Separate Beds (30 page)

Maisie had made a good job of mutilating the biscuit and a dollop dropped to the floor. Bending down, Ruth mopped it up – and her spine curved in a delicious movement that reminded him of the swoop of a banister on a Palladian staircase. He grinned as she straightened.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘I asked,’ she pointed out reasonably.

‘Your back reminded me of a banister … one of those beautiful sinuous staircases where the daylight and sun drifts down from the fanlight in the roof …’

‘Steady on,’ she said.

‘You’ve been very nice to me, Ruth. Helpful.’

‘And you thank me by comparing me to a banister?’

‘You’ve no idea what a compliment that is.’

‘You’re right. I don’t.’ She scrubbed Maisie’s mouth with a tissue.

‘I
am
grateful.’

She smiled and dropped the tissue into the bin.

It seemed warmer and the sky outside looked more promising. There might even be a chance of some sun. Even so, as Jake stretched the green silk into the box’s interior, the tiny frisson of attraction stirred up by Ruth withered, leaving him longing to be alone.

‘Knock, knock,’ said a voice.

Jake glanced up. Tom, looking smarter than he had seen him for a long while, was framed in the doorway. ‘Dad.’

‘Thought I’d come and see if I could help with Maisie.’ He paused at the sight of Ruth. ‘Am I interrupting?’

Jake introduced them. Ruth smiled radiantly at Tom, and Jake was astonished. Night had turned into glorious day. ‘What Jake means is that I’ve been bombarding him with stuff,’ she said.

Jake noted that his father was transfixed.

‘It’s not exactly what he’s been used to but, round here, people need things mended and someone like Jake is difficult to find.’

‘A good thing,’ said Tom, and Jake understood that a seal of approval had been bestowed on Ruth. ‘Adapting … If we don’t we won’t survive.’

Bastard
, thought Jake. Sounding like David Attenborough and wearing that stupid corduroy jacket too.

‘Shouldn’t just be the economy that makes us change our behaviour.’ Ruth continued to glow. ‘We should do it anyway.’

‘True, and that’s what my elder daughter might say. But when have humans ever really got ahead of the game? They’re too busy making hay with the present.’

Tom was being very, very nice. A tiny flush crept into Ruth’s face. ‘Maybe.’

Tom’s gaze rested on Ruth a fraction longer than Jake reckoned it needed to. ‘What do you think?’

‘Any progress is better than nothing.’ Ruth tucked her hair behind her ear. ‘We have to be realistic, and any result is the best result because that’s all we have.’

‘You’re very wise very young,’ replied Tom. ‘It’s taken me years to get to that point.’

You old dog
, thought Jake. Seizing a screwdriver, he set about replacing the faulty hinge while Tom and Ruth (the ultra-receptive audience) talked away, his father waxing eloquent and animated in a manner Jake had not seen in him for some time, a small relief that Jake could hardly begrudge him.

‘Do you work?’ Ruth asked, in such a careful manner that Jake realized she probably came from a situation where work was not a given.

There was a short pause. ‘I lost my job, but I’m looking for another.’ Tom glanced at Jake. ‘I’m afraid it’s made me rather short-tempered, as Jake could tell you.’

Jake slotted the final screw into place and closed the lid of the box. He slid it over to Ruth. ‘First job done. The rest will take a few days.’

‘Here, let me.’ Tom inserted the box carefully into the holdall and zipped it up.

Again Ruth’s features melted into a smile. ‘Thank you.’

He could see his father reflected in Ruth’s eyes,
a charming, interesting man
. And perhaps he was.

Interposing himself between Tom and Ruth, he took possession of the holdall. ‘Dad, if you could look after a Maisie for a moment, I’ll carry this over for you, Ruth.’

‘No need.’

‘All the same.’

She sidestepped to face Tom and the fall of her hair lodged against her neck. ‘Very nice to meet you.’

Together, Jake and Ruth picked their way over the cobbles and headed for the block of flats. ‘Is business OK for you?’ he asked.

‘OK-ish. I’m hoping to find a bigger space – the flat’s tiny – so I can hire someone to help with the orders and run the website. But …’ She shrugged. ‘Meanwhile I help keep an eye on the elderly in the flats. As I said, lots of lonely old ladies.’

At the entrance, which looked in need of some robust upkeep, she held out her hand for the holdall. ‘Thanks.’

