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  Jean nodded. ‘Good. That’s good,’ she said, more as though Lydia had told her that her leg no longer hurt, than that she’d enjoyed a novel.

  Now that she had stopped, Lydia seemed planted there, at that point on the path, as if her key had unwound its spring entirely, as if the world had stopped in its tracks, the birds in the trees, the children and the lovers.

  ‘It’s a lovely afternoon,’ Jean said, a little too loud. ‘I like being able to walk through the park. I’m so often in my car,’ she said, hefting up her black bag as if to explain.

  Lydia looked across to where the grass rose in a slight hill. On the far side, behind the crest of trees, the pond lay, and even now distant shouts reminded her of Charlie and his triumphs on that small circle of water.

  ‘But you’re always on your way to other people’s misery,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that hard?’

  ‘The cost of the job,’ Jean said simply. ‘Somebody needs to do it.’

  Lydia looked back at the doctor, and her words came out in a rush.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was very rude.’

  ‘Well, sometimes I leave them with less misery than they had before,’ Jean said, ‘and sometimes I don’t.’

  ‘I really did like that book,’ Lydia said.

  ‘It was a guess, on my part.’

  ‘I tried the other too …’ Lydia paused and gestured to Jean’s bag. ‘But you’re in a hurry. Ill people.’

  ‘No, no, actually I’m not. In fact …’ Jean cast around for anything she could offer, a way to make Lydia stay. Inside the gate the ice-cream van gleamed. ‘In fact, would you like a cone?’

  She could see Lydia shy at this, begin to leave, but as if to back her up, the van tolled its bell and Jean grinned.

  ‘All right then. Thank you,’ Lydia said.

  The women walked towards the trees. Lydia spread her plastic mackintosh on the grass and they sat down with their cones.

  ‘How is the garden?’ Lydia said.

  Jean looked up, surprised.

  ‘Hasn’t Charlie said anything?’

  Lydia shook her head slowly, but Jean, watching her face, noticed a slight fret to her eyes.

  ‘I don’t think he has,’ Lydia said finally, ‘but I’ve been preoccupied recently. So perhaps I simply don’t remember.’

  She put a hand to her cheek and stared down at the grass. Then, as if a thought had just come to her, she looked straight at Jean.

  ‘Why have you stopped here with me? Is it because of Charlie? Something I should know?’

  ‘No, only because I wanted to,’ Jean said. ‘As a matter of fact, I enjoy your company.’

  Lydia looked at Jean, eyebrows raised.

  ‘You enjoy my company?’ she said slowly.

  Jean nodded, serious, and then Lydia threw back her head and laughed.

  ‘You find that funny?’ Jean was nonplussed, and then she smiled, because it was a grand thing, to see this woman laugh.

  ‘I must go now,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Come soon and choose another book,’ Jean said as they got to their feet, and Lydia smiled this time and went on her way.

  16

  Charlie had left the books with Mrs Sandringham. They were carefully parcelled in brown paper and, when Jean unpacked them, she found the note.

  Thank you for the novels. I am sorry to have been so long with them. Charlie has promised to return them safe. I walked in the park at the same time this Thursday, but perhaps more of your patients were ill this week. Anyway I did not see you.

  Yours gratefully,

  Lydia Weekes

  Jean put the note away in her desk. She wished the books were not returned, because then she could imagine Mrs Weekes coming with them herself, and now she would not. She cursed herself for being far the other side of town at five o’clock today, when Mrs Weekes had walked again in the park. But something made her glad, too, though she couldn’t put her finger on it, and she stood still in the room and shut her eyes to be calmer.

  Jean sent Lydia two more packages of books in the weeks that followed, tying them round with string so that Charlie could carry them home. She wrote the briefest of notes each time, since Mrs Weekes clearly had enough on her plate without Jean calling in each time.

  But as busy as she made her life, packing it so full that there was no time to ponder, once her head touched the pillow she would think of Lydia, wondering over her sadness and bemused by her own pleasure in the other woman’s company.

