“Yes. Thank you. I will. Thanks. Sorry.”

He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home.

An old man with a withered hand was sitting opposite him. He was wearing a yellow mac and carrying a greasy satchel of papers and looking directly at Jamie and muttering to himself. Jamie was very relieved when he got off at Swiss Cottage.

Ringing Mum was going to be tricky. Was he meant to know about her leaving Dad? Was Katie even meant to know? She could have overheard a conversation and jumped to conclusions. Which she was prone to do

He’d ring Katie first.

When he got home, however, there was a message on the machine.

He pressed PLAY and took off his jacket.

He thought, at first, that it was a prank call. Or a lunatic dialing a wrong number. A woman was hyperventilating into the phone.

Then the woman was saying his name, “Jamie…? Jamie…?” and he realized that it was his mother and he had to sit down very quickly on the arm of the sofa.

“Jamie…? Are you there…? Something dreadful has happened to your father. Jamie…? Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.”

The message clicked off.

Everything was very quiet and very still. Then he threw himself across the room, knocking the phone to the carpet.

His parents’ number. What the fuck was their number? Jesus, he must have dialed it seven thousand times. Zero one seven three three…Two four two…? Two two four…? Two four four…? Christ.

He was halfway through ringing Directory Inquiries when the number came back to him. He rang it. He counted the rings. Forty. No answer.

He rang Katie.

Answerphone.

“Katie. This is Jamie. Shit. You’re not in. Bugger. Listen. I’ve just had this scary call from Mum. Ring me, OK? No. Don’t ring me. I’m going up to Peterborough. Actually, maybe you’re there already. I’ll talk to you later. I’m going now.”

Something dreadful? Why were old people always so fucking vague?

He ran upstairs and grabbed the car keys and ran down again and had to lean against the wall in the hallway for a few seconds to stop himself passing out, and it occurred to him that in some obscure way he had caused this, by not ringing Katie back, by standing Ryan up, by not loving Tony, by not telling Stuart the whole truth.

By the time he crossed the M25, however, he was feeling surprisingly good.

He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people’s, at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn’t have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.

Like they said. No one committed suicide in wartime.

He was going to talk to his father. Properly. About everything.

Jamie had always blamed him for their lack of communication. Always thought of his father as a dried-up old stick. It was cowardice. He could see that now. And laziness. Just wanting his own prejudices confirmed.

Baldock, Biggleswade, Sandy…

Another forty minutes and he’d be there.

65

Katie and Ray were standing in front of a sculpture called Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. Basically, a girder sticking out of the wall with this jagged black metal spike dangling from it, and some pieces of junk on the floor nearby, which were meant to represent the stag and a goat and some “primitive creatures,” though they could have represented the Crucifixion or the recipe for Welsh rarebit from where Katie was standing.

The aluminum stag was originally made from an ironing board. She knew this because she’d read the little cardboard explanatory note in some detail. She’d read quite a lot of the little cardboard explanatory notes, and stared out of a lot of windows and imagined the possible private lives of many of their fellow visitors because Ray was spending a lot of time examining the art. And it was pissing her off.

She’d come here for all the wrong reasons. She’d wanted to be in her element, but she wasn’t. And she’d wanted him to be out of his element, but he wasn’t.

You could say what you liked about Ray but you could drop him in the middle of Turkmenistan and he’d be in the nearest village by nightfall eating horse and smoking whatever they smoked out there.

He was winning. And it wasn’t a competition. It was childish to think it was a competition. But he was still winning. And she was meant to be winning.

They finally reached the café.

He was holding a cube of sugar so that the bottom corner was just touching the surface of his tea and a brown tide line was slowly making its way up the cube. He was saying, “Obviously most of it’s rubbish. But…it’s like old churches and stuff. It makes you slow down and look…What’s up, kiddo?”

“Nothing.”

She could see now. The dustbin-throwing wasn’t the problem. It was the not winning.

She liked the fact that she was more intelligent than Ray. She liked the fact that she could speak French and he couldn’t. She liked the fact that she had opinions about factory farming and he didn’t.

But it counted for nothing. He was a better person than she was. In every way that mattered. Except the dustbin-throwing. And, in truth, she might have thrown a few dustbins in her time if she’d been a little stronger.

Ten minutes later they were sitting on the big slope looking back down into the vast space of the turbine hall.

Ray said, “I know you’re trying really hard, love.”

Katie said nothing.

Ray said, “You don’t have to do this.” He paused. “You don’t have to marry me because of Jacob and the house and money and everything. I’m not going to throw you out onto the street. Whatever you want to do, I’ll try and make it work.”

66

Jamie was crossing the waiting room when a dapper man in his late sixties sprung off one of the orange plastic chairs and blocked Jamie’s path in a slightly disturbing manner.

“Jamie?”

“Yes?”

The man was wearing a linen jacket and a charcoal roll-neck sweater. He did not look like a doctor.

“David Symmonds. I’m a friend of your mother’s. I know her from the bookshop where she works. In town.”

“OK.”

“I drove her here,” the man explained. “She rang me.”

Jamie wasn’t sure what he was meant to do. Thank the man? Pay him? “I think I should go and find my mother.” There was something disconcertingly familiar about the man. He looked like a newsreader, or someone from a TV advert.

The man said, “Your mother got home and found that your father had been taken to hospital. We think someone broke into the house.”

Jamie wasn’t listening. After his panicked phone calls standing in front of the locked house back at the village he wasn’t in the mood for interruptions.

The man continued: “And we think your father disturbed them. But it’s OK…Sorry. That’s a ridiculous word. He’s alive at any rate.”

Jamie felt suddenly very weak.

“There was a great deal of blood,” said the man.

“What?”

“In the kitchen. In the cellar. In the bathroom.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Jamie.

The man took a step backward. “They’re in cubicle 4. Look…it’s probably best if I slipped away. Now that you’re here to look after your mother.” The man was clasping his hands together like a vicar. There were ironed creases down the front of his canvas trousers.

Someone had tried to murder Jamie’s father.

The man continued: “Send her my very best wishes. And tell her I’m thinking of her.”

“OK.”

The man stood to one side and Jamie walked to cubicle 4. He paused outside the curtain and braced himself for what he was about to see.