‘Just pour it, darling,’ said Stephanie. She made an elaborate female solidarity face at Kirsty, who did her best to return it.
At the window end of the table, Tom Gadd, still unbuttoned, occupied his chair with a kind of doomed elegance, toying with a slice of Parma ham, a stuffed olive, then, with a blatant yawn, excusing himself to make some phonecalls.
Alice sipped at a glass of mineral water but ate nothing. For several minutes towards the end of the meal she appeared to be asleep, but when Stephanie returned from the kitchen carrying a tray of sliced peaches and freshly made meringues, saying how sorry she was she didn’t have more, that it wasn’t more special, that it was just something to ‘fill a hole’, Alice silenced her, calling out in a voice retrieved with visible effort, and saying, ‘Please! Please can we see the house now?’
There was an instant’s confusion. The skin on Stephanie’s face tautened, as though her self-control might be far more fragile than her manner had so far suggested. But she recovered herself, set down the tray, and touched her pearls. ‘How very thoughtless of me,’ she said. ‘Of course you can see the house now. Rupert!’
‘Absolutely,’ said Rupert, springing from his seat. ‘Are we all going together?’
They started in the lounge, filing in behind Stephanie, who, sketching freely in the air, explained how they had knocked through and enlarged and finally forced upon these simple rooms a type of luxuriousness. In each of the rooms there came a moment when they gathered around Alice as though to witness a public act of recollection, but her gaze was distracted. She frowned as if they had brought her to the wrong house, or she was searching for something in particular, something that wasn’t there, the fine end of a thread that would lead her back.
They went upstairs, Alice at the front clutching on to Larry’s arm, the others inching up behind them.
‘You have a beautiful home,’ said Kirsty.
‘How kind,’ said Stephanie. ‘We keep our little place in London, but it’s not the old London now.’
‘Can’t buy a morning paper,’ said Rupert, ‘unless you speak Portuguese or Urdu.’
‘Un moment!" called Stephanie, striding to the head of the column. She opened the door at the far end of the corridor and announced the master bedroom. ‘We brought the mirror in Italy,’ she said. And then to Alec: ‘Do you know Siena well?’
Larry, who thought he might be able to have a lot of fun at these people’s expense, picked up a photograph from the mantelpiece beside the mirror. Two boys in cricket whites in the school grounds of some middle-ranking English public school. The boy with the bat was recognizably the languid Tom. The other boy, slightly older, blond-brown hair in a flop over one of his eyes, held up a ball as though he had just taken five wickets and was trying not to look too pleased with himself. At the far left of the picture there was the green flutter of a woman’s dress, and the dark green brim of her hat. Larry put the photograph back on the mantelpiece, catching sight in the mirror of Stephanie Gadd staring at him with an expression he had last seen on Betty Bone’s face in the San Fernando Valley.
At the window, Alice was gazing down into the garden. It was smaller than the one at Brooklands, and neater, running down a slight incline between beech hedges to the bank of a stream. The others joined her.
‘There,’ said Alice, a voice barely audible. ‘There…’
‘Do you mean the old willow?’ asked Stephanie.
Alice nodded, pressing on the glass with her fingertips.
‘You want to go into the garden, Mum?’ asked Alec.
She turned to him and smiled, beamed at him as if she were surprised to find him there, and his suggesting that they go out somehow made it possible. ‘What an angel,’ she said. And then turning to Stephanie Gadd, she repeated it: ‘My son is an angel.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanie, her hand straying towards the pearls again. ‘Yes, I can see that.’
For a few minutes the garden gave Alice new strength. With her stick she moved on her own across the trimmed lawn with more energy than she had been able to muster in weeks. It was mid-afternoon, the velvet hour. At the point of farthest visibility, the air was silver and slate, darkening nearer the horizon, almost purple. Something was building out there, new weather, but it was still a long way off, and might, in the end, come to nothing.
‘The place doesn’t look too bad on a day like this,’ said Rupert. He was standing with Kirsty in the shade of the house.
‘Oh, I think it’s heavenly,’ she said.
‘Old fellow from the village mostly. Can’t understand a word he says but he’s reliable. Steph’s the brains behind it all.’
‘It was kind of you to let us come.’
‘Not at all.’
‘I think she’s OK now,’ said Kirsty, watching Alice pause to lean her face into the heart of a large yellow rose.
‘Still,’ said Rupert, ‘it must be wretched for her.’ Then in a voice that was quite different, he added, ‘We lost Tom’s brother to leukaemia two years ago. They used Tom’s bone marrow but it didn’t help much.’ He grinned, as though his face suffered from a poverty of expressions. ‘Poor Tommy seems to think it was his fault. You know. Thinks he should have done more.’
When Alice started to slow down, a toy unwinding, they brought out a chair for her and tried to coax her into the shade. They were solicitous and complained that she was overexerting herself, but she insisted they set the chair on the grass in front of the willow. Alec helped her to sit. She clutched at his hand and told him it was the garden she had come back for. Nothing in the house had helped her–who were those people? – but the tree was miraculously unchanged. The perfectly kept secret of itself! The same tree she had seen each morning from her bedroom window as she got ready for school. The tree behind whose branches she had hidden with Samuel, her head on his shoulder, Sunday afternoons before he took the train back to London. The tree she had stood beside the night she went out to rescue her father. The night he told her about the flame-throwers. Did he know about that?
Alec nodded. He had no idea what she was talking about. And could this really be the same tree? He had his doubts. But her face had acquired that particular waxy glaze that meant her pain was on the flood. ‘We ought to go,’ he said.
She gestured with her hand. She wanted to stay a little longer. Sit there on her own. She was expecting someone. She didn’t know who. Not yet. But someone. ‘I’m very tired,’ she said. ‘Don’t know if I can stand up again.’
‘I’ll help when you’re ready,’ he said.
‘Will you?’
‘When you’re ready.’
He crossed the garden and joined the others on the patio, where they had gathered under a sun umbrella.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Fine,’ he said.
Stephanie brought out a jug of home-made lemonade, and for twenty minutes they made small talk, a shrill to-and-fro of pleasantries that only Ella felt free to ignore, twisting in her seat to stare at Alice’s back, at those fascinating creatures slung over her shoulders, those little savage heads, their glass eyes prinked with sunlight. It was a sight she would remember even into middle age, long after she had forgotten the house and the people who lived there, or even why they had gone. She asked about it when her mother came to visit her and the grandchildren in New York (the Thanksgiving of 2037), but Kirsty had no memory of mink heads, though she could recall, she said, clear as day, the storm on the drive home, and, of course, the birthday party the following week. And all that that entailed.