

‘There, look. I thought the place would be somewhere at the top of this hill.’

The road was dipping downwards ahead of them. Dinah compressed her lips but said nothing as she swung the Jeep sharply into the driveway. There were more trees, conifers and birches pierced by airy columns of sunlight, and then they emerged into a wide space at the crown of the hill. The Parkeses’ house rose in impressive stone and timber tiers against a sombre belt of firs.

Before Dinah had parked beside Ed’s Porsche a door opened in the bottom tier and Ed himself emerged.

‘Great, so you found us okay, no problems? Come on, come on in. Sandy’s looking forward to it.’

Obediently they followed him through a hallway and into the centre of the house. The huge room soared up through complicated levels, its cool space enclosed by squares and rectangles of wood and rough stone and shimmering glass. Beyond the glass was blue air and the reckless colours of the trees.

‘Cool,’ Jack murmured.

‘This is an amazing house, Ed.’

‘You like it? I designed it myself, with a bit of help from an architect.’

Matthew looked around him, his hands in the pockets of his shabby khakis.

‘Is there no end to your talents?’

Ed turned on him, grinning and sharp-eyed.

‘Beginning, doesn’t the line go?’

Matthew was easy in the company of other men, particularly men as successful in their fields as he was in his own. He laughed now, genuinely amused by Ed’s disarming self-satisfaction.

‘That’s not what I said or what I intended. Hi, Sandra.’

Sandra appeared on one of the balconies projecting over their heads, and then fluttered down some steps to join them. Her hair was knotted close to her small skull and she was wearing a loose cream tunic that revealed the knobs of bone at the base of her throat. She kissed Matt and Dinah in turn, resting her hand for an instant on Dinah’s wrist.

Dinah and she had had lunch together the week before.

At Sandra’s suggestion they had met in one of the potted-fern-and-scrubbed-boards café bars that were popular in Franklin. They sat at a window table looking across the green towards the campus. Students streamed past in pairs and groups, on their way between morning and afternoon classes.

‘Would you like to be that age again?’ Sandra asked.

Dinah made the conventional response without thinking about it. ‘Only if I could be forewarned and forearmed against making all the same mistakes.’

‘Did you make so many?’

Dinah could not look at her. She felt an instant of fear that this woman was a threat. She might come too close and Dinah would not be able to fend her off in the way that she could keep Nancy and Dee Kerrigan and the others at bay. She heard herself laugh, a false high-pitched denial.

‘No, not really. What about you?’

Sandra turned her wineglass full circle on its stem. A spilled drop broke into shining globules on the polished table top. Dinah’s deflection of her question had been too sharp. She hesitated, on the brink of offering some truth of her own, and now thinking better of it. They looked at each other, suspecting an opportunity missed before they had even become properly aware of it.

Sandra said, ‘Mistakes? I couldn’t lay claim to too many, could I? Ed’s a good man, as well as a very successful one. I have everything I want. A husband, a daughter I adore …’

Family, wealth, travel, ease, luxury, Dinah silently supplied for her. Only Sandra did not have quite everything she wanted, evidently. Not her own freedom, perhaps, from her husband’s dictates. Dinah wanted to ask her why they had only one child. But she could not. The ripples that the question would make might stream back and rock her own precarious equanimity.

‘How is your daughter?’ she tried instead. Sandra had said the child was difficult. Fourteen …

Sandra drank her wine. ‘Milly’s quite unusual. Very strong-willed, very certain in her opinions. And we’ve probably spoiled her. But I expect most of the difficulty is just to do with her age, isn’t it?’

‘I should think so,’ Dinah murmured. ‘I daren’t think what will happen when Jack gets there.’

That was all. The spectre of intimacy had shivered between Dinah and Sandra and they found that they had somehow brushed it away. After that they talked about missing England, and all the places Ed and Sandra had travelled to when Camilla was smaller and more tractable.

Now, a week later, they were all in the Parkeses’ gleaming glass castle in the woods. Ed was herding them towards the drinks.

‘C’mon, honey, what’s going on? Are Bloody Marys okay for everyone? I don’t believe in these orange juice brunches. Take this glass and let’s fill it up for you. Listen you guys, the pool table is through there. You don’t have to hang out with us if you can find something better to do.’

Jack and Merlin sidled away, not needing to be told twice. Dinah and Matt were caught up and washed along like twigs in the full flood of Ed’s hospitality.

‘Now, you want the house tour? Outside or in first? Perhaps we’ll do outside after we’ve eaten, maybe we can get some kind of a walk. The property stretches a good distance, way down into the dip out of sight of here. I want to take you in my study, Matt, show you the setup I’ve got in there, maybe you can tell me something about computer modelling, I’ve got this idea I want to kick around? Dinah, what do you think of this bathroom?’

He led them through his house, flicking taps on and off and clicking remote controls of lights and blinds and screens into choreographed display. There were twin studies, a vast creamy bedroom with twin bathrooms, an exercise suite with every conceivable machine and a shipsized deck with a spa tub overlooking the descending panorama of trees. There were pictures everywhere, covering the limited wall space, excellent modern pictures. Ed had a good eye.

Matt and Dinah tried not to look at each other because they feared a descent into giggles. They suddenly felt like children, awed and irreverent in the face of such purchasing power. The house was beautiful, but in its sheer opulence and abundance it was also comical.

And yet, it was impossible not to like Ed himself. The energy of him was invigorating.

‘Quite a place,’ Matt murmured. Ed seemed to expect no more.

One corridor on the upper north side of the building was left unexplored. Dinah glimpsed at the end of it a door, firmly closed, and guessed that this must be Camilla’s territory. Because every other nook and cranny had been so freely displayed and demonstrated, she was left with the sense of something brooding, almost sinister, contained within the open geometry of the house.

Ed led them away from the corridor without comment and back to the big room. Sandra was setting out food and cutlery on a huge refectory table in a slate-floored annexe.

‘How are the drinks? Here, Matt, let me freshen you. What hardware have you got in that department of yours? Are we ready to eat, baby, those boys will be starving.’

‘Yes, everything’s ready,’ Sandra said.

The boys came in from the pool table at the first summons.

‘Where is she?’ Ed growled. The creases in his face were no longer genial.

Sandra picked up an intercom and pressed a button.

‘Milly? Brunch is ready, darling.’ She replaced the handset. ‘She’s coming,’ she said.

The six of them were standing behind their chairs, as if waiting to say grace.

A door slammed shut on another level. A moment later a girl appeared framed in one of the upper windows and stared down at them. There was a silence, and then an awkward clatter as they all pulled back their chairs and hurried to sit down. The girl was coming slowly down the stairs.

There was nothing pink or wobbly or plump about Camilla Parkes. Nothing so familiar or explicable.

She was thin and dark and her small pointy face was dead white. Her lustreless hair was matted and spiked and knotted into dreadlocks that hung around her cheeks and down her thin neck. Her eyes were painted with thick black lines and her mouth was outlined in vicious crayon. Her clothes were layers of shredded knits and torn and faded black drapes, and her spindly legs were thickened by black woollen tights with holes at the knees. On her feet she wore huge Doc Marten boots with steel toecaps. Her right nostril was pierced with two small silver rings.

