A Place for Us

by Harriet Evans

  Luke nodded, looking around him and chewing his thumb, with a kind of dazed fascination mixed with extreme fatigue. Martha couldn’t stop staring at him. He was her great-grandson.

  “It used to be orangey, now it’s sort of wattle and daub, isn’t it? Very trendy,” Cat said.

  Martha laughed. “It hadn’t been painted since I did it myself when we moved in. Florence was four and she stuck her foot in the paint tin, I remember. Orange footprints everywhere.”

  “Really?” Florence said. “Oh dear, I’m sorry. Did I really?”

  “I’m afraid so, and it took forever to get off your foot, too. But you did make pretty foot-shaped flowers on the tiles over there.” She pointed. “This time I got someone in to do it. Very lazy.” She moved toward Luke and stroked his cheek softly with one finger. “And how are you feeling, Luke? You were very brave.”

  “Yes, I was,” said Luke. “I wanted to cry. But look at this.” He tapped his head purposefully, then frowned and burst into tears again. “It hurts!” he wailed. “Maman . . .” And he began to babble away in French, and Martha did not understand him.

  David, who had been standing by the doorway, held out his hand. “Luke, come with me, little one. I have something to show you. And there’s cake in my study too.”

  Luke looked up at his great-grandfather questioningly, then nodded and ran over to him. He took his hand, and as they disappeared, followed by Florence, Cat sank down into Southpaw’s carved wooden chair and stared into space.

  “He’ll draw him a little Wilbur cartoon about it, won’t he?”

  Martha thought of the last time David had tried to draw Wilbur, a pathetic, grotesque parody of the dog he used to scribble in one-two-three-four-five seconds for an eager child or an enthralled fan.

  “He’ll think of something, I’m sure.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Cat said. “I still can’t believe . . . we’re here.” She squared her slim shoulders and said quietly, “Gran, you must want to know what happened. Why I didn’t—tell you about Luke. Who he is, and all that.”

  “Well, I can guess he’s your son, and his father had black hair, that’s about it,” Martha said. “What I want to know is why you didn’t tell me.”

  Cat said something so faint Martha couldn’t hear.

  Martha leaned in. “I’m a little deaf. Say it again.”

  She said, very softly, “I lost myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounds so . . . stupid, saying it out loud.” Cat said. “My friend Véronique calls it the mist. Like I got caught in it, couldn’t see out of it.”

  Martha stood up and fetched the old teapot. She plucked the mugs off the dresser behind Cat as the door opened and Florence came in.

  “There you two are. Pa’s having a great time with Luke, you know. I’m going to make some coffee. Cat, love, coffee for you?”

  Martha nodded approvingly at her, and handed Cat the mugs.

  “I’ll stick to tea. Oh, these old friends,” Cat said, looking at them. “The Silver Jubilee, the hedgehog wearing glasses . . . Leeds Castle . . .” Martha saw tears falling onto the wooden table.

  “Why are you crying, darling?” she said, stroking her granddaughter’s shoulders.

  Cat bent forward, her head in her hands, and cried as though her heart was breaking, softly, sobs thrumming through her, rocking backward and forward. It was a good minute or so before she could speak. Florence tactfully busied herself at the sink with some washing up, while Martha sat beside her granddaughter, waiting till she raised her head. Suddenly she felt enormously guilty. She had done this. She had created this.

  Then, quite clearly, she heard Daisy’s voice.

  She has to know, Ma. You have to explain what you’ve done.

  It was so distinct that she turned round. But no one was there. Martha shrugged, batting the invisible away. She gripped Cat’s heaving shoulder.

  “Darling, tell me what’s wrong. Tell me why you’re crying. Then I can help you.”

  Cat looked up and said softly, “Everything is wrong. I shouldn’t have come home. Seeing the mugs and Southpaw’s sketches on the wall, and the owl on the door—I—I can’t go back there, knowing that now.”

  “Knowing what?”

  “How much I hate it. I can’t . . . we can’t do it anymore.”

  She pressed her fingers to her face.

  “You can stay here,” Martha said. “You and little Luke.” Her breath caught in her throat. “You don’t have to go back.”

