Loe raamatut: «Left of the Bang»
CLAIRE LOWDON
Left of the Bang
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
Copyright © Claire Lowdon 2015
Cover photographs © Christoph Hetzmannseder / Getty Images (woman); Phil Portus Photography (train). Design © Kate Gaughran.
Song lyrics quoted from: ‘Hey Jude’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Sony/ATV); ‘The Nearness of You’, music by Hoagy Carmichael, lyrics by Ned Washington (Sony/ATV); ‘Only Girl (In The World)’, by Crystal Johnson, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Sandy Wilhelm (Sony/ATV); ‘S&M’, by Ester Dean, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Tor Erik Hermansen, Sandy Wilhelm (Sony/ATV); ‘We Are the Champions’, by Freddie Mercury (Sony/ATV); ‘You’re Not the Only Oyster in the Stew’, music by Harold Spina, lyrics by Johnny Burke (Warner/Chappell Music)
Claire Lowdon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008102166
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780008102180
Version: 2016-03-15
Praise for Left of the Bang
‘Clear-eyed, audacious and disarmingly honest’ William Boyd
‘A disarming and affecting debut … Lowdon has an acute ability to paint exquisite pictures of ordinary life and capture what is extraordinary about it. It is social observation at its very best with characters that are both painfully honest but also hilarious in their satirical humour … Tamsin Jarvis will resonate long after the final page is turned’ Stylist, *****
‘In refreshingly flourish-free prose, Lowdon picks apart the cloaks that these millennial Londoners use to disguise their true selves, uncovering the startling disconnects underlying their friendships. The characters of this remarkable debut are neatly drawn and sharply skewered, the satirical observations crack like a whip and, most impressive of all, even the denouement arrives with the bang of the title’ Sunday Times
‘While [Lowdon’s] cast are hardly sympathetic, they’re too credible – and also too damaged – to be mere one-dimensional grotesques. The upshot is that they get uncomfortably under your skin, making Lowdon’s incendiary denouement real read-between-your-fingers stuff’ Daily Mail
‘In her deeply impressive and accomplished first novel, Left of the Bang, Claire Lowdon charts the lives of a group of twentysomethings in London with sharpness and precision, with humour and insight, and with generous helpings of humanity … There are shades of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and hints of Lena Dunham’s Girls, too, in the book’s depictions of sex and in how it so flawlessly captures these twentysomethings’ expectations of what the world owes them, and the disappointments that flow from these misapprehensions … The writing is razor-sharp, excruciating in its honesty … It takes stylistic risks with voice, tense and point of view. These pay off, absolutely, and tempted this reader, upon finishing, to begin again from page one … A piece of fiction that is flawless, beautifully paced and expertly judged. At age 30, Lowdon has the flair, polish and insight of a firmly established novelist … A gifted and perceptive writer’ Sarah Bannan, Irish Times
‘Write what you know, they say. Yet it’s a clever author who does just that and succeeds in offering insight. Claire Lowdon spins this tale about twentysomethings living in London as only someone who knows the drill well could do: it’s full of references to real pubs, nights out and the very particular emotional angst that comes from that post-university period in a thrilling but indifferent metropolis … The characters are well-drawn and sympathetic … Lowdon flits deftly between the perspective of each character … She takes time with the hopes and fears of each one, conjuring up a tension that builds painfully slowly … Lowdon uses sex to show the characters’ real selves, their hidden wants and desires … A smart and sober pronouncement on consequence’ Francesca Steele, The Times
‘Claire Lowdon’s serious-minded but nevertheless sparky debut novel can be seen as an extended rebuttal of the secret but abiding anxiety – especially among the youth – that everybody is having more, or better, sex than they are. What if, she asks, nobody is?… Lowdon is unobtrusively good on the non-glamour of London life … Left of the Bang is not a didactic novel, but its story certainly mutates from social comedy into something far more disturbing’ Alex Clark, Spectator
‘Claire Lowdon has written the definitive novel of a generation of Londoners. So involved did I become in their lives, so closely did I feel I knew them, that the note of disquiet that carries through the pages like the eerie mewl of a tuning fork absolutely levelled me when finally it reached its full glass-shattering resonance three-quarters of the way through’ Gavin Corbett
