‘I’m more worried about our son-in-law dropping dead of a heart attack,’ said Martin, shoving his hands in his pockets. ‘He looked terrible.’
He was right, Sam had looked absolutely terrible at the hospital. It didn’t seem possible that one event could have such a profound physical effect on a person. They’d seen Sam just yesterday, when he’d dropped by to help Martin move out their old washing machine, and he’d been in great form, chatting about Clementine’s audition, some plan he had to help her get over her nerves, excited about his new job, but tonight he’d looked like he’d been rescued from somewhere, like those people you saw on the news wrapped in silver blankets, with red-rimmed eyes and a ghost-white pallor. He was in terrible shock, of course.
‘You were very rough on Clementine,’ said Martin mildly as Pam pressed the doorbell and they heard its distant chime.
‘She should have been watching Ruby,’ said Pam.
‘For Christ’s sake, it could have happened to anyone,’ said Martin.
Not me, thought Pam.
‘And they both should have been watching,’ said Martin. ‘They made a mistake and they very nearly paid a terrible price. People make mistakes.’
‘Well, I know that.’ But in Pam’s eyes it was Clementine’s mistake. That’s why she was battling this terrible, unmotherly sense of rage towards her beloved daughter. She knew it would eventually recede, she sure hoped it would, and that she’d probably feel just awful about the way she’d spoken to her at the hospital, but for now she still felt very, very angry. It was the mother’s job to watch her child. Forget feminism. Forget all that. Pam would scream about equal pay from the rooftops, but every woman knew you couldn’t rely on a man to watch the children in a social situation. It was scientifically proven they couldn’t do two things at the same time!
Clementine had always been too prepared to rely on Sam, but just because she was a musician, a creative person, an ‘artist’, didn’t give her the right to relinquish her responsibilities as a mother. Her job as a mother came first.
Sometimes Clementine got the identical distracted, dreamy expression on her face as Pam’s dad used to get at the dinner table while Pam was trying to tell him something, and she wouldn’t even have finished the sentence before he’d wandered off. He might have been Ernest bloody Hemingway for all Pam cared. All that time he’d spent writing that novel no one would ever read, ignoring his children, locking himself away in his study, when he could have been living. ‘It could have been a masterpiece,’ Clementine always said, as if it was a tragedy, as if that was the point, when it wasn’t the point: the point was that Pam never got a father and Pam would have quite liked a father. Just every now and then.
What good did it do Ruby if her mother was the best cellist in the world? Clementine should have been watching. She should have been listening. She should have been concentrating on her child.
Of course, Clementine’s music had nothing to do with what happened today. She did know that.
If Ruby didn’t make it through the night, if she suffered some sort of long-term damage to her health, Pam didn’t know what she’d do with all this anger. She’d have to find the strength to put it aside to be there for Clementine. Pam put her hand to her chest. Ruby was stable, she reminded herself. That rosy little plump-cheeked face. Those wicked slanting cat-like eyes.
‘Pam?’ said Martin.
‘What?’ she snapped. He was studying her closely.
‘You look like you’re having a heart attack.’
‘Well, I’m not, thank you very much, I’m perfectly –’ The door swung open and Oliver stood there, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt.
‘Hello, Oliver.’ Pam hadn’t seen him in casual clothes before. Normally he wore a nice checked shirt tucked into trousers. Pam had met him on so many occasions over the years, but she’d never really got to know him that well. He was always so complimentary about Pam’s signature dish, her carrot and walnut cake. (He seemed to have got it into his head that the cake was sugar-free, which was not the case, but she didn’t bother to correct him; he was so skinny, a bit of sugar wouldn’t hurt him.)
‘Holly is just through here watching a movie,’ said Oliver. ‘She would have been very welcome to stay the night with us, of course.’ He said this sadly.
‘Oh, she would have loved that, Oliver,’ said Pam. ‘But we were all fighting over her, you see, it’s a distraction from our worry over Ruby.’
‘I understand you were the hero of the day,’ said Martin, and he held out his hand to Oliver.