She could feel something ascending within her. A rising scale of fury. A melody from her childhood. She looked at her mother’s familiar face: the grey fringe cut in that unflinching straight line over her protuberant brown eyes, the big, determined nose, the large, utilitarian ears, for hearing, not earrings. Her mother was all strength and certainty. Never a moment’s doubt over a spider or a tight parking spot or a moral dilemma.
‘That little girl needs a friend,’ she’d told Clementine the first time she saw Erika in the school playground. The different kid. The unpleasant-looking kid sitting cross-legged on the asphalt playing with old brown leaves and ants. The kid with the greasy blonde hair flat against her head, the pasty dead white skin and the scabby sores dotting her arms. (Flea bites, Clementine learned many years later.) Clementine had looked at the little girl, and looked back at her mother and felt one enormous word caught in her throat: No.
But you didn’t say no to Pam, especially not when she used that tone of voice.
So Clementine went and sat down opposite Erika in the playground and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And she’d glanced over at her mother for the nod of approval, because Clementine was being kind, and kindness was the most important thing of all, except that Clementine didn’t feel kind. She was faking it. She didn’t want anything to do with this dirty-looking little girl. Her selfishness was a nasty secret she had to hide at all costs because Clementine was privileged.
Pam was a woman ahead of her time in her use of the word ‘privilege’. Clementine learned to feel bad about her white middle-class privilege long before it became fashionable. Her mother was a social worker, and unlike many of her exhausted, jaded, bitter-jokes co-workers Pam never lost her passion for her vocation. She worked part-time while bringing up three children and she loved to share unflinching accounts of what really went on in the world.
Clementine’s family wasn’t particularly wealthy, but privilege was measured on a different scale when you saw what Pam did. Life was a lottery and Clementine knew from a very early age that she had apparently won it.
‘What are you going to say to Erika?’ said Pam.
‘What choice do I have?’ said Clementine.
‘Of course you have a choice, Clementine; it will be your biological child. It’s a big thing to ask. You don’t –’
‘Mum,’ said Clementine. ‘Think about it.’ For once she was the unequivocal one. Her mother hadn’t been there at the barbeque. Her mother didn’t have those ghastly images burned forever across her memory.
She watched her mother think about it, and come to the same conclusion.
‘I see what you mean,’ she said uneasily.
‘I’m going to do it,’ said Clementine fast, before her mother could speak. ‘I’m going to say yes. I have to say yes.’
chapter nineteen
‘Are you okay? You’re not still upset about our friend Harry?’ said Vid, lying next to Tiffany in their dark bedroom while the rain continued its incessant soundtrack.
Thanks to their red velvet ‘absolute blackout’ curtains Tiffany could see absolutely nothing but black. Normally the darkness felt luxurious, like a hotel room, but tonight it felt suffocating. Like death. There was too much death on her mind these days.
Although she couldn’t see Vid in their king-sized bed, she knew he would be lying flat on his back, his hands crossed behind his head like a sunbaker. He slept the entire night like that without changing position. It still made Tiffany laugh after all these years. It was such a casual, confident, aristocratic approach to sleep. You may approach, sleep. So very Vid.
‘He wasn’t our friend, was he?’ said Tiffany. ‘That’s the point. He was our neighbour but he wasn’t our friend.’
‘He didn’t want to be our friend, you know,’ Vid reminded her.
It was true that if Harry had been at all interested in friendship with them he would have got it. Vid was open to friendship with anyone he encountered in his daily life: baristas and barristers, service station attendants and cellists.
Definitely cellists.
If Harry had been a different sort of old man they would have had him over all the time and they would have noticed his absence so much sooner.
Soon enough to have saved his life? Today, the police had told Oliver and Tiffany that it seemed most likely that Harry had either fallen down the stairs, or had a stroke or heart attack and perhaps had fallen as a result. There would be a coroner’s inquest. It seemed like a formality. The police were going through a process; ticking off the boxes.
‘He probably died instantly,’ the policeman told Tiffany, but how would he know? He had no medical expertise. He was just saying it to make her feel better.