Part 38 (2/2)

'I don't know. He's very poorly at the moment. He needs a lot of rest.'

'Carrie says he's got flu and that she saw him crying yesterday. Was he crying, Harriet?'

'I don't know; I wasn't there.'

'Why do you think he was crying?'

'Because he's not feeling very well.'

While he continued to help Harriet put his toys and books into a box, Joel thought that talking with grown-ups could be a bit like going round in circles. It didn't usually happen with Harriet, but maybe, because they were moving tomorrow, she didn't have time to talk to him properly.

Mummy used to say that she couldn't talk properly when she was busy. 'I'll answer your questions in a minute, Joel,' she'd say. 'Just let me finish what I'm doing.' She was always busy on her computer. Every morning when they came home after taking Carrie to school she'd go into the spare room and switch on the computer. 'Go and play while I send an email to your auntie Harriet,' she would say. Mummy used to say that Harriet wasn't just her sister, she was her best friend, too. Carrie was his sister but he didn't think she thought he was her best friend. She had all her friends from school to play with now. She was always talking about them. He had no one. Only Harriet and Grandma and Granddad. And they were all too busy to talk to him. He suddenly felt sad. And a bit frightened. Things kept changing. He blamed it on that boring party the day it snowed. Ever since that day things had been different. First he'd overheard Dora talking to someone about Will and what a shame it was about his daughter dying and how upset he must be. Hoping it wasn't that nice girl they'd met ages ago in that funny old shop that smelled, he'd asked Grandma about it. He could tell she didn't really want to talk to him, because she'd hugged him and said he wasn't to worry about anything. But he was worried. Everyone was dying. Who would be next?

Granddad?

Carrie said that Granddad had caught his flu germs at the party and that was what had made him go mad and wreck the garden. But Joel didn't believe Carrie. He'd never heard of anyone wrecking a garden because they weren't feeling well. He knew what had really happened. Granddad must have drunk too much wine at the party, like Dad did that time when he got cross with Mummy and threw all her books out of the window. It was raining, but Mummy went out in her slippers to get them. But they'd fallen into a puddle and she cried because they were ruined. She said they were her favourite books of poems. But they weren't like the poems she read to them at bedtime, the funny ones with the nice rhymes. They were serious ones without any pictures. He hadn't liked seeing Daddy like that, all angry and using bad words.

Harriet didn't approve of lying to the children. When it came to important matters, she'd always believed in being straight and honest with them, but out of respect for her parents she had agreed, for the time being, to keep quiet about Dad's breakdown. Just as she'd done with Suzie's death. Perhaps, when she and the children had moved, and she didn't have her mother's wishes to tiptoe around, she would talk more openly with them.

Meanwhile, she had the move to deal with. 'Come on, Joel,' she said, brightly, 'a little faster with those toys or we'll still be here when the removal men arrive in the morning.'

'What time are they coming?'

'About nine o'clock, so we need to be ready nice and early.'

They worked together for another twenty minutes, until finally every last cuddly toy, book and game had been sealed up in a packing box. 'There,' she said, 'all done.' Noting that Joel was looking uncertainly at his now-empty room - all that was left was his silky lying on top of his folded pyjamas on the bed, along with his new slippers - she added, 'You've done a fantastic job, Joel. I don't know how I would have managed without you.'

He gave her one of his notoriously wobbly smiles, the one that he knew was expected of him, but he didn't really mean. 'Can I have my bath now?'

'You'll have-to see if Carrie's finished in there.'

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but Carrie had decided that she was too old now to share a bath with her little brother. Harriet knew that Joel didn't like this new arrangement, which made him feel excluded. She listened to him talking to his sister through the closed bathroom door and yawned hugely, stretching her arms above her head. She was exhausted. She had spent most of the day getting ready for the move. A blessing really, because it had taken her mind off the events of the last forty-eight hours.

No one had come right out and said it, but it was officially all Harriet's fault. If she hadn't taken it upon herself to confront Dominic so dramatically, and to make Miles stand up to him once and for all, her father wouldn't have gone berserk and smashed up the garden. Nor would Harriet's mother been forced to witness him go through such a harrowing ordeal.

