‘Come on, you monkey,’ he said, bearing her off to the far end of the long table under the fog-bound windows that had been elaborately laid for dinner.
The children were sitting at one end of the table; the adults were at the other. The red-haired girl sat in the middle. I had been placed opposite Eloise and for a while I watched her as her eyes darted anxiously around her guests, her fingers frequently fluttering over her own dress and hair, which she touched as though to reassure herself of something. She had a mild, pretty face, with small pink-rimmed eyes that seemed always to be on the verge of tears and a valiant smile that she showed often as though to counterbalance them. She was quite unlike Susie, who had been a tall, strong, voluble woman given to issuing orders and to the management of practicalities, and whose organisational grip was so fierce that she had timetabled her and Lawrence’s life far into the future and was often able to tell you where they would be and what they would be doing on a date months and sometimes years away. In Susie’s company Lawrence had become increasingly truculent and uncooperative, something she alone appeared not to have noticed, for she was, I supposed, insensitive. Nonetheless it seemed peculiarly cruel that in all her obsessive forecasting of the future, Lawrence’s absence from it had never been permitted to cross her mind. She was lonely these days, Lawrence had told me, and was trying – not always successfully – to behave with civility and even generosity towards Eloise and himself. I told him that she had sent my sons Christmas presents. They were so carefully and beautifully wrapped that the sight of them had caused me to feel a disproportionate sadness, as though what lay beneath the wrapping was not some toy or game but innocence itself, the innocence of good intentions that would eventually be worn out or discarded once they had been exposed. This innocence suddenly seemed much realer than all the documented aberrations in Susie’s conduct both before and after Lawrence had left her: in that moment – I did not say to him – I wanted nothing more than that he should go back and honour his promises to her.
Eloise had noticed me looking at her and she immediately gathered her straying attention and directed it in a single smiling beam towards me. She clasped her hands over her bosom, leaning as though confidentially across the table.
‘I want to know everything!’ she said.
Her younger son Jake had left his place at the other end of the table and was standing at her elbow. He tapped her arm.
‘What is it, Jakey?’ she said, turning her head distractedly.
He stood on tiptoe to whisper in her ear and she listened with an expression of bright patience on her face. When he’d finished she excused herself and got up and went to speak to Lawrence, who was taking food out of the oven, an apron tied around his waist.
While she was gone Jake asked me if I had ever been to Mars. I said that I hadn’t.
‘I’ve got a photograph of it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see it?’
He went away and came back with a book and laid it open on the table in front of me.
‘Do you see what that is?’ he said, pointing.
I said it looked like a footprint. He nodded his head.
‘That’s what it is,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have seen it in real life,’ he added, disappointed. He said he was going to live on Mars, just as soon as he was old enough to get a rocket. Sounds like a good plan, I said.
Lawrence came over and told Jake to sit back down in his place.
‘And don’t go asking Mummy for different food,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to eat the same thing.’
Jake looked immediately anxious.
‘But what if I don’t like it?’ he said.
I saw that Lawrence was struggling to keep his temper. His face was brick red and his mouth was set in a line.
‘Then don’t eat it,’ he said. ‘But you’ll be hungry.’
Eloise came and sat back down, straightening her dress. She leaned across the table to address me in her confidential whisper.
‘Have you ever noticed how controlling Lawrence is about food?’ she said. ‘He’s positively French. We were in a restaurant the other day and he made Angelica eat a snail.’
Angelica was Lawrence’s daughter.
‘The poor child was like Joan of Arc at the stake,’ Eloise said. ‘Jakey and Ben were absolutely goggle-eyed. You could see they were thinking they’d be next. Jakey only eats sugar,’ she added. ‘And Ben won’t touch anything that’s not basically white. They wouldn’t go near her for hours afterwards. They said they could smell it on her breath.’
She glanced around the table and then leaned even further across towards me.
‘He gets so angry when I give them what they want,’ she whispered. ‘He’s appalled at their lack of discipline. You know Jakey doesn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘He comes into our room four or five times a night and Lawrence won’t let him get into our bed. He doesn’t approve of it. The thing is,’ she said, ‘Jakey always used to get into my bed. It was what made him go back to sleep. But now I have to get up with him and take him downstairs in the middle of the night.’
I asked her what they did together at that hour.
‘We watch television,’ she said. ‘The thing is,’ she went on, leaning even closer, ‘Susie was very organised. She got it all out of books. They had a whole library of them. Every time a child did something you’d have to stop and wait while she went and looked it up. Some of it,’ she added, ‘was actually quite Victorian.’
I remembered once visiting Susie and Lawrence’s house and coming across Angelica aged three or four sitting alone at the bottom of a staircase. It was the naughty step, she told me when I asked. She was still there when I left.
‘I say to Lawrence, honey, we’ve just got to love them.’ Eloise’s eyes were filling with water. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? They just need you to love them.’
I said I didn’t know. For someone like Lawrence that kind of love was indistinguishable from self-abnegation.
‘I think people are frightened,’ Eloise said. ‘Frightened of their own children.’
If that was true, I said, it was because they saw in their children the register of their own failings and misdemeanours.