It didn't seem right on a boy his age, the way he was. When Byron compared him with his niece, Lily, and her noisy chatter, her uncomplicated demands on everybody's time and affection, he felt sad. They said it was understandable, in a boy who had just lost his father, that all kids reacted in different ways to such a trauma. He had overheard the widow on the phone to the school, fighting off psychiatrists and suchlike that some teacher had wanted to press on her. 'I've talked to him about it, and he doesn't want to go. I'm happy to let my son deal with things in his own way for now,' she had said. He had noticed that while her voice was calm her knuckles, gripping the drawer handle, were white. 'No - I'm well aware of that. I will certainly let you know if I feel he needs specialist help.' He had silently applauded her: he had an instinctive need for privacy, for freedom from interference and supervision. But it was hard not to wonder what on earth was locked behind the boy's closed-off little face.
He leaned over the half-door of the kitchen. 'You all right down here for a minute, Thierry? I've got to get a couple more bits down from upstairs.'
The boy nodded, hardly seeing him, and Byron ducked out of habit as he made his way up the narrow staircase to his bedroom. Two suitcases, four large cardboard boxes and a trailer-load of bits and pieces, plus a bootfull of puppies. Not a lot to show for a life, not a lot to find a home for. He sat down heavily on his bed, hearing the yaps downstairs. It wasn't the smartest or most luxurious bedroom, but he had been happy these last few years, with his sister and Lily. He had not brought women here - on the few occasions he had felt the need of female company he had made sure he went to theirs - and consequently, without any feminine input, it had the blank, utilitarian appearance of a hotel room. His sister had insisted on making matching curtains and quilt covers - an attempt, he knew, to make him feel like he was part of a home again. He had told her not to bother. He spent most of his time outdoors anyway. Still, it had been home, and he realised that he was sad to leave it.
Landlords did not want tenants with dogs. The only one who had said he would be happy to accept Byron's dogs had demanded six months' rent as a deposit, 'in case the animals cause damage'. It was a laughable figure. The other possible landlord had not wanted the dogs indoors. Byron had explained that once the puppies were gone his dogs would be happy to sleep in his car, but the landlord wasn't buying it. 'How do I know you're not going to let them in as soon as my back's turned?'
The weeks had ticked by, his sister had left, and it was now a matter of days until the tenancy formally ended. He had considered asking Matt for a loan, but even if he had agreed, something in Byron balked at the idea of being even further beholden to him.
'What we going to do, then, old girl?' He rubbed the collie's head. 'I'm thirty-two years old, I have no family, a job that pays less than the minimum wage, and I'm about to be made homeless.'
The dog looked mournful, as if she, too, had grasped the uncertainty of their future. Byron smiled, and made himself stand up, trying not to think of what he had just said, or of how oppressively quiet the house already felt now that he was alone. He tried not to let the voice that spoke of despair drown his determination. He knew from another time how easy it was to let such thoughts overwhelm you.
Life wasn't fair, and that was that. Young Thierry downstairs knew it, and he had had to learn a harder lesson than Byron at a painfully young age.
Byron made his way downstairs. It was nearly time to get the boy home. The local newspaper was out this afternoon. He hoped something would turn up in it. He watched the child, registered his joy, suddenly grateful for the distraction.
'Come on, you,' he said to Thierry, making himself sound more cheerful than he felt. 'If you're good we'll ask your mum if you can sit in Steve's digger when we clear that bottom field.'
Isabel heard the low whistle as she came down the stairs, and found her hand creeping across her chest to pull the two sides of her shirt collar together. Matt was on the other side of the hallway, feeding electrical cable into a gaping cavity, his leather tool-belt slung low round his hips. He was flanked by two other young men she had seen a couple of times before. He was smiling at her. 'You're very smart, Mrs D. Going anywhere nice?'
Isabel blushed, and cursed herself for it. 'Oh . . . no,' she stuttered. 'It's just an old shirt I dug out.'
'Suits you,' said Matt. 'You should wear that colour more often.' He went back to the electric cable as one of the men muttered to him. He began to sing quietly to himself. Eventually she recognised the tune. 'Hey there, lonely girl . . . lonely girl . . .'
She fought the urge to turn round and instead walked into the drawing room, her hand still at her throat. This was the third time Matt had commented on her appearance in a week, but she found it hard to believe that her shirt was worthy of note. It was navy blue linen, and so old as to be worn paper-soft. Laurent had given it to her many years ago during a trip to Paris - it was one of a number of old garments that had recently begun to fit her again. In truth, a large proportion of her wardrobe now hung off her. She hadn't had much appetite since Laurent had died. Sometimes she felt that if it hadn't been for the children she would have lived on biscuits and fruit. And there was nobody to talk to about the children, about Kitty's foul temper, her son's continuing silence. She probably spoke to Matt more than any other living being.
