First Aid (17 page)

She said he didn't see anything did he? He made all this stuff up and he didn't see what was really going on. She said Jo was always shutting the shop for a couple of hours: the blind down and the closed sign up. She and Trevor liked doing it with people walking by outside. It was like being on stage with the curtains down. He wasn't to think that his turning up was going to stop it. Not for more than five minutes. He was a kind of blip. Jo was probably trying to make Trevor jealous. Whatever it was, it had worked. It was on again. He would soon notice that they were seeing each other every day and calling each other. They would go out in the middle of the night, like last time. Driving to some parking place. They weren't particularly careful. None of them would mind. Not even Annie. Where did he think
she
came from when her parents weren't getting on? Why did he think Trevor was so nice to her? The story was out of control – full of holes and the holes growing bigger. She had left Felpo and started to run. People had stared at her. She'd got to the sea and then she hadn't known where to go. She was sure he'd tell Jo. There would be a row. She'd have to style it out. She had run back towards home. She had stepped out in front of a lorry. The driver had shouted at her. She'd knocked into an old man. She'd reached the house. She'd run up the stairs. Her mother was there, but it was different from what she'd expected.

Ella realised that she still hadn't spoken.

‘It wasn't true what I said about Mum and Trevor. It was me you saw, not her,' she said.

Felpo paused fractionally – and threw the cup. That went in the bin too.

‘Thanks for telling me,' he said.

She couldn't read anything in his face.

‘None of it was true,' she said.

He still didn't speak.

‘Doesn't it make any difference?' she said.

‘Not really,' he said.

He sat down again. She waited. Cars were starting their engines.

‘The lie doesn't matter. It's the least important thing about it,' he said.

‘But, if I hadn't,' Ella said.

‘Forget it. It was made-up. The rest was real.' He hesitated. ‘She wouldn't want me after that. I'm sorry, I can't talk about it.'

She looked down at her hands; her dirty fingernails, the silly elastic bracelets.

‘You're tired,' he said. ‘Why don't you go home?'

‘I suppose I might,' she said.

‘There's no point hanging around here,' he said.

He stood up again.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘I'll take you back.'

Ella stood up too but she didn't move. She jammed her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, as if she were afraid to let them out.

‘Why not?' he said.

Ella dropped her head and her hair hid her face.

‘I understand,' he said. He gave a sort of laugh. ‘You're not taking any chances. I don't blame you. Here, call your dad and ask for a lift. Then I'll push off.'

He handed her his phone. Ella took it but hesitated, staring at it as if she were trying to read a message in a cryptic code. They told you not to lie but they never told you why. They didn't say it changed things, that it was some sort of cosmic interference.

‘Do it, El,' he said. ‘I've got to leave.'

She punched in the numbers. Her dad answered, muddled with sleep. She told him where she was, then cut him off. Felpo took the phone and put it back in the frayed bag he always carried around with him. He felt around in the bottom of it.

‘These are yours,' he said. He pulled out his door keys. ‘Take them.'

Then he left.

DILYS WOKE HER,
leaning over in her night-dress. Jo hadn't heard the telephone. She got up from the sofa immediately and went through the open door to the hall, Dilys hovering behind her. She picked up the receiver that lay passive on its side next to the telephone. It had the look of an object she would remember if things turned out badly.

She turned away from Dilys and her expression of worry. She looked at the elongated shapes of red and green and yellow that the coloured panes of the front door had formed on the wall. She listened and, from time to time, cleared her throat to show Peter she was still there. His voice continued. He was very thorough in his account and in his criticism of her. She said yes and no a couple of times, and then all right, and goodbye.

Jo told Dilys as little as she could get away with about the call. Nothing about Ella accepting a lift from a stranger. Nothing about Peter and Tara going to pick her up from the ferry terminal. She couldn't face the present, so she couldn't describe it. She told her grandmother she should go back to bed. They were both standing at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Please,' Jo said. ‘Everything's fine. Peter's coming to pick us up. He won't be here for hours yet. We don't want to wake the children. Let's get some more rest.'

