Ninepins (25 page)

His ability to get round her was galling, sometimes, even while it was handy. ‘Wash your hands first, then,' she said.

Simon could not be persuaded to stay for a cup of tea, pleading the requirement of his presence at home for goodnight tuckings-in; but she was irked by his grin as he told her at the door, ‘I'd only be in the way here.'

They each armed themselves with a quarter of the dough and began to knock it into shape. The mixture seemed to Laura too sticky; hers came up in strings when she tried to knead it and adhered to the board in spite of the liberal application of flour. Then, when she began to pull it out flat, it stretched unevenly and tore to holes. The others all seemed to be managing all right, so it must just be her. What was wrong with her tonight?

Once it was on the oiled baking tray, she pressed closed the rents with her fingers, disguising her botched handiwork with tomato and mushrooms. Vince opened his wine: an Italian name she didn't recognise, red, full-bodied and good. She emptied her glass more quickly than was sensible, and found it refilled.

By the time the kitchen warmed to the aroma of oregano and melting cheese, she was starting to relax. Beth was having fun, which was, after all, the object of the exercise. If the shadow of Dougie had haunted her weekend at Simon's, she showed no sign of it now as she shouted suggestions for novel pizza toppings.

‘Pepperoni, pea and prune,' she squealed, wrinkling her nose. Beth abhorred prunes.

‘The Lancastriana,' countered Vince. ‘Black pudding and fried egg.'

‘Anchovy and custard. That would be so gross.'

‘Or how about eel? The
Fen
eziana. For every pizza sold, 25p will be donated to the Elswell in Peril fund, for improvements in land drainage.'

Willow, Laura noticed, wasn't joining in, though she watched the two of them closely. And when the pizzas were decreed to be done and the trays lifted steaming from the oven and on to the table, three were dismembered and three-quarters dispatched before hers missed more than a slice. And as soon as Beth sat back in her chair and declared herself ‘totally stuffed', Willow took hold of her arm.

‘C'mon, let's go upstairs.'

To her credit, Beth looked doubtfully at her mother, though any sense of obligation was apparently limited to practicalities. ‘What about the washing up?' she asked.

Beth had spent increasing hours in the spare bedroom over the past two weeks. But Laura resolved to say nothing; what was there she could say?

‘Don't worry about the dishes. You two go.' It was only twenty to nine.

Vince replenished her glass with a roll of the eyes. ‘Kids.'

‘Perhaps I'll make a start …'

But as she began to shuffle the remains of pizza on to a single baking tray, he trapped her hand and held it still. ‘Later. Just sit. Drink.'

She did as she was told, and presently the warmth of the food and the glow of the wine seeped up to flood her with lassitude and she lost all thought of clearing up. For some time, she allowed Vince to talk, and for once he seemed very willing to do so, though not about his work – never about that. He related some story about a social worker friend of his up at King's Lynn who kept a fishing boat there. It had been his father's, and he still went out in it at weekends. He'd had to let go of the family fish shed when his father died and no longer had an outlet for his catch, so had developed the habit of pressing his clients to gifts of mackerel, bass and pollack.

‘We had a lad in the office this week who'd turned up at Social Services in Lynn. A runaway. One of ours, so they sent him back down to us. I knew it must have been Sam who'd seen him there. The lad was giving off a stink of fish. When someone finally asked about it, he produced a pair of dabs from his pocket, wrapped in greaseproof paper.'

Laura laughed, and more than merely dutifully, though her mind was running on other tracks.

‘Next time I come I'll bring supper, shall I? I can get Sam to look out four nice fat sea bream.'

‘That would be nice. Beth likes fish. Anything, as long it doesn't have tentacles.' Then she took a slug of wine and said, ‘Vince, I'm worried about her again.'

What is it this time?
If he was thinking it, he gave no outward indication. But, poor man, he must be fed up of her bending his ear about Beth.

‘I think there are some girls at school giving her a hard time.'
Bullying
, she almost said, but the word seemed too portentous.

He surveyed her across the table and said nothing.

