LITMIR.BIZ

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that he had put his two suitcases down in the hall and glanced in, briefly, as if to check that nothing of himself remained. Then he had put the suitcases in his car and driven away to Michelle’s flat.

      Years before that, Jess and he had papered this room together over a week of his summer holiday. Today the Laura Ashley pattern of tiny brown flowers looked dingy, and the matching curtains hung limply beneath their gathered pelmet. The brown carpet was worn, and so were the green tweed seats of the second-hand Sixties Scandinavian wooden chairs. Jess had made no changes or improvements to the home they had created together; Ian clumsily understood that she had probably lacked the emotional energy as well as the money.

      From the kitchen drifted the scent of frying garlic. James was cooking dinner, and the three women were upstairs somewhere. Ian was glad of the interval of quiet. The house had been full of people for hours.

      Everyone had come back to the house from the crematorium. They had eaten the food prepared by the caterers that Lizzie swore by, shaken hands with Ian and Jess and whispered their assurances that if there was anything, anything at all, they only had to ask. There had been a parade of faces: neighbours Ian had almost forgotten, teachers from Danny’s school, and friends of Jess’s, including a woman from her work who had brought flowers picked on the nursery – viburnum and winter jasmine and strong-scented daphne. And there had been solemn, tongue-tied mates of Danny’s whom Ian had last seen as little boys. Dozens of faces, and none of them Danny’s.

      Ian swallowed hard on the sensation within himself that was not quite a yawn, not quite nausea. He didn’t know how to express his grief for his son. He hadn’t cried, yet. Crying was for women. The acknowledgement made him think of Michelle, who cried as easily as she laughed.

      ‘When are you coming home?’ she had asked him. The telephone strengthened her Australian vowels, or maybe his ears were already re-tuned to the Midlands accent.

      ‘I’ll be on the Qantas flight the day after tomorrow, love. I want to get back to you, you know that.’

      ‘I’ll come and pick you up at the airport,’ she’d said at once.

      ‘Do that.’

      He missed her. Life with Michelle was comprehensible, comfortable. From the beginning, that had been one of the problems with Jess. He had never felt that she gave herself to him; there was always a little distance, a measure of holding back that was at first tantalising, and finally disappointing.

      Ian clicked his lighter to the candles. Points of flame flickered and then steadied in the still air. He watched them for a minute before walking through to the kitchen.

      James was standing at the cooker. He looked up and waved a wooden spatula at a pan on the heat. He said, ‘It’s a bit hit and miss. I wasn’t sure where to look for things.’

      James enjoyed cooking and was good at it; Lizzie could barely fix a sandwich. It was one of the ways they fitted together. He had tied Jess’s striped apron over his unfamiliar dark clothes.

      ‘I’m sure it’ll be good,’ Ian said automatically. He thought James looked like a poof, fannying around in his pinny. But he knew enough about Lizzie to be sure that couldn’t really be the case. For an actress, Lizzie had always been quite definite about liking proper men. For a year or two, long ago, when she had been spending a lot of time in and out of their house and Jess had begun to withdraw, Ian had fancied her himself, although it had never come to anything. It would have been too difficult, that.

      ‘Drink?’ James nodded at an opened litre of red wine.

      ‘Scotch for me,’ Ian answered. He took a bottle of Bell’s out of the usual cupboard and poured himself a full glass. James opened a tin of tomatoes and slopped the contents into a pan. Once he had stirred down the splutter of it, he reached for a cloth and busily dabbed the crimson speckles off the margins of the stove. Tidy, Ian noted.

      ‘Jess still resting?’

      ‘I suppose,’ Ian said. ‘Do her good.’

      After the last mourners had gone Jess and Beth had separately retreated into their bedrooms. Lizzie had given Sock his bath and put him to sleep on the living-room sofa. No one went into Danny’s room.

      Ian sat down at the table and drank his whisky. He couldn’t think of anything else to say to James.

      They had met a handful of times at the end of the awkward period before Ian went to Australia with Michelle. James was naturally defensive of Jess; Ian assumed that Lizzie had spared her new boyfriend none of the details about Jess’s husband’s misbehaviour, but he had felt too embattled to bother trying to justify himself. Moreover, Ian never felt quite at ease with men who were more successful than himself, and he knew that James headed his own accountancy firm. He also knew that when he had married Lizzie James had bought her a substantial Victorian house in a prosperous village surrounded by rare unspoilt countryside. Ian hadn’t seen the house but he imagined a cedarwood conservatory, a quarry-tiled kitchen and acres of pale sculpted carpets. His own home, Jess’s home now, seemed to reproach him with its relative shabbiness.

      To his relief, he heard Lizzie emerge from the bathroom upstairs. She crossed the landing and tapped gently on Jess’s door.

      ‘They’ll be down in a minute.’

      James nodded. ‘This is ready now.’

      The three women came downstairs together.

      ‘He’s gone off properly at last,’ Lizzie explained, about Sock. ‘I thought he wasn’t going to.’

      ‘Have a drink.’ Ian picked up the uncapped Scotch bottle and poured a measure.

      ‘Thanks.’

      ‘Beth?’

      ‘Give Mum one.’

      Jess leaned against the dresser, obediently nursing the glass he put into her hand. Lizzie put a set of dishes to warm and Beth scraped potato peelings into the pedal bin. They were each of them occupying themselves with the tasks to hand, in order to contain the mess of grief. Realising this brought the sudden tears to Jess’s eyes. She pressed the back of her hand into her face.

      ‘Sit down, darling. Here, come on.’

      Lizzie guided her to a chair. In the folds of her clothes as they held each other Jess smelled cigarette smoke. Lizzie had succumbed.

      ‘Thanks,’ Jess murmured. She saw Beth’s white face and shadowed eyes, and the way Ian’s thin hair had crept back from his forehead. They had loved Danny too; how could they not have done?

      She said, ‘Thank you for being here tonight.’

      ‘Where else would we be?’

      Lizzie’s jacket was broad stripes of scarlet and black satin, like a winter deckchair. She had worn it that afternoon at the funeral, with a black fedora hat pulled down to shield her eyes. A costume.

      ‘I can’t wear black for him,’ she had whispered to Jess. ‘As if he was old.’

      Jess hadn’t thought about her clothes until an hour before the cars came. Although incongruously while she was still married to Ian she had sometimes imagined how it would be if he were to die and leave her a widow. Picturing herself at the graveside, the cut of her black dress.

      She had read somewhere that women in unfulfilling marriages fall in love with their sons.

      She bent her head, drank some of her whisky.

      ‘Let’s eat,’ James said.

      At once there was a little rush to fetch plates and carry serving dishes.

      They sat down in the dining room. Beth tilted her head as if she were listening for something. She was thinking that the front door should slam now to announce that Danny was home. He would push his way into the room, shrugging his coat off his shoulders, and wolfishly peer into the dishes to see what there was to eat. They were still a family around the table. They couldn’t begin to miss Danny yet because he was still

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