Dilys went up without speaking, looking old in her night-clothes, laid bare by the absence of beads and a collar, displaced by the early waking.

Jo returned to the front room, shutting the door on the morning light that filled the hallway and the murmur of voices from her grandparents' room upstairs. She knew what they would be saying to each other and thought of her mother, Gail, also listening to those voices, the troubled intonation, not of criticism but of fear for the future. And she felt protective towards them because they'd spent half their lives coping.

Peter must have been in a deep sleep when the telephone rang at four in the morning. He would have thought it was a wrong number. He would have asked Ella to repeat her name. When Peter said they were going out to collect Ella, Tara would have got up and put back all the make-up that she had taken off before bed. She would have made herself impeccable. Her eyes would have been spiky with mascara and excitement. She would have dressed carefully as if she were off on a business trip with a colleague she liked the look of. She and Peter would have driven in to Dover and out to the Eastern Dock. On the way Tara would have talked about maniacs, perverts, rapists, antique dealers, drug dealers, emergency vehicles, emergency contraception, alarm bells ringing in her head, which hadn't, she really couldn't understand why, rung in anybody else's.

Tara and Peter knew now about the cut on her face, Ella's leap from the train, her failure to contact Ella. She didn't blame Ella for telling them.

Although she hadn't been to chapel or church for decades, Dilys's Sundays were corseted. Jo couldn't list the precise constraints, but she could always feel them. In particular, there were a couple of hours on Sunday mornings to which different rules applied and which accounted for them, at that moment, sitting in the front room and not in the kitchen. Jo had been surprised to discover that Sundays need not be like this, that they didn't possess an essential property, like the redness of cochineal. Though, as she had grown up, she had come to see that other people's families built in different tyrannies and that the British Sunday was often part of the trap.

Filling the time could be difficult, but today they had a purpose. They were waiting not for God's grace, which hadn't been outpoured on their family for more than a generation, but for Peter to find his way there from the M2. He hadn't visited for several years and the road lay-out had changed.

‘He won't know where he is,' said Geoff. ‘The pubs have all got new names. Ridiculous names.'

‘Don't worry, Grandad. He's used to finding his way about,' Jo said.

‘They shouldn't have allowed it,' he said. ‘All those years people turned left at The Plough, and now it isn't The Plough. He won't find it easy to park, either. Never is on a Sunday.'

‘It will be all right,' she said. She leant across and gave him a kiss.

They heard footsteps on the front path.

‘This is him,' said Dilys. ‘You'd better go, Joanna.'

Dilys didn't often call her that.

Jo picked Annie up, although she was getting too big to carry, and left the room. She could see Peter through the glass. He used to press his nose right into the red lozenge shape. But today he didn't. She opened the door and said hullo. He kissed Annie, then pecked Jo on the cheek. Annie smiled and hid her face in Jo's shoulder. They stood in the doorway of the front room together, Peter slightly ahead, as Jo had manoeuvred him there. Geoff got to his feet. He and Peter shook hands and exchanged remarks on the motorway traffic. Dilys kept to her chair and bobbed her head. She had asked Jo earlier if she should offer Peter coffee and there was something about the need to ask the question and the word
offer
which made Jo say not to bother.

‘You didn't bring Ella, then?' Dilys said.

‘No,' said Peter. ‘She stayed behind.'

He glanced round quickly, at eye level. He wouldn't have been able to describe the room ten minutes ago; he wasn't good at remembering the look of things. But Jo could see from his face that he knew that it was exactly as it used to be. He didn't want to re-learn it.

‘I told you she wouldn't be coming,' Jo said. He hadn't used the Tara word.

‘She might have changed her mind,' Dilys said. ‘How is she?'

‘She's fine,' said Peter.

Rob looked up at him.

‘Oh, Rob, I didn't see you there,' he said. ‘Hi.'

