‘Don’t what?’
‘Make this more difficult than it is.’
He read it in her eyes. Walking to the back of the car, he snapped open the boot. It was crammed with luggage, coats, shoes, toys.
‘You’re not just going for a couple of days, are you? This is not a couple of fucking days.’
‘Tom, please…’ She raised a hand towards him, but he knocked it away.
‘You’re leaving, that’s what you’re doing…’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You’re not?’
‘It’s just for a little while… A break. I need a break. So I can think.’
‘You need to fucking think right enough!’
Whitemore snatched open the rear door and leaned inside, seeking to unsnap the nearest boy’s belt and failing in his haste. The boys themselves looked frightened and close to tears.
‘Tom, don’t do that! Leave it. Leave them alone.’
She pulled at his shoulder and he thrust her away, so that she almost lost her footing and stumbled back. Roused by the shouting, one of the neighbours was standing halfway along his front garden path, openly staring.
‘Tom, please,’ Marianne said. ‘Be reasonable.’
He turned so fast, she thought he was going to strike her and cowered back.
‘Reasonable? Like this? You call this fucking reasonable?’
The neighbour had come as far as the pavement edge. ‘Excuse me, but is everything all right?’
‘All right?’ Whitemore shouted. ‘Yeah. Marvellous. Fucking wonderful. Now fuck off indoors and mind your own fucking business.’
Both the twins were crying now: not crying, screaming.
The car door slammed as Marianne slid behind the wheel. Whitemore shouted her name and brought down his fist hard on the roof of the car as it pulled away, red tail lights blurring in the half-dark.
He stood there for several moments more, staring off into the middle distance, seeing nothing. Back in the house, he went from room to room, assessing how much she had taken, how long she might be considering staying away. Her parents lived on the coast, between Chapel St Leonards and Sutton-on-Sea, a bungalow but with room enough for Marianne and the twins. Next year they would be at school, next year would be different, but now…
He looked in the fridge, but there was nothing there he fancied. A couple of cold sausages wrapped in foil. Maybe he’d make himself a sandwich later on. He snapped open a can of lager, but the taste was stale in his mouth and he poured the remainder down the sink. There was a bottle of whisky in the cupboard, only recently opened, but he knew better than to start down that route too soon.
In the living room, he switched on the TV, flicked through the channels, switched off again; he made a cup of tea and glanced at that day’s paper, one of Marianne’s magazines. Every fifteen minutes, he looked at his watch. When he thought he’d given them time enough, he phoned.
Marianne’s father came on the line. Soft-spoken, understanding, calm. ‘I’m sorry, Tom. She doesn’t want to speak to you right now. Perhaps tomorrow, tomorrow evening. She’ll call you… The twins? They’re sleeping, fast off. Put them to bed as soon as they arrived… I’ll be sure to give them your love. Yes, of course. Of course… Goodnight, Tom. Goodnight.’
Around nine, Whitemore called a taxi and went across the city to the Five Ways pub in Sherwood. In the back room Jake McMahon and a bunch of the usual reprobates were charging through Cannonball Adderley’s ‘Jeannine’. A Duke Pearson tune, but because Whitemore had first heard it on Adderley’s Them Dirty Blues — Cannonball on alto alongside his trumpeter brother, Nat — it was forever associated with the saxophonist in his mind.
Whitemore’s father had given him the recording as a sixteenth birthday present, when Tom’s mind had been more full of T’Pau and the Pet Shop Boys, Whitney Houston and Madonna. But eventually he had given it a listen, late in his room, and something had stuck.
One of the best nights he remembered spending with his father before the older man took himself off to a retirement chalet in Devon had been spent here, drinking John Smith’s bitter and listening to the band play another Adderley special, ‘Sack O’ Woe’.
Jake McMahon came over to him in the break and shook his hand. ‘Not seen you in a while.’
Whitemore forced a smile. ‘You know how it is, this and that.’
McMahon nodded. ‘Your dad, he okay?’
‘Keeping pretty well.’
‘You’ll give him my best.’
‘Of course.’
Whitemore stayed for most of the second set then called for a cab from the phone alongside the bar.
Darren Pitcher moved in with Emma Laurie and her three children. October became November, became December. Most Sundays Whitemore drove out to his in-laws’ bungalow on the coast, where the twins threw themselves at him with delight and he played rough and tumble with them on the beach if the cold allowed, and if not, tussled with them on the living-room settee. Marianne’s parents stepped around him warily, keeping their thoughts to themselves. If he tried to get Marianne off on her own, she resisted, made excuses. Conversation between them was difficult.
‘When will we see you again?’ she asked one evening as he was leaving.
‘When are you coming home?’ he asked. Christmas was less than three weeks away.
‘Tom, I don’t know.’
‘But you are coming? Coming back?’
She turned her face aside. ‘Don’t rush me, all right?’
It was just two days later that Bridget Arthur phoned Whitemore in his office, the first call of the day. Emma Laurie was waiting for them, agitated, at her front door. She had come back from work to find Pitcher with Jason, the elder of her two sons, on his lap; Jason had been sitting on a towel, naked, and Pitcher had been rubbing Vaseline between his legs.
Whitemore and Arthur exchanged glances.
‘Did he have a reason?’ Arthur asked.
‘He said Jason was sore, said he’d been complaining about being sore…’
‘And you don’t believe him?’
‘If he was sore,’ Emma said, ‘it was ’cause of what Darren was doing. You know that as well as me.’
‘Where is Darren now?’ Whitemore said.
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I told him to clear out and not come back.’
Whitemore found Pitcher later that morning, sitting cross-legged on the damp pavement, his back against the hoardings surrounding the Old Market Square. Rain was falling in fine slanted lines, but Pitcher either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care.
‘Darren,’ Whitemore said, ‘come on, let’s get out of this wet.’
Pitcher glanced up at him and shook his head.
Coat collar up, Whitemore hunkered down beside him. ‘You want to tell me what happened?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Emma says-’
‘I don’t give a fuck what Emma says.’
‘I do,’ Whitemore said. ‘I have to. But I want to know what you say, too.’
Pitcher was silent for several minutes, passers-by stepping over his legs or grudgingly going round.
‘He’d been whingeing away,’ Pitcher said, ‘Jason. How the pants he was wearing was too tight. Scratching. His hand down his trousers, scratching, and I kept telling him to stop. He’d hurt himself. Make it worse. Then, when he went to the toilet, right, I told him to show me, you know, show me where it was hurting, point to it, like. And there was a bit of red there, I could see, so I said would he like me to put something on it, to make it better and he said yes and so…’
He stopped abruptly, tears in his eyes and shoulders shaking.
Whitemore waited.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ Pitcher said finally. ‘Honest. I never touched him. Not like… you know, like before.’
‘But you could have?’ Whitemore said.
Head down, Pitcher nodded.
‘Darren?’
‘Yes, yeah. I suppose… Yeah.’
Still neither of them moved and the rain continued to fall.
On Christmas morning Whitemore rose early, scraped the ice from the windows of the second-hand Saab he’d bought not so many weeks before, loaded up the back seat with presents, and set out for the coast. When he arrived the light was only just beginning to spread, in bands of pink and yellow, across the sky. Wanting his arrival to be a surprise, he parked some houses away.