But never mind all that, Ralph instructs himself. And, as he pulls out round another lorry, he pushes practicalities aside and begins to calculate once more the precise number of hours it will be before he is able to see her again, touch her skin, hear her voice, bask in the words she says to him: ‘You’re the love of my life, Ralph. You’re all I think about. You’re—’
‘Lily’s asleep,’ says Eve, glancing back at their daughter in her car seat.
‘That’s good.’
‘So you can answer my question, Ralph. What is it that you’re not telling me?’
Again he laughs. Warmth 0, this time round, Nonchalance 12, and, for good measure, he nudges the slider for anger up to 3. It’s a defensive anger in reality, the anger of a creature that’s been spotted in its hiding place and is under threat, but Ralph so fervently needs it to be heard as the righteous anger of a falsely accused innocent, that he actually does feel righteously angry. Preposterous as the peasant knows this to be, the Czar really does feel that Eve is making unreasonable demands on him.
‘Don’t let’s go over this now, Eve. It’s not the moment. I’m tired and I’m driving at seventy mph on a motorway in heavy traffic. I need to concentrate on what I’m doing.’
He glances in her direction for half a second, sees her narrowed eyes watching him, and flinches. Is this going to be his future when he emerges back out under the sky? Eve, Ianthe, Lily: all three of them disappointed in him, all three of them asking him to deliver something he doesn’t know how to give?
‘We can talk when we get home,’ he mutters. ‘I promise. Is that alright? Will that do?’
‘Now’s not the time for what, that’s what I want to know? What exactly is this thing that we’re going to talk about then but can’t talk about now? Why can’t you at least tell me what it is?’
‘I’ve got a lot of worries at work. You know that.’
He feels Eve’s gaze searching his face, trying to catch a glimpse of him through the layers of armour plate.
‘Well,’ she says slowly, ‘I don’t know what’s been happening at your work because you never tell me anything any more, but you’ve certainly been working late a great deal.’
‘Exactly!’ Ralph shouts, just barely managing to stretch his rage out far enough to cover up his panic. For Eve is almost there. She’s a single step away from naming what’s going on. She only has to ask one more question, and the calamity will have begun. ‘Exactly!’
The truth is though, that Eve, too, is afraid of that next question. She too hesitates to rupture the thin membrane that still maintains the outward appearance of normality, and plunge the three of them into new and terrifying territory. So she asks a less specific question instead.
‘Why are you so angry with me, Ralph?’
‘For going on and on! When I’ve already said I need to concentrate on driving! Our daughter’s in the back, in case you’d forgotten. Our precious daughter.’
This is a new low. He hears himself, appalled. Yet, bizarrely, he really does feel indignation, even though he knows it’s entirely spurious.
‘You’ve had every evening to talk to me the whole of this last week, after Lily went to bed,’ Eve points out. ‘But you just watched TV every night, and waited until I’d gone to sleep before you came to bed.’
‘I just want to concentrate on driving till we get home,’ he stubbornly repeats.
‘I wonder what you’d do,’ Eve says, ‘if you knew I was holding something back from you, and I refused to say what it was? Would you be content just to let me drive? I don’t think you would, you know. It seems to me that—’
‘I feel sick,’ whines Lily from the back.
‘Poor darling,’ says Eve, twisting round in her seat. ‘I thought you were asleep!’
‘She was,’ says Ralph, in the aggrieved tone of one whose sensible warnings have all been ignored, ‘but now you’ve woken her.’
‘We’re going to stop soon, sweetheart,’ Eve tells their daughter.
‘Remember we said we’d stop at the seaside for a bit, darling?’ Ralph joins in, in a voice that strives to be even kinder and more solicitous than Eve’s. ‘It’s not long now. It’s not long now at all.’
The rusty skeleton of a seaside pier is cut off behind a razor wire fence. The beach consists of grey mud. Most of the buildings along the front are empty and boarded up, blank sheets of metal or plywood bolted on over the windows of what were once guesthouses and amusement arcades. They look like blinded eyes.
‘This was a mistake,’ says Ralph.
Neither he nor Eve know this part of the country, and they chose this particular seaside town simply because it was at about the right point to break their journey.
‘Well we promised Lily, so we’ll have to do our best to make it fun.’
‘Of course.’
As he pulls up the car on the seafront, Ralph’s now constantly simmering anger is roused once again by Eve’s implication that he might in some way be less attuned to his daughter’s needs than she is.
‘Here we are, Lily my lovely girl!’ he calls out. ‘Here we are at the seaside!’
One good thing about the unattractiveness of this dismal town: there are plenty of parking spaces.
They emerge from the car. They look around. It struggles on, this dying place, like some maimed animal run over by a truck, but still trying to drag itself to safety. In between those blank squares of metal and plywood there is still a chip shop of sorts, a Pound Shop, a place selling plastic buckets and seaside rock, and a single small amusement arcade. The arcade is called Yogi’s Cave and it has a life-sized bear outside it, moulded in fibreglass. ‘Welcome, folks!’ says the bear, its smile fixed, the arcade machines bleeping and gurgling behind it. ‘Come and play in my cave! It’s bear-i-fic!’ For the rest of their time here, its mechanical voice will be there in the distance, coming in every couple of minutes with one of three standard phrases.
‘I guess no one needs seaside towns any more in the north,’ says Ralph, ‘now there are cheap flights to Ibiza and Corfu.’
Eve ignores this completely. If he’s going to refuse to tell her what’s on his mind, she isn’t going to offer him the comfort of ordinary conversation.
‘There’s a roundabout over there,’ she says shortly. ‘Lily will like that.’
‘Come on in, people, come on in!’ calls out the bear behind them. ‘Let’s all have some fun!’
Assisted from the car by her mother, four-year-old Lily climbs down onto the promenade and assays the attractions of this new place with her sharp grey eyes. The markers of poverty and decay mean nothing to her, and, unlike her parents, she has no sense of having strayed into the territory of an aggrieved and hostile tribe. Her mental template of a seaside town is more circumscribed than theirs, and requires only a short list of specific facilities, all of which seem to her to be satisfactorily present. The drifts of litter don’t trouble her, nor does the coiled dog turd over there by the metal balustrade. They don’t please her, of course, but they have no wider significance. She simply looks away from them, and gives her attention instead to the fibreglass bear that talks, the cartoonish tinkling and bleeping from the little amusement arcade, and the roundabout which her mother has already pointed out as a destination. Her parents might look at all this and see a dying thing, a mockery, a cruel parody of fun, but Lily takes it all at face value. Her mother and father are here after all, and she trusts them to keep her safe.