‘Hi. Mum said you were friends when you were my age.’
‘Yes, we go back a very long way.’ Jane laughed.
‘Yes,’ agreed Daphne. ‘And, Libby, you’ll be lucky if you have a wonderful friend from school after so long. Imagine if you still know Paige when you’re fifty!’
‘So, did you have fun in Greece?’ Jane sensed it was an irritating question as it emerged.
‘Yes.’ Liberty hesitated. ‘But it was intense. I was helping my dad with the refugees a lot of the time. It was so hot in Athens. And there are so many people crossing over from Turkey. Thousands arriving off the boats in Athens. It feels biblical.’ Jane guessed Libby was quoting someone else. She felt put in her place for asking about fun.
‘Good for you. That’s amazing. The world needs young people who are looking outwards, doing something, following their principles.’
‘Thanks.’ The girl looked solemn. ‘If I was older, I’d go and stay there and work full-time. Everything else looks a bit pointless in comparison.’
‘Libby’s so different to me – how I was,’ said Daphne. ‘I don’t mean physically, though that’s pretty obvious. She’s so clever and organised and knows what she’s doing. I don’t think I’ll ever be that disciplined.’
‘Oh you were pretty clever,’ said Jane. ‘About lots of things.’ She laughed, wondering whether Daphne would interpret this as a dig at her patchy academic abilities or as a reference to her judgement in other matters.
‘So, Libby, are you artistic like your mum?’
‘No, I’m hopeless at art.’ The girl smiled, tolerating the adult questioning the child in this manner. ‘At school I like biology best. And sports. Especially running.’
‘Snap!’ said Jane. ‘That’s exactly like me. Did you know I work in a lab? I do medical research. And I love running.’
‘Wow, I didn’t know.’
‘Yes, if you ever wanted to come and see my lab, you’d be more than welcome. I’d love to show you around.’
‘Cool. Thank you. That’d be great.’
Libby turned to her mother. ‘OK, I’m going round to Paige’s now. See you later.’
‘Like what time?’ Jane noticed an infinitesimal stiffening in Daphne’s face.
‘Dunno. I’ll text you, OK?’
‘Rough idea?’
‘Like nine thirty and you can meet me at the Tube?’
‘OK, deal. Keep me posted.’
The walk took them over the train-bridge and Daphne laughed as they climbed the steps. ‘Returning to the scene of the crime,’ she puffed. As girls, they’d run up and down two at a time, and Daphne’s movements were still more expansive than her size suggested – a kind of bodily largesse. ‘We’d never have believed that we could be this old, or that we’d be back here again after so long.’
‘I used to come across this bridge from the Tube station and hear opera blaring out from your house. And do you remember when Edmund got the peacock? I’d try to spot it down in the garden when I was approaching. What was it called?’
‘Nietzsche.’ Daphne giggled. ‘Nietzsche the Screecher. Ed could never resist something shiny and colourful.’
‘I loved that about your place. It was like a fairground, with the strings of coloured lights and flags in the trees, and then the different animals that came and went. Didn’t he buy a collection of oriental ducks at one point?’
‘Yes, and they all got ill and died. It was horrible. Chaos, our household, wasn’t it?’
The two women reached the ornate cast-iron gate to Daphne’s old house and paused, peering in like time travellers. Number 7 had altered – not merely shrunken like most locations remembered from childhood and revisited. The overgrown privet hedge and scruffy patch of grass were gone and the facade was now painted expensive grey, and fronted by neatly planted herb beds and antique brick paths. Jane said, ‘So if we came out of the front door aged fourteen or fifteen, would we be wearing flowery Laura Ashley dresses, punk trousers full of zips, or Victorian knickerbockers with Oxfam leopard skin?’ Daphne’s outfits had often looked as though she had been playing with a dressing-up chest. You couldn’t predict who she’d be.
‘I wish we had more photographs,’ said Daphne. ‘Nobody took them much in those days, did they?’
