Leo is in the fast lane of the A23 when Susie tells him to pull over, right now. She has her hand over her mouth. In the lay-by she leans out of the car door and retches over the tarmac. Juggernauts thunder past, one after another. The Vauxhall rocks with the vibrations. In the back seat, Justin and Madeleine are silent.
‘That’s the worst,’ Susie gasps, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her long scarlet fingernails flash against her cheek, a blood-coloured bouquet. ‘When nothing comes up.’
An uprush of air pressure slams into the side of the car and is sucked instantly back. They rock from side to side: for a few seconds they are in the lee of a monster, engulfed in the roaring, churning wheels, the crazily flapping tarpaulins.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Leo says nervously. ‘Those things come so fucking close.’
Susie flips down the passenger mirror, reapplies her lipstick. She turns around in her seat, scanning the road through the back window.
‘I’ll tell you when,’ she says.
They stop twice more before they get there. On the winding B-road Susie groans and clutches her stomach. The cows look up at them from the fields as they pass. A mile from Little Wickham there are crows hopping around a tattered carcass in the middle of the road. Leo stops, blares his horn. They are picking at the bloodied flesh and fur, unheeding. He blares again, revs the engine. He can see it was a rabbit. He can see a torn ear, a crushed fragment of skull.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he says. He realises he is trembling. ‘Leave the bloody thing alone.’
Reluctantly they lift themselves away on their black wings and settle on the verge, their beaks engorged. Susie puts her hand on his knee. She is all right now. She keeps her hand there, firm.
‘Nearly there,’ she says.
It is a grey day, gusty, the bare trees twitching and irritable, the countryside lying in unconscious mounds of rough vegetation. Ma is on the front lawn when they pull up the drive. She is wearing a funny hat, a man’s jacket, thick socks that she’s tucked her trousers into.
‘Oh, hello!’ she says, through the car window.
She sounds surprised. Leo and Susie joke about it, the way his parents always seem surprised to see him, despite the fact the visit has been arranged: not a pleasant surprise and not a shock either, just a mild lack of expectation, like when you’ve forgotten something and it turns up again. There’s an imitation Susie does, lifting one eyebrow very slightly, widening her eyes, the hint of a query in the voice. Oh, hello? She gets it exactly.
His mother’s clothes say it all. She isn’t putting herself out, put it that way.
‘Leo,’ she says, when he gets out of the car. She hugs him. He can feel her gnarled vigorous body through the clothes, her eternal unstoppable sufficiency. ‘And Susie.’ Susie gets a hug too. Her high heels are sinking into the grass.
‘Get you, darling,’ Susie says, fingering the man’s jacket, the crumpled old hat. ‘Get your fashionable androgynous look.’
Ma screeches with laughter, delighted. Susie knows how to handle her, has always known. Justin and Madeleine are banging at the car windows.
‘Oh dear, shall we let them out?’ Ma says.
‘Let’s leave them there,’ Susie says. ‘I could do with a day off. We can toss them in a bag of crisps at lunchtime.’
Ma screeches again. Susie hams it up, her bad mother act, and Ma soaks up every last drop of it. She wants to be in the club, the gang.
‘Don’t!’ she says. ‘I was forever locking mine in the car – I’d go off and forget about them for hours!’
At home Susie does an imitation of that too. Once I didn’t see Leo for seven years! I completely forgot about him!
‘Thomas here?’ Leo says.
‘Not yet. I can’t think where they’ve got to – they phoned hours ago to say they were leaving. And the others aren’t coming at all because Howard’s unwell. I’ve got this great big joint of beef and at the moment only us to eat it.’
It’s another thing, the way after fifteen years she doesn’t seem to know that he and Susie are vegetarians.
‘Oh well,’ he says, because she makes it sound as though it isn’t enough to have him there, as though without Howard and Thomas the day might as well be cancelled, because she has so many other things she needs to be getting on with. His father is coming out of the house, peering around like a policeman investigating a disturbance. He sees Leo and Susie, changes his expression to one of recognition. Leo wonders how long he waited inside before coming out. He imagines him pressed against the wall beside the curtains, his eyes screwed up, trying to see through the crack.
Susie is getting the children out of the car, fussing over them now, straightening their clothes. He shakes his father’s hand.
‘Nice to see you,’ his father says.
