‘There is something I have to send to somebody,’ she begins. ‘He is in London, but I cannot send it from this place. I must send it from London. Perhaps it would be possible for you?’
‘You want me to send something?’ he asks, and a crease of doubt appears between his eyes.
‘It is strange, I know.’
‘So what’s the something?’
‘A letter.’
‘You want me to post a letter?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes,’ she says, and he looks so mystified that she feels she has to tell him the story, a story which is almost true, about her boyfriend in London, who turned out to be a bad man, a violent man, and who is saying she owes him money, though she doesn’t owe him anything, but now he is taking money off friends of hers and will keep taking money until she pays him what he says she owes him, so what can she do? She must get the money to him, but he must not know that she is here. He must think she is in London, so she wants to post the letter in London but she has to work every day so she cannot go there. And it costs too much to go there, so she needs somebody to help her, but if it is not possible for him he must tell her and she will find somebody else.
Mr Morton has turned to listen to her. He has not spoken while she has been talking, and his face does not move, except for his eyes, which continuously trace a winding track as though he were seeing a picture on the wall and is thinking that something does not make sense in what he is seeing, but he cannot find what it is. Her boyfriend was good to her in the beginning, she goes on. But he drank and he began to beat her, so she ran away, from her boyfriend and from London. Mr Morton makes a small, quick grimace when she says that she was beaten; he tilts forward a fraction, bracing his hands on the edge of his chair, as if the imaginary picture were becoming clearer. Through the open window rises the sound of an engine and the ripping noise of gravel; leaning to look out, she sees a huge car turning in the parking area, swaying on thick tyres that make the stones explode underneath them. ‘That is all, if you think you can help me,’ she says and Mr Morton gives a tiny nod.
‘Of course,’ he says.
‘It is important for me,’ she thanks him, wanting to take hold of his sleeve, and then she sees Mr Caldecott walking across the parking area. A slim blonde woman with large sunglasses and a blazingly white shirt is closing the driver’s door of the huge car, and on the other side stands a teenaged girl in a turquoise T-shirt that ends a long way above the waist of her baggy jeans. Seeming to ignore Mr Caldecott as he approaches her, the woman removes her sunglasses and drops them into her handbag. The girl stays beside the car, looking straight at Mr Caldecott, who is looking straight at her. Neither of them is speaking, as if both of them were as surprised as she is, spying on Mr Caldecott and the teenaged girl whose mouth is the same shape as his, whose nose is the same as his, whose jaw is so similar to Mr Caldecott’s that from this feature alone she would know that this is his daughter.
With her shoulders narrowed and her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jeans, in the posture of a captured truant, Stephanie looks at him, her head cocked to one side. It’s the way Kate would sometimes look at people, especially at anyone she was predisposed not to like. The car, an absurdly oversized machine, looms above his daughter. ‘Impressive vehicle,’ he says, which elicits a smirk from Stephanie.
Kate regards the car and then him, as if to gauge the intention of his remark. ‘Hello, Malcolm,’ she replies, peering into her handbag, from which she extracts a tissue. ‘Sorry we’re late. Unscheduled delay before departure,’ she says, dabbing her neck as Stephanie, feigning obliviousness, appraises the garden and the building. ‘You got the message?’ she asks, but it’s a statement rather than a question.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Pity about lunch,’ she says, posting the tissue back into the bag.
‘It’s OK. I’m glad you’re here.’
Kate clips the bag shut and adjusts a shoulder of her shirt. Although she has been driving for three hours or so, she looks as though she has stepped out of a dressing room. She is wearing new white linen plimsolls, new jeans and a new white shirt, and every aspect of her appearance has an uncanny freshness: there’s a scrubbed glow to her face, which is lined only around the eyes, and very lightly, hardly at all; her hair, fairer and straighter and shorter than it used to be, has a sheen it never had before; the shape of her body has changed – she is more slender now, and there’s an athletic tautness in the way she moves. He looks at the hand in which she holds the keys: her nails are glossy ovals of carmine, her skin tanned and blemishless over sinews as fine as the ribs of a fan. You would think she was a decade younger than she is.
