Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Sabrina Broadbent

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Gone

What

Cow

Fetch

Love

Hot

Work

Endgame

Urn

Pray

Go

Rip

When

Late

Missing

Bad

Sign

Because

Night

So

Memo

But

Wife

Beach

What

Sorry

Best

Scream

Gin

Cold

Tender

Stairs

Fair

Exit

House

Flat

Temp

Over

Sorry

Venus

Daddy

Went

Ithaca

Bitter

Seen

Her

Lost

Us

Found

Yet

Snap

Perhaps

Falling

Ever

Steel

Yes

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Book

SOMETIMES DOING THE RIGHT THING ISN’T AN OPTION

In her late forties, in a stalled marriage and emailed half to death at work, solid, dependable, sensible Bea notices that she is starting to disappear. One morning on her way to work she vanishes completely.

Her husband is suspected of murder, high-flying sister Katharine starts to unravel and Katherine’s teenage children, Laura and Adrian – brilliant, difficult, and wise – struggle to solve the mystery of their beloved aunt’s disappearance. Touching and funny, You Don’t have to be Good is a sharp and clever look at what happens when a woman reaches the point where being good is no longer an option.

About the Author

Sabrina Broadbent’s debut novel, Descent, won the WHSmith Raw Talent Award. Author of a second novel, A Boy’s Guide to Track and Field, she used to teach English at a comprehensive school in north London, and now works for FILMCLUB, which works with teachers to set up and support free after-school film clubs in schools throughout the UK. She lives in London.

Also by Sabrina Broadbent

Descent

A Boy’s Guide to Track and Field

For Mum and Dad

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C.P. Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’

Gone

FRANK FIRST NOTICED his wife was gone a month before she disappeared.

It was night-time, in the dead hour. It was long before dawn, before the milk float and the blackbird, when he woke and saw a face inches from his own staring at him. The room smelt peaty.

‘There’s someone in the house.’ Her voice was afraid, dry like a quill scratching parchment.

‘Bea?’ he said, peering through the grainy dark.

He raised himself on one elbow and listened to the house. Light from the landing leaked into the room and he felt a shift in pressure, as if a door somewhere closed. Dry-mouthed, he looked down at her and saw that she had gone. It wasn’t Bea lying there beside him on the rumpled, sweat-soaked sheet. Not Bea, but a grim-mouthed stranger with clammy skin and a sour tang on her breath.

She brought one finger to her lips and said, ‘Shhh.’

Frank held his breath.

And then they heard it. A small, quiet sound like the click of the latch being eased gently home. Her eyes held his for one last time and then, heart racing and with the cloyed slowness of the dream, Frank struggled from the bed. Naked and slack-bellied, he took two steps to the window and parted the curtains a crack. Outside, Oyster Row was deserted and still. Narrow terraced houses stared back at him, blind and dumb. He watched the space between the crumbling gateposts, but no figure slipped through to hurry down the street.

‘Frank?’

He rubbed the rough skin of one buttock and caressed the bald dome of his head.

‘Frank?’

A shudder ran through him. He was afraid to turn round and look at her.

‘Nothing,’ he said, eyes still on the street. ‘There’s nothing there.’

DOWNSTAIRS IN their frayed dressing gowns, the draughty floor chilled their feet. The fridge hummed, the boiler ticked and the sweet smell of decay drifted up from the bin. Nothing appeared to be missing and there was no sign of an intruder. Relief made Bea smile as she switched the kettle on to boil.

Frank came in from the front room and checked the back door again.

‘You were brave,’ she said, feeling shy and strange.

He moved away from her and looked out into the hall.

She heard him open the front door, close it again and turn the key in the lock. She waited.

When he appeared in the doorway, his face was like putty. A laugh escaped her.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

She sat down at the table and pushed a chair out for him with her foot. She wouldn’t sleep now. It could be nice, a dawn cup of tea, just the two of them.

‘Your tea,’ she said, holding a mug out and sipping her own.

She was thirsty, always thirsty. What she lost in the night in sweat, she replaced in the day with tea. She was becoming a tea lady, a teapot, a tea bag . . .

She laughed down her nose. ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

Frank saw nothing amusing in the situation. He sighed. ‘I might as well get some work done now I’m up.’

Bea watched his old-man slouch and the sheen of his head. Crestfallen, she thought. That’s what I’m seeing. Your crest is fallen, Frank, and let’s face it, so is mine. She felt wrung out, hung out to dry. Perhaps they should see someone, a counsellor, a doctor, or a priest. There were books they could read, Mating in Captivity or Hanging on to the Bitter End. She should smile more, she knew that for a fact. The plumber said so, and so did Frank. She pulled her mouth wide, and looked at the crowded years of the walls and shelves around them. Apart from the floor, the kitchen felt warm and safe; their home, their hutch.

‘I’ll sleep on the couch,’ said Frank and left the room.

Bea said, ‘Ouch.’ Then, ‘What work?’ to the space where he had been.

We’ve reached the couch stage, she told her window reflection. She could hardly blame him. She had sweated litres of herself during the night, cocooned in her larval bed, metamorphosing in their marriage swamp. She wished there had been an intruder in the house; some drama or event, Frank doing battle on the stairs, defending his homestead, his wife and his chattels . . .

‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she said aloud.

Her reflection looked back at her from the garden, where a solitary bird had begun to sing. She drank her tea and saw herself there, on the outside, looking in.

What

JUST THEN, A wolf did come out of the forest.

