78

Katie felt wrung out.

You expected crises to resolve stuff, to put it into perspective. But they didn’t. When they’d got to Peterborough she’d imagined staying for a few days, a week maybe, just her and Jacob. Keep an eye on Dad and make sure he wasn’t planning to hack something else off. Give Mum a hand. Be a better daughter and atone for the guilt about disappearing last time.

But when Dad got back with Ray and told everyone they could go home, she was relieved. Another day in that house and they were going to kill each other.

The wheelchair was a shock, but Dad seemed strangely buoyant. Even Mum seemed keener on looking after him on her own than sharing the house with her children.

As they were leaving, Katie steeled herself and apologized.

Mum said, “Let’s just forget about it, shall we.”

And Dad overcompensated by saying, “Thank you for coming. It was lovely to see you,” despite the fact that this was the first time he had actually been awake in her presence.

Which reminded Jacob that he hadn’t given Grandpa his chocolate buttons. So Ray went outside and retrieved the packet from the glove compartment and Dad made a show of opening it and eating a couple and declaring that they were delicious despite the fact that the car heater seemed to have fused them into a kind of brown porridge.

They drifted to their cars and drove away and Ray and Jacob played I Spy for half an hour and Katie found that she was actually looking forward to getting back to the house she’d been so desperate to get away from only the day before.

When they arrived Ray and Jacob put the train set together on the living-room floor while she made supper. She bathed Jacob and Ray put him to bed.

Neither of them had the energy to argue and they spent the next few days playing the role of dutiful parents so as not to trouble Jacob. And she could see them turning slowly into the people they were pretending to be, the problem they were meant to solve drifting slowly into the background, the two of them turning into a team whose job it was to bring up a child and run a household despite the fact that they had nothing in common, having conversations about what was needed from Tesco and what they were going to do at the weekend, going to bed and putting out the light and rolling away from each other and trying not to dream about the lives they could have led.

79

Jean canceled work.

She really hadn’t known what to expect when George came out of hospital. In the event he seemed surprisingly normal. He apologized for all the upset he had caused and said he was feeling a good deal better than he had done for some time.

She asked whether he wanted to talk about what had happened, but he told her there was no need to worry. She said he should tell her if he ever started feeling the same way again and he reassured her that he wasn’t going to feel the same way again. Pretty soon it became clear that Dr. Parris had got things out of proportion and that her more paranoid imaginings had been unfounded.

He was still in a lot of pain, clearly. But he was determined not to use the wheelchair. So she spent most of that week helping him out of bed and in and out of his salt bath and holding his hand as he made his way downstairs, then driving him back and forth to the surgery to have his dressing changed.

After three or four days he was moving around on his own, and by the beginning of the second week he was able to drive the car, so she went back into work, telling him that he could call her at any time if he needed help.

She rang the florists and the caterers and the car hire company and canceled them. The florists were downright rude, so she found herself telling the caterers and the car people that her daughter had been taken seriously ill and they were so understanding it made her feel worse than being shouted at.

She couldn’t face ringing guests and telling them the wedding was off, so she decided to leave it for a few days.

And it was good. Obviously it was good. Only days ago she thought their lives were falling to pieces. And now they were getting slowly back to normal. She couldn’t have asked for any more.

But she sat at the kitchen table some evenings and thought about the washing and the cooking and the cleaning and she could feel something dark and heavy weighing on her, and just getting up to put the kettle on was like wading through deep water.

She was depressed. And it was not something she was used to feeling. She worried. She coped. She got cross. But she was never down for more than a few hours at a time.

It was uncharitable, but she couldn’t help wishing there was more wrong with George. That he needed her more. But in no time at all he was back out in the studio, laying bricks and sawing wood.

She felt as if she was lost at sea. George was on his island over there. And David was on another island. And Katie. And Jamie. All of them with solid ground under their feet. And she was drifting between them, the tide slowly dragging her farther and farther away.

She drove over to David’s house the following week and parked round the corner. She was about to get out of the car when she realized she couldn’t do it. When they’d first got together it seemed like the beginning of a new life, something different and exciting, an escape. But she could see it now for what it was, an affair, like any other affair, tawdry and cheap, a selfish compensation for the mess her real life had become.

She imagined sitting in the staff room at St. John’s, drinking tea and eating Garibaldi biscuits with Sally and Bea and Miss Cottingham and felt, for the first time, as if she bore some kind of stain, that they would be able to look at her and see what she had been doing.

She was being silly. She knew that. They were no different from other people. She knew, for a fact, that Bea’s son was in some kind of trouble with drugs. But it seemed wrong that she should be making love with David one afternoon and teaching children to read the following morning. And if she had to make the choice between the two she would have chosen David without hesitation, but that seemed even worse.

She drove away and rang David later that evening to apologize. He was charming and sympathetic and said he understood what she must be going through. But he didn’t. She could hear it in his voice.

80

George was lying on the bed with his trousers off, having his dressing changed.

The practice nurse was rather attractive, if a little on the plump side. He had always liked women in uniforms. Samantha, that was her name. Cheerful, too, without being talkative.

In truth, he was going to miss these sessions when they came to an end in a couple of weeks’ time. It was like having one’s hair cut. Except that he always had his hair cut by an elderly Cypriot man and it was a lot less painful.

The nurse peeled back the large plaster over the wound. “OK, Mr. Hall. Time to grit your teeth.”

George took hold of the edges of the bed.

The nurse pulled the end of the bandage. The first couple of feet of pink ribbon came away smoothly. Then it snagged. George did anagrams of the word bandage in his head. The nurse gave a gentle yank and the remains of the bandage lifted free of the wound making him say something he would never normally say in front of a woman. “I’m sorry about that.”

“No apology needed.”

The nurse held the old dressing up. It looked like a large conker that had been soaked in blood and lemon curd. She dropped it into the little swing bin by the side of the bed. “Let’s get you a clean one.”

George lay back and closed his eyes.