LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. All I’m old enough for is either being towed round while Ed researches his crap books, or being left behind with some pain in the arse housekeeper. It’s no wonder nothing worked out in school, really. I was always being taken out to go somewhere else, that they wanted.’

      Dinah contemplated this opposing perspective on Milly’s life.

      ‘I can see that would be difficult.’

      Milly shrugged. She stuck her hands deeper in her pockets and walked on, looking straight ahead, as if she had already given too much away.

      Dinah tried one or two more conversational openings, but Milly did not respond. They walked the rest of the way in silence, but it was a companionable silence.

      When they came back to the house, having made a wide arc through the unrelenting woodland, Ed was already waving at them from the deck, the bow-saw hanging over the other arm. Sandra was watching too. Her eyes flicked from Milly to Dinah. Milly veered away from Dinah.

      ‘See you,’ she muttered.

      It might have been a threat or a promise. Her face was closed up again, admitting nothing. She went up the steps, looking at no one, and vanished into the house.

      The Stewards were ready to leave. The boys were already inside the Jeep and the adults gathered in a loose group beside it to exchange their goodbyes. Sandra stood beside Dinah.

      ‘Thank you for taking such trouble with Milly.’ The thanks sounded oddly formal.

      ‘I liked her,’ Dinah said. ‘Did you?’

      It was less than the truth, but even the mild assurance seemed to displease Sandra.

      ‘She doesn’t often go out for a walk. You were honoured,’ Sandra told her.

      ‘Great, great, we must do that,’ Ed was saying to Matthew. ‘I’ll call you and we’ll fix it.’ He crossed in front of the Toyota to Dinah’s side, taking something out of his wallet as he did so. Dinah watched him, noting the set of his head on his neck and the forward thrust of his chest and shoulders. He was a bully, she thought. An amiable one, but still a bully. She wondered how the Parkeses lived together when there was no call for the polish of hospitality.

      Ed was talking to her. ‘Di, you said you were thinking of looking for a job of some kind? Sounded like a good idea …’

      They had discussed it, only very briefly, over lunch.

      ‘Well …’

      Ed had taken out a card. He passed it to her now through the open window. ‘This woman’s a good friend of mine, an employment consultant. Now, don’t look like that. She’s the best, and I’ll call her about you. Go see her, won’t you? Can’t do any harm.’

      ‘No, it can’t do any harm,’ Dinah agreed. It was not easy to deny Ed.

      The car rolled down the driveway leaving the Parkeses with their arms around each other, waving, against the backdrop of their woodland castle. Dinah wondered if Milly was mutely watching from some window slit.

      ‘I rather like Ed,’ Matthew said. ‘There’s something about all that energy.’

      Matt liked him because he reflected himself, Dinah thought. Matt was full of his own kind of energy, and he was capable of the same self-absorption.

      ‘Odd child, wasn’t she? Why do they let her behave like that? It’s almost as if they’re afraid of her, of what she might say or do.’

      ‘Camilla-and-custard,’ one of the boys murmured from the back of the car.

      ‘Or the wild witch of the woods.’

      Dinah thought of the streetwise shell and the vulnerable core she had glimpsed within the carapace of clothes and cosmetics, and suppressed her impulse to jump to Milly’s defence.

      ‘What did you talk to her about on the walk?’ ‘Home,’ Dinah said.

      Matt sighed. He would not pursue the conversation, and a space of silence admonished them both. Dinah stared ahead at the trees and the dipping road and then the gas stations and parking lots as they drove back into Franklin.

      A little later, when the boys were back in school and her days were no longer superficially occupied with their needs and demands, Dinah crossed town in the Jeep on her way to an appointment with Ed’s employment consultant. Dinah had concluded that it could not do any harm to see her, as Ed had pointed out at the beginning, and the woman had sounded pleasant and businesslike on the telephone. Dinah’s résumé and some examples of her work were in the unfamiliar briefcase on the passenger seat beside her.

      The town lay quiet under a pallid, sunless sky. The trees that lined Main Street brandished their fall colours, but less noticeably against the backdrop of dignified clapboard houses and the rosy brick-built façades across the green. The windows of some of the tackier shops were already displaying Hallowe’en masks and costumes. There was little traffic in the wide streets and she arrived too early for her appointment. She parked the Jeep and sat waiting, thinking.

      There was an uncomfortable pressure weighing on her, and the sense of it made the colours of the day seem sickly and caused the clean resinous scent of the air to scrape in the back of her throat. Dinah felt that the gap between the capable laughing wife and mother she pretended to be and the real woman who crept within herself was growing wider and wider.

      Only Matt sensed it, and she could barely talk to Matt at all.

      She checked her watch again. Still a few minutes before time, but she needed to get out of the Jeep. She felt shut in, panicked by claustrophobia, fearful of the two women who slid uncontrollably apart beneath her skin.

      She scrambled her belongings together and stepped out into the cool air. She dropped her purse and bent down to retrieve it, and as she straightened up again dizziness assaulted her.

      Forcing herself to breathe evenly Dinah walked up the shallow steps to the door of the building. It was a new low-rise, with glass curtain-walls reflecting the whitish sky. Two men came out of the doors as she tried to go in and they glanced curiously at her as she edged past them.

      The building was multi-occupied, there was a long list of tenants in the small lobby. Dinah searched for the consultant’s name, reading the list twice before she located it.

      It was a corner office on the second floor. In the little anteroom there were two chairs and a table with neatly arranged business magazines.

      ‘Jenny shouldn’t be more than a minute or two,’ the consultant’s secretary smiled. Dinah opened her briefcase and stared at the typed résumé in her lap. Who was this woman? Was this who she had once been, defined and held in place by these qualifications and this much work done?

      She realised that she was looking past the sheets of paper at her own knees. They made bony protuberances under the matt black stuff of her leggings. Solid enough. Yet she was afraid to touch them in case her fingers met emptiness. The fear of it ballooned in her chest like nausea.

      Dinah’s head jerked up again and she focused on the view from the window. The buildings in the block opposite. A sugar maple, fire-tinted leaves. Back on Kendrick Dee Kerrigan would be laying out after-school bread and cookies in her kitchen. Nancy would be lifting her little girls out of the back of the station wagon, wondering as she did so if it was too early to have a glass of wine. Not knowing that Dinah was out she might well call over to see if she wanted to join her.

      Normal things.

      Were they normal, or did they seem strange to her only because of her distance from them?

      Dinah straightened her legs. Her feet looked odd, disjointed.

      Am I going mad?

      ‘Hi. I’m Jenny Abraham.’

      The consultant had emerged from her office, was holding the door open for Dinah. They shook hands and Dinah obediently followed her. She sat

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