Semi-Sweet (29 page)

“I hope you’re not thinking about going back to America,” her mother said quickly. “Daddy and I wouldn’t like that at all.
Would we?” she demanded, turning to her husband.

“No,” he said through a mouthful of roast potato.

Adam smiled to himself. They probably thought she’d get married again the minute she set foot on American soil.

“You picked up the accent,” their father said to Nora.

“I did, didn’t I?” Nora helped herself to another spoonful of garden peas. “Ma, this lunch is amazing—I forgot how much I
missed your roast lamb.”

“Three hours in the oven, a hundred and sixty,” her mother said. “Forget twenty minutes to the pound, it’d come out half raw.
Three hours, isn’t that what I always do?” she asked her husband.

“Three hours,” he said, forking up more lamb.

“And Adam, what’s your news?” their mother asked. “Any nice young lady?”

“No, Ma,” Adam said. “I’m between nice young ladies right now. But I’m keeping an eye open.”

Every time he saw her, she asked. He presumed that the question was programmed into every woman who gave birth to a son. He
debated briefly telling them about the clarinet but then decided to wait until he’d at least gotten the lessons set up.

His mother sighed. “I’ll never be a grandmother,” she said, “with the pair of you. Nora keeps getting divorced, and you’re
doing nothing at all. I can’t for the life of me see why you and Hannah wouldn’t get together and have done with it.”

“Yes, bro, I think you and Hannah would be perfect for each other,” Nora put in, grinning.

“Ma, you’re far too young to be thinking like that,” Adam said, shooting his sister another dark look as he tried to calculate
his mother’s age. Sixty-three or thereabouts. “There’s lots of time.”

“There is not lots of time. Everyone your age is married or getting engaged. I’m the only one I know with no grandchildren.
There’ll be nobody left to choose from if you wait much longer.”

“True…I’ll set my mind to it. Would I put an ad in the paper, d’you think?”

As his mother sighed exasperatedly, Adam wondered what Vivienne’s home was like. He imagined a small cottage—a single woman’s
house, he thought firmly—filled with things made of china and flowers in vases. Rugs in muted colors on the floors and maybe
a wall hanging of birds that she’d made herself.

A small room where she gave her lessons, her clarinet on a polished wooden table next to a music stand. Narrow attic stairs
to her bedroom, the bed covered with a white crocheted spread.

“How’s Hannah’s shop doing?” his father asked.

“Good,” he said, relieved at the change of subject. “She’s kept busy, but it’s going well. She’s taken on a part-time assistant.”

“We must take a trip up to see it,” his mother said, turning to her husband again. “Mustn’t we?”

“Oh, we must, sometime soon.”

A dreadful squawking erupted just then outside the back door, causing them to abandon the roast lamb. They rushed out to find
the hysterical chickens being chased joyfully around the yard by Kirby, who’d somehow managed to wriggle free from his rope.

He was reattached more firmly to the yard gate, well out of reach of the fowls, who soon recovered from their fright and began
pecking the ground again.

“He’s full of energy,” their father said, regarding the dog sternly.

“I might take him for a bit of a walk after lunch,” Adam replied. “Tire him out.”

They went back inside and followed the lamb with tea and fruitcake, and then their father disappeared to listen to the second
half of a football match on the radio, and Nora and her mother tackled the washing-up while Adam escaped with his dog and
strolled along country roads for an hour.

“God, nothing changes there,” Nora said on the ride home, Adam steering the car carefully between the potholes that lined
the laneway to their parents’ house.

“No, but it suits them.” He longed suddenly for that life, the comfortable coexistence with the person you chose, and who
chose you.

Nora yawned. “The boredom of it, though. Miles from anywhere, nothing going on. I’d slit my wrists. You can have my cake,”
she added. “I’m watching my fabulous figure.” Ma never let any visitor leave without a generous slab of whatever she’d been
baking.

Adam hadn’t mentioned the clarinet to Nora. He could imagine her reaction. It was a daft thing to do—he knew exactly how daft
it was. But there was the hope within him that this daft action, this illogical plan of his, would lead him to where he wanted
to be.

His clarinet should have arrived by next Saturday, and then everything would be in place. He’d intercept Vivienne on her way
out and ask if he might please have a word. He would make every effort not to sound like a crazed stalker.

She couldn’t possibly turn him down. He was only looking for music lessons. Where was the harm in that?