'This bathroom,' he said, appearing in the doorway. 'Have you made a decision about moving it? It would be much better in the third bedroom.'
She tried to remember their previous discussion. 'Didn't you say that would cost more money?' she said.
'Well, a little more, but you could divide it up then into a dressing room and en-suite for your room and it wouldn't be that hard to reroute the plumbing. It would be much better than stuck away in that corner.'
She considered this, then shook her head. Since the ceiling collapse she had found it hard not to glance upwards during every conversation. 'I can't do it, Matt. I think we should stick to putting in a working bath.'
'I'm telling you, Isabel, it really would work much better. It would add value, a decent-sized bathroom and dressing room.'
There was something so persuasive about him, and it was clear from his tone that he usually got his own way.
'I know you've given it a lot of thought,' she said, 'but not this time. Actually, the thing I really wanted to talk to you about was a power point in the kitchen. I must be able to plug in the fridge before it gets too warm.'
'Oh. Yes, the power point. It's not as straightforward as it sounds because of the way the cabling is laid out in there.' He grinned. 'I'll work something out. Don't worry. Hair looks good, by the way.'
She caught a flash of her reflection in the wall mirror, and tried to work out whether there was anything different about her appearance that day. He had commented twice now. Then she turned away, fearful that he would catch her examining herself. There were days when he seemed omnipresent, popping out of a room she was about to enter, humming when she practised her violin, taking his coffee break in the kitchen when she was cooking, and passing comment on the day's newspapers. Sometimes she didn't mind.
'I have to warn you. I found a few more rat droppings when I was lifting the skirting. They might have been disturbed by the building work.'
She shuddered. She had barely been able to sleep since the rat. 'Should I call out the pest-control people?'
'No point. There's too many places for them to hide while the floorboards are up. They could be coming in from outside. Leave it till we've finished.'
Isabel closed her eyes to visions of rats scampering into the house at dead of night. She sighed heavily, then reached for her keys and wallet. 'Matt, I'm going to the shop. I'll be back soon,' she called. She was not sure why she had to keep him abreast of her movements. If he needed to come and go he used the key that lived under the back doormat. It had been he who had revealed it several weeks previously. She had been shocked to discover that she and the children had slept for months in a house that eve
ryone else knew how to enter.
'Matt?'
He didn't hear her. As she closed the front door she could hear him somewhere above, whistling.
It had taken her almost ten minutes to reach the front of the queue for the cashpoint, largely because the elderly man in front of her had insisted on reading aloud every option offered him by the flickering screen. 'Ten pounds, Twenty pounds, Fifty pounds, Other . . .' he had muttered. 'Now, how much do I want?'
Isabel had not tutted, like the woman behind her, even though it was raining and she had forgotten to bring an umbrella. She knew from recent experience how easy it was to feel daunted by tasks that seemed simple to other people. Instead she had tapped him on the shoulder when he left his money in the machine and accepted his gratitude with a smile.
Thinking about the old man, and how easy it was to be distracted, meant that when she had typed in her own pin number and a request for money, it was some seconds before she noticed the message that flashed up on the screen. 'Insufficient funds to complete transaction,' it read. 'Please contact your local branch.'
She left the queue and entered the bank. The woman behind the counter had examined the card, typed something, then confirmed what the machine had told Isabel. 'You don't have enough cleared funds in your current account,' she said.
'Can you tell me what I do have?' Isabel asked quietly.
The woman tapped her keyboard, then scribbled a figure on a piece of paper and pushed it towards her. 'You're overdrawn. If you go any further than that,' she scribbled another figure, 'then you'll have to pay charges as the overdraft automatically becomes unauthorised.'
Isabel tried desperately to remember what she had paid for recently and came up with the unexpected order of roof tiles, the new soil pipe, the light fittings that had cost twice what she'd expected.
'Could you transfer some money from my savings account, please? There should be some in there. Just to get me out of the red.'
The woman carried out her request with impersonal efficiency, and handed Isabel another piece of paper, on which her savings had been totalled. The figure was much reduced from the one Isabel had imagined, but the woman, turning the screen towards her as if bestowing some kind of unusual gift, pointed out all the transactions that had taken place over the previous month.
'Oh . . . I'm having building work done,' said Isabel, shakily.
The woman smiled at her, as if in commiseration. 'Painful, isn't it?' she said.