  She was in the garden the evening that Lydia came to find her. It was a Wednesday and she was digging hard, the grit cut of the blade striking down through the drying summer soil, breath and effort filling her thoughts.

  The garden bell rang loud enough to raise the evening birds from the lawn. Jean opened the gate swiftly, efficiently, ready to reassure, to calm, ready to wash the soil from her hands and change her shoes, gather her black bag and go. But it was Lydia she found standing there; Lydia, her body half-turned to go, her face uncertain, holding a string bag jutting with Jean’s books.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you this time of an evening.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Jean said.

  ‘I’ve brought back your books,’ Lydia said, lifting the bag slightly. ‘Seemed rude to have Charlie always bring them this way and that. I thought all of a sudden … it was a nice evening for a walk anyway.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve caught me. I’m on call tonight. I thought you were a call-out,’ Jean said.

  ‘You’re gardening,’ Lydia said, pointing to Jean’s hands.

  ‘Digging,’ Jean said.

  ‘Must be annoying. To have to drop everything when someone rings the bell.’

  ‘Sometimes. Jean leaned against the gatepost. ‘But I fought a battle with my parents and then studied very hard for the right to have my evenings and my nights interrupted.’

  Lydia smiled. ‘Well, then at least this time you can go back to your digging.’ She held out the string bag. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That big book was one of my father’s favourites,’ Jean said. The bag swung between them, awkward, unbalanced. She looked at Lydia, a question in her voice. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d like it, it being so long.’

  ‘I haven’t read anything like that before. It’s got such a lovely cover. Not like a library book. But heavy to read in bed,’ Lydia said with a small laugh. ‘You know, holding your arms up.’

  ‘So come and get some more,’ Jean said. ‘Now you’re here, you can choose for yourself.’

  Lydia glanced away, into the garden, then back to Jean. She looked at the doctor with her tousled hair, her muddy hands, the sweat beading where her shirt collar opened. She didn’t know any other woman who would be easy, being seen like this by someone not much more than an acquaintance. You got your lipstick on and your hair sorted out quick, whether you’d knocked off work, or gone and had a baby, or been in an earthquake. Lydia grinned.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Neither mentioned Charlie, but both conjured him, and they walked through the vegetables and round into the house each in their own silence. Jean saw him running ahead like a puppy between the high lines of beans, then stopping on a pinhead to crouch and watch something tiny on the ground, on a leaf, something invisible to her. She pictured him calling to them and showing them his find, his child’s brow furrowed for a moment with the effort to describe, as she had encouraged him to do. He had said his mother was happy with him visiting, but Jean was anxious that Lydia might be hurt if she found out how much time he spent in the garden, or about the growing assortment of things he’d shown her, or about how many teatime meals Mrs Sandringham had fed the hungry boy.

  Lydia wondered how far into this house Charlie had been. Had he been up these stairs? Had he stopped to look at the pictures? There were several that looked very old in big, gilt frames: solemn couples with children on their knee, one of a man with his dogs. She could imagine that one catching Charlie’s eye. Had he seen the room with all the books? Played mar
bles on this landing? Had he been at home here?

  ‘It’s a lovely house,’ she said, and as if she knew Lydia’s mind, Jean answered.

  ‘I don’t believe Charlie’s ever been upstairs. No cause. He lets himself in through the gate at the bottom of the garden.’ She turned to Lydia. ‘He’s always happy to occupy himself in the garden. With the bees; watching down by the pond. No trouble. He seems quite a solitary fellow. We barely know he’s here.’

  Lydia nodded. It was strange to hear someone so nearly a stranger talk about your own boy like this. She supposed Jean was used to doing that, being a doctor. Jean opened a door off the landing and gestured to Lydia to go in.

  The room was walled all round with books. Shelves from floor to ceiling. Lydia stood silent at the sight. Aside from the public library, she had never seen so many books in a single room; never seen so many in a single house. The room was lit pink with late, low sun, and the books glowed on their shelves, all their browns and reds and greens, all the gold lettering. Lydia wanted to run her fingers down their spines, feel the sun’s warmth held in them. She wanted to stroke these lovely things.

