David knew that something was wrong as soon as he saw Suzie. He had noticed as he parked on the drive that her car was missing, but he’d assumed that she was taking Hannah to ballet class or Joel to swimming; he didn’t always remember the busy running order of the children’s arrangements. Through the lit window as he came around the side of the house he could see his family in the kitchen eating pizza, and it did occur to him then that it was late for them to be having supper. They couldn’t see him, in the dark outside. They lived in a new estate at the growing tip of Cardiff, near the motorway that circled the periphery; beyond them there was only a golf course and then fields. David paused before he opened the back door, enjoying a moment alone in the humming dark that was always nervous with the noise from the motorway: not a roar, but a thin murmur of movement that sucked substance from everything it reached. David didn’t mind this; he even felt it as a kind of lightness.
“Where’ve you left the car?” he asked as he wiped his feet on the back-door mat.
Suzie was putting something in the microwave; she didn’t turn.
“Smashed up,” Hannah said, relishing the words. She was standing at the table to eat her pizza, and had a piece of tomato on her chin. She liked crisis. Joel, who didn’t, sat absorbed in some game with his Beanie Babies.
“You’re joking.”
“I was involved in an accident,” Suzie said calmly. “On the motorway, on my way home from the teachers’ center. But I’m all right. It was raining, and the car in front of me hit a lorry pulling out. No one was hurt, amazingly enough. But the car’s a write-off.”
“Good God,” David said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Suzie shrugged. “I was O.K. There was no need.”
But he knew as she turned around that she wasn’t O.K. Usually Suzie was sturdy and steady; she had a wholesome, closed muzzle of a face that made him think of a fox, with her sandy coloring and the fine fair down that showed in a certain light. She was tall and lean and big-boned, her broad shoulders set defiantly; only now something had been jangled loose in her, as if she’d touched a live wire. Her hair had dried in a dark mat that clung to her head, and it frightened him to see her blue eyes startled open.
“I wish you’d called me.”
She tried to smile at him. When she put Joel’s plate down on the table, he saw that her hands were shaking. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”
David made her describe to him exactly where the accident had taken place; he wanted to understand why this lorry had pulled out into traffic so carelessly. Suzie couldn’t remember things precisely. It had all happened very fast, she said. He imagined the chaos, the rain, the scorch of horror that had brushed close.
“Where’s Jamie?” he said angrily. “Why isn’t he helping?”
Jamie was David’s seventeen-year-old son from his first marriage.
“Upstairs. Why don’t you call him? Ask him if he wants pizza.”
“You shouldn’t be standing here doing all this. Go and lie down. I’ll take over. I’ll bring you a cup of tea, or a drink.”
“I’d rather be busy, really.”
Jamie was in his bedroom, in the attic. He lay on his back on the bed, smoking, and he didn’t even turn his head as David lifted the trapdoor and climbed through; the room was thick with the rank smell of weed. A familiar sensation of impotence seized David; he didn’t know how to talk to this boy, how to guess his thoughts, or how to forbid what ought to be forbidden to him. Jamie didn’t rage or fight. He simply ignored whatever they told him: don’t pull the ladder up into the attic behind you; don’t smoke in the house; don’t stay out at night without letting us know where you are. When they tried to be outraged, he just smiled as though he were embarrassed for them. David opened the skylight to let out the smell.
“Suzie wants to know if you want pizza.”
“Is she O.K. now?” Jamie said. “I’m sorry about the swan.”
“What swan?”
“Hasn’t she told you? The one that came down on her car.”
“On her car? What are you talking about?”
He thought the boy might be befuddled with marijuana.
Jamie propped himself up on his elbow. He was wearing some sort of torn sleeveless vest; he shook back the thick hair that he chopped off with scissors at shoulder length. Something in his wide face—a faint adolescent rash over the thickening cheekbones, distinctive creases under the eyes, and black brows like quick pencil strokes—stirred and pained David; the boy resembled his mother, Francesca, which was not reassuring. His big brown feet at the end of the bed were bare, with dirty soles and coarse knobbled toes; they had transformed from soft child feet in some instant when David wasn’t looking.
“A swan came down and hit her car, made her swerve into the fast lane. It must have hit the power lines. Then it bounced against the side of a lorry and onto her bonnet.”
The picture was vivid to David for a moment: melodramatic, not Suzie’s kind of thing at all.
“Why didn’t she tell me it was a swan? Perhaps she didn’t want to talk about it in front of the children?”
“That’s probably why,” Jamie said. “You know what Hannah’s like. She’d be more upset about the swan than if people had been hurt.”
