Ninepins (35 page)

‘Hormones,' he said. ‘Human sex hormones are to blame for half of the evils in the world. And I expect Beth's are all over the place at the moment.'

Perhaps. Laura was not about to enlighten Vince on the matter, but Beth had begun to menstruate early, in Year 6 when she was ten. She had taken it completely in her stride; there had been no apparent mood swings then, so was it likely that her hormones should suddenly be playing havoc with her emotions now?

‘What is it?'

Glancing up, she found Vince surveying her face. ‘Oh, nothing.' Did the heat show in her cheeks? She hoped not. ‘Just, you know … Beth.'

She swallowed a quantity of her wine, which was very good.

‘What was it about, anyway? This fight the two of you had.'

‘Well, actually, I found out she's been playing truant.'

‘She has?' He put down his glass and touched her hand, a brief pressure, but hearteningly human. She wondered if he was going to tell her not to worry, that everyone bunks off school or that his friend who'd once skipped double geography was now the chairman of Oxfam. But he didn't. He simply said, ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Only twice, and only very recently – well, once since Easter and once just before, I gather. And she didn't deny it. It's good that she was honest about it, isn't it?'

‘Very good.' If he thought her need for reassurance pitiable, he was making sure not to show it.

‘But then she blew up and was angry about it, so I can't tell if she's really sorry or not. She did apologise later, in the morning. But she hasn't said she won't do it again.'

He said nothing for a short time, so she drank some more of her wine and wondered if she was being spineless, whether she ought to have it out with Beth again.

At length, Vince asked, ‘When does Beth get angry?'

She stared into her wine and gave the question thought. ‘When she's upset,' she said.

‘And when does she get most upset?'

‘When people are mean to her, I suppose. And about cruelty and unfairness generally – incidents at school when someone's been picked on, even stories on the news, people hurting animals, people being hurt.' And Dougie, of course: when Dougie died.

‘So, she's angry and upset when people have hurt her, or have hurt one another. And is that all?'

She looked at him in puzzlement for a second before she understood: he was right, he was absolutely right.

‘And when she's hurt someone herself.'

‘Exactly.' He grinned. ‘Being in the wrong. It's often the most painful of all.'

If this was the case, then Beth might have been longing all week for the chance to put things right, but too proud to bring it up, and all Laura's avoidance and pussyfooting had been quite misjudged, completely the wrong way to handle things. Oh, why did it have to be so bloody difficult?

His fingers skimmed her wrist again. ‘What are you thinking?'

She raised a smile. ‘I was just having a self-pitying wallow, if you must know. All the usual crap about how hard it is raising Beth on my own and how I always seem to mess it up.'

That made him laugh out loud. ‘I shan't dignify your appalling self-flagellation by telling you that you're very far from messing things up. You know that. But as to the other thing, maybe you're not completely on your own.' His voice was soft and serious, causing Laura's heart to lift, so that she was knocked off balance when he said, ‘What about Simon?'

‘Simon?' she repeated, stupidly.

‘Have you told him about it? About Beth skipping school?'

‘N-no. He has enough on his plate with his own three. I don't want to load this on him, too.'

‘His own three.' Vince turned her words over carefully. ‘And isn't Beth his own as well?'

‘Oh, you know what I mean. His new family. Three little ones are such a handful. It's right they should be his priority at the moment – isn't it?'

When he said nothing, she focussed back on her wine glass, took a sip, and then another. She wished he would stop looking at her like that.

‘The thing is,' she said, ‘Beth worships Simon. And he thinks the world of her, too. I don't want to trample on that. She would be so distraught to lose his good opinion.'

‘
Would
she lose it?'

Bloody counselling training. He was too good at this game: at feeding her own words back to her for re-examination, exposing the flaws. ‘No. Of course not. But she'd feel she had lost it, and she'd hate that.' And hate me, she added silently, for being the one to tell him.

He nodded slowly. ‘And Simon,' he said. ‘If you were in his place, would you want to be told your daughter was playing truant?'

