16. April

Eve

Eve watches. She watches Sorrel and Poppy and even Izzy. She needs to keep everyone safe. There are rings under her eyes from getting up in the night to watch the children. Sometimes she slips into bed with Sorrel and holds her, watching the way her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks in the moonlight.

The whine of the power saw has become background noise in the daytime. She watches from the window as the trunks topple, the branches with their sprays of green descending slowly. Blake helps pull the undergrowth out after school and at weekends; Eric is tired after his long days, longer without Igor. He seems to have abandoned his former ideas about a Japanese garden. Evenings are silent, he goes to bed early, straight after supper sometimes.

Poppy is reading much more than she used to, old books Eve read to her a while ago: Little House in the Big Woods, The Magic Faraway Tree, Roald Dahl, Beano annuals; comfort reading like comfort eating or drinking. She doesn’t talk about Ash much, nor does Sorrel. Sorrel has been told he has gone to heaven and isn’t coming back. Fragments of memory have appeared, flotsam washed up from the deep: the glass plates in Greece, paddling in the sea, a doll she’d had for Christmas. Eve asked all the children not to push her for more and they listened, nodding.

The pain of losing Ash has returned with greater force, like a storm coming back across the sea, increasing in strength as it comes. In the day she can weather it but at night she is beaten to the ground. She can hardly crawl upstairs to bed at night. If it wasn’t for Poppy and Sorrel or Melly and Grace, she’d have given up by now. Eric never refers to his son. She knows he is thinking about him when he stands at the window, his face drawn and fists in his pockets, gazing at the donkey field with the fence that extends right down to the ground.

The time to discuss the affair has passed; she doubts whether he cares one way or the other. The connection between them has thinned to the point that if it snapped, neither of them would notice; perhaps it’s broken already.

Grace

Martin’s letters are addressed to all three of them, Grace reads them out at supper.

‘… crowded classroom, listening as if their lives depended on it. I go to the park to write in the evenings; the little monkeys in the trees try to steal my sandwiches, they remind me of Charley.’

‘It’s not fair,’ bursts out Charley. ‘How come he gets to have a holiday and we don’t?’

‘It’s not a holiday,’ Grace reminds her. ‘He’s teaching, earning us money.’

‘He sees these animals. He has picnics in the park.’