فصل 03

CHAPTER THREE

Looking back, for the first nine months after Will’s death I was in a kind of daze. I went straight to Paris and simply didn’t go home, giddy with freedom, with the appetites that Will had stirred in me. I got a job at a bar favoured by expats where they didn’t mind my terrible French, and I grew better at it. I rented a tiny attic room in the 16th, above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and I would lie awake, listening to the sound of the late drinkers and the early-morning deliveries, and every day I felt like I was living someone else’s life.

Those early months, it was as if I had lost a layer of skin – I felt everything more intensely. I woke up laughing, or crying, saw everything as if a filter had been removed. I ate new foods, walked strange streets, spoke to people in a language that wasn’t mine. Sometimes I felt haunted by him, as if I was seeing it all through his eyes, heard his voice in my ear.

What do you think of that, then, Clark?

I told you you’d love this.

Eat it! Try it! Go on!

I felt lost without our daily routines. It took weeks for my hands not to feel useless without daily contact with his body: the soft shirt I would button, the warm, motionless hands I would wash gently, the silky hair I could still feel between my fingers. I missed his voice, his abrupt, hard-earned laugh, the feel of his lips against my fingers, the way his eyelids would lower when he was about to drop off to sleep. My mother, still aghast at what I had been part of, had told me that while she loved me, she could not reconcile this Louisa with the daughter she had raised, so with the loss of my family, as well as the man I had loved, every thread that had linked me to who I was had been cut. I felt as if I had simply floated off, untethered, to some unknown universe.

So I acted out a new life. I made casual, arm’s-length friendships with other travellers: young English students on gap years, Americans retracing the steps of literary heroes, certain that they would never return to the Midwest, wealthy young bankers, day-trippers, a constantly changing cast that drifted in and through and past; escapees from other lives. I smiled and I chatted and I worked, and I told myself I was doing what he wanted. That there had to be comfort, at least, in that.

Winter loosened its grip and the spring was beautiful. Then almost overnight I woke up one morning and realized I had fallen out of love with the city. Or, at least, I didn’t feel Parisian enough to stay. The stories of the expats began to sound wearyingly similar, the Parisians to seem unfriendly – or, at least, I noticed, several times a day, the myriad ways in which I would never quite fit in. The city, compelling as it was, felt like a glamorous couture dress that I had bought in haste but didn’t quite fit me after all. I handed in my notice and went travelling around Europe.

No two months had ever left me feeling more inadequate. I was lonely almost all the time. I hated not knowing where I was going to sleep each night, was permanently anxious about train timetables and currency, found it difficult to make friends when I didn’t trust anyone I met. And what could I say about myself, anyway? When people asked me, I could give them only the most cursory details. All the stuff that was important or interesting about me was what I couldn’t share. Without someone to talk to, every sight I saw – whether it was the Trevi Fountain or a canal in Amsterdam – felt simply like a box I’d needed to tick on a list. I spent the last week on a beach in Greece that reminded me too much of a beach I had been on with Will not too long before, and finally, after a week of sitting on the sand fending off bronzed men, who all seemed to be called Dmitri, and trying to tell myself I was actually having a good time, I gave up and returned to Paris. Mostly because that was the first time it had occurred to me that I had nowhere else to go.

For two weeks I slept on the sofa of a girl I’d worked with at the bar, while I tried to decide what to do next. Recalling a conversation I’d had with Will about careers, I wrote to several colleges about fashion courses, but I had no history of work to show them and they rebuffed me politely. The place on the course I had originally won after Will died had been awarded to someone else because I had failed to defer. I could apply again next year, the administrator said, in the tones of someone who knew I wouldn’t.