‘It's these girls that she was friends with, and now they've fallen out and I think they're being nasty to her about it.'

His eyes narrowed. ‘The shoplifters?'

She nodded. ‘The girls who put her up to it, yes.'

‘And what kind of thing are they doing?'

‘I'm not exactly sure. About what's going on at school, I mean. Beth never says anything. Not to me. I've tried, but asking makes it worse. She just clams up.'

There she lapsed into silence, so that he had to prompt her. ‘So, then …?'

‘Well, I saw something on the computer. Or rather, I didn't actually see it, not to read, but I knew it was there, and I'm sure it won't have been the first or only time, not by Beth's reaction.'

‘On the computer?'

‘Yes. She was on Facebook, and there was a message there. A ‘‘wall post'' is what she called it, which I gather means it's public, and all her friends could see it as well.'

He didn't need to nod; his frown was confirmation. ‘But you don't know what was said – what's being said?'

Miserably, she shook her head. ‘I only know she was really upset.'

‘Poor old Beth,' he said, and she felt a moment of anger, or at least of disappointment. Was that all he had to offer?

‘The thing is, I wonder if I should say something – do something.'

‘Complain to the moderators, you mean?' She must have looked blank, because he added, ‘Networking sites, chat rooms, they all have rules against posting abuse.'

Impatient, she shrugged. ‘Beth deleted it.'

‘But if these girls are going to post more messages – '

‘It's not that. It's not Facebook, not really – or not only that. I mean, it won't be just the computer, will it? I'm worried they're being spiteful to her in other ways, in other places. At school, for instance.' In school or outside school, spreading their poison; talking or texting, to her or about her; jeering, telling hurtful lies. ‘I suppose I was wondering if I should tell her form teacher.'

After a pause, he said quietly, ‘What does Beth think?'

She looked at him, with a feeling of slipping, of the ground falling away. ‘She wants me to leave it alone, to keep out of it. At least that's what she says. But I can't just do nothing, can I?'

That's what she'd done last time, over the stolen chocolate bars. She hadn't gone marching into school with her denunciations; she'd kept Beth's confidence and not named names. And precious good it had done. Weren't you supposed to stand up to bullies?

But Vince was unmoved. He reached for the wine bottle and measured out the final inch between their two glasses.

‘In the end,' he said, ‘it's down to Beth. You can't fight her battles for her.'

There was some truth in it, Laura supposed as she gazed at him helplessly, yet there was surely an irony in his saying it. Wasn't that what he did all the time at work, fight kids' battles for them? It was practically his job description.

Letting her thoughts drift into absence, she broke off an edge of pizza, encrusted with cheese and a final olive. She took a bite but it was dry as polystyrene.

‘Shall I open another bottle?' She rose, collecting up, now, the baking trays and plates. ‘There's some red in the corner cupboard, though I'm sure it's not as nice as yours. Just cheap supermarket plonk.'

He made polite, demurring noises and tossed back the remnant in his glass. When she'd recovered the corkscrew from the washing up bowl, given it a wipe and uncorked the Côtes du Rhône, she poured them both a generous helping. She was about to sit down again when he stood up.

‘Let's go outside.'

‘Outdoors?' It had been close to freezing all day.

‘Do you mind? Just for a breath of air.' He laughed. ‘Stupid habit of mine. I used to smoke, and I miss it. At work I go and stand out the back by the bins every day for five minutes in the rain.'

This, she assumed, could not be true, but he seemed to be serious. He was already half way down the hall, taking his wine glass with him. She took hers and followed.

It wasn't as cold as she'd supposed, not as cold as when she'd made him walk by the Hundred Foot Drain. After nightfall, cloud had crept across, blotting out the stars and drawing the temperature up by a few degrees. There was certainly no frost: the chill had a damper, blunt-edged feel. It was hard to make out anything beyond the semicircle of electric light cast by the open front door. She wrapped her arms around her body and wished her wine were cocoa.