Camilla did not look at any of them, or at Sandra’s scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and bagels and the baskets artfully heaped with raisin breads and croissants. She went to the fridge and took out a small dish covered in clingfilm, tore off the film and screwed it into a ball and aimed it towards the sink. Then she sat down at the far end of the table and began to eat, spooning up a gluey mixture of rice and beans without lifting her eyes from the dish.

‘Camilla is a vegan,’ Sandra explained. ‘Milly, please say hello to Professor and Mrs Steward.’

She raised her head briefly. Her eyes were full of anger.

‘And this is Jack, and Merlin. Some company for you.’

Milly didn’t favour the boys with so much as a glance.

‘Where do you go to school?’ Jack asked, refusing to be intimidated into silence.

‘Milly doesn’t go to school right now. A teaching assistant from UMass comes here to tutor her.’

Milly put down her spoon. There were dirty silver rings on every finger of both hands and her nails were painted black. She turned her burning stare on her mother.

‘Why do you answer everything for me, as though I’m a moron? Why do you think I can’t speak for myself?’

Her voice was pure glottal North London.

‘If you can speak, why don’t you?’ It was Ed who asked, with surprising forbearance. There was a flush of colour mottling Sandra’s lovely face.

Dinah had been watching Milly with terrible fascination, half-greedy and half-apprehensive. But as soon as the child opened her mouth familiarity embraced her and Dinah smiled, without thinking.

‘You make me remember London. It’s like hearing a piece of home.’

Oh, what a crappy thing to say, she reproached herself immediately the words were out.

But Milly only shifted her gaze in her direction.

‘Where you from?’

‘London.’

‘Yeah. London’s okay.’

‘Did you go to school there?’

‘Camden. Only I got expelled.’

Dinah and Milly looked at each other. In the child’s face, as she made her boast, Dinah read the habits of defiance and aggression, and also saw from the soft and uncontrollable pout of her lower lip that she was vulnerable, and deeply unhappy. Milly was very young, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise.

‘Tough,’ Dinah said.

But she was already becoming aware that Milly and her assumed disguise – fourteen-year-old part-punk, part-Goth and part-Dickens street-urchin – called on some hungry instinct ineffectively buried within herself. She was drawn to the child, and she also felt a cold stirring of fear brought on by the intensity of these feelings.

Merlin put down his bagel. ‘Ben Burnham was expelled from my old school. He used the phone in the secretary’s office to call the Fire Brigade. He told them the science room was on fire, and two fire engines came with ladders and hoses and about twenty firemen.’

The adults laughed and Jack sighed, but Milly gave no indication that she had heard the story. She ate the last grains of rice from her bowl and then left the table as silently as she had come. The tails of her wraps flapped behind her as she mounted the stairs and disappeared the way she had come.

‘Do you see what I mean?’ Sandra murmured to Dinah. ‘Somehow it’s easier just to let her …’

Ed shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up in a rakish crest on top of his big round head.

‘They’re parents as well, honey. You wait, you guys,’ he warned Dinah and Matthew. ‘They get past twelve years old and all bloody hell breaks out.’

‘I’m nearly eleven …’ Jack said meaningfully.

The adults laughed again and the boys were given permission to go back to the pool table. Coffee was poured and the baskets of croissants passed round, and the mellow Sunday morning talk was resumed. From time to time Dinah found herself glancing upwards to the frame where Milly had first appeared in the half-apprehensive hope that she might materialise again. But she did not, and there was no sound or movement to indicate that she was even in the house.

After the meal Ed proposed a walk. He wanted to show the Stewards the full extent of the property, and some thinning and replanting that was under way in his woodland. Ed liked to be physically involved in the work. He emerged for the expedition in a lumberjack’s coat and boots with a bow-saw slung over one shoulder. Sandra had already announced that she was not much of a walker, and would stay behind to have a nap.

Ed was leading the way through his woodland garden when an outer door slammed in the house. They all turned. Milly had put on a man’s long tweed coat over her ragbag clothes. The afternoon was mild but she was wearing gloves with the fingers roughly sawn off and a shapeless knitted hat. The Dickens urchin effect was complete.

‘Great,’ Ed called to her. ‘Glad you’re coming. Which way shall we go, Deer Path or along the ski trail?’

‘I dunno,’ Milly shrugged. The route was of no interest to her. She stood pointedly waiting until her father and Matt and the boys moved on again. She was not quite looking at Dinah, but almost. Dinah resisted the urge to turn and look at whatever it might be in the air six inches to the left of her own head. Ed’s voice faded in the distance. He was explaining something about cross-country skiing. The boys were running, chasing each other, their feet in the years’ depths of dead leaves sounding like waves breaking.

‘Shall we follow them?’ Dinah asked.

‘We’ll have to, I suppose. I don’t know the way, otherwise.’

The lack of familiarity with her own home ground was deliberate, Dinah thought. Milly didn’t want to know this place.

They began to walk, not quite side by side, along a wide path through the trees. The air was still scented with resin and leaf-mould. Dinah imagined how if she were to be lifted up over the treetops she would see the undulating woodland stretching in every direction. She had seen a pattern of leaves, a carpet in chemical approximations of these colours, somewhere, a long way …

No.

She asked Milly, not waiting to consider her words, ‘You live in London for part of the year, is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

I won’t make her talk if she doesn’t want to. She may just want to walk, not necessarily with me. I’m glad she came out. The thoughts skittered through Dinah’s head. She wanted Milly to continue beside her, not to frighten her off.

They continued in silence for perhaps a hundred yards. There were birds singing, and silverbarked birches with their leaves turning butter-gold.

‘It’s very beautiful here,’ Dinah said quietly.

‘I hate it.’ Milly’s voice was so low that it was barely audible.

Dinah waited, walking with her head bent and her eyes fixed on the path in order not to intrude on Milly.

‘I hate it,’ Milly repeated more loudly after a minute.

‘Why?’ Dinah ventured.

Milly stopped walking. She half turned and made an eloquent gesture of spreading her hands an inch, opening her hunched shoulders, twisting her head against the backdrop of gilded trees and china-blue sky. And at once Dinah had a sense of her isolation in this calendar landscape, sullen and strange, adrift from the chains of healthy high-school kids she had seen dismounting from the dog-nosed yellow State of Massachusetts school buses. Milly fierce and freaky. Lost and longing to be found. And yet, she was not so different from hundreds of kids in London. She was only so different here.

To Dinah’s surprise, Milly suddenly smiled.

Her teeth were white and even, startlingly so as they appeared between the dark-painted lips. Her eyes slanted upwards, giving her a completely new expression of sceptical merriment.

‘See?’ Milly asked.

Dinah nodded. ‘Yes. I suppose I do.’

It came to her that she recalled the familiarity of London and home for Milly, just as Milly did for her. They had recognised the exile in one another. They walked on, the distance between them perceptibly lessened.

‘It will start snowing soon,’ Milly remarked.

‘Not that soon. Another two, maybe three months.’

‘Then everyone will put on their ski-suits and start poling around the trails like these clockwork people, arms up and down, two, three, legs going like stupid machines.’

Milly’s spidery black limbs jerked in cruel imitation and Dinah laughed at the image she conjured up.

‘Cross-country skiing is harmless enough,’ she protested mildly.

‘It isn’t just that, is it? It’s the woods and the empty fresh air and the kindness and health and shitty peace and beauty of it all.’

‘What would you like instead?’

Milly’s second shrug was as expressive as the first.