I looked online at jobs websites and saw that, despite everything I had been through, I was still unqualified for the kind of jobs I might be interested in doing. And then by chance, just as I was wondering what to do next, Michael Lawler, Will’s lawyer, rang me and suggested it was time to do something with the money Will had left. It was the excuse to move that I needed. He helped me negotiate a price on a scarily expensive two-bedroomed flat on the edge of the Square Mile, which I bought largely because I remembered Will once talking about the wine bar on the corner, which made me feel a bit closer to him; there was a little left over with which to furnish it. Six weeks later I came back to England, got a job at the Shamrock and Clover, slept with a man called Phil I would never see again, and waited to feel as if I had really started living.

Nine months on I was still waiting.

I didn’t go out much that first week home. I was sore, and grew tired quickly, so it was easy to lie in bed and doze, wiped out by extra-strength painkillers, and tell myself that letting my body recover was all that mattered. In a weird way, being back in our little family house suited me: it was the first place I had managed to sleep more than four hours at a stretch since I had left; it was small enough that I could always reach out for a wall to support myself. Mum fed me, Granddad kept me company (Treena had gone back to college, taking Thom with her), and I watched a lot of daytime television, marvelling at its never-ending advertisements for loan companies and stair lifts, and its preoccupations with minor celebrities that the best part of a year abroad had left me unable to recognize. It was like being in a little cocoon, one that, admittedly, had a whacking great elephant squatting in its corner.

We didn’t talk about anything that might upset this delicate equilibrium. I would watch whatever celebrity news daytime television threw up and then say, at supper, ‘Well, what about that Shayna West, then, eh?’ And Mum and Dad would leap on the topic gratefully, remarking that she was a trollop or had nice hair or that she was no better than she should be. We covered Bargains In Your Attic (‘I always wonder what that Victorian planter of your mother’s would have been worth … ugly old thing.’) and Ideal Homes in the Country (‘I wouldn’t wash a dog in that bathroom’). I didn’t think beyond each mealtime, beyond the basic challenges of getting dressed, brushing my teeth and completing whatever tiny tasks my mother set me (‘You know, love, when I’m out, if you could sort your washing, I’ll do it with my coloureds’).

But, like a creeping tide, the outside world insisted steadily on intruding. I heard the neighbours asking questions of my mother as she hung out the washing. Your Lou home, then, is she? And Mum’s uncharacteristically curt response: She is. I found myself avoiding the rooms in the house from which I could see the castle. But I knew it was there, the people in it living, breathing links to Will. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them; while in Paris I had been forwarded a letter from Mrs Traynor, thanking me formally for everything I had done for her son. ‘I am conscious that you did everything you could.’ But that was it. That family had gone from being my whole life to a ghostly remnant of a time I wouldn’t allow myself to remember. Now, as our street sat moored in the shadow of the castle for several hours every evening, I felt the Traynors’ presence like a rebuke.

I’d been there two weeks before I realized that Mum and Dad no longer went to their social club. ‘Isn’t it Tuesday?’ I said, on the third week, as we sat around the dinner table. ‘Shouldn’t you be gone by now?’

They glanced at each other. ‘Ah, no. We’re fine here,’ Dad said, chewing a piece of his pork chop.

‘I’m fine by myself, honestly,’ I told them. ‘I’m much better now. And I’m quite happy watching television.’ I secretly longed to sit, unobserved, with nobody else in the room. I had barely been left alone for more than half an hour at a time since I’d come home. ‘Really. Go out and enjoy yourselves. Don’t mind me.’

‘We … we don’t really go to the club any more,’ said Mum, as she sliced through a potato.

‘People … they had a lot to say. About what went on.’ Dad shrugged. ‘In the end it was easier just to stay out of it.’ The silence that followed this lasted a full six minutes.

And there were other, more concrete, reminders of the life I had left behind. Ones that wore skin-tight running pants with special wicking properties.

It was on the fourth morning Patrick jogged past our house that I thought it might be more than coincidence. I had heard his voice the first day and limped blearily to the window, peering through the blind. And there he was below me, stretching out his hamstrings while talking to a blonde girl with a ponytail; she was clad in matching blue Lycra so tight I could pretty much work out what she’d had for breakfast. They looked like two Olympians missing a bobsleigh.