‘Attuned to the nuances of social interaction that lie above the threshold of awareness and elude articulation, Lowdon observes interpersonal relationships with a satirist’s sharp eye. Her narrator pierces façades and parses hybrid, often contradictory, cocktails of emotion with an efficiency reminiscent of Alan Hollinghurst’s early novels … Peeling the layers of her characters’ drives and desires demands a precision that, as the subtlety of these observations attests, Lowdon possesses’ Lindsay Gail Gibson, Times Literary Supplement
‘A startlingly assured debut, chronicling the lives of twentysomethings in contemporary London. (I read it in the same fevered excitement as I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.) It’s a social commentary, a page-turner and it’s packed with beautiful sentences’ Sunday Business Post
‘All the way through what is essentially a realist novel about young Londoners runs an edge of tension, of suppressed panic. You await the explosion, never quite knowing what form it will take … Minor events all seem to take place in the shadow of the loaded gun we know must be about to go off, in “those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds” before the obscure but inevitable bang … The characters’ moral wranglings and the machinery of the plot spiral inexorably inwards, into the bedroom. It’s there that everything will eventually go bang’ Lidija Haas, Guardian
‘Lowdon has Evelyn Waugh’s willingness to inflict gruesome plot twists on her Bright Young Things’ Literary Review
‘A fresh and sharp-minded writer’ Blake Morrison, Observer
‘Razor-sharp satire of millennial Londoners and their pretentions in this promising debut’ Sunday Times
‘Lowdon deftly maps the tangled love life of failed concert pianist Tamsin Jarvis … She writes with an admirable honesty’ Claire Allfree, Metro
‘Deftly plotted and evocatively written. Left of the Bang’s characters are believable and their interactions ironically, wince-inducingly familiar’ Sasha Garwood, Marylebone Journal
Dedication
For my grandmothers, D.E.M. and G.M.M.L.
Epigraph
Left of the bang: a military term for the build-up to an explosion. On a left–right time line, preparation and prevention are left of the bang; right of the bang refers to the aftermath.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Left of the Bang
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Thank You
About the Author
About the Publisher
One
Her father’s arms around her. His voice vibrating through his chest and into hers.
‘I’m here, tinker. I’m here.’
Her bleeding toenail, open like a birthday card.
Two
When Tamsin Jarvis was twelve, she saw her father kissing another woman.
The whole family was up in Manchester to hear him conduct a celebration of British music at the Bridgewater Hall. It was a treat, at the end of the concert, for Tamsin to go to his dressing room all by herself. Her mother had to put ten-year-old Serena to bed in the Jurys Inn Hotel across the road. ‘Tell Daddy not to hang around chatting, the restaurant’s booked for nine forty-five.’
Backstage, everything was hushed. All the doors had leather quilting. The carpet was very thick. A stagehand with his radio earpiece hooked round his neck pointed her towards the end of the corridor. Tamsin pushed her father’s door open, enjoying its weight and the smooth, silent swing of the hinges.
Three seconds later she closed it again, just as silently. The lovers had been kissing with their eyes shut. Neither of them knew they’d been seen.
The woman was Valery Fischer, the mezzo from the concert. Val and her husband Patrick were old friends of the Jarvises. Their only son, a stocky, sporty eleven-year-old called Alex, played viola in the same youth orchestra as Serena. Last summer, the two families had even spent a long weekend together in a rented cottage in Suffolk.
Tamsin walked slowly back up the corridor, seeing it all over again. Bertrand’s left hand gripping Val’s bottom through the stiff satin of her turquoise strapless dress. His right hand crushing her loosely permed curls. A large raised mole in the middle of Val’s back, pale, like a Rice Krispie. The kiss itself: muscular, forceful, almost angry, as if they were fighting one another with their mouths.
In the foyer, she sat down on the floor next to the ice-cream stand and tried to think. When she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of her own blood. She could feel it, too, each pulse a tight squirting sensation. Around her, adult chatter thinned to a trickle as the concert-goers left the building. Tamsin stayed where she was, eyes still closed. A Hoover began its melancholy drone.