Frank raised his fingers from the keyboard and looked at the sentence he had written. He shuffled forward in his chair, stared at the crack in the wall two feet from his face and nodded. The writing had gone slowly today. Ten words since lunchtime, and now it was half past five. But, he peered at the screen, this was something.

He cleared his throat, got to his feet and read out loud, stepping around the piles of clutter on the floor of his workroom. ‘Scene 24. Ext. Marsha’s flat with the woods behind. Night. We watch Marsha hurry from the bus stop, look up at the moon and enter the building. Peter steps from the shadows. Dr Anton (Voiceover): Just then, a wolf did come out of the forest.’

Yes, he had found a way to bring the predatory Peter into Marsha’s world. And he had managed to create the requisite sense of threat, inevitability, animalism and— He sat down abruptly and felt his lower lumbar seize. He was tempted to email his agent right away and let him know that great progress was being made with Lupa, but his agent had yet to reply to the last email, in which he had told him that Lupa was proving problematic. Frank frowned. How long was it since then? Two months? Three? The floorboards behind him creaked.

‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’

Frank sighed and looked up at the crack in the wall again. Adrian, his nephew, had crept into the room.

‘What?’ said Frank without turning round. He had a shocking headache advancing up behind his eyes. He could do with a drink.

‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’

Frank closed his laptop and swivelled slowly round in his chair.

Adrian had a way of standing in whatever space he found himself in that reminded Frank of the way tall seaweed swayed upward from a rock. At thirteen, he didn’t pose and he didn’t slouch. He just was. In his school uniform, a dismal array of greys in acrylic and polyester, the most striking thing about him was his head of frantic flaming hair. Like a Caravaggio, Bea always said; like a young Bob Dylan, his mother, Katharine, always said. Like a young Frank, in fact, thought Frank, stroking the smooth dome of his own head and wincing at the worrisome fact that all the really great writers possessed a head of magnificent hair. The evidence was there for everyone to see. Hair and genius go together. Look at Chekhov, Balzac, Beckett. Frank’s eyes scanned the shelves to his left. Look at Hemingway, Ibsen, Strindberg. Every single last man of them crowned with a glorious mane of hair. And when it wasn’t what could be called a crowning glory exactly – for example, Dickens, Trollope, Tolstoy – then there was a beard the size of a beehive. Damn. Was this the real, the awful, the actual, the inescapable reason that he had not had a script or play accepted for . . . what was it? Five years? Had all his creative energy fallen away on his forty-fifth birthday, the year he wrote an episode of Casualty and he and his hair parted company for ever?

‘Would you rather be—’

‘Yes, yes, I heard what you said.’

Adrian rubbed his bottom this way and that across the ribs of the radiator in a way that Frank found faintly offensive. The boy didn’t swear, had a brain the size of a planet and liked girls. He was an anomaly, and exceedingly irritating. He was at an age when the unconscious child in him had yet to be put to death by the scimitar of sex and surliness. That wasn’t a bad phrase. He ought to write it down, but Adrian was still sweeping up and down the radiator and was now doing a boggle-eyed, slow, head-rolling-back-on-his neck movement that suggested he was entering the nethermost reaches of boredom.

Frank tried to apply himself to the question. As it happened, he felt far from brilliant and looked appalling. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the night before. Now he came to think about it, he felt shredded and unaccountably close to tears.

He raised himself from the chair, paused until his lower back spasm eased, and made his way carefully to the fireplace, managing to become more or less upright by the time he got there. A bust of Chekhov frowned back at him from the mantelpiece. A string of red beads dangled from its neck. Wanda’s no doubt. She was pushing it, leaving things like that around the place. He sighed, lifted them off and dropped them in the waste-paper bin. Wanda. Even the thought of her failed him these days. There had been a time in the last year when the knowledge of what he had with Wanda made all the difference, when just the image of her name in his head, the feel of her name in his mouth, Van-da, would be enough to set his blood racing. But lately, the ‘what’ had been bothering him. What was it that they had exactly? The answer, knocking quietly and persistently at a small door down some long corridor in his mind, was becoming difficult to ignore.

Adrian started up an urgent fingernail tapping on the radiator. ‘Fra-a-nk.’

‘I’m thinking!’ Frank said.

A gold bullet of lipstick and a tube of mascara lay in the ashtray beside Chekhov. He really must speak to her about her encroachments. He had, after all, made it completely clear that the relationship could never edge towards the domestic, although as Wanda was in fact their cleaner, boundaries were possibly not as clear as they should be.

Adrian came and hovered alongside him, opened the lipstick and sniffed it, then repeated the question in a loud whisper. ‘It’s not a riddle,’ he added and began rocking from one leg to the other, knocking Frank’s arm in an arrhythmic beat. He drew a crimson smear across his lower lip and pouted at his uncle.

‘For God’s sake, Adrian.’ Frank gave the boy a shove so that the lipstick dropped from his fingers and fell to the floor.

Frank leaned forward to study himself in the mirror. There was something tired and diminished about him today, he thought as he scanned his face, taking care not to look himself in the eye. He turned his head a little and examined his profile. His nose was good, sculpted and rather fine, and he had what some had called a sensual mouth. Wanda told him that the crest of greying copper curls above his ears made him look distinguished as long as she kept it trimmed and neat. He leaned closer to the mirror. His eyebrows could do with a trim, and the tops of his ears too. It was strange what was happening to his hair. Having retreated from his head, it seemed to sprout and flourish in places it had never done before. Thank God for Wanda’s nail scissors and tweezers.