Vince had taken a few steps along the top of the dyke. The darkness, which had seemed as dense as bitumen, thinned to show her his silhouette. She moved forward and stood beside him, squinting the way he was looking, across the lode and into nothing.

He didn't move or speak, and presently she found herself asking, ‘How's Marianne?'

He turned a fraction. ‘All right, I think. Back on her pills.'

There was nothing more she could think to say – not about the mother, not directly. But there were things she wanted to know.

‘Vince, do you mind if I ask you about bipolar disorder? I talked to Willow, and she mentioned that might be the issue, with Marianne.' It was manic depression – she knew that much, of course, and she'd looked it up to find out more. But she hadn't found an answer to the doubt that dogged her. ‘Is it hereditary? Might Willow …?' She let her question drift, thinking of the silences, which might be troubled, unhappy or merely self-absorbed; the long days in the spare bedroom, alone.

Vince replied from the textbook. ‘It's not that simple. The medics talk in terms of percentage risks of developing a given condition. Of increased percentage risks.'

Frustrated, she jabbed her glass at him in the air. ‘But what do you think?'

There was a brief pause, and then he said quietly, ‘Listen.'

‘To what?' Was this another diversion? She could hear nothing: no trace of voices from the spare room window, no slur from the sluggish lode, no breath of wind, no lone night bird.

‘Just listen.'

‘I can't hear anything.'

‘Exactly.' Through the dark, she could see his half smile. ‘The fens,' he said. ‘You live here in this silence. Just look at it – listen to it. You live here and you ask me, is it nature or nurture? Depression, madness, are they in-bred or a factor of the environment?'

Laura gazed at him, a little helpless.

‘More than a little of both, out here, I'd think. Wouldn't you?' He laughed, and she heard it as at a distance, strange and jarring. Perhaps it was the wine making her dull, but she could see no cause for humour in it. ‘Come on. Let's go back inside.'

In the kitchen, they sat down again at the table on opposite sides of the litter of crumbs. It was still early, so why did she feel so tired?

‘What about Marianne, then?' She knew she should drop it. She knew she was getting nowhere, only banging her head against a closed door. She knew the answer already. Bloody confidentiality.

‘What about her?' he said, and sipped his wine.

‘What's the prognosis? Will she ever – ' it sounded so trite ‘ – get better?'

Vince shrugged. ‘I'm not a psychiatrist.'

‘But,' she persisted, ‘you'll have seen her medical files, or at least spoken to her doctors. You must liaise.'

‘Naturally.'

‘And? Is she ever likely to improve? Or will she always be that way?'

He eyed her levelly. ‘I'm really not in a position to say.'

So there it was. The same stone wall, the same professional cold shoulder he'd shown her in the Fisherman's Arms, that first time they went for a drink, back before Christmas. Still keeping her at the same stupid, superior distance.

Something of her irritation must have shown in her face, because he unbent a degree or two, conceding, ‘She hasn't always been so acute. She had spells, I gather, when Willow was younger, when things were at least less volatile. More manageable. And she manages now, too, when she takes her medication.'

Flatter
, remembered Laura.
Emptied out
. ‘So she's safe where she is now?'

‘And by ‘‘safe'' you mean secure, I assume. Not liable to go walkabout again.' He was smiling; he could be infuriating with his judgments about her – all the more so when, as this time, he struck close to the truth. ‘Look, don't worry. I'm sure when they moved her to Cambridge, they were well aware that Willow is in a placement nearby.'

‘
Placement?
' The word came out dangerously high; she struggled to contain a tide of anger. ‘So that's what we are, is it, Beth and I? A placement.'

She saw something cross his face, some flicker of self-consciousness – Vince, who was never known to doubt. But her blood was up; she pressed on furiously.

‘I'm not some foster carer you're liaising with, Vince. This isn't a placement. This is our home you're talking about, Beth's and mine. This is our lives.'

If she expected capitulation or apology, she had misjudged him. ‘Of course. I know that. But Willow is still my client, and as such she has to come first. My duty to her – '

‘Your duty, always your bloody duty. What about Beth and me? Where do we fit in? What's your professional duty there?'