The children reacted in the aftermath of the accident. Hannah thumped through her keyboard practice with hot cheeks and wept extravagantly when Suzie told her off for tickling Joel. Joel lay mute and still in his bath, then shivered in his Spider-Man pajamas and refused to get into bed because he had caught sight of the moon through his bedroom window. He had been afraid of the moon when he was a baby. When David came downstairs after reading to them, he found Suzie standing in the kitchen over a sink full of winter branches that she’d cut to take to school for her nature table: bedraggled yellow jasmine, gnarled apple, and silver birch thickening and reddening with buds. Her hair was wet again, and in the centrally heated air he could smell the cold breath of the rain-soaked garden. She pretended to be busy, tying up the branches with twine. Her hands were big and unbeautiful: skilled at cutting out pictures with children’s scissors, tying laces, rubbing cream into grazed knees.
“You shouldn’t be going in to school tomorrow.”
“I’m all right,” she said heavily, without looking at him.
He expected her to tell him then what had really happened on the motorway, but she didn’t speak. After David had watched “Newsnight,” they went upstairs. He lay in bed going over a paper he had to deliver at a Health Protection conference the next day while Suzie sorted piles of clean laundry and put them away. The children had fresh clothes every day; the airing cupboard was piled high with ironed sheets and towels. Even though the house had been newly decorated when they bought it, four years earlier, Suzie had redone every room. Her little touches were everywhere: curtain tiebacks, friezes pasted onto the wallpaper, bowls of potpourri, carved acorn light pulls, dishes of glass pebbles, thriving houseplants. The children’s toys were tidied away into labelled storage boxes every night. The only place that Suzie hadn’t reached was Jamie’s attic; Jamie had once calmly said that he would leave home if she ever touched anything in there, and Suzie had agreed that if he wanted to live in a pit then who was she to interfere. All the transactions between these two used to flare with violence, even though Suzie had looked after Jamie since he was small, but things had been better lately.
Suzie finished putting the clothes away and began to undress for her shower; she fumbled out of her clothes with her shoulder blades hunched, as if she were uncomfortably aware of being watched. Usually she was blithely indifferent; the readiness with which she stripped had shocked him when they first slept together.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the swan?” he asked, looking at her over the top of his reading glasses while she was smothered inside her T-shirt. When she pulled off the shirt, her hair, still stiff with rain, stuck up in ruff around her face, as if she were roused against him.
“How did you know?”
“You told Jamie.”
“Did I? I suppose I did.”
She sat down in her underwear on the padded chest at the foot of the bed, hugging her arms around herself, her long back bent.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to make you talk about it. All that matters is that you’re not hurt.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” Suzie said.
“What wouldn’t I like?”
“What I felt I saw.”
“How could I mind?”
She lifted her eyes; her face was cloudy with the effort of thought.
“When this thing came hurtling down out of the sky at me, I thought it was Francesca.”
Suzie had never known David’s first wife, who had killed herself by jumping off a balcony.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I hadn’t been thinking about her. I never think about her. Then: thump, on my bonnet. It was her—intuitively I just knew.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You see? I knew you’d hate it.”
David took off his glasses and folded them. “I don’t feel anything about it except that it doesn’t mean anything. The mind throws up all kinds of rubbish when you’re in shock.”
“She wasn’t rubbish.”
He was patient, looking away from her. “I didn’t mean her, needless to say. I just meant your making any kind of association between that and what happened to you today.”
“We never talk about her.”
He shrugged. “Why would we? What could there be to say, after all this time?”
“You can’t imagine the force of the blow when it hit me, how heavily it fell. The whole car leaped—it leaped. Surely too heavy for a swan. And then everything went dark. I didn’t have time to think of any rational explanation.”
“But now you know what the rational explanation was.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Suzie stood to go and take her shower. When she climbed into bed, he had already turned off the light on his side, and he closed his eyes as if he were asleep. Pressing up close against his back, she made him too hot.
“Tell me about Francesca,” she pleaded into his pajama top, her voice muffled, so that at first he wasn’t sure what he’d heard.
“Whatever for? I’m asleep.”
“Tell me. It’s important.” He turned over to face her in the dark.
“You know all there is to know.”
“No, I don’t. We hardly ever talk about her.”
“When someone’s dead, after a while there’s nothing new to say. That’s natural.”
“If I died, would you be this calm about it?”
“You used not to want to discuss all this.”
“I know. But now I can’t stop thinking about her. How did you go to sleep together, when you were lying in bed like this? Which side did she like to lie on? What did she wear to bed?”