‘Tamsin?’
It was her father. He was still wearing his black trousers, but he’d swapped his tux and dress shirt for a loose grey tunic. He held out one of his big hands for Tamsin to haul herself up with.
‘What are you doing down there?’
‘We have to go,’ said Tamsin. ‘We’ll be late for supper.’
* * *
For five years she told no one.
Tamsin was frightened: of the pain that disclosure would cause her mother, of the possibility of divorce (a condition that ranked, in her twelve-year-old mind, as second only to cancer). Most of all she was frightened of her father’s anger – which, she realised, would no longer be the familiar, beneficent anger of grown-up to child, father to daughter, but real, unbounded, adult anger.
She hated being alone with him. Car journeys were the worst: prisoner in the passenger seat on the way home from school, her father asking about her day, trying to make her laugh. He was his usual garrulous, ebullient self, fond of hyperbole, susceptible to sentiment, domineering, opinionated, funny, warm. Tamsin could see nothing in his demeanour to suggest that here was a man with a terrible secret. And this was what made him truly monstrous.
Bertrand wasn’t as relaxed as he appeared. He was worried – by Tamsin, about Tamsin. Before, the two of them had been a team. Now she was nervy and skittish, slow in conversation, unwilling to meet his eye. If he hugged her, she hugged back, but she no longer initiated contact between them. On more than one occasion, he had the impression that his touch was actually unpleasant to her.
Before – but before what? Bertrand didn’t know; he couldn’t even really say when the change had occurred. He wondered if some male authority figure had behaved inappropriately towards her – a teacher, or perhaps one of the gap-year students who helped out at her summer music school. When he suggested this to his wife, however, she dismissed it as a typical piece of melodrama. ‘She’s growing up, that’s all. She can’t be your little girl for ever.’ They were in the bedroom, getting ready to go out for the evening. Roz spritzed perfume onto her left wrist, then drew her right wrist across her left in a sawing motion. ‘She’ll be thirteen soon. It’s just hormones,’ she said decisively, meeting her husband’s doubtful frown with a brisk, case-closed sort of look.
Bertrand also wondered whether Tamsin knew about his affair. Somehow, it seemed to him that she might. No matter how firmly he told himself that his anxiety was unfounded, he felt increasingly uneasy in his daughter’s presence; and in time, he found he was unable to prevent unease from translating into mild aversion. He was ashamed of this feeling, and did everything he could to conceal it – to the point where he appeared, if anything, even more affectionate and indulgent towards Tamsin than before.
As far as her mother was concerned, Tamsin was a textbook teenager: surly and non-responsive at home, perpetually in trouble at school. She collected detentions, missed curfews, got a tattoo. At fourteen she spent a night in A&E with a stomach full of vodka and caffeine tablets. At fifteen she pierced her own bellybutton. ‘Hormones’ became Roz’s buzzword, mouthed unsubtly over Tamsin’s head to sympathetic friends. Secretly, she was a little frightened of her eldest daughter. Tamsin at sixteen was a good six inches taller than her mother and almost ethereally thin, with angular shoulders and no hips or breasts to speak of. Cropped halterneck tops exposed the bejewelled bellybutton, elongated by the tautness of her stomach and embellished, more often than not, with a purplish crust of infection.
On the rare occasions that her parents argued, Tamsin lay awake in bed, monitoring the muffled sounds coming up from the kitchen for any change in register that might signal the end. The end: expected and dreaded yet also, in a small, hard way, longed for. But the rapid cadences of blame and recrimination always rallentandoed into a truce, followed, a few minutes later, by her mother’s face at the bedroom door, flushed with guilt and tenderness.
‘Darling. All couples argue. There’s nothing to worry about, I promise. Your father and I love each other. And we love you. Love you love you love you.’
Roz perched her small frame on the edge of the bed. Her daughter’s large-lidded eyes – Bertrand’s eyes – were round and wide, a precious glimpse of the little girl who had long since morphed into this difficult, untouchable half-woman.
