Ninepins (40 page)

‘Tough on Willow, whatever happens.'

‘Bloody tough,' he agreed.

He tucked into his meringue, then, so she attacked hers, too, and conversation was rendered impossible for a time by collapsing mouthfuls of icing sugar and whipped cream. They both resurfaced approximately together, and began to speak at the same time.

‘Vince – '

‘Laura – '

‘No, you go,' she said, smiling.

He looked a little awkward – something she was unaccustomed to seeing in him – and he sounded deadly earnest. ‘I was going to say, that I hope you'll forgive me if I haven't always told you everything there was to know about Willow. But also, I hope you'll believe me when I say there were things I didn't always know.'

These seemed to be important matters, important to him, as they would have been important once to her. She took the time to ponder what he'd said. But she found she wanted to tell him that it didn't matter any more; that nothing did, nothing that was done and gone.
We're here now, we're here together, and that's all that counts
. But she could never say it, or make him understand it if she did, so instead she caught his hand and held it.

‘And you?' he prompted, after a moment. ‘What were you going to say?'

‘Actually, I was going to ask you something about Willow.' How strange, the closeness of the tracks on which their thoughts had been running.

‘Ask.'

‘It's the thing that has always bothered me about her, I suppose. The arson. When she was thirteen, and set that garage on fire. It doesn't seem – I don't know, I guess I've just never been able to understand why she should have done it. Willow is so … controlled. She's never seemed to me to have that wildness in her.'

He nodded slowly. ‘No.'

‘What I've been wondering – especially since, you know, Friday night …' She took a breath, let it out again. ‘I've been wondering if maybe it wasn't her – if it wasn't really Willow who set fire to the garage, but Marianne. I thought maybe Willow might have known about it and taken the blame for it to protect her mother. Crazy, I know. But she knew Marianne was fragile. She'd probably always protected her, in her own way – in whatever way she could. And kids can do crazy things in defence of a parent, can't they? Stupid things.' What was it Vince had said?
Never underestimate the resource of a mother in shielding her child
. So why not the other way round? ‘Might it have happened that way?'

Vince did not reply. She slid her hand more closely into his. ‘What do you think? What do you believe really happened?

With his free hand he was playing with his wine glass, twisting it round on the edge of the base, and she wondered whether there would be a withdrawal, even now.

But at last he said simply, ‘I don't know. I've never known. She's never talked about that day. She's told me many things about her past, but never that.'

So that was it? A dead end. She had finally asked him, and he was ready to tell her, and there was nothing to tell?

‘But – ' he began, and stopped.

She squeezed his fingers. ‘Go on.'

‘Well,' he said slowly, ‘she's never told me herself, not explicitly, but I think I know. Just recently, these past few months, I think I've worked it out. The thing is, it can't have been easy, living with a severely bipolar mother.'

Laura, who knew this already, nodded and tried not to let her impatience show.

‘She didn't get a lot of looking after, as a kid – or if she did it was patchy, inconsistent. The last few years, when she was eleven, twelve, she was the one doing most of the looking after.'

Beth's age, thought Laura.

‘It must have crossed her mind, as she grew older, that some kids got taken away. That parents had their kids removed, and placed in foster care. Marianne was undiagnosed, as I mentioned before. They were always on the move. But it wouldn't have been hard for Willow to say something to somebody. To raise the alarm and ask for help.'

‘But she didn't,' said Laura slowly, beginning to see where he was heading. ‘She never spoke to anyone about Marianne.'

‘Right. I think this was her way out. I think setting fire to an empty garage was a way of getting herself taken into care without its being her mother's fault.'

She nodded again, eager now. ‘It's admirable, when you think about it – admirable in a crazy, cockeyed way – the same cockeyed, admirable craziness as in my version. A child's muddle-headed plan for taking the guilt upon herself, to avoid betraying a parent.'

‘Or perhaps,' he said, ‘for taking on one kind of guilt in order to escape another.'

Outside the window, the sky had darkened, casting the table between them in a softer, muted light. They both looked up at the world outside as if they had forgotten it was there.

‘Looks as if the weather's going to break,' said Vince. ‘Come on.'

He led her by the hand, through the hall and out on to the top of the dyke. A breeze, the first of any consequence for days, was skimming in across the fields, lifting the tired grasses and snatching at Laura's hair. The skylarks, whose babble had been a ceaseless soundtrack to the heat, seemed to sense the change and fell silent. Then, as fast as it had risen, the breeze fell away, and the entire flat, earthbound world seemed to hold its breath in anticipation. Laura waited for the rumble of thunder, for the first wide-spaced, fat, fizzing drops that would herald the expected torrential downpour. But when it came the rain crept in by stealth, and it was fine and gentle, misting the air and hazing the bare skin of their arms and necks and faces. It dappled the mud and low water of the lode in soft recurring patterns and, behind them in the garden, it shed its soothing balm on the four blackened walls of the pumphouse, and the smoking wound between.

From up the concrete steps came the sound of voices, Beth's and Willow's, then running footsteps, and the girls appeared, linked arm in arm, laughing and streaked with rain. The four of them turned together and walked back into the house. And when they had gone, there were only the swallows, swooping to trap the evening's insects over the slow procession of the lode.