I stood back from the window in case he looked up and saw me, and within a minute, they were gone again, jogging down the road, backs erect, legs pumping, like a pair of glossy turquoise carriage ponies.

Two days later I was getting dressed when I heard them. Patrick was saying something loudly about carb-loading, and this time the girl flicked a suspicious glance towards my house, as if she were wondering why they had stopped in exactly the same place twice.

On the third day I was in the front room with Granddad when they arrived. ‘We should practise sprints,’ Patrick was saying loudly. ‘Tell you what, you go to the third lamppost and back and I’ll time you. Two-minute intervals. Go!’

Granddad rolled his eyes meaningfully.

‘Has he been doing this the whole time I’ve been back?’

Granddad’s eyes rolled pretty much into the back of his head.

I watched through the net curtains as Patrick stood, eyes fixed on his stopwatch, his best side presented to my window. He was wearing a black fleece zip-up top and matching Lycra shorts, and as he stood, a few feet the other side of the curtain, I was able to gaze at him, quietly amazed that this was someone I had been sure, for so long, I loved.

‘Keep going!’ he yelled, looking up from the stopwatch. And, like an obedient gun dog, the girl touched the lamppost beside him and bolted away again. ‘Forty-two point three eight seconds,’ he said approvingly, when she returned, panting. ‘I reckon you could shave another point five of a second off that.’

‘That’s for your benefit,’ said my mother, who had walked in bearing two mugs.

‘I did wonder.’

‘His mother asked me in the supermarket were you back and I said you were. Don’t look at me like that – I could hardly lie to the woman.’ She nodded towards the window. ‘That one’s had her boobs done. They’re the talk of Stortfold. Apparently you could rest two cups of tea on them.’ She stood beside me for a moment. ‘You know they’re engaged?’

I waited for the pang, but it was so mild it could have been wind. ‘They look … well suited.’

My mother stood there for a moment, watching him. ‘He’s not a bad sort, Lou. You just … changed.’ She handed me a mug and turned away.

Finally, on the morning he stopped to do press-ups on the pavement outside the house, I opened the front door and stepped out. I leaned against the porch, my arms folded across my chest, watching until he looked up. ‘I wouldn’t stop there for too long. Next door’s dog is a bit partial to that bit of pavement.’

‘Lou!’ he exclaimed, as if I was the very last person he expected to see standing outside my own house, which he had visited several times a week for the seven years we had been together. ‘Well … I’m surprised to see you back. I thought you were off to conquer the big wide world!’

His fiancée, who was doing press-ups beside him, looked up, then back down at the pavement. It might have been my imagination, but her buttocks might have clenched even more tightly. Up, down, she bobbed furiously. Up and down. I found myself worrying slightly for the welfare of her new bosom.

He bounced to his feet. ‘This is Caroline, my fiancée.’ He kept his eyes on me, perhaps waiting for some kind of reaction. ‘We’re training for the next Ironman. We’ve done two together already.’

‘How … romantic,’ I said.

‘Well, Caroline and I feel it’s good to do things together,’ he said.

‘So I see,’ I replied. ‘And his and hers turquoise Lycra!’

‘Oh. Yeah. Team colour.’

There was a short silence.

I gave a little air punch. ‘Go, team!’

Caroline sprang to her feet and began to stretch out her thigh muscles, folding her leg behind her like a stork. She nodded towards me, the least civility she could reasonably get away with.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well. A saline-drip diet will do that to you.’

‘I heard you had an … accident.’ He cocked his head sideways, sympathetically.

‘News travels fast.’

‘Still. I’m glad you’re okay.’ He sniffed, looked down the road. ‘It must have been hard for you this past year. You know. Doing what you did and all.’

And there it was. I tried to keep control of my breathing. Caroline resolutely refused to look at me, extending her leg in a hamstring stretch. Then, ‘Anyway … congratulations on the marriage.’

