‘That’s right. See some friends. You know? Be back later.’
‘Milly, I can’t let you do that. You’re not old enough to go wandering off on your own in the dark. Wait. I’ll drive you, if you’re going to someone’s house, if you’ll tell me who so I can call the parents first …’
Milly grinned. ‘No thanks. Don’t need a chaperone. I can look after myself. Promise.’
‘That’s not the point. I promised Sandra I would look after you.’
Milly was demonstrating deafness. She had her satchel slung over her shoulder, was moving towards the door. Dinah scrambled after her, realising that the child would walk out. She caught hold of her arm and tried to pull her back. At the same time the detail that had nagged at her revealed itself. Matthew kept three bottles on a small wooden tray at the far end of the work surface, one of gin, one of whisky and one of vodka. The vodka bottle was missing.
‘Have you been drinking?’
The shrug inflamed Dinah. Her grip on Milly tightened and the child began to struggle in her grasp. Her arms felt like sticks, but she was surprisingly strong.
‘You can’t keep me here.’
They were wrestling in earnest now, Dinah’s hands clamped around Milly’s wrists. It was absurd to fight with her, as well as misguided, but Dinah’s sense of proportion deserted her in a tide of panic that burst out of some closed reservoir within herself. They lurched backwards, struggling against each other.
With Milly’s weight falling on her the edge of the worktop dug into Dinah’s side, winding her.
She would not be able to hold her much longer. Milly would break free; she would disappear. The knowledge was fearful and the fear came out of somewhere long ago, unacknowledged and more terrifying for it.
Dinah felt that she would choke. She realised that she was crying.
‘That fucking hurts,’ Milly spat at her, enraged. She disengaged one leg, drew it back and kicked Dinah square in the shin with her steel reinforced toecap.
Dinah yelped in pain and at the same time Milly ducked her head and bit hard into the back of Dinah’s hand. Dinah jerked the bitten hand to her mouth and swung out with the other. She slapped Milly satisfyingly across one cheek, and was rewarded by a flash of astonishment and respect in her pale eyes before fury blotted out everything else.
‘You hit me.’
‘Milly, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that …’
Milly was out of her grasp and she darted away while Dinah hesitated. The kitchen door slammed and an instant later the front door swung and banged shut on its troublesome spring. Ape barked at the empty air in Milly’s wake.
Dinah walked slowly across the hallway to the front door. It seemed to vibrate still with the force of the crash. It was dark outside, and Kendrick was deserted. Milly had vanished. I should run after her, Dinah thought. I should catch her and bring her back.
But she only checked the door, making sure that it was on the latch so that Milly could come in again when she was ready. Dinah couldn’t chase after her now, for even if she caught up with her she would not be able to force her to come back. She had been clumsy enough for one day.
In the den, on a low table beside the dented sofa cushions, Dinah found the vodka bottle. The level in it, as far as she could remember, had hardly dropped at all. Bravado, Dinah thought. A child’s bravado. She sat down and rested her head against the cushions. The back of her right hand showed an inflamed ring of crimson teethmarks.
Ape heaved himself on to the sofa beside her, and Dinah twisted her fingers in his rough coat. She sat and waited for Milly to come back again.
As the time crept by Dinah dismembered their argument over and over again in her mind. She was shamed by the evidence that she had done everything wrong. She had let her own needs and anxieties bleed out into her dealings with Milly. Where she should have been detached she had been demanding. Instead of encountering a cool, dispassionate adult Milly had met a creature as unstable as herself.
With a shiver of fear, Dinah realised that the tight seals she had kept on the past were straining and threatening to give way. At home in England she had been able to contain herself with familiarity and routine. But in Franklin she was out of her place and adrift, and her awareness of this intensified with time rather than diminished.
Then Milly had come, and her age and her fury and fragility had all touched a rawness and longing in Dinah that was frightening, and always increasing, and now threatened to overwhelm her.
Dinah grew cold and stiff with sitting. She stood up and walked the length of the room and back, and the dog raised its head to look irritably at her. It was two, nearly three hours since Milly had run out of the house. The night was bitter, and she had been wearing only the usual layers of ragged woollens. Where had she gone? Was she outside in the darkness, wandering by herself, or was she in some dangerous warm place, shut in and at even greater risk?
She was only fourteen. A child, a little girl. Her responsibility, entrusted to her.
Dinah ran to the front door and jerked it open. Cold air met her, and the scent of woodsmoke, and the sight of the cosy curtained windows of her neighbours’ houses. The wind carried the irregular hum of distant traffic.
She closed the door again, pressing the night away behind it. Denied images rose up before her eyes, making her roll her head in an effort to dispel them. None of her old methods of deflection would work any longer, because Milly had unlocked the sealed place.
Dinah ranged through the rooms of the house, looking for somewhere to hide and collect herself, but there was nowhere. The tidy defences of possessions and pictures and an ordered life looked irrelevant now. Guilt emerged from its lair as tangible as another human being until she thought that she could hear its breathing, smell the rankness of its sweat.
She could stay in the house no longer, she would have to get away from this foetid personification. She snatched a coat from its peg and pulled it on. She called to Ape and he came bounding eagerly towards her. The sight of him gave her an idea and she ran up the stairs to Milly’s room. At first it looked bare of her minimal possessions, but then she saw a frayed and shapeless garment discarded on a chair. Dinah bore it downstairs, and gave it to Ape to sniff.
‘Find her,’ she ordered. ‘Seek, there’s the boy.’
When she opened the door for him he set off up Kendrick, tail waving like a plume. Dinah ran behind him.
The dog thought it was a good game. He ran in a diagonal line across Pleasant, and plunged into the dark area between two houses. Dead leaves crackled under Dinah’s feet as she followed him. There were garage doors with basketball hoops, fences and paved yards and silent porches. Ape ran her until she was gasping for breath and then circled back to twist between her legs, panting and slobbering. She could have kicked him for his amiable stupidity. Milly was nowhere in these quiet streets, why should she be? The peaceful suburban darkness only emphasised her fears. But still she walked on, with the dog now scuffling at her side. She threaded up and down the neighbouring streets, peering at each house as her shadow reached ahead of her and then fell back again between the blue-white auras of the street lamps.
Dinah knew that she could walk all night and not have a hope of discovering where Milly might be.
A need to return home as urgent as the one that had driven her out took hold of her. She swung round and began to walk, faster and faster until she was running, into Kendrick and across the grass to the steps of her house. The door was still on the latch, as she had left it. She knew as soon as she stumbled inside that Milly had not returned.
It was after midnight.
Dinah picked up the phone and dialled the Parkeses’ home number. The answering machine picked up, Ed’s confident voice. If Milly was there she wouldn’t answer. Dinah quickly hung up.
Whom to call? The