‘Decay,’ she murmured gothically.

Merlin appeared ahead. He scuffled back towards them through the leaves and then stood in the middle of the path.

‘What are you talking about?’ He looked from his mother to Milly with a hint of jealous accusation. His round face was shadowed. Milly ignored him, simply waiting for Dinah to deal with the interruption so they could resume their conversation. She was entirely focused on what interested her, and what was of no interest did not exist. Dinah reflected on this as she dealt with Merlin, and guiltily encouraged him to run on again to look for the men. She wanted to prolong this talk.

As soon as he was out of earshot Milly greedily reclaimed her attention. ‘Why don’t you like it here?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, you don’t, do you?’

Dinah sighed. ‘I miss … threads, connections. Nothing very specific.’ She could not explain, particularly she could not think of explaining to this child. Associations began to pile up, like nerve impulses behind the blocked synapses of denial.

‘Just plain homesickness,’ she offered lamely.

Milly walked with her hands in the pockets of her long coat. Her bottom lip stuck out; her expression was a young-old hybrid of disappointment and dismissiveness. Dinah saw that she had given an inadequate answer. ‘So what is it you miss?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Well, everything. People, you know. Mates. That you can just be with and, like, not have to pretend to be someone else for half the time just because they think you ought to be different from the way you are. I’ve got friends in London, in Camden, who know me all the way through. Better than Sandra and Ed ever will. I’d rather be there with them than stuck here.’

The tone of her voice was withering.

‘School friends?’ Dinah asked. She felt sorry for Milly, cut off in the glass castle from children of her own age, with only her UMass tutor for company.

‘God. I told you. I got expelled from Camden bloody School.’

‘Why?’

Milly sniffed in exasperation. ‘The usual shit. Smoking. Language. Defacing school property. Bunking off. Violence to a member of staff. Actually it was only a ruler I smacked her with. Should have been an iron bar, really. Only I didn’t have one in my pencil case.’ There was a distinct note of pride in this recitation.

Dinah nodded. ‘I see,’ she said mildly.

Milly’s voice softened. ‘No, my mates are nothing to do with school. I met them down the Lock. I used to hang round there in the day, not being at school. They just do stuff, like, their own way. They’ve got a place they live in, near Chalk Farm. Caz, that’s one of them, he’s fixed it well up so there’s water and heating and everything, not like some stinking squat. I’ll move in there, soon as I’m old enough.’

‘You aren’t old enough yet.’

‘Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. All I’m old enough for is either being towed round while Ed researches his crap books, or being left behind with some pain in the arse housekeeper. It’s no wonder nothing worked out in school, really. I was always being taken out to go somewhere else, that they wanted.’

Dinah contemplated this opposing perspective on Milly’s life.

‘I can see that would be difficult.’

Milly shrugged. She stuck her hands deeper in her pockets and walked on, looking straight ahead, as if she had already given too much away.

Dinah tried one or two more conversational openings, but Milly did not respond. They walked the rest of the way in silence, but it was a companionable silence.

When they came back to the house, having made a wide arc through the unrelenting woodland, Ed was already waving at them from the deck, the bow-saw hanging over the other arm. Sandra was watching too. Her eyes flicked from Milly to Dinah. Milly veered away from Dinah.

‘See you,’ she muttered.

It might have been a threat or a promise. Her face was closed up again, admitting nothing. She went up the steps, looking at no one, and vanished into the house.

The Stewards were ready to leave. The boys were already inside the Jeep and the adults gathered in a loose group beside it to exchange their goodbyes. Sandra stood beside Dinah.

‘Thank you for taking such trouble with Milly.’ The thanks sounded oddly formal.

‘I liked her,’ Dinah said. ‘Did you?’

It was less than the truth, but even the mild assurance seemed to displease Sandra.

‘She doesn’t often go out for a walk. You were honoured,’ Sandra told her.

‘Great, great, we must do that,’ Ed was saying to Matthew. ‘I’ll call you and we’ll fix it.’ He crossed in front of the Toyota to Dinah’s side, taking something out of his wallet as he did so. Dinah watched him, noting the set of his head on his neck and the forward thrust of his chest and shoulders. He was a bully, she thought. An amiable one, but still a bully. She wondered how the Parkeses lived together when there was no call for the polish of hospitality.

Ed was talking to her. ‘Di, you said you were thinking of looking for a job of some kind? Sounded like a good idea …’

They had discussed it, only very briefly, over lunch.

‘Well …’

Ed had taken out a card. He passed it to her now through the open window. ‘This woman’s a good friend of mine, an employment consultant. Now, don’t look like that. She’s the best, and I’ll call her about you. Go see her, won’t you? Can’t do any harm.’

‘No, it can’t do any harm,’ Dinah agreed. It was not easy to deny Ed.

The car rolled down the driveway leaving the Parkeses with their arms around each other, waving, against the backdrop of their woodland castle. Dinah wondered if Milly was mutely watching from some window slit.

‘I rather like Ed,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s something about all that energy.’

Matt liked him because he reflected himself, Dinah thought. Matt was full of his own kind of energy, and he was capable of the same self-absorption.

‘Odd child, wasn’t she? Why do they let her behave like that? It’s almost as if they’re afraid of her, of what she might say or do.’

‘Camilla-and-custard,’ one of the boys murmured from the back of the car.

‘Or the wild witch of the woods.’

Dinah thought of the streetwise shell and the vulnerable core she had glimpsed within the carapace of clothes and cosmetics, and suppressed her impulse to jump to Milly’s defence.

‘What did you talk to her about on the walk?’ ‘Home,’ Dinah said.

Matt sighed. He would not pursue the conversation, and a space of silence admonished them both. Dinah stared ahead at the trees and the dipping road and then the gas stations and parking lots as they drove back into Franklin.

A little later, when the boys were back in school and her days were no longer superficially occupied with their needs and demands, Dinah crossed town in the Jeep on her way to an appointment with Ed’s employment consultant. Dinah had concluded that it could not do any harm to see her, as Ed had pointed out at the beginning, and the woman had sounded pleasant and businesslike on the telephone. Dinah’s résumé and some examples of her work were in the unfamiliar briefcase on the passenger seat beside her.

The town lay quiet under a pallid, sunless sky. The trees that lined Main Street brandished their fall colours, but less noticeably against the backdrop of dignified clapboard houses and the rosy brick-built façades across the green. The windows of some of the tackier shops were already displaying Hallowe’en masks and costumes. There was little traffic in the wide streets and she arrived too early for her appointment. She parked the Jeep and sat waiting, thinking.

There was an uncomfortable pressure weighing on her, and the sense of it made the colours of the day seem sickly and caused the clean resinous scent of the air to scrape in the back of her throat. Dinah felt that the gap between the capable laughing wife and mother she pretended to be and the real woman who crept within herself was growing wider and wider.

Only Matt sensed it, and she could barely talk to Matt at all.

She checked her watch again. Still a few minutes before time, but she needed to get out of the Jeep. She felt shut in, panicked by claustrophobia, fearful of the two women who slid uncontrollably apart beneath her skin.

She scrambled her belongings together and stepped out into the cool air. She dropped her purse and bent down to retrieve it, and as she straightened up again dizziness assaulted her.

Forcing herself to breathe evenly Dinah walked up the shallow steps to the door of the building. It was a new low-rise, with glass curtain-walls reflecting the whitish sky. Two men came out of the doors as she tried to go in and they glanced curiously at her as she edged past them.