And so the silence continued, as if it might go on for ever. But later, when Tamsin looked back at that time, she would recall very clearly a sense of anticipation. A firework mutely blossoming, Concorde ripping noiselessly across the sky: those vacuum-packed, suspended seconds before the bang.
Three
Five fifteen on a Tuesday evening in late November: the crowded southbound Bakerloo line. Tamsin Jarvis, now seventeen, still very skinny, had a seat. Even better, she had the end seat. This meant she could lean right away from the woman on her left and press her hot cheek onto the pane of glass dividing the seats from the standing section. She had shrugged off her parka at Marylebone to reveal a faded black Nirvana T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘flower sniffin kitty pettin baby kissin corporate rock whore’. In her lap, a book of Beethoven piano sonatas, open at No. 21. Tamsin had been tracing the melody with a chewed-down fingernail, pleasantly conscious of the incongruity: a grungy-looking teenage girl absorbed in classical music, performing the indisputable miracle of turning black marks on the page into sounds in her head.
She didn’t notice the suitcase until the train was pulling out of Piccadilly Circus. It was a pine-green, hard-shelled case with wheels and an extendable handle, pushed up against the other side of the glass panel. How long had it been there? At Charing Cross, she looked to see if somebody claimed it. People jostled past it on their way out, irritated by the obstacle. A small woman with a scrappy high ponytail banged her knee on it and let out a bleat of pain. The woman scowled around for the owner, but no one came forward.
Almost as soon as the train had left the station, it stopped. Tamsin looked at the suitcase. Then through the window behind her at the tunnel blackness with its dirty arcana of wires and pipes. Then back at the suitcase. Someone was watching her: a tall boy about her own age, with broad shoulders and something slightly Asian, Chinese or Japanese maybe, about the eyes. He was standing in the middle of the carriage, holding the handrail with both hands, elbows flexed as if about to do a chin-up.
The boy nodded towards the suitcase.
‘Is that yours?’
Tamsin shook her head. ‘Is it yours?’ she asked, stupidly.
‘No.’ The boy leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of an older man in a pale grey trench coat. ‘Excuse me, sir: does that case belong to you?’ His voice was respectful and refined, the accent upper class without a hint of arrogance.
The man frowned, shook a no, turned back to his paper.
Tamsin and the boy each read the same thoughts in the other’s face. When the train jolted, they both jumped. But it was just a false start; another jerk and they were moving again. Tamsin looked away, suddenly sheepish. No one else seemed concerned about the case; surely they were both being paranoid.
But her gaze was drawn back. Tamsin’s mind played forward to the blast, the train carriage crumpled like a Coke can. Though of course, she wouldn’t see that. She was sitting next to the suitcase; she would be killed outright. Tamsin Jarvis, daughter of the conductor Bertrand Jarvis, was killed outright in the attacks of 25 November. Unless the pane of glass was thick enough to protect her, just to begin with. Maybe it would shatter, or melt down onto her, sticking her clothes to her skin…
At Embankment, the same thing again: one lot of passengers shuffling off, the next lot starting to push their way on prematurely. And all the time the suitcase squatting there, unclaimed. At the last minute, Tamsin stood up and burrowed to the exit. Two seconds later the tall boy followed her out. Neither of them said anything.
In the bustle of the platform, Tamsin felt their fears start to shrink into silliness. The boy headed decisively for the help-point phone, only to find it was broken. As they discussed what to do, their convictions gave way to embarrassment. At last Tamsin said, quite firmly, that she thought they had both overreacted.
The boy laughed nervously. ‘Right. Bloody hell. Don’t know about you, but I could really do with a drink.’
‘I was meant to be meeting friends in Camberwell…’ She looked up at him. There was a charming, improbable smattering of freckles across the bridge of his very straight nose. ‘But yes, a drink would be lovely, yes.’
He held out his hand, smiling for the first time. ‘I’m Chris.’
On the escalator, Tamsin felt the elation she associated with playing truant, but there was something else, too: an intimacy thrown over them first by fear and now, increasingly, foolishness. Yet at the entrance to the station, they both paused and breathed in deeply, tasting concrete in the damp November air. The world was newly sweet.