He surveyed his future wife proudly, lost in admiration of her sinewy leg. ‘Well, it’s like they say – you just know when you know.’ He gave me a faux-apologetic smile. And that was what finished me off.

‘I’m sure you did. And I guess you’ve got plenty put aside to pay for the wedding – they’re not cheap, are they?’

They both looked at me.

‘What with selling my story to the newspapers. What did they pay you, Pat? A couple of thousand? Treena never could find out the exact figure. Still, Will’s death should be good for a few matching Lycra onesies, right?’

The way Caroline’s face shot towards his told me this was one particular part of Patrick’s history that he had not yet got round to sharing.

He stared at me, two pinpricks of colour bleeding onto his face. ‘That was nothing to do with me.’

‘Of course not. Nice to see you, anyway, Pat. Good luck with the wedding, Caroline! I’m sure you’ll be the … firmest bride around.’ I turned and walked slowly back inside. I closed the door, resting against it, heart thumping, until I could be sure that they had finally jogged on.

‘Arse,’ said Granddad, as I limped back into the living room. And again, glancing dismissively at the window: ‘Arse.’ Then he chuckled.

I stared at him. And, completely unexpectedly, I found I had started to laugh, for the first time in as long as I could remember.

‘So did you decide what you’re going to do? When you’re better?’

I was lying on my bed. Treena was calling from college, while she waited for Thomas to come out of his football club. I stared up at the ceiling, on which Thomas had stuck a whole galaxy of Day-glo stickers, which, apparently, nobody could remove without bringing half the ceiling with them. ‘Not really.’

‘You’ve got to do something. You can’t sit around here on your backside for all eternity.’

‘I won’t sit on my backside. Besides, my hip still hurts. The physio said I’m better off lying down.’

‘Mum and Dad are wondering what you’re going to do. There are no jobs in Stortfold.’

‘I do know that.’

‘But you’re drifting. You don’t seem to be interested in anything.’

‘Treen, I just fell off a building. I’m recuperating.’

‘And before that you were wafting around travelling. And then you were working in a bar until you knew what you wanted to do. You’ll have to sort your head out at some point. If you’re not going back to school, you have to figure out what it is you’re actually going to do with your life.

‘I’m just saying. Anyway, if you’re going to stay in Stortfold, you need to rent out that flat. Mum and Dad can’t support you for ever.’

‘This from the woman who has been supported by the Bank of Mum and Dad for the past eight years.’

‘I’m in full-time education. That’s different. So, anyway, I went through your bank statements while you were in hospital, and after I’d paid all your bills, I worked out you’ve got about fifteen hundred pounds left over, including statutory sick pay. By the way, what the hell were all those transatlantic phone calls? They cost you a fortune.’

‘None of your business.’

‘So, I made you a list of estate agents in the area who do rentals. And then I thought maybe we could take another look at college applications. Someone might have dropped out of that course you wanted.’

‘Treen. You’re making me tired.’

‘No point hanging around. You’ll feel better once you’ve got some focus.’

For all it was annoying, there was something reassuring about my sister nagging at me. Nobody else dared to. It was as if my parents still believed there was something very wrong at the heart of me, and that I must be treated with kid gloves. Mum laid my washing, neatly folded, on the end of my bed and cooked me three meals a day, and when I caught her watching me she would smile, an awkward half-smile, which covered everything we didn’t want to say to each other. Dad took me to my physio appointments, sat beside me on the sofa to watch television and didn’t even take the mickey out of me. Treena was the only one who treated me like she always had.

‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’

I turned onto my side, wincing.

‘I do. And don’t.’

‘Well, you know what Will would have said. You had a deal. You can’t back out of it.’

‘Okay. That’s it, Treen. We’re done with this conversation.’

‘Fine. Thom’s just coming out of the changing rooms. See you Friday!’ she said, as if we had just been talking about music, or where she was going on holiday, or soap.

And I was left staring at the ceiling.