The building was multi-occupied, there was a long list of tenants in the small lobby. Dinah searched for the consultant’s name, reading the list twice before she located it.

It was a corner office on the second floor. In the little anteroom there were two chairs and a table with neatly arranged business magazines.

‘Jenny shouldn’t be more than a minute or two,’ the consultant’s secretary smiled. Dinah opened her briefcase and stared at the typed résumé in her lap. Who was this woman? Was this who she had once been, defined and held in place by these qualifications and this much work done?

She realised that she was looking past the sheets of paper at her own knees. They made bony protuberances under the matt black stuff of her leggings. Solid enough. Yet she was afraid to touch them in case her fingers met emptiness. The fear of it ballooned in her chest like nausea.

Dinah’s head jerked up again and she focused on the view from the window. The buildings in the block opposite. A sugar maple, fire-tinted leaves. Back on Kendrick Dee Kerrigan would be laying out after-school bread and cookies in her kitchen. Nancy would be lifting her little girls out of the back of the station wagon, wondering as she did so if it was too early to have a glass of wine. Not knowing that Dinah was out she might well call over to see if she wanted to join her.

Normal things.

Were they normal, or did they seem strange to her only because of her distance from them?

Dinah straightened her legs. Her feet looked odd, disjointed.

Am I going mad?

‘Hi. I’m Jenny Abraham.’

The consultant had emerged from her office, was holding the door open for Dinah. They shook hands and Dinah obediently followed her. She sat down in the chair facing the desk, fanning out the paper evidence of herself before handing it over for scrutiny.

‘Thanks. That’s all very professional-looking. I’ll check through it in a moment, but we should talk a little first. It helps if I can get a kind of a feel for the person you are.’

Ms Abraham smiled encouragingly. They began to talk about the kind of work Dinah might do. Dinah knew that her body language was all wrong, but still she could not make herself unlock her knees and arms. She doubted that there was much in advertising outside New York or Boston, and even if there were there would surely be plenty of home-grown talent. Who would want a precarious Englishwoman? She wondered vaguely if she could teach. Almost everyone in Franklin seemed to be some kind of a teacher.

‘Good. That’s very interesting.’ Jenny Abraham managed to purse her lips and shake her head at the same time. She was writing busily in the spaces on a long form. The little stabs of her pen seemed sharp enough to puncture Dinah’s skin. There was a big coloured Peanuts poster on the wall behind the woman’s desk.

This was a bad mistake, Dinah was already thinking. Why had she let Ed Parkes bully her into it?

‘Let’s talk a little bit about the real you, Dinah.’

Ms Abraham leaned back in her swivel-chair and steepled her fingers.

‘Tell me, what are you proudest of, amongst all your achievements?’

Dinah started to talk too quickly, to fend the woman off. The words came out jumbled up. She said something about a campaign for a children’s charity she had once worked on and then contradicted herself, mentioning her boys, her family.

‘And most ashamed of?’

No.

I should have heard that before she said it. I should have guessed it was coming and forestalled her.

Who is she, to sit in her big chair with a smile and eyes like glass chips and ask me about shame? It was only a job I wanted. Some little occupation to divert my mind. Perhaps make me feel fixed here like Matt, even Jack and Merlin, instead of skidding over some huge inhospitable polished surface with no landmark, no harbour.

Only there is no diversion. How could I have imagined there would be? I have to get away from here first. Then I can think.

Dinah made an answering smile, just by stretching her stiff lips. She leaned forward and took her papers off the woman’s desk, squared them neatly by tapping the edges and slid them back into her briefcase.

She said, ‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve been wasting your time. I don’t really need a job. I’ve just realised.’

Somehow, she was standing up. Ms Abraham’s face showed a real expression, surprise. Dinah gathered her belongings awkwardly in her arms. Anger carried her out of the room and past the secretary in her cubicle, and back down in the elevator to the lobby. The Cherokee was where she had parked it, across the street.

She was driving, unseeingly following the route that led across town, before the fortifying anger drained away. It left her weak and disorientated so that she blinked through the windscreen at the white clapboarding of the Franklin Hotel on the south side of the green, and the line of cars waiting to turn at the lights. The driver of the station-wagon behind her hooted, and Dinah slid the Jeep into a parking space. She was shaking now.

Surging out of the dark place that she kept shuttered all her waking hours came a black wave of pain.

What was she ashamed of? That was what the woman had asked her. Not the woman’s fault, of course. Just a crappy pop personality-test question to make everyone think they were getting a slice of a real person in the answer.

Dinah’s hands gripped the steering wheel until the bones of her knuckles showed their reddened cleft. Shame and guilt were her constant companions. Sometimes they hid their faces, dissembling as craftily as she did herself, but still they were always with her.

She didn’t see the fake-rustic Franklin Inn sign swinging in front of her eyes. Instead Dinah was thinking of home, picturing the rain-smeared streets of a small town in Norfolk. She had never even been there, although to hear its name or see it written made her catch her breath.

I have to go home, she said aloud, knowing that she must look like a madwoman mouthing in the sanctuary of her car. I have to go back home and start searching.

Matthew sat at the end of the big kitchen table with some papers spread out in front of him. The boys were in bed and the house was quiet except for Ape snoring and twitching in his basket under the window.

Matt liked this time of the evening. The day trailed in a wake behind him and there were still hours beckoning, subterranean chambers below the chipped surface of the working day, before he need think of bed. Matthew never slept before the small hours. There was too much else to do, to think about, to waste time on sleep. Dinah was different, always had been. She needed eight hours and firmly believed, like her mother, that one hour before midnight was worth two after.

Matthew was reading columns of figures, following a pattern through them that was as vivid to him as a picture. He didn’t hear Dinah come in, but he looked up when she sat down in the chair opposite him. She was wearing her bathrobe, splashy red print on a white background.

‘Hi.’ He had been drinking a glass of wine, a Californian Cabernet recommended by Todd Pinkham. ‘Want some of this?’

Dinah shook her head.

Resignedly Matt took off his reading glasses. ‘Tell me about your day. What did happen with the job woman?’

He had asked the question earlier and she had turned it aside, pressing her lips into a thin suffering line as she did so.

‘Nothing happened. I just decided it was a bad idea.’

‘Okay, so don’t talk about it.’

Irritated, although he had resolved that he would not be, Matt replaced his glasses and began reading again. He wanted to slip away from Dinah and the difficulty that she had become, and re-enter the cool lofty place in which she had disturbed him.

Dinah sat in silence. She was aware of the comfortable structure of their home enclosing them, filled with pictures and furniture and all the insulating drift of their joint possessions. How many things, she wondered, remembering the packing cases in which they had been shipped to Franklin. How many cups, and scarves, and books, and teapots.

Matthew turned a page. She watched the way he reached out unseeingly for his glass, his fingers quivering a little until they connected with the stem.

Dinah looked at her husband and wondered, do I love him or hate him? Did I do it alone, this thing, or did I do it because it was what Matt wanted?

‘Matthew?’

He rubbed the inner corners of his eyes, sighing, working his middle fingers under the lenses so that the frame bobbed over his nose.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m all adrift here in this place. I want to go back home, to look for her.’

His face hardened. His flexible mouth became a slit and the planes of his cheeks and forehead turned boxy.