‘Hi,' said Rob.

‘It was quite a surprise when you rang this morning,' Dilys said.

She couldn't help being chatty. She'd always had a lighter touch with her grandson-in-law. The habit returned, in spite of all the things she'd said and thought about him in the last few years.

‘It was too early to call you,' said Peter. ‘I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking.'

‘We're generally up by seven,' Dilys said. ‘When I heard your voice I thought something had happened to Ella. That was the first thing I thought. I worry about her. It may be daft but I can't help it.'

‘No, she's fine,' said Peter. ‘I didn't mean to give you a fright.'

‘Well, you said straight away there was nothing untoward. Then, when Joanna came off the phone, she said you were going to give her a lift home.'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘I thought you must be up in London,' Dilys said.

‘I told you he wasn't,' Jo said.

Dilys glared at her and Peter looked inept.

‘It's good of you to come all this way to fetch them,' Geoff said.

He sounded grateful, though Jo knew he didn't want them to leave. His remark was a reflex – some bygone male solidarity.

‘You'd tell us if anything was the matter, wouldn't you?' said Dilys.

‘Yes,' Peter said. ‘Yes, of course.'

It was bare as a reply, but it would do. He had always colluded with Jo in fielding Dilys's interrogations, without getting any better at it. She could hear how she and her ex-husband sounded – as if they were in some kind of conspiracy. She marvelled that loyalty could be piecemeal; some aspects of it, like this, ingrained and others sent flying. He could be unfaithful and go and live with another woman. But he wouldn't call her names in front of her grandparents, or give anything away.

‘You look under the weather,' said Dilys.

Peter looked as if he hadn't slept, but Dilys wouldn't put it like that. It would invoke bed and aspects of life best not drawn attention to.

‘This extra driving won't do you any good,' Dilys said, ‘if you're going down with something.'

‘You can't rely on Sunday trains,' said Geoff. ‘Engineering works. Rob got stuck last year when he came to stay with us, do you remember? He sat outside Dover Priory station for an hour and a half.'

‘They could have stopped longer if they'd wanted,' said Dilys. ‘They've only just arrived. I can't see what the hurry is.'

‘It's easier by car,' said Geoff. ‘They want to take the opportunity.'

‘We'll be here again soon,' Jo said. ‘I promise.'

She knew she'd compromised her grandparents. With Peter there as a third party she could hear them, circling the situation, not understanding, but unable to leave well alone. They were too decent to be false. She should never have come. She hadn't run back to them when Peter had left. She had had more sense.

When had she and Peter last been here together? She couldn't remember a particular occasion. She must have been pregnant with Annie. She hadn't known it was the last time, or the day might have stood out more clearly. Visits to East Greenwich revolved around meals and hot drinks between meals, board games and card games, turns round the garden. Peter's parents had laid on more elaborate arrangements. Trips to local beauty spots and lunches out in country places.

‘Are you ready to go, Rob?' Jo said. ‘We'll be leaving soon.'

She and Geoff and Peter were still standing up. Annie was heavy in her arms, but she didn't want to put her down. She used her as a shield. Annie clung on.

‘Nothing to do. Done it all,' Rob said, shaking himself awake, surprised to be spoken to. He had taken himself off to some comfortable hollow where he hoped not to be disturbed until ordinary life returned. ‘There's just that stuff.'

The bags were still stacked in the middle of the floor, like overnight contributions to the charity shop. The best place for them, Jo thought. Or in the back garden with a match put to them. Only she hadn't got the nerve to do it. She would have to pretend they weren't so numerous, have the family help her carry them to Peter's car, move them across the country and rediscover them at the other end.

‘There's always a lot to carry with children,' said Geoff.

No one contradicted him and Annie was too little to know what was being heaped on her. Jo looked down at her. The clothes she had on could have been squashed into a mug.

‘We'd better think about going,' said Peter. ‘Beat the Sunday drivers.'