Inside the house there is the old darkness, the old smells. Flossie is in her basket. The clock in the hall ticks. The house is cold. The scarred wooden floor, the hunting prints with their unfunny antique humour, the faded William Morris wallpaper full of strange, devouring forms: it is more than familiar, it is thick with subconscious life, like a forest in a fairy tale. The house is haunted, Leo knows it is. Only once, when he was seventeen, he spent the night here alone. Something said his name, sat on the bed. He had been asleep and the feeling of a weight on the bed woke him. It made it worse, to have been asleep. It is worse to go into something unconscious. He shouted at it to go away, went all round the house turning the lights on and shouting. To shout at nothing is to break some contract with yourself, with reality. Thinking about it now, he sees that his life has been punctuated by such incidents. Reality is personal too. He’s had to break it to advance himself, to go forward. It’s the only way he can get to the place where he feels comfortable.
‘Work going well?’ his father says. ‘Any new commissions recently?’
‘It’s all right,’ Leo says. ‘It’s much the same.’
He doesn’t know where Dads has got hold of this commissions idea. Leo is a copywriter. He writes copy for the same agency he has always written for. Yet every time he sees his father he starts talking about commissions. It sounds like an army word: it isn’t a word Leo has ever applied to himself. He supposes it’s his father’s way of rationalising the troublesome fact that Leo is not an employee. He is freelance, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. One day he’ll receive his commission and off he’ll go into the sunset.
‘How about you?’ he says. ‘How is everything?’
‘All right.’
There is a silence. Leo looks around for Susie, but she isn’t there. He needs her. He doesn’t know what to say. He feels the silence consuming him, swallowing him up.
‘How’s the garden?’ he says.
His father looks mildly at him with his cold eyes. He wears a cravat at his throat. His snow-white hair is plastered into place.
‘Not much happening in the garden at this time of year. Just some pruning, cutting back for winter. We’re thinking about thinning out some of those trees over by the garage. The roots are starting to undermine the foundations.’
‘Really?’ Leo says.
‘The problem is that your mother won’t hear of any of them being cut down. The tree surgeon came out to explain it to her, but he couldn’t seem to make her understand. We rather wasted his afternoon, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took us off his list, which would be a pity.’
Justin and Madeleine are petting Flossie in her basket. She snaps her jaws a little, rolls over. They tickle her coarse old belly and she lies back, stiff with pleasure on her filthy blanket. Leo looks at their soft hair, their new fresh skin, feels the tension of love for them, as though in this place his love were illicit.
‘Oh well,’ he says.
At last there is a commotion at the door; the others come in, Susie smelling of cigarettes, Thomas and Tonie close behind with the breath of the world on them, of blessed modernity. They look young and clean and slim. They look eminently, relievingly competent.
‘Sorry,’ Thomas says. He puts his arms around Leo, pats his back. ‘We had to take a detour. We got here as quickly as we could.’
‘I would have had to have eaten cow,’ Leo says. Now that they are here, he can acknowledge how miserable he feels.
‘We need a drink,’ Thomas says. ‘Dads, we could all do with a drink, don’t you think?’
Madeleine looks up, startled.
‘Don’t give Mummy anything to drink,’ she says. ‘She had too much to drink last night. She was sick in the car.’
Susie rolls her eyes. She’s wearing a lot of make-up and her skin is deathly-looking, grey. She has lipstick on her teeth. Her dress is all creased down the front. Leo feels guilty. He should have let her stay at home, let her sleep it off. He worries that he doesn’t look after her properly. He worries that he’s going to wear her out.
‘Mummy had a tummy bug,’ he says sternly, to Madeleine.
Madeleine creases her forehead, perplexed. ‘No she didn’t. And she was smoking just now. I saw her in the garden.’
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Susie says, through her teeth. ‘Isn’t she everything you’d want in a daughter?’ She catches hold of Alexa, kisses the top of her shining head. ‘Now this is a nice, discreet child. This child is house-trained.’
Tonie is in the doorway. Leo sees her, sees her watching everything. She looks like she is watching a play.
‘Come outside,’ he says in a low voice to Madeleine.
She opens her mouth in protest, but she doesn’t say anything, just gets up and walks sullenly ahead of him, out into the garden. He lectures her there on the grass, in the windy grey day. When they go back in the others are sitting down, talking, drinking watery gin-and-tonics. Madeleine glances meaningfully at Susie, glass in hand, but Leo has silenced her. She goes and sits on the windowsill and stares out until Ma calls them for lunch.
Susie drinks a second gin-and-tonic, and then wine, and by three o’clock she is flushed, blowsy, her red hair cascading wildly over her shoulders. The children have left the table. Leo can hear them calling and laughing on the lawn.
‘How’s the new job?’ he asks Tonie.
She smiles mysteriously, distantly. She nods.
‘Yeah, it’s good.’
‘And the – what’s it called? – the sabbatical. How’s that going?’ Susie says, to Thomas.