  Cat laughed. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Yes, you can.” She whispered it in her ear. “Darling, you’re home. You don’t ever have to leave again.”

  Only after she said it did she remember to whom she’d said it before, and why.

  Lucy

  THE DOORBELL RANG, ferociously, at 7:00 a.m. Lucy tried to ignore it, as she did most mornings; then she sighed and let out a low growl of irritation, rolled out of bed, and stamped down the hall. The rain had stopped, and as she opened the door a sharp wintry breeze flew into the damp flat.

  “Package.” The grim-faced courier held out a box and a tiny BlackBerry, screen hopelessly scratched. “Please sign.” Lucy drew a straight line, wondering if there was a piece to be written about signatures on courier deliveries, because she’d never once managed to sign something on one of the screens that even closely approximated her name. The courier walked away without a word—they always acted as though she’d kept them waiting ten minutes, not ten seconds—and Lucy slammed the door, slightly louder than she should have.

  “Post for you, Irene,” she growled, throwing the box outside her flatmate’s closed door. Irene was an obsessive eBayer and at least once a day, usually more often, some piece of vintage fashion would arrive in Amhurst Road, ready to be exclaimed over, photographed, blogged about. Lucy really didn’t understand how Irene could afford any of it, but she didn’t want to be hauled away to prison as an accessory to identity fraud so she assumed a position of ask no questions, and longed for the day when she had a place of her own.

  Lucy started making herself some coffee, then remembered she was trying not to drink coffee because of that article she’d read about how every cup shortened your life by 3.5 minutes. So she made herself some hot water with a slice of lemon, which was what Lara had at the start of each day, as she liked to inform the office in her blaring foghorn voice. “It’s amazing, it’s really cleansing. It means you’re not hungry for breakfast.”

  She said it every morning.

  The flat was on the ground floor of a chilly Victorian house in the heart of Hackney. Lucy’s room was much bigger than Irene’s, and soon after Lucy moved in she’d understood why Irene had chosen the other. Lucy’s was freezing, even in summer. It faced northeast and the sun never quite reached the huge, draft-magnetic, grimy gray bay window. It smelled vaguely of cats and damp; Irene’s room, however, smelled of cleaning products, plastic synthetic packaging materials, and Gucci Envy.

  Snuggling back under the still-warm duvet with her hot water and lemon, Lucy pulled her laptop up onto the bed and waited for it to power up, gazing vacantly at the black screen. She wished she could shake this feeling of dread that seemed to have settled on her lately, like a cloud somewhere just above her head. She couldn’t work out what was causing it.

  It wasn’t just the foreboding she felt when she thought about Gran’s invitation, or her wild, panicked eyes when Lucy had asked her about that damned article. She wished she’d never mentioned it to Deborah. It wasn’t just Southpaw’s frail face and swollen hands, either. This time tomorrow she’d be in her dad and Karen’s house. Karen would have bought croissants from Marks & Spencer. Dad would have something to show her; he always did. Some funny book, some article from a newspaper he’d cut out. And Karen . . . she’d be there, sipping coffee, just . . . staring at them.

>   It was always the same; but the last time she’d been back, nearly two weeks ago, she’d known something was going on between them. Was it true? Had Dad found something out? Karen was snappy, not eating anything. Dad was behaving strangely too. That kind, friendly, Dad-style jollity she knew so well was turned up several notches. He only did that when he was feeling panicked: the more worried he was, the more sprightly he became. She’d lived with it for years. As a child, Lucy had always known if her mother was particularly bonkers or feeling spiteful when she got up in the morning. Dad would be making French toast in the kitchen, singing Gilbert and Sullivan at the top of his voice. Everything’s fine here! Nothing to see!

  “So, all was good up at Winterfold,” Lucy had said. “Gran says the preparations are going well. She’s polished all the silver.”

  “Oh, yes!” Dad had said. “More coffee, Karen? The party, hey! It’s going to be great.”

  Karen had looked up from her magazine. “No, thanks.” She’d pushed her plate away, the croissant virtually untouched. “I’m not feeling that well, actually.”

