Then she stood back to let James carry him on out to the car.
‘Will you be all right?’ Lizzie asked, repeating herself.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I’ll be all right. Ian and Beth are here, aren’t they?’ A flutter under her diaphragm, like fear or the beginning of sickness.
The sisters kissed each other and Jess cupped Lizzie’s face in her hands.
‘Don’t worry about me.’
She loved Lizzie, and was much more used to looking after her than the other way around.
‘I do. Will you call me? Any time, the middle of the night, whenever? I’ll come straight away.’
Jess tried to smile. ‘I know. Thank you.’
They hugged again and Lizzie stumbled out after James.
Jess went slowly up the stairs. Beth was in bed, lying curled on her side with her hand beneath her cheek, in the way she had done when she was a little girl.
Jess sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the framed photographic prints on the wall.
‘I don’t think it’s properly sunk in yet,’ Beth whispered.
‘I know.’
‘He didn’t seem the kind who was going to die, did he?’
‘No. Danny was always interested in getting a bit more life.’
Beth’s face was hidden. She demanded suddenly with a spurt of bitterness, ‘Have you been wishing it could have been me instead?’
‘How can you ask that? No, I haven’t. You’re mine. You and I have to go on living now.’
She did not know how: she thought that tomorrow would be like setting out from the beginning of time with the necessity to relearn the world in the absence of Danny.
‘I’m sorry. I’ve always known you loved him best.’
‘No, I love you both the same,’ Jess lied. Beth had always been the vulnerable one and Danny the brave. She cared for Beth, and protected her, but she knew that she failed her too.
‘I love you, Mum. And Dad as well. I wish you weren’t divorced.’
‘I know you do.’
Jess held her hands and rubbed them between her own, thinking how narrow the margin was that separated her adult daughter from childhood.
‘I just meant that if you weren’t divorced you would have someone to look after you now, when you really need it.’
‘You and I and Lizzie all have each other, don’t we? We can look after one another. Take it in turns.’
Beth nodded. ‘I suppose.’
‘Can you sleep, do you think?’
Beth lay back and Jess drew the cover over her shoulders and smoothed the thin fine hair back from her ear and cheek. Jess kissed her and turned out the light, as she had done so often.
‘Sleep well.’
When Jess came downstairs again Ian was tidying the photographs into the boxes and envelopes in which they had been stored. They had never been an album family.
‘Is she all right?’
‘I think so.’
Silence seeped through the house. Jess sat down, letting her head fall back. Ian fanned out a last sheaf of pictures, then dropped them face down like a poker player folding a losing hand. They were wedding photographs; Jess in a white dress and a big hat and Ian in a tight-waisted suit with a huge shirt collar.
‘Are you very disappointed in me?’ he asked.
They had furnished and decorated this room together too; their mutual failure seemed embedded in the cushions and the carpets.
Wearily Jess shook her head. She knew that Ian wanted to be absolved from having left her for Michelle, for having finally taken the initiative and walked out of a marriage that had failed long before. It was not Ian’s fault, and she owed him that acknowledgement. If it was anyone’s fault, it was her own. Before Danny was born she had stopped loving Ian and in the end, although she had devoted so much energy to hiding the truth, it had become too obvious for him to ignore.
‘I miss some of our life together. I don’t want to belittle the importance of our marriage but I miss the ordinariness of it. The everyday little routines. It wasn’t a grand passion. How many marriages are? I’m sorry we failed, but I’m not sorry you’ve found someone else.’
Was that what he wanted to hear?
They had married too early, too young. That was partly what had gone wrong. Jess was nineteen when they met, and still at horticultural college. Ian was two years older, making a precocious success of a job as a photocopier salesman. After a year of spending all their time together there seemed no reason not to marry. Both sets of elderly parents had been eager for them to regularise their relationship. Jess had found a job as undergardener at a nearby estate; Ian grandly told her that she need only work if she wanted to, otherwise he would look after her.
‘Do you remember the couple from Yorkshire?’
They spent their honeymoon in Majorca, and in the hotel there had been another pair of newlyweds. On the second day the other bride had succumbed to a stomach upset and never re-emerged from their room, and her bridegroom devoted himself to beer instead. They would meet him swaying red-faced in the bar or nightclub and loudly insisting, ‘It’s dead here, it is. Tomorrow I’m renting a car and bloody driving to Madrid. See some action there. You coming with me, or what?’
Long ago. Jess smiled at the memory, grateful to Ian for offering this safe piece of their joint currency.
‘It’s like remembering two different people,’ Ian said.
‘I was younger then than Beth is now.’
Beth was born a year after the wedding and Danny three years after that.
‘We were happy. I know we were. I can remember exactly the way the world looked. Sharp, with clear edges, and bright as though the sun was always out.’
Jess had no reason to deny it because it was the truth.
For what had come after that she wanted to offer some apology, but there were no words she could think of that were not double-edged. It was simply that Danny’s coming had altered all her perspectives.
‘I’m glad we looked at all those pictures of him,’ Ian said.
‘Yes.’ Only they were mere glossy coloured images that didn’t contain more than a whisper of Danny; already she was afraid that the memories that animated them would fade and leave her with nothing of him.
Awkwardly Jess reached
