Flora sat once more by her father’s bed. His breathing had changed to a rumble like an approaching Underground train. She stared at his collapsed face, trying to reimagine Gil into a womanizer, someone who had slept with “whoever he could get his hands on.” A man who took women to his writing room while his wife and children slept a few yards away. The image didn’t come. The knowledge, if that’s what it was, also changed the way she thought about Ingrid—made her more concrete, a real person with thoughts and feelings, decisions to make and an understanding of their consequences. Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words “to father” have such a different meaning from the words “to mother.”
When she wasn’t sitting, she stood by the window, looking out at the concrete sky and the drive, hoping to hear the Morris Minor’s throaty engine.
After Nan had thrown the bowl at the kitchen wall, she’d run out of the house without taking her car key; she’d fled along the lane or to the beach. Flora and Richard didn’t see which way she went.
“Let her go,” Richard said, holding Flora back. “Give her some time.”
Flora wanted to chase after her, but she remembered Nan’s warning about not leaving Gil alone, so she made Richard go down to the sea to look for her sister. When he returned, he said he’d waded around Dead End Point and walked as far as the nudist beach sign and had seen dog walkers, kite fliers, and birds, but no Nan. She sent him to the pub to bang on the door until they opened up; she wasn’t there. Without clearing up the debris in the kitchen, Flora made jam sandwiches but picked at hers. She brewed a pot of tea, which she poured but left to go cold, and when even Richard had tired of waiting, he agreed to go out in the car and drive through the lanes and to the ferry to check whether anyone matching Nan’s description had boarded.
Only after he was home again did Flora think of Viv, but when she telephoned the bookshop there was no reply, even though it should have been open. Flora sent Richard out again, to Hadleigh. When he had left, she wrote down Nan’s numbers from the kitchen telephone and stretched the curled mustard cord of the sitting-room phone tight across the hall and into the front bedroom. When it wouldn’t come any farther, she gave it a yank. It caught on a corner of one of the stacks of books, which toppled. Hardbacks about space and time, paperbacks about love affairs, tumbling together with poetry pamphlets and novellas, knocked the top off another stack and then another, like a line of dominos. She didn’t pick them up. Sitting on the edge of the chair next to Gil, she dialled the bookshop and Nan’s numbers, letting them ring until the answerphones cut in, then trying again and again. She worried she had lost her sister too.
The noise of a car turning onto the drive made Flora jump up and run to the door. It was small and white, not the Morris Minor. A man unfolded himself from the passenger’s seat.
“Jonathan!” Flora said, and ran out of the house and down the veranda steps. He flung his arms wide and they hugged; then he held her away from him and stared at her face.
“Jesus, you look more like your mother every time I see you.”
“I’m so pleased you’re here,” she said into the cloth of his jacket, breathing in the smell of him—cigarettes the colour of wet bark. She was aware of other doors opening, and when she stood back to look around him, she saw Louise, her fingers with polished nails clutching the top of the car door as if she needed the support.
“Hello, Flora,” she said. And before Flora could answer, someone else stood up from the driver’s seat: a man at once familiar and unknown. He raised a hand awkwardly.
“Do you remember Gabriel?” Jonathan said. “He says he met you once, a long time ago.”
Flora was aware she was frowning and her mouth was open.
The man had stubble and long hair, but he could have been the same age as the teenager she remembered. “Gabriel,” she said. “I don’t know whether Daddy . . .”
“It’s OK,” Gabriel said. “He asked me to come.”
“You are expecting us, aren’t you?” Jonathan said. “I spoke to Nan.”
“Yes,” Flora said. “But I didn’t know who . . . I just wasn’t expecting you all . . . now.”
“Is Nan here? I’m parched,” Jonathan said.
“She went out,” Flora said, reversing, blocking the way into the house. “I’m not sure when she’ll be home.”
“But Gil’s in?” Jonathan said.
“How is he?” Louise asked. She slammed the car door shut and came forwards. Flora took two more steps away from them. Her ankles touched the bottom tread of the stairs.
“Tired,” Flora said. “Very tired. I don’t know if he’s up to guests right now.”
“But we’ve come all this way,” Louise said, as if the length of her journey had some bearing.