J
ohn Wyatt passed the yellow-fronted shop on the opposite side of the street. He walked half a block, and then he retraced
his steps, crossing the road when he saw a gap in the traffic. He pushed the shop door open and walked in.

The woman behind the counter wasn’t Hannah. It threw him for a second—he hadn’t been expecting that.

“Hi,” she said, smiling.

She was younger, hardly out of her teens. Her skin was pale, her hair tied back. She wore the same apron he’d seen on Hannah,
with wide white and navy stripes overlain with a yellow smiling sun. Her shade of lipstick was too light against her pale
face. Her eyes were the green of the glass marbles he remembered from childhood.

“Hi there,” he said, glancing at the displays under the counter. “I’ll take a couple of cupcakes, please—you can choose.”

“No preferences?” she asked. “With or without nuts? Chocolate chip?”

“Not fussed,” he said. “They’re all good.”

“That’s true.” She selected a peanut butter and a rum-raisin and put them into a small box.

“Hannah not around today?” he asked as he handed her a fiver.

“She’s gone out for a bit—she’ll be back at noon.”

He remembered then, her saying that she’d taken on someone part-time. “Tell her John Wyatt was in, would you? Just to say
hello. Sorry I missed her.”

“I will. Thanks, now.”

“See you.”

At the woodworking store, he handed over the two cupcakes and was thanked and scolded in equal measure by Patsy, who was trying,
as ever, to lose weight. “You’re the devil, John Wyatt, you know that?”

Hannah hadn’t been back to Vintage for the past two Saturdays. She’d seemed pleased to see him the last time, and she’d made
a point of letting him know that she and her companion, whose name John had forgotten, were just friends. But she hadn’t been
back. Wouldn’t she have shown up at the bar again if she’d been at all interested?

She might come this weekend, if the part-time girl remembered to pass on his message. If she thought he still wanted to keep
up the contact, she just might appear.

Alice pulled in three doors up on the other side of the street. There was no sign of the two little boys from the last day,
but the red flowers were still there—or rather their remains, hanging forlornly from the gatepost of number 37. And the curtains
were still closed in the upstairs room.

There was no car outside the house, but maybe the father had gone to work in it, or the mother. Would they be back at work,
barely a month after their only child had been buried? They probably wouldn’t have had a choice—life went on, and bills needed
to be paid.

She wondered if they were married, if they had gotten around to that. She guessed they hadn’t been married when Jason had
come along four years earlier. The sister saying the poem on the altar at the funeral had looked in her teens still; Jason’s
mother probably wasn’t much older.

Two girls in blue school uniforms walked past the car, both heads bent over a mobile phone. A small dog pattered across the
road in front of Alice, sniffing at something on the edge of the far path, lifting a leg briefly against a streetlight before
trotting away rapidly.

A car drove past, coming up behind her unnoticed, making her start. Someone cycled by, whistling. It began to drizzle, settling
silently on the windscreen. A man came out of the house beside number 37 and walked past it buttoning his coat.

She sat for fifty minutes, a magazine open on her lap in case anyone looked at her, in case anyone approached her to know
what she was doing there. The front door of number 37 remained closed; nobody came or went from the house. She thought she
saw a movement once, in the uncurtained upstairs window, but it might have been her imagination, or a trick of the light.

At twenty to four, she started the car and drove back into town.

The dark brown UPS truck stopped outside the house, and Adam watched a man in a matching brown uniform get out, slide open
a side door, and remove a package that didn’t look long enough to house a clarinet. He thought maybe it wasn’t for him, that
it was a delivery for a different house, but then the man turned in to the driveway and walked up the path.

Adam waited until the doorbell rang. He got up, walked downstairs, and opened the front door. “Morning.”

“How do?” The man looked at the label on the package. “Adam O’Connor?”

“That’s me.” The man handed him the clipboard, and Adam signed along the dotted line. “Thanks.”

He brought the package into the sitting room, where Kirby was dozing. “Look what I got,” he said, tearing off the paper to
reveal a black case. He opened it and saw that it was lined with dark blue velvet, and contained five pieces of clarinet.

He took his phone from his pocket and called Hannah.

“It’s here,” he said.

“What is?”

“The clarinet.”

“Well? What’s it like?”

“It’s in bits.”

“So you have to put it together. Try not to break it.”

“Hang on, I’ll call you back.”

Ten minutes later, when he had finally figured out how to assemble it, he put the clarinet’s mouthpiece between his lips and
blew.

