about the difference in their circumstances.
‘You want another pint?’ Danny asked, shrugging.
They had drunk three pints apiece and the afternoon had drifted away. Rob leaned against the wall with his arms stretched along the greasy dado rail. The bar was already filling again with little groups of day’s-end people who put briefcases on the floor and draped mackintoshes over the chairs. The haven was being invaded and he was in any case bored with it.
‘No. I could handle some food, though.’
Outside, the greenish remnants of daylight had been swallowed by the multicolours of shop windows and street lights. It was drizzling, and the black road was shining with wet and the red splinters of refracted tail-lights. The traffic had closed in and there was a thrum of idling engines at the traffic lights, and the compressed noise of lined-up in-car stereos. The boys hesitated, turning up the collars of their jackets and squinting in the rain. Most of the shops were closing but there was a café on the corner. Rob pointed and they ran to it.
At a table in a wood-partitioned booth they ordered a fry-up and chips. After a dozen mouthfuls Rob paused, his fork poised.
‘What do you fancy doing tonight?’ He looked sideways at Danny, across the narrow bridge of his nose. His eyes were elongated, greenish, expressing a challenge even when there was none.
Dan hesitated. ‘I ought to go back.’ He still lived at home. It was cheaper than digs and his grant didn’t go far.
‘Sure. Don’t want to be late and get into trouble, do you?’
They both laughed at the idea. Again, Danny had an expansive sense of the pleasures of life, lent a hazy and seductive glow by the beer he had drunk. The door opened with a gust of cold and rain, and a gang of girls came in.
There were four of them. They wore little belted coats, shiny and crackling, that peeled off to reveal short skirts and fuzzy knitted tops. They crowded together into the booth opposite the boys, clattering and giggling and banging their handbags on the table. One of them had long thin legs in thick black tights, and buckled ankle boots with high heels. Her long dark hair was beaded with rain and as she flicked it back she stared boldly under her fringe at Danny.
Within a few minutes the boys were squeezing into the booth with them.
‘D’you mind?’ one of the girls pouted. ‘This is a private celebration.’
‘We don’t object to a bit of privacy, Dan, do we?’
‘Not at all. What are you celebrating? We’ll help you out, if you want.’
The dark-haired one said, still looking at Dan, ‘It’s Zoe’s birthday.’
Rob clicked his fingers. ‘That’s no problem. It so happens that birthdays are our real speciality, and Zoe’s birthdays are what we do best of all. Waiter, bring flowers, ice, champagne.’
‘You’ve got a bit of a cheek,’ the plainest girl said, and one of the others laughed.
‘Champagne? In this place? Two teas one teabag, more like.’
‘We’re going to a club later,’ the dark one told Danny. The girls always gravitated towards him. He had an air of tender vulnerability, which Rob did not. Danny nodded seriously.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Cat.’
‘What sort of name’s that?’
‘Cat. For Catherine, you know.’
Jess was driving the twelve miles home from the nursery, along a route so familiar to her that all the features of it had been smoothed away. Ditchley was in the middle of England; it was neither southern nor northern, and whilst it was some distance from Birmingham or Sheffield or Nottingham, it was no longer just a country town. Jess had grown up there, and she had seen the surrounding countryside eaten up by new housing estates, and out-of-town shopping developments, and garden centres. The open fields had shrunk and had been hemmed in by roads, so it seemed now that she lived on an island triangle bounded by motorways. The town itself was prosaic and middling as it had always been, but the last years had smeared it with tacky modernity. It now appeared brave but increasingly discomfited under its pedestrian centre and multi-storey car park, like a middle-aged matron making an effort in an outfit too young for her.
Jess’s face tipped into a sudden wry smile. It wasn’t Ditchley that was middle-aged, but herself. Am I so dull? she wondered. To have spent so much of my life in one place, and to have ended up disappointed in it, as well as in myself?
Deliberately, to avoid the question, she turned her thoughts to Joyce. Joyce had gone home, as she did every night, to relieve her mother’s day nurse and to look after the old woman until the nurse came back again in the morning, setting Joyce free once more for her work in the shop. Jess’s sympathy for her colleague made her feel ashamed of her own trivial worries. She dismissed her anxiety about money, and the future, and the faint but persistent loneliness that lived inside her like a disease, and tried to be positive.
This was her good time of the day. For all its tedious familiarity the journey home was soothing. She liked the way the road unwound through a dark twist of fields towards the orange-rimmed straddle and loop of the motorway, and on to the choreographed knit and unravel of a pair of roundabouts and through tidy streets to the cul-de-sac where she lived.
Her house, when she reached it, was in darkness behind its unkempt hedge.
Jess let herself in, switching on the lights. She glanced at the brown envelopes thrown on the hallstand and passed on into the kitchen without picking them up. Automatically she brushed a scatter of crumbs off the table and dropped them in the sink, and put the butter dish back in the refrigerator. She opened the door of the freezer compartment and stared at the neat stack of ready-made meals, then slammed the door shut again so the rubber seal made its meaty reverse-kissing sound.
The living room was tidy, and warm because the central heating had clicked on an hour before. The room was green with plants, weeping-leaved Ficus and palms and pink and purple-starred Saintpaulias. Jess moved from one pot to the next, touching the soil under the thick leaves with the tips of her fingers. The telephone rang.
‘Darling, it’s me. How’s your day been?’
It was Jess’s sister Lizzie. Jess smiled, looping the cord of the telephone away from the receiver and sitting down in the armchair, her feet tucked beneath her.
Lizzie was in her own home, twelve miles away. The sisters always tried to talk to each other every day, even when the differences in their lives kept them apart. Once it was Jess who had made the calls, mothering and reassuring her more exotic sister; now it was Lizzie’s turn to ask the probing questions.
Lizzie slumped on her sofa, massaging her neck with her free hand and staring at the mess of toys on the carpet. There was a glob of baby food drying on her black jersey and she frowned, picking at it. She was the younger by four years. When Lizzie had been working as an actress, precariously balanced between waitressing jobs and the promise of making it big, Jess was already married and a mother. The home that Jess had made with Ian and their children had been a second home to Lizzie, whenever she had needed to crawl back to it after disappointment over a part or in love.
Now, their roles were reversed.