‘You can’t do that, Dinah. Why torment yourself?’

‘Why not be like you, you mean? Indifferent?’ Her voice whipped him.

‘I’m not indifferent.’

The telephone rang. For three, four rings neither of them moved, and then Dinah slowly got up and lifted the receiver. Even from where he was sitting Matt could recognise Sandra Parkes’s high insistent voice. Dinah listened as it nibbled on, saying yes, yes okay, nodding as she spoke.

‘Of course we can,’ she added at length. ‘If Milly’s happy with that we’d be glad to have her.’

There was another high-pitched torrent of talk. And then Dinah said, ‘Friday, then. Yes, yes. That’s fine.’ She replaced the receiver.

‘Ed and Sandra have got to go out to the coast for three days. Something to do with a movie deal for one of Ed’s books. Sandra wondered if Milly could come to us.’

‘I’m taking the boys up to the cabin in Vermont for the weekend. Had you forgotten?’

Max Berkmann had promised a loan of their summer cabin. Matt was going to take the boys fishing and hiking, although neither of them had shown much enthusiasm for the prospect.

‘Yes, I had,’ Dinah admitted. ‘It doesn’t matter. Milly and I will be okay here.’

She hesitated for a moment, but Matt was shifting his papers, ready to immerse himself in them again. He had closed off her plea with his hard face. Not now, she told herself. Don’t try to talk about it now.

‘I’m going up to bed,’ she said at last.

‘I’ll be up soon,’ he told her, although she knew he would not be.

THREE

Dinah imagined that to have Milly in the house for two or three days would be to have a companion.

In the muffled, dead-weighted time after her visit to Jenny Abraham, Dinah planned how Milly and she would cook and talk and watch TV together, maybe even go shopping for clothes. Out of the brief affinity that had flickered between them she constructed in her head a temporary daughter and allowed herself awkward, unspecific imaginings in which Milly confided in her in some way, and she was able to offer advice and comfort.

Dinah looked forward to the weekend visit, and when the time came she confidently waved Matt and the boys off at the beginning of their drive up into Vermont.

‘You won’t be lonely?’ Matt asked, as he was halfway into the loaded Toyota. ‘You could still join us, you know. Bring the Parkes girl as well.’

‘Milly. Her name’s Milly. No, we’re going to stay here and have a women’s weekend.’

Matthew caught her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. After a minute he said, ‘Good. You look all right.’

‘Of course. Why not?’

After they had driven away Dinah went back into the house with the sense of having become someone who sometimes did not look all right, as if another person’s face had become superimposed upon her own.

Ed and Sandra arrived with Milly later that Friday evening. Milly unfolded herself from the back of the Porsche and hoisted a very small and shabby black canvas rucksack over her shoulder. She seemed to be wearing exactly the same clothes as the last time Dinah had seen her.

The adults moved into the house, with Milly at a little distance behind them. It was the first time the Parkeses had been to Dinah’s house. Looking at his watch, Ed refused her offer of tea or a drink.

‘We should get to the airport,’ he said. Out of the corner of her eye Dinah saw Milly turn her head to gaze blank-faced out of the window. She had not put her rucksack down.

‘Dinah, this is so good of you,’ Sandra murmured, but the words were at odds with her expression. She stood awkwardly halfway between Ed and Milly, unable to move closer to either of them. Clearly it was important that she go with Ed to perform whatever service it was he required of her, but equally clearly she did not want to leave Milly behind with Dinah. Torn between the two halves of her family, Sandra’s confusion crystallised in hostility to Dinah. She twisted the silver bracelets on her wrist as if adjusting her armour. Her face was cramped with jealousy. ‘I wanted Milly to come to LA with us, of course. But she absolutely won’t.’

Milly continued to stare in the opposite direction, her rucksack clutched against her chest. Dinah guessed that Milly knew exactly how to cause dismay and discord at home. She wondered what it was the child wanted to punish her parents for.

But she only said, ‘I’ve been looking forward to it. We’ll have a good time, the two of us.’

‘Sure you will,’ Ed said heartily. ‘Now, come on, honey. You know the Friday traffic.’

They went out into the street again, Milly trailing in her heavy boots, the embodiment of sulky reluctance. Dinah suppressed a sudden urge to turn round and shake her. The child was getting what she apparently wanted, after all.

Ed and Sandra both kissed Milly, who did not return their embrace. The Porsche cleared its throat, over-loud in the quiet of the street, and swung away towards Boston and the airport.

Milly tilted her head, and the black knotted strands of hair fell back to show her white neck.

‘Your house is the same as all the others.’

Without looking Dinah saw the various white wooden houses with green-painted shutters, porches and steps, old Mr Dershowitz’s at the end shabbier than the others, and grass dotted with shrubs and trees. She felt no more fixed in this serene suburbia than she had done a year before.

‘Similar. We can’t all live in fantasy castles in the woods, can we? You’re welcome here, anyway.’

‘Yeah,’ Milly said.

‘Is all your stuff in that one bag?’

‘Stuff?’

‘Everything you need for the weekend. Change of clothes, washbag, book, cosmetics. Middle-aged baggage, crap, is that what you’d call it?’

A shrug. ‘Yeah.’

Milly followed her into the house. Dinah led her through the rooms, showing her the place where she would sleep, the boys’ playroom, the bathroom. Milly dropped her little bag on her bed and sat down, barely rippling the smooth white cover. She stared out of the window into the steely blue twilight.

‘I’ll leave you to sort yourself out,’ Dinah said. ‘I’ll be downstairs making some supper, when you’re ready.’

Milly reappeared a little later. She leaned in the kitchen doorway with her thin arms wrapped across her chest, defensive.

‘There’s no TV.’

‘Yes, there is. Through there, in the den. I showed you.’

‘In my room.’

Dinah had forgotten her moment of irritation. She considered her present urge to propitiate this child, to move televisions and rearrange her house, so that in return she would smile and talk and look upon her as a friend.

‘No. We don’t let Jack and Merlin watch in their bedrooms. If we did, they’d never do anything else. Switch it on now in the den, if you want. Are you ready to eat? It’s pizza.’

‘I don’t eat pizza.’

‘Four-cheese and tomato. I know you’re a vegetarian.’

‘Vegan.’

For God’s sake, Dinah thought. ‘So what do you eat?’

‘Rice. Pulses. Fruit. Tofu.’

There was a distant clicking sound and then a skidding rush as Ape emerged from his lair in the utility room. He stopped short when he saw Milly and his legs stiffened as he launched into a volley of barking. A thin thread of spittle roped down from his furious jaws. Milly scrambled away from him, almost falling, and wedged herself behind the table. Her lips went white, making their dark crayon outlining bloom lividly.

She’s afraid of the dog, Dinah thought. She’s a scared little girl.

‘Ape, quiet. Sit now. Dead dog. He’s quite all right, Milly. Ugly but harmless, look.’

The dog subsided, sighing and panting. Dinah went to Milly and put her hand on her shoulder to reassure her, drawing her closer in a half-hug. Her fingers felt prominent bones through the layers of matted wool.

‘I hate dogs,’ Milly snapped.

‘So did I, as it happens. Ape belongs to the boys. Shall I cook you some brown rice? If that’s all you eat it’s no wonder you’re thin, but …’

Milly wrenched away from her. Her eyes glittered between the hanks of hair. ‘Why do you think you can touch me? What gives you the right to make personal remarks about me?’

