‘You brushed your teeth?’
‘Immyjen did them, after tea.’
‘OK then, hop into bed. Do you want me to tuck you in?’
‘No. Mmm. Yes …’
She has stopped saying ‘we’. The silly but disturbing confusion has passed? She climbs into bed and lays her face on the pillow and as she does she looks very small. Like a toddler again.
Kirstie’s eyes are fluttering, and she is clutching Leopardy to her chest – and I am leaning to check the nightlight.
Just as I have done, almost every evening, for six years.
From the beginning, the twins were horribly scared of total darkness: it terrified them into special screams. After a year or so, we realized why: it was because, in pitch darkness, they couldn’t see each other. For that reason Angus and I have always been religiously careful to keep some light available to the girls: we’ve always had lamps and nightlights to hand. Even when the twins got their own rooms, they still wanted light, at night, as if they could see each other through walls: as long as they had enough light.
Of course I wonder if, in time, this phobia will dwindle – now that one twin has gone for good, and cannot ever be seen. But for the moment it persists. Like an illness that should have gone away.
The nightlight is fine.
I set it down on the side table, and am turning to leave when Kirstie snaps her eyes open, and stares at me. Accusingly. Angrily? No. Not angry. But unsettled.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What is it? Sweetheart, you have to go to sleep.’
‘But, Mummy.’
‘What is it?’
‘Beany!’
The dog. Sawney Bean. Our big family spaniel. Kirstie loves the dog.
‘Will Beany be coming to Scotland with us?’
‘But, darling, don’t be silly. Of course!’ I say. ‘We wouldn’t leave him behind! Of course he’s coming!’
Kirstie nods, placated. And then her eyes close and she grips Leopardy tight; and I can’t resist kissing her again. I do this all the time now: more than I ever did before. Angus used to be the tactile parent, the hugger and kisser, whereas I was the organizer, the practical mother: loving them by feeding them, and clothing them. But now I kiss my surviving daughter as if it is some fervent, superstitious charm: a way of averting further harm.
The freckles on Kirstie’s pale skin are like a dusting of cinnamon on milk. As I kiss her, I breathe her in: she smells of toothpaste, and maybe the sweetcorn she had for supper. She smells of Kirstie. But that means she smells of Lydia. They always smelled the same. No matter what they did, they always smelled the same.
A third kiss ensures she is safe. I whisper a quiet goodnight. Carefully I make my exit from her bedroom, with its twinkling nightlight; but as I quietly close the door, yet another thought is troubling me: the dog.
Beany.
What is it? Something about the dog concerns me; it agitates. But I’m not sure what. Or why.
Alone on the landing, I think it over. Concentrating.
We bought Beany three years ago: an excitable springer spaniel. That’s when we could afford a pedigree puppy.
It was Angus’s idea: a dog to go with our first proper garden; a dog that matched our proximity to Regent’s Park. We called him Sawney Bean, after the Scottish cannibal, because he ate everything, especially chairs. Angus loved Beany, the twins loved Beany – and I loved the way they all interacted. I also adored, in a rather shallow way, the way they looked, two identically pretty little blonde girls, romping around Queen Mary’s Rose Garden – with a happy, cantering, mahogany-brown spaniel.
Tourists would actually point and take photos. I was virtually a stage mother. Oh, she has those lovely twins. With the beautiful dog. You know.
Leaning against a wall, I close my eyes, to think more clearly. I can hear distant noises from the kitchen downstairs: cutlery rattling on a table, or maybe a bottle-opener being returned to a drawer.
What is it about Beany that feels wrong? There is definitely some troubled thought that descends from the concept dog – yet I cannot trace it, cannot follow it through the brambles of memory and grief.
Downstairs, the front door slams shut. The noise breaks the spell.
‘Sarah Moorcroft,’ I say, opening my eyes, ‘Get a grip.’
I need to go down and talk to Immy and have a glass of wine and then go to bed, and tomorrow Kirstie – Kirstie – will go to school with her red book bag, wearing her black woollen jumper. The one with Kirstie Moorcroft written on the label inside.
In the kitchen, I find Imogen sitting at the counter. She smiles, tipsily, the faint tannin staining of red wine on her neat white teeth.
‘Afraid Gus has nipped out.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yeah. He had a minor panic attack about the booze supply. You’ve only got’ – she turns and looks at the wine rack by the fridge – ‘six bottles left. So he’s gone to Sainsbury’s to stock up. Took Beany with him.’
I laugh, politely, and pull up a stool.
‘Yes. Sounds like Angus.’
I pour myself half a glass of red from the open bottle on the counter, glancing at the label. Cheap Chilean Merlot. It used to be fancy Barossa Shiraz. I don’t care.
Imogen watches me, and she says: ‘He’s still drinking a bit, ah, you know – excessively?’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it, Immy: “a bit excessively”. He lost his job because he got so drunk he punched his boss. And knocked him out.’
Imogen nods. ‘Sorry. Yes. Can’t help talking in euphemisms. Comes with the day job.’ She tilts her head and smiles. ‘But the boss was a jerk, right?’
‘Yes. His boss was totally obnoxious, but it’s still not great, is it? Breaking the nose of London’s richest architect.’
‘Uh-huh. Sure …’ Imogen smiles slyly. ‘Though, y’know, it’s not all bad. I mean, at least he can throw a punch – like a man. Remember that Irish guy I dated, last year – he used to wear yoga pants.’
She smirks my way; I force half a smile.
Imogen is a journalist like me, though a vastly more successful one. She is a deputy editor on a women’s gossip magazine that, miraculously, has a growing circulation; I scrape an unreliable living as a freelancer. This might have made me jealous of her, but our friendship is, or was, evened out by the fact I got married and had kids. She is single and childless. We used to compare notes – what my life could have been.
Now I lean back, holding my wine glass airily: trying to be relaxed. ‘Actually he’s not drinking as much as he used to.’
‘Good.
‘But it’s still too late. For his career at Kimberley.’
Imogen nods sympathetically – and drinks. I sip at my wine, and sigh in a what-can-you-do way, and gaze around our big bright Camden kitchen, at all the granite worktops and shining steel, the black espresso machine with its set of golden capsules: all of it screaming: this is the kitchen of a well-to-do middle-class couple!
And all of it a lie.
We were a well-to-do middle-class couple, for a while,