Except sleep.
He fell asleep on James’s shoulders as they made their way out of one teeming zoo and headed towards the other, with its market and its lock, at the far end of Parkway.
Later, sitting in Isabel’s orderly kitchen with a mug (Che Guevara) of Earl Grey while Omar told her what animals they had seen—and he seemed more enthusiastic then, talking about them, than he had when they were there, seeing them—James, for the first time, found himself envying his sister’s life. The tidy, well-lit maisonette (lights on everywhere), Omar’s kindergarten daubs magneted to the fridge, the Volvo in the parking space outside (the Volvo that went to the two-acre Sainsbury’s in Finchley every Saturday), the quietly up-to-the-minute electronics everywhere, the sections of the Observer strewn on the sofa, where Steve had been lying after lunch, the Banksy prints in the hall—it was all just so safe and warm and middle class, and sitting there in the kitchen, he felt an envious tug towards something like that. Yes, even towards its intrinsic predictability. Even its faint smugness.
Omar was just telling Isabel about the merry-go-round when Steve appeared in the French windows, with frayed half-moons trodden out of the heels of his jeans and plump pale little Scheherazade in his arms. They had been out on the Heath—Scheherazade in her Bugaboo, Steve having a perambulatory script meeting with his friend Pete.
‘Alright, mate,’ he said.
‘Hi, Steve.’
‘How’s things?’
James said things were fine.
He phoned Katherine as he walked down the steep street, under the sheared, leafing elms. Voicemail. He left a message.
*
Emerging from the tube half an hour later, his hope was that she had tried him while he was underground. She had not. The disappointment was so surprisingly potent that he wished he had not phoned her in the first place. He had felt okay leaving Isabel’s house and now he didn’t. He felt very alone.
3
Philippa Persson thought it would take two days. First thing on Tuesday morning, the house was totally empty. A freshly painted, four-bedroom void. They headed to Neasden in soiled, low sunlight. Katherine was driving. Philippa did not intend to tackle this on her own. She had enlisted her daughter to help.
Kate seemed surprisingly down. She was wearing sunglasses and torn jeans. On Sunday evening they had spoken on the phone for two hours—the Edinburgh post-mortem. Philippa had been pleased to hear that it had been a failure, and pleased that Kate, on the phone, had sounded okay. She had sounded no more than wistful, the persistent numbness of Saturday having thawed to a tranquil sadness. The eight-hour drive down to London, she said laconically, had not been much fun. The parting in Packington Street even less so. Fraser in tears. Philippa had permitted herself a quiet snort at that. She had never liked her son-in-law, had encouraged Kate to have nothing to do with him from the start, when he was still married to that other woman. Naturally she did not let on how pleased she was that the Scottish weekend had been a failure. She made sympathetic mooing noises while Kate said that in Edinburgh she had found Fraser tired, tedious, frightened, sad… Sad, she said, that was the worst thing. The way he was so sad. For her part, Philippa said things like, ‘Well, maybe it’s for the best…’ She said, ‘You tried, Kate. Now I think it’s probably time to move on…’ Time to move on… She had been saying that for more than a year. And now, thankfully, the whole thing did seem to be over. As Kate herself put it, ‘The love is dead.’ She said it quite simply. ‘The love is dead.’ That was just how it felt. The sense she had was of silence, nullity, non-existence. On Sunday night she was just pleased to be home and she slept well.
On Monday morning she felt shockingly worse. There was a serious faltering of the idea that this was not something massively significant. She struggled through the day at work. In the evening she was supposed to meet some people, but the idea of pretending to be okay, of pretending to be interested in other things, was impossible. She went straight home.
Tuesday. Still on a frighteningly steep downward trajectory. A terrible sense of futility. What was the point? The love was dead. In a way she was thankful that she had something mindless to do. Drive to Neasden. Push the obese trolley through Ikea wearing shades. Smoke in the car park under the huge suburban sky, the massing chrome-fendered clouds. Whenever Philippa asked for her opinion, though—These hand towels or those hand towels? Darling, which hand towels do you think…? — she just shrugged. She just muttered, ‘I don’t know.’
She snapped, ‘Mum, I don’t know.’
‘Whatever,’ she said.
She was thirty-two. She felt half that.
On Tuesday morning, they did Ikea. They did it. The long Peugeot estate was overloaded as it waddled onto the North Circular. And Philippa wasn’t just taking the first thing she saw. She would spend twenty minutes on the towels, ten on the toilet seats, half an hour on the light fittings. There were the soap dishes, the mirrors, the laundry hampers. The list of necessities seemed endless. Not everything was from Ikea. Over the next two days, many other shops were involved—mostly in their vast, out-of-town interpretations, skirted with acres of parking space. John Lewis weighed in heavily, for instance. It was there that Katherine’s head started to throb as she was asked to look at forty different irons and make a decision. Two dozen toasters—which was it to be? Do we need a pizza slicer?
At two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon they unloaded the morning’s shopping at the house, where Katherine’s younger brother, Marc, an MBA student at the London Business School, was waiting for the various deliveries—the fridge-freezer, the washing machine, the sofas. The house was in West Kensington, past Olympia, the wrong side of the tracks. Nevertheless, Philippa was hoping for two thousand a week. That was why all the stuff had to be ‘nice’. Even the hoover had to be ‘nice’. (They found a nice one in John Lewis.) ‘Have you been smoking pot in here?’ she said to Marc, as she started down the stairs to the kitchen.
‘No…’
‘What’s been delivered?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘Nothing? I’d better phone them.’
While she made some sharp enquiries into the whereabouts of her things—‘Yes, you said between eight and two. It’s now twenty past and there’s no sign of them…’—Marc had found the Waitrose bag and was eating a lobster sandwich. Katherine was out on the patio smoking a Marlboro Light.