Even as she was telling Liz how excited they all were to see her, she felt a protective wariness. She didn’t mind Liz with the kids—when she actually saw them, she was great with them—but she didn’t particularly want her sister to meet her soon-to-be second husband. And Liz’s presence introduced a stress to the household that was paralyzing. Kenneth and Liz had not actually come to blows since school—but the needling and riling that Liz considered normal made everyone around her tense. Liz was the star of the family, and her mother’s clear favorite. She was so sure she had the answer to everything. But she just had different questions. Normal people, real people, who had to get up and go to work and come home and make dinner, found answers enough in the repetition, in the dull, rough ceremony of cooking, and bathing the kids, and reading three stories, and downing a large glass of chenin blanc, and turning off the television, and double-locking the door, and heading up to bed, amen.
Educated to the nth degree—but so what? To what purpose? Liz knew a lot about some things, sure, but nothing about how to live. She was one of life’s tenants—she rented: flats, people, cars. Trying them out, using them up, breaking them down, moving along. Liz was older, twenty-one months older, but as soon as Alison could speak she’d adopted the responsible role. Had Liz got money? Had she got tissues? Had she remembered her packed lunch? Alison could never have told her, of course, but it was clear as day that Liz would never become an adult till she had children of her own—climbing over her, lying on her, needing her at three in the morning. And not until she became a solid fact in someone else’s life would she start to understand her own parents. She still had the worldview of a child. She faced upwards. She hadn’t yet forgiven Kenneth and Judith—not that there was so much to forgive. Alison knew that Liz pitied her, still stuck in Ballyglass, still stuck with their parents, the business, but in turn Alison pitied her right back, pitied her harder, longer, louder.
The laptop was still showing Downton Abbey on the wicker stool, and she closed it and exited the room, shutting Michael’s door softly. Typical Liz to be snobby about a TV show she didn’t even watch. How could it be offensive? It wasn’t as if it didn’t show the servants to be just as wise and just as confused as the masters. Just that everybody knew their place back then. They weren’t lost in wanting more. Now everyone thought they deserved to have everything at every moment. She was a great fan of the individual, her sister, while hating any actual person she ever had to meet. Liz liked the concept of people but not the reality. That’s why she couldn’t hold onto a boyfriend. Alison stood for a moment on the landing. A soft, repetitive clicking that took her a second to identify as the tap dripping into the bath. It had started again. How amplified a sound became at night. She’d mention it to Stephen.
This was the umpteenth time he’d stayed overnight, but only the third or fourth time he’d done it with the kids here and not at Judith and Kenneth’s. You couldn’t say the evening hadn’t gone well. She’d made a proper roast chicken dinner and Stephen lit the fire. The kids were pretty good, and after dinner, when she bathed them among the ducks and frogs and foam letters that Isobel still refused to spell her name with, he’d slid Bill’s old red toolbox out from between the turf basket and the coal scuttle under the stairs and fixed the loose shelf beneath the sink. Back when Bill was around, she’d have nagged him for weeks, and he’d have botched it anyway, if he ever did it. But Stephen would be a different kind of husband: He could do stuff. He’d be a great dad, and Isobel and Mickey would soon think of him as the only father they’d ever had. She hadn’t heard from Bill in almost two years. Stephen was far from perfect, God knows, what with his sullenness, his gift for switching off, leaving the room but not through the door or the window. Stephen, Stephen, Earth calling Stephen, and he’d turn back towards her and smile a little shyly.
The kids went down easy and they shared a second bottle of Tesco’s finest Italian red, and watched TV and cuddled on the sofa. Upstairs, in bed, they did it twice, once quickly and then, twenty minutes later, again but slowly. She didn’t come but she wasn’t far off the second time. She wore a new nightie from M&S, a classy white satin thing, and he liked it, or said he liked it.
She looked in now to check on Isobel. Her daughter’s darling head was pressed against the wall, the hair covering her face entirely so that for a second she couldn’t tell which direction she was facing. One bare foot came out from under her Tinkerbell duvet. She gave a little moan and shifted her legs, taking a step. What went on in her head? When she came home from school now she was silent about it, just said it was “good.” Alison knew already the inner life of her daughter, at four years old, had closed up to her, was newly zoned and fortified and she couldn’t visit. She might tell Isobel her life was one long carousel ride of being fed and entertained and washed and soothed, but she’d seen her daughter nervous, embarrassed, tense. You can’t protect them from everything.
Everyone sleeping, Alison felt like a ghost wandering the house, benevolent, visiting the much loved, the much missed. She put an ear to Michael’s door, but it was silent. In her own bedroom Stephen lay splayed across the duvet, his white T-shirt riding up his narrow back, revealing the scatter of a few moles. At the nape of his neck the hair whorled in such a way that it came down into a perfect point. She slipped in under the duvet and felt his warmth and the lovely new security of a breathing human body in her bed. And then he spoke, surprising her.
“Was Michael all right?”
“Yeah. Just wanted a cuddle.”
There was a long pause, and just when she thought he’d gone back to sleep, he spoke again.
“Wouldn’t mind one of those myself.”
He turned towards her and draped one of his skinny arms across her waist. A few minutes later, Michael started again. Stephen and her lay perfectly still. Michael grew louder, the pitch rising and rising until he was wailing in utter despair. He started making a hacking, sobbing sound. She set a hand gently on Stephen’s chest and whispered, “I’m going to leave him. He needs to learn to settle—”
Stephen’s whole body jerked awake and backwards in a panic, as if she’d flicked a switch. It was intent on repelling her, hell-bent on defending himself—the side of one hand caught her on the cheek, the other grabbed her by the throat hard.
Something awful possessed him. His eyes stayed closed and she screamed and tried to pry his fingers from her neck. He raised his leg and kneed her in the thigh. Then he was looking at her but his eyes were strange and hard and far away and he was shouting, “Fuckoff, fuckoff” in a voice high pitched and different, sharp with fear. Then it was over—but what had it been? She was crying and hitting at him and he hugged her as she tried to pull away. “It’s me, it’s me,” he kept saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry. I was dreaming. I was dreaming. I’m sorry.”
Ten minutes later she sat in the empty bath, her knees pulled up. Stephen passed her a bag of frozen sweetcorn from the freezer and wrapped it in a tea towel. She held it now to her eye.
“Go on back to bed, you. There’s no point in us both being up.”
Stephen perched on the toilet lid and sighed repeatedly, as if he were the one thumped in the face. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It wasn’t that she thought he’d done it on purpose. He’d have been out on his ear with the door banging his heels if she’d thought that. It was not deliberate, and that was the point, wasn’t it? But another point, another really very pressing point, was that it hurt.
“Go on, really. I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“I am so sorr—”
“Honestly, it’s fine.”
She didn’t want to hear it but he kept on.
“Well, it’s not fine.”
“No.”
“I was just—it was an accident. We’ll have to get separate beds if we get married.”
She looked up and he was trying to smile. She nodded.
“If we get married? You haven’t left yourself much time to pull out.”
“Sure,