The woman Joan was sixty years old, and wore a polyester dress from a charity shop. A housewifely type, she had chosen to drip her blood into the kitchen sink. When Kit touched her on the elbow, she threw down the knife on to the draining board and attempted with her good hand to cover Kit’s eyes.
By this stage in her life Kit was not much surprised by anything. As she ducked under the woman’s arm she thought, that’s our bread-knife, if you don’t mind; but she said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that, Joan, why don’t you come away from the sink, why don’t you sit down on this chair and I’ll get the first-aid kit?’
The woman allowed herself to be led to a chair at the kitchen table. Kit pulled a clean tea-towel out of a drawer and wrapped it around Joan’s wrist. The towel was a checked one, red and white; Joan’s reluctant blood seeped black against the cloth. Her cuts were light, early, indecisive: the practice cuts. ‘Just wiggle your fingers,’ Kit said, ‘make sure you haven’t done any damage.’ The woman looked down at her hand in dry-eyed dread, while the child scrambled on a stool and brought down a box from a cupboard.
‘Lucky it’s half-term,’ Kit said, unpacking the bandages and the round-ended scissors. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have been here. I was upstairs. I was reading a book. It’s called Children of the New Forest. Have you read it? It’s about a family like ours, two boys and two girls, but they live a long time ago, in the olden days.’
I’m all fingers and thumbs, she thought. She heard her voice, running on. She was learning first aid at school. They told you, ‘Reassure the patient.’ ‘They live in the forest by themselves.’ Joan nodded: again her dumb dazed nod. ‘They’re Royalists. They have to hide from their enemies.’
Kit was afraid that Joan might faint, dropping as a dead weight to the flagstoned floor. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ she said. ‘Or I dare say you could have hot sweet tea.’
She thought, poor Joan. Perhaps dead is what she wants to be. It’s just as Dad always says: you can never find a sharp knife when you need one.
As she stood filling the kettle, she heard her mother’s car. She knew the crunch and scrape and wheeze of it, as it lurched up the drive. Relief washed through her body, turned her legs to water. She put the kettle on the hob, and was wiping out the sink with disinfectant when her mother came in.
Anna put her bags down on the table. She saw, more in sorrow than in surprise, Joan’s figure slumped across it. ‘Tea for me as well, Kit,’ she said.
That night Kit caught the tail-end of a whispered conversation: ‘You didn’t say she was a suicide risk, Ralph.’
‘I didn’t say because I didn’t know.’ She closed her bedroom door; she didn’t want to listen to her parents’ private thoughts.
Three days later, she came into the kitchen and found her mother on her hands and knees by the sink, working on the flags with a scrubbing brush. ‘The blood’s gone,’ Kit said, puzzled. ‘I wiped it up.’
Anna didn’t answer her, but rose from the floor, lifted the bucket and threw the soapy water into the sink.
By this time Joan had left, taking everything she owned in the two carrier bags with which she had arrived. Sudden exits were not infrequent among their visitors; they were not like the visitors that other households get. Ralph made inquiries of the police, the Salvation Army, and the Department of Health and Social Security, but he drew a blank. When Anna came to check the first-aid kit – restocking it was one of her responsibilities – she noticed that Joan had taken an extra bandage with her. They saw this as a hopeful sign.
In those years, when the children were growing up, the house was full of people like Joan. Ralph brought some of them from the hostel in London, which was maintained by the charitable trust for which he worked. Others he took in when Social Services didn’t know what to do with them, or when there were no beds at the local psychiatric hospital. Sometimes they turned up of their own accord, crouching out of the wind in one of the outhouses until he came home. ‘So-and-so’s a sad case,’ he would say; and over the years, this was what the family came to call them: the Sad Cases. Other people he called Good Souls. ‘Your Aunt Emma is giving so-and-so a lift to her drugs clinic in Norwich – she’s a good soul.’
And this was how the world was divided, when Kit was growing up – into Good Souls and Sad Cases. There was no wickedness in it.
On the day of Felix Palmer’s funeral, his wife, Ginny, met his mistress, Emma. They had met before, of course. The county of Norfolk is not so populous that they could have avoided each other. Their conduct at these meetings had been shaped by Ginny’s lofty and wilful ignorance of the situation: by Emma’s sang-froid: by Felix’s natural desire to maintain an arrangement that suited him.
Over the years they had coincided in draughty parish halls, in charity committee rooms and at the caucuses of local groups concerned with the protection of what, in the decade just beginning, would be known as ‘the environment’. They had bumped into each other in Norwich, shopping in Jarrold’s department store; they had exchanged. small-talk at exhibitions of craftwork, and occupied neighbouring seats at the theatre.
Once, travelling to London, they had found themselves sole occupants of a first-class carriage. For half an hour they had found enough that was anodyne to pass the time. Then Ginny, excusing herself with a smile, delved into her bag and pulled out a fat paperback book. She retired behind it. Emma examined its cover. A svelte woman, with a small crown perched upon her wimple, stood before a manor house with anachronistic chimney-stacks. The title was in florid gold script: Wyfe to Crookback. Emma looked out of the window. The landscape was a sad East England green; crows wheeled over the fields. As they moved from the edge of England to its heart, Emma herself took out a book.
They parted at sooty Liverpool Street with a nod and a smile. London forced no collusion on them, but Norfolk did. A handful of farming and professional families played host to both. At a round of weddings and christenings they had made polite, even warm conversation. At a dozen New Year’s Eve parties they had wished each other luck and happiness: and sometimes almost meant it.
Now, on this February morning, Ginny stood surrounded by a knot of mourners. Friends and business associates had turned out for the occasion; Felix had been well-liked in the district. The church occupied high ground, and a ripping wind billowed coats and snapped at woollen head-scarves and brought a flush to aching faces. The mourners could sense the presence of the sea, hidden from them by a belt of pines.
Some of them lingered in the church porch, reading the notices about flower rotas, dusting and brass-cleaning; others stood among the gravestones, looking depressed. They had double-parked in the open area beyond the church gate, and would have to wait their turn to get away. Ginny, leaning on the arm of her son, moved from group to group, offering a few tactful words to soothe their feelings; she understood that death is embarrassing.
Her own family – her son Daniel, who was an architect, her daughter Claire, who was a buyer at Harrods – had been as gentle and as careful of her feelings as anyone could wish. But – even as she deferred the moment – Ginny felt that it was Emma to whom she wished to speak, to whom naturally she should be speaking. Patting her son’s arm, smiling up and dismissing him, she made her way across the grass with a short, precisely regulated stride, her high heels spiking holes in the ground like some primitive seed drill.
Ginny Palmer was a sharp, neat, Wallis Simpson sort of woman, to whom black lent an added definition. As she advanced on Emma, she took from her pocket a crisp lace-edged handkerchief, folded it very small and polished the tip of her nose: a gesture quite unnecessary, but somehow drawn out of her by the occasion. You see me, the widow: fastidious but distraught.