‘How long have you known?’ asks Clive.
‘About a fortnight.’
‘We didn’t want to spoil Christmas, especially for Emily,’ says William.
There’s another moment of silence. Naomi can’t bring herself to speak.
‘What’s the…er…the diagnosis?’ asks Julian.
‘Terminal, I’m afraid, Julian.’
Julian blushes, regretting his earlier joke, though there is no reason for him to.
‘I don’t believe that,’ says Antoine. ‘With a family like yours, and a medical service like yours – Coningsfield General has a good reputation, no…?’
No. Everybody thinks it, but nobody says it.
‘…And with a spirit like yours, I’m sure you can prove this diagnosis wrong. Come on. You are British. You are fighters.’
Emily enters with a bunch of leaves.
‘Twenty-two different leaves,’ she cries, with proud excitement.
Her innocence bruises their souls.
Maggie has been up since six o’clock, cleaning. She does two rooms every morning. There are fourteen rooms in the house if you include bathrooms and lavatories, so this means that she cleans each room once a week. That might not sound too bad, but this is no ordinary clean. This is a spring clean every week. Maggie has slowly become obsessive over the years. From her first waking moment – at six, with the alarm, meaning Timothy wakes up too and never drops off properly again – she is planning her battle against germs. It’s May, a lovely spring morning, the first morning of the year on which none of the good people of Coningsfield, or indeed the bad people, of whom there are plenty, dream of being on the Algarve or in Southern Spain. Maggie goes round the house opening windows, letting the stale air out, but she doesn’t have time to pause to breathe in the scents of yesterday’s first mowing of the ragged lawn at number ninety-two and of the massed daffodils which are not yet quite dead all along the central reservation of the main road. Maggie never has time to smell the flowers.
Timothy reaches out sleepily and runs his hand gently over Naomi’s soft, sleepy, still-slender body. His prick is as stiff as a dead curlew. But this can’t go on. It’s wrong. It’s an invasion of her privacy, even though she will never know. He drags himself out of bed, kneels at the side of the bed, and prays to God to save him from his desires. O Lord, I know it’s wrong. And, as you know, because I’ve told you, which of course I didn’t really need to do, because you know everything, I must not covet my neighbour’s wife or Simon Prendergast’s wife. Prendergast. How can his precious Naomi now be Mrs Prendergast, which is what he assumes she still is. Oh, blow. He’s lost his place in his prayer. Where was I, Lord? The Lord doesn’t prompt him. Maybe Tuesday mornings are busy. Oh, yes. Not coveting her. Please, O Lord, give me the strength to have only clean thoughts, for I am ashamed of my wickedness.
He wishes he could just get dressed and go next door straight away, past the board which actually still says ‘R. Pickering and Son – Taxidermists’, for they are keeping up the pretence that his father still takes a major part in the work. Yes, they are living in Ascot House, formerly a B & B run by Miss de Beauvoir (Mrs Smith). Charlie Smith ran off eighteen years ago after falling head over heels for a physiotherapist. This has long been a sore point with Timothy’s father, who regards it as less disgraceful than being abandoned for a plumber. Mrs Smith decided that Mrs Smith was no sort of name for the owner of a B & B with pretensions towards being select (she hated the word ‘posh’), and became Miss de Beauvoir. She sold up five years ago. ‘I’m getting out while the going’s good. Mrs Percival at the Mount has been forced to take in people sent by social workers. She’ll end up with immigrants, you mark my words. I’d hate to be young. What chance have the young got of running select B & Bs?’
But first there’s the kids to be got ready. Sam is seven and Liam five. Why on earth did they call him Liam? Everyone will think he’s Irish. Oh, well, too late now, and he doesn’t seem to mind. Liam is cheeky, a bright spark, freckly, could almost be mistaken for Irish. Sam is dark like his father, serious like his father, showing real promise at his lessons, like his father. Maybe in his case the promise can come to fulfilment. His teachers think Sam could be clever. He isn’t as quick as little Liam, but there’s a solidity there, an understanding of all his subjects, which is rare in a boy so young. Timothy in truth doesn’t know either of his boys very well; he loves them, of course, loves them utterly in their good and bad moments alike, but he leaves them mainly to their mother; he isn’t awfully good with smaller children, his time will come when they are stronger and they can play football properly together and play card games and board games and go to visit beautiful places together. That is when his time will come, when he can show them the world.
He has to supervise their dressing and get their breakfast and make them eat it and make sure they clean their teeth because Maggie has been so busy cleaning that she only just has time to get herself dressed and tidied and ready for school.
At last she’s ready and the kids are ready and she leaves the house with them. It’s a short walk across the park, and she passes the junior school on her way to the senior school where she still teaches, so it’s all very convenient.
The most wonderful sound in the world is that bang of the front door closing. She has gone. The house is his. He knows he should go next door. He’s got a fox to finish. But first he goes right round the house, opening the door of every room, savouring the emptiness of every room.
Now Timothy is at peace. Now he can face his work. At weekends and during the long, long school holidays he loves his work, it’s an escape, but during the week he resents every moment that he cannot spend in his gloriously empty home.
He enters number ninety-six. The front door no longer squeaks. He has bought ample supplies of WD40.
He is surprised, as he is every morning, by the darkness of the house. Roly is standing in the cold vault of a kitchen, waiting. Whatever time Timothy enters in the morning, his father has had his breakfast and washed up and is standing in the kitchen, waiting.
‘What are we doing today?’
The ‘we’ is royal, though Roly doesn’t realise it.
‘There’s the fox to finish, and then I thought we might tackle Mrs Lewington’s lurcher.’
‘Righty ho. Anchors away.’
‘Absolutely.’
Roly won’t do much except fetch a few things that Timothy has deliberately left in the wrong place so that his father can fetch them and think he is useful. He can still see to move around the house, in which no piece of furniture has been moved for at least twelve years, but he can’t see to do useful work any more. He has a blind stick for when he goes out on his own, but he never uses it, because he never goes out on his own. Maggie is a treasure, taking him to do all his shopping for the week at Tesco’s every Saturday.
Timothy’s spirits droop at the thought of Mrs Lewington’s lurcher. He has tried to turn the business more in the direction of wild life taxidermy, but the location is against him. People knock on the door and buttonhole him in the street. ‘He’s seventeen, Mr Pickering. We’ve had him seventeen years. If Cecil hadn’t been taken by the good Lord I know he’d want me to keep him. I’m going to put him where he always loved to sit, in his old basket, just to the left of the grate.’ Timothy hates doing pets, asks three times the normal price, and the silly people accept the estimate without a tremor, in the hopelessness of their love.
‘I’ll be out for an hour or so late morning,’ he hears himself say.
His father looks surprised, and so does he. He hadn’t known he was going out. But suddenly the urge is irresistible.
‘I’m sure there was nothing in the diary.’
His