‘There’s a letter for you.’
‘I do have eyes, thank you.’ Brian picked it up and pursed his lips, casually judicious. ‘Any idea who brought it?’
‘No. It was here when I came back from play group.’ Brian was quite proud of the cool way he dropped the bulky envelope into his cardigan pocket and carried on munching his banana and walnut bap while it lay there, sizzling.
‘Probably someone can’t make rehearsal.’
‘How’s it doing? Your play?’
‘Fine.’
Sue watched him poking food into the pink hole in the middle of his beard, then priss up his lips and use his little finger to dab at the tight corners, checking for crumbs.
‘I shall be going to London on Tuesday.’
‘London?’ He stared across the room without seeing her. ‘What for?’
‘My lunch. With the editor.’
‘Oh. Right.’ It was no good. He couldn’t wait. Not another second. Not another heartbeat. Certainly not as long as it took to get out from the table and hide himself away. ‘Could you do me a favour, Sue? Please.’
His wife could not conceal her consternation. She said, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Would you mind getting me some dry socks? These are soaking.’
She took forever. Twenty-four hours to drag herself to the edge of her chair. A week to attain the vertical. A month to make it to the door. Six more to cross the sitting room. A year to climb - God’s truth! - she was coming back.
‘Any special sort?’
‘No, no, no. No. You choose.’
Somehow he waited, fists clenched and his body in a tight little ball. Holding his breath like a drowning man conserving energy. Then, when he heard her clogs clatter on the floorboards overhead he tore at the envelope, his fingers all thumbs. And drew out the contents.
When Barnaby got back to Arbury Crescent there was a postcard from Cully - in black and white, of the Radziwill Palace in Warsaw. The greeting was, as usual, dryly noncommittal. Playing to great houses, invited everywhere. The weather was fine, Nicholas was fine, she was fine. Don’t forget to video The Crucible. Love Cully. Cross, cross, cross.
Barnaby wondered, as he so frequently did, just how much she did love them. Or even if she loved them at all. Surely, she must. You couldn’t devote years of protective tenderness and concern, gut-wrenching anxiety and supportive admiration to someone and not have that person reciprocate, if only to a modest degree, in kind.
But of course you could. Beloved children took their place in your heart carelessly for granted and your devotion as no more than they deserved. They did not see it for what it was, the best you could do, but merely as the least you could do. It was only the desolate and deprived, the youthful walking wounded amongst whom Barnaby spent so much of his time, who saw the truly colossal magnificence of such a gift.
Joyce watched her husband, frowning down at the postcard in his hand. He was wearing his ‘better than nothing’ look. Half resentment, half relief. The light caught his grizzled sideboards and his still thick, black and silver hair. Thirteen hours since he had left for work and she could tell from his absent and distracted movements that he was still there in spirit.
Some cases were like this. She simply lost him. Watched as he became subsumed into an alternative universe in which there was no honestly relevant part for her to play. It was not that he didn’t, quite frequently, describe to her what was engaging his attention. But there was no way that these occasions could be mistaken for discussions.
Lying back on the sofa, Tom would ramble on in a shapeless, repetitive manner, with his eyes closed, rather on the ‘how do I know what I think till I say’ principle. And Joyce would listen with attentive and sympathetic interest even as she remained aware that, for quite long periods, he would have forgotten her presence entirely.
She had, very early in their marriage, seen exactly what a policeman’s wife was in for. Loneliness, disorienting time patterns, stressful periods of isolation and the constant apprehension that today might be the day he would be brought home, like a Roman soldier, lying on his shield.
Wives had various ways of coping - or not - with all these aspects of police life. Joyce chose what seemed to her the safest, most pleasant and most sensible. Whilst Tom and, later, Cully remained the emotional lynchpins in her life, from the earliest days of her marriage she had looked constantly outwards, developing and sustaining friendships (virtually none within the Force) and working on the second most important thing in her life, her music. She had a lovely, rich mezzo-soprano voice and still sang frequently in public. Lately she had started to teach.