“Oh dear.”
“And I have to sleep on a fold-out bed in the room where Martha does all her painting and it’s really messy and smells of paint. But if I make a mess I get told off.”
“Have you told your mother how you feel?”
“She doesn’t understand. Martha’s all nice when she’s around. But if Mummy goes out she just ignores me.”
Margaret took a sip of milk and wiped her top lip on her sleeve.
“One time when we were on our own I said, ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ and she said, ‘I haven’t decided yet. I don’t dislike you.’’
Her rendering of Martha’s low, cultured voice was uncannily, almost cruelly accurate.
“Oh, Margaret, I don’t know what to say. What can I do to help you?”
The girl blinked hard to try and hold down the first hot prickling of tears.
“I wish we could just go back to the way things were,” she burst out. “With Daddy. It was better before.”
Jean put a tentative arm around her shoulders and, meeting no resistance, gathered her into a hug. She could feel the bones of her back, fragile and birdlike, beneath the wool of her cardigan as she sobbed.
“Don’t cry,” she pleaded, powerless to offer any real comfort. “Everything will be all right.”
But this was an assurance not hers to make and, as one of the chief beneficiaries of the fractured Tilbury marriage, she felt its hollowness.
At last Margaret’s tears were cried out and she consented to mop her flaming face with a cool facecloth. This outpouring of emotion and moisture had fogged the kitchen windows.
“Good heavens,” said Jean, “much more of this and we’ll have to build Jemimah a raft.”
Margaret had recovered sufficiently to giggle between gulps and sniffs.
“Did you tell anyone where you were going?”
“No. I just sneaked out.”
Jean imagined Gretchen, frantic at the discovery and combing the streets. She would have to be telephoned and reassured at some stage, but would it really hurt her to taste a little fear, if it opened her eyes to the cost of her emancipation?
In the end it was Howard she rang, leaving that other, more difficult phone call to him. Margaret was adamant that she wanted to go home to Burdett Road. It was agreed that he would pick her up after work; Sunday was their day together anyway. The rest would have to be negotiated with Gretchen. Margaret’s main concern was Jemimah.
“Where is she going to sleep tonight? I had to leave the hutch behind.”
Howard promised to bring a stout cardboard box home from the shop; he would spend the evening fashioning some form of temporary rabbit-proof accommodation. It was impossible for Jean to speak openly with Margaret bobbing about beside her and interjecting every few seconds, and the anguished pauses in the conversation were heavy with unspoken regret for their abandoned plans.
Noticing that Margaret was starting to shiver in her damp clothes, Jean offered to run her a hot bath—the one she had intended to take herself but would not now need. She filled it a little deeper than the scant three inches that was her usual allocation and dug out another of their elderly towels from the airing cupboard. It was only at moments like these, when she saw her belongings through another’s eyes—even those of an uncritical ten-year-old girl—that she was ashamed of how shabby they were. There was a crust of limescale around the neck and snout of the tap, and a green streak running down the enamel from the overflow to the drain. The ancient linoleum, though clean, was cracked and ridged.
“I’m sorry, it’s probably not as nice as your bathroom at home,” Jean said.
Having lived there all week she knew quite well that it wasn’t.
“That’s all right,” said Margaret kindly, beginning to peel off her jumper. “It’s better than Luna Street.”
Jean left her to undress and returned to the kitchen, where Jemimah had been shut in with a saucer of the rabbit food from Margaret’s running-away kit. She washed up the milk dish and cut herself a slice of the cherry cake—Howard could take the rest when he came—then sat at the table gazing blankly at the crossword in the Saturday paper while brooding on these latest developments.
If Margaret moved back home permanently that would put an end to staying overnight with Howard, even before her mother’s eventual discharge from hospital, which would only frustrate matters further. It was a mess.
Her ruminations were interrupted by a cry from above. Jean bounded up the stairs, her heart thudding in alarm. Margaret stood in the steamy bathroom, naked apart from her sturdy white knickers. She was craning to catch sight of her back in the mirror. A patch of raw pink skin the size of a postage stamp was visible just above her waistband.