the evening of the same day, Cathy and Lucy Clegg sat in the upstairs room at Wilton that Hannah had designated as the older children’s sitting room. The room had a pretty view of the garden and the fields that dipped towards Grafton, but it was underdecorated compared with the rest of the house. The curtains were no more than striped ticking hung on plain wooden poles, and the walls were bare except for a series of tired Guns n’ Roses posters that were beginning to peel away from their Blu-Tak anchorages. There were two sofas, on either side of the empty fireplace, both of them heaped with magazines and cracked paperbacks, and a folding snooker table belonging to Barney rested against one wall. In the past, the room had been a place of refuge for the twins and Barney from Hannah and the upholstered extravagance of the rest of the house.
Lucy was sitting on one of the sofas with her hands folded behind her head. Cathy flicked at the pages of a book. They had been sitting in silence for what seemed a very long time.
Then Lucy said, ‘I hate this waiting. It’s horrible being suspended, not knowing how to go forwards or back. I don’t know what to do, and now there’s this with Daddy too. What’s going to happen?’
Cathy watched her as she stood up and went to the window. They were waiting for Barney to arrive, because Darcy had said that he wanted to speak to the three of them together. The house was full of a queasy silence within which the confusion of the day was barely contained.
‘I don’t know,’ Cathy answered. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on. But I do know one thing. You can’t wait much longer. You have to decide what to do.’
Lucy did not turn from the window.
‘He’s not going to do anything, is he?’ she whispered. ‘I thought he might. I thought he might come after all, when he had had time to realize what it meant. Me, and his baby. And then how would it have been, if I had already had an abortion?’
‘Jimmy isn’t going to come for you,’ Cathy said. ‘How could he? Think of the damage it would cause.’
They had trodden this circuit before.
‘He hasn’t even called me.’
‘I know that. Lucy, do you want to go ahead and have the baby by yourself?’
Lucy crossed her hands over her chest and massaged her arms. Even up until today, although she understood the reality perfectly well, she had let herself hope that Jimmy might contradict everything she had learned about him and come to her rescue. That he had not was not surprising, but it was the tiny hope itself that had become precious. She longed to hold on to it.
But now there were other reckonings to be made.
Darcy had always been the secure and generous rock in his children’s lives. Yet here he was, not only ill, betraying a frailty that she had never imagined before, but there were also other more disturbing intimations of his fallibility. Lucy could only dimly conceive what the visits from policemen and lawyers and the urgent telephonings, and Hannah’s half-concealed tears might really mean, but she felt that some entire structure of security and insulation, never so much as questioned before, was being knocked out from underneath her. Lucy began to be afraid that not only might her father not be able to look after her for ever, however shockingly the world might assault her, but that he might without warning have ceased to be her protector and be instead in need of her protection.
The thought made her feel exposed and precarious, but also suddenly and surprisingly older. She pressed her fist into her stomach, as if she wanted to reach inside herself.
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t want to go ahead and have the baby by myself.’
‘Then there’s only one possibility, isn’t there?’ Cathy lifted her blonde head. ‘Listen. I think Barney’s here.’
They heard Barney’s voice, and the rumble of their father’s. Then the door opened and Barney appeared with Darcy behind him. Darcy was wearing a shapeless sweater. His shoulders hunched forward.
He’s old, Lucy realized with a surge of panic stronger than anything she had felt when she witnessed his heart attack. He’s an old man.
Darcy waited while his children sat down. Barney glanced at his sisters, his face telling them that he didn’t understand this mysterious summons or the air of foreboding in the room any more than they did.
Darcy wouldn’t sit himself. He began to walk, traversing the floor and back again, his big head half turned away from them. As he walked, he told them that they had better hear what would soon be public knowledge.
‘I am accused of theft,’ he said. ‘My client Vincent Templeman and his accountant claim that I have by means of forgery and false accounting misappropriated certain funds belonging to Templeman’s private company for my own use.’
Darcy turned, completing one negotiation of the room and beginning another. It seemed that he was intent on fitting his words to the number of paces. His children sat waiting, with their eyes fixed on him. Lucy had opened her mouth in protest but Barney took her hand and held it, silencing her.
‘The police were informed, which is why they came here last night. They have taken away various sets of books, without which I can’t continue to do business. My solicitor advises me that there will be some charges to answer. I don’t know yet exactly what will happen. But I think there will be … publicity, difficulties before everything is set right again. Because the business is based in this house it won’t only be difficult for me, but for you and Hannah too. I wanted to tell you.’
Darcy reached the window yet again. This time he stopped and stood as Lucy had done, with his back to them.
‘I wanted to tell you myself, and to say I am sorry.’
There was a silence as his words began to make threatening sense out of random impressions.
Lucy sat upright. ‘They can’t accuse you!’ she shouted. ‘They can’t just say you’ve done something you haven’t. This is a free country not … not some police state.’
Barney still held her hand. She realized that he was hurting her by trying to hold her down, and she snatched it away.
‘Dad?’
Darcy turned again, and each of them could see from the sluggishness of the movement the weight he was carrying.
‘I know you didn’t do it,’ Barney said, ‘but what’s the basis of the accusation?’
Darcy smiled, the upward lift of the muscles not quite aligning and his upper teeth showing so he looked momentarily, grotesquely, as if he had suffered a stroke.
He’s being brave, Lucy thought. He’s being brave because he has to be.
‘I haven’t done anything dishonest. But you know who I am. I’m not always conventional. I have been a maverick. I wouldn’t be where I am now, would I, if I had never broken a rule?’
He shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of dismissal. Out of bravado he was trying to be the father they had always known, and the threadbare attempt made the difference in him all the more disturbing. For a few seconds none of them could think of anything to say, so that the fragile construction of Darcy’s assurances might not be dislodged. The three children sat, looking nowhere, trying to assimilate what he had told them