You had a deal.

Yeah. And look how that turned out.

For all Treena moaned at me, in the weeks that had passed since I’d come home I had made some progress. I’d stopped using the cane, which had made me feel around eighty-nine years old, and which I had managed to leave behind in almost every place I’d visited since coming home. Most mornings I took Granddad for a walk around the park, at Mum’s request. The doctor had instructed him to take daily exercise but when she had followed him one day she had found he was simply walking to the corner shop to buy a bumper pack of pork scratchings and eating them on a slow walk home.

We walked slowly, both of us with a limp and neither of us with any real place to be.

Mum kept suggesting we do the grounds of the castle ‘for a change of scene’, but I ignored her, and as the gate shut behind us each morning Granddad nodded firmly in the direction of the park. It wasn’t just because this way was shorter, or closer to the betting shop. I think he knew I didn’t want to go back there. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I would ever be ready.

We did two slow circuits of the duck pond, and sat on a bench in the watery spring sunshine to watch the toddlers and their parents feeding the fat ducks, and the teenagers smoking, yelling and whacking each other; the helpless combat of early courtship. We took a stroll over to the bookie’s so Granddad could lose three pounds on an each-way bet on a horse called Wag The Dog. Then, as he crumpled up his betting slip and threw it into the bin, I said I’d buy him a jam doughnut from the supermarket.

‘Oh fat,’ he said, as we stood in the bakery section.

I frowned at him.

‘Oh fat,’ he said, pointing at our doughnuts, and laughed.

‘Oh. Yup. That’s what we’ll tell Mum. Low-fat doughnuts.’

Mum said his new medication made him giggly. I had decided there were worse things that could happen to you.

Granddad was still giggling at his own joke as we queued at the checkout. I kept my head down, digging in my pockets for change. I was thinking about whether I would help Dad with the garden that weekend. So it took me a minute to grasp what was being said in whispers behind me.

‘It’s the guilt. They say she tried to jump off a block of flats.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I know I couldn’t live with myself.’

‘I’m surprised she can show her face around here.’

I stood very still.

‘You know, poor Josie Clark is still mortified. She goes to confession every single week, and you know that woman is as blameless as a line of clean laundry.’

Granddad was pointing at the doughnuts and mouthing at the checkout girl: ‘Oh fat.’

She smiled politely. ‘Eighty-six pence, please.’

‘The Traynors have never been the same.’

‘Well, it destroyed them, didn’t it?’

‘Eighty-six pence, please.’

It took me several seconds to register that the checkout girl was looking at me, waiting. I pulled a handful of coins from my pocket. My fingers fumbled as I tried to sort through them.

‘You’d think Josie wouldn’t dare leave her in sole charge of her granddaddy, wouldn’t you?’

‘You don’t think she’d …’

‘Well, you don’t know. She’s done it the once, after all …’

My cheeks were flaming. My money clattered onto the counter. Granddad was still repeating, ‘OH FAT. OH FAT,’ at the bemused checkout girl, waiting for her to get the joke. I pulled at his sleeve. ‘Come on, Granddad, we have to go.’

‘Oh fat,’ he insisted, again.

‘Right,’ she said, and smiled kindly.

‘Please, Granddad.’ I felt hot and dizzy, as if I might faint. They might still have been talking but my ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t tell.

‘Bye-bye,’ he said.

‘Bye then,’ said the girl.

‘Nice,’ said Granddad, as we emerged into the sunlight. Then, looking at me: ‘Why you crying?’

So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things, had you done it even a degree differently.

My mother had told me that being with Will at the end would affect the rest of my life, and I had thought she meant me, psychologically. I’d thought she meant the guilt I would have to learn to get over, the grief, the insomnia, the weird, inappropriate bursts of anger, the endless internal dialogue with someone who wasn’t even there. But now I saw it wasn’t just me: in a digital age, I would be that person for ever. Even if I managed to wipe the whole thing from my memory, I would never be allowed to disassociate myself from Will’s death. My name would be tied to his for as long as there were pixels and a screen. People would form judgements about me, based on the most cursory knowledge – or sometimes no knowledge at all – and there was nothing I could do about it.