‘So this is it,’ she says, squinting at the building behind him.
‘Indeed. What do you think?’
‘Looks nice,’ she says. She saunters past him, dangling the car keys on a little finger, and does not react when he unhooks them from her hand.
‘I’ll get your luggage,’ he says.
‘Not locked,’ she tells him, walking on towards the front of the hotel.
Stephanie turns to open the tailgate, which rises with a hiss into the leaves of the apple tree. Under its roof he stoops beside his daughter. A canvas suitcase, in Burberry check, lies in the back of the boot, beside a small olive-green sack. ‘One of these is your mother’s and one of these is yours, I assume,’ he says. ‘The question is, which is which?’
‘Guess,’ she says, deadpan, looking at him with one eye shut.
He takes hold of the suitcase and drags it out. Stephanie hoists the little sack onto her shoulder. Together they stand up, face to face under the car’s rear window. ‘Hello, Stephanie,’ he says to her.
‘Hi,’ she replies.
‘You OK?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘Drive OK?’
‘Drive total hell,’ she says impassively, raising a hand to grasp the tailgate. ‘Easy listening, door to door.’ Humming an inane melody, she yanks at the tailgate to free the top edge from the branch it’s jammed against, bringing down scraps of leaves.
‘What are you doing?’ Kate demands, striding across the car park, her arms spread wide with consternation. She inspects the paintwork and scowls at Stephanie, who is fastidiously picking bits of greenery from her shoulders. ‘Give,’ Kate orders, putting out a hand for the keys.
With mock subservience he drops the keys into her palm and steps back. As the car eases forward he observes his daughter. Fiddling with the silver ring that pierces her navel, she affects indifference to her mother’s temper, and doesn’t even look up when Kate slams the tailgate right in front of her. When Kate picks up her suitcase and walks away, towards the entrance, Stephanie looks over her head at the wall of ivy, projecting her insolence onto it, an insolence that modulates, once her mother is out of sight, into something like the face of a girl under hypnosis, a face that reminds him of the daydreams into which she would often fall when she stayed with him, when he would realise that the sounds of her playing had stopped and he would go into the living room to find her sitting stiffly in a chair by the window, staring at something only she could see, somewhere between the window and the opposite house. Noticing now that she is being watched, she gives him a half-smile, like the smile you might give a stranger who’s waiting for an overdue bus with you.
‘Coming?’ Kate calls, reappearing at the corner of the building.
Stephanie gives no indication that she has heard, but a moment later she follows. The ragged hems of her jeans drag on the gravel behind him and flap against her feet as she follows him up the stairs to the rooms he has reserved for her and Kate. She gives her bedroom a cursory survey and makes no remark on it, neither when he shows it to her nor when he returns, after she has unpacked her bag. She follows him and Kate back down the stairs and stays behind them as he takes them to see the dining room, the lounge, the Randall Room. She follows one step behind, her jeans flapping, and stands a s
tep apart whenever they stop. Occasionally she receives a reprimanding or beseeching look from her mother, but she does not react noticeably to anything, not to her mother’s glances and not to what she is being shown, until they come to the rose garden, where Kate lets out a small enraptured cry at the sight of plush crimson bloom, and Stephanie raises her eyes to the clouds by way of comment. Only when he ushers her through the door that leads to the pool is Stephanie roused to speak. As the lights ignite beneath the water, raising a blue dazzle all around them, she purses her lips, impressed despite herself. ‘Good,’ she says, and that is all she says. She stays by the door, leaning on the wall with her arms folded, while he takes Kate to see the marble fountain and the copper tubs.