  Jean watched Lydia’s face. Her expression wasn’t hard to read, and Jean was abashed at the other woman’s wonder.

  ‘There are a good few to choose from,’ she said.

  ‘Had your father read them all?’

  Jean shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A lot, certainly.’

  Lydia thought of her uncle’s precious books, tucked into a corner of her wardrobe. She had read them all several times over years ago and now they were cherished objects: The Thirty-nine Steps, Rogue Male, The Sign of Four, and maybe a dozen others. But Dr Markham said she didn’t read the books she’d inherited, so what was it that she held so precious?

  ‘I’ve put all the novels on those shelves,’ Jean said, pointing to one side of the room. ‘Please, choose some more, if you’d like to.’

  ‘I mustn’t be too long,’ Lydia said.

  Jean sat down in the armchair by the window. She had pulled out a book she remembered her father reading and that she thought she might enjoy. Not a novel, more of a travelogue, Norman Douglas’s Old Calabria. But now she didn’t want to read, only to watch this other woman in her reverie, and so she sat, book on her lap, finger marking a random page, eyes lowered, Lydia’s outline just in her sights.

  Lydia ran her eyes along the shelves. She took out a book and read the first paragraph, replaced it just proud of its neighbours so as to find it again. She pulled out another and held it in her palm. Such a solid weight. Opening it near the middle, she scanned over the text. The print was tightly spaced and she turned towards the window for more light.

  ‘I could stay in here for hours,’ she said. ‘Pull out every one.’

  And for ten minutes or more they stayed like that. Then Lydia started and looked at her watch.

  ‘I must get back to Charlie. I said I’d only be out an hour.’

  ‘If you liked Middlemarch, there are more by her,’ Jean said. ‘You could take another one back with you.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘She wrote under a man’s name.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be sure she was taken seriously.’

  ‘But you haven’t read her novels.’

  ‘No. But my father knew I’d be interested by the name question. Did you like it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s a million miles from detective novels.’

  Jean waited.

  ‘There’s a character, one of the chief ones, and she’s not like me, not at all. And her husband isn’t like my husband, either.’

  Lydia stopped, and again Jean waited. Waiting was something she was good at. She’d learned to be patient, to listen for what was important.

  Lydia looked at the wall, at the floor. Then she turned towards the doctor and spoke in a dull voice.

  ‘Her husband only has eyes for himself,’ she said. ‘He never really notices how she feels, so she despairs.’

  Jean looked at her because her voice was full of grief, and she saw the tears on Lydia’s cheeks.

  ‘But does it end like that?’ Jean said.

  ‘No. It doesn’t end like that. But it’s what I felt most, about the book.’

  The sun was almost gone; the evening was darkening into night. Jean turned on a lamp.

  Still Lydia stood, her cheeks wet with tears, like someone bereft, Jean thought. It was not the same, she knew, but she thought of her father’s dying and how empty she had felt when he was gone. How hard it had been, how painful, to have nothing to hold. How it had hurt, physically hurt. Nothing in the place of his body. Even a body which, by the end, was little more than skin and bone.

  That memory, the terrible, numbing loneliness of it, took Jean a step forward and made her open her arms and hold this woman, standing so still and sad; and wrap her round and hold her as she wept.

  17

  Charlie had his head down, already running, out of the boys’ cloakroom, along the corridor and out of the school. It was Friday and he was heading for the pipe factory with Bobby. Bobby said he’d seen a grass snake there, he swore he had, and they were going to find it and make a den. It was a hot day and the playground tarmac was soft beneath his sandals. It gave off a smell that made Charlie sad, though he couldn’t have said why.

  He was running hard and fast, satchel wrapped tight to him. His thoughts were already crouched low and still, watching the scrubby grass near the stream, watching for a snake’s turn or fold, watching the water for the ripple coil it would make. He didn’t see Lydia waiting outside the gate.