Adrian was back by his side and making kissing noises in the mirror.

‘You see, if you look stupider than you are—’

Frank held out a finger to shush the boy. He needed to collect his wits for this one. He laid his hand on Chekhov’s head and thought about it. Chekhov had an impressive mane of hair and a sublime, extraordinary face. No doubt about it, Chekhov looked like a genius, and when last winter Frank had studied the late manuscripts, seen the beauty and the power scratched on the page, seen with his own eyes the man’s conflict about which direction the piece should take, he had felt he was in the presence of divinity. He ran his thumb across Chekhov’s lips. The fact was that Chekhov’s face, though magnificently clever-looking, probably appeared stupider than he was. He nodded and turned round.

‘I would rather be stupider than I look.’

In the pause that followed, Frank had the sense that he had fallen short of the mark and was a disappointment. Adrian wandered over to the window and drew a face in the dirt. When the phone rang, they both leapt for the table but Adrian reached it first. Frank glared at him.

‘Bea!’ said Adrian, hugging the handset to his ear. He placed one hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s your wife.’

Frank snapped his fingers for the phone but Adrian flapped him away. He listened carefully to his aunt and said, ‘Oh,’ ‘Er,’ and ‘What?’

‘What does she want, Adrian?’ said Frank, getting slowly down on his hands and knees and looking under the couch for Wanda’s lipstick.

Adrian said, ‘She’s in the river at Grantchester and can’t get out.’

A vision from the night before surfaced in Frank’s mind. He sat back on his heels and sneezed. ‘Grantchester? What on earth is she doing all the way down there?’ There was plenty of river at the bottom of their road. Grantchester was two miles away.

‘She says she was attacked by cows.’ Adrian listened carefully to Bea, then added, ‘Well, not attacked exactly. Menaced.’

‘Menaced?’ Frank stood up painfully. ‘Give me the phone, please.’ Adrian slipped easily out of reach so that Frank had to follow him round the room with his hand out like a child trying to get his toy back. ‘Stop messing about.’

‘A whole herd?’ said Adrian. ‘They can be quite dangerous if they have calves with them. Did they have calves with them, Bea?’

Frank cornered him by the coffee table but Adrian jumped over it, then trampled along the duvet on the couch. At the bookcase in the alcove Frank nearly had him but Adrian put his hand up to warn him to stop. This was no time for silly games.

‘Bullocks,’ said Adrian. ‘Bullocks and cows maybe. They turned nasty so she had to escape into the river. Which is where she is now. They won’t let her get out.’

‘And what does she want me to do about it?’

‘Frank says, “And what do you want me to do about it?”’ Adrian listened some more and said nothing.

‘Well?’ said Frank.

Adrian walked calmly to Frank’s desk and sat down. He set himself off on slow revolutions on Frank’s chair, using the table leg to maintain momentum.

Frank saw that he had the phone in his lap. ‘Adrian, what in God’s name is going on?’

Adrian stuck his foot out and brought his orbits to an end. ‘I’m just waiting for her to reach the shallow bit.’

Frank closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. Something he didn’t understand was happening to his wife.

Faintly, Bea’s voice called Adrian’s name.

Frank shook his head, put his fingertips into his trouser pockets and adopted what he assumed was an expression of piercing insight but which reminded Adrian of the bewildered and worn-out old bull in a toreo he’d once seen on the television in Spain.

‘Bea, Frank wants to know what on earth you’re doing all the way over in Grantchester and also, what’s for supper?’

His eyes roved the room as he followed the originality of her logic. He relayed the information back to Frank. ‘It was beautiful . . . it was warm . . . soon summer will be gone . . . spaghetti.’

‘And kindly ask whether I am to bring you, your sister and her friends to Grantchester too,’ said Frank, hands on hips, vexation, indignation, consternation and many other kinds of ‘ation’ making him feel suddenly alive and upright for the first time that day.

‘We’re all coming to get you,’ Adrian told Bea. ‘Oh, and Bea?’ he added. ‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’

Adrian listened, then handed Frank the phone. He headed for the door.

‘Bea would rather look stupider than she is,’ he said. ‘And her battery’s going.’

Cow

WAIST-DEEP IN RIVER water and fully clothed, Bea held her phone clear with one hand and clutched at reeds with the other. Her left foot succumbed further to the river bed’s muddy embrace while the current coiled around her other leg like rope. She lurched towards a thicker clump of bulrushes near the bank and felt her long skirt float out behind her. She thought she could hear a weir somewhere, roaring out of sight, round the bend.

All at once the situation seemed serious and sad, as if she were hearing the story from someone else: Woman Found in River. Things could change and slip out of control so fast. She shouldn’t have sounded calm and cheery on the phone to Adrian. ‘You’re so calm,’ people always said to her. But she didn’t feel calm very much of the time. A bit stunned perhaps, but not calm. She managed to take another step forward and the river’s drag on her legs lessened.

Those bastard cows were still looking at her. A gang of five or six crowded at the bank by the wooden footbridge, their heavy-skulled heads blowing and puffing. One or two had got as far as placing hooves into the steep, broken sides of the water’s edge. Cows Drown Woman. What bovine slight or trespass could she possibly be guilty of ? She looked at the swirling brown eddies of water and realised she might have to swim upstream in order to get out. Perhaps if she headed for the middle, the current would be weaker. She had seen people swimming here, she was sure of it. To her right, a mass of bright reeds flowed past like green snakes.

