*
Jessamine knocked on the door soon after I heard them all come back. She was ten and dressed like one of the Queen’s grandchildren. She was supposed to tell me lunch was ready and also supposed to tell me I didn’t have to come and have any.
‘Or –’ she itched her tights ‘– if you want to eat in here, you are allowed and someone can bring it.’
I said I didn’t want anything. She went cross-eyed to indicate that I was insane and went out, leaving the door open.
I got up to close it. Patrick was hovering just outside. He was a foot taller than he had been the year before and said hello in a voice so unlike the one I was expecting, I laughed.
Embarrassed, he lowered his eyes. I was wearing the tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt I had arrived in but I had taken my bra off and felt suddenly aware of it. I crossed my arms over my chest and asked him what he was doing. He said, fiddling with one cuff and then the other, that he was meant to be calling his father and Rowland had told him to use the phone in the snug but then Jessamine had just told him I was already in here.
‘I can go out.’
Patrick said it was fine, he could just go and find another one, then looked quickly in either direction as though my uncle was about to appear from one of them. I took a half-step to the side and he rushed in.
For a minute or two, he spoke to his father, in monosyllables. I waited outside the door until I heard him say goodbye. He was standing next to the phone table, staring blankly at a painting above it of a lion attacking a horse. A moment passed before he noticed me, apologising for taking so long when he did. I thought he would leave then but he just stood there while I walked back to the sofa and sat down on the covers, crossed-legged, hugging a cushion in front of my chest and silently wishing for him to go so I could lie down again. Patrick stayed where he was. Because I could not think of another question I said, ‘How is school?’
‘Good.’ He turned around, paused, then said, ‘Sorry you’re sick.’
I shrugged and pulled a thread out of the cushion zip. Although it was his third year with us, I could not remember talking to Patrick individually about something other than what time it was or where to put the plates he had brought down to the kitchen. But after another moment of him not leaving, I said, ‘You must miss your dad.’
He smiled and nodded in a way that made it clear he didn’t.
‘Do you miss your mum?’ As soon as I said it, his face changed, not towards an emotion I could name, more the absence of any. He moved over to the window, stood with his back turned and his hands by his sides, not speaking for such a long time that when he eventually said yeah it felt like it wasn’t in reference to anything. His shoulders rose and fell with a heavy breath and I felt guilty that I had never considered how lonely he must be as the only unrelated person in the house, that having Christmas with someone else’s family every year was less likely his preference than a source of shame.
I shifted a bit and said, ‘What was she like?’
He stayed at the window. ‘She was really nice.’
‘Do you remember specific things about her? If you were seven.’
‘Not really.’
I pulled another thread out of the cushion. ‘That’s sad.’
Patrick finally turned around and said, quietly, that the only thing he did remember, which wasn’t from a photo, was one time in the kitchen of the house they lived in before she died, he asked for an apple and as she was handing it to him she said do you need me to start it for you?
‘I don’t know why.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Five or something.’
I said, ‘You probably didn’t have front teeth.’
There isn’t a name for the emotion that registered on his face then. It was all of them. Patrick left after that.
*
There was a café, a minute or two from the Executive Home, which I used to go to every morning. The barista was very young and looked like a non-specific famous person. One day I made a joke about it as he pressed the lid onto my coffee. He said something disappointingly flirtatious in response and by the end of the week I had entered into a mandatory banter relationship with him. It quickly became onerous and I started going to a café that was further away, where the coffee was less good and where I did not have to talk.
*
Alone again, I got off the sofa and tried to find something to read. There was only a Radio Times and a fully revised and updated edition of The Complete Whippet on the coffee table, and some sheet music on my aunt’s writing desk.