runs, skimming pavements and jostling his way between lanes of traffic. Had he been happy? Tobias had trained for six of the seven years it took to qualify as an architect. He had been supposed to build things, not fetch and carry, but he got stuck looking after Mary and the child. Carlo did not like to think of Tobias as losing momentum so much as being taken up by love.
The dead struck Carlo not as absent but as removed. Now he would begin to understand what they did to what they were removed from.
In the days that followed, the Clough family dispersed and waited. Fred and Juliet spent as much time as they could at work, where Fred was surrounded by noise and Juliet by silence. Carlo made arrangements, and Clara went back to her husband and children in the country. Five miles away, in a large and empty house, her parents tried to help one another move through the days but each found that their pain became trapped in the other’s. At night, they lay and waited for morning. On the fourth night, Francesca Clough rose and left her husband’s bed for ever.
Juliet’s friends tried to surround her, but she felt that just as their circle formed, she slipped outside it. Her feelings were of such a size that everyone she spoke to or passed in the street had to stay where they were, miles away. Tania tried a few times to send her home, and then settled for bringing her cups of tea and slices of cake. Juliet stared at the wall.
Hour by hour, the truth of her brother’s death accumulated. She did not think about that other pain, or kissing a married man, or going to America; and then she did and forgot about Tobias with such entirety that when she remembered she had to begin again at the first shock.
She didn’t know that she had moved or made any sound until the door opened and Jacob was there, holding her and saying ‘You can stop now,’ and she did stop and asked, ‘Stop what?’ and he said, ‘Banging on the wall. You were banging so hard, I thought you’d bring what’s left of it down.’
Just outside the village of Allnorthover, Carlo turned into a gravel drive and pulled up outside a large, shabby greystone house. Jacob looked out of the window and then at Juliet who asked, ‘What is it, what are you thinking?’, which made Carlo frown. He did not like the fact that Jacob had come with Juliet, nor that she would not let go of his hand.
An hour of inching their way north through the city and an hour of signs and fields, more like fields of signs thought Jacob, a chain of mini-roundabouts, and a brief wind through a wood. Primroses, ice and mud.
Jacob answered Juliet’s question: ‘It’s barely outside London. Hardly the country at all.’
‘And here it is,’ said Carlo as he watched Jacob helping Juliet out of the car, ‘Hardly a home at all’, and Jacob laughed so warmly that Carlo felt pleased, which then made him cross.
Fred, who had chosen to come up by train, was in the kitchen perched on a particularly ugly chair that Jacob noticed was held together by string.
Francesca Clough turned from a sink piled high with dirty dishes and held out a soapy red hand to Jacob, who pursued her attention in her eyes, as dark and unreadable as Juliet’s, and sunk in brown hollows within planetary yellow rings. Her strong skin was still smooth but had lost its light and was shadowed by the mass of wiry hair, black spliced with grey and white. The bones of Francesca’s face were rising up as the flesh receded.
‘What did you think of Ma?’ Juliet asked later.
‘That she looks like a ghost of you.’
‘And Clara? Did you like Clara?’
Clara, he had thought full of light. She strode into the kitchen with a baby on her arm, buttoning the front of her dress. Her twins, who looked four or five, followed her as closely as courtiers as she plonked the baby on Juliet’s lap and shook Jacob’s hand while reaching up with her other arm to tidy her hair. His eyes flicked from her smooth copper shoulder to the damp shock of orange in her raised armpit to the tight bodice with its two patches of milky wetness. He stared frankly at her hair. That evening, as they sat smoking in the garden, Jacob asked her about her painting, which he managed to suggest he knew by reputation and not just through Juliet. Clara had scoffed at every good thing he said but did not move away, even though he was sitting powerfully close to her.
Juliet’s father was known fondly in the village as Dr Kill Off. He was a dignified man with a face that naturally looked full of grief, so that the change brought about in him by his son’s death was not generally noticed. At the funeral, he had spoken in a voice so cracked and agonised that it was the sound that people remembered rather than what he said.
Juliet and Fred walked into the church behind Mary, who was wearing the black dress in which she sang. Her parents had come – her mother, Stella, from Hay-on-Wye where she ran a chain of antique shops and her father, the architect Matthew George, from New York. Carlo carried Bella, who gave sudden shouts throughout the service and hit out with her fat fists at anyone who leant over and suggested that they take the child outside. Mary shook her head as she stared at the coffin. She could not believe that Tobias, with all his strength and capacity, could fit inside it.
She was whispering something.
‘What was that?’ Carlo murmured, but she didn’t reply. It had sounded like ‘Stop’.
After the funeral, the entire village, it seemed to Jacob, came back to the house for tea. He stayed by the French windows which gave onto the garden, smiling at whoever passed. An aunt approached. She had Juliet by the hand and took one of his and looked for a moment as if she were about to demand some sort of vow. Her mutterings of hope and approval panicked Juliet, who was not ready to admit that in these last few days something had begun.
In the evening, there was a dinner of odds and ends: a salad of dandelion leaves that Francesca had pulled out of the lawn, luncheon meat that looked like something freshly skinned, slices of cold fatty lamb, white sliced bread, an enormous cheese that had gone glassy with age, cake left over from the tea and a blancmange rabbit. This last was placed in front of Fred who decapitated it and auctioned off the head.
The children were in bed and so these were the children, and as such they recovered themselves and talked all at once in a condensed coded language punctuated by the same unattractive laugh. Juliet reduced it to a snort and Fred to a horse-like snicker, Clara trumpeted and Carlo rumbled. Fred made Clara a crown of dandelion leaves and flicked spoonfuls of blancmange. Mary sat next to Clara’s husband Stefan and they talked to one another. Jacob tried to catch the eye of Francesca, who ate slowly while staring past his right shoulder. He also tried to talk to the doctor, who was interjecting in his children’s banter but did not seem to listen and could not be heard.
Later, when the parents had disappeared, Jacob went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. The dirty pans were still on the stove but someone had moved each plate, bowl, spoon, knife and fork onto the chair of the person who had used it. The table was clear and had been wiped clean. He went to find Juliet.
‘I was about to wash up, only half of it’s been sort of arranged …’
‘You mean on our chairs?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Ma’s rule. She tried to get us to help but we just argued, so she said the least we could do was to wash up our own things and when we forgot, she put them on our chairs.’
‘And what if you still didn’t clear them?’
‘They