‘Are you all right?’

On the bank behind the press of cows, a young woman ran slowly on the spot. Tiny black pumas leapt up the tongues of her shoes.

‘I’m fine,’ said Bea with her hapless, sexy smile. She was thinking she needed a new word. ‘Fine’ didn’t quite do it these days.

The woman on the bank had the artless, honest face of the very physically fit. Nike was emblazoned on her chest. Her body seemed impatient to get on with the running but her head remained turned towards the odd sight of this handsome blonde woman, fully clothed and up to her breasts in the river. ‘You sure?’

No. She wasn’t quite herself; had the sense that she had become tiny and remote, vanishing down the wrong end of a telescope, and that the last few years had been a long dry spell, a lonely crawl through desert and scrub, and that she was tired and desperately thirsty and in truth she did not know how she had ended up in the river except that she felt something bad was about to happen and tried to create her own ending rather than have one happen to her. A new and powerful current tugged at her lower legs. She hoped Nike saw the scene for what it was: a woman getting out of her depth.

‘I’m afraid of the cows.’

‘They won’t hurt you. They’re just curious.’

‘Well actually,’ Bea pushed the mobile phone down into her cleavage and braced herself against the current, ‘actually they kill five people a year. Women mainly. Women walking dogs.’ Sludge oozed up between her toes and something nibbled her knee. The main cow chewed at her insolently. This cow was definitely giving her evils, as Laura would say. A long tongue, like a tentacle, swiped drool from its aqueous nose. Nike flapped her arms at them.

‘Shoo!’ she shouted, then delivered a volley of curses.

‘Watch out for that big buttery-looking one,’ warned Bea. ‘It encouraged the others.’

‘Get out of it!’

The cows looked sheepish. They blew down their noses and shuffled off, bumping their bony angles and heavy sides against each other, cleft hooves trip-trapping across the bridge. They fell into single file and ambled along the path that led towards the far meadow.

Bea pushed forward towards the bank, where the water was warm, and here, at the shallow margins, the sludge between her toes was rather pleasant in a forbidden, ‘Don’t do that, Bea, it’s not nice’ kind of a way. She beamed up at Nike, who offered her hand and helped her up through the hoof-pocked mud. Tussocky grass spiked at her ankles and feet.

‘Wave your arms around and swear your head off. My dad told me that.’

Bea glanced down at the swags and pleats of her mud-slicked skirt. She looked odd, she knew, alien and primordial. Then the fish clambered out of the swamps and the world was changed for ever. Her father’s voice, as they searched for fossils among the rocks and chalk of Hastings beach, her hand in his. She flicked a creature off her calf, remembered Patrick’s hot, angry grip on her wrist on this very bank two months ago, his voice clear in her ear: I’ve never forgotten you and I never will.

‘I’ll walk back with you if you like,’ offered Nike, beginning to jog on the spot again. ‘Which way are you going?’

‘Really, I’m fine. Thank you for your help.’

Bea wished her gone now, unsure how to handle the kindness. She looked towards the line of willows at the turn of the river. The cows grazed peacefully. Seed heads and butterflies spun and danced in the soft light.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, honestly,’ she said, thinking how rare it was to have an adult to help. She had Wanda of course, although she couldn’t really afford her and didn’t truly need her, the house was so small. But without Wanda, cheerful curator of objects and clutter, converter of creases to flawless expanse, she sometimes thought it would be hard to come home after work. Wanda was all Flash and muscle, she was Pledge and sparkle, and if it weren’t for Wanda, Bea suspected that the jumble and chaos of life in Oyster Row would rise up and close over her head. Her phone fell from her cleavage as she wiped at the mud on her shins. ‘I phoned my husband just before you came.’

Nike nodded. She looked up the path and shook her arms and wrists.

Yes, thought Bea, as she flicked away some dark, wriggling things that were inching across her chest. Husband. Oh, yes. She tried the word on for size. Hus-band. For better, for worse. My husband. ‘My husband is on his way.’ She froofed her curls into shape and thought of the other husband, the one that wasn’t hers but someone else’s, the one she had given the best ten years of her life to, the husband called Patrick not Frank. They’d said goodbye, goodbye again, finally, one last time, two months ago in buttercups and clover, not far from this very spot.

‘Well, that’s all right then.’ Nike was waving goodbye and moving down the path at a slow jog.

‘Yes, goodbye!’ called Bea, waving. ‘And thank you for . . .’

But she was gone, head bobbing, narrow, upright body swaying into the light, covering the length of a child with each easy stride, putting distance between herself and the middle-aged river woman who had climbed out of the water and on to the bank.

Fetch

FRANK MARCHED INTO the kitchen and put the phone on its charger. Coffee spluttered on the stove and the boiler whumped into life. A blast had killed sixty-four in Baghdad and Frank despaired at Bea’s flagrant waste where the hot-water timer was concerned. It was half past five. Who was going to be having a bath at this hour? The fighting in Afghanistan is extraordinarily intense. The battles are close and personal and hand-to-hand. Unless more troops— Frank said, ‘Bloody hell,’ and silenced the radio with a stab of his finger. Close and personal. He knew what that meant. That meant bayonets. What in God’s name were they doing bayoneting the enemy in the desert in the twenty-first century?

He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up at Laura and her friends. He knew they were in because he could hear the thudding of their moronic music through the ceiling. Earlier he had heard their shrieks and thumps.