  “Oh dear,” Bill had said, and then, “Poor old thing. You’ve been working so hard lately, haven’t you?”

  Lucy saw her father watching Karen, and she didn’t quite understand the look in his eyes, and was discomfited. “Yes, much too hard,” Karen said. She arched her back and stood up, then said, too casually, “I keep meaning to tell you, by the way. I’ll be at the lunch, of course, but the drinks on the Friday night—I’m not sure I’ll be able to make them. There’s a conference call with the States at six thirty that day—”

  “Oh, no!” Lucy, ever the Pollyanna, cried. “Can’t you tell them it’s important?”

  Karen was standing in the doorway. She rubbed her eyes, then looked over at her husband. “I have, several times. Rick won’t listen. I’ll be there the next day.”

  “But how sad you have to miss the drinks—those parties of Gran and Southpaw’s are the best,” said Lucy, who literally could imagine nothing better than a family gathering at Winterfold, the house full of people and light and laughter.

  Her father said nothing throughout this. Then he got up too, went over to the sink, and rinsed out the cafetière. “That’s a real shame, Karen,” he said, and started humming.

  And I am right and you are right and all is right as right can be!

  • • •

  Lucy took a sip of her hot water, grimacing. The lemon was bitter, the water lukewarm in the chill of her room. The truth was, she couldn’t bear the idea of upsetting her dad. He’d been like a sad old dog after he split up with her mum, padding around his new house in the village in his slippers, trying to invite people over for weird things like Korean barbecue night. Karen had been good for him. And—Lucy forced herself to admit it—she liked her.

  Karen was fun, when she didn’t have that awkward look in her eyes. She liked X Factor and popcorn films; she could recite The Proposal and The Holiday off by heart but, like Lucy, she hated Love Actually, said it was way too saccharine, which was exactly what Lucy thought. And she was so clever, she had this amazing job. Lucy had once heard her on the phone to her boss, and Karen had said about fifteen things Lucy didn’t even understand as sentences, let alone pieces of actual information. She’d been good for Dad. She’d relaxed him, while Lucy’s mother, Clare, had wound him up with her intense moodiness and obsession with fads: tai chi, womb rebirth, Bikram yoga. Lucy had grown up with it and she’d seen how hard it was for him. Karen didn’t take, take, take all the time, she just let him be himself; and in the beginning you could tell she just thought he was wonderful, looked at him like he was the voice of wisdom. Lucy sometimes felt Dad labored under a yoke of Winter-ishness. Pretending everything was okay when it wasn’t, keeping the mood of the room upbeat, happy, when it wasn’t. He wanted the approval of his parents more than anything, and because he was nearby, handy, undramatic, he never seemed to get it. Which was stupid, Lucy thought. He was the best dad ever, and he was an amazing doctor, nothing too trivial for him. He cared about people: look at old Mr. Dill’s housemaid’s knee, which had got so bad he couldn’t walk. Dad went and saw him every day for two weeks and took him soup and just let him talk. Or Joe Thorne’s finger: Joe had told Lucy in the pub last week that he’d have lost it, if it wasn’t for her dad. No career, nothing. He’d saved that awful man Gerald Lang’s life at the disastrous summer party, which had passed into Winter folklore. And there was the time he waded into the river and pulled out Tugie, Gran and Southpaw’s final dog, who was obsessed with finding otters, while Lucy and Lucy’s then boyfriend, Tom, just looked on blankly.

  Tom said afterward, “I would have gone in but I really didn’t want to cramp your dad’s style. I think he needed that.”

  Yeah, right, Lucy had wanted to say. You’re a twenty-five-year-old ex-rower who runs every day. My dad is nearing fifty and his knees click when he walks. Sure, that was really nice of you.

  Oh, why hadn’t she done anything?

  A sound along the corridor, of creaking floorboards and mewling, suggested Irene was awake and about to come out to feed Chairman Miaow. Lucy snapped out of her reverie, looking around her. It was seven thirty-two. She ought to get up, get in the shower first, be at work early, ahead of the game, so when Deborah asked her for the fourth time what was happening with that article about Southpaw, she’d be able to say, “I’m sorry. I still need to dig around a little more. Work out what angle to take. But I’ve had this idea for a piece on the Kardashians. The Oscars. Rihanna. Jennifer Aniston and her secret heartbreak.”

