just like the song said. The dancing made her feel less self-conscious about whether people were questioning what on earth he was doing with her.
Sometimes she wondered if he ever had crossed the line, and mixed play with the work he was so devoted to. She’d asked him about it once and he’d laughed. He said he’d spent thirty-five years with nothing to recommend him but his smile and his wits; he wouldn’t want to be with the sort of woman who might want him now that he had a belly and grey temples and a bit of cash. That was a couple of years ago, though. Back then he wouldn’t have slunk off to bed with a whisky. On the other hand, back then she’d probably have mustered the enthusiasm for a nightcap elsewhere.
‘Well?’ Her mother was still looking at her expectantly.
‘Sorry, I drifted off a bit – a bit woozy I’m afraid. It was lovely. The venue was spectacular.’
‘I’m glad you had fun,’ Barbara said, making Helen feel about seventeen again. Her eyes were on the laptop as it went through its shutting-down processes. It seemed Helen had no need to worry about her mother trying to get her to open up.
‘So how’s the coursework going?’ Helen asked, more to stop her own mind whirring than for any other reason. ‘I thought you were finishing up with that last spring?’
‘Yes, I did, but then I signed up for some of the degree-level modules. It’s fascinating, actually.’
‘It’s a shame you didn’t get into it when you were younger – you could have made a fortune.’
Barbara laughed lightly. ‘Yes, it would have been nice to have had the chance. But never too late, as they say – I’ve got a few little projects I’m dreaming up. Anyway, that’s my work done. I think I’ll get to bed.’
‘Night, Mum.’
But Helen’s mind had drifted back to the dance floor, to the moment when a slow Sam Smith number had come on and she’d insisted that she was exhausted and needed to go back to their table for a drink. Darren had nodded and they made their way back across to the low table where their bottle of champagne still waited, half full.
One of the new regional managers glided over, in painfully high sandals that pushed her chest forward.
‘Darren! You two were amazing on the dance floor. You kept that quiet!’
‘Louise …’ He clasped her shoulder warmly.
‘Lauren.’
‘Lauren, of course, so sorry. This is my wife, Helen.’
‘Don’t worry.’ She brushed his hand, as if to smooth away his mistake, laughing loudly. ‘There’s so many people here!’
She’d cornered them for the next ten minutes – despite Darren’s smooth attempts to move her on – sharing gossip and gushing compliments.
If he were going to get involved with someone at work, someone like Lauren would be last on the list. So why was the sound of her grating laughter continuing to rattle around Helen’s head as she failed to get to sleep?
Helen
In the end, she didn’t get any chance to mention the note on Saturday. Neil whisked them all off to a theme park for the day, then dinner at the local Italian. ‘Take our minds off it all,’ he said, repeatedly. Helen grinned for his sake, as much as for Barney and Alys. Barbara’s enjoyment, she was sure, was just as manufactured. The thought gave her an unfamiliar sense of camaraderie with her mother – for as long as she could remember, she’d found herself siding with her dad in the face of Barbara’s quirks and moods.
On Sunday morning, however, she woke up thinking about the note. It had lurked through her dreams, which had danced from Darren, to her children, then her parents; all unformed and fast-fading glimpses. Each encounter had played out on the sickly green landscape of the notepaper – those black capitals always there but never in focus. In those giddy predawn hours, something fearful woke in her belly, and, once woken, it shifted and clawed about inside her like a rat.
She was still turning the words of the note over in her mind as the grey dawn gradually crept round the edges of the heavy velvet curtains. They were cast-offs from Neil’s sister – Aunt Vicky – given away when she moved to Málaga, to replace the yellow ones that had been up since Helen was small. Good enough for the spare room, her parents must have decided, even though the size wasn’t quite right. She’d got used to sleeping here with Darren over the years. Now she was sleeping alone in the big old bed, with no one else to see the patterns the morning light made around the badly fitting curtains.
If only she could show Darren the note. Her Darren, not the new, arm’s-length, polite-chat-about-the-weather Darren who made her skin crawl. It wasn’t that she thought he’d have all the answers, just that she wasn’t used to having no one to share things with. They’d met at school and grown up together as an ‘us’. Suddenly Helen had to work everything out as ‘me’. And everything was bloody tough.
At first, her mind had tricked itself – he was on a business trip, or working late – God knew she was used to not having him around. But now it was more than six weeks, and the reality, the permanence, of his absence was becoming undeniable. All the more so since that awful call with her dad. The old Darren might not have been around when the au pair was sick or when she needed to decide on a holiday booking, but she could be confident that if the world fell apart he’d be there to catch her. Now it had and he was content to see her in free fall.
Gradually, the lumpy shadow-scape revealed itself as her assorted bits of luggage, strewn with clothes and toys and everything else that she’d not had the will to try to tidy up. The green dizzy dreams and the clawing rat seemed to shrivel in the light. It was too bizarre. To be looking at the fresh baked-bean-juice stains on her dressing gown, or the cascade of children’s books erupting from a Gruffalo backpack, and thinking that somebody out there was happy her mother could be dying, that somebody out there wanted Barbara to suffer.
Error, as the laptop would say. Switch it off and on again. If only she could.
She kept coming up with improbable explanations – the note was a prop from a murder-mystery party, or a handwriting test, or Barbara had written it herself as some sort of weird displacement activity. But why the mention of cancer? And why had it been on the doormat when Helen arrived? There was no simple answer to explain that away.
Finally she heard Alys start up her morning whimper, which, in her usual way, would soon become a chatter and then, shortly after, a wail. As Helen quit the stale bed and pulled on the bean-juice-stained dressing gown, the demons scuttled back to their dusty recesses. She pushed the curtains back, then, still fumbling with the belt of her dressing gown, she headed upstairs.
*
Helen found the blue dress later that morning, when she was going through some stuff in her old room. She’d hoped that one of the dusty boxes stashed under the bed would hold something that might keep the kids occupied for a while.
Of course, she’d packed for the journey in a hurry, with no real idea of how long they’d be staying, and the flaws in her organisation – no charger for Barney’s tablet, DVD boxes missing their discs,
