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‘What are we going to do?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know, Sam Moore. Whatarewe going to do?’
CHAPTER 27
The key rattles in the front door. Joyce checks the clock on the mantelpiece. Nine thirty, early to be coming in. Perhaps they’ve had a fight. Might not be a bad thing. Might remind Sam why he left in the first place. Because her grandson is the proverbial moth; that woman not so much a flame as a bed of embers, a glow you only see in the blackness, flaring against your wingtips when it’s far too late.
A moment of silence. She is about to call out when she hears him singing – not words but da-da-das, his voice thinning as he bends to take off his boots, thickening again when he stands. It’s a theme tune. She recognises it. Some detective series he told her to watch, set in Copenhagen.
The door opens. Sam comes in. He is not frowning, far from it. He is grinning like an idiot.
‘You sound pleased with yourself,’ she says, sliding her bookmark between the pages of her Kate Atkinson and placing it on the coffee table. ‘You were singing away when you came in.’
‘Was I?’ He closes the door and leans against it, as if for support. His smile is still wide and silly. Obviously the evening has not gone as badly as she hoped.
Feared.Come on, Joyce.
‘It’s nice,’ she says. ‘Nice to hear you singing again. I take it you had a good time?’
‘Really good actually. We talked properly, you know?’ He wrests himself from the door and comes to join her, taking the armchair, rubbing his hands together. ‘You laid a fire.’
‘I did.’
‘It was bloody chilly this evening actually.’ Sam stares into the flames, lost in his thoughts. ‘We were frozen.’
‘Fire’ll soon warm you up.’
She does not add that she laid it to fight an attack of the blues that came at her from nowhere. The emptiness of this big old house in the evening came as a shock after so much time together – a bit like when he first left to live with Naomi. This last year, even when he’s in another room, she’s been able to hear the faint notes of his music, the burble of whatever podcast or nature programme he’s listening to. Sometimes she just wishes this sodding pandemic would bugger off so she could get out there and fill her old lungs with the Sea Shanty Chanteurs, share a few laughs down the pub with her friends, swim in the sea. And now that little Tommy’s here, well, she just hopes this thing will be truly over in time for her to take him down to the beach with a bucket and spade, buy him an ice cream, share a bag of chips. That’s what she got stuck thinking earlier, feeling sorry for herself. She’s done everything she’s been told by that fool at Number 10, obeyed the rules like a soldier. Because it’s been a war this. Nearest most people have been to one anyway.
Yes, she managed to get quite cross with it all.
But then she poured herself a large Amaretto and reminded herself, as she always does, of all those who’ve had it ten times worse.
Sam is still staring into the fire.
‘It’s early,’ Joyce says. ‘I thought you might have fallen out.’
‘Not at all. She was anxious to get back to Tommy, that’s all. She doesn’t complain. Shenevercomplains.’ He draws his gaze from the fire, looks at her, smiles.
Again, unease stirs in her belly – why, she has no idea. ‘She does seem like a different person,’ she says. It is less, much less, than she means. Because there’s something odd about this transformation. Maybe that’s what’s bothering her. Motherhood changes you, yes, but not this much. And the changes are slow; they’re cumulative.
‘It’s as if I’m getting to know her all over again.’ He sounds joyous, not picking up on Joyce’s misgivings at all. ‘But at the same time, I know her inside out and back to front, you know? It’s weird.’ Again he looks at her, and she sees through him as if he were made of glass. Sees the scowling ten-year-old covered in scuffs and bruises from fighting in the playground, the lost boy uprooted from his home, the excited kid of a few months later who brought home a bunch of six daffodils and told her he’d grown them himself.
It is this last one she sees now. He is excited, dizzy, childlike. He is, she realises, in love.
Whether Naomi has changed or not, Joyce can’t be the one to burst his bubble. He’s a grown man. His love life is none of her business. To voice her fears would spoil everything she has built between them.
‘And you believe this change in her, do you?’Oh, take a bow, Joyce. Great restraint, I must say.
But he only nods, no offence taken. Astonishing how guileless he is, how trusting. Worrying.
‘Well, if you’re sure,’ she says carefully. ‘Just, you know, as the Doors say:take it easy, baby. There’s no rush, is there? No rush at all.’
CHAPTER 28
It was around this time that Joyce and I began to talk more frequently. She wasn’t gritting her teeth or anything as she had been at the start, more quietly concerned. As for Sam, he talked constantly about the baby. And I meanconstantly.
Me? I kept my feelings to myself obviously, along with the fact that I’d noticed he’d shaved off his beard. And yes, I wondered if Naomi had asked him to do that, what else she was asking him to do, telling him to do. But I didn’t see too much of him, because Betsy and I both tested positive for COVID and had to isolate. I remember Sam dropped some groceries off at the cottage on one of the days. I didn’t ask him to; he just improvised, buying all the things he’d seen me give Betsy – the organic yoghurts she liked, and a head of broccoli, which he picked out of the bag and laid on the front step, telling her as he backed away two metres that he’d cut it down in the forest. This moved me. As I said, he was such a softie, no matter what some of the more lurid press said about him afterwards. Even ifdesperate local manglided near the truth, he was not aweird loner, nor was hereclusive,nor, of all things,acrazed troll.