An answering spurt of anger burned in Dinah for an instant. They looked at each other, barefaced, waiting.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dinah. She dragged Ape away by the collar and shut him in the utility room. Milly trailed off into the den and watched a game show on television while Dinah cooked her food. She could see through the open door that Milly was curled up with her boots resting on the cushions.

When it was ready she ate the plain rice and then a banana, but she deflected all Dinah’s attempts at conversation while she did so. They finished the meal, picking at their opposing dishes in silence.

‘Shall we go out and see a movie?’ Dinah suggested when the plates had been cleared away.

Milly’s black mouth twitched with a suggestion of sarcastic amusement. ‘Thanks, but no. You go, if you want.’

‘I can hardly go out and leave you here alone, can I?’

She stared. Her eyes were black-painted and the lashes were thickly spiked with mascara. Dinah noticed for the first time the colour of her irises, a pale greenish hazel. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I told Sandra I’d look after you.’

Another shrug, dismissing her. ‘Well, okay. That’s between the two of you. I’m going upstairs.’

She went, closing the door with a snap. Dinah sat on at the kitchen table, listening to Ape lumbering about in the confined space between the washing machine and the boiler. She imagined that Milly would be sitting on the unfamiliar bed, arms wrapped around her knees. She wanted to go up and tap on the door, open it and slip into the room and perch on the bed beside her, to twist a blade between the clamped halves of Milly’s shell and prise it open so that the child could be reached.

Another voice, a colder tone of her own inner monologue warned her, it isn’t Milly who needs that. It’s you.

Dinah pressed her knuckle against her mouth. Her thoughts tipped sideways and away from her. Thetford. England. A house, probably on an estate somewhere. Another bedroom, a child’s room with animal posters and family photographs. Not her family.

The telephone rang. Dinah lifted it and heard Nancy’s voice.

‘Hi. Listen, Linda and Maria are coming over for a drink and a sandwich. We thought we might play a couple of hands of poker or something dumb like that. Want to join us since you’re a free woman?’

‘I can’t. I’m not. I’ve got Milly Parkes staying the weekend, Ed and Sandra have gone to LA.’

‘Sweet Jesus, rather you than me.’

Is this what I’d rather? Dinah wondered, as she hung up. Rather a clumsy attempt to bond with another woman’s child, who looks at me as if she despises me?

When she went up to bed the closed door of Milly’s room confronted her. She hesitated briefly and then silently eased it open. Milly was asleep, lying on her side with the covers pulled tightly up around her. Her face looked younger, smoothed out by sleep. There were streaks of black eyepaint on the white pillowcase.

In the morning Dinah was downstairs early. She loaded the washing machine and fed Ape, promising that she would take him out for a proper walk later. Perhaps Milly would want to come, and they could take one of the paths that led through the woods beside the Franklin river. It was another white-skied day, but perceptibly colder than it had been. Bare fingers of branches were beginning to show through the burst of fall colour, and waves of burnt-out leaves accumulated beneath the trees.

The morning crept on, until Dinah had done all her usual chores and found herself some extra ones as well. When she looked out into Kendrick she saw that most of the driveways were empty; everyone had gone off about their Saturday morning business. There was no sound from upstairs. The silence of the house began to oppress her. She felt confined and then, with a sudden clap within her head, anxious for Milly. Of course she couldn’t be asleep all this time. Something must be wrong.

She ran up the stairs two at a time and rapped on the closed door.

‘Yeah.’

Milly was sitting on the bed, fully dressed. Clearly she had been staring vacantly out of the window. Dinah wondered for how long. She had preferred to sit alone in an empty spare room rather than come downstairs and seek Dinah’s company.

The evaporation of her anxiety fuelled another spurt of anger, a stronger flame than last night’s.

‘Why didn’t you come down? Don’t you want any breakfast?’

Milly regarded her, judging the effects of her behaviour.

‘What is there? Pizza?’

‘Brown bloody rice and bananas, if that’s what you want.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Milly, what’s the matter? You must eat something. I don’t want to force you into anything …’

‘You couldn’t. Don’t bother to try.’

‘… but you’re here, and I’m responsible for you for this time, and it would make it pleasanter for us both if you were co-operative.’ I sound like the mother in some nineteen-fifties radio drama. We haven’t even got a common language.

There was no answer. Milly’s eyes wandered back to the window. Dinah made a last attempt, breathing through the rising waves of her irritation.

‘Come downstairs. Have some breakfast and then we’ll go and buy tofu and mung beans. We can take Ape for a walk by the river. Or drive over to Northampton, there’s a shop there …’

Milly leaned forward on the bed. One knee protruded through a hole in her black knitted leggings. Her chin jutted out as her gaze swerved back to Dinah.

‘What do you want? Do you need some kind of a doll that you can take out for walks and dress up in frocks and tip upside down to say Mama?’

Dinah’s heart knocked in her chest, squeezing the breath against her ribs. ‘Why are you so rude?’

‘Is it rude to say what you think?’

‘Yes. Don’t you know that?’

She turned and left the room, aware that Milly was testing her for something, and that she was failing miserably.

It was another hour before Milly came downstairs. She skirted around Ape and made for the kitchen. She found the bread and cut herself two doorstep slices, then smeared them thickly with raspberry jelly. She wouldn’t talk, although Dinah offered her the most neutral of openings. She turned on the television and sat in front of it, her eyes fixed on the screen as if to let them wander elsewhere would be to betray vulnerability. Dinah couldn’t persuade her to leave the house, and Ape’s demands for exercise were becoming impossible to ignore. In the end Dinah took the dog for a walk and left her.

It was a raw afternoon with a taste of fog in the air. Ape ploughed through the undergrowth beside the river path while Dinah shivered and stared into the grey-white rush of water. She was glad when the moment came to turn back towards Kendrick Street. There were plenty of logs on the back porch. If she lit the fire perhaps Milly might even enjoy something improbable like toasting marshmallows.

As soon as she came back into the house she sensed that Milly’s mood was different.

She was waiting in the kitchen, holding back the knots of her hair with one hand so that her face was completely exposed. It was small, triangular, almost pretty under the disfiguring paint. The silver rings in her nose glinted.

‘You were gone a long time.’

‘Only an hour.’

‘Seemed like longer.’ Milly’s eyes were very bright.

‘Glad you missed me. Would you like some tea?’ There was something different about the kitchen, a detail that Dinah couldn’t quite place.

‘Nah. I thought I’d go out for a bit.’

‘Out?’

‘That’s right. See some friends. You know? Be back later.’

‘Milly, I can’t let you do that. You’re not old enough to go wandering off on your own in the dark. Wait. I’ll drive you, if you’re going to someone’s house, if you’ll tell me who so I can call the parents first …’

Milly grinned. ‘No thanks. Don’t need a chaperone. I can look after myself. Promise.’

‘That’s not the point. I promised Sandra I would look after you.’

Milly was demonstrating deafness. She had her satchel slung over her shoulder, was moving towards the door. Dinah scrambled after her, realising that the child would walk out. She caught hold of her arm and tried to pull her back. At the same time the detail that had nagged at her revealed itself. Matthew kept three bottles on a small wooden tray at the far end of the work surface, one of gin, one of whisky and one of vodka. The vodka bottle was missing.