Here he was, he thought, staring up at the landing, herding teenagers at the age of fifty, and not a play or a script sold in five long years. The stairs did their mean and narrow rodent yawn back down at him, silent witness to the night before. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a wide and sweeping staircase in marble and mahogany. It was supposed to be a glorious gleaming glide from one pinnacle of literary achievement to the next.

‘Laura, I’m going to fetch your aunt!’ he bellowed, climbing halfway up, where he was startled to find his niece’s head hanging upside down in the gloom over the landing banister. Her hair dangled, and her mouth split into a lunatic grin. Her tongue, bright purple from some toxic confection she had been drinking, protruded from between stained and haphazard teeth.

‘Cool.’

Frank sighed. ‘Laura, you should probably come with me.’ He hesitated, and saw the others lurking and listening. ‘Don’t your friends have to go home now?’

‘Huh?’ Laura braced herself on the bottom of the banisters and raised her lower body up in the air until she was perpendicular. Her yellow top fell over her head. Her hair fanned. Frank looked away.

‘Laura, get down. You’ll have an accident like your aunt.’

‘Can my friends come, Frank? Please? They’re allowed.’

Laura’s friends called, ‘Hello, Noddy!’ and collapsed on to the carpet in hysterics. Laura rolled on top of Rachel and Chanel thumped Rachel’s backside hard with a cushion. Laura said, ‘We’re doing homework.’

‘Come on, Bea’s stuck in the river.’ Frank turned resolutely around and went downstairs shouting for Adrian and thinking it was absolutely preposterous that he should be left in charge of all these damned children. Here he was, trying to do the hardest thing, to write, to create a work of genius, and yet more often than not he spent half his day hanging about looking after other people’s offspring. Frank took in a deep breath of righteous indignation. Adrian and Laura weren’t even his flesh and blood, they belonged to Bea’s sister, Katharine. The others upstairs, whatever their names were, well heaven knows who they belonged to. Frank let out a heartfelt sigh. Where the hell were the mothers, for God’s sake?

‘Wait for us!’ called Laura.

The girls came downstairs in every possible way but normally. He wondered whether their school, Colgate Community College, might ever consider it sensible to teach them some Trollope or Rachmaninov every once in a while, something they didn’t know about, instead of all this Media Studies and Sex and Relationships nonsense. Probably not. Education was rendering the younger generation quite incapable of serious thought. Of course, if grammar schools existed such as the one that rescued him from a lower-middle-class background of cultural and intellectual poverty, things might be different. He despaired sometimes, he really did.

Adrian nudged him and said, ‘Er,’ looking pointedly at Frank’s head.

‘Yes, Adrian? Any chance of some language, child? You know, words, a phrase? Push the boat out perhaps and try a whole sentence? Hmm?’

‘The nodding,’ murmured Adrian. ‘You’re doing it again.’

The girls pushed each other into the coat pegs and ran back upstairs to the bathroom. Then there were several minutes of footwear confusion, followed by a tedious conversation in which Frank said, ‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’ and they said, ‘Like what?’ before they finally all spilled out into the front garden.

A hooded boy appeared from nowhere on a bicycle and accompanied them down the street, keeping his front wheel rampant the whole way and hawking up phlegm whenever the conversation, such as it was, dried up. Rachel and Chanel swooped and swerved round him while Laura trotted on the pavement saying, ‘Oh shame, man’ and ‘Oh my days, I, like, don’t believe it.’

Adrian said to Frank, ‘Do you like my sweatshirt?’ for the tenth time.

It took a while to find Bea’s car, which was parked round the corner near the flyover. By the time Frank had bundled the teenagers into it, negotiated his way through the Cambridge rush hour and endured their bawdy clamour, he was very nearly beside himself with fury. Here was another day frittered away and precious little achieved.

When they reached Grantchester Meadows, the children ran from the car before he had time to ease himself from the driving seat. He shouted after them to wait and was about to bellow dire warnings of what would follow if they didn’t do as he said, but instead he rested for a moment against the warm bonnet of the car. The sun was gentle on his face, the scent of apples and beer filled the air and from the garden of the pub came the buzz of early-evening drinkers. He had forgotten. He should get out more. How pleasant to be in the Meadows on a late-September afternoon. As he began to walk, he felt the weight on his shoulders lift, the pain in his back ease a little. The trouble was, since his last birthday, a leaden dread had settled inside him. It made him snap at the children and droop at the shoulders when he walked. The dread weighed heavier each time he read the words ‘bright young talent’, ‘extraordinary promise’ or ‘playwright of the year’. It kept his eyes to the ground when he walked, like now, and it beat out a refrain to the rhythm of his feet on the path. ‘Your best is past. There’s no more to come . . .’ Enter Wanda.

Frank paused and looked about him. No sign of the children or of Bea. How typical of them all to disappear. He turned and began walking back to the car. He would call Bea’s phone from the pub and wait for them all there, and anyway, he really could murder a drink. Now Wanda was a woman who could hold her drink. Bea used to be able to hold her drink, but all of a sudden, quite recently, she couldn’t. Wanda, though, my God, she could knock back the vodka like it was water. And Wanda was very calming where the writing was concerned. She told him that her father was still writing when he died at the age of eighty-three (which, as Bea pointed out, meant that Wanda’s father was in his sixties when Wanda was born). Frank flicked away that thought with a shake of his head. What about a screenplay set in communist Poland? A woman in the secret police falls in love with a much older dissident writer. Frank quickened his step and tugged at his cuffs. Close and Personal, he could call it. Thank God for Wanda. The ideas were coming thick and fast now. He should walk more often. He would phone his agent tomorrow and tell him all about it. He felt suddenly better. Last night had been a wake-up call, a kind of ghastly sleepwalk or waking dream. It was a warning not to neglect his creative impulse, a sign that he must take his work more seriously. This nonsense of Bea’s and the children’s had to stop. He would make himself unavailable for as long as it took to complete the script.

