Page 28 of All Our Missing Pieces

‘That’s so hard.’ I was torn between wanting to know more about him and not wanting to pry into something I sensed had caused him deep hurt. ‘Did they separate a long time ago?’

‘They didn’t separate. They were separated. Dad came out here on a student visa, to study law. He and Mum got together at uni and I was – well, I was a mistake. They never got married, because Dad knew he’d struggle to get that past his family. But they were happy together, I think, until I was about four.’

‘Then what happened?’

He poured more water into our glasses. ‘1988 happened. Massive crackdown on illegal migrants. Dad had to go back to Bangladesh, and I guess at first they both thought he’d be able to come back. But he never did.’

‘You never saw him again?’

‘I did at first. They both tried. Mum took me out there to visit him and when I was a bit older I went on my own. But he – I wasn’t enough to make him want to jump through hoops to come back here. He never forgave the British government for what had happened. And when I was twelve he got married to someone else.’

I could just about imagine it. The effort to keep a little unit of three together, even across such a distance, a chasm widened by time and politics and family pressures. And Luke, stuck in the middle until he drifted inexorably to one side.

‘That’s so sad,’ I said.

‘Hey, it’s all in the past now.’ He gestured for the bill. ‘And I’m bringing the mood right down, rambling about myself. What about your family, anyway? You go back home and see them often?’

‘Hardly ever.’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t… I don’t really like where they live.’

‘Nottingham?’ He looked puzzled.

‘Nottingham’s all right. It’s more – it’s their house. I don’t like going there much.’

‘But you’re cool with living in a building site?’

I laughed. ‘Trust me, Damask Square’s a palace compared to what I’m used to. Why don’t we go on somewhere and have a drink?’

He agreed and I thanked him profusely for the meal, which he insisted on paying for. We found a nearby bar and shared a bottle of red wine, talking about things that weren’t sad at all. Listening to his voice and the joyful sound of his laughter, admiring his strong hands as he lifted his glass, discovering the way his smile was slightly lopsided, I found myself hoping – longing, even – for him to kiss me.

And, just before we arrived home, he did. In the shadow cast by the plane tree, the street lamp obscured, he took me in his arms and I turned my face up to his. Our lips met, tentatively at first and then more urgently, our bodies pressing together in the cooling evening.

Then we unlocked the door of Orla’s house and went upstairs to our separate bedrooms.

TWENTY

‘“I thought I could, I thought I could, I thought I could,”’ Beatrice read, before closing the book with relief. Parker was asleep, her thumb in her mouth, her long eyelashes fanned over her plump, flushed cheeks. Slate’s eyes were closed, too.

Thank fuck. She allowed her lips to form the words but no sound to emerge. Another day was done – now all she had to do was sneak out of the kids’ bedroom without waking them, stack their dinner plates in the dishwasher, mop the floor, put a load of washing on – and then she would be able to sit. Sit alone, in blissful silence, until Frances arrived home and she was free to leave.

But before she even stood, she noticed tears trickling down Slate’s face. He wasn’t crying like he normally did – the outraged bawl of a four-year-old – but silently, his eyelids squeezed tightly shut as if trying to prevent the tears from falling.

He was crying the way Beatrice used to when she was a child and didn’t want her mother to hear.

‘Honey?’ she whispered. ‘What’s the matter?’

With any luck, he was actually asleep and just having some weird Little Engine That Could-induced nightmare. Beatrice could relate to that – she often felt that if she had to read that stupid story one more time, she’d weep herself.

Then his eyes opened, his mouth turned downwards in an almost absurdly exaggerated expression of sadness, and he rolled over, burying his face in the pillow, his shoulders shaking.

For God’s sake, don’t wake your sister, Beatrice thought.

But she reached out a hand and stroked his shoulder gently. ‘Slate? What’s wrong?’

The little boy’s shoulders heaved and a thin wail emerged, muffled by the pillow.

Shit, Beatrice thought. He’s properly upset about something. But what? She was used to coping with skinned knees, devastation when cucumber was cut into rounds instead of sticks, and plain overtired grouchiness.

This felt different – like real sadness. She couldn’t begin to guess what in the inner life of a four-year-old could have brought it on. She lay down next to him and pulled him into a cuddle, not knowing whether it was the right or appropriate thing to do but acting on pure instinct.