‘Have you been drinking?’

The shrug inflamed Dinah. Her grip on Milly tightened and the child began to struggle in her grasp. Her arms felt like sticks, but she was surprisingly strong.

‘You can’t keep me here.’

They were wrestling in earnest now, Dinah’s hands clamped around Milly’s wrists. It was absurd to fight with her, as well as misguided, but Dinah’s sense of proportion deserted her in a tide of panic that burst out of some closed reservoir within herself. They lurched backwards, struggling against each other.

With Milly’s weight falling on her the edge of the worktop dug into Dinah’s side, winding her.

She would not be able to hold her much longer. Milly would break free; she would disappear. The knowledge was fearful and the fear came out of somewhere long ago, unacknowledged and more terrifying for it.

Dinah felt that she would choke. She realised that she was crying.

‘That fucking hurts,’ Milly spat at her, enraged. She disengaged one leg, drew it back and kicked Dinah square in the shin with her steel reinforced toecap.

Dinah yelped in pain and at the same time Milly ducked her head and bit hard into the back of Dinah’s hand. Dinah jerked the bitten hand to her mouth and swung out with the other. She slapped Milly satisfyingly across one cheek, and was rewarded by a flash of astonishment and respect in her pale eyes before fury blotted out everything else.

‘You hit me.’

‘Milly, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that …’

Milly was out of her grasp and she darted away while Dinah hesitated. The kitchen door slammed and an instant later the front door swung and banged shut on its troublesome spring. Ape barked at the empty air in Milly’s wake.

Dinah walked slowly across the hallway to the front door. It seemed to vibrate still with the force of the crash. It was dark outside, and Kendrick was deserted. Milly had vanished. I should run after her, Dinah thought. I should catch her and bring her back.

But she only checked the door, making sure that it was on the latch so that Milly could come in again when she was ready. Dinah couldn’t chase after her now, for even if she caught up with her she would not be able to force her to come back. She had been clumsy enough for one day.

In the den, on a low table beside the dented sofa cushions, Dinah found the vodka bottle. The level in it, as far as she could remember, had hardly dropped at all. Bravado, Dinah thought. A child’s bravado. She sat down and rested her head against the cushions. The back of her right hand showed an inflamed ring of crimson teethmarks.

Ape heaved himself on to the sofa beside her, and Dinah twisted her fingers in his rough coat. She sat and waited for Milly to come back again.

As the time crept by Dinah dismembered their argument over and over again in her mind. She was shamed by the evidence that she had done everything wrong. She had let her own needs and anxieties bleed out into her dealings with Milly. Where she should have been detached she had been demanding. Instead of encountering a cool, dispassionate adult Milly had met a creature as unstable as herself.

With a shiver of fear, Dinah realised that the tight seals she had kept on the past were straining and threatening to give way. At home in England she had been able to contain herself with familiarity and routine. But in Franklin she was out of her place and adrift, and her awareness of this intensified with time rather than diminished.

Then Milly had come, and her age and her fury and fragility had all touched a rawness and longing in Dinah that was frightening, and always increasing, and now threatened to overwhelm her.

Dinah grew cold and stiff with sitting. She stood up and walked the length of the room and back, and the dog raised its head to look irritably at her. It was two, nearly three hours since Milly had run out of the house. The night was bitter, and she had been wearing only the usual layers of ragged woollens. Where had she gone? Was she outside in the darkness, wandering by herself, or was she in some dangerous warm place, shut in and at even greater risk?

She was only fourteen. A child, a little girl. Her responsibility, entrusted to her.

Dinah ran to the front door and jerked it open. Cold air met her, and the scent of woodsmoke, and the sight of the cosy curtained windows of her neighbours’ houses. The wind carried the irregular hum of distant traffic.

She closed the door again, pressing the night away behind it. Denied images rose up before her eyes, making her roll her head in an effort to dispel them. None of her old methods of deflection would work any longer, because Milly had unlocked the sealed place.

Dinah ranged through the rooms of the house, looking for somewhere to hide and collect herself, but there was nowhere. The tidy defences of possessions and pictures and an ordered life looked irrelevant now. Guilt emerged from its lair as tangible as another human being until she thought that she could hear its breathing, smell the rankness of its sweat.

She could stay in the house no longer, she would have to get away from this foetid personification. She snatched a coat from its peg and pulled it on. She called to Ape and he came bounding eagerly towards her. The sight of him gave her an idea and she ran up the stairs to Milly’s room. At first it looked bare of her minimal possessions, but then she saw a frayed and shapeless garment discarded on a chair. Dinah bore it downstairs, and gave it to Ape to sniff.

‘Find her,’ she ordered. ‘Seek, there’s the boy.’

When she opened the door for him he set off up Kendrick, tail waving like a plume. Dinah ran behind him.

The dog thought it was a good game. He ran in a diagonal line across Pleasant, and plunged into the dark area between two houses. Dead leaves crackled under Dinah’s feet as she followed him. There were garage doors with basketball hoops, fences and paved yards and silent porches. Ape ran her until she was gasping for breath and then circled back to twist between her legs, panting and slobbering. She could have kicked him for his amiable stupidity. Milly was nowhere in these quiet streets, why should she be? The peaceful suburban darkness only emphasised her fears. But still she walked on, with the dog now scuffling at her side. She threaded up and down the neighbouring streets, peering at each house as her shadow reached ahead of her and then fell back again between the blue-white auras of the street lamps.

Dinah knew that she could walk all night and not have a hope of discovering where Milly might be.

A need to return home as urgent as the one that had driven her out took hold of her. She swung round and began to walk, faster and faster until she was running, into Kendrick and across the grass to the steps of her house. The door was still on the latch, as she had left it. She knew as soon as she stumbled inside that Milly had not returned.

It was after midnight.

Dinah picked up the phone and dialled the Parkeses’ home number. The answering machine picked up, Ed’s confident voice. If Milly was there she wouldn’t answer. Dinah quickly hung up.

Whom to call? The Parkeses were staying at the Bel Air Hotel, Ed had told her that twice and Sandra once. Not yet. She couldn’t call them yet.

The police? What to say, that a difficult teenager had banged out of the house to sulk for a few hours?

Matthew?

No, not Matt. Not Matt, most of all.

Dinah went into the kitchen and slowly, deliberately made herself a cup of tea. As an afterthought she tipped a measure of Scotch into it. She stood by the uncurtained window and stared out into the darkness of the yard as she drank the peaty tea. She began to see faces other than her own mirrored in the black glass.

At one a.m. she called Nancy Pinkham. Nancy answered the phone after two rings but her voice was thick and bewildered with sleep.

‘I know I’ve woken you up,’ Dinah said.

‘I’ll be right over,’ Nancy answered, when she had explained.

Ten minutes later she was sitting in Dinah’s kitchen in her blue terry robe. She drank the whisky that Dinah poured for her and rubbed her smeared eyes.

‘Listen, don’t you worry. Not yet, anyhow. I’m certain the kid will be back when she’s ready, when she thinks she’s done enough mischief. Don’t you think?’

Dinah nodded, Nancy’s prosaic common sense like a buoy to catch at in a riptide.

‘Yes, I guess so. But I’m so scared something’s happened to her, that it’s my fault …’

‘Sure you are. Who wouldn’t be, with any imagination? But it isn’t your fault, okay? The kid’s a monster, how can you be responsible for that?’