David dutifully thought about it. “I can’t remember,” he said. “It’s been fifteen years.”
“Fourteen.”
“I don’t know what she wore.”
“You must be able to remember.”
“We kept such different hours. I’d be getting up to go to work sometimes as she was coming to bed.”
He did remember that when Fran-cesca was very pregnant she had been able to sleep only sitting up in an armchair. But that was also the time when she began to imagine that it wasn’t a baby growing inside her but a demon that would split her open and kill her when it was born. He didn’t want to tell Suzie about that. Instead, he kissed her, and she fell asleep easily, despite everything, breathing lightly through her nose, radiating clean heat scented with whatever shampoo she’d used.
David lay aridly awake. Long afterward, he heard Jamie dropping down from his trapdoor like a cat, prowling the house, helping himself to food in the kitchen, letting himself out the front door with his bike; he cycled for hours at night and then slept half the day, probably missing classes at school. David tried to imagine how it would feel to sleep and wake when you wanted to, to choose your life without thinking of anybody else, not to be broken into the hard frame of adult necessity.
David and Suzie had met in Regent’s Park. Neither of them had ever been there before that day, and neither ever went back, so it remained a bright free space in their imaginations: sunlit stately walks, aisles of tall flowers, fountains splashing. Suzie was in the second year of her teacher training, skipping lectures. David, who was working for his Part One medical exams then, had a morning off; he was wheeling Jamie in his pushchair. Jamie was really too old for the pushchair, but he refused to walk anywhere; he’d sit with his knees almost up to his chin, weaving his old rag of yellow blanket into its ritual knot between his fingers and sucking the corner that was wrapped around his thumb, frowning out at the world from behind its shelter. That morning in the park, he had hurt himself. Probably he’d trailed his foot and David had run over it; that was always happening. Suzie was a tall fair girl in a sleeveless flowered dress, passing; at first, David had only resented the fact that she was a witness to his shame, his helplessness, the screaming child. That year after Francesca’s death was the hardest year of his life.
Suzie was eating an ice cream. She hesitated and looked at Jamie.
“Would he like some?”
David had lifted him out of the pushchair and put him on a park bench; Suzie sat down and tentatively held out her ice-cream cone.
“If you want it,” she said, “you have to stop crying and come and sit on my knee.”
Jamie had looked at her suspiciously, but then, to David’s surprise, climbed into her lap; he wasn’t a child who cuddled easily, but he allowed himself to be hugged against her chest in return for licks of ice cream; his sobs subsided. Suzie’s freckled arms around him were awkward, as if she weren’t used to little children.
“I’m afraid he’ll make you sticky.”
“I don’t care. This is only an old thing.”
When David said then that her dress was pretty, he was just being polite—he didn’t take much notice of women’s clothes—but Suzie misinterpreted. She’d only stopped in the first place, she told him later, because she thought he was attractive.
“Where’s his mum?” she asked, appraising David frankly.
That scene—the child calm and surrendered on her lap—hadn’t been at all representative of what was to follow. Suzie had found mothering Jamie fraught and difficult; Jamie had not often allowed her close. But in that decisive hour Suzie had seemed to David uncomplicatedly open, like a door out of the dark maze of his troubles.
In the days after the accident with the swan, Suzie began to talk about a new friend at school, a teacher who was fill-ing in for a woman on maternity leave. She said that this new teacher, Menna, had read her palm in the staff room one lunchtime; Suzie tried to laugh as if this were just funny, but David could tell that it excited her. She wouldn’t look him in the eye—she’d mentioned it deliberately while she was filling the dishwasher, so that she didn’t have to see his response.
“So what did she tell you?”
“It’s not what you’d think, not strangers and crossing the water and all that. She told me about my mother—that was the amazing part. She said that my mother was careless with precious things. She said that a ring had been lost, which is exactly what happened to my grandmother’s ring; my mother lost it when we were on a beach. I’ve never told anyone about that. I’d forgotten it until she said it.”
“So what did she see in your future?”
She was vague then. “I don’t know. The useful stuff. Change.”
David was embarrassed for Suzie, because the trickery seemed so obvious; his own rationalism was complete, penetrating all his instincts. He imagined this fortune-telling woman at first as frumpy and middle-aged, but, when she came to give Suzie a lift to school one morning, Menna looked like a child, not much older than Jamie. She was tiny, with a white face and black pits of eyes and dyed-black hair braided with beads and ribbons; she stood in the doorway straight and unsmiling, and reminded him of one of those old-fashioned dolls with jointed wooden arms and legs. Suzie began to see Men-na in the evenings, too, at her house. David suspected that they were having some kind of séances. It even came into his head once, when he found Suzie rummaging in the desk in his study, that she was looking for photographs of Francesca.