  She’d rung her grandmother and told her she wasn’t going to do it anymore, and she’d meant it. Lucy’s conversation with Cat had shaken her, not just because Cat was so . . . vicious. It was more than that. For the last few weeks Lucy had been buying time so she could decide whether she really should just give up the whole thing or carry on digging a little further, for her own sake, if no one else’s. Even if she never showed the article to another living soul, she felt she had to write it: because something wasn’t right, that was for sure.

  She scrolled quickly through her e-mails. The usual morning inbox junk. Discounts from the Outnet, celebrity gossip updates, a new pub around the corner from her was opening a microbrewery called the Dalston Hopster—even Lucy could see that the lack of irony in that was almost appalling.

  She almost missed the e-mail from her mother, sent late the previous night, and Lucy’s shoulders tensed in anticipation as she opened it.

  Hi Darling

  I’m off to India tomorrow, just to remind you. I find it hard to be in the country with the celebrations taking place this weekend. I feel excluded by your grandparents. This is a source of sadness to me.

  In answer to your question, I have been in touch with Daisy myself. I wanted some advice on traveling alone, especially through Delhi. I have tried to contact her several times with no reply. I did remember, however, that she used another name when she went to Kerala: Daisy Doolan. Read this because even though it’s four years old I think it is very interesting.

  https://bitly.com/perssonch

  She didn’t tell your grandparents she’d been booted out, did she? What’s happened to her, then? I’ll let you know if she replies.

  I’m away until the week before Christmas. Raymond has my schedule and the details of the ashram if you need to contact me in an emergency. Take care, darling, be well, be full of light and love.

  Clare xx

  Who was Raymond? Typical Mum. Lucy clicked on the link, and as she read slowly, her eyes opened wide, her jaw dropped.

  “No,” she said to herself. “She wouldn’t do that. That’s not right.”

  Charity worker fired, sent home in disgrace

  Local residents profess themselves shocked and saddened by the exit from the Sunshine Children’s School of Daisy Doolan from the United Kingdom, who has done so much to aid
school attendance and prosperity in this area and was rewarded only recently with a medal from the mayor (see picture). In 1983 when Miss Doolan arrived in Cherthala, literacy was already high but attendance was low and poverty was great. She raised 2 million rupees toward the building of the new school for girls and, as we know, five pupils have gone on to Bombay University to study a diverse range of subjects. Miss Doolan is said by the school’s principal to have been embezzling money up to the sum of 1 million rupees over five years. She has been dismissed and police are anxious to trace her whereabouts. One colleague said she had left and gone back to England.

  Cat

  BY FRIDAY, IT felt as though she had been at home for months. Had she really been away all that time? The only difference was that first night in the upstairs bathroom, unchanged after all these years, same William Morris peacock wallpaper, same pig-shaped tooth mug, handle missing. Same carpet, same dust-encrusted bottles of ancient Body Shop Ice Blue Shampoo and Grapefruit Shower Gel. She’d stared at her reflection, tired, strung-out after a long day, and nearly screamed at the truth that only old, familiar mirrors give you. She’d thought: I look like her. I look exactly like her.

  That first night, Cat slept as though she’d been drugged; Luke too. It was the first night they’d been in different rooms, and she was still worried that the cut on his head might wake him up; but the thought of putting him into his own room—that alone made coming home worthwhile. When she checked on him, he was fast asleep, arms flung outward as if he was running to hug someone, duvet tangled around his feet, cheeks flushed.

  It was so strange, how easy it was to slip back into life here. As if it had been waiting for her, and her son, to come back into it. Easy, and terrifying at the same time. Had she changed? Was she a different person? Were they? She couldn’t help asking herself this, as the day of the birthday lunch grew nearer, and then it was Friday.

  “Apples, milk for Luke, trash bags. I’ll be home in time for lunch. Luke?” She looked around. “Luke?”