a wide-eyed paranoid look, hand to heart. “Oh my God. Does it show?”
Tom blinked at him. Tom is medium height and medium stocky and medium blond and medium handsome and extremely sweet, and he brings out the irresistible urge to warn him about drop bears and dihydrogen monoxide. “Um,” he said. “What . . . ? Like, what is it?”
“It’s just a bit of bingo,” Leon said. “Have you ever tried it?”
“Bingo?”
“Oh, you should,” I said. “I bet bingo would be the biggest thrill of your life.”
Tom—worried, eyebrows pulled down—was glancing back and forth between us and Susanna, who had hit the point where all she could manage was to flap a hand helplessly in his direction. “I don’t—”
“It’s totally legal,” Leon said reassuringly.
“Well,” I said.
“Well. More or less.”
“Do you want a hit?” I offered Tom my cigarette.
“Um, no thanks. Su,” Tom said, rubbing at his neck. “I mean, the kids. If they—”
This obliterated Susanna all over again. “Oh, they’re fine,” Leon said. “They’re miles away.” He waved to the kids.
“If they notice anything,” I said, “we’ll talk to them about it. Give them the facts. In today’s world, the sooner you educate your kids about bingo the better, right?”
“I guess. But I mean, I don’t think—”
I’d never really got Tom. When Susanna met him, in our first year of college, everyone was delighted. She had been having some kind of ornate teenage crisis over the past year and had first gone into emo mode, lank hair and oversized jumpers and no social life and lots of music about too-passionate spirits crushed by the cruel unfeeling world, and then done a 180 and turned into a full-on wild child, Alice-in-Wonderland clothes and pop-up clubs in secret locations, disappearing for weeks except for a handful of vague giggly texts from someone’s camper van in Cornwall and never handing in her essays. To me it all looked like standard teenage-girl stuff, but her parents were worried enough that Aunt Louisa kept buttonholing me to ask whether I thought Susanna was cutting herself (how would I know?) and whether I thought she took drugs (definitely, but then so did I), and I knew they had tried a few times to get her to see a therapist. Tom—sturdy, peaceful, pleasant, unremarkable in every way—seemed like the perfect antidote; once she got together with him, Susanna settled down and, almost overnight, went back to her old untroublesome well-behaved self. I didn’t bother developing much of a relationship with him, since I assumed she would move on once he had got her solidly back to normal, and I was completely gobsmacked when instead, before they had even finished college, they decided to get married. Within a couple of years they had two kids and much of their conversation revolved around toilet training and school choices and various other things that made me want to get a vasectomy and go on a coke binge. Basically, while Tom seemed like an OK guy, I didn’t see what he was still doing in our lives.
“You,” Susanna told us, finally getting her breath back. “Stop fucking with Tom. I like him.”
“We like him too,” I said. “Don’t we, Leon?”
“Looove him,” said Leon, giving Tom a lascivious lash-flutter.
“You bollixes,” Tom said, red and grinning.
“We’re only playing,” I said.
“Play with someone else,” Susanna told us. “Jesus, I needed that.”
“Mummy!” Sallie dashed across the grass and skidded to a stop in front of Susanna. “There are dolls in my shoes and I can’t get them out and Zach says if we leave them in there they’ll die!”
“Let me see,” Susanna said. She scooped Sallie onto her lap, deftly whipped off one shoe, pulled out the inner sole and popped the doll into Sallie’s hand.
“Whoa,” Sallie said, wide-eyed. “Cool.”
Susanna did the same with the other shoe, wriggled them back onto Sallie’s feet and slid the kid off her lap. “There,” she said, “away you go,” and saw Sallie off with a light slap on the rear. Sallie galloped off down the garden, a doll held high in each hand, yelling, “Zach! Look! They’re out! HA-ha!”
“That’ll shut Zach up,” Susanna said. “Do him good.”
“Babes,” Leon said, leaning over to throw one elbow around Susanna’s neck and give her a big smacking kiss on the cheek. “I’ve missed you.” And over her head, to me: “I might have actually missed you, too.”
* * *
Finally—it can’t have been after nine o’clock, but it felt much later—the party, or whatever it was, broke up. I think my mother