One warm weekend, Suzie took the children camping in west Wales with Menna and her boyfriend, Neil. On Sunday night, they came home late, hours later than she had told him to expect them, by which time David was frantic with worry. An old Dormobile van, painted with flowers and with a fart-ing exhaust, dropped them off in the drive. By the time he opened the door, it was gone. Suzie was stoned, really stoned; when he looked for her in her eyes he couldn’t find her. His children, too, seemed transformed by their short time away, tanned and dishevelled and staring with exhaustion. They even smelled alien: of some mixture of smoke and earth, pee and petrol. He was outraged at Suzie’s irresponsibility, getting into that state while she was in charge of the children.
“We had a good time,” Hannah and Joel insisted, but didn’t smile.
He bathed them tenderly and put them in clean pajamas; they didn’t even ask for stories—they melted into sleep almost as he was lifting the duvets over them. As he did all this, he heard Suzie throwing up noisily in the bathroom.
“What is this about?” he said. “What were you doing?”
She was propped against the sink in her bra and trousers, her hair dripping wet as if she’d been pouring water over her head to try to sober up.
“Having fun, that’s all,” she said idiotically, with the water running down her face and neck. “But you wouldn’t know about that.”
“It’s a peculiar kind of fun. Look at you. The children are wiped out. They have to go to school tomorrow. So do you, but that’s your business.”
“What are you accusing me of?”
“You can go where you want,” he said. “But you’re not taking the children off with that crew again.”
“They had a fantastic time. Just because they’re tired now—”
“Who was driving?” David said. “What had he been smoking?”
“Oh, I’m going to go and sleep in Joel’s room,” Suzie said, pushing past him, picking up her pillow from the bed, rummaging for pajamas in a drawer, slamming it shut with the clothes still hanging half out of it.
“I’ll go and sleep in there,” David said with a sigh, performing weary patience. “You stay here. You might need to be near the bathroom.”
He moved to close the drawer.
“I don’t want you to touch me!” she exclaimed, backing off, hugging the pillow to her chest. “Don’t even touch me.”
He hadn’t thought of touching her, but when she shrieked at him he felt a vivid tingling in his hand, as if he’d slapped her face with all his strength; he stood away from her quickly, letting her go, then he slumped down onto the side of the bed. He heard her vomiting again, in the other toilet.
In the morning, Suzie was chastened. She reassured him that Neil had been perfectly safe to drive, Menna had been fine, she had been the only one who was poorly—she must have reacted badly to something, she was sorry. And the children, although they drooped and whined all week, slipped fragments of their adventures into their conversations with him in delighted voices that didn’t expect him to understand: the nights so dark, the torch that failed, the barbecue built from stones, the thieving goats. Jamie remarked conversationally that the skunk that Su-zie’s friends had been smoking was proba-bly hydroponically grown and much stronger than anything she was used to, which would be why it had made her ill. David heard him out in silence, then shrugged, as if it were a matter of indifference to him. Suzie went on sleeping in the top bunk in Joel’s room.
She began to be out at Menna’s all the time. David had no idea what she got up to there—she wouldn’t talk about it. She neglected the house, which had always been immaculate. The children missed her; they grew sulky and unhappy. Jamie often had to look after them until David got home from work. Suzie brought home New Age books that David couldn’t bring himself to look at. On a few occasions, he thought she was high on something again: short of breath, hectic, with dilated pupils, looking at the children as if they weren’t there. He didn’t know what her new friends were giving her—magic mushrooms or cactus or pills—and he wouldn’t inquire. She seemed to get to school most days. Once, when he tried to ask her what the matter was, she put her hand over his mouth, shaking her head to warn him off, as if someone were watching them and she was under a vow of noncommunication, although they were alone.
One night, he and Suzie went out together to a party at the house of some friends, beside the lake in one of the old city parks. He tried to enjoy himself, but all the time he was aware of her moving back and forth between the rooms, not talking to anyone. They were his friends, really, people he knew through the hospital. Suzie was wearing a white trouser suit, with a blouse of some blue silky stuff that shifted over her breasts when she breathed; it looked good on her but was perhaps a bit brash for this party, where everyone else seemed to be wearing subtle, sombre colors. They left after only an hour or so.
“It wasn’t too bad, was it?” he said hopefully once they were sitting in the car.
Instead of replying, she exhaled as if she were getting rid of something, and threw her head back, staring up through the dark at the felt lining of the roof.