Running round in circles after three young boys, a house in chaos, financial uncertainty … But – ‘Yes. You know I would. And I suppose you're going to tell me he has the right to know, as well?'

He shrugged this off, although without denial. ‘Perhaps Beth, too. She might not think so now, but perhaps in the end she'd actually prefer him to know what's going on in her life.'

Was it the wine going to her head, or the warmth of the kitchen, or was it Vince and his seductive confidence that were inducing this dizzy, sliding sensation of letting things go? His rightness ought to irritate her – his smug, all-knowing rightness – the way she remembered it sometimes did, but when she reached inside for the feeling, she couldn't locate it. Instead, she felt lulled and cosseted – and more than that, absolved; it felt good to be told these truths about her life, to be allowed the illusion of shifting off the responsibility for a moment, for an hour, a night.

When he filled her glass again she didn't move to stop him, but glanced at her watch and said something vague about its getting late.

‘I ought to go home and look in on Willow, see how she is.' She might be awake now and in need of more hot tea, or a change of bedclothes if she'd sweated out the fever.

‘Let it go,' he murmured, with a quaver of amusement. ‘Willow's a big girl. I'm certain she'll be fine.'

She laughed at that. ‘Oh, well. After this glass, then.'

There was the fraction of a pause. ‘Or you could stay here,' he said.

Something in his voice made her want to turn and interrogate his face, but he was too near, much too near, and she didn't dare. Then, as she struggled to adjust her thoughts, his lips were in her hair, somewhere above and behind her left temple, and he was repeating, ‘Stay.'

Laura's mouth was dry. Where had all her saliva gone? Why, of all things, were her feet trembling, on the rung of the bar stool? Then,
he's going to kiss me
, she thought, but distantly, as if she were telling herself a story.
Vince is going to kiss me, and I'm going to let him
.

Even so, his mouth was a shock: the cool otherness of this mouth that she'd been watching and talking to all evening, the taste of the wine which was different in his mouth from the way it had been in hers. He wasn't insistent, as she'd have thought he might be, more gently coaxing, and at the same time completely affirmative. His certainty infected her with a rush of boldness and she tilted her face and raised one hand to the back of his neck, and he grunted his appreciation and for a second it was simple and sweet and right. And then she remembered, and broke away.

‘I can't. We can't.'

Beth.

She swallowed and stared down at her hands, now clasped together on the breakfast bar; her mouth, from being dry, now seemed awash with too much saliva. They were both breathing raggedly in the silence, making it difficult for her to recover her equilibrium.

‘Beth would know. Willow's at home, so she'll know, and she'll tell Beth.'

It was all nonsense. Of course she would have to tell Beth herself. She would have to talk to her first, and tell her, before she could … before anything …

Vince hadn't moved from the position in which she'd left him; he'd said nothing. But still she felt the weight of his silent persuasion.

‘No,' she said, as firmly as she could manage. ‘It's no good, we can't. It wouldn't be fair on Beth, not now, not as things are at the moment. She needs more time. She needs … It just wouldn't be fair to her, that's all.'

After a moment, very quietly, he spoke. ‘And what about you, Laura?'

Brushing this aside, she returned to her theme. ‘Things have been tough for Beth recently. At school, with friendships, and getting into trouble. And at home, too. Dougie, and other things as well. If I … if we … well, what good would it do? It can only make things worse.'

‘What
good
?' His voice had risen in pitch, not by much, but enough to register some quickening of emotion – anger, was it, or frustration? But when she braved for a second his brown eyes, she saw only amused affection. Could it be that he was laughing?

He muttered something indistinct, which she heard as, ‘Might do us both some good.' Then he laid his hands over her clasped ones on the table top and sought her eye.

‘Not everything has to be for the good it does. For Beth, for other people. There's you as well, you know, Laura. What do you want?'

What did she want? Incongruously, it was Willow's words that flashed through her mind.
A proper family
.

