Dominic gave me a flat smile. “It’s the weekend. You shouldn’t be working. I’m afraid we take advantage of you far too much.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“Do you want to go out somewhere? I could drop you in town?”
An image of my friends flashed into my mind. The four of us who used to spend our Saturdays hanging out at the shopping center, scraping money together for chips, gossiping about the other kids at school.
“No, I’m good, thanks. I’ll—” I indicated the annex door with my head.
“Okay.”
I stood by the table after they’d gone, wondering what my friends were doing at that very moment. My throat ached with self-pity. Hazel would be taking notes in a Saturday morninglecture, I suspected; the first year of medicine was pretty lecture-heavy. Jo had joined the police, and I pictured her on a weekend shift, gulping down scalding coffee before dashing out to an urgent call. Pati would almost certainly still be asleep in her student apartment, unlikely to surface until midafternoon. They’d all have new friends by now, new in-jokes, new futures mapped out. I doubted they had time to spare a thought for me.
A movement in the garden tugged me back to the present, and I stepped closer to the tall day nursery windows. Ruth was wandering out across the lawn in her baggy gray cardigan and slippers, seemingly oblivious to the November chill. She disappeared among the trees. I was alone in the house.
In the kitchen, raw onion and garlic lay abandoned on a chopping board, filling the room with their odor. I plucked two paperbacks from the bookshelf in the sitting room and took them with a cup of tea to my annex.
The sound of cartoons alerted me to Edwin’s return a couple of hours later. He didn’t acknowledge me passing behind his sofa, his eyes fixed on the screen. I filled the kettle, but tiptoed to the doorway with it in my hand, holding my breath. Dominic’s voice floated from the sitting room.
“...thinking of selling it,” he was saying. “After such a short time. It’s ridiculous. He knows it’s a good investment even if he doesn’t want to use it himself.”
I couldn’t make out Ruth’s reply.
“Well something has upset him, that’s for sure,” Dominic said.
Ruth said something like,“...his own life.”
“You’ve picked a fight with him again, haven’t you? Made him think we want him here, then told him you don’t. Well, I hope you’re satisfied.” I heard the creak of the sitting room door, and I dashed across the kitchen, clattering the kettle onto its base.
“Heshould move into Winterbourne,” came Ruth’s voice. “With you and my mother. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and Alex. You could suit yourselves then.”
I abandoned the kettle and crept back to my rooms.
Dominic headed back to London on the Sunday morning. Ruth kept to herself that week, and I took Edwin out of the house as much as possible. Michael introduced me to quinces, another fruit I had never encountered. Edwin and I picked some and I hacked them into pieces to stew with apple, but it was their fragrance that attracted me the most: an aroma that reminded me tantalizingly of Turkish delight jellies and the Earl Grey tea that Vera drank. I kept a couple on my windowsill in the annex, stroking their fuzzy yellow skins when I passed them, inhaling their beguiling scent as if it was an antidote for the tense atmosphere in the main part of the house.
Dominic and Ruth argued again the following weekend, and Dominic sought me out on the Sunday afternoon.
“I’m really sorry about all this, Laura,” he told me, his lips tugged downward. “I think Ruth could do with getting away from here for a little while. Is there any chance you’d consider looking after Edwin full-time for a few days? I might book a minibreak for her to go on with Vera.”
I nodded. “Of course. Whatever helps.”
He pressed his lips into his flat smile.
“God, I don’t know what we did to deserve you. Thank you. I’ll pay you at double rate for all the extra hours, overnight, all of it,” he said.
I opened my mouth to protest. That would be a ridiculous amount of money for the minimal extra work it would entail. He held up a hand.
“Really—it’s the only way I can justify it,” he said. Edwin whizzed down the slide and ran head on into his father’smidriff. “It’s danger money,” Dominic added, his smile reaching his eyes this time.
The weekday atmosphere in the house lightened after that. Ruth told me she and Vera were going to stay at a luxury country house hotel for a few days, and she began to eat meals with us again. She asked Edwin questions about his morning activities, and sometimes she took him out with her in the afternoons so that I could study. Often, she walked down to the beach with Edwin in the early evenings, saying it helped clear her head. She asked me to babysit on Saturday nights, and she and Dominic went out together, coming home late. I dozed in the day nursery until they came in, and then took myself off to the annex.
But as the date of her mini holiday approached, she withdrew again, her behavior distracted and restless. I did my best to reassure her that Edwin would be fine with me, but she barely listened: that didn’t seem to be the source of her anxiety. I knew Dominic thought she was miserable about not being pregnant again, and Vera thought she was ill with depression and ought to see a doctor, but I wasn’t convinced about either of these theories. If Dominic was right about Alex putting his cottage back on the market, I guessed that Ruth was feeling guilty about pushing him away. I wondered if she missed him, and if she might attempt to entice him back to Summerbourne. I was torn between wanting to see him again and hoping I never would.
I checked the clock constantly on that last morning. Dominic had taken the day off work to collect both women and chauffeur them to the hotel. I wondered if Ruth was building up to a refusal to go.
However, she seemed resigned to the trip by the time Dominic arrived, and she gave Edwin a fierce hug before joining Vera on the back seat of the car. It was a gray Thursday afternoon,spitting lightly with a cold rain, and Edwin and I huddled in the doorway to wave them off. Edwin’s bottom lip wobbled as the car purred away.
“Is Daddy coming back after?” he asked. We gazed down the lane together.
