Chapters (40)
- Cover
- About the Author
- PENGUIN BOOKS
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- THE BEGINNING
Sasha just shrugged. Her milkshake arrived and she took a long suck at the straw then wiped her mouth with her napkin.
Irene watched her and then said, carefully: ‘Do you ever want to ask me anything about …’
‘No!’
‘OK, but if you ever …’
‘I won’t.’
‘OK then, my darling.’
‘What about you?’ asked Sasha.
‘What about me?’
‘Will you be all right when we’re gone?’
‘Of course I will be.’
‘Sometimes when you hug me goodnight, you say you don’t know what you’d do without me.’
‘I don’t mean it like that. It’s a figure of speech. I mean, without you in the world.’
‘But Mummy, I’ll always be in the world.’
The children’s departure came closer, like the wall of a great ship gradually blocking off the horizon. She couldn’t see beyond it, although of course she knew what was there. The deserted sea. The great grey stretch of time, with its cold slapping waves and unimaginable depths. She had not spent more than two or three nights alone for twelve years.
She had an evening for her students’ parents, who all arrived at the door with anxious, expectant faces. One mother kept saying tearfully: ‘But will he get better?’ as if her son had an illness which one day would go away. She went to Sasha’s parents’ evening and heard how she had become a little withdrawn; rather secretive and was refusing to choose a partner to go up to secondary school with. She said she wanted to go alone. She looked through Sasha’s work. In her weekly diary, she always wrote about what she had done with Adrian and Frankie, whom she called, formally, ‘my parents’, not with Irene.
She went to Clem’s and heard how she was disruptive in class; they’d had to deduct rather a lot of team points from her, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. She fought with the boys at playtime.
She sat with Ruth at her final lesson of the term and heard how the fertility treatment hadn’t worked and now they had to save up for the next round but it was so expensive and her husband didn’t know if they should go through with it, but if they didn’t, if they didn’t … At this point Ruth cried into her tea and Irene put a tentative hand on her arm and told her she was sorry, so sorry.