The first she'd known about Dad's breakdown - and that he knew all about Felicity's affair with Dominic - was when she'd come home later that evening and found Miles in the kitchen drinking tea with her mother. Mum had told her she'd had to call out the doctor for Dad. 'He's fast asleep,' Eileen had explained. The doctor gave him something.' Her mother had then taken her outside to show her the garden and even in the dark, Harriet could see the extent of the damage. What hurt most was the sight of the Wendy house - it was the only thing her father had left standing. It stood there bleakly in the snow and shadows, like a lone, traumatised survivor of a ma.s.sacre.

At no stage did Eileen ask where Harriet had been for the last three hours, for which she was grateful. Perhaps her mother had guessed where she'd been and was saving Miles's feelings. Harriet could see that Miles was desperate to talk to her but Harriet had done enough talking, so she offered to go back out into the cold and fetch the children, who were still with Dora. Across the road, the curtains were drawn at Will's and she pictured him sitting by the fire where she'd left him earlier.

Immediately after telling Harvey McKendrick what she'd thought of him, she had decided that only a walk in the punis.h.i.+ng cold would make her feel better. She had come across Will clearing the snow from the bench at the end of his garden. It had seemed an odd thing to be doing, seeing as a fresh fall of snow was now coming down. When he saw her, he'd stopped what he was doing and, without a word, had started walking beside her in unnerving silence. She could feel his sadness reach out to her. Several minutes pa.s.sed before she asked him how he was.

'I've been better,' he replied. 'How about you? I saw punches being thrown over at the McKendricks'. Was there a problem with the sherry? Not dry enough, perhaps?'

She stopped walking and looked at him. 'I've missed you, Will.'

'I've missed you too.' The snow was falling faster and heavier now; swollen flakes of it were forming a thick layer on their clothes. He glanced up at the sky and catching sight of the vulnerable paleness of his skin above his scarf she felt an urge to kiss his neck. 'We need to make a decision,' he said, stamping his feet in the cold. 'We either brave this snowstorm or we turn for home.'

'I don't want to go home. Not yet.'

'Then come back to my place. I could do with the company.'

'Even my company?'

He wiped away a snowflake that had settled on her eyelashes. 'I told you, I've missed you.'

They hurried back the way they'd just come, kicked off their boots at the kitchen door and shook the snow from their clothes. He offered her a gla.s.s of wine, but she declined, not trusting herself to drink any alcohol and stay in control of her emotions.

While Will threw some logs onto the fire and she knelt in front of it gratefully she saw that there wasn't a trace of Christmas in the sitting room: no tree, no cards, not a single festive knick-knack. Exactly as she would have predicted.

'How's Gemma?' she asked when he was settled in the armchair nearest her.

'Difficult to say.'

'Did she tell you I spoke to her before Christmas?'

'No.'

'I gave her my mobile number, in case she wanted to talk to someone, other than family.'

'That was kind of you.'

'I know how it feels to be the surviving daughter - the daughter who gets overlooked in favour of the one who's died.'

He visibly bristled. 'She isn't being overlooked. I'd never do that to Gemma.'

'Good. Because it's the worst thing that can happen to her.'

'I'll keep your advice in mind,' he replied coolly. He stretched his legs out in front of him and rested his feet on the hearth. She could see from his expression as he stared into the fire that she'd rattled him, and he'd taken her comment as a criticism. She was just about to apologise when he said, 'Tell me about the fisticuffs. What was that all about?'

She sighed. 'It's complicated.'

'Life is.'

'Mine especially.' She turned slightly so that she was sideways on to the fire and facing him, her chin resting on her drawn-up knees. 'I realised this morning that I've been deliberately played with. For months I've been fed a pack of lies. I've been manipulated in a way you wouldn't believe. And I hate myself for having been so naive, for not being astute enough to realise what was going on. I seem to have a singular lack of talent for reading between the lines.'

'Would I be right in thinking that your old friend Dominic, the one on the receiving end of the punches being swung, is at the bottom of this?'

She nodded. And then she told him the whole unedifying story, the lies, the secrets, the betrayals. She poured everything out: how she'd grown up with a love-hate relations.h.i.+p towards Dominic, how she'd wors.h.i.+pped him yet despised him. Finally she told Will about Miles and how their friends.h.i.+p had begun to change when she moved back home. 'I suddenly saw him in a different light,' she explained.

'No longer as a friend but as a potential boyfriend? A lover?'

'Yes. It suddenly seemed the perfect answer. Almost as though this was what Felicity might have wanted for us; you know, two people who had been really close to her coming together to bring up her children.'

'But Dominic had other ideas?'

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