Edwin raises his eyebrows; Danny just blinks at me.
“Yeah,” Edwin says eventually. “It was ten years ago, but yeah, of course I remember.”
“What happened after I left?” I look from one to the other. “Did Joel get hurt?”
Edwin tilts his head back against the sofa and looks at the ceiling. Danny’s gaze slides sideways, and he waits.
“You knocked a glass off the table as you ran away,” Edwin says quietly. “Deliberately, it looked like. Maybe not, I don’t know. A piece of glass flew up and cut Joel under his chin.”
I stare at him. The air feels too thick. “I never knew that. It was an accident.”
They’re both quiet.
“So what happened then? Did he need stitches?”
“We got Michael.” Edwin rolls his head forward again. “The nanny would have made a fuss. Michael took Joel to the doctor. He got stitched up. It was fine.”
“Lots of blood, though,” Danny says.
I look at the bottle of beer in my hand, and slowly place it on the coffee table. “Why didn’t you tell me? Nobody ever told me.”
Edwin sighs, and Danny makes a small noise in his throat.
“You always turned everything into a drama, Seph,” Danny says, his gentle tone at odds with the weight of the words. “Who knows how you’d have reacted. You spent the rest of that summer hiding from Joel anyway, and biting our heads off if we tried to talk to you about it. It was generally easier not to tell you stuff like that.”
The fact that neither of my brothers adds,It still is, merely deepens the silence that follows.
20
Laura
January to March 1992
VERA BEGAN TOvisit more frequently in the New Year—at least once and sometimes twice a week. Each time she arrived, she found an excuse to take me out of Ruth’s earshot and ask, “How is she?” I felt sick at being put on the spot like that, unwilling as I was to describe Ruth’s odd behavior, yet reluctant to lie that everything was fine. I began to dread her visits.
Ruth took Edwin to his first settling-in session at the preschool. The following day I heard her on the phone canceling his place for the rest of the term.
“Thank you so much. We’ll try again after Easter.”
She didn’t mention a reason to me, and I didn’t ask.
She hired a man to come and paint the day nursery, and then after he had moved all the furniture and covered it in dust sheets, she sent him away, claiming she couldn’t bear the smell of the paint. Privately, she told me, “I didn’t like his eyes. I didn’t trust him.”
She spent ten minutes chatting at the front door with a red-haired traveler woman one afternoon, allowing the warm air of the house to be sucked out into the January gloom, and she bought a pair of beautiful glass candlesticks from her. Afterward, she smashed the candlesticks in the kitchen sink, grinding the glass with a rolling pin and flushing it down the drain.
Yet frequently, she was seized by buoyant moods. She sang as she pottered around the kitchen, making up nonsense words to entertain Edwin. She stopped taking him to gymnastics, but she often joined us on the beach despite the cold weather, and we’d all have hot chocolate together on our return to the house.
I might have told all of this to Dominic, but he never asked. He had a wary manner about him those days—sometimes watching me without seeming to actually see me.
“I know you’ve been discussing me with Mother behind my back again,” I heard Ruth say to him. “You both use identical phrases—it’s pathetic. I’m fine.Weare fine. I’m having my scan on the eleventh of February, and I’m happy with my doctor. You’ve got to let me do this my way, Dominic. Trust me to know what’s best for my baby.”
“Our baby,” Dominic said, and then I heard her weeping and him murmuring soothing words.
I agreed to look after Edwin from a Sunday evening until a Tuesday evening so that Dominic could take Ruth down to London for a couple of days and accompany her to her scan. On the Monday afternoon, I had Edwin and Joel kneeling on chairs at the kitchen table, stirring cake mixture, when a taxi pulled up on the drive.
For a minute, I thought it was going to be Alex. I hovered in the kitchen doorway, watching through the hall window, waiting for him to step out and look up and perhaps catch my eye. But it was Ruth who emerged, handing money to the driver, marching up to the front door with a broad smile on her face.
“Guess what?” she said, bustling in and shedding her coat, checking her hair in the mirror. “It’s just one baby, and all is well.”