There is, Leo thinks, a hierarchy, an order to these conversations, and he and Susie are at the bottom of it. It is understood that they will ask questions, will find out about the others, as they might find out about somewhere interesting they were visiting, like Paris. He is the youngest, five years younger than Thomas, seven younger than Howard. He is also the biggest, the tallest, taller even than Howard, though he doesn’t feel it, not in this house. Howard used to make him sit under table at mealtimes, when their parents were out. He kicked him if he tried to come out. He used to give him his food on the floor, like a dog.
‘I’m learning to play the piano,’ Thomas says.
‘Are you?’ Susie says, perplexedly. ‘What – professionally?’
Susie wouldn’t understand about playing the piano. She doesn’t understand any middle-class hobby. She’s always worked, looked after other people, even as a child she worked, cooking and taking care of the house. Her mother was a cleaning lady. She couldn’t read or write. Susie couldn’t either until she was fourteen and someone at school noticed it.
‘Not exactly,’ Thomas says, laughing.
Leo wants to shield her, to defend her. He wants to hit and hit until she is safe. He loves Thomas, but with a passive love, a background love. It is something he never looks at straight on. He is used to seeing it there out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t choose it, yet it’s always been there. He doesn’t really know what it is.
‘You can’t spend a whole year playing the piano,’ he says. He sounds more indignant than he wants to. It’s always the same, the difficulty of being himself with these people, his family, the difficulty of locating his own authenticity. He says things he doesn’t feel, and what he feels most keenly he doesn’t say at all.
Thomas looks surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s – it’s a waste, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Thomas says. ‘Anyway, it might be more than a year.’
‘You want to be careful,’ Dads says. ‘If you stay out too long, they might not take you back. Things move on, you know. Your experience becomes obsolete.’
‘I don’t want to go back,’ Thomas says. ‘I like being at home.’
Dads chuckles mirthlessly. ‘That may be so,’ he says, ‘but no matter how much you like it the question has to be, is it sustainable?’
Leo hears it, that tone, the way it goes over everything and mechanically levels it, like a tank. It is benign, ruthless, unvarying. He has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it: it is in the levelling persistence that the violence is accomplished. His voice has talked constantly in Leo’s head about the world and its ways since he can remember.
Thomas laughs too, slightly combative, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Ask Tonie. Ask Tonie whether it’s sustainable.’
‘I’ve always tended to the view’, Dads continues, ‘that work is life for a man, as children are for a woman.’
A ridge of silence which they all go over together, bump.
‘But work wasn’t life for me,’ Thomas says carefully. ‘As children aren’t all of life for Tonie.’
Suddenly there is something new, an atmosphere. Leo feels it, a shift far down at the bottom of things, like a rumbling of plates on the ocean bed. He feels upheaval, change, far down below.
‘Hey,’ Tonie says, in her low, husky voice that always makes the hairs rise on the back of Leo’s neck. ‘Hey, let’s change the subject.’
She puts her hand with its single silver band over Thomas’s. Leo thinks there is something unreassuring about Tonie’s ring. Susie wears a big emerald in a gold claw on that finger.
‘Yes, for heaven’s sake, do let’s,’ exclaims Ma. ‘You’re all sitting round with faces like a wet weekend.’
As though if it had been left up to her, life would have been different, would have been all frivolity.
Later, when it’s time to go, Leo is searching around the house for the children and in his father’s study finds a book of crossword puzzles on the desk, all completed and dated in his father’s neat fountain-pen writing. He has to help Susie across the lawn. He holds her firmly by the elbow, but even so she staggers when her heels sink into the turf, and one of her shoes comes off. Ma is weeding the flowerbeds, kneeling on a mat she has laid in the earth. She looks up at them. Sometimes there is something so vague about her pale blue eyes that Leo wants to cry. She makes his existence seem more random than he can bear. When he was a child, she used to go around freely telling people that Leo was a mistake, until he was old enough to ask her to stop.
‘Oh, are you going?’ she says. ‘I feel I’ve hardly seen you.’
‘Oh well,’ he says. It is all he can say, all he’s been able to say today.
In the car on the way home, he tells Susie about the crossword puzzles.
‘Well, he’s got to fill his time somehow, hasn’t he?’ she says sleepily.
She’s right, of course, but all the same it has upset him. He can’t quite explain it but he doesn’t have to, because Susie is now snoring lightly, slumped into the seat beside him. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a crossword puzzle. It’s just that it doesn’t go anywhere. It is rigid within itself, but it has no force of extension. It is trivial. The flat motorway landscape is radial, infinite, extending and extending itself into nothingness. A kind of hollowness opens out in Leo’s chest, a feeling of weightlessness.
A yellow Lamborghini is overtaking them in the fast lane. Leo has no interest in sports cars, but suddenly it cheers him, tickles him, the sight of this pointless bananacoloured contraption. He turns to Justin in the back seat.
‘Look at that,’ he says.