The light was on in the main room—kitchen, bedroom, and sitting room—but Richard, who must have got up, was now back under the covers with his eyes closed. The dirty plates had gone from the floor and were stacked on the table, the remains of the food scraped into the bin. In her food cupboard Flora found a box of Rice Krispies and dropped her phone inside. She sat on the sofa, trying to imagine her father broken and bruised in a hospital bed, but she could only see him wiry and brown, striding beside her over the heath, or showing her another book he’d found. She thought about her mother walking around Hadleigh right now, or sitting in a shop or a pub or a café. It made her hands shake and the creature in her stomach flip over. And then she realised that her mother wouldn’t be in any of those places; she would be waiting for them at home.
Flora watched Richard sleeping. There was no noise of wind or rain in the main room. The ceiling bulb shone full on his face and he looked different without his glasses, not just younger, but blanker, more unformed. She kneeled beside the bed and scrabbled underneath it for her suitcase.
“Who was that?” Richard said, opening one eye.
“No one,” Flora said, tugging at what she hoped was a handle.
“Why are you wearing that? Isn’t it a tablecloth? You must be bloody freezing. Come back to bed.” He lifted up the duvet to reveal his torso.
“Oh,” she said, “I’d forgotten about that.”
“What?” Richard craned his neck forwards to stare at his body. He clawed with his free hand on the shelf below the bedside table and brought up his glasses. When he put them on, he gasped in mock surprise. Between the brown hairs that covered his chest and flowed from his belly button was an anatomical drawing of his insides—ribs, sternum, clavicle, the start of his pelvis, and the wrapped snake of his intestines—all in indelible black felt-tip. “You have to come back to bed.” He leaned over to pull her towards him. “I don’t have any arms or legs yet. You need to finish your drawing or I can’t go back to work.” He smiled.
“Did you know it’s nine thirty?” Flora said, giving another yank on the suitcase handle and toppling backwards onto the carpet.
“Nine thirty? In the morning?” Richard dropped the duvet.
“No, in the bloody evening,” Flora said.
Richard reached out again for the shelf below the bedside table. This time he brought up his phone plugged into his charger, and Flora felt a flash of irritation not only that he had remembered to charge it but also that he had been sensible enough to put it somewhere safe.
He gave a long whistle. “Nine thirty. Maybe it’s nine thirty tomorrow and we missed the whole of Saturday. Work is going to be really pissed off with me.”
Flora gave up on the suitcase, went to the drawer where she kept her underwear and rooted through it.
“Is everything all right?” He sat up in bed to watch her.
“It was Nan,” Flora said. “On the phone.”
“Your grandmother?”
“Nanette. My sister.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister. Older or younger?”
“Five and a half years older,” Flora said. She dumped a handful of knickers and bras in the middle of the floor. She returned to the chest of drawers to go through her jeans and jumpers.
“What did she want?”
“I have to go home.”
“Right now? As in, this instant?”
“Yes, right now,” she said as she dropped another pile of clothes on the first and turned to him. “As in, immediately. Daddy’s been taken to hospital, and I need you to get up so I can get my suitcase from under the bed.”
“Daddy?” Richard said.
“Yes. Gil, my father. Do you have to repeat everything I say?” Flora stood with her fists on her hips. Richard got out of the bed, found his pants and jeans, and pulled them on. He bent to get her suitcase and sat on the side of the bed, watching her pack. The case had belonged to her mother and was made of blue cardboard, with rounded corners. Flora was facing away from him, but she could feel Richard’s mind working.
“Hang on,” he said. “Gil? Your father’s called Gil? And isn’t your surname Coleman?”
Flora sighed. She hadn’t realised he knew her surname. It had taken a little less than two weeks for Richard to work it out. That wasn’t bad; once, she had discovered that a boy had only slept with her after he had found out who her father was. She never returned his calls.
“That Gil Coleman?” Richard said. “The Gil Coleman who wrote A Man of Pleasure?” She knew without turning around what the expression on his face would be, and that was why, she reminded herself, she must never sleep with a bookshop assistant again.
“That’s the one,” Flora said, pressing sketchbooks and a box of charcoal on top of her clothes.
“My God. Gil Coleman is your father. I can’t believe it. I thought he was dead. He hasn’t written anything else since that book, has he?”
“I expect you think it’s all a bit I Capture the Castle.” Flora tried to laugh it off. But looking at Richard from where she sat on top of the case trying to lock it, she could see he had remembered that there was something else; another thing that was memorable about Gil Coleman apart from the book he had written. It was coming and it was best to get it over with, and then she could leave and not see Richard again. The suitcase clicked shut.
“Wait,” he said, sitting up straight, with one hand on his forehead and the other in the air, as if she had been doing something to stop him thinking. “Wait, I know this story.”