Separate Beds (34 page)

Jake entertained an unpleasant vision of turnips and swedes, of battling slugs and foxes. ‘Not like you, Dad.’

Tom dropped his arm and Jake sensed embarrassment. ‘Helps the exchequer.’

‘Mum won’t like the shrubs being dug up.’

‘That’s half the fun,’ confessed Tom.

‘I’ll look at the fork later,’ said Jake, heading out to check on Maisie.

Tom called after him. ‘You’re not to torture yourself. OK?’

Despite its frailties, the dog was a shrewd and cunning survivalist. Annie marvelled at the instinct that told him with whom to throw in his lot. A couple of forays in the park where he had been (almost certainly) abandoned, and he had sniffed out a weak point in Hermione (which the majority would never have spotted) and followed her with the doggedness of the superdog.

But on arrival at number twenty-two, his courage and resourcefulness had taken a rain-check. Hermione having extracted him from her room, he was relegated by Annie to the downstairs cloakroom, where he sat and shivered. But maybe that was strategy too.

With the family gathered for supper, Annie coaxed him out. Flanks pumping, he advanced warily into the kitchen. ‘Come on,’ she said.

Like a trusting child, he looked up at her – innocent, at bay, uncertain of his life. The little body seemed brittle and starved, and his coat was badly in need of attention. Annie swooped down and picked him up. At first he remained rigid. Then, responding to the whispered, ‘It’s OK’, he relaxed. Annie cradled him and he settled his head on her arm. Too late, she realized this was a mistake: she would struggle to consign him to the cages and concrete floors of the dog pound.

She carried him into the kitchen and placed him on a cushion. ‘I want you all to know that this is not a good idea.’

‘See what I’ve got.’ Emily rummaged in her bag and produced a tin of upmarket dog food. ‘The best.’ She doled out a portion on to a plate.

Jake glanced at the label. ‘That costs more than rump steak.’

It was demolished in seconds. Observing this, Annie asked, ‘Has
anyone
rung the vet to check if someone has been looking for him? Answer: I have. And the local police. And, no, no one has reported him missing.’

Hermione regarded the dog with imperfectly concealed pride of ownership. ‘I’d like to call him Rollo in memory of dear Rollo.’

Oh, God, thought Annie. This
is
happening.

The new Rollo was not a pushover. Tempered by experience – abandonment, cruelty (there were suspicious scars on his flanks)? – he made it clear in the days that followed that he guarded his affections and was careful to bestow
his trust only on Hermione and Annie. Prudently, he maintained a distance from Maisie, who had decided it was uproarious to throw objects at him, and made little eff ort with Tom. Jake he ignored. ‘You shouldn’t make remarks about the cost of dog food,’ said Emily.

Hermione, however, was a marked woman. Furthermore, she succumbed to her fate with the fervour of one newly in love and sent the family mad with her fussing.

Coming home from work, Annie was not surprised to find Rollo ensconced in Hermione’s room. Nose tucked on his matted and calloused front paws, he had positioned himself at Hermione’s feet with all the authority of Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell.

Hermione was on the phone to Sheila at the Manor House Home. ‘That girl was always a nasty one. Remember when I caught her going through my things?’ At Annie’s entrance, she looked round and continued, without missing a beat. ‘Did I tell you, Sheila? I’ve been given a dog. Pedigree. Very sweet. But I have to go now …’

Annie intercepted a look that Rollo cast Hermione: the wide-eyed, I-was-ill-treated-but-you-have-saved-me look. ‘Hermione, what do you mean you’ve been
given
a pedigree dog?’

‘Did I say that, dear?’

‘You must remember what you just said.’

‘We were talking about that awful girl who used to go through our drawers. Still does, according to Sheila. I’m sure she took money. Are you tired, Annie? You must be if you walked back.’

At the word ‘walk’, Rollo’s ragged tail stirred.

‘It’s all very peculiar,’ she reported back to Tom, as they
got ready for bed later. ‘I definitely overheard her telling Sheila Reade that she had been given a pedigree dog. But she denied it when I asked her about it. Why Sheila would care one way or another if it’s a pedigree I don’t know. Maybe it’s Hermione’s way of making sure we can’t get rid of him.’

‘His name’s Rollo,’ said Tom.

Annie stared at him, incredulous. ‘He’s got to you.’

