for making a cake each time she raised her voice to Frank. Now Dorothy opened the oven door and stuck a wooden skewer into the tin. Of course she wouldn’t tell him. She dropped the skewer in the sink; it had come away gooey with warm, unset batter.
When Daniel called out hello and pushed the door open it was as though a character from a dream, an animated cartoon, had entered the waking world. But she was the one who’d told him to come now, while Andrew was at work and Hannah playing at a friend’s, the one who’d felt alive – alive to the glimmering leaves, the light in the sky, the smoky colours in her children’s hair, the smell of the daphne bush and lavender, the gliding closeness of birds, everything. Now here he was, real on the couch. Unasked, he’d removed his shoes in the hall. She hated it when people did that – totally unnecessary – but she’d disappeared into the kitchen as soon as he came in, so hadn’t seen it happening, just the resulting socks. He didn’t look around the house and this lack of interest miffed her but was also a relief. The fewer things he touched the better.
She put lunch on the table and thought she wasn’t hungry but as soon as she tasted the bread realised that she was. Daniel draped his suit jacket over the arm of the couch and sat at the table in his shirtsleeves, ate and drank easily, relaxed in his body, and she searched his eyes for evidence of the past, of anything other than this innocuous moment – her mind flipping back and forward over what it meant. No, it meant nothing, had nothing to do with her life. Yes, it was a good thing to have him here with the dandruff on his shoulder and debunk the whole fantasy. She should get him round another time for dinner; they could all talk about the old days. Ask him to babysit the kids while she and Andrew went out. They could be movie friends, sneak off to daytime sessions when Hannah was at preschool and he was between saving needy addicts. Yes.
While they ate he told her about the clown school and afterwards, performing for kids in refugee camps, the travel, the drugs, rock bottom, coming home. She prompted him for stories. Daniel wouldn’t say much about the harder things he’d seen, but there was still plenty to tell. He had sat in the YWCA in Nairobi, watching as a tall thin woman lowered sugar cubes into her cup of tea: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. He’d dropped his wallet, passport, credit cards, everything, into a hole-in-the-ground toilet in Indonesia and had to lower himself in to fish them out. Cuban families had welcomed him into their peeling Havana apartments and fed him cured meats and rum. He had slept, or tried to sleep, on the deck of a ferry travelling to a remote Greek island, velvety water black beneath him, hard bright stars above, been abandoned by friends to card games in Marseilles when the luck was not going their way, got stranded on the wrong side of the river in St Petersburg as the bridges were pulled up for the night.
She wanted to know more about the low he hit, was greedy for disaster and humiliation, the appalling behaviour, smoking coals left in his wake. He mentioned a couple of women and she thought poor them, no wonder they hate you, and then she thought what a couple of crazy bitches and then she thought oh, I just want to be special and she cleared the table and said nothing.
‘So what about you? You were practically a teenage mother,’ he said.
‘Not quite.’
‘I wish I had kids.’
‘You still could.’
‘Yeah, no.’
She tried to imagine her life without its family life. Half-awake in her father’s arms, being carried up the stairs to bed. Keeping lookout while Evelyn squatted for a wee in the long grass by the estuary at the commune. The living room at home full of Lee and her women friends, jigging on the spot, watching them swing their hips with their eyes shut, arms fronding the air. A baby’s slow turn inside her, like an astronaut. Her son’s hilarity at his own sense of humour. The mailman paused on his bicycle by their letterbox. Daniel lay on the sofa, clutching a cushion to his chest. ‘You look as though you’re at