Something has changed. Or not changed: been lost. Tonie realises it with a jump, a start, the way she might feel around her throat for a necklace and realise it was no longer there.
They are walking with Alexa to Beacon Park, where there are swings, where they have taken her a hundred times since she was born, and not one of those times has Tonie felt that something was missing in the way that she feels it now. It is Saturday. Alexa is wearing new shoes, red, the leather plump and glossy and unmarked. Thomas bought them for her. They were very expensive. Tonie would never have bought Alexa such expensive shoes, beautiful Italian shoes with white kid insoles. She can’t decide whether it is the beauty or the expense that troubles her more.
The day is cold, bright, a diamond-hard February day, and Tonie walks ahead of the others on the pavement with her hands stuffed into her pockets. At the gate she stands silently back, to let them pass through. Alexa goes first, then Thomas. Tonie notices her daughter’s small, delicate shoulders as she passes, the head turning like a flower on the fragile neck, the dark, glossy ponytail tumbling down her back. She would like to touch it. Just then, Thomas puts his own hand out and touches the ponytail, fingering its ends. That’s when Tonie realises that something has been lost. She has lost his attention.
In the afternoon she decides to make spaghetti Bolognese. She gets out the saucepans, clanging and clattering. She fills the kitchen with the fumes of cooking onions and meat. She chops things and hurls them into the pot. She is frenzied, transfixed; she is engulfed in the preparation of this red sauce which bubbles, thick and volcanic, at her fingertips. She doesn’t know what will happen when the sauce is finished. She doesn’t know what she’ll do.
Occasionally Thomas comes into the kitchen, searches around, leaves again. Tonie, at her cauldron, brews up her red anger, her face damp with steam. She wants to scream, to throw things. Every time Thomas appears, blank-faced and diffident, searching for something, she has the desire to shock him with violence. She wants him to be brought into line. She wants him to be punished. For the first time, she wishes he were back at work. She wants him held and constricted, fenced round with regulations; she wants him corrected. Now he has the look of someone who has got away with something. He can withdraw his attention, with no fear of reprisal.
‘What are you actually looking for?’ she says coldly, when he has come in for the third or fourth time.
‘What?’ He looks up, notices her. ‘Oh, nothing.’
When she goes upstairs she finds Thomas and Alexa, all quiet and companionable, in the sitting room. She stands in the doorway but neither of them looks up. She doesn’t go back to her red sauce, which is still bubbling on the cooker. She leaves it, abandons it, goes to her bedroom. She lies on the bed. Later, Thomas puts his head in.
‘I think your sauce is done,’ he says. ‘Shall I turn it off?’
‘If you want,’ Tonie says.
He goes away again. The house is full of the red rich smell of what she has created. The room is getting dark. She can hear music playing downstairs. She lies still. She doesn’t turn on the lights.