Tom was propped up on the pillows reading the
Guardian
. ‘You should know by now that dealing with my mother is like nailing jelly to the wall.’

Annie paused in brushing her hair. ‘Seriously, Tom, it was odd she felt she had to big up Rollo for Sheila. It is as if she had to prove to Sheila that she mattered to us.’

‘Aha,
you
’ve just said “Rollo”.’

‘On second thoughts,’ Annie concluded grimly, ‘Hermione knew exactly what she was doing.’

For all its normality, the conversation was curiously stilted. Tom and she appeared to have slipped into a guarded phase. They were considerate to each other in the manner that strangers were with fellow strangers. After their recent conversations, when a tiny aperture had opened on to each other’s private thoughts, Annie had imagined that relations between them would be easier.

Tom turned to the financial pages. ‘Oh, God,’ he exclaimed, under his breath.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Just a rumble about the state of the banks.’

There was a polite pause, during which Annie bent to pick up a discarded sock. ‘How’s the job-hunting?’

‘So-so.’

‘Tom, has something else happened?’

He retreated behind the paper. ‘
Nothing
.’

She trod carefully. ‘Tom, are you going about it in the right way? I mean …’

‘Annie, I’m doing my best.’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a rush of contrition, ‘I know you are. But if you want to bandy some ideas around …’ She faltered to a halt. Tom had thrown the paper aside and, if she wasn’t mistaken, he was staring at the neckline of her nightdress. She coloured. He pursed his lips and whistled – and she heard an echo of being young together. Of the passion that had turned out not to be eternal, but humiliatingly mortal.

‘You’re blushing,’ Tom said.

‘I’ve just cleaned my face. It does that.’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘Stop it,’ she said, but she didn’t mean it.

Annie resumed the hair ritual. It was very strange, but she had become re-sensitized to Tom’s presence. When he entered the room, she registered it in a significant manner. When he left it, she registered that too. With each stroke of the hairbrush, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck sent a prickle through her flesh.

These inner shifts and adjustments were not reflected outwardly. Neither did they impinge on her routines, which, apart from agonized conversations with Jake about Maisie, were normal. Morning and evening, Annie creamed her face and thought, Oh, Lord, what’s happening to my jawline? She got dressed in her office uniform and went out to do battle in the hospital.
Samuel Smith, you should not have died
. There were the odd variations – dropping her shoes at the cobbler’s, dithering over whether macaroni cheese
or stew would go further to feed the family, a frantic hunt for a mislaid twenty-pound note.
How is Zosia? Must get in contact and tell her how much I miss her
. At work, she walked through the hospital corridors on the trail of the cleaners, expertly dodging porters, stretchers, wheelchairs and patients. (It was curious: even if they knew exactly where they were going, patients and visitors always exuded the anxiety of the refugee.) In the evening she came home, went over the accounts and, occasionally, packed up more of her possessions to sell. Just in case.

Had she been good with people? Her track record suggested yes. But it was easier to be clever with people who weren’t close to you. She had chosen her work because she had wanted to help make things better and easier for the sick. Only today she had spent several hours with the manager of the new crack cleaning teams and they had understood each other fine.

She sneaked a look at Tom. Their relationship was another matter. With that, the image of Mia sprang into her head and, so strong, so vivid, so living was it, her heart almost stopped. The coppery hair, the thin little hands, the breathy ‘Mum’. Annie held the image suspended in the silvery spaces of memory, gazed on it, endured the pain it provoked. Then, with a huge effort, she banished it.

She dropped the brush on to the dressing-table and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Tom, I’m here if you want to talk things over.’

‘Thank you.’

He didn’t move. In fact, he remained quite still but it felt to Annie as though he had reached out a hand and drawn her close.

Chapter Twenty

The decision to push Mia to the back of her mind worked. It was a breakthrough and proved to Annie that she had wrested back some control. And if the Jocasta affair threatened to turn the family inside out, extraordinarily she breathed easier because of it.

Frantically busy, Jake divided his time between childcare and the workshop. He asked if he might bring Ruth home for a meal and she turned up for a Sunday lunch, which they ate in the garden. Jake and Ruth took turns to sit Maisie on their knees and they ate roast chicken and minted peas. Ruth had brought with her a bottle of Sancerre – ‘Sweet of you,’ said Tom – and they drank it with the meal. A tardy summer sun shone down on them so Tom and Jake fetched the big umbrella from the shed and there was general hilarity as they tried to avoid the dead spiders and cobwebs that threatened to festoon them. The conversation meandered this way and that. For that moment, and for the first time in years, Annie felt entirely peaceful.

