out here on the patio, in the suntrap made by the fence and the back wall of the kitchen, reading a book and having a glass of wine or a cup of tea—it occurred to her that if she had a gift for presenting things not as they are, but as they really should be, well, that was only to be expected of someone who’d lived with an alcoholic for as long as she had.
Liz was sleeping off her jet lag. Kenneth had gone to Ray Mullens’s funeral and Judith and Alison stood alone in the kitchen. Alison turned the carousel display of coffee capsules for the new machine, while Judith winced at her daughter’s neck: “He must be a very heavy sleeper.”
“Oh, he woke up almost immediately. Do you want cold water in this?”
“Just a splash. Is it just the neck?”
“He kneed my thigh and there’s a bruise but it’s nothing. Did you see the doctor yet about your bloods?”
“Next Wednesday.”
“How’s the tummy been? There’s more milk powder in a tub in the bag, but he shouldn’t need it.”
“Not bad at all. I’ll give him a biscuit later.”
Judith took the bottle out of Alison’s hand, and bent down to put her face in Michael’s. He sat still strapped in his car seat on the living room floor, asleep.
“Oh, I know what my little boy needs, don’t I?”
As Alison stood up, Judith touched her arm.
“It’s not like Bill again, is it? He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”
“Stephen wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
Alison waited for her mother to say, “It’s not flies I’m worried about,” accompanied by a steady imploring gaze that Alison would avoid meeting. But nothing happened, her mother moved away, and to cement her victory, Alison cheerfully lifted a millionaire’s shortcake and took a bite from it. She knew Judith thought her younger daughter had a history of making bad choices. But Judith herself hadn’t made many better ones. She’d married the first man who came along, and if they were still together that was part indolence and part convention. Whereas Alison had faced up and taken hard decisions and was in many ways a braver woman than her mother. No one could deny that. She’d risked things for love! She’d suffered! All of this she intimated by the brusque way she buttoned up the second and third buttons of her lemon-colored wool coat. Her mother walked past her, opened the fridge door, and rearranged various Tupperware containers.
“If you see your brother remind him he said he was coming for his dinner.”
“I wasn’t going to call into the office. I was just going to pick Isobel up.”
“Well, no rush. We’re going to be very happy here. Aren’t we?”
“Well, maybe I’ll call in at the church and check on the flowers. Just text me if you need anything, or if Mickey’s playing up.”
How Alison could christen her grandson with a lovely strong name like Michael—the name of an archangel no less—and then call him Mickey as if he were a gangster or a cartoon mouse was just beyond her. At times it seemed to Judith that her daughter held her in permanent contempt, and little decisions like these were designed purely to rile her. She knew it was irrational and unfair, but she felt it.
Kenneth came in from the funeral, plucked the tweed trilby from his head, and unwound the scarf delicately. It hurt today to lift his arms too high. Shrugging off his coat was taking some time, and Judith slipped behind him and began guiding one arm out of its sleeve. He pulled away.
“I can do it myself.”
“Just trying to—”
“But it’s not helpful. You’re getting in the way. I need to be able—”
“Calm down.”
Judith stepped back and lifted the wheaten loaf out of the bread bin. For over forty years of marriage, telling her husband to calm down was the closest Judith came to a daily mantra. Depending on the way the phrase was accented, the two words could mean almost anything—endearment, warning, threat. This “calm down” meant nothing in itself, but was designed to cut Kenneth off in his monologue; if it was allowed to continue, the trickle would turn to a torrent and carry him away into the kind of black despair it could take hours to dissipate. He had a remarkable gift for misery. The next step was to change the subject quickly, which Judith duly did.
“Big funeral? Do you want tea? A slice of wheaten?”
“I’ll have tea, yes. No bread. Not that many. A hundred maybe.”
She was surprised by how long it had taken to get used to watching this big bear of a man adapt himself to simple situations. To see him do such simple things with such tremulous care and physical trepidation. His eyes expressing fear, his fingers fiddling with a zipper. It was like the element he lived in had changed, had once been air and now was water, and the entire choreography of daily life had to be relearned. It was necessary to familiarize yourself with the actions of brushing your teeth, to study the order of the movements of getting into a car. It had been four years since the first stroke and heart surgery, but everything was still heavier, denser. For Kenneth, everything was a potential source of hurt.
Now he looked at her abdomen, at the hurt hiding in there, and asked, “You tell the kids?”
“I’ll tell them after the wedding. Sure, I’m not going to spoil everyone’s day.”
“Did you speak to Dr. Boyers?”
“I left a message.”
“You OK?”
“I’m all right.”
Kenneth watched her set the kettle on its base, the spout facing inward. When she went to the cupboard for cups, he adjusted it so it faced outwards, to let the steam vent away from the underside of the cupboards. She noticed and he watched her jaw perceptibly tighten with anger. It was not about cupboards and steam; it was about authority and submission, or men and women, or simply the ways of Kenneth and the ways of Judith. And so marriage goes, thought Judith. Everything becomes a sign and symbol of something else.
By four o’clock, Liz was awake and Alison had returned, though there was still no sign of Spencer.
In the living room Kenneth’s eyes were trained on yet another antiquing show on the TV, but in deference to the gathering of his daughters on the sofa, he voluntarily muted it.
“Mickey is a wee dote. God, those eyes.”
On cue, Michael appeared from the hallway, carrying a plastic dustpan in one hand and Kenneth’s tartan slipper in the other. Judith trailed behind, staring amorously at his blond curls.
“Cute, isn’t he? When he’s not screaming the house down.”
“Shooooooooos!” Michael tunefully declaimed, and handed his mother the slipper.
“The thing with Stephen is,” Alison said, “he’s very family orientated.”
“Is he from a big family?”
“It’s terrible actually. There was a brother in England but he’s dead now. Cancer. And his parents died years ago. He’s on his own. But he loves family, he’s so good with the kids.”
Liz played along, though she did not see why her sister was so set on selling her life to her, as if without the approval of others she could hardly bear to live it. Then it occurred to her that it was perhaps a mark of how unsure Alison was about the marriage if she was seeking even Liz’s affirmation.
In Liz’s eyes, her younger sister had always been much closer to Judith and Kenneth than she was, and if their parents didn’t always