“Will you let me out?” she said then, as they drove along the lake, which sent its pale light flashing like a signal between the passing trees.
“Let you out?”
“Not here. I’ll give you directions.”
Baffled, he held his hands in the air above the steering wheel. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“You wouldn’t know. Turn left here, and go back down the park. It isn’t too far. I’ll get a taxi later. I’m not ready to come home yet.”
Dumbly, he drove where she told him to go. Eventually, beyond a railway bridge, they pulled up in front of a row of little mid-Victorian cottages he’d never noticed before. He couldn’t make them out very well in the dark; behind the huddle of their overgrown front gardens, they seemed cozier and more secretive than the usual austere long terraces in this part of the city.
“This is it,” Suzie said. “I’ll see you later, but don’t wait up.”
“Can’t I come in with you?”
“No,” she said, and put a hand on his arm, as if postponing something, promising something for another time.
He watched her pick her way up a path whose faint paleness was blurred by overgrowing shrubs and then lost in the thick overhang of shadows from the house; he knew that she turned to look at him once, because he made out the weak blob of her face. Then another car, lights glaring, came up behind him and he had to move. He drove around the block to go past the house again, and paused with the engine running, peering into the garden. There was no sign of habitation, apart from a dim gleam in the glass fanlight above the front door. But Suzie in her white trouser suit had vanished, presumably inside.
David gathered himself in a great effort of concentration on the children, his younger children. He tried to reëstablish their routines: mealtimes, Hannah’s piano lessons, Joel’s pottery on Saturday mornings, bedtimes, baths, tooth-brushing. Joel didn’t like his new teacher. Hannah feuded, crossed out and rewrote names on the list she actually kept, in a notebook, of her best friends. He took for granted that these difficulties were manifestations of their distress over the situation at home; he told them that their mother was overtired, that she had problems at work. He couldn’t, on top of all this, begin to think properly about Jamie. If he did think about him, he felt sure that he wasn’t doing enough work for his A levels. Whenever David had reason to go up to the attic, the boy was lying on his back on the bed, smoking, doing nothing; he had difficulty controlling how angry this made him, the empty space of his older son’s life.
Suzie came and went; she wouldn’t talk to him beyond practicalities, and she wasn’t very interested in those. She slept, when she slept at home, in the study, downstairs. What happened to her touched him only remotely now; it had begun to seem improbable that they had lived together for all these years. He judged her coldly. Their arrangement, living apart in the same house, ought to have felt eccentric; robustly, they adapted.
One evening when the weather was fine, they drove over to the nearby parkland together. David had said that they ought to discuss things. They sat side by side on the grass at the top of a long sloping field where, at the weekend, families picnicked and played cricket and flew kites; midweek, they had it to themselves. David kept an eye on his watch, afraid they would miss the locking of the park gates. Even as he worried about this, he was carried away by a rage that seemed to blow into him from nowhere. He began shouting at Suzie. What he resented most about what was happening, he told her, was that she was making a stupid person’s mistake, falling for fakery and tricks. He wouldn’t have minded if she had fallen in love or was going through any other sort of crisis, if she would only talk to him about it, like a grownup. This came out so clearly formulated that David realized he must have been working it all out to himself at home. His whole body shook as the words flooded out of him. Suzie lay back on the grass.
“It’s you who’s stupid,” she said. “Something’s happening to me—the first sign of it was the accident—but you’re too busy seeing through everything.”
“How dare you blame me? What is this thing, anyway, that’s supposed to be happening to you?”
She rolled over so that her face was buried against the ground and her voice was muffled. “I don’t know.”
“Is it sex? Are you having sex with someone? With that girl? Or with both of them?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know what I feel.”
She was wearing some kind of thin print skirt. He could see through it to her curved buttocks and brief knickers. Without knowing he was going to do it, he lifted the skirt and smacked her hard with the full weight of his hand across the back of her thighs; astonished, she scrambled to her knees and pounded at his shoulders and chest with her fists. For a few strange minutes they scuffled together viciously: at one point she tangled her fingers in his hair as tightly as she could and tugged hard at it; he slapped her again, on the face this time; she scratched his neck. A dog-walker emerged from the trees at the bottom of the field and looked up toward them, then retreated; he must have thought that they were making love, but in fact their fighting instinct for those minutes was pure and unsexual. As soon as David realized that Suzie was crying, he stopped in dismay. They got to their feet and brushed themselves off shamefacedly; she found a tissue in her bag for both of them to wipe their tears. On the way back to the car, Suzie wrapped her arms around herself, clutching her shoulders tightly; once or twice he touched her on the elbow to steer her onto the right path. Afterward, because they never talked about it, he found it hard to believe that this scene had actually taken place. It didn’t seem to make any difference to the way they lived together.
