We didn’t talk about anything that might upset this delicate equilibrium. I would watch whatever celebrity news daytime television threw up and then say, at supper, ‘Well, what about that Shayna West, then, eh?’ And Mum and Dad would leap on the topic gratefully, remarking that she was a trollop or had nice hair or that she was no better than she should be. We covered Bargains In Your Attic (‘I always wonder what that Victorian planter of your mother’s would have been worth … ugly old thing.’) and Ideal Homes in the Country (‘I wouldn’t wash a dog in that bathroom’). I didn’t think beyond each mealtime, beyond the basic challenges of getting dressed, brushing my teeth and completing whatever tiny tasks my mother set me (‘You know, love, when I’m out, if you could sort your washing, I’ll do it with my coloureds’).
But, like a creeping tide, the outside world insisted steadily on intruding. I heard the neighbours asking questions of my mother as she hung out the washing. Your Lou home, then, is she? And Mum’s uncharacteristically curt response: She is. I found myself avoiding the rooms in the house from which I could see the castle. But I knew it was there, the people in it living, breathing links to Will. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them; while in Paris I had been forwarded a letter from Mrs Traynor, thanking me formally for everything I had done for her son. ‘I am conscious that you did everything you could.’ But that was it. That family had gone from being my whole life to a ghostly remnant of a time I wouldn’t allow myself to remember. Now, as our street sat moored in the shadow of the castle for several hours every evening, I felt the Traynors’ presence like a rebuke.
I’d been there two weeks before I realized that Mum and Dad no longer went to their social club. ‘Isn’t it Tuesday?’ I said, on the third week, as we sat around the dinner table. ‘Shouldn’t you be gone by now?’
They glanced at each other. ‘Ah, no. We’re fine here,’ Dad said, chewing a piece of his pork chop.
‘I’m fine by myself, honestly,’ I told them. ‘I’m much better now. And I’m quite happy watching television.’ I secretly longed to sit, unobserved, with nobody else in the room. I had barely been left alone for more than half an hour at a time since I’d come home. ‘Really. Go out and enjoy yourselves. Don’t mind me.’
‘We … we don’t really go to the club any more,’ said Mum, as she sliced through a potato.
‘People … they had a lot to say. About what went on.’ Dad shrugged. ‘In the end it was easier just to stay out of it.’ The silence that followed this lasted a full six minutes.
And there were other, more concrete, reminders of the life I had left behind. Ones that wore skin-tight running pants with special wicking properties.
It was on the fourth morning Patrick jogged past our house that I thought it might be more than coincidence. I had heard his voice the first day and limped blearily to the window, peering through the blind. And there he was below me, stretching out his hamstrings while talking to a blonde girl with a ponytail; she was clad in matching blue Lycra so tight I could pretty much work out what she’d had for breakfast. They looked like two Olympians missing a bobsleigh.
I stood back from the window in case he looked up and saw me, and within a minute, they were gone again, jogging down the road, backs erect, legs pumping, like a pair of glossy turquoise carriage ponies.
Two days later I was getting dressed when I heard them. Patrick was saying something loudly about carb-loading, and this time the girl flicked a suspicious glance towards my house, as if she were wondering why they had stopped in exactly the same place twice.
On the third day I was in the front room with Granddad when they arrived. ‘We should practise sprints,’ Patrick was saying loudly. ‘Tell you what, you go to the third lamppost and back and I’ll time you. Two-minute intervals. Go!’
Granddad rolled his eyes meaningfully.
‘Has he been doing this the whole time I’ve been back?’
Granddad’s eyes rolled pretty much into the back of his head.
I watched through the net curtains as Patrick stood, eyes fixed on his stopwatch, his best side presented to my window. He was wearing a black fleece zip-up top and matching Lycra shorts, and as he stood, a few feet the other side of the curtain, I was able to gaze at him, quietly amazed that this was someone I had been sure, for so long, I loved.
‘Keep going!’ he yelled, looking up from the stopwatch. And, like an obedient gun dog, the girl touched the lamppost beside him and bolted away again. ‘Forty-two point three eight seconds,’ he said approvingly, when she returned, panting. ‘I reckon you could shave another point five of a second off that.’
‘That’s for your benefit,’ said my mother, who had walked in bearing two mugs.
‘I did wonder.’
‘His mother asked me in the supermarket were you back and I said you were. Don’t look at me like that – I could hardly lie to the woman.’ She nodded towards the window. ‘That one’s had her boobs done. They’re the talk of Stortfold. Apparently you could rest two cups of tea on them.’ She stood beside me for a moment. ‘You know they’re engaged?’
I waited for the pang, but it was so mild it could have been wind. ‘They look … well suited.’
My mother stood there for a moment, watching him. ‘He’s not a bad sort, Lou. You just … changed.’ She handed me a mug and turned away.