At nearly thirteen years old, Charlotte was not quite what you could any longer call a child, exactly. She had her mother’s blonde colouring and willowy figure, but her intellectual development had from her earliest years been overseen by her father. From the beginning, he taught her to think mathematically. Even as a toddler, she had been encouraged to count the things which made up her world. ‘How many ducks on the village pond today, Charlotte?’ ‘Fifteen, Daddy.’ A pause and a wrinkling of his brow while he checked. ‘I make it fourteen.’ A delighted chuckle. ‘There’s one gone under the water, Daddy.’
He taught her figures to remember and disgorge as a kind of party game. She could recite the metric equivalents of imperial weights and measures, and vice versa. He taught her the times tables, then mental arithmetic. At the age of four, she was a computer adept. Not surprisingly, she was already a star at her school, Stag End Comprehensive in Cirencester, where the formidable Linda Rice, a trustee of the Prince’s Trust and the government’s favourite educationist – after a stint in which she had turned round the ailing Waterbury School in Oxfordshire – had recently become Head.
How could this prodigious child of the future and her spinster aunt, lover of old books and dead poets, ever hope to reach any common understanding? Even when her niece was small, Catriona had never found it easy to communicate with her.
‘Auntie Cat, are you a witch?’ she had asked at six.
Bill had chuckled. Flora had been shocked and tried to hush her daughter into silence.
Catriona had been amused. ‘Why do you think I’m a witch?’
‘Because you always wear black.’
This was not invariably the case, but often enough to prove that the child had good powers of observation. She had thought of replying in the words of Masha in The Seagull that she was in mourning for her life, which was as good a reason as any, but it would have been unfair to load that on her niece. Instead she had said simply, ‘Because I’m a black Cat,’ thinking that for one who never made jokes it was quite a good one. But instead, Charlotte had stared at her with eyes round with suspicion and fear.
The bell rang. Catriona, engaged in the last-minute preparations of their meal, hurriedly wiped her hands on a paper towel and ran out of the kitchen to open the front door. Charlotte stood on the step. She wore blue jeans and a white top tightly stretched over the buds of her breasts.
‘Hello! Come in!’
She stretched out her arms to give the girl a hug, but there was no mistaking that the thin shoulders remained stiff and unresponsive.
Bill followed from the car, carrying a bulging nylon sports hold-all.
Charlotte pulled out of the embrace and stood in the hall, staring up and around at the pictures and framed prints, tapping her fingers to some kind of internal rhythm on the newel post, her white-trainer-shod foot idly kicking the bottom step of the stairs.
‘I’ll show you your room!’
Led by Catriona, the three of them trooped upstairs. Bill dumped the bag on the bed, then went over to one of the windows and stared out, his tall, heavy body partially blocking out the evening sunlight.
‘Hey, Charly, you can see Ally Pally from here.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Alexandra Palace. It’s a famous London landmark. Where television started. That should make it appeal. Come and look!’
She clumped to his side. ‘What a sad-looking dump.’
‘Nothing looks interesting to you at the moment, does it?’ her father responded with asperity.
The girl swung back abruptly into the room, glancing around without enthusiasm. ‘Is there a power point?’ she demanded of her aunt.
Catriona did her best to maintain her initial note of bright enthusiasm. ‘Yes, of course! There are doubles on each side of the bed and another here by the fireplace.’
Her niece nodded curtly, then proceeded to unzip the holdall and lug out of it the black rugby-football shape of a portable CD-player. She banged the machine down on the writing table. Catriona tried not to wince as the hard plastic grated on the polished surface.
Charlotte rummaged further in the bag and removed a stack of CDs in shiny plastic cases, the covers of which featured young blonde-haired women, who looked similar and may indeed have been the same person, for all Catriona knew.
These were slammed down by the CD-player with the previous disregard for the french-polishing.
Bill was looking at his watch. ‘I ought to be going. You know what the bloody traffic’s like at this time.’
At the open front door, he bent to give his daughter a peck on the cheek. ‘See you Sunday. Don’t give Catriona any hassle.’ He raised a hand in farewell to his sister-in-law who had hung back by the stairs. ‘Bye, and thanks.’
The girl and the woman, left alone, stared at one another.
‘I expect you’d like to unpack?’
Charlotte consulted the lime-green fashion watch she wore. ‘There’s this programme starting. Where’s the telly?’
‘I don’t have one, I’m afraid.’
The girl’s heavy brows contracted and her face twisted in a look of fury. ‘You haven’t got a telly? I knew you were weird, but not that weird. Why didn’t you say? We could have brought mine.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it.’ It was true. Television didn’t figure in her life. She had a sudden vision of Charlotte’s bedroom in Owlbury, crammed with electronics. She should have thought of it. But would she then have done anything about it? Probably not. ‘You’ll be deprived only for the weekend. And there’s so much else that we can do in London,’ she added, with more than a touch of irritation. She might have had a blank over the wretched television, but she had picked up a copy of Time Out and marked some of the places they might visit together.
‘Such as what? We came here on a trip in the Juniors and it was really boring. Traipsing around museums and going on about history all the time.’
‘I’m sure we can find something to interest you.’ She said this with more conviction than she felt.
‘Oh yeah?’
Catriona decided it was time to assert some kind of authority in her own house. ‘We’ll discuss that later. Supper will be ready in a quarter of an hour. I suggest you go up, sort out your things and wash your hands.’
The girl turned and ran up the stairs. The bedroom door slammed, and after a moment the pounding beat of rock music played at high volume filled the house.
Catriona thought of saying something, thought better of it, sighed and returned to the kitchen. She had the impression that children of her niece’s age lived on hamburgers and chips or similar, but she had no intention of cooking such stuff. Instead, relying on the belief that a growing child would be hungry enough to eat whatever was put before it, she had decided to make the kind of thing she would have eaten if she’d been alone: in this case a bean casserole with rice and green salad.
The food, which smelt delicious, was simmering ready on the hob. She laid the pine table for two, set in the middle a cut-glass vase in which she placed a few stems of early blooming roses from the garden, then called up the stairs.
‘Supper-time, Charlotte!’
Charlotte flopped down on the indicated chair and stared at the table.
‘This is posh.’ She indicated the flowers. ‘These from your boyfriend?’
Catriona smiled, with an effort. ‘No. Only from the garden.’
The girl regarded the plate set before her with an expression