In the summer, they spent a week at the house in west Wales with David’s parents. Suzie insisted that she wanted to swim, although the weather was cold and wet. David warned that if she was taking pills or any sort of hallucinogen this would be dangerous, and then he stood watching while she stripped, shivering, on the stony little beach in front of the house. It was late afternoon. The children were exploring among the rocks. A low, blurred, chilly sun was reflected in the rocking water, making a dim silver path from the horizon. Suzie had her black swimming costume on under her clothes; she stepped, long-legged, across the shingle, laughing and grimacing, balancing with her arms held out.
“You’re making a mistake,” David said. “I really think you’re making a mistake.”
Suzie stepped in, tottered at the shock of cold, forged on up to her knees, then with a shriek plunged and swam the crawl with strong strokes into the glittering path. She was a good swimmer, better than David. He and the children watched the shape of her head bobbing, disappearing and reappearing against the dazzle. He was wrapped in the sensation of her absence, the gulls crying and circling, the crash and drag of the waves, a cold wind slicing underneath his clothes. He worried that Suzie was going too far; the idea seized him that he would be left alone on the shore like this forever, holding the towels. Accidents really happened: it was idiotic to swim in this cold, in her state. He even took off his coat and went to the edge of the water, to go in after her. Then he caught sight of the bobbing dot of her head again: grateful, he saw it turn and head back toward the beach.
After Francesca died, David had cleared out her flat. They hadn’t been living together when it happened; she’d moved out a few months before and got a place of her own from the council. The flat was on the sixth floor of a bleak tower block in Islington and he hadn’t liked her having Jamie there; they’d quarrelled over it. As he sorted out Francesca’s belongings, putting aside Jamie’s clothes and toys, it occurred to him that this woman who was the mother of his child was hardly known to him at all. He felt as if he were folding the skirts and dresses of a stranger: he found it so difficult to recognize anything in her cupboards or her drawers that he even wondered if she had replaced all her possessions since they’d split up, in some spasm of disgust at him. It was all in such a mess, anyway. He went through her makeup bag and the rubbish in the dusty bottom of her handbag, thinking that there might be something left behind that he recognized—just a hairgrip or a bead or a receipt from somewhere they’d been together.
Francesca, in the days before she died, had seemed more stable than she had for months; she had been taking her medication. She was even supposed to go to a party that night—she had left Jamie with her mother. People reassured David that he mustn’t feel responsible for what had happened, but he never really felt responsible—he only felt angry with her. In all the time he spent clearing out that flat—it took him two days—he never once stepped out onto the balcony from which she’d jumped. It had been swelteringly hot, and he had dripped with sweat as he stuffed Francesca’s suitcases with things for the charity shops; he would have been more comfortable with a bit of air circulating inside, but he hadn’t even wanted to open the sliding doors. Afterward, he sometimes regretted this. He thought it might have been good for him to look down and see only the ordinary scruffy paving below.
In September, Suzie’s headmistress rang to ask why Suzie hadn’t been in school for the first day of the new term. David didn’t know where she was. In the sitting room, the children had drawn the curtains against the daylight. The television capered weakly, and they hardly looked up as he peered in. Jamie was on his back on the sofa, Hannah sitting under his raised knees, Joel at his head, with an arm thrown carelessly across his big brother’s chest; like somnambulants, they gazed at the screen. David put some sausages to cook under the grill, opened tins of baked beans, cut his hand on the sharp edge of one of them, and leaked surprisingly thin wet blood onto the bread. He sat with the children in front of the telly to eat his heavy plateful, although he couldn’t remember later what he’d watched; he imagined the fatty food dissolving sourly in his stomach, sending spurts of acid into his esophagus, squeezing his heart. Then he piled up the dirty dishes in the kitchen, left the children with Jamie, and drove out to where he had dropped Suzie off in the spring, after that party; miraculously he remembered the way, didn’t make a single wrong turn, as if the little cottage in its close-nestled row behind overgrown gardens had lurked, waiting for him all that time, beneath his conscious thoughts.