He heard shouting and looked back. The girls sprang through the grass like puppies, shedding shoes as they went. Adrian ran large circles round them, chasing first one and then another. The willows and chestnuts burned gold and red and the sun was low. Overhead, the sky stretched away, a rippled sea of pink and blue. His throat ached and the view blurred. He would have loved a son.

Adrian swerved inches from him, panting and bounding over waist-high grass.

‘Stop larking about,’ snapped Frank. ‘And just remember that we’re looking for your aunt.’

Love

FRANK DIDN’T HAVE to walk very far before he heard the children calling and laughing and he saw Bea walking slowly towards him. Back-lit by the sun, the shape of her skull was silhouetted so precisely in its halo of hair that he could feel the shape of it in the palm of his hand.

‘I’m a bit wet,’ she said when they reached each other.

He looked at the space around her.

‘Where are the cows?’ he asked. ‘The stampede?’

‘Oh, I was rescued.’

He smelt of stale whisky and he had his shirt tucked in. What an unspeakable disaster, she thought, waving the children over. I married completely the wrong man.

Rescued? He looked at her then, at the broad swell of her belly, at the place on her breasts where the wet fabric clung. Of course. He nodded. Always this. Always the knight in shining armour standing in the wings. Who had she been here with? Bloody Patrick Cumberbatch? Surely he wasn’t still sniffing about the place, was he? No, Mr Cumberbatch had been booted out of Shire Hall (ha!). He had been told to take his bonhomie, his management skills and his skinny-arsed wife and take a running jump to Corfu or Costa Early Retirement or wherever.

‘Frank? Is your back bad?’

He wanted to crush her with a cold comment but her nipples had an insolent, brazen look to them. His eyes travelled up her throat as she swallowed, up to her neck where the skin was creased and crêpey. He looked at her uncertain mouth and offered a pained smile in the direction of the river.

‘Where are your shoes?’ She smelt weedy. It was important with Bea not to make too much of anything. Keep things on an even keel. She longed for melodrama and, like all women – not Wanda perhaps, but most women – she seemed to need a crisis once in a while.

Screams and shouts curtailed by a series of splashes informed them that the children had managed to fall in. Adrian ran towards them, arms flailing, legs leaping, laughing and shouting that all three girls were in the water, that Rachel’s phone had sunk, Chanel couldn’t swim and Laura’s foot was stuck. Frank tore towards the river in his lopsided run. Bea gathered up her skirt and followed him, heavy-thighed and slow. She watched him sprint ahead of her, arms pumping, zigzagging round the tussocks, racing with surprising speed towards the emergency, and she remembered vaguely what it was like to love him.

When she reached the bank, she found the dripping forms of the girls draped like leopards along a low willow branch. They were panting and smiling and swinging their hands and feet in the shallow water. Frank was supporting himself with one arm up against the trunk, catching his breath and trying to speak. Laura waved over at Bea and called, ‘We fell in too! Brutal!’ Adrian whacked the tree with a stick and said, ‘Are you all right, Frank?’ Laura pulled off her shorts and said, ‘I’m only going to have to walk back in me keks!’ Rachel said, ‘Minging,’ and Chanel said, ‘This branch is doing me an injury, innit though?’ Frank said, ‘Right, that’s it,’ and strode away towards the car park. They watched him go, stretching his arms down and splaying out his fingers, a gesture that had become a habit since Bea once commented that all his shirtsleeves were a little on the long side. He stopped and called back furiously to them.

‘Come on! I have a deadline to meet.’ Yes, he nodded to himself. There’s Lupa, there’s Close and Personal . . . The others stared at him like cattle. ‘And I do not want my evening to seep into your evening of non-sequiturs, pantomime hysteria, pizza crusts and . . .’ He took a few steps towards them and the girls scuttled, giggling, behind Bea. He pointed at them. Bea took a long, slow final breath in. Was he really pointing at them? Yes, I’m pointing, thought Frank, because things are about to change around here. Then he shook his finger at them and Adrian looked up at the sky. ‘I don’t suppose your mother has deigned to inform us of her expected time of arrival, but if you don’t mind, I would like to get back before it gets dark!’ Then he turned on his heel and set off for the car park.

Halfway to the end of the path, he wondered if they were following and hoped that Adrian and Laura understood that it wasn’t that he didn’t love them. Of course he did. Well, he loved Adrian. Perhaps not Laura. Fond, yes. Love, no. There was something hard about her, and all that blingish she talked. What was that all about? An affectation. He was fairly sure that Laura wouldn’t know a US gang member if one came and bit her on the backside. The girl had too much of her mother in her. Katharine Kemp was a fierce, cold woman – ruthless, calculating, clever – the complete opposite of Bea. How Katharine and Bea had emerged from the same parents was a mystery. How Adrian had emerged from Katharine was a bloody miracle.