A low sound squawked out, like the honk of a seal. Kirby pricked his ears.

Adam called Hannah again. “Listen,” he said. He laid the phone on the arm of the couch and pressed the keys one by one, blowing
furiously, honking and squeaking in equal measure. Kirby lifted his head and regarded Adam, ears still cocked.

He lifted the phone, breathless. “What do you think?”

“Brilliant,” she said. “You don’t need lessons at all. Is Kirby there?”

“Yes.”

“Put him out, or I’m reporting you to the animal-welfare people.”

“Good-bye,” he said, and hung up.

He raised the clarinet to his lips again and pressed keys at random, blowing as forcefully as he could manage. Midway through
this performance, Kirby shuffled to his feet, padded to the sitting-room door, and sat looking pointedly at it.

In less than a minute, Adam was completely out of breath. He lowered the clarinet and waited for the feeling of light-headedness
to pass. “It’s okay,” he told Kirby, “I won’t be doing any more of that for a while.”

He had a long way to go. Maybe he should have started with a tin whistle.

“I’m worried about Alice,” Geraldine said, folding her glasses.

Stephen entered
“biscuit”
using a triple-word square, and his total shot up to 215. “You’re worried? Why?”

“She’s not herself.” Geraldine slid the glasses into their soft tartan case. “She seems to have no interest in the shop anymore.
Last week we made less than three hundred—I don’t ever remember a week that bad—and it didn’t seem to knock a feather out
of her.”

Stephen tried to find a word that contained
l
,
x
, two
a
’s, and a
t
. “Don’t forget, we’re in a recession. All businesses are suffering.”

Geraldine unplugged the television. “It’s not that, though—this is different. I’m really wondering if there’s some kind of
boycott going on.”

Stephen gave up and tagged
“axl”
onto the
e
of
“fable,”
which earned him a pathetic eleven points. “Hardly a boycott. Surely everyone appreciates that the accident wasn’t Alice’s
fault—what would be the point in taking it out on her?”

Geraldine bundled the newspaper sections on the coffee table into a neat pile. “You’d be surprised. I’d swear Sheila Barrett
crossed the street when she spotted me yesterday—she never misses the new stock, and there hasn’t been a sign of her lately.”
She straightened the rug in front of the fire with her foot. “And another thing—Alice has started disappearing in the middle
of the day.”

“Disappearing?”

“Well, she doesn’t say where she’s going, just that she has things to do, very vague. She was gone for over two hours yesterday.
Normally she just does the weekly run to the wholesalers or takes half an hour around the town now and again.”

“She’s got a lot on her mind,” Stephen said, eyeing the
“excel”
his virtual opponent, Stanley, had just entered.

“She certainly has—half the time she doesn’t seem to hear me when I talk to her.” Geraldine walked to the door with her newspaper
bundle. “Will I make tea for you?”

“I might be another while,” Stephen said, determined not to let Stanley, described only as adept, beat him. “Have your own,
and I’ll be up when I finish this.”

In the kitchen Geraldine poured water into the kettle and put a tea bag into her cup. No point in a pot for just one. She
took a single ginger nut from the pack and left the rest in the press.

If you need to cut my hours, that’s okay,
she’d said to Alice.
Just while things are slow.
She and Stephen would manage fine—if she had no income at all, they’d manage on what he made. But Alice had shaken her head
and said,
Ah no, we needn’t do that.

She must be losing money now, must be out of pocket. Ridiculous for Geraldine to be there all the time, when some days only
half a dozen customers came in. Some days they didn’t sell a single pair of shoes.

How’s Tom doing?
she’d asked a couple of times since the accident, and Alice had said,
He’s fine,
or
Bearing up,
in the kind of tight voice that had kept Geraldine from saying any more.

Come to dinner this evening,
she’d suggested more than once,
you and Tom. Four is as easy to cook for as two.
But Alice had shaken her head and found an excuse each time, and Geraldine had eventually given up.

The kettle boiled, and she made tea and brought it upstairs with her biscuit. Just as well she had John Grisham to distract
her when she went to bed.

“She’s getting up,” Hannah said. “Head her off at the pass.”

Adam turned and moved swiftly through the tables of drinkers, advancing diagonally toward the back door. He reached it as
Vivienne approached from the opposite direction, clarinet clutched to her chest. Tonight she wore a long black dress with
sleeves to her elbows and black suede ankle boots.