Chris took her to Gordon’s Wine Bar on Villiers Street. ‘A real gem of a place,’ he said loudly, as they made their way down the little stone staircase. The bar had low-vaulted ceilings and red candles stuck into old wine bottles, each with a dusty ruff of stalactites. The clientele was mostly male and middle-aged; but there were also some groups of younger drinkers playing for sophistication, and a fair-haired couple with matching hiking boots and a Rough Guide. Tamsin was nervous about her fake ID – thus far, she’d done most of her underage drinking in Camden pubs – so Chris, already eighteen, went up to buy the drinks. As she waited, she gazed round at the framed newspaper clippings, the cobwebs (evidently encouraged), the line-up of bottles behind the bar.
Tamsin was indulging in an old, childish game of deciding which instrument each wine bottle would be – some were square-shouldered like violins, others sloped gently from the neck like double basses – when the fear she’d felt in the tube rose up again. What if, at this very moment, people were dying because she and Chris had been too – too what? too selfish? too shy? – to act?
‘How will we know what’s happened?’ she asked Chris, as he placed a little carafe of red and two glasses on the table in front of her.
Chris shrugged. He started to pour out their wine, still standing, not meeting her eyes.
‘It was definitely nothing.’ He sat down opposite her, tucking his long legs under the table with difficulty. Tamsin waited for him to settle, then lifted her wine glass and tipped her head to one side.
‘Cheers.’
The clink of their glasses registered as a punctuation mark. Somehow, it had been agreed that neither of them would mention the suitcase again.
Their conversation was unremarkable: where they lived, what A-levels, how many siblings. Hearing in each other’s voices the same expensive educations, he confessed, a little shyly, to Rugby (‘but on a bursary, you know’), she to St Paul’s. They ascertained that, aged fourteen, they had both been to the same teenage charity ball, where a friend of Tamsin’s had kissed a record twenty-five boys in the space of two hours. Perhaps Chris had been one of them? Tamsin described her friend: tallish, dyed blonde hair, heavy eyeliner? Chris didn’t think so; the girl he had kissed that night – the first girl he had ever kissed – was a brunette with traintracks. And so to kisses, first kisses, bad kisses, aborted kisses, swapping horror stories with that world-weariness peculiar to late adolescence, dismissive and vaunting at the same time. Tamsin referenced a one-night stand, ever-so-casually, and watched Chris’s eyes widen briefly, telling against his knowing nod.
‘Right.’ Tamsin emptied the last of the carafe into Chris’s glass. ‘My turn,’ she said, bending for her handbag. ‘Wait a moment … here it is … no, fuck. Fuck, I was sure I had twenty quid.’
Chris was already on his feet. ‘It’s fine, really, I’ve got plenty – I’ll get it. Please, allow me,’ he added as Tamsin made to protest. ‘It would be my pleasure.’
These last words seemed an absurd imitation of someone older. Tamsin started to laugh; but when she saw the discomfort in Chris’s face, she softened the laugh to a giggle that was inescapably flirtatious – becoming, without quite meaning to, a girl being bought a drink by a boy who wanted to buy it for her.
He came back with a bottle this time. ‘Friend of mine, he did a gap year working in Bordeaux, just picking grapes to start with, bloody hard work … anyway, we’re meant to be tasting, what was it, blackberries, and some sort of spice, oh, it was clove, and something else a bit weird – leather, I think…’
Tamsin watched Chris’s mouth while he talked. She was trying to work out whether she fancied him. He was undoubtedly good looking and, to her, a little exotic – his Japanese father, his Hong Kong childhood. But in spite of Chris’s charm and the off-beat romance of this impromptu date, she wasn’t entirely sure she liked him. There was something in him that couldn’t function without outside approval. He wasn’t a show-off, exactly, but he needed an audience.
(Later, she would forget this. In the edited version, only the romance would remain.)
Chris’s hand hovered near the book of Beethoven Sonatas, now lying on the table underneath Tamsin’s bag. ‘Uh, may I?’
