father said.
‘I suppose that’s right,’ her mother said. She stood, irresolute. Jane’s father carried on tugging at the perhaps non-existent weeds, never having turned to look at her; and in a moment she went back into the house. She’d find nobody to talk to about Nick in there, Jane thought. She patted Jane’s head absently as she passed.
Jane thought the situation through, and decided the best way to deal with it. Anne was still sort of her best friend. A week or two later, after school, they went round to Anne’s house. She lived in Lodge Moor, in a modern house, brick-yellow, surrounded by innumerable stunted shrubs planted by the original builders. The ill-fitting windows rattled all year round with the ferocious wind. They went up to Anne’s bedroom: she was allowed to put posters up with sellotape, and her walls were lined with images of big-eyed brown horses, on which Anne was mad, and two or three pop-singers, just as glossy in their brown big-eyed gaze.
‘My mum’s having an affair,’ Jane said, once the door was closed.
‘An affair?’ Anne seemed frightened but impressed.
‘It’s happening everywhere, these days,’ Jane said, and sighed. ‘I only hope it won’t lead to divorce. It would break my heart if my parents split up.’
‘Who would you live with?’ Anne said.
‘I don’t know,’ Jane said. She hadn’t thought things out this far.
‘It’d be your dad,’ Anne said. ‘Your mum’d be off with her fancy man. It’d be all her fault – you wouldn’t let a woman who’d done that walk off with the children too. It’d not be fair.’
Jane let the full, lovely tragedy wash over her, its forthcoming bliss. She’d practically be an orphan, her and Daniel and Tim, coping bravely after a family tragedy; how they would look at her, when she moved up to Flint next year! ‘I don’t know,’ she said, honesty cutting in. ‘I don’t know that it’s come to talk of divorce yet.’
‘What’s your dad think?’
‘I don’t know that he knows,’ Jane said.
‘Well, how d’you know, come to that?’ Anne said. ‘You’re making it up.’ Then Anne got up, apparently bored with the subject. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I got it down town on Saturday.’
She opened her white-painted louvred wardrobe doors. That was one of the things about Anne, along with her horses and her snappiness, her incredible wardrobe: there were things in there she’d grown out of, she having no small sister or cousin to pass things on to, all pressing against each other stiflingly. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for Anne’s clothes, suffocating each other in that breathless wardrobe. ‘Look,’ Anne said, and from the bottom of the wardrobe, she fished out a scrap of cloth, white and glistening, its price tag still on it even though it had been tossed to the bottom of the wardrobe, and a pair of strappy white shoes. ‘I got a halter-top and a pair of slingbacks from Chelsea Girl. The shoes were three ninety-nine.’
Jane didn’t know whether that was a lot or not. ‘Your mum go with you?’
‘Course she did,’ Anne said. ‘She paid. I’m going to put them on.’
She shucked off her school shirt. Jane looked, with envy, at her starter bra. Anne’s mother had bought it for her the first time she’d asked. No one else in their class had managed it, and Jane certainly not. But Anne didn’t have an older brother who’d overheard and laughed his head off. She put on the halter-top, twisting and fiddling with the strings behind. She slipped off the heavy brown school shoes, not untying the laces, and pushed on the slingbacks, squashing them on in a hurry, and then, striking a pose, the price tag dangling from her waist over the grey school skirt, she pushed forward her left hip and pouted. She twirled, the strap of her starter bra across her bare back.
‘Nice,’ Jane said.
‘Go on, you try them on,’ Anne said, and so they started to play, the lipstick coming out, the hairbrushes, the materials of femininity. Most of their afternoons turned to this.
‘I’m not making it up,’ Jane said, after a while, their makeup smeared, their outfits half on, half thrown off across the bed.
‘Making what up?’
‘My mum and her affair. I’m not,’ Jane said. ‘She talks about him all the time. She can’t stop herself. It’s like you and horses.’
‘Me and horses? What’re you talking about?’ Anne got up and peered into the mirror, admiring her face, this way and that.
‘It’s like the way, you know, you love horses, you, you’re mad about them, and all the time, it’s horses this, horses that.’
‘I thought you liked horses too,’ Anne said, drawing back a bit, offended. ‘I wouldn’t talk about them if you weren’t just as interested as I am.’
‘I am interested,’ Jane said, feeling that the conversation was getting away from her. ‘But you love horses, you.’
‘Yes, I do,’ Anne said. She sank to her haunches, clasping her knees to her chest like great adult breasts. ‘I’m not saying I don’t.’
‘So you talk about them, don’t you?’
‘If you say so,’ Anne said, not quite convinced.
‘Well, it’s like that with my mum,’ Jane said. ‘Every day it’s “Nick says this, Nick did that, Nick likes ketchup with his chips.”’
‘Everyone likes ketchup with their chips,’ Anne said. ‘That doesn’t prove anything, if you ask me.’
‘Yes,’ Jane said, gathering the logic of her case. ‘Yes, that’s it, though. If everyone likes ketchup on their chips, why’s she bringing up Nick especially? You see what I mean?’
‘You’re daft, you,’ Anne said, ‘I think you’re just romancing. Anyway, you don’t want your mum and dad to split up, do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Who’s this Nick, then?’
‘He’s her boss. She got a job, working in a flower shop. In Broomhill, it is.’
Anne sighed. She was eight months older than Jane: sometimes she took advantage of this difference to make an emphatic point. ‘I would say,’ she said heavily, ‘there’s nothing in it. I’m glad my mum doesn’t have to go out to work.’
‘My mum doesn’t have to either,’ Jane said. ‘She just wants to. I know what. I’m going to go down there one day after school, I want to have a look at him. Do you want to come?’
‘What’ll that prove one way or the other?’
‘Are you going to come?’
‘If you insist,’ Anne said, and then, from downstairs, her mother called something. She rolled her eyes. The call came again. She got up from her squatting position, and impatiently flung open the door. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted rudely.
‘There’s
