NINE

The Thursday was kind of an average working day for me – no clients I had not had previous contact with, just continuing support for the existing ones. Which is what I spend a lot of my time doing.

First, I paid another visit to Mary Griffin. I could have asked her on the phone, but I wanted to see for myself how she’d progressed with turning her devastated house back into a home. And, more importantly, how Amy had reacted to her changed environment.

Somewhat to my surprise, as I parked the Yeti, I saw a familiar 1951 Morris Commercial CV9/40 Tipper outside the house. When Mary led me into the kitchen (which now looked like a kitchen), I found Dodge there with a cup of coffee. He didn’t look relaxed – I’ve only ever seen him look relaxed when deeply involved in his construction work – and he didn’t make eye contact with either Mary or me, but I was intrigued by his presence there.

Surely there couldn’t be any romantic interest between him and Mary …? I had gleaned over the years I’d known him that the breakdown which turned Gervaise the consumerist City whiz kid into Dodge the recycler had also involved the ending of a relationship. And, though he’d never said as much, I’m fairly sure that relationship had been with a woman. At what level, though, whether they had been married or cohabit-ing, I hadn’t found out. And it wasn’t my business. I never pushed Dodge for information about his past. Anything I did know was stuff he had volunteered. Sometimes reluctantly. Like the fact that he helped out young people in a drug rehabilitation programme. He’d also implied that drugs might have been a contributory cause of his breakdown.

But, since I’d known him, he’d never shown signs of sexual interest in anyone.

And it was clear that nothing of that kind was needed to explain his presence in Mary Griffin’s kitchen when I was taken upstairs to meet Amy.

She was an enchanting little girl with her mother’s brown eyes. But Amy’s looked unclouded by fear. Whatever scenes she may have witnessed in that house, she appeared untraumatized by the experience. That might be different if she woke from a bad dream in the night, but at that moment she irradiated the whole room with her happiness. And I could see how much that was helping her mother’s healing process.

The immediate reason for her joy was in front of her. She sat on a little Amy-sized pink wooden chair, in front of a pink-painted Amy-sized dressing table. There were four drawers down one side with a smooth wooden top running across to two stout legs the other side. Leaving a perfect Amy’s-knee-sized space for her to sit in comfort at the dressing table. On the surface in front of her stood an adjustable mirror. Its frame and the front of the drawers were decorated with Frozen stickers.

I was surprised by a sudden pang of memory, of a time when I was pregnant with Ben. Juliet at the same age as Amy, before she became the distant Jools, reacting with ecstasy to a picture of ballet dancers (her then obsession) that Oliver had painted for her third birthday. I wondered if she still had it. Or had she excised the painting from her life, as she had everything else that might remind her of her father? The recollection of Curtis family happiness was sharply painful.