“If our house was so shockingly small, why did the Gavey woman make a viewing appointment?” Dad asked.
“She didn’t think she would at first, not once she’d seen it from the outside. But then she looked again at the alternatives and reminded herself of their depressing hoveliness, and her husband, whom she seems to detest, kept telling her she needed tocompromise instead of thinking she could be lady of the manor forever…andthen, she said, she noticed how stunning some of the tiny little details were in the photos of each of Shukes’s rooms, and at that point she fell in love. Until…”
“No back garden,” said Dad.
“Correct. That was when she decided I’d let her down, because Shukes was supposed to be flawless apart from his too-smallness: her perfect house to be poor but happy in. She’d done her bit—compromised, forgiven him his inadequate square footage—but he hadn’t even met her halfway. He’d rubbed salt into her wounds, and so had I, and so had Peter, by arranging for there to be no proper back garden, just to spite Lesley Gavey.”
“Right, well, if she comes back with an offer of double the asking price, we’re not selling to her.” Dad looked fierce.
“Agreed. Don’t worry; she won’t be back. From her point of view, Shukes fucked around and now he’s going to have to find out—to use a Ree-ism. She really was awful, Mark. Having got all that off her chest, she ordered a second mug of tea as if I were a branch of Costa, then proceeded to interrogate me: Was Itrulyhappy in this cramped, confined space that I called home? Was that why I’d made every inch of it so immaculate and beautiful—to compensate? Have I ever been more materially fortunate than I am now, and if so, do I miss it? Did we somehow lose our fortune, or were we born poor and deprived?”
“You’ve got to be exaggerating now.” Dad’s eyes widened. “Tell me you’re making it up.”
“Definitely not making it up,” said Mum. “Maybe exaggerating atinybit, but trust me, that was the gist. ‘And you’ve got a dog!’ shesaid, properly laughing in a kind of admiring-the-bonkersness way, as if pet parenting is an absurdly ambitious thing to attempt, given the huge financial constraints we’re clearly under. Then she noticed the framed portrait of Furbs and asked if that was Champ and I told her it wasn’t, it was Furbert, our first dog. And then, I don’t know why, but…I started to tell her all about him. It was as if her sadness kind of…reached into me and brought out all my grief, and I thought maybe she was as sad to have to leave her home as I was sad about Furbs. Maybe her house felt like a member of the family, the way Shukes does to me. But then she soon made me hate myself for telling her anything at all, because when I happened to mention Furby’s full name, she looked affronted and said, ‘Furbert Herbert Lambert—are you serious, Sally?’ I told her I was, and guess what the nasty witch said?”
“That it’s a daft name?” Dad’s face assumed a mischievous expression. “I seem to remember someone else saying something sim—”
“She frowned and said, ‘It’s not fair to give a dog a joke name like that, Sally. It’s disrespectful, actually.’ That’s when I told her to stick it up her vicious arse and fuck off.”
“You said that? Nice one!”
“My version of that, yes,” said Mum. “I pretended to remember an important Zoom meeting that was starting in five minutes and told her she had to leave.”
19
Tuesday 18 June 2024
Sally
The Lamberts’ burner phones arrive at Corinne’s Lake District house just before midday, brought to the door by a man who gives them to her with a discreet nod, then walks away without a single word being exchanged. Soon afterward, something else happens without the involvement of words: Sally comes to understand that Corinne Sullivan is Ree and Toby’s new favorite person. Now, at her large kitchen table (carved from just one tree previously in the garden outside, Corinne told them as they sat down), they are both staring at her wide-eyed, as if she contains magic. Hot tub cinemas, miraculous phone deliveries—not only in the middle of nowhere but before breakfast, which is imminent now that the youngsters have surfaced… No one else Ree and Tobes know could lay on all of this.
Sally worries that everything is dangerously out of control. Who is the man who brought the phones? And who are the two silent, pleasant-but-blank-faced young women cooking sausages and bacon a mere twenty or so feet away? Their agreement withCorinne, clearly, is that all three of them will pretend they aren’t there, and Sally feels she has no choice but to go along with this charade, though it feels extremely odd to her.
How many people are there, she wonders, who slip in and out of Corinne’s life, performing various services for her? How many more will turn up today, or tomorrow? Anyone who sees the Lamberts here will be in a position, if anything reaches the news about a Welsh terrier and his family in flight from the law, to make a call and report them to the authorities, even knowing what that might mean for Champ.
At one time Sally would have imagined most people were far too decent to inform on their relatives, friends, and neighbors to that useless joke that calls itself a police force despite not giving a toss about justice anymore. (Mark says this all the time, so Sally is inclined to believe him, especially after she was treated like a criminal for glancing at her phone while stuck in a traffic jam.) Now she believes most people would betray even their nearest and dearest in order to comply with the latest nonsensical rule.
During the COVID lockdowns, Sally’s friend Oonagh got a visit from some killjoys in blue after her next-door neighbor called the police on her. All Oonagh had done was have her lonely, elderly mother round for lunch; no one else was affected. Sally is convinced (Mark says this often too) that the majority of people have lost all their moral marbles and get angrier about people eating cake in their offices and sitting on park benches with their brothers than they do about an excrescence of evil like the Gavey family trying to get innocent dogs killed. This isn’t happening only in England, either. Didn’t Mark say that in Canada, the president or primeminister, whatever his name is, has started confiscating the pets of any lorry drivers who disagree with him? And isn’t that same chap also encouraging all Canadians who are a bit fed up to kill themselves?
Sally has laughed at Mark in the past when he’s said these crazy-sounding things, but now she’s thinking he’s probably right. She’s never felt more suspicious of supposedly trustworthy institutions in her life. She can’t help eyeing Corinne’s sausage-and-egg coordinators at the far end of the kitchen and wondering exactly how willing they might prove, if the price were right, to usher groups of dispirited Canadians into rooms reserved for the opposite of Enjollification—or, more to the point, to inform on poor Champy.
The more delighted her children seem by Corinne’s every utterance and deed, the more afraid Sally feels. There’s a danger, surely, in assuming too much about someone who’s all movies and hot tubs from the word go. What if Corinne…
No. Don’t doubt the only person who’s made a significant positive difference since this nightmare began. Don’t do that, Sally.
The kitchen helpers have started to transport heaped breakfast plates across the room. Pushing Ree’s phone away from him, Mark says, “Can we please log off from Tess Gavey’s wound before we eat? We’ve all seen it now, from all angles.” His and Sally’s phones are still in their boxes; Ree and Tobes leaped on theirs as soon as Corinne handed them over, and they’d set them up within minutes. Since they and Corinne-under-a-false-name all follow Tess Gavey on Instagram, Sally has already seen Tess’s mangled, bloody, bruised forearm on three separate devices.
“Log off?” Toby shakes his head in disgust.
“The idea that Champ wouldeverdo that to anyone,” says Ree. “I mean…she’s going to be scarred for life, right, Mum?”
“Oh, yes,” says Corinne, before thanking the blank-faced servers and telling them they won’t be needed for the next hour. She turns back to Ree. “Let that be our first consolation: Tess will be hideously disfigured for the rest of her life.”
“Corinne—” Sally starts to say.
“Oh, shut up, Mum!” says Ree cheerfully, and Sally feels churlish for disapproving of the joke that cheered her up. “Tess is already disfigured—by her personality. She’s a sociopath.”
“True,” Tobes confirms.