At the end of the meadow was the kissing gate, where Frank had to stop while a young couple went through. The girl and then the boy became trapped and then were freed with a kiss. Frank waited and coughed, aware of the ache in his lower back beginning to climb. He could smell charcoaled meat from the beer garden, and laughter rose up from the hum of voices. He looked back the way he had come, saw the swallows dive and swoop in the evening air but saw no sign of the others. When the gate was free, he let himself through, going through the paces of the silly foxtrot of love on his own, went to the car and got in. He waited, eyes closed, door open, listening to Bob Dylan on Radio 2. Funny, he thought, how they had reached the stage in life where they listened to Radio 2. They would have laughed at that ten years ago when they first met.

The first time he saw Bea was on the Oriana en route to Madeira. In the lounge a pianist played Abba medleys on the white baby grand to an empty dance floor. When heavy rain forced passengers down from the top deck, the dance floor filled with pensioners and a red spotlight swept the crowd in time to the music. Bea walked up to him then with wet hair and a lost expression on her face. He loved her mouth straightaway. It had a vulnerable look to it that made him want to open doors for her. She was holding a Dubonnet and lemonade and a Bloody Mary and said, ‘Have you seen an elderly lady in red?’ They both laughed. The dance floor was a swarm of old women, swaying together to the strains of ‘Lady in Red’ at half past three in the afternoon—

‘Frank!’

It was Laura, calling and waving from the entrance to the car park. Bea and the other girls were behind her, wet and muddy and cheerful. Bea had her jacket tied round her waist and no skirt on. Rachel wore Bea’s skirt like a sarong. Laura wore just a bra and what appeared to be Adrian’s school trousers. Chanel had a long furry-hooded winter coat zipped up to her nose and shoes that squelched when she walked.

Frank got out of the car. ‘Where’s Adrian?’ At the sight of the empty path, he felt suddenly sick.

Bea put the front seat forward so the girls could get in.

‘He’s being slow because he’s so gay,’ said Laura.

Bea sat in the passenger seat. Frank got in beside her and waited. Then he got out of the car and went to the gate just as Adrian appeared. Adrian wore only the sweatshirt, which barely reached his thighs.

‘The cows started following me,’ he said. ‘I think it’s their path. I had to stay near the hedge.’

‘Someone told me they only threaten females,’ said Bea.

‘That’s what I said. He’s so gay,’ said Laura.

‘Come on, get in,’ said Frank.

Adrian dipped his head inside the car, then stood up and looked mildly at it. ‘Problem,’ he said.

Frank looked at Adrian and then at the car. It was full.

‘Ah,’ said Bea.

‘I’ll walk,’ said Frank, tossing the keys on to the driving seat. ‘It’ll be a pleasure.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Adrian, following Frank up the lane. He waved to Bea and the girls as they drove past.

Frank turned to look at his nephew and said, ‘For God’s sake, Adrian, take that bloody sweatshirt off.’

‘But then I’ll be nearly naked.’

‘Turn it inside out then. You look like a bloody fool.’

‘The girls made me wear it,’ said Adrian, beginning to lift it over his head. ‘For their homework.’

‘You’re talking gibberish now, Adrian.’ Frank began to stride up the lane, towards the main road. ‘I have rather a lot of work to do, so if you want to come with me you’ll have to keep up.’

Adrian stumbled along beside Frank but his head became stuck in the neck of the sweatshirt. Frank stopped and gave it a tug. Adrian yelled. What Frank needed now was a large drink and a good blast of Beethoven at his most tortured. He gave it another yank. What he needed now was Wanda, naked, face down on the couch, swearing in Polish.

Frank stopped pulling and gave the headless torso a push. It staggered and fell into the blackberry bushes. ‘I very much doubt that Laura’s homework was to make her brother wear a sweatshirt saying “Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian”.’

Adrian put the sweatshirt back on inside out. His ears were red. ‘It’s ironic,’ he said. He held Frank’s hand as they waited to cross the main road. ‘They had to find an example of irony. And I’m it.’

Hot

KATHARINE STEPPED THROUGH Bea’s front door backwards, throwing the central locking on her 4x4, which was parked in the middle of the road, hazard lights flashing. She said, ‘Damn this sodding car,’ and ‘Sorry, sorry about the time,’ and ‘Two trains cancelled then unbelievable traffic all the way from the station,’ and ‘What’s wrong with your phone? I’ve been trying to ring all evening.’

Bea said, ‘Mum rang.’

‘What?’ said Katharine, turning and looking behind her. ‘Where?’

‘She phoned me.’

‘Oh.’ Katharine stopped. ‘What did she want at this time?’

Katharine looked at her watch, at the flyers by her feet for pizza, tandoori and minicabs, down the hall for signs of the children, back at the car and then at Bea. Why didn’t she do something about her hair? ‘Adrian! Laura!’ she called. ‘Sorry, yes, go on about Mum. Where’s Frank?’

Bea shrugged. ‘She didn’t want anything. Just to talk.’

Katharine shut the door and put her briefcase down, then picked it up again. Some people they knew had been robbed like that because kids look through the letter box, see the briefcase, handbag, whatever, break the glass, release the door latch and take the bag. All over in ten seconds. Good heavens, was it really half past eight?

‘How is she?’

‘Quite,’ said Bea so that Katharine looked at her properly, which was when she noticed that her sister looked suddenly older. Bea walked away from her, slow and heavy, towards the kitchen. All she needed to do was to lose a few pounds and get her hair done. It wasn’t beyond her, surely.

‘What do you mean, “Quite”?’

