My mood sank further as we reached the lawn and saw the kitchen doors were open. Ruth appeared in the doorway and watched us approach.
“Mummy!” Edwin yelled, running toward her. Alex kept his chin high, his focus directly on Ruth, no sideways glance at me. I tugged the flowers from my hair and slowed my stride.
Ruth kissed the top of Edwin’s head. “Go and wash your hands and face, darling, and take Joel with you. You can play inside then until your lunch is ready.” When she straightened, her gaze was fixed on Alex.
“Ruth. You look wonderful.” Alex opened his arms as he walked up to her. She allowed him to kiss her on each cheek, her expression taut. I hesitated on the patio, turning to look out at the garden.
“Are we still on for our lunch date?” he asked her, and I could tell he wasn’t confident of her answer.
“Why not?” she replied after a heartbeat’s pause, and then, “Laura, please make sure Edwin eats a sandwich before any more fruit, won’t you?” By the time I had turned to acknowledge this, they were walking away side by side, and I heard Alex’s car engine start up a minute later.
There was a bird-pecked apple on the patio table, and I picked it up and examined it. I thought of Ruth saying “at his beck and call,” and I pressed my thumbnail through the wrinkled green skin into the spongy flesh. Alex didn’t deserve someone who made him wait, who made him feel guilty when he hadn’t done anything wrong. He deserved someone who would race with him on the beach in the wild wind and laugh at the sky. He deserved someone who loved him—someone who was free to love him.
In the kitchen I prepared ham sandwiches for myself and the boys. I sliced two unblemished apples into perfect crescents, and arranged them on a plate alongside a mountain of chocolate fingers. Afterward, while Edwin and Joel were pushing trains around a wooden track in the day nursery, I escaped to the annex and slid the wilting purple flowers that Alex had given me between pages of my heaviest textbook and pressed them flat.
11
Seraphine
ILOVE WAKINGup at Winterbourne. I love lying with my eyes closed and listening to the soft rumble of traffic outside, the snatches of phrases from cyclists whizzing by, the leisurely comments drifting up from neighbors as they emerge from their houses. This morning there is high-pitched yapping from a little dog, and then the clatter of the trash truck as it begins its stop-start progress down the street. I trace the familiar embroidery pattern on the bedspread with my fingertips like I used to on childhood visits to Granny Vera. Even the scent of the wood polish on the mahogany bedside table takes me back to being seven years old again, and for a moment I pretend that all is well and my dad is still here, pottering around in the kitchen downstairs, brewing his coffee and reading his newspaper.
By the time I descend to the kitchen, Edwin has left for work. Danny is frying bacon, yawning.
“How many are coming?” I ask, eyeing the panful.
“Funny. I need energy. Brooke’s taking me on a walking tour of the city with some friends of her parents.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Friends of her parents? How serious is this?”
He ducks his head. I’m not used to seeing Danny embarrassed, and it gives me a little jolt of amusement, alongside some other more protective emotion. He shrugs.
“I like her, that’s all,” he says. “Listen, sis. I was thinking, about last night. That letter. And Dad’s accident.” He looks at me, hesitating.
“Hm?”
“Dad said something a few days before he died. When I first got back. He said he had something he wanted to tell us, when we were all together.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, pouring milk onto my muesli.
“I don’t know. He said he was glad we were all going to be together that weekend, our birthday weekend. There was something he wanted to tell us.”
I pause with my spoon halfway to my mouth.
“Well, what was it?” I ask, then see his expression and add, “Okay. You don’t know.” I put my spoon down slowly.
Dad’s accident happened on a Thursday, the day before Danny and I turned twenty-five. He’d driven over to Summerbourne to start preparations for the family party we had planned for the Saturday. We think he might have been trying to rescue one of the farm kittens from the garage roof. He fell off the ladder onto the driveway and hit his head and died.
Edwin and I were at work that day—Edwin in London and me in Norwich—but Danny was freshly returned from working abroad and was catching up with friends in the village, so he was the first of us to arrive at Summerbourne and find him. It wasDanny who had to watch the paramedics shake their heads. It was Danny who had to talk to the police, phone the rest of us, ward off the curious neighbors, pick me up off the gravel when I got home.
“Did Dad say anything to Edwin about this?” I ask eventually, but Danny shrugs.
“I’d forgotten about it until this morning. Do you think it means anything? No one was there when he fell.” He looks down then, blinking at the bacon he’s laid out on his bread. “That’s what I keep thinking. No one was there. How can we be sure itwasan accident?”
“Danny!” I push my chair back and get up, walk to the sink, turn around, and walk back. “The policesaidit was an accident.”
“I know.”
I can tell that, like me, he is remembering our conversation last night: the implication in the letter that Dad’s death was far from an accident, and my insistence that this was a hollow threat. I attempt to summon back that certainty now, but there’s a tremor in my voice.
