‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ Katherine said, but there must have been something wrong with the way she said it, because Nick came up behind her and put a hand on her arm, as if he was about to turn her round to face him. The touch of him: she actually flinched. She could not endure the sensation.
‘Don’t be cross with me,’ he said, taking his hand away. ‘I can’t bear it if you – if anyone, I mean, if anyone’s ever cross with me. It’s just something I hate. It’s so silly, too, to fall out over something like that.’
‘Oh, no one’s going to be cross with you,’ Katherine said. She meant it to come across contemptuously, but it came out wrongly, as a confession of loneliness. Nick’s statement, which ought perhaps to have been that admission of loneliness, had instead been amused, self-reliant, adding to his confidence rather than anything else. Katherine had assured him that nobody could possibly be cross with him, and the words had their face value, a confession of admiration. All at once she was in tears, and gulping, trying to wipe her face with her arm and scratching herself with the rose in her yellow-gloved hand.
‘Katherine, don’t,’ Nick said. Without turning she could not tell whether concern or embarrassment would be in his face, but in a moment he took the rose from her, laid it on the pile, the right-hand one, of prepared roses, and he turned her round, her face lowered, not ready to meet his eyes and what might be in them. He so rarely used her name. No one did.
There was still quite some laundry to get through; that had been neglected in the days before the party and now it was keeping her busy. At home, she set the dinner to cook, and went through into the utility room to get on with it in the meantime. The children were in the sitting room, watching the noisy television they all seemed to get something out of. A year or two before they had extended the house. A garage had been built on the strip of land to the side, and what had been the garage, separated from the house, was turned into the dining room and, behind it, an intermediate sort of room, leading from the dining room into the garage.
After dinner, that evening, Katherine went back to the utility room. She had to do something to fill her mind with blankness. You could not hear the telephone from there, but the children would get it, and fetch her. Anyway, there was nobody to ring her, and if it rang, it would only be one of the children’s friends. The washing-machine had done one load – shirts and blouses – and was now starting on another, underwear. Normally, she would have transferred the shirts to the tumble-dryer, a newish acquisition, but today she wanted the chores to keep her busy, and she was ironing her way through a damp pile.
The door opened, the one from the dining room. It was Malcolm. She stopped and looked at him. He was wearing the suit he had been wearing that day, but a shirt she had never seen before, and no tie. He’s been buying new shirts while he’s been away, she thought, with a flush of anger. There were no children behind him; they’d probably taken themselves upstairs, whether to bed or just to be on their own. They’d been avoiding her, but now she didn’t care. After all, he’d come to see her first.
‘Are you back?’ she said harshly.
‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘Yes, of course I’m back.’
‘I was worried,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Malcolm said. ‘But you know why I went like that.’
She stared at him, and thumped down the iron. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, frankly, I don’t know why you went like that. I haven’t the faintest idea.’ She had to raise her voice; the washing-machine with its noisy rhythms was going into the racket of its spin cycle.
‘You want me to tell you?’ Malcolm said. ‘All right,’ and he started to speak. He was telling some sort of story, and in his hands, his face, you could see the weight of the conviction behind the story; telling what had led up to this, and what he had been doing the last few days outside the house, where he had been. His face went from pleasure, enjoyment as he thought of something, and rage, pain, irritation and puzzlement. He came into the utility room, and started walking up and down. But she could hardly hear any of it. His voice, always rather soft and low, stood no chance against the furious racket of the washing-machine. She watched, fascinated, and in all honesty not all that interested. It would probably be better, in the long run, not to know. She knew, afterwards, exactly how long Malcolm’s explanation had taken, because it was the exact length of the spin cycle. It took four minutes and twelve seconds. The spin cycle came to an end, juddering across the amplifying concrete floor, and made one or two final groans before going into a quieter reverse. It was Daniel and Tim’s socks in there, mostly black.
‘So that’s it, really,’ Malcolm said finally.
‘Yes, I see,’ Katherine said.
‘I don’t think there’s much point in going over and over it,’ Malcolm said.
‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘I’ll not be bringing it up, asking for details. We’ll just get on with it.’
‘Exactly,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s the best thing, just get on with things, don’t go on about them.’
‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘The new people moved in over the road.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Malcolm said. ‘Nice, are they?’
‘They seem nice,’ Katherine said. ‘Why don’t you go and say goodnight to the children?’
‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’ll do that. I suppose I could just tell them—’
‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Just tell them you’re back. That’ll do.’
‘Probably best,’ Malcolm said. ‘All right, then.’
There seemed to be something more he wanted to say; perhaps he could see in her face that in the last few days something had changed for her as well. But what would he know? For Malcolm, nothing in the situation as he knew it had changed; Tim had not had a snake under his bed, and still did not have a snake under his bed; his wife’s concealments remained his wife’s concealments; and he was back where he had always been. In a few days’ time he would wander across the road, drop in on the Sellerses, ask them over for a drink, and they would come over, none of them mentioning at any point any of the things he had caused or missed, and everything would be quite all right. ‘Is there any supper left?’ Malcolm called from the stairs.
‘There’s a bit,’ Katherine called back, but her answer was lost as the doors upstairs started to open, and something like conversation began again, and even the children pretended that there was nothing so very extraordinary, as there indeed was not, in their father coming home in the evening, the only cause for comment a shirt not seen before, the only remarkable detail a man in a suit, and no tie, and no sign of a tie anywhere.
Afterwards he could never accurately reconstruct the rules of the game. The game and its rules had come from nowhere, like myth or tune. It disappeared afterwards, leaving no trace in memory, not even its name, perhaps still being played by generations of children who discovered it, just as Francis had in the autumn of 1974, in a playground and lost it again within the year. But preserved only in that way. What he had in his memory was the sense of a chase, a circle of tremulously linked limbs, some raucous and pungent chant, and, more, the ecstatic terror of wriggling as the quarry turned and buckled under the hand of the pursuer, the ecstasy whichever way the roles had fallen that day; above all, a thick, vivid rise in the chest at the promise or the enactment of violence which, years later, he identified with some shock as an adult sensation,