Maisie succeeded in squashing a pea into the skirt of Ruth’s bright red halter-neck sundress. ‘Couldn’t matter less,’ she said, as Jake made a fuss about scraping it off. ‘It’s vegetable.’

Tom asked her about her parents and what her father did. Ruth flushed. ‘My father … he started out on the printing presses but he hasn’t worked for years.’ Maisie demanded her attention and Ruth stood her up on her knee
and bounced her up and down. ‘Unemployment did things to him,’ she said. ‘My mum says it changed him.
He
says he isn’t a proper person without a job.’ She glanced at Tom and her flush deepened to dark red. ‘What I mean is … I didn’t mean …’

‘No, but he’s right,’ said Tom. ‘That’s exactly what it feels like.’

Jake leaped up. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’ He bent over and whispered something into Ruth’s ear and she gave him her radiant smile. While Jake was indoors, she said to Tom, ‘Are you sure I wasn’t speaking out of turn?’

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I agree with your father. It should be said.’

In early September, Jake sought out Annie and asked for a loan so that he could pay the solicitor’s bill. He was pale, his nails were bitten and he looked as though smiling was an outlawed activity. Without hesitation, she gave him what she had to spare. ‘Don’t worry,’ he promised, ‘I will pay it back. I’m going to sell my wood stockpile.’ When Annie protested that it was his insurance for the future, he replied, ‘That’s what Ruth thinks. But it has to be.’

A few days later, Annie discovered Tom’s notes on the hall table: ‘Jocasta served court petition. Jocasta applied for Leave to Remove. Family court decides Residence Orders. Best result? Split Residence Order. Would this be practical? Judge will request Family Court Advisers (Cafcass) to make report. Courts almost always pay attention to contents of report.’

Wandering into the kitchen, she discovered Hermione with Rollo ensconced cosily on her knee. On the table, a cup of tea steamed beside an open packet of HobNobs. Hermione was murmuring to Rollo who, ears pricked, was
paying careful attention. She snapped a biscuit in two and gave half to him.

Annie stuffed Tom’s notes into her pocket. ‘You shouldn’t give dogs chocolate biscuits.’

‘He was crying,’ said Hermione, as if that explained everything. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

Annie glanced at her sharply. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Fine. Rollo needed some comfort, that’s all.’

Annie surveyed the touching tableau. ‘He certainly got it.’

Hermione shifted in her seat. ‘We are definitely, definitely keeping him, aren’t we? You’re not going to whisk him away?’

Annie was shocked that, after so many weeks, Hermione would consider that she could do such a thing. ‘What do you think?’

Hermione clutched Rollo. ‘That means you don’t want to keep him.’

Annie began to see that working in Administration in a huge National Health hospital was mere child’s play, and fell gamely into the trap. ‘Of course I want to keep him.’

‘He’s got used to us now. It would be wicked to disrupt him again.’ Hermione administered more comfort to Rollo in the shape of the second half of the HobNob. ‘She’s not really cruel,’ she informed him.

Annie winced. ‘We’re bulging at the seams and money is a bit tight.’

‘I pay my share of the bills. I’ll pay for Rollo.’

‘Yes, you do. And we must keep something back. Just in case …’

‘In case I need to be carted off, you mean.’

Annie was accustomed to dealing with tricky conversations
but this one was close to the bone. She reached over and ran a gentle finger down Rollo’s muzzle.

‘I’ll say this, Annie. I sincerely hope you’re never in my shoes. I’m on the slide and it’s getting faster and I can’t stop it, and I’m …’ Hermione was both enjoying and frightening herself with the dramatic scenario she was painting. ‘I worry where I’ll end up.’

Annie hunkered down beside her. ‘You don’t sound quite yourself.’

Hermione’s tone was desolate. ‘When you’re old, you’re not yourself.’ She sighed heavily, then gave Annie a look so on-the-ball, and so cunning, that Annie should have known she was being wound up. ‘Still, it helps if you have someone to look after. Someone and something to think of other than your aches and pains.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ll go and watch
Countdown
.’