smiled. Her eyes lingered on my companions. Bob carries some weight and Sue, who has an issue with her thyroid, is never without her fingerless gloves, frayed and rather soiled. I felt a shameful lurch of embarrassment. How I’d wished I’d been on the table of narrow-trousered estate agents, or even the teachers with their bulging bags and general air of exhaustion. (How badly that wish reflects on me.)
‘What are you all doing here?’ I said, stupidly.
‘Class night out. It’s great, isn’t it? Not that I know anything. My general knowledge is terrible. I’ve warned these guys. I’m going to be hopeless.’
‘Not the whole class,’ Trish said. ‘Just a bunch of like-minded souls.’
‘How nice.’
The curvy brunette clomped back from the bar and sat down with a big collapsing movement, the air of someone who had just climbed Everest and been underwhelmed by the view. ‘They’re out of Camembert,’ she said. ‘And the Greek platter comes with nachos, not chips.’ I was poised to turn back to my table when I realised Delilah was still looking at me intently.
‘How are Mr and Mrs Tilson?’
‘Tom seems fine. I haven’t seen Ailsa for a while.’
‘You’ve become friendly, I hear.’
‘Yes, I think so. I hope so.’
‘She’s an odd one. Rather elusive.’ She seemed pleased with her choice of words. She rested her hand against her forehead. Her fingernails were rimmed with dirt. ‘Is she happy? I don’t know. She doesn’t seem it. And Tom . . . Poor Tom.’
‘Are you talking about Ailsa?’ Trish interrupted. ‘She only came to book club twice, and yet she made such a fuss about joining.’
‘Plus she didn’t even read the book,’ Delilah said. ‘It was obvious her heart wasn’t in it.’
The table had gone quiet. ‘She’s a bit flighty,’ another woman said, her open mouth revealing a plastic covering to her teeth – of course: dear Soph’s mother. ‘When she first moved here, she begged to join our Pilates class. Sonia went out of her way to make space for her, even though the studio only really fits five, but she hardly ever comes.’
‘So selfish,’ Trish agreed. And they began to talk among themselves, not directly criticising Ailsa but talking in general about behaviour they deemed unacceptable in a friend.
The quiz started up almost immediately but for the whole of the first round, I was aware of the conversation on the next table starting and flaring and being suppressed, like random flare-ups after a forest fire.
In the half-time break, I stood on the pavement outside with Maeve and Sue while they smoked their roll-ups, picking tobacco now and then from the tips of their tongues. The conversation – they were bickering about their van, whether to get it serviced before their next trip to France – didn’t need my input. I was thinking how Ailsa hadn’t lived in the area long, her roots here were shallow, these friends of hers didn’t know her well. I could see Delilah and Trish and dear Soph’s mother and all the others through the window – passing round the wine, screwing up their noses at the mushroom pâté. I’d imagined Ailsa the centre of all this, the queen of her little world. I’d been wrong.
When I walked behind Delilah heading back to my table, she put her hand out to stop me. ‘Don’t tell Ailsa you saw us,’ she said. ‘Be a love.’
I was home that night at about 11 p.m., and the shouting started soon after. Or maybe it had been going on the whole time; the walls had absorbed it, but now they had got close to the back door. ‘I’m not going to ask you again. Just tell the truth.’ Tom’s voice, bullying and boorish, repeating the same phrases over and over again. I thought about the children upstairs, pressing their faces into their pillows. How Ailsa had grown up with arguing parents, how patterns repeated. When I was a child, I used to line my stuffed toys along the bottom of the door, block out the noise that way. Should I go next door and knock? Take the children from their beds? My heart rate, already raised, raced at the thought; my hands trembled. What would I do? Where would I take them? I couldn’t bring them here. I was a coward, and I did nothing.
I fell asleep, hours after it had gone quiet, and dreamt vein-like cracks appeared across the ceiling, that it began to creak and then bow, and that as I watched, small droplets began