of time by the edges of roads. He avoided coming to bed at the same time as her, choosing instead to sit watching TV late into the night, while she lay silently in Charlie’s bunk bed. When she was brought home from a store in town, because she had been found in the children’s department, her arms full of small shorts and gaily coloured T-shirts, crying square-mouthed at the enormity of her loss, he was impatient with her.
‘You have to move on,’ he said but she didn’t know where there was to go.
‘Talk to me,’ she begged. ‘Tell me how he was. Tell me some of the things he did.’
‘I can’t,’ he replied, but she couldn’t stop herself.
‘Do you remember how when he was a baby his whole naked body used to shake when we trailed a muslin over his stomach?’ she said. ‘Do you remember the way he would hook raisins out of those tiny boxes with a bent finger and make a strange growling noise as he did it?’
Even worse than the way she wanted to talk about Charlie all the time, was the way Carrie picked away at the sequence of events that led to their son’s disappearance. She reminded him of a bear he had seen years ago in a Spanish zoo walking forwards and backwards endlessly in its concrete canyon. She couldn’t let it rest, but carried on down the same groove that gave them both nothing but pain.
‘I slept. Damian. I slept. How could I sleep? Everyone knows that when you are looking after children on a beach, you can’t take your eyes off them, even for a minute. Tell me, how could I sleep?’ Each time she asked him she would look at him with the same wide-eyed incredulity. At first he felt pity for her and felt his own astonishment mirrored in her face, but when she asked him again and again he was maddened by her and no longer had the strength to spare her. It seemed that there was no way for them to help each other. It seemed that in suffering so differently they made each other’s pain worse.
One night he found her standing in Charlie’s room. He came up and touched her on the shoulder and she spun round at him.
‘WHERE IS HE?’ she shouted, her fingers pulling viciously at the soft undersides of her arms.
‘Come back to bed,’ he said, scared of her and the way she had become.
‘I can’t sleep. I don’t know where he is.’ She tried to explain.
‘Don’t you wonder where he is?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Why won’t you talk to me?’
Damian saw his son’s pyjamas folded on his pillow and he knew he was going to start the ending for them.
‘You were supposed to be watching him. Why did you let him go?’ said Damian, and Carrie knew that this was what he had been trying not to say since Charlie had gone. Despite the pain his words brought her, she also felt a kind of relief. She had been waiting for him to blame her because she believed it was what she deserved.
‘I left him with you. I left him with you …’
Damian didn’t hide his face, but looked directly at her as the tears poured from his eyes. He made a sound that was more like rage than sorrow.
Chapter Eight
Shortly after Molly and Rupert returned from Italy, a news story captured the headlines for several weeks. A young woman who had been jogging in their local park never made it home. She was found behind some shrubbery, her throat cut, her skirt pulled over her head to cover her face, then gathered up and tied with a ribbon.
‘If that happened to you,’ said Rupert, ‘I would kill myself. I don’t want you going out alone at night for a while, at least not until they get the bastard who did it.’
Months later, Molly saw a picture in a newspaper of the so-called Ribbon Murderer. He was looking straight at the camera as he got out of the police van. He had an ordinary, quite pleasant face. The sort of face you would trust. However much you scrutinised it, the signs of what he had done weren’t there.
What had started as a short-term solution to the potential threat posed by the murderer became a way of life for Molly. Without really noticing it, she stopped going out by herself. She became so accustomed to her life being managed by Rupert that she forgot that other people didn’t have to account for every minute of their day, the way she did. He had been so solicitous in the trammelling of her life that she had not noticed her imprisonment. First he started to ring her at work, and then more and more frequently he was outside the school gates at the end of the day, waiting for her to come out. One day he decided that the skirt she was wearing was too short, so he replaced it with two Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses. They were beautiful and they suited her, so she forgot that she had been angry that he had thrown something of hers away without asking her. He told her that she was getting too old to have un-styled hair that hung down her back like a girl and took her to an expensive salon, where a young man with sharp scissors and sharp hip bones transformed her curls into an elegant bob. The reflection of her face, with its newly framed eyes, looked strange to her. When the hairdresser moved smoothly round her with the mirror, she could see the exposed white length of her neck that had been hidden since she was a child and was reminded of the bleached bones of a prehistoric find.
Without really noticing it, her friendships started to fade away. People got fed up of being turned down all the time or discovering that where Molly went, Rupert would inevitably be. Many of them felt envious of what they saw as the romance of her relationship. Only one or two of her closest friends questioned this all-encompassing intimacy, but when this questioning became too strident, Rupert was adept at putting doubts in her mind about their motivations.
‘I think they are just jealous of our happiness, darling,’ he would say. ‘They’d give anything to have what we have.’
They had been married for about a year and a half when Rupert suggested that she should stop taking the pill. Although in theory Molly was keen to have children, she found herself curiously reluctant to start the process.
‘Couldn’t we just have a couple more years enjoying being together?’ she asked. ‘Besides which, it wouldn’t be a good time to get pregnant at the moment, with the school getting ready for an Ofsted inspection.’
Rupert’s answer was to take the pills from the sponge bag that she kept by the bed and to pop them down the sink, pushing through the foil and firing each one down the plug hole as if they were tiny missiles, then pulling her down on the bed to perform his own ‘Ofsted inspection’ on her. He was so charmingly eager, so attentive to her every need from the first moment that the subject came up, that Molly quickly came to see her reluctance as simply a lack of confidence in her own readiness, in her ability to be a good mother. He set himself assiduously to the task of making a baby, reading about optimum times and recommended diets, researching a theory that if the man ate a high proportion of smoked foods he was more likely to produce a son.
‘I’d like a son,’ he said, as if the matter was decided. ‘Girls are too complicated. Just look at the convoluted way your mind works … In any case you are the Queen of the House. You don’t want any rivals for Daddy’s affection now, do you?’ and he set about preparing salads with smoked bacon and smoked salmon and looking into the benefits of water births.
She knew exactly when she conceived Max. Always a light sleeper, she had been woken that morning by the sound of clamorous birds and lay for a moment watching the muslin curtain at a half-opened window swaying