Shapes were silhouetted in the twilight against a clear sky; he could see that the wildness of the gardens, which he had remembered as dense with foliage, in fact consisted only of broken sofas, concrete, buddleia, a fallen wall, a garage sunk under the weight of its ivy. The fanlight above the front door through which Suzie had disappeared shone feebly yellow, as it had the last time. Children still played out in the streets around here: a gang circled on bikes, shouting to one another, two boys to a bike, the front one standing to pedal, the one behind with his legs splayed wide. David got out of the car and locked it behind him, scowling at the boys, then strode up the path, pushing through the bristling shrubs that blocked his way. There was no doorbell, only a taped-on note that said, absurdly, “Knock three times,” so he hammered with one fist, then both. When the door yielded and a man stood warily, holding it half open, David pushed forward across the threshold.
“I have to speak to my wife. Suzie. Suzanne.”
The man was slight and wiry, with tanned skin and a ponytail; he might have been a boy if it weren’t for the tight crinkles at the corners of his lips and eyes. He stood firmly in the doorway.
“She’s not here.”
“Suzie!” David bellowed past him. “Suzie!”
A female shape moved into the shadows at the end of the hall. Too slight for Suzie—he made out the pale oval of Menna’s face.
“You don’t have any right to come bursting in here,” she said.
David had never been in a fight in his life; he knew that even though he was bigger he wouldn’t have a chance against this man, if it came to that. Everything about Menna’s boyfriend suggested the capable male, his strength held decently in reserve. David pushed past him clumsily nonetheless; the dingy narrow hall was just as he would have imagined it, down to its smell of dirty carpet overlaid with incense.
“Neil,” Menna said. “Let him, if he wants to. We’ve got nothing to hide.”
“You can take our word for it, mate,” Neil said, not offensively. “She isn’t here. We haven’t seen her for a few days.”
David was immediately sure that they were telling the truth. Yet in a parade of angry expectation he had to storm about, searching, slamming open all the doors; he ran upstairs, blundered into the bathroom, switched on glaring central bulbs in two little bedrooms draped with patchwork, scarves, and beads. They didn’t even follow him: Menna made a sign to Neil. The house was surprisingly neat, in its junk-shop way. He looked for signs of whatever witchery it was that Suzie got up to in this house, but he couldn’t find anything sinister. There were piles of schoolbooks for marking, socks hanging on the radiators to dry, in the bathroom henna hair dye and a stained towel. Eventually, he came to rest in the kitchen, breathing heavily, propped with his knuckles resting on the little table where they had been eating when he came pounding at their door; their soup—lentil—was getting cold in green pottery bowls. He considered throwing the bowls wildly onto the floor, but didn’t do it.
“Then where is she?”
“If I did know I wouldn’t tell you,” Menna said. “But to simplify matters, as it happens I don’t. She must have been at school today—why don’t you ask them? We haven’t seen her for a week. She doesn’t live here, you know; she’s just a friend. We don’t insist on knowing her whereabouts.”
“Then is there someone else?”
“Someone else?” she mocked. “I don’t know what you mean-.”
“She didn’t turn up at school today.”
Menna shrugged. “We’re not her keepers. Obviously, you think that’s what you are.”
“I’m the father of her children,” he said. “If she’s gone, I only want to know it.”
“If she’s gone,” Menna said, “I’m not surprised. Not after this.”
While David was inside the house, the evening light had blinked and gone; it was suddenly night. Blundering down the path, he ran right into someone turning in from the street; David let out an astonished, winded noise, although they hadn’t actually hurt each other. It was Jamie. David was so surprised at meeting him here that he almost didn’t recognize his own son; the closeness of Jamie’s face in the dim light confused him, those broad cheekbones, his eyes somehow masked in irony behind thick short eyelashes. He was supposed to be at home with Hannah and Joel. And how could he possibly know about this place?
Jamie seemed just as surprised to see him.
“Dad? Fuck.”
“For Christ’s sake, can’t I even trust you to do one thing for me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What have you done with the kids? I can’t believe you’ve left them at home on their own.”
“Of course I haven’t done that. Suzie’s there.”
“Oh. She is?”
“She came back just after you left.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know these people? Did you meet them through Suzie?”
“Sort of.”
Jamie stood obstinately, not moving either way on the path.
“I’ve got the car. Do you want a lift anywhere?”
“No.”
In the end, it was David who had to move first. The boys were still circling on their bikes in the street. When he looked back at the house, he couldn’t see Jamie; he must have gone in through the front door, which David had left open behind him.
On his way home there was traffic, people driving into town for the evening. Lit--up shop fronts swam in a blur of the rain that had begun to spatter in angry fistfuls across the windscreen. For minutes, David peered stupidly, forgetting that he could turn on his wipers. It took him half an hour to get through the thick crawl of cars, woven with crossing pedestrians, on the main roads; released at last into residential streets, he pressed his foot too hard on the accelerator, leaping forward. At the same moment, in a sudden squall, a white shape broke out in front of him from nowhere, or from between two parked cars. He stamped on his brake and swerved, and the car slewed, screeching sideways, but surely too late. He must have struck something: the blow seemed to resonate in the bodywork; his heart thumped out of his chest as if he’d been hit himself. He threw himself out of the car door to see what he had done, ready for the worst.
