John Honey seemed relieved at this idea. I was relieved at this idea. Mother hadn’t gone out anywhere for ages. I nodded my assent and let Mother pretend to fuss about the state of my twisted ankle so it looked like she was a good mother who cared.

And they left. The house was much easier to be in when I was on my own these days. Still, as they went laughing out the front door, something nagged at me: Was it alright for a woman to go and drink champagne at lunchtime with a man who wasn’t her husband? I didn’t know. I suspected Carlito would get angry if you did it, Ornella. But you weren’t publishing your first collection of poetry. That made everything different.

GREEN FOAM

Coming off the plane, Mrs Parish looked longer and thinner. She wore a red skirt and carried a flat leather case under her arm. This was her folio, she said, full of photographs of the work she’d made in Japan. She presented her cheek for Mr Parish to kiss and put her arms around me—just for a second or so, but filling me with assurance that she was definitely back and would definitely have some kind of present for me in her suitcase. She smelt of something odd that wasn’t perfume. Tea or soap or face-powder. We picked her luggage up off the luggage belt—it was the first to come out, and there was only half as much of it as she had left with, in new red leather that matched her red skirt—and Mr Parish wouldn’t let her take anything, except for the flat leather case, which she kept tucked under her arm as though it were entirely natural for a woman to walk around with a folio under her arm. At another time, Mr Parish might’ve ribbed her—he might’ve said, ‘Oh, that’s a new pose, dear!’ or ‘Going out to teach the world a lesson, are we?’—but tonight he was fussing around her and seemed to want to make everything pleasant for her. I wondered if she was as surprised as me about this, but she remained composed, and not in the least surprised, not even when he opened the car door for her and pulled out the seatbelt end from where it habitually got stuck between the upholstery and the metal.

‘It’s good to have you back, June,’ he said, and she nodded and felt in the back for my hand to squeeze.