How different our day could have been. I pictured Rosie running through the garden with Beth, lost in an imaginary game, whizzing back and forth through the hedges between her camp and Beth’s. And me, with my best friend, who would be jangling her bangles and laughing her head off as she poured more Pimms into my glass, telling me to seize the day, to relax and enjoy life as much as she did.
‘Sorry.’ He handed me the arrowroot jar as though it was a peace offering.
‘Did you happen to see a couple of police cars flying round the close today by any chance?’ I asked angrily.
‘Trouble in the ‘hood, was there?’ He opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine.
I took it from him and put it back in the fridge. ‘I think you’d better have some coffee. You’re going to need to sober up for this.’
I handed him a coffee pod.
‘Sounds ominous,’ he said, taking it and dropping it three times before slotting it into the machine.
‘Those police cars were at our house.’
The noise of the coffee machine was so loud, it drowned out what I had said.
‘The police did what?’
‘The police cars were at our house. Mira called the police on us.’
Even before he had a sip of coffee, the lax, drunken muscles of his face tightened. He sat down on the stool at the island and shot back his espresso.
‘Say that again, Gemma.’
‘Mira called the police and two officers came round and basically accused me of abusing Rosie.’
‘You’re having me on.’
‘If only.’
‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ he said, almost aggressively.
The spice jars slowly filled up the racks as I methodically took him through every detail, missing nothing out. Peter’s face became progressively graver.
At the end, I waited for him to react. I was expecting outrage and incredulity.
‘You should have changed your shirt,’ he said.
My mouth gaped open. ‘What?’
‘The blood would have made it look much worse.’
My hands hung suspended in the air in front of me, palms open, as I stared at him gormlessly almost, at a loss. ‘But, Peter, I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘I know that.’
‘A guilty person changes their bloody clothes,’ I said, disbelief catching my throat.
‘Is Rosie okay now?’
‘She clammed up completely when I tried to ask her about what she said to PC Connolly.’ My stomach lurched at the thought.
‘Probably because she’s still traumatised.’
‘Likewise.’ I rolled my eyes, feeling misunderstood and undervalued.
He shook his head back and forth before he responded. ‘The police are trained to make everyone feel like a criminal, aren’t they? It doesn’t mean they think you are.’
‘I promise you they were really quite reassuring by the end,’ I said, biting my lip, wondering why I couldn’t mention that Social Services were to be notified.
‘And they can’t change their minds?’
‘Jesus, Peter. You’re really freaking me out.’
I imagined the two officers chatting about me on their drive back to the station, analysing and reassessing their information; at their computers, tapping out a report for Social Services.
Peter jumped off the stool and wrapped his arms around me. ‘Sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. What an ordeal.’
Over his shoulder I noticed the cumin pot was the wrong side of the cardamon seeds. I shrugged him off and switched the jars round. ‘If that Mira woman is watching us, what will she do next time Rosie has a tantrum?’
‘Rosie cannot have another tantrum,’ Peter stated firmly.
‘Right, yes, it’s that simple.’
A twitch of a smile appeared on Peter’s face. ‘A cream egg?’
‘Don’t even joke,’ I smiled, relieved he was coming round.
Both of us looked over at the kitchen window to Mira’s house and a nasty spread of hatred rolled through my body.
‘Why does Rosie put herself through it?’ Peter asked desperately. ‘It can’t be any fun for her.’
‘And it’s only ever directed at me.’
‘You’re her safe haven, I suppose.’
How ironic, I thought, when I was possibly the one person most likely to retaliate. Perhaps this was what she was aiming for, to push me and push me and push me, to check that my love was truly unconditional, to make sure I loved her enough to take the battering. It scared me to think that she needed to test me so radically, that she suspected a weakness in me.
Peter moved away and pulled his fingers across his scalp. When he turned around, there wasn’t a hint of the joke left in his expression. He looked as unsettled as I felt, and he opened his mouth long before he spoke.
‘Where does she get it from?’ he said under his breath, staring at me like a man about to be hit by a train.
I took a step back from him as though he was now capable of hitting me.
‘What difference does that make?’ I hissed back.
He turned away from me and bent over the kitchen work surface with his head in his hands.
I left him there, escaping to the study and pushing the door shut, leaning my forehead into it, the pressure on my skull causing a pleasant circle of pain.
Distraction became urgent. I sat at the computer. A slick of sweat cooled my face and my fingers trembled as I typed in the password for my work emails. I needed to silence the lingering implication on Peter’s lips.
Chapter Fourteen
Enclosed in her small, green dining room, Mira shuffled her chair tightly in, until her belly was up against the edge of the table and her back was straight. The only sound was the flick-flack of photographs through her fingers. The motion reminded her of sifting through piles of autumn leaves as a child to find the best, biggest and brightest leaf.
While Barry slept upstairs, she discarded one snapshot after the other, her mind stuck in the unpleasant groove of a day that she had wanted to forget.
PC Yorke and PC Connolly had left hours ago. They had asked many questions. At first she had felt important, and then empty. She had wanted to talk to Barry before he went to bed but the words never came out. She had wanted to ask him if she had been mistaken. She didn’t feel confident about any of it anymore, and she was fretting about the role Deidre had played. Her sister had always been the strong-minded, unwavering one of the two of them. While Mira shilly-shallied over which biscuit to choose from an assortment box, Deidre would snatch the one she wanted without hesitation. There seemed to Mira to be so many considerations and uncertainties and options in an average day; she found it hard to get through without prevaricating over something or other. If Deidre hadn’t been there, would Mira have actually made that call?
Before Deidre had squeezed herself back into her car to return home – most definitely over the limit after three gin and tonics – she had praised Mira for ‘doing the right thing’ and she had reminded her of all the little babies who had died because people turned a blind eye. Nevertheless, ‘the right thing’ was beginning to feel like a grey area. Was it too late to take it back? Would it be worth calling PC Connolly again, and talking through her doubts? She couldn’t imagine police people looking kindly on doubts.
Uneasiness hung in the air around her. The Bradleys’ house next door, which had for so many years sat benignly next to theirs, seemed now to have an iniquitous glow. Every time she thought about Gemma, her stomach jumped into her throat.