‘No. Not like now, where the photograph becomes the event. We have to take a selfie to know we actually exist.’ She wished she had taken more photographs. Perhaps she could have captured evidence about what Ralph did – that steady grooming that was heading so inevitably towards his goal.
‘I didn’t go to your house that much, did I?’ Daphne looked wistful. ‘It was so calm and peaceful there. Everyone behaving themselves. Your mum so kind. Now I think I probably should have spent more time there with you.’
Jane’s parents did not try to prevent her visiting Daphne, but gave the impression they were not entirely happy about it either. They were warily intrigued by the cautiously modified details Jane relayed: foreign mother, rather famous writer father, peculiar food, lots of visitors. For Jane, the Greenslay household was her escape and refuge – almost an obsession. At Barnabas Road she was able to forget the rules. There was a long list of all the things she did there for the first time. First midnight feast. First fag – up in the tree house. First wine. First sight of a fox. First sneaking out of the house at night. Even her first kiss.
That kiss happened when she was fourteen – too late to admit that she hadn’t done it before.
It was a Friday in September, and she’d gone to stay the night with Daphne. ‘A school project’, she told her parents. There was already a whiff of damp autumn in the air, but the house was warm and alive with bustle. Unusually, all the Greenslays were at home. Ellie was cooking some strange-looking but delicious Greek pasta shaped like rice, baking it in tomato sauce with pieces of garlicky chicken. ‘She tries to make us seem like a great big happy Greek family,’ Daphne complained. ‘But we’re not and she knows it. It’s like she’s playing a game. Tomorrow she’ll probably go away and leave us stranded.’
The excitement of the day was Ed’s latest acquisition – a hot tub that had just been installed and was due to be tested that evening. As Daphne and Jane laid the table, he gushed about his new toy. ‘I tried them for the first time in San Francisco. Utterly beguiling. And extremely beneficial as well as pleasurable.’ As he spoke, he waved his arms around, his harlequin sleeves flapping, his long face animated.
‘Edmund, my love,’ interrupted Ellie from the sofa where she was resting after her efforts at the stove. She was wearing a long, draped dress gathered under the breast and was smoking a French cigarette. ‘Do give me a glass of wine.’ Ed opened a bottle of Chianti – the sort wrapped in raffia – and poured a glass for his wife and himself. ‘It’s all the joys of a hot bath, but under the stars,’ he continued. ‘You feel rejuvenated, almost reborn – part of nature, but held in the safe, warm water.’
‘I expect Professor Freud would have had something to say about amniotic fluid and a return to the womb,’ said Ellie, rather sharply.
‘And would you deny me that, my angel?’ Ed countered.
A record of Greek music was playing – a deep, female voice singing tragic songs of rebellion – and Ellie joined in with the march-like chorus. The air was thickened with scents from the rich sauces, Ellie’s perfume, and the plumes of smoke she blew up towards the ceiling from a tiny cigarette made from a rolled leaf tied with red thread. ‘They’re from India,’ explained Daphne, enjoying her expertise and showing Jane the little paper package of bidis.
When they sat down to eat, Jane discreetly engineered herself next to Liam, Theo’s old friend. Both boys were nineteen and considered brilliantly clever. About to return to St Andrews for their second year studying physics, they were already planning postgraduate work. Jane had not admitted to Daphne how much she liked Liam, though it had gnawed at her for ages. She appreciated his delicate, pale hands and the way he exploded into high-pitched laughter. He was mysterious, with fishy green eyes swimming behind black-rimmed glasses and half his face hidden by hair. Sitting beside him at the table, she felt the heat from his thigh. When Edmund toasted ‘the scholars’ return to the Northern wilds’, she clinked her glass against his, looked straight into his eyes and felt her heart flip. Ellie always served a drop of wine for the children at family suppers and they usually said, ‘Yeia mas.’ Theo managed to refill everyone’s glass, including the girls’, while his parents’ attention was elsewhere. He smiled wine-red lips when Edmund opened another bottle.