Natalia and Alice would be as mad as hell to have missed this skeleton rattling out of its closet tonight, and their father taking ages to catch on that the facts about Diane Jenner weren’t facts at all. But James had asked Tamzin’s sisters to stay at home. Valerie wasn’t in danger, Nat was working shifts and Ally was in the middle of accountancy exams. Tamzin, as usual, hadn’t been given an option; James had just said, ‘Come on, Tamz.’ Because of Her Condition he wouldn’t leave her home alone when anything bad happened – not that she’d wanted to be left at home. She’d wanted to see her mum. And now she had, so broken and bruised. Her dad would be watching her like a hawk for days, if not weeks.
Nat and Ally were lucky; strong and confident and well-adjusted, with healthy lives full of healthy problems like annoying boyfriends, impossible bosses and killer hangovers. She loved Nat and Ally. She wished shewasNat or Ally.
Depression was a bastard.
She yawned. She hadn’t got up till lunchtime but she longed to retreat to her cool sheets. On bad nights she would only lie and stare at the ceiling, but still she loved the cocoon comfort of her bed. Bed. Her heart lurched to remember Valerie strung up like a fly in a web in that hospital bed. It was so crap that Valerie had been hurt. Really hurt. Tamzin felt a familiar hollowness in her chest. It would be ages before Mum was home. Could Tamzin hack undiluted James for so long? Her father got so stressed about her getting better it made her feel guilty that she couldn’t.
Valerie placed less importance than James on things like washing and dressing. Possibly, she didn’t always notice whether Tamzin had. That was cool. Less pressure.
Yet, the baby of the family, Tamzin’s childhood memories included perching proudly on her mother’s lap at parties in her Laura Ashley dresses and white knee socks while Nat and Ally, less malleable and less pretty, careered around with sashes untied and lace ripped. Valerie loved parties, having always been beautiful and vivacious so that men made idiots of themselves over her, which made her dead snappy with Dad, sometimes, because he refused to be made angry by them.
Tamzin had a special connection to her mother – they closed their eyes to each other’s problems. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand as the car purred through the dawn and wondered how her mother would take to Diane Jenner. Uncle Gareth had been a lovely new audience for Valerie’s toys, the big stone house, the Alloy Blue TVR Tuscan 2 Targa, the 4-wheel-drive Lexus, the flying.
But Diane didn’t look the type to be easily impressed.
‘Where’s your place?’ James asked Diane, politely.
Diane stirred and stretched in the dark grey light. ‘A couple of miles. Drop me by the village green, if you like. I can walk down the lane.’
James glanced across at her. ‘At night?’
‘It’s getting light.’
He made a performance of peering out. There was no colour yet in the fields or hedges and the streetlights were still alight as they neared the village. Tamzin could have told Diane that she was wasting her breath. James wouldn’t drop Diane anywhere but safely at her front door. ‘Just tell me where to find your house,’ he said.
Shrugging, Diane sent him down a main road between brick houses topped with tile, turning left just before a huddle of new properties advertised as ‘executive residences’. Nowhere near as big as our house, Tamzin thought. Over a small bridge, they crossed a dyke where the water looked like weak tea without milk in the first of the sun’s rays and ran down a lane between a string of redbrick houses with hedges. The flatness of the surrounding fields was typical of the wide expanses of the Fens where most of the scenery was sky and the pylons marched like robots.
The Mercedes rolled along quietly. James glanced at Diane. ‘Bit bloody lonely down here. Do you often walk it alone?’
One of Diane’s shoulders lifted. ‘I have to get from A to B.’
Tamzin couldn’t decide whether Diane was hostile or amused at James’s concern. Concern was kind of a habit, with him.
They pulled up outside one of the redbrick semi-detached houses and Diane opened the car door. ‘Sorry to have put you to so much trouble at the end of a long night.’
Tamzin climbed out, too, intending to move into the front seat. The first streak of pink had appeared overhead and she hunched her shoulders against a chill morning breeze.
‘I’ll see you in,’ said James.
Diane halted, her long plait settling over one shoulder. ‘See me in?’ She examined the thirty yards between the car and her house. The corners of her mouth twitched. ‘Oh. OK. Um, thanks.’
Tamzin grinned as her father, scowling at being humoured so obviously, trailed Diane up the concrete path to what probably used to be a council house. The front garden was long and the shrubs they brushed past were silvery with dew and spider webs. Something squelched under Tamzin’s shoe. ‘Gross,’ she muttered.
Diane led them to a side door that opened into the kitchen. In the light of a bulb shaded by taut white cotton, they all blinked. ‘As you can see,’ observed Diane, gravely, ‘quite safe. It’s very good of you to worry, of course.’
‘Right.’ James turned for the door.
But Tamzin couldn’t stop gazing at her surroundings. This kitchen was out of a museum! White Formica worktop, chipped and scarred, white tiles, greying grout, a freestanding electric cooker crouched on quarry tiles, more Formica on the units on the wall. It would have been straight out of the 1970s, except for the fresh pink emulsion with a stencilled grapevine arcing above the washing machine.
Well old! Andtinycompared to their house, with the gables of six bedrooms studding the red-tiled roof and four cars parked in the garage at the end of the drive.
Her mouth was quicker to react than her sluggish brain. ‘Whoa! Does Uncle Gareth livehere?’
Diane halted, that disconcerting gaze homing in on Tamzin in a way that made Tamzin want to suck the words back out of the air. Seconds passed in silence. Without removing her gaze, Diane reached down thick, yellow mugs from behind a glass sliding door of a wall cupboard. Her voice had taken on a note of steel. ‘I can’t let you go without something to keep you awake on the drive home.’ She filled the kettle, plugged it in, and scraped out two kitchen chairs. ‘Please – sit.’
‘We ought to get going.’ James turned for the door.
‘A cup of tea first,’ Diane contradicted firmly. ‘And a chat. That would be ... helpful. Please.’