‘She isn’t, it’s not that …’

Nancy took her arm and the whisky bottle and drew them into the den.

‘We’ll just make ourselves comfortable here and wait for madam to get back.’ She looked shrewdly at Dinah as they both sat down. ‘I’m more worried about you than her.’

They drank some whisky. Nancy punched the television remote and found an old Clint Eastwood movie that had only just begun. They watched it to the end and then dozed a little in the grey light from the screen.

Dinah woke up with a shudder. The television light had been replaced by the beginnings of daylight, and Nancy was standing over her.

‘She’s back. Coming down the road, large as life.’

Dinah jumped up. Through the window, she saw Milly swinging up the path to the porch steps. She looked no more dishevelled than usual.

‘Where’ve you been? Do you know we’ve sat up all night, you thoughtless little tramp?’

It was Nancy who began shouting as soon as the door opened. Dinah had never seen her so angry. ‘How d’you think Dinah felt? If you were mine, I can tell you, I’d cane your ass.’

Milly walked straight past her into the kitchen.

‘Shit. I’ll leave you to it,’ Nancy muttered. ‘If there’s nothing else I can do?’

‘Nothing. Thanks, Nancy. You’re a good friend.’

‘Do the same for me sometime. Although, Jesus, if Laura and Brooke turn out like her …’

Milly scowled in the kitchen when Dinah came wearily in.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Go on where?’

‘Say your piece, like mother tightarse out there.’

The softness of relief was wrapping itself around Dinah. The kitchen, and its everyday instruments looked sweet and wholesome in the strengthening light.’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything. Only that I’m pleased you’ve come back.’

Milly suddenly smiled, the merry, upward-slanting smile that transformed her face. Her shoulders dropped and her head lifted. ‘Well, great. Yeah. Thanks.’

Dinah wanted to hug her, but remembered in time that Milly didn’t like to be touched. She asked her instead if she was hungry.

‘Starving.’

‘There are some English muffins.’

‘Why are they called English? They aren’t English, are they, they’re bloody American.’

Dinah toasted the muffins and spread jelly on them. She made rosehip tea and gave Milly a mug, and Milly wrapped her black-varnished fingers greedily around the warmth. Dinah noticed for the first time a clumsy tattooed flower in the vee between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Did you go to friends?’ she asked at length, when Milly had drunk two mugs of tea and eaten the muffins.

‘What?’

‘You said you were going to see some friends. Last night, before you went out.’

‘I haven’t got any friends here.’

She said it coolly without inviting sympathy but Dinah’s heart still twisted for her.

‘So where did you go?’

‘I walked around a bit. Then I remembered some people Sandra and Ed know, across the other side of Main Street, they’ve got, like, this big barn thing at the side of their house. They keep all the garden furniture and stuff in it. The door, wasn’t locked so I just went in and slept on a kind of padded seat thing. It was fine. I can look after myself.’

‘Yes, I suppose you can.’

Milly was studying her tattoo.

‘I’m sorry about last night, right?’

‘I’m sorry I slapped you. I shouldn’t have done.’

Milly laughed. It was the first time Dinah had heard her laugh and it was as attractive as her smile.

‘Actually that was kind of funny. It felt like we were two kids fighting. Let’s have a look.’

Dinah realised that she meant the bite on her hand. Obligingly she held it out to show the red weal. Milly sighed.

‘Maybe you should get a tetanus shot. You know, I asked Sandra if she could fix it for me to come here this weekend. After that time I met you I thought you were kind of okay, and I liked you. Only when I like someone I can’t believe they could like me or anything because I’m so shitty, and then I have to be like, really as bad as I can be so they won’t like me and then everything’s sort of proved for me so that I don’t have to speculate.’

It was the speculate that touched Dinah. With an effort to find the right neutral voice she said, ‘I think I understand. But why were you so determined not to go to LA with your parents?’

‘Because that’s what they always do. Or what he does and she lets him do. He just announces that we’re going somewhere, to suit him, and up and off we go. Franklin, Zermatt, London, back to bloody Franklin. For his writing. As if it’s some kind of art, instead of crap paperbacks with swastikas on the front.’

Milly paused, trying to arrange her words. ‘And it’s like, that’s how she needs it to be. She wants him to act that way so she can, I don’t know, accommodate him. It’s like a deal between them.’

Yes, Dinah thought. That’s what it’s like. We all have our different deals.

‘Anyway, I didn’t want to be taken like some parcel and left to sit in a hotel. I thought of asking to come here. Like I said, I do like you.’

And showing her liking, however grudgingly, was an added way of attacking Sandra. Milly was no fool.

‘Thank you,’ Dinah said. She would not make the mistake of offering clumsy reciprocal assurances just yet. The conversation was about what Milly thought and felt.

‘Is there any more tea?’

‘I can make some.’

While her back was turned Milly said, in a rush of words, as if she wanted to get it out while no one was looking at her, ‘I’m adopted, you know. They couldn’t have any kids of their own so they got me.’

Dinah moved carefully, not letting her surprise show. She put down the refilled teapot and took her place again opposite Milly at the table.

‘I didn’t know that.’

Sandra might have told her, she realised, that day in the café bar. But somehow the as-yet unmade friendship had developed a flaw, like a pattern going awry. They had become suspicious instead of intimate.

She thought of Ed and Sandra and their castle in the woods, but a different perspective made them seem smaller, farther off, while new questions and associations hung between Milly and herself, pricking her, hooking into her skin.

‘Yeah. They told me all that shit when I was a kid, they talked about it all the time in churchy voices, about how I’m special. They got me from the adoption services in London. Specially chosen, they wanted me so much, you know? I never believed a word of it. I don’t think they do nowadays, either. How could they, seeing what they ended up with was me?’

The small pale face with the angry make-up mostly rubbed away by the night in a barn. The lower lip pushed out, simultaneously aggressive and tremulous. Eyes fixed on Dinah’s face, greedy for attention and affection and reassurance, as well as routinely defiant. Another woman’s child, her history compacted within her. God forgive me, Dinah thought.

‘I had a daughter too.’

Milly gaped at her, silenced for once.

‘She’s fourteen, the same as you. Only I haven’t seen her since she was a little baby. I gave her up for adoption.’

There was a long pause. Milly picked reflectively at the smaller of her nose rings, turning it in its reddened puncture. Dinah could almost follow her thoughts down through their faltering spirals. Finally she breathed the question, ‘Are you saying, like, I could be your daughter?’

‘No. I know you couldn’t be.’

‘How do you? Why did you have her adopted? Was she, kind of, somebody’s she shouldn’t have been?’

‘No. She was Matthew’s baby too.’

It had been a long time, such a very long time since Dinah had allowed herself the luxury of words to vent the pressure. Silence had contained everything like a cold crust over molten liquid. She felt the pressure increasing, cracking the crust and pushing words into her mouth. They were ready to spill out of her mouth now. It was wrong that it should be Milly to hear them, Milly with her own pressing needs. Wrong, but right also.

‘Why, then?’

Dinah turned her head. Through the window she saw the Berkmanns driving off to their Sunday morning tennis game. Kendrick Street, Franklin, Massachusetts, coming alive once more.

‘I’ll tell you, if you like.’

‘Yeah. I’d like. Make a change from going on about me.’

Awkwardly at first, then fast, Dinah began to talk.

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