Danny gripped the mouthpiece harder. “This is her son. She’s not in. May I take a message?”
“I’m returning her call about the bookkeeping position here in Chelmsford. Will you let her know she’s been selected for an interview in two weeks’ time? Thursday, at ten o’clock.”
Chelmsford?
His throat was too tight to swallow, but he let out a strangled, “Yes.”
“Thank you, dear. Have a nice day.”
He stared at the telephone until a loud and unpleasant blaring exploded from the receiver, then slammed it down and went upstairs. He couldn’t remember how to put away his socks. The rubbish bin stayed overturned where he’d kicked it. Unable to stand the questions that stabbed the backs of his eyes, he retreated to bed.
The front door opened and closed around ten. Danny had dozed off, and his stomach was hollow and vengeful. He went downstairs as if marching to the gallows.
His mother was puffing on a cigarette in the kitchen, flitting about like a worker bee. Smoke streaked the air in gray clouds. Danny waved them away.
“Mum?”
“Still up, are you? How’s the auto?”
“Cass has it in the shop. It needs a new boiler.”
Leila clucked her tongue. “Can’t be helped, the poor thing is getting on in years.” She dragged a pot onto the stove. “Had a chat with Cassie’s mum. She told me Cassie’s going to a social dance. You’ll be going, I hope? There’s a nice suit in your closet you never wear. I’ll straighten it up and make sure it still fits.”
“Mum?” He waited until she turned around. Leila’s face had become lined around her mouth, her lips pursed as if she always thought she were smoking. Runaway curls had sprung free from her coiffure, giving her a particularly mad look. Her shoulders sagged with exhaustion.
“What is it, Danny?”
He took a deep breath. “Why have you applied to a job in Chelmsford?”
She stood stock-still, her dark eyes like a frightened deer’s when the hunter’s caught a glimpse of it. She turned and rearranged the pot, then grabbed a few potatoes on the counter.
“Mum.”
“It’ll pay more than my current job,” she said, studying the potato in her hand. “Much more.”
“Chelmsford is at least two hours away. How d’you expect to get there every day?” When she remained quiet, he finally understood. “You want us to move?”
“Chelmsford’s a nice place, and—”
“My life’s in London,” he said. “My friends, my job, my—everything’s here, Mum! Everything is in London.”
“Then you can stay here,” she said, “and I’ll move to Chelmsford.”
Life tilted a bit, and he looked at it from this new angle. Living in London without his mother? Was such a thing possible, or was it on the list of things he thought would never happen?
He knew he could have a place of his own, some grimy flat above a barber’s shop—that’s where people his age went to live, wasn’t it?—but then he would be truly alone. The gaping threat of the future chilled him.
Perhaps his mother simply didn’t want to be near him anymore. Perhaps, finally, she had stopped caring.
“You have a job, you have connections,” Leila said. “You’ll be fine here on your own.”
Danny detected something stiff about her, something in the way her eyes moved to the pot to avoid his gaze. He thought of Chelmsford and the towns around it. What the mechanics were trying to build on the very edge of its time zone, right where it met Maldon’s.
“You want to go because of Dad.” He said the words slowly, his voice hard with accusation. “You want to be closer to Maldon.” Danny flinched when she shoved the pot away with a scraping clatter.
“Of course I want to be closer to him! Why do you make it out like that’s a bad thing? I miss him, Danny. We both do.”
Danny was alarmed, and ashamed, to see that her cheeks were wet. She turned and wiped her face around a sniff like paper tearing.
“It won’t bring him back,” he said quietly. They had lived that first year in anticipation, thinking Christopher would come through the door at any moment. But just because his father now lived where time stood still didn’t mean their lives could stand still also.
“I know that,” his mother said. “I only want to be closer to him, to see if I can f-feel him, somehow.” Her shoulders shook. “If it were you, if it had h-happened to someone you … Wouldn’t you do the same? Wouldn’t you do anything for the one you love?”
Danny felt the wound again, the sharp slide of stone. He clutched his stomach and closed his eyes. He deserved this. He deserved her leaving him.
Nothing would get through to her now.
“A woman named Collins called,” he said. “You have an interview in two weeks. Thursday, ten o’clock.”
Leila turned her head, her eyelashes formed into wet spikes. “Thank you, Danny.”
He went to bed hungry.
The news made the front page of next day’s paper:
ROTHERFIELD CLOCK TOWER BOMBED—CITIZENS ALARMED