‘Sorry about my father.’

Ruth looked puzzled. ‘What for? He’s nice. You’re lucky to have a father.’

That gave Jake pause.
A charming, interesting man
. ‘And you don’t?’

‘I have a father but he’s not particularly nice.’

Clearly the subject was not one she wished to pursue, which made both of them a little uncomfortable.

Ruth seemed sweet, and her sweetness was balm to his fractious feelings. He decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘Do you share the flat with someone?’

‘I did.’ The answer arrived reluctantly. ‘Matt. But he’s gone now.’ Her eyes reflected pain and distress. ‘We’d been together a little while, but …’

‘Sorry.’ Jake hated to see the distress. ‘If it’s of any comfort …’ thinking,
Of course it’s no comfort
‘… my wife’s just left me.’ They were the hardest words to say and not that brilliantly put. If being cut off at the knees by Jocasta had left him so inept and fatuous, he would have to do something fast.

Her eyes widened at the information. ‘
Not
good.’

Thank God. There was no false sympathy. And, even if he had evolved into a fatuous, witless idiot, he might as well continue this conversation because it brought relief of sorts. ‘It’s a bit like having a brain fever and waking up feeling a different person.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do know.’

Jake scuffed his boot on the kerb. ‘I’d better be going.’

She smiled her light-bulb smile. ‘If you like I’ll make the notice and put it up for you. What sort of hours do you think you’ll be here?’

He looked into the beautiful eyes, containing their hint of anguish. ‘You mustn’t bother.’

She blinked. ‘I must bother. That’s the point. I’m telling myself that if I take control of some things, others will fall into place. Making a notice is easy.’

Struck by this point of view, Jake promised to get in touch with the wording.

On returning to the workshop, he discovered Tom walking up and down with Maisie in his arms, pointing out objects – ‘Window, Maisie … chair’ – in a manner Jake found mildly irritating. At his entrance, Tom turned round. ‘This is a good place to be.’ He yielded Maisie up to Jake. ‘I hadn’t appreciated how much so.’ He wandered over to the stack of wood and laid a hand on it, a priest bestowing a blessing. ‘It’s the
basic stuff in the best sense. The stuff of life.’ He seemed a little bemused by his own conclusions. ‘It smells good. It smells
truthful
. Solid.’ He turned and smiled at Jake. ‘I hadn’t appreciated this before. I didn’t know.’

‘Nice as it is to see you, Dad,’ Jake was puzzled, ‘why are you here?’

‘Thought I might take Maisie off your hands, which would allow you to get on. If it would help I could do it on a regular basis. While I can.’

He meant:
Until I get a new job
. Suddenly anxious for his father, Jake kissed the top of Maisie’s head. ‘You love Maisie, don’t you?’

‘Yes … Actually, I adore her. But that isn’t the sole reason I’m here.’ Tom was extra gruff. ‘I wanted to say … sorry.’

Jake settled a protesting Maisie in her pushchair. He did not look at Tom. ‘Do I know for what exactly?’

‘You do. Playing Monopoly. Other times, too. You feel I get at you … and I want to say I’m sorry about that.’ Jake was gathering up his tools and deliberately didn’t look at Tom. ‘Of course you make things. I’m afraid I’ve been very angry and impatient with the way things have turned out.’ He sounded deeply chastened. ‘But you will understand what it feels like. The shock, I mean.’

Jake checked the blade on his Stanley knife before retracting it into the handle. The wounds inflicted by Tom still smarted sufficiently to tempt him to tell his father not to worry because Jake never paid much attention to what he said in the first place. But that would be a lie. Also, it had cost his father to apologize. ‘Both of us could do with a break.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Picking up a length of beading lying on the bench, Tom admitted, ‘I’m pretty useless at the
moment.’ He twisted it this way and that and forced it into a curve.

The beading threatened to snap. ‘Give it here, Dad.’ Jake wrested it away.

The sun had moved round from one window to the other. Empty-handed, head bent, his father was encased in a patch of shadow, a man with the stuffing knocked out of him. Pity, plus a slightly shameful satisfaction in this apparent power shift between father and son, went through Jake.

‘Dad, it would be great if you could look after Maisie.’

Tom lifted his head and a spark of animation lit his dulled eyes. ‘Then I will.’