  He was yards down the pavement when he heard his name called, but it brought him to a halt so fast that Bobby was into the back of him.

  ‘Charlie,’ Lydia called again.

  ‘It’s my mum,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Why’s she here?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Come on then. Before anybody else finds it.’

  But Charlie still stood there.

  ‘It must be important, cos she doesn’t finish at the factory till five.’

  ‘I saw the snake, for real,’ Bobby said. ‘I bet it’ll be there today.’

  Charlie looked again, as if to be sure it was his mother.

  ‘I’ll catch you up. Soon as I can.’ He turned and jogged back towards the school, his satchel banging careless on his hip, but his face sharp with apprehension.

  ‘Mum?’ he said.

  Lydia was standing at the railings, a bag on her shoulder and a basket at her feet. But she was wearing a summer dress, the blue one he especially liked, not her factory clothes and he didn’t understand. She took a step forward and Charlie felt his heart jolt and the back of his neck go hot.

  ‘Charlie,’ Lydia said, her voice excited, ‘we’re going on a trip. You and me.’

  Fear had gripped him fast. But she was all right, and now it dropped and left him dazed. He looked back through the railings at the empty playground. Bobby was gone to find the grass snake, and Charlie wanted to be with him. More than anything in the world, he wanted to be with him.

  ‘But you’re at the factory,’ he said. ‘You’re at work till gone five. And I’m going to see a snake. Bobby promised to show me.’

  ‘We got given the afternoon off,’ Lydia said. ‘So I’ve planned us a trip. There’s a bus in twenty minutes. Marion at work was talking about it. This big lake, outside Allendon.’

  ‘But I want to find the snake.’

  Lydia didn’t seem to hear him. She hoisted the bag to her shoulder and passed him the basket.

  ‘I’ll get you an Orange Maid,’ she said. ‘The bus ride’s not long.’

  Charlie looked out of the window. The bus seat scratched and stippled his legs, so he put his hands under to protect them as he watched the town slip away. He was still cross with his mother, and sulking. He saw the river turn between the trees and the birds and the grazing animals, and the hills far off on the horiz
on, while beside him, his mother read a book. Something in a brown leather cover from Dr Markham’s library.

  Charlie watched for what he could see and he made a list in his head. When he got home, he’d write it down in his notebook:

  Sheep with a limp

  Island for den in river – can Bobby swim?

  Girl with birthmark

  Hawk diving, don’t know if it got its prey

  Cat in a field, no house near by

  They were the only people to get out at Allendon. Lydia took a piece of paper from her basket.

  ‘Our map,’ she said. ‘Marion did it out for me. She said it was about a mile from the village.’

  ‘What’s a mile from the village?’ Charlie said, looking around. There was nothing here that he could see. Only some cottages and a church. Nothing that you’d take a bus to specially.

  ‘The lake. I told you.’ Lydia turned the map around and fixed herself with a finger. ‘This way,’ she said.

  Try as he might, once they started walking, Charlie couldn’t keep hold of his sulk. His satchel over his shoulder, he took turns with his mother to carry the basket.

  ‘Tea,’ was all she said when he asked what was under the cloth, but every now and then he smelled a sweet bread smell, and sometimes there was a bottle clink. The playground and the railings, Bobby and the snake, they all slipped away and he was here with his mother, walking down a dusty lane full of flowers and insects and dried-up dung.

  They smelled the lake before they saw it. It smelled of wet places, something that Charlie knew from the river.

  ‘There it is,’ Lydia said, pointing through the trees to what Charlie could see only as an empty space, a hollow in the air. But he followed her along a small path trampled in the grass and suddenly there it was, a vast expanse of water. Charlie stood and stared. It was so big, and so hidden. He couldn’t even see the end of it. Willows swung their fringes and birds scaggled around the rushes along one side. Moorhens ventured out into the open water, jerky little pedalos, only to turn suddenly and duck back in behind the greenery at invisible perils. There were big lilies and high trees. On the other side of the lake there was a tumbled line of flat stones reaching into the water and, behind them, a piece of rough grass.