An early September morning, the day summer crumbles into autumn. Thick fog presses up at the windows. Romy sits enthroned in the wooden child’s high chair from the attic that Jessie has restored, nibbling one of the orchard’s first almost-ripe apples. The clock ticks on the newly painted calamine-pink kitchen wall. The silence is shouty. Romy nudges the apple off the table to the tiled floor, where it lands with an impressive thump, its red skin splitting, revealing wet white flesh. “Uh-oh.”
Jessie glances distractedly at the apple rolling into the little tepee she’s made for Romy out of sticks and an old sheet in the corner of the kitchen, then at the clock again, then at Will, who is by the range, being careful not to lean upon its greasy flank, blue-lipped from his icy shower, since the plumber didn’t turn up. Dressed for his second week wooing investors in his slim-cut navy suit, clean white shirt, and Italian leather brogues, he seems almost comically at odds with his surroundings now, and in danger of being soiled by them at any moment: the butcher’s block scattered with Romy’s craft glue and pasta shapes; the fuzzy sheepskins that Jessie’s laid over the spindle-back kitchen chairs to make them more comfortable; and Jessie herself, who has been up for hours already—Romy now wakes with the cockerels at dawn, maddeningly in sync with her environment—and is wearing baggy denim dungarees splattered with the pink kitchen paint, the knees shiny from bending down, yanking up brambles. “What is Bella doing up there? Shall I go up?” she asks, even though she’d rather not. She’ll never get used to that gallery of Mandy.
“Give her one more minute.” Will frowns, rakes back his hair.
“Apple, Daddy.” Romy points imperiously at the floor.
“You must think I’m sillier than you, ma’am.” But Will picks it up, hands it to her, putty in Romy’s hands, as he is in Bella’s. Guilty, too. Soon, he will say good-bye.
Romy, oblivious to Daddy’s imminent departure, grins, swings the bare tough tiny feet that seem permanently grubby from weeks of scuffing along the house’s oak floorboards, the centuries of dust and God knows what wedged in their cracks. She knocks the apple off the table again. “Uh-oh.”
Jessie presses the gold gingerbread man pendant on her necklace between her fingers, feeling stress rise through her body like prickly heat, her anxious gaze sticking to the clock. Bella has to be at the school bus stop by eight. Although Will woke her with a cup of tea an hour ago and was instructed to go away, she’s not yet emerged. Since Bella got her exam results a few days ago, she’s been sleeping late, increasingly withdrawn, brooding in that bedroom like a fierce young owl. The grades were a blow, not an unexpected one, and not because they were particularly bad, only because Bella knew she could have done so much better, that she’d not fulfilled the promise of her early school years, the glowing reports that stopped abruptly with her mother’s death. Jessie fears that she’ll simply give up, or refuse to go to Squirrels, and that one of the main reasons they’ve moved from London could fall apart. What on earth would they do then? How could they justify being here?
The question tightens like a belt across her chest. Reality has hit hard this morning. Will is in his suit, armed for corporate combat. The air is wet and cidery, the river starting to swell. Yesterday Jessie saw swallows, tiny beautiful birds, wheeling south for winter. For some reason, the sight made her eyes fill with tears.
Hearing the slow clap of footsteps on the stairs, Jessie and Will rush into the hall, their fingers touching, not daring to entwine. And there is Bella, unexpectedly shy, hand gripping the wooden banister, halfway down. Except it is not a Bella they recognize. In a pleated gray skirt, wool blazer, and striped burgundy tie, her face scrubbed clean of makeup, dark hair tied back, she looks like a schoolgirl from long ago, nothing like the precocious alley-cat teen in tiny denim shorts and black tights who used to stalk around London, eyes cast down, in silent sullen communion with her cell phone. Will beams. He grabs Jessie’s hand and holds it tightly behind his back against the wool of his suit. Jessie smiles. “You look wonderful,” she tells Bella truthfully.
“I feel like a right twat.”
After a hurried breakfast, Bella insists on walking to the bus stop by herself, no embarrassing family send-off. At the front door, Will stands back admiringly, holding Bella’s hands and swinging her arms, as if she were a little girl in a new party dress. “I’m sorry I have to be in London all week again. It’s just until I secure the finance, okay? Good. That’s my girl. You don’t have to pretend to miss me.”
Jessie glances away, feeling like an intruder. When she looks back, Bella is walking down the gravel path into the fog, her skirt brushing against the spent silver lavender heads, and the sight makes her heart lurch. “Bella . . .” she calls. Bella turns around and there is an awkward pregnant moment, a moment when a mother would naturally run and hug her daughter good-bye. The thought of Bella’s recoil stops Jessie even attempting it. “Good luck,” she says instead.
Bella nods in receipt. The moment has gone.
“Bye-bye, Bell Bell.” Romy waves excitedly. Bella keeps walking. She doesn’t wave back.
Will’s turn to leave. He pulls Jessie gently toward him by the straps of her dungarees until their foreheads meet, the tips of their noses. Over the tailoring of his shoulder, Jessie can see dense black clouds framed in the paned glass, their shadows like huge airships moving slowly over the hills toward them. She’s hit by a sense of foreboding.
And yet she knows this is the sensible thing to do. The days he struggled up to London last week proved that a daily commute isn’t feasible, not with these back-to-back meetings, canceled trains, early starts. And it would be stupid to turn down the offer of a nice spare room in a friend’s house during the week—churlish even to observe that his host, an attractive divorced doctor called Kate, was one of Mandy’s best friends. Besides, it’s just a temporary measure. He’ll secure the finance quickly.
“You sure you’ll be okay here on your own?” he asks gently.
Jessie’s thoughts turn to the woman with the dogs, the one Bella said was in the lane again yesterday evening, staring up at the house. “Check out the dungarees, the hoary leather boots.” She smiles. “Would you really mess with a woman who looks like this?”
“You do look like you might cut your evening cigar with the wood ax.”
Jessie thinks of the photos of stylish, elegant Mandy in Bella’s room and her smile fades. Does Will ever compare his two wives? Is it even possible not to, given that the pictures are so in his face? Jessie remembers her mother’s warnings about moving to the country, what it can do to a marriage.
Will’s expression grows serious again. “Now that Bella’s back at school, you’ll be able to meet other mothers in the area, all that stuff,” he says in the hesitant manner of a man who senses he might be fluffing it.
“Civilize myself?” she says quickly.