Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

She was driving, unseeingly following the route that led across town, before the fortifying anger drained away. It left her weak and disorientated so that she blinked through the windscreen at the white clapboarding of the Franklin Hotel on the south side of the green, and the line of cars waiting to turn at the lights. The driver of the station-wagon behind her hooted, and Dinah slid the Jeep into a parking space. She was shaking now.

Surging out of the dark place that she kept shuttered all her waking hours came a black wave of pain.

What was she ashamed of? That was what the woman had asked her. Not the woman’s fault, of course. Just a crappy pop personality-test question to make everyone think they were getting a slice of a real person in the answer.

Dinah’s hands gripped the steering wheel until the bones of her knuckles showed their reddened cleft. Shame and guilt were her constant companions. Sometimes they hid their faces, dissembling as craftily as she did herself, but still they were always with her.

She didn’t see the fake-rustic Franklin Inn sign swinging in front of her eyes. Instead Dinah was thinking of home, picturing the rain-smeared streets of a small town in Norfolk. She had never even been there, although to hear its name or see it written made her catch her breath.

I have to go home , she said aloud, knowing that she must look like a madwoman mouthing in the sanctuary of her car. I have to go back home and start searching .

Matthew sat at the end of the big kitchen table with some papers spread out in front of him. The boys were in bed and the house was quiet except for Ape snoring and twitching in his basket under the window.

Matt liked this time of the evening. The day trailed in a wake behind him and there were still hours beckoning, subterranean chambers below the chipped surface of the working day, before he need think of bed. Matthew never slept before the small hours. There was too much else to do, to think about, to waste time on sleep. Dinah was different, always had been. She needed eight hours and firmly believed, like her mother, that one hour before midnight was worth two after.

Matthew was reading columns of figures, following a pattern through them that was as vivid to him as a picture. He didn’t hear Dinah come in, but he looked up when she sat down in the chair opposite him. She was wearing her bathrobe, splashy red print on a white background.

‘Hi.’ He had been drinking a glass of wine, a Californian Cabernet recommended by Todd Pinkham. ‘Want some of this?’

Dinah shook her head.

Resignedly Matt took off his reading glasses. ‘Tell me about your day. What did happen with the job woman?’

He had asked the question earlier and she had turned it aside, pressing her lips into a thin suffering line as she did so.

‘Nothing happened. I just decided it was a bad idea.’

‘Okay, so don’t talk about it.’

Irritated, although he had resolved that he would not be, Matt replaced his glasses and began reading again. He wanted to slip away from Dinah and the difficulty that she had become, and re-enter the cool lofty place in which she had disturbed him.

Dinah sat in silence. She was aware of the comfortable structure of their home enclosing them, filled with pictures and furniture and all the insulating drift of their joint possessions. How many things, she wondered, remembering the packing cases in which they had been shipped to Franklin. How many cups, and scarves, and books, and teapots.

Matthew turned a page. She watched the way he reached out unseeingly for his glass, his fingers quivering a little until they connected with the stem.

Dinah looked at her husband and wondered, do I love him or hate him? Did I do it alone, this thing, or did I do it because it was what Matt wanted?

‘Matthew?’

He rubbed the inner corners of his eyes, sighing, working his middle fingers under the lenses so that the frame bobbed over his nose.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m all adrift here in this place. I want to go back home, to look for her.’

His face hardened. His flexible mouth became a slit and the planes of his cheeks and forehead turned boxy.

‘You can’t do that, Dinah. Why torment yourself?’

‘Why not be like you, you mean? Indifferent?’ Her voice whipped him.

‘I’m not indifferent.’

The telephone rang. For three, four rings neither of them moved, and then Dinah slowly got up and lifted the receiver. Even from where he was sitting Matt could recognise Sandra Parkes’s high insistent voice. Dinah listened as it nibbled on, saying yes, yes okay, nodding as she spoke.

‘Of course we can,’ she added at length. ‘If Milly’s happy with that we’d be glad to have her.’

There was another high-pitched torrent of talk. And then Dinah said, ‘Friday, then. Yes, yes. That’s fine.’ She replaced the receiver.

‘Ed and Sandra have got to go out to the coast for three days. Something to do with a movie deal for one of Ed’s books. Sandra wondered if Milly could come to us.’

‘I’m taking the boys up to the cabin in Vermont for the weekend. Had you forgotten?’

Max Berkmann had promised a loan of their summer cabin. Matt was going to take the boys fishing and hiking, although neither of them had shown much enthusiasm for the prospect.

‘Yes, I had,’ Dinah admitted. ‘It doesn’t matter. Milly and I will be okay here.’

She hesitated for a moment, but Matt was shifting his papers, ready to immerse himself in them again. He had closed off her plea with his hard face. Not now, she told herself. Don’t try to talk about it now.

‘I’m going up to bed,’ she said at last.

‘I’ll be up soon,’ he told her, although she knew he would not be.

Dinah imagined that to have Milly in the house for two or three days would be to have a companion.

In the muffled, dead-weighted time after her visit to Jenny Abraham, Dinah planned how Milly and she would cook and talk and watch TV together, maybe even go shopping for clothes. Out of the brief affinity that had flickered between them she constructed in her head a temporary daughter and allowed herself awkward, unspecific imaginings in which Milly confided in her in some way, and she was able to offer advice and comfort.

Dinah looked forward to the weekend visit, and when the time came she confidently waved Matt and the boys off at the beginning of their drive up into Vermont.

‘You won’t be lonely?’ Matt asked, as he was halfway into the loaded Toyota. ‘You could still join us, you know. Bring the Parkes girl as well.’

‘Milly. Her name’s Milly. No, we’re going to stay here and have a women’s weekend.’

Matthew caught her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. After a minute he said, ‘Good. You look all right.’

‘Of course. Why not?’

After they had driven away Dinah went back into the house with the sense of having become someone who sometimes did not look all right, as if another person’s face had become superimposed upon her own.

Ed and Sandra arrived with Milly later that Friday evening. Milly unfolded herself from the back of the Porsche and hoisted a very small and shabby black canvas rucksack over her shoulder. She seemed to be wearing exactly the same clothes as the last time Dinah had seen her.

The adults moved into the house, with Milly at a little distance behind them. It was the first time the Parkeses had been to Dinah’s house. Looking at his watch, Ed refused her offer of tea or a drink.

‘We should get to the airport,’ he said. Out of the corner of her eye Dinah saw Milly turn her head to gaze blank-faced out of the window. She had not put her rucksack down.

‘Dinah, this is so good of you,’ Sandra murmured, but the words were at odds with her expression. She stood awkwardly halfway between Ed and Milly, unable to move closer to either of them. Clearly it was important that she go with Ed to perform whatever service it was he required of her, but equally clearly she did not want to leave Milly behind with Dinah. Torn between the two halves of her family, Sandra’s confusion crystallised in hostility to Dinah. She twisted the silver bracelets on her wrist as if adjusting her armour. Her face was cramped with jealousy. ‘I wanted Milly to come to LA with us, of course. But she absolutely won’t.’