Bea stumbled over the children’s school bags and shoved them against the wall with her foot. ‘I mean, she is, as in she’s still alive, existing. But the how, well, I don’t know.’

Katharine scanned the notes and letters on the kitchen counter. Nothing of interest there. Bea was being obtuse. Best not to provoke her.

‘Well, if only she would agree to move closer to us. Of course she’s lonely, stuck out there in the sticks.’

She noted her sister’s ridiculous collection of souvenir donkeys trooping across the windowsill, noticed the wilting flowers and the half-finished glass of wine and thought, this is what happens if you don’t have children or a challenging job. She sat down at the table and stopped herself saying, ‘I hope they aren’t watching crap TV on your bed,’ and ‘You haven’t let Adrian buy any more of those fireworks, have you?’

Bea began clearing the table. ‘Let’s give Mum a surprise birthday party.’

Katharine felt weak at the thought of it all. The move to London, her new job, Laura’s school problems. ‘But it’s so soon.’ Was it soon? October sometime, wasn’t it? ‘There’s no time, is there?’

‘It needn’t be a big deal. Just the family. We’ll have it here.’

Katharine looked round the cramped kitchen. Bea’s collection of ceramica from Spain and Greece adorned every space of wall while jugs and bowls filled every shelf. Dusting those must be a full-time job. They gave the room a warm vibrancy, Katharine couldn’t deny that, but it was absolutely too cramped here for a birthday lunch. And as the front room was where Frank did whatever it was that Frank did in there, well, you couldn’t really have a party in a two-up two-down, could you? She watched Bea make a neat pile of the children’s school clothes and suddenly wondered whether her sister was all right for money.

‘Oh, but our house, surely,’ she said, except it couldn’t be their house, they were moving any day now. Katharine wondered whether Bea would be offended by a cheque.

‘Here will be fine.’ The party would be swamped at Katharine’s in her chilly dining room that seated sixteen. What Bea envisaged was a cosy, informal gathering round her own kitchen table. They could open the back door and put Adrian in charge of a firebasket on the patio.

There was no point reasoning with Bea. Katharine could tell she had already decided. ‘Well, the next few weeks are impossible so I would have to leave the arrangements to you. Get Wanda to help maybe.’ She looked again at her sister and wondered whether something had happened to her. She hoped to God she wasn’t ill. ‘Have you been swimming, Bea? Your hair looks . . .’ No, knowing Bea, she probably just needed to ease up on the alcohol.

Bea touched her head and mumbled something about the river. She felt foolish now. Frank had said not a word to her about it and she decided to let the children tell Katharine. She barely knew how to describe what had happened herself. It frightened her a little, how she had ended up near the fast-flowing centre of the river. Her skirt was soaking upstairs and it had turned the water green. Adrian had found a gleaming black leech jerking determinedly up the side of the bath, and now she was bone-achingly tired and what she really wanted was for everyone to go so that she could watch television in bed and pass out.

What Bea really needs, thought Katharine, is a complete restyle with a proper hairdresser, not that little place round the corner that she’s been going to for years. The woman needs a total overhaul and a new job while she’s at it, because languishing in Shire Hall all these years is probably doing no good at all for her self-esteem, let alone her bank balance.

Katharine said, ‘How’s work?’ and then she said, ‘You know, if I do get the consultant paediatric job in London, there’s no way I can commute.’

Bea tried to arrange too many glasses on the top shelf of the dishwasher. ‘We’ve been restructured. Efficiency measures. And we’re about to be inspected so everyone is—’ There was a crack. She pulled out a broken glass and dropped the pieces in the bin.

A small explosion on the front doorstep was followed by screams, thundering footsteps upstairs and the smell of gunpowder.

Adrian’s voice called down from above. ‘Sorry!’

Katharine went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up. ‘Come on, Adrian, we have to go. Where’s Laura? Laura!’ She took a few wary steps upwards. ‘Come on. Time to leave!’

Bea stood in the hall and heard Laura’s voice wheedling from the landing.

‘Do we have to go now? We haven’t had our ice cream.’

‘Well, we’ll have that when we get home,’ said Katharine.

‘There isn’t any. You know there isn’t.’

‘We’ll get some on the way. Sainsbury’s. Who’s up there with you?’

‘No one. I’m doing my homework.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Adrian.

‘Shut up!’

‘I think you’re tired, darling,’ said Katharine.

‘I’m not. I need a shower.’

‘That’s true,’ said Adrian.

‘Shut up!’

‘You can have a shower at home, Laura.’

‘I fell in the river.’

‘You fell in the river?’ Katharine looked to where Bea had been standing but Bea had disappeared. Really, things had got completely out of hand with this arrangement. ‘What happened? For heaven’s sake, Bea? Bea!’

‘Bea fell in too.’

‘But it’s nearly October.’ (Was it nearly October? It could be nearly March – time just flew.) ‘And there’s Weil’s disease, darling, you don’t want that. You might . . .’ She took a step up towards Laura, who shrank from her. Katharine stopped where she was. What was the matter with the child? All Laura’s boundaries were becoming blurred. God knows what was going on at that school. ‘Are your glands up? Do you feel achey at all? Where’s your uniform?’

Laura coughed and looked ill. ‘Can I stay here tonight?’

‘What’s that noise?’

‘My French tape.’

‘Are you watching television up there?’

‘No.’

‘I can hear it.’

‘Well I’m not.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Adrian.

‘Shut up, ugly!’