for Dot and Andrew to look at each other for the first time in ages, bewildered. She was no longer a young mother. She was not a hippy or a retiree.
Doggedly positive, Andrew approached unemployment in his mid-fifties as a self-improvement project. T’ai chi at the community centre; a men’s book club; canvas frames. ‘Now’s my chance to really paint.’ Their neighbour, Dennis, was a local noble, and Dorothy supplemented her practically voluntary job teaching art at the maternity home with work in his garden. A bit extra.
When he wasn’t working on his paintings, Andrew spent most of his time in the library, researching the area and reading books by middle-aged men who had found a new meaning for life through their dog, or their father’s diaries, or their dying football coach. In a few months he finished a series of local portraits in gouache. No mainstream dealer was interested, but he soon met Jennifer from the local art gallery, a community powerhouse in chunky necklaces and a smoker’s growl, a woman who moved and shook. She turned him on to the neighbourhood giveaway guide and got him sketching, unpaid, for that. ‘Promise you, darling, if we get our grant covered again next year and no counting chickens in these times, I’ll give you a show. Or you could hit up Dennis for some sponsorship? God knows we all need a bit of philanthropy.’ And she winked at Dot from beneath her pale-pink beret.
A postcard from Ruth adorned the fridge door, next to Grace’s latest from Guatemala. Ruth was coming to stay in the brick house behind the green hedge, the house flanked by dark cypresses like thick green flames. Soon she would appear on their driveway, suitcase in hand. The late summer holidays were perfect for a visit: long afternoons and less likelihood of rain, the sculpture park still open to the public.
Dot mowed the lawn and hassled Andrew to fix the stuck window in their son’s bedroom and thought about a range of books – Dennis’s catalogues of pioneer watercolours, local poetry, a novel – to place on the wooden chair next to the bed. There was plenty of time, a day to go. But then, when she was making space inside the refrigerator for crocus and hyacinth bulbs, came a crunching sound from the drive and she ran to the door, feeling red-faced and oh, breathless and wild, and saw the car – not the airport shuttle which Ruth had insisted she would take, declining Dorothy’s offer to collect her, but a taxi. A woman got out and a man followed and at first she thought it was the driver, that the driver had emerged to help Ruth with her luggage, but then the bags were on the path and the taxi pulled away and the man and the woman both remained.
As Dot walked down the steps towards the couple who frowned at the house, at the cypress trees, the camellia bushes and clay roof tiles, it became clear Ruth was ageing in reverse. At the funeral she had been strung-out, dry-handed, efficient and too thin, and she now looked younger, the layer of dewy plumpness in the skin of her face at odds with the cage-bones above her unlikely breasts. The man at her side – it wasn’t Ben – could have been a younger version of Daniel, at least how Dan might have looked if he never took the drugs or hadn’t fucked off overseas and acquired the terrifying agelessness of the constant traveller. All of this registered while Dorothy was being embraced by Ruth and this American, kissed once, twice, three times. There was a tussle over the suitcases, which Dorothy won.
‘We weren’t expecting you till tomorrow.’ Andrew marched up the hallway towards them. He would think he was being welcoming but Dot cringed at his tone. He kissed Ruth and clasped hands with the man, whose name was repeated – Hank – what a relief because it had flown straight out of her mind the first time she heard it, down there by the garage, and she could just see herself getting the name wrong, or never saying it for the duration of his stay, falling mute when the time came to introduce him to anyone else, Hank, Hank, and now they were not in the hallway any more but in the kitchen where she was pouring glasses of water from the jug in the fridge, which needed refilling, so she and Andrew