since a man’s given me a little prod.’ Ailsa deftly swooped in. ‘I just love Trinity Fields,’ she said. ‘Nicer than Balham where we’ve been renting. I can understand why you live here. I can’t imagine myself ever moving away.’
Why, I asked, had they left Kent?
Ailsa looked down. She started fiddling with the pepper pot on the table in front of her, grinding a tiny bit into her hand and then dipping her finger into it and dabbing it on her tongue.
‘Don’t mention Kent,’ Tom said.
‘OK.’
‘We needed a fresh start,’ Tom added. ‘Kent’s not everybody’s cup of tea. To be honest, I hate the place.’
A silence bloomed.
Ailsa looked deeply uncomfortable. She was fiddling with her scalp, fiddling with her hair at the roots, with tense, almost aggressive stabs.
‘Ailsa, you’re in HR?’ I said, to change the subject.
She looked up then. ‘I’m not working at the moment,’ she said. ‘Finding it hard to get back into it after the kids.’
I turned back to Tom. ‘And you’re in the record business?’
‘No. No. Not really. I’m a lawyer. I specialise in entertainment law. I’ve started my own boutique firm. The music biz is certainly part of it. Musicians. Tech companies.’ He nodded his chin at a bouquet of flowers on the counter, still in their cellophane. ‘The occasional movie star.’
I was about to ask which florally grateful occasional movie star – anyone I’d heard of? – when the front door slammed and two children burst into the doorway.
They were ten, I knew. Max and Bea. They had that almost-but-not-quite symmetry of some twins, the sense that one – in this case the girl – was slightly more finished than the other. The boy was paler, and smaller. He had a bruise on his forehead, and one of his eyes turned down very slightly. The girl, freckly and robust, bounced in, ignoring me, a stranger at the table, and started opening cupboards. ‘What is there to eat?’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’ The boy stood shyly in the doorway, a pair of football boots in his hands dropping flecks of mud onto the floor.
Ailsa got up and took the boots off the boy, quickly sweeping the bits of mud into one corner with her foot. She cupped the back of his head with her hand, smoothing his hair while drawing him into the room. She introduced me, made him and his sister say hello and then busied herself, pouring juice and reaching up to a top cupboard for a tin of cake. ‘Lemon drizzle,’ she said, handing them a slice each. ‘That’ll keep you going.’
‘I love a lemon drizzle,’ I said. I was still watching the boy. ‘As long as it’s moist.’
‘Moist!’ Ailsa said, bringing it over to the table. ‘How funny. Do you just hate that word too? It’s the worst, isn’t it? Moist.’
It is very her, now I think of it, that tendency to kill a joke by spelling it out.
‘How can you hate a word?’ Bea said. ‘That’s so random.’
‘I don’t like words,’ her brother said. ‘Most of them anyway.’
‘That’s an odd thing to say.’ Tom furrowed his brow. ‘What will our new neighbour think of us?’
‘Max’s an idiot,’ the girl said, springing across to sit on her father’s knee.
The room appeared to regroup around me, the girl’s arms snaked around her father’s neck; the boy standing quietly behind his mother’s chair. His eyes seemed to sink, the skin beneath them to darken. Family dynamics are always of interest to me. I know only too well how alliances build, how parents, despite their avowals to the contrary, have favourites. I could do anything for my mother: wash her, read to her, bring morsels of her chosen meals, and it was always Faith she talked about. ‘Oh, but of course Faith,’ she’d say to visitors, ‘has done so well for herself.’ I know, too, how it isn’t always comfortable being the favourite, how it creates its own pressures and resentments. ‘She never sees me,’ Faith used to say. ‘It all has to be wonderful. There’s never any room for darkness.’ But then that was Mother all over.
I opened my mouth to speak, to say anything, really, to rearrange the atoms. I began explaining how, in fact, it was actually quite a coincidence because words were my metier.
‘Your metier?’ Tom said, in that same arch tone. I suspect he hadn’t associated me with employment. He probably thought I spent my time making jam, doing crafts.
‘Indeed.’
And I told them about my work as a lexicographer