I cut my hair into a bob. I changed the way I dressed, bagging up everything that had ever made me distinctive and stuffing it into the back of my wardrobe. I adopted Treena’s uniform of jeans and a generic T-shirt. Now, when I read newspaper stories about the bank teller who had stolen a fortune, the woman who had killed her child, the sibling who had disappeared, I found myself not shuddering in horror, as I once might have, but wondering instead at the story that hadn’t made it into black and white.

What I felt with them was a weird kinship. I was tainted. The world around me knew it. Worse, I had started to know it too.

I tucked what remained of my dark hair into a beanie, put my sunglasses on, and walked to the library, doing everything I could not to let my limp show, even though it made my jaw ache with concentration.

I made my way past the singing-toddler group in the children’s corner, and the silent genealogy enthusiasts trying to confirm that, yes, they were distantly connected to King Richard III, and sat down in the corner with the files of local papers. It wasn’t hard to locate August 2009. I took a breath, then opened them halfway and flicked through the headlines.

Local Man Ends His Life at Swiss Clinic

Traynor Family Ask for Privacy at ‘Difficult Time’

The 35-year-old son of Steven Traynor, custodian of Stortfold Castle, has ended his life at Dignitas, the controversial centre for assisted suicide. Mr Traynor was left quadriplegic after a traffic accident in 2007. He apparently travelled to the clinic with his family and his carer, Louisa Clark, 27, also from Stortfold.

Police are investigating the circumstances surrounding the death. Sources say they have not ruled out the possibility that a prosecution may arise.

Louisa Clark’s parents, Bernard and Josephine Clark, of Renfrew Road, refused to comment.

Camilla Traynor, a Justice of the Peace, is understood to have stood down from the bench following her son’s suicide. A local source said her position, given the actions of the family, had become ‘untenable’.

And then there it was, Will’s face, looking out from the grainy newspaper photograph. That slightly sardonic smile, the direct gaze. I felt, briefly, winded.

Mr Traynor’s death ends a successful career in the City, where he was known as a ruthless asset stripper, but also as someone with a sure eye for a corporate bargain. His colleagues yesterday lined up to pay tribute to a man they described as

I closed the newspaper. When I could be sure that I had got my face under control, I looked up. Around me the library hummed with quiet industry. The toddlers kept singing, their reedy voices chaotic and meandering, their mothers clapping fondly around them. The librarian behind me was discussing sotto voce, with a colleague, the best way to make Thai curry. The man beside me ran his finger down an ancient electoral roll, murmuring, ‘Fisher, Fitzgibbon, Fitzwilliam …’

I had done nothing. It was more than eighteen months and I had done nothing, bar sell drinks in two different countries and feel sorry for myself. And now, after four weeks back in the house I’d grown up in, I could feel Stortfold reaching out to suck me in, to reassure me that I could be fine here. It would be all right. There might be no great adventures, sure, and a bit of discomfort as people adjusted to my presence again, but there were worse things, right, than to be with your family, loved and secure? Safe?

I looked down at the pile of newspapers in front of me. The most recent front-page headline read:

ROW OVER DISABLED PARKING SPACE IN FRONT OF POST OFFICE

I thought back to Dad, sitting on my hospital bed, looking in vain for a report of an extraordinary accident.

I failed you, Will. I failed you in every way possible.

You could hear the shouting all the way up the street when I finally arrived home. As I opened the door my ears were filled with the sound of Thomas wailing. My sister was scolding him, her finger wagging, in the corner of the living room. Mum was leaning over Granddad with a washing-up bowl of water and a scouring pad, while Granddad politely batted her away.

‘What’s going on?’

Mum moved to the side and I saw Granddad’s face clearly for the first time. He was sporting a new set of jet black eyebrows and a thick black slightly uneven moustache.