Over the evening meal she continues to direct her silence at Kate. ‘Looking forward to your new school?’ he asks her, making another effort to talk her out of resistance, and Kate regards her with frank curiosity, as though this were a query to which she has never received an adequate answer.
‘Can’t wait,’ Stephanie replies, concentrating on the removal of a flap of skin from the body of her trout.
‘What will you be studying?’
‘A bit of everything.’
‘Any favourite subjects?’
‘Not really.’
‘But there must be some you enjoy more than others?’
The fish’s skin having been cast aside with a wince of distaste, Stephanie gives perfunctory consideration to the question. ‘English,’ she decides, then she starts to divide the exposed orange-pink flesh into equal fork-sized portions. ‘You don’t have to do any work,’ she adds, pausing to assess the neatness of her handiwork. Taking no notice of her mother’s glare, she runs the point of her knife down the fish’s spine.
In imitation of Stephanie’s nonchalance, he smiles and refills Kate’s glass. ‘OK, so you’ll study English,’ he says.
‘That’s the way it’s looking.’
‘And? What else?’
‘French. History.’
‘OK. And any idea what you want to do afterwards, when you leave?’
‘Far too early for that, Malcolm,’ Kate intervenes, perhaps aiming the rebuke at their daughter.
‘Not the faintest,’ says Stephanie.
‘Would you like to go to university?’
‘Probably won’t get the results,’ she shrugs, beginning to tease the segments of flesh off the skeleton.
‘You’d get the results,’ Kate tells her. ‘You’d get them easily, if you bucked your ideas up.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘I do know. All your teachers said the same thing.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘Underneath it all, she’s actually quite clever,’ Kate assures him, prompting Stephanie to open her mouth slackly, letting her tongue loll. ‘She’s got the brains, but she spends too much time with her friends. Too many parties and not enough homework. Just doesn’t make any effort.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘No, she’s right. I don’t,’ Stephanie assures him. ‘Bone idle,’ she laments, shaking her head at the hopelessness of her case.
‘It’s nothing to be proud of,’ Kate rebukes her.
At last Stephanie looks at her mother, and gives her a frigid twitch of a smile. ‘I was being ironic,’ she says.
Anger stiffens Kate’s fingers and jaw as she lifts her glass to take a sip of wine. She holds the glass against her lip. A tear is forming in one eye.
‘But would you like to go to university?’ he asks.
‘Maybe. Better than going straight into a crappy job, I suppose. Delay the inevitable for three years. Can’t be a bad thing.’
‘Not quite the way to look at it, I’d say, Stephanie. Not all jobs are crappy.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t appear that way to me. The world of work: the lifelong struggle to justify your existence,’ she pronounces, as if pleased to have found a resounding quotation to back her point of view. Yet in her eyes there is something that does not match the assertiveness of her voice, a softening from which he can’t be certain whether she’s asking him or defying him to take issue with her.
‘And there’s the small matter of working to support yourself,’ Kate interjects. ‘Or am I being dim? Am I missing something, as usual?’ she enquires, addressing him. ‘Should we be making donations to people who can’t be bothered to work?’
‘A lot of people enjoy their jobs,’ he tells Stephanie.
‘Is that so?’
‘I enjoy my work.’
‘Really?’ she asks, lowering her knife and fork to impress upon him the magnitude of her facetious incredulity.
‘Really,’ he states.
Stephanie looks around the dining room, at every table, at every diner, as if counting a show of hands. ‘OK,’ she concedes, unpersuaded.
‘There’s absolutely no need to be so rude,’ says Kate.
‘I wasn’t being rude. I was saying what I think. I know what I think isn’t what you think, but there we are. If my opinions have caused offence, I apologise,’ she says, bowing to each of them. Her look fixes for an instant on his face, seeming to convey a true apology.
‘Apology accepted,’ Kate responds. Precisely she touches a point of the folded napkin to the corners of her mouth, four or five times, an operation that appears to soothe her irritation. ‘Let’s try to be pleasant, shall we?’ she says. ‘Not much to ask, is it?’
