Cory hadn’t slammed the door in her face, which was practically—wasn’t it?—an invitation to come in. Diana took a deep breath before entering, but she needn’t have worried: her son’s room was ordinary to the point of expressionless. A bag of schoolbooks on the floor; a few clothes over the back of a chair; a couple of dirty mugs. An exam timetable taped to the wall.

“You used to draw me,” she ventured. “Do you remember? You had a real gift for it.”

Cory nodded absently. He was levering the pencils out of their tin one by one, and testing their relative softness on the cover of the sketchbook.

“Perhaps you’ll get into it again?”

Diana was hardly talking nineteen to the dozen but he, with his silence, made her feel as if she were. She noticed—not for the first time—how his eyes had changed over the course of the year. They used to look outward at the world, whereas now they looked inward at his own secret thoughts.

“Thank you,” he said, unexpectedly.

She sat by the window and leaned on the sill with her chin in her hand. He didn’t tell her to go away. After a while she heard the irregular sweep of pencil on paper and knew he was sketching her, but she resisted the impulse to look. A cloud passed over the sun and her bare arms felt cold. She watched a sparrow hopping about on the grass and tried not to notice the pins and needles in her feet.

“Dad would not approve of this,” Cory said. There was a smile in his voice; a slight, conspiratorial smile.

Diana gripped her chin and stared at the sparrow, as if her son’s observation hadn’t changed everything; as if nothing much had happened.

“He would hate it,” she agreed, as soon as she could say anything. “But that’s not a reason to stop, is it? You’ve got a real talent for art—I mean a real talent—it would be a shame not to use it.”

The pencil kept scritch-scratching across the paper.

“Mum? The more you yatter, the harder it is for me to draw your mouth.”

She didn’t say another word, but it was hard to keep her lips still when they kept wanting to quiver into a smile.

Diana lies in bed, half dreaming, half awake. She has her home, and her boy, and her moments of peace. As long as she keeps picturing that day of his fourteenth birthday—as long as she refuses to recall what came next—the darkness and the dying don’t seem to matter much.

Chapter 10

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