People LIke Her(51)

“Sweet little girl,” says Doreen when Coco has gone off to play at the other end of the living room for a bit. “Lovely name.”

“It was my wife’s idea, actually,” I reveal, as I always do when I get the chance.

When Doreen tells me her hourly fee, I say that sounds perfectly reasonable to me—only marginally more than we were paying the nursery. “Would you prefer cash?” I ask. She says a check is fine. “Oh,” she adds, as if she has just remembered. “I’d better ask—does little Coco have any allergies?” I say not that we know of, although she does get a little sniffly on very polleny days in the summer, but she’s okay with milk and nuts and penicillin. “That’s good,” says Doreen. “So many kids seem to have them these days, allergies.” The little boy she looks after at the moment, Stephen, has to be very careful with shellfish. His mother gave her a little allergy pen to carry with her at all times. Doreen never goes anywhere without it; she wouldn’t dare. “You would never forgive yourself, would you? If anything happened to one of them and it was your fault?”

I agree not.

As she’s drinking her tea, her eyes are giving our bookshelves the once-over.

“I expect you’ll want to know what Emmy and I do for a living,” I suggest.

Doreen raises her shoulders gently.

“Is it something to do with books?” she asks.

I tell her I am a writer, and she nods, as if this explains a lot. Trying to describe what Emmy does proves trickier. I keep thinking Doreen has got it, then she asks a question like, “What is Instagram?” or expresses surprise that some people have the internet on their phones. She’s pretty sure she’s on the Facebook, she says. She thinks one of her great-nieces set her up an account.

We arrange for Doreen to come back and do a half day with Coco to start off with, the following morning. If you come at eight, I say, that will give you the chance to meet Emmy too.

“I’ll look forward to that,” she says. “And to seeing you again, Coco.”

Coco looks up and smiles and waves.

“See you tomorrow!” she says.

Once I’ve closed the door behind her, I check the time, wondering where Emmy has got to. That thing in the park must be over by now, surely; it’s nearly time for Coco’s dinner. I’m looking forward to her getting home and to telling her what Coco and I have been up to and seeing her reaction.

All in all, I reckon it’s been quite a successful day. My status in our relationship as a mature adult who can be entrusted with a responsible task—in this case, arranging childcare that doesn’t involve Winter or my mother—has been reaffirmed. Not only that, but apparently there was another seemingly random midafternoon attempted burglary two streets over the day before last, which means that I’ve almost managed to put my panic about the stolen laptop out of mind entirely.

It is hardly surprising the relationship broke down, really, after what happened. I know they tried their best to get through it, to help each other through it. Neither of them ever thought they could get over it, obviously. Neither of them ever wanted to get over it. At the funeral, Grace and Jack clung to each other, keeping each other upright. All through the inquest, they sat shoulder to shoulder, holding hands tightly under the table. Afterward, she clutched the shoulder of his suit as their lawyer read their prepared statement. Death by misadventure, that was the coroner’s finding.

It was only after they had got through all that, I think, that things really started to go wrong. When the funeral was over and the people had gone home and they were left to face the rest of their lives together.

The person who first noticed how oddly Grace was behaving was not me or Jack. It was my friend Angie, who hardly knew Grace at all. We were out having a cup of coffee one Saturday morning in town, and as we were sitting at our table in the window of Costa, Grace walked past. Well, that was strange, for one thing, because she hadn’t said anything to me about driving over, but I guessed maybe she had arranged to meet up with some of her old friends for brunch; maybe it was a last-minute thing, something like that.

Angie spotted Grace and asked me if that was her and at first I said it couldn’t be. Then I looked, and it was her and I knocked on the window. She looked up and saw me and sort of faintly smiled. I beckoned her in. She hesitated a minute. It was not until later that I found myself wondering what Grace was doing wandering around town in the middle of the morning. At the time I found myself noticing—as a mum does—that her hair looked a bit unwashed and wondering—as a mum does—whether I should say anything about it. She did seem a bit distracted, but I put that down to her having other things to think about. And while she did look a bit thin, I knew she hadn’t had much appetite of late. It was hardly surprising.

Not until Angie asked me if Grace was looking after herself did I really start wondering about my daughter’s state of mind. About whether she was okay. There had been a couple of times when she fazed out of the conversation completely. Admittedly, Angie is not the most scintillating conversationalist. She was telling us about a recent trip to hospital, to get some regular tests done, the trouble she had parking. But under any normal circumstances, a kind, gentle, generous girl like my daughter would at least have pretended to be listening. She got up and went to the loo. She came back again. She said she had to go. She promised she would call me. She barely even said goodbye to Angie.