Stephanie prods her fork into a sliver of carrot, draws it through the puddle of sauce in the centre of her plate, bites a morsel from it and puts the remnant back. She rakes a lump of flesh from the half-stripped ribs of the trout, but doesn’t even taste it. The plates are taken away and the desserts are brought. While Kate talks about her husband’s practice and the tribulations of working with his new partner, he observes the meandering of Stephanie’s gaze, which passes lethargically over the objects on the table and her mother’s hands and her own, seeming to make no distinction, until coming to rest on a random area of tablecloth. Not seeing, she stares into the fabric, and then, at an interval in the conversation, the vision returns to her stare. ‘I’m whacked,’ she announces, though it’s not yet ten thirty and she looks no more tired than when she arrived. ‘’Night,’ she says to the space between them, rising. ‘Sleep well.’
Kate watches Stephanie walk out of the room. ‘Told you, didn’t I?’ she says, picking at a chip on the rim of her saucer.
‘Yes, you did.’
‘You wouldn’t believe me,’ she says, looking down on the reflection in the coffee. Again a tear is budding in one eye.
On an impulse to touch her arm, his hand moves an inch or two before withdrawing. ‘This is a stressful situation for her,’ he says. ‘We shouldn’t forget that. She must be finding it difficult.’
‘Her idea, Malcolm. Her idea. And I don’t think she’s the one with the stress. If it’s difficult it’s because she’s making it difficult. I knew she’d be like this,’ she says, shaking her head in annoyance at herself.
‘Might have been better to let her travel alone. She’s not a child.’
‘Technically.’
‘She’s sixteen. She’s a young woman.’
‘I’m the better judge of that.’
‘You think she’s too young to travel on her own?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m not saying anything, Malcolm. It’s more a question of what point are you trying to make. You tell me. You haven’t seen me in years, you haven’t seen her in years, but you obviously think you understand what’s happening better than me. So you tell me what the point is.’
‘OK. Well, you weren’t keen on her coming down here, were you? I think that’s why you brought her down. Because you don’t want her to be here.’
‘To spoil it for her, you mean?’
‘No. Not to spoil it.’
‘Well, what then? To keep a
n eye on her?’
‘If you like.’
‘It’s possible that I thought it might not be entirely appropriate for a girl to be reunited with her father while her mother stands on the sidelines. It’s even possible that I might have had some interest in seeing you myself. Did that thought ever cross your mind?’
‘I can’t say it did, Kate, no. What crossed my mind was: “Why is she taking it like this?”’
‘I’ve explained.’
‘Yes.’
‘I have. I told you. I didn’t like the way you went about it.’
‘But that’s not –’
‘And it doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s happened. We’re here. Let’s not keep ploughing through the same patch of mud over and over again.’
‘But why –’
‘Malcolm, please,’ she says, wiping a hand down her face in a gesture that seems to signify exasperation defeated by exhaustion. ‘I’ve tried to explain. I’m sorry if you don’t get it. Really, I am. But I’ve nothing more to say. Can we not have a row about it? Every day of my life is a battle right now. The last two years have been a battle, and I’ve had enough. So can we leave it, please?’ she asks. ‘Please? No more? I want a rest.’
Palms displayed in surrender, he leans back. ‘A deal,’ he promises. ‘Not a word more.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, and then her mood seems to change, with an abruptness that is familiar, and her face is transformed by a fragile yet piercing smile, a questioning smile that reminds him of her face when they were in their twenties, that gives him a sensation of sweet anguish, a consciousness of the proximity of lost happiness that is as acute and transitory as the unbidden memory of a delicious taste. She replaces the empty cup and looks at him as though to take the measure of his thoughts, to ascertain whether he can be trusted not to resume his interrogation of her. ‘Tell me how you are,’ she says. ‘How have you been? I want to know.’
‘I’m fine. It’s been good, working here.’
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