He found nothing, only an empty street. Perhaps the sheet of sodden filthy newspaper under his wheels had been his phantom, inflated by the wind into a moment’s lifelikeness. He had been imagining things. He felt so sick that he had to pull in at the side of the road and rest his head against his arms on the steering wheel. For some time he couldn’t drive on.
When at last he got home, the smell of sausages lingered, but the mess of supper had been cleared away. The children were sitting painting at the kitchen table. Their tranquillity seemed uncanny after the weather outside: their absorbed breathing, the stroke of their marks on big sheets of blue paper, the chink of their brushes in jam jars of clouding water. The tip of Hannah’s tongue stuck out in concentration; unnoticing, Joel sucked his brush, so that his lips were blue. Suzie must have put out the china dish piled with apples for them to paint; gazing at it, they seemed themselves as deliberate as a composition.
“Is Mummy here?”
They blinked at him, surfacing reluctantly.
“Having a shower,” Joel said, frowning.
He took the stairs two at a time. Suzie had begun to tidy up here, too; some of the piles that had waited on the landing to be sorted into different bedrooms had been put away. She was not showering: she had run herself a bath, perfumed with something; she was floating in it by candlelight, her body showing vaguely pink through the foamy water, her knees islands. Little candles on saucers were burning at intervals around the edges of the tub and on the windowsill. David put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat; Suzie hardly stirred the water, only turning her head to look at him.
“Are you going to be cross about the candles?”
“Cross?”
“Aren’t they dangerous?”
He sighed. “Am I really so dreary?”
“I’m sure they are dangerous, but I’m being very careful. I just wanted to relax. I want to have a nice weekend at home, with you and the kids. Did you see that they were painting downstairs? David? Are you all right?”
“I bumped into Jamie.”
“He went out a while ago.”
“I went to your friend’s house—Menna’s. I was looking for you. Then, as I came out, Jamie was going in. What was he doing there?”
“You went to Menna’s?” she said, as if she were amused and curious.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “Jamie was probably just buying weed. Neil sells to a few friends. What did you think he was doing?”
“I don’t seem to be able to talk to him. I can’t get any sense out of him.”
Suzie waited a few moments. “You know, he’s a nice boy,” she said. “He’s grown into a really nice boy. You’re too hard on him sometimes.”
“I’m a bit out of my depth,” he said eventually. It was very difficult for him to make this confession.
“David, you’re not all right, are you?”
“I nearly crashed the car on the way home.”
“How do you mean, you nearly crashed it?”
“I thought someone ran out in front of the car. But there wasn’t anyone. I was imagining things.”
Suzie stood up in the bath then, water sluicing off her thighs and her breasts; they were still pointed plump girl breasts, even after two children. She pulled a towel off the heated rail and stepped out; rubbing at her hair to dry it, she stood carelessly naked in front of him.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “So long as nothing actually happened.”
As she towelled her hair, with her arms lifted above her head, he could see the red-gold wiry fuzz in her armpits; he was distracted by the long oval swell of her abdomen and the knot of her navel, so close to his eyes.
“But what about you?” he said. “What is it that’s been happening to us, these last few months?”
“Oh, that,” she said lightly. “That’s all over.”
“What’s all over?”
“Whatever it was. My crazy fit. Whatever got inside me when I killed that swan.”
“Crazy fit?”
“Abducted-by-aliens kind of thing. I can’t explain it.”
“Is that all you’re going to tell me?”
Suzie drew a smiley face in the condensation on the washbasin mirror. “I know you always think I’m stupid.”
“I don’t, Suzie. That’s not—”
“But I had this dream last night, about ice cream. I was trying to buy it or something, some special kind with fruit in it. I couldn’t find it anywhere. D’you remember that I don’t really like ice cream, and we always wondered afterward why I was eating it that first day we met? So when I woke up I thought I ought to come home. I thought the dream was a sign. A good sign.”
The hot steam in the bathroom was making David feel sick and weak. “And where were you sleeping, when you woke up out of this dream?”
She bent down over him where he sat, wrapping the towel around both of them for a moment, printing her heated body wetly against his clothes. He closed his eyes.
“You don’t need to know,” she said to him in the warm dark. “It doesn’t matter. It’ll be O.K. now, honestly.” ♦
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