‘I don't know, Vince. I'm sorry, I – ' Floundering, she'd lifted her hands, not to shake off his, which she had forgotten were there, but in a gesture of pure helplessness. In doing so, she caught the stem of her glass and it tipped and fell, sending red wine spreading wide across the laminated surface.

‘Damn it. Sorry.'

As he rose to fetch kitchen towels to mop up the spill, she was grateful for the small distance it placed between them, breaking the tension; she wondered if he might grateful, too. Certainly he kept his eyes on his wiping as he said, ‘Perhaps I should call you a taxi.'

‘Thank you.'

While they waited for it to arrive, he poured her the last dribble of wine from the bottle. Neither of them spoke much, and she wasn't sorry when the entryphone sounded before she'd emptied her glass.

‘Let me come down with you,' he said.

‘Really, you don't need – '

‘I'll see you into the taxi. Let me do that, at least.' There was no reproach, but he sounded stiff and wretched, and she hated herself for being the cause.

Then he caught her expression, and shrugged, and grinned. ‘Come on. I'll bring a jug of water with me. Then on my way back up I can give a drink to that benighted plant of yours.'

The rain that had threatened but held off on the day of Jack's birthday party was the last to be seen for a long time. April and May were often showery, unsettled months in the East Anglian fens, but this year the succeeding days were first clear and cool, then clear and warm and finally clear and hot, as temperatures by the middle of May soared to an unseasonably early high. The vast, open skies stretched in unbroken blue from dawn until dark, shifting through palest aquamarine to rich cobalt and back to pale again with the slow arc of the sun. Every day from mid-morning a shimmer of heat hazed the fields around Ninepins, their surface never dappled by the shadow of a cloud.

The flow in Elswell Lode was reduced to a meander, the level as low by Whitsun as it often was in August; the swallows darted and dived over trickles which grew slenderer by the day, and the heron took flight in search of some more reliable watercourse. Only the skylarks appeared to embrace the heat. They filled the air above the fens with a constant dizzy twittering; when she was out of doors, Laura's ears filtered out their noise as her lidded eyes shaded out the sun.

The earth of the dykes and the garden and fields baked hard and began to split and crack. Instead of the water rising up to reclaim the land as it had in the autumn, now the artificial land seemed to shrink and recede, back towards the mire from which it had come.

Laura examined the rear wall of the house with some anxiety. A long, jagged crack ran down between the bricks from just below the eaves to around the height of her own head. It had been visible last summer, but seemed to close up again with the autumn's damp; now, as the drought continued, it gaped worse than before. She could almost imagine it widening as she watched.

Alan Cowling of Cowling and Son suggested a chartered surveyor, who in turn recommended a structural engineer, who came in a suit with spirit level and measuring rods, took a good look and blew out his cheeks.

‘Always a risk of subsidence with these waterside properties,' he informed her, with gloomy satisfaction. ‘Built up on a bank, as well – asking for trouble. I don't like the look of this at all.'

He extended rules and read gauges and poked and peered, and then he stood back again, looking no less glum.

‘Blame it on Vermuyden,' he said. ‘Him and his Dutch engineer friends. What did they expect? To drain three hundred thousand acres of evaporating peat and then to build on it? It's all sinking, you know. The fens are sinking at the rate of a centimetre a year.'

There was further alarming talk of heave and landslip, of diagonal shift and tensile strain, and finally of underpinning.

All the pretty skittles
, thought Laura with a flutter.

‘Should I be getting some estimates, then?' she asked. ‘And contacting my insurance company?'

‘Oh, well, I shouldn't worry just yet. I should leave it for a while, if I were you, and see how it develops. Keep a watching brief, so to speak. You never can predict how it will go, with this fen soil.'

On Beth's return from her father's on the weekend of the Noise Coercion gig, Laura had followed Vince's advice and raised again the matter of her truancy. Beth had cried and sworn remorse and promised to be good, and when, a few days later, Willow's throat infection had transferred to Beth and gone to her chest, Laura had sat up late and read aloud old favourite books, to the accompaniment of a musical wheeze.