Girl A(49)

She glanced away, as if she was embarrassed for me. She was smiling, just a little, and I suspected then that this had nothing to do with Father.

‘I said no,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I.’

Miss Glade didn’t give up, although she abandoned the idea of enlisting Mother for support. Our Friday meetings became more fervent. You have to consider how other people may interpret this, she said. Don’t just say that you like it – that isn’t enough – tell me why. Her recommendations became more diverse: she brought in books about history; religions; the Romans and the ancient Greeks. In an hour we could unravel the string through the Labyrinth; slide through the hippocampus; scour coral for a male seahorse with eggs in its pouch. ‘How long do we have?’ she would ask me, when we came back to the little cupboard room. I narrated the time from the clock above her head, although she never seemed particularly interested in my response. I don’t think that’s what she was asking me at all.

‘Alexandra,’ Father said. ‘You have a guest.’

He was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I had crossed the landing to clean my teeth, with Fantastic Mr Fox in my hand. My ritual was to stick the brush in my mouth and read three pages, whatever the book.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Who?’

‘Why don’t you come and see?’

He swept an arm towards the living room, like a showman presenting a new, exotic act. I left my book on the side of the sink and padded down to him, into the downstairs lights and the smell of just-eaten casserole.

Miss Glade stood in the centre of the room, wearing a bobble hat and a duffle coat, impossibly clean. It was the first time I realized that she must exist outside of school. She had evenings, and a bed, and things that she thought about when she got into it. She was shorter than she was in the classroom, but Father did that: he shrank people. I folded my arms over my pyjama top, which was threadbare, thin enough that you could see my nipples through the material.

‘Lex doesn’t need to be here,’ Miss Glade said. ‘I came to talk with you.’

‘Oh, we’re a very open family.’

She was trying to look between us, but her eyes drifted to the corners of the room and the garbage bags there, the spill of old clothes and shoes and a few exhausted soft toys. Mother’s blankets were piled on the sofa, stiff with dirt.

‘Hello, Lex,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ I said. And then, not trusting this version of her, the night-time version which didn’t want to talk to me: ‘What are you doing here?’

She looked at Father, who was already smiling.

‘You remember the scholarship,’ Miss Glade said.

‘Yes.’

‘I wanted to talk to your dad about that – and a few other bits and pieces. Nothing very important. Certainly nothing for you to worry about.’

Father spread down on the sofa, and gestured to the spare cushion. Miss Glade sat right at the edge of it, as if she didn’t want our house against her skin. When she was there, she wrung her hands, still purple-white from the cold.

‘If you don’t want her to hear,’ Father said, ‘that’s fine with me.’

Miss Glade looked at me with something sad and resigned in her face. Something like a message, with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to read it. ‘I’m sorry, Lex,’ she said. ‘But I need to talk to your father in private.’

‘OK, then.’

‘OK. I’ll see you tomorrow, Lex.’

Evie was already asleep. I lay on top of the covers with the light on, keeping guard, trying not to fall asleep. Miss Glade was one of the cleverest people I knew, I thought, but also one of the stupidest. She looked at me as if she was frightened for me, while she sat down there with Father, and wasn’t even frightened for herself.

I never did find out what Miss Glade and Father discussed, but we left for Hollowfield a week later. I arrived home from school to find the family in the kitchen, Father standing with his palms flat on the table and Mother at his side. ‘We’ve got a house,’ he said. ‘A house of our own.’

A little earthquake passed across Delilah’s face. It started with tremors at her lips and at the corners of her eyes. ‘I hate you,’ she said, and her features crumpled.

‘Already?’ I said.

‘It’s become necessary,’ Father said. ‘All hands on deck.’

There were times when the exercise of packing seemed to be an autopsy of the house and the childhood we had spent there. Here, beneath my parents’ bed, were the blankets on which Mother had given birth to Ethan. Here was a book about the American Frontier, never returned to the library. Here were unwashed liquor bottles, housing families of thin black flies. When we lifted the furniture from its cavities, we uncovered the house’s worst ailments. The carpet beneath my bed was soft and matted, and tumours of mould had grown up to the mattress. There were putrid sleepsuits underneath the cot, each worn by any one of us, and never washed. The walls in Mother and Father’s room were punctured, and when we held our fingers to the wounds we could feel the air outside, leaking into the house.

At the bottom of Mother’s wardrobe, I found a notebook, sun-crinkled and close to disintegrating. I opened it in the middle. The handwriting was cumbersome – the writing of a child – but I didn’t recognize it. Dispatch 17, it said. I visit Mrs Brompton’s cottage on a Saturday afternoon. She is in her garden, and in the mood for talking. I smiled. Dispatches from Deborah. Mother’s contacts from the world of journalism were recorded on the back page. They would be retired by now, I thought. Some of them would probably be dead. Had she ever called them? It seemed unlikely. The book had been forgotten, rather than hidden. I added it to the rubbish pile.