in silence for a while, and then Peter emptied the bin and cleared some old food from the fridge before serving up the soupy beef.
‘I think that was nice,’ Bob said, ‘but I can’t seem to taste anything. Actually, Suki, my sister, asked to stay but I told her no. Perhaps…’
Peter seized on the idea.
‘Yes, absolutely, even if just for a few days, Bob. I know it would be better than you being on your own so why not call her now? I can speak to her too if it helps.’
Oddly, Bob thought it would help. He handed the phone to his boss. Between them, Peter and Suki concocted a plan to keep Bob from festering.
‘But she can’t sleep in Lauren’s room,’ Bob said in a sudden panic.
‘No, of course not, Bob,’ Peter said. ‘She’ll do everything required to make the spare room what she needs.’
Bob had been sleeping alternately in his daughter’s room, his and Vera’s room, and the spare room. They were all a bit smelly and somehow Peter knew this. He went upstairs and opened the window to the spare room and stripped the bed. He had told Suki to bring her own bedding.
Suki was a limited cook, but it was hardly appropriate, she decided, for the pair of them to be dousing pancakes with Grand Marnier or flambéing steaks. Suki was a limited housekeeper too, but even she could tell the place needed a good hoover. After vacuuming the entire house, she decided she had been enough of a martyr and called on the neighbours and devised a rota. She would look after Sundays and Monday mornings, but everyone else would have to chip in with something the rest of the week. The mother at No. 2 yelled at her twin boys to offer to wash Bob’s car, and when Suki realised that would be the most she would get from her she accepted the offer with a forced smile.
‘We don’t know him,’ said the couple who had recently moved into No. 17 and found The Willows to be a morose sort of place.
‘In that case, you can just drop off milk and bread on Thursday mornings,’ Suki said. ‘If he doesn’t answer, leave it outside the door.’ And with that she left them gawping, railroaded, and even more regretful that they had chosen this house over the smaller one near the church. Suki found The Willows stifling and dull and told Bob it would be a diversion, and good for him, to sell up. He mumbled something non-committal. Suki smiled, sadly. Bob was the quietest, least interesting person she knew but she was fond of him, always had been, and it angered her that he was being made to suffer.
‘We should visit Vera’s mum, don’t you think, Bob?’
Bob was startled and for the first time in weeks felt something other than self-absorbed grief. Beryl would be having just as awful a time of it as he was. Maybe worse. But he could not bear to phone her so Suki took charge of their sombre trip past Stockport to Marple Bridge and Beryl’s damp stone cottage.
At least, Suki thought it was damp. Everyone else thought it a sweet and cosy sort of place, but as soon as they walked in Suki began to feel uncomfortable. Every side table and shelf was stacked with photographs. Vera and Bob on their wedding day, Vera holding baby Lauren, Beryl and Alfie holding baby Lauren, Beryl holding baby Vera, Lauren on her first day of school, her uniform slightly too big, her briefcase slightly too formal. The telephone, instead of being on the hall table or in a corner, sat incongruously in the middle of the polished round dining table at the back of the living room. More than any photograph, it told a picture of loss. No more chats about nothing much at all with her daughter or her granddaughter.
To Suki’s surprise, the visit was a success. Bob tried to cheer up Beryl and Beryl tried to cheer up Bob. Bob told her about his ‘options’ and Beryl told him she had none unless she considered leaving the country to stay with her sister and her family in Canada but as she had not been invited she could not, really, consider it much of an option at all.
‘Funny place to want to live, don’t you think?’ she said to Suki.
‘Utterly ludicrous,’ Suki said and for the first time in a long time Bob gently chuckled.
It was a turning point. It was as if one chuckle had broken the spell of pain and inertia. Bob decided he could have a future and it only took him two years to decide which one. It was not on the list made by Peter Stanning but it was in the spirit of it. Bob rented out No. 13 The Willows because he could not bear to break the ties completely, and bought an apartment in a trendy conversion overlooking the River Mersey and not too far at all from Suki. He did not retrain, but set himself up as a consultant, working on projects for Peter’s business and for smaller clients.
When Peter vanished, the December after presenting Bob with his life options, Bob helped out from a sense of duty, but gradually he expanded his private client base and cut his ties to his old firm. He liked to be busy but he also liked knowing he could cut away for brief periods and wallow and weep without letting anyone down. One Sunday each month he let Beryl cook him a roast chicken, and one Saturday each month Suki let herself take him out to a pub or the cinema.
Was it living? Suki wondered sometimes how her brother’s mind worked, whether he could forget for a while about his wife and daughter or if it might be worse if he could forget only to have to remember and suffer all over again. There was something very contained about Bob, she thought. It was like being with an acrobat, a man treading the high wire and wanting to appear confident and calm but knowing one lapse in concentration could lead to a catastrophic fall. His laughter was measured, his smiles were tempered, his eyes could twinkle but only dimly. She remained, all the same, very fond of him.
‘Do you fancy seeing Prizzi’s Honor?’ Suki asked Bob on the phone ahead of their regular Saturday outing. His wife had been dead for two years and his daughter had been dead for over three but, still, there was a remnant of it being somehow inappropriate to spend too much time wondering which film they should see.
‘Seen it, Suki, very good, though.’
Suki paused. How had he seen it, the film had only been in cinemas for a week?
‘I went with Rachel,’ he said.
‘Who the fuck is Rachel?’ Suki said.
Bob laughed.
‘I think I somehow ended up on a date,’ he said.
‘In that case no movie for us on Saturday, we’re meeting for a drink,’ Suki said.
Rachel was deep into divorce proceedings and had employed Bob to untangle the financial mess of her marriage. There was a large house on The Wirral, a large house near Lake Windermere and a flat in Menorca to be sold off and all manner of stocks and shares and registers which Rachel had not even known her name was attached to.
Rachel had a golden tan, long legs and expensive hair and when she met Bob she realised how much she wanted a solid man who did not travel, who was straightforward and honest and serious and highly unlikely to have been secretly shagging another woman for the past seven years. The fact that Bob did not notice her tan, her legs or her hair made him desperately attractive to her. The fact that Bob was sad and damaged made him irresistible.
Suki wondered how protective she should be. Rachel could be a shallow vulture or exactly what her brother needed. She rattled off her questions.
‘How old is she?’
‘Er, forty.’
‘Children?’
‘Nope.’
‘Does she have a brain?’
‘She knows a lot about Menorca.’
Suki paused. Was Bob humouring her?
‘OK, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just, well, you know.’
‘I know,’ he said.
Eventually, Rachel was introduced to Suki. Bob’s sister had low expectations. Yes, she was attractive and very golden for someone