Jake rolled up his sleeves. ‘Since you’re here could you help me move the wood? I need to clear a space. It’s looks as though I’m going to turn into a repair shop.’

Mia had maintained that it happened overnight. ‘One day you’re sewn into the family. The next you’re cut off and quite separate.’

She couldn’t have known how prescient her words were. They had been sitting together in her pink and white bedroom – Mia on the bed with her laptop on her knee, tapping into a chatroom, and Emily sort of crouched on the stool in the corner as though she didn’t quite dare sit next to her sister.

She was fifteen and still inclined to the literal, and Mia was eighteen and busy with thoughts on climate change and her plans to save the animal kingdom. The separation bit set off alarm bells in Emily. Would this include her, or only Mia? Was everyone ejected on to the streets, whether they liked it or not?

She gazed at the carpet, an attractive oatmeal-beige that
Mia had made a fuss over choosing and which no one else was allowed as it was impractical. But Mia was because she could be trusted to look after it. Emily had had a
big
fight with her mother over the unfairness. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a sultana that must have dropped out of Mia’s lunch box. Under the pretext of doing up her lace, she placed her foot on it and squashed it down hard into the carpet.

‘The unsewing? Is it painful?’

‘Not particularly. Most children can’t wait for the off.’ She snapped the laptop shut. ‘I’ve been reading about it. Young children experience a series of disconnections that prepare them for later. Going to school … well, you know.’

‘You want to leave home?’

Mia threw her the look she reserved for the perpetrators of cruelty to animals. ‘I do. As soon as A levels are over, I’m off.’

In reality, Mia had done no such thing and Emily had noted that she had stuck around long enough for the parents to fund her through university. It was only after she’d met Pete at the end of her second year that the real change took place. Before Pete, Mia’s crusading fervour exhibited a lovely frothy quality. After Pete, she turned serious and her expressive features no longer invited anyone to laugh.

From the start, Pete had hated everything about the Nicholsons and made his feelings clear. Emily used to watch him sniffing around the house as if it was built on a plague pit, picking on bits of furniture as bourgeois hate objects. Dark and bulky, he had held the slender coppery Mia in thrall. Be careful, Emily wanted to warn her sister. He’s an enemy.

One of the first signs had been when Mia cut her hair
very short and joined the Marxist Society. Or was it the other way around? Then, at the end of the second year at Manchester, she had arrived home and cleared out her wardrobe. She threw out skirts, coloured sweaters and high heels but kept jeans, black sweaters, flat shoes and lace-up boots. From then on, she had made a point of dressing exclusively in them.

‘Do you like Pete?’ Mia asked Emily, in a rare instance of eliciting Emily’s opinion.

That was really tricky. Emily knew enough to grasp that it would be unwise to be truthful. On the other hand, she did not know enough to understand how to dodge difficult questions. She fell back on her arsenal of references.

‘He’s a bit like Heathcliff,’ she hazarded.

‘Meaning?’

‘He likes to be rude to people who don’t agree with him.’ She couldn’t quite bring herself to say that Pete was a bully and Mia was making herself ridiculous the way she trailed around after him, and pretended she was as bold and free-thinking as Pete told everyone he was.

Mia’s eyes narrowed. ‘How stupid is that?’

After the big bust-up and Mia’s departure, Emily had stolen into Mia’s now empty room, searched the carpet for the sultana stain and found a brownish shadow that definitely marred the sweep of oatmeal. She had regarded it thoughtfully and with a sheepish pleasure. It was complicated. All her childhood, she had loved Mia and longed to be part of the inner circle. Now she didn’t, and she felt nothing but guilty relief that Mia had gone, leaving Emily free to focus on other things.

Chapter Eighteen

Annie packed up the clothes she had selected for the second-hand shop. Bought in the glory days, the silk evening dress, the designer trouser suit and several (hardly worn) cashmere sweaters would fetch – if not a reasonable sum as everyone was now in the same boat – something that would help. Wrapping them in tissue paper, she felt a pang at their going.

She refused to think about her mother’s ring.

‘I’m off for a walk,’ Hermione called, from across the corridor.

Annie poked her head out of the door. ‘Will you be all right? You know the way to the park now?’

‘Would anyone like to come with me?’

Oh dear. Annie quashed any misgivings and ducked that one. ‘I think everyone’s busy. Tom is trying to get the lawnmower to work, Emily is going out and Jake’s at the workshop.’