‘Permanent pen,’ said Mum. ‘From now on nobody is to leave Granddad napping in the same room as Thomas.’

‘You have to stop drawing on things,’ Treena was yelling. ‘Paper only, okay? Not walls. Not faces. Not Mrs Reynolds’s dog. Not my pants.’

‘I was doing you days of the week!’

‘I don’t need days-of-the-week pants!’ she shouted. ‘And if I did I would spell Wednesday correctly!’

‘Don’t scold him, Treen,’ said Mum, leaning back to see if she’d had any effect. ‘It could be a lot worse.’

In our little house, Dad’s footsteps coming down the stairs sounded like a particularly emphatic roll of thunder. He barrelled into the front room, his shoulders hunched in frustration, his hair standing up on one side. ‘Can’t a man get a nap in his own house on his day off? This place is like a ruddy madhouse.’

We all stopped and stared at him.

‘What? What did I say?’

‘Bernard –’

‘Ah, come on. Our Lou doesn’t think I mean her –’

‘Oh, my sweet Lord.’ Mum’s hand flew to her face.

My sister had started to push Thomas out of the room. ‘Oh, boy,’ she hissed. ‘Thomas, you’d better get out of here right now. Because I swear when your grandpa gets hold of you –’

‘What?’ Dad frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’

Granddad barked a laugh. He held up a shaking finger.

It was almost magnificent. Thomas had coloured in the whole of Dad’s face with blue marker pen. His eyes emerged like two gooseberries from a sea of cobalt blue. ‘What?’

Thomas’s voice, as he disappeared down the corridor, was a wail of protest. ‘We were watching Avatar! He said he wouldn’t mind being an avatar!’

Dad’s eyes widened. He strode to the mirror over the mantelpiece.

There was a brief silence. ‘Oh, my God.’

‘Bernard, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.’

‘He’s turned me bloody blue, Josie. I think I’m entitled to take the Lord’s name to Butlins in a flipping wheelbarrow. Is this permanent pen? THOMMO? IS THIS PERMANENT PEN?’

‘We’ll get it off, Dad.’ My sister closed the door to the garden behind her. Beyond it you could just make out Thomas’s wailing.

‘I’m meant to be overseeing the new fencing at the castle tomorrow. I have contractors coming. How the hell am I meant to deal with contractors if I’m blue?’ Dad spat on his hand and started to rub at his face. The faintest smudging appeared, but mostly seemed to spread onto his palm. ‘It’s not coming off. Josie, it’s not coming off!’

Mum shifted her attention from Granddad and set about Dad with the scouring pad. ‘Just stay still, Bernard. I’m doing what I can.’

Treena went for her laptop bag. ‘I’ll go on the internet. I’m sure there’s something. Toothpaste or nail-polish remover or bleach or –’

‘You are not putting bleach on my ruddy face!’ Dad roared. Granddad, with his new pirate moustache, sat giggling in the corner of the room.

I began to edge past them.

Mum was holding Dad’s face with her left hand as she scrubbed. She turned, as if she’d only just seen me. ‘Lou! I didn’t ask – are you okay, love? Did you have a nice walk?’ Everyone stopped abruptly to smile at me; a smile that said, Everything’s okay here, Lou. You don’t have to worry. I hated that smile.

‘Fine.’

It was the answer they all wanted. Mum turned to Dad. ‘That’s grand. Isn’t it grand, Bernard?’

‘It is. Great news.’

‘If you sort out your whites, love, I’ll pop them in the wash with Daddy’s later.’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘don’t bother. I’ve been thinking. It’s time for me to go home.’

Nobody spoke. Mum glanced at Dad. Granddad let out another little giggle and clamped his hand over his mouth.

‘Fair enough,’ said Dad, with as much dignity as a middle-aged, blueberry-coloured man could muster. ‘But if you go back to that flat, Louisa, you go on one condition …’