He opened it gently. ‘All these notes … I tried once, but I was no good. Think I just about made Grade 5.’ He shook his head in admiration. ‘I’d love to hear you play. Seriously, I think musicians must be the closest thing to angels.’
For a moment Tamsin thought it was a bad pick-up line; but one look at Chris’s face told her he was in earnest. She decided that she didn’t fancy him.
‘Are you going to be a professional?’
Tamsin nodded, then remembered to add a modest grimace. ‘If I make it. It’s pretty tough.’
Chris was impressed. ‘What about the rest of your family? Are they musical, too?’
‘My – yes, my mum’s a singer, actually. And my sister plays the oboe.’ Tamsin found herself reluctant to say who her father was.
Chris’s thoughts were rather more straightforward. He did fancy Tamsin, and he wanted to kiss her. She was tough and edgy and – a word that had powerful mystique for Chris – artistic. He was entranced. The more they talked, the more certain he felt that they had been brought together by fate and irresistible mutual attraction. Everything about the evening seemed tinged with inevitability.
They had had nothing to eat. By 9 p.m. when they stood up to leave, they were both fairly drunk. On the stairs, Chris dared a hand in the small of her back. Not wanting to embarrass him, Tamsin let it stay there; though she had a dim premonition that this would mean more serious embarrassment for both of them later.
But later never came. As soon as they reached ground level, Tamsin’s phone began to buzz.
‘Shit, loads of missed calls. Sorry—’
Tamsin wedged the phone between ear and hunched right shoulder, leaving her hands free to fumble with the zip on her parka. Chris could hear the low chirrup of the dial tone.
‘Mummy? Mummy, is that you?’
Her face went tight as she listened. ‘Okay. I’m coming home.’
Tamsin pocketed her phone and started on the zip for a second time. ‘I have to go.’ Her voice was hard and strangely adult, different from any other tone he’d heard her use that evening.
‘Is everything all right?’ Something warned him not to touch her again.
‘I can’t explain. Sorry. I have to go.’ It was a pedestrian-only road but she checked for cars out of habit, three quick pecks of the head. Chris called after her but she was already gone, over the street and into the bright tiled mouth of the tube station.
He didn’t have her phone number. He didn’t even know her surname.
And so for Chris – who never had the chance to discover that Tamsin didn’t want to be kissed – the evening retained all the allure of unrealised possibility. Time magnified her charms in his memory. Tamsin informed his type; he looked for her height in other women, her slightness, those small, widely spaced breasts that had barely nudged the fabric of her T-shirt. To say he thought about her constantly would be an exaggeration, but she was, in a sense, always there – as an ideal, a measure against which everyone else was found wanting.
* * *
On the phone, her mother had been unintelligible. Tamsin assumed she had somehow uncovered the affair, but in fact, her father had simply announced that he was leaving and that he had been planning to leave for years. The trigger? Serena’s sixth-form scholarship to the Purcell School: Bertrand had wanted to wait until both his daughters had a secure future ahead of them before disrupting their home environment. Now that Serena’s musical career was more or less assured, he felt free to leave.
This was what he was explaining to his wife, for the fourth time that evening, as Tamsin came through the front door.
‘My god. My fucking god.’ Roz’s voice was muted with disbelief. ‘You actually think you’ve been considerate, don’t you, you shit—’
In the hall, Tamsin hung up her coat; she felt as if she were preparing for an interview. The house smelled like it always did: wood polish, old suppers, stargazer lilies, home.
When she stepped into the sitting room, both her parents turned to look at her. Her mother was dressed, incongruously, in a ritzy black cocktail number with a swishy little fringe of bugle beads around the hem. Her usual five-inch heels had been kicked off; standing in her bare feet on the thick carpet, Roz looked very small indeed. The corn on her middle right toe shone in the lamplight.
‘Your father’s leaving us. He can’t wait to get away, apparently. He’s been sick of us for years, apparently.’
Bertrand took a step towards his wife, one hand raised. ‘Roz, that’s not fair, that’s not what I said—’
‘But luckily for you, he’s deigned to stick around till now. So as not to disrupt your home environment. Now, isn’t that nice of him, Tamsin? Aren’t you going to say thank you to your father?’