Isabel drove home, deflated, with potatoes and baked beans instead of the roasting chicken and salad she had intended. To cheer herself up she put on an old tape of Handel that had been lurking in the glove compartment. She had never considered the cost of things like food before, but now, faced with her rapidly dwindling cache of savings, she understood that she had to economise. By cutting meat and fish from their diet she could save almost twenty pounds from the grocery bill, and squash was significantly cheaper than pure juice. She had spent the previous evening darning Thierry's socks when once she would have thrown them away and bought replacements. There had been something almost meditatively pleasing about sitting in front of the fire with her handiwork as evidence of domestic efficiency.
She was almost a quarter of a mile down the lane when Dolores, with impeccable timing, decided to squash any remnant of optimism. The engine, which had struggled to turn over in previous days - a fact which Isabel had chosen to ignore - finally spluttered into silence as the car's undercarriage lurched over a large puddle in the middle of the track. Isabel sat there, the wipers splayed across the windscreen, the music blaring. She turned it down and tried the ignition to no avail.
'Oh, bugger you!' she yelled. She climbed out of the car, cursing as her foot sank into cold muddy water, then squelched to the bonnet and fumbled it open. Half sheltered from the rain, she stared at the ticking engine with no idea of what she was looking for.
'Why?' she said aloud. 'Why now? Why couldn't you have got me home?' She kicked the wheel arch, then reached for the dip stick - the only item in the engine she knew. But once she had checked it she couldn't think of anything else to do. Rain continued to plummet from the slate-grey sky, and she fought the urge to rail at the elements.
She didn't even know if she wanted to return to the house. Some days she felt eaten by it, as if her whole self was enslaved to it, her energy devoted to its interminable upkeep. Her once-free thoughts were filled with an endless series of decisions - where should this power point go, what quality of wood should be used here, which height of skirting?
She tried not to think what would have happened if Laurent had been alive. It was the small things that felled her, rather than her loss: the car that wouldn't start, the bank statement she couldn't understand, the school report she couldn't discuss with anyone, the rat in the kitchen. 'I don't care,' she wanted to shout, when the workmen approached her for the fifteenth time. 'I just want a house that works, one that I don't have to think about. I want to be thinking about adagios, not insulation.'
'And I want a car that goes to the shop and back!' she yelled. 'Is that too much to ask?' She kicked the front wheel, almost relishing the pain that sparked in her foot. 'I don't want to deal with any of this! I want my old life back!'
She climbed back into the car, her hair dripping on to her shoulders. She screwed her eyes shut, took a few deep breaths. She tried to work out whether it would take longer to walk back to the shop to call for a recovery vehicle, or carry on down the lane to the house. She had given Kitty her own mobile telephone that morning in an attempt to raise her daughter's foul mood, and she calculated that it would be a fifteen-minute walk in the rain whichever way she went. Isabel closed her eyes and let the music remind her that this, too, would pass, that she had another way of being.
When she opened them, she could just make out, through the watery channels on the windscreen, a red shape lurching up the lane towards her. It was Matt's van.
'Car trouble?' He got out a few feet in front of her.
'It just stopped.' She was unable to contain her relief at his presence. 'I don't know what the matter is.'
He walked over, lifted the bonnet and peered inside. The music rang out of the open driver's door. 'You never stop, do you?' he said. He stuck his hand inside, feeling deftly around the engine, then removed it. 'Start her up.'
She sat in the car and tried the engine.
He listened, then motioned at her to turn the music down so that he could hear better. 'Again,' he commanded. And then, 'Hold on a moment.'
'What can you hear?' she said, intrigued. 'What can you hear that I can't?'
She got out of the car. It seemed wrong to sit in the dry when he was doing the work. When he saw her, he took off his jacket and signalled that she should shelter under it, then went back to his van, leaned in and brought out a rag. He came back, pulled out a piece of rubber and wiped it meticulously. He then cleaned several small plugs. By the time he had finished, his grey T-shirt was wet through and his hair glistened.
'Now try,' he said. Isabel climbed back into her seat and fired the engine, her wet fingers slipping on the key. It turned over obediently. 'Oh!' she exclaimed, delighted. She jumped as Matt's face appeared at the window, his skin gleaming in the rain.
'Distributor cap,' he said, squinting against the water trickling down his face. 'They get soaked on a low-slung car like this, what with all these puddles. You want to stick some WD-40 in there. Tell you what, I'll come with you and get the boys to turn at the top and follow us back to the house. Make sure you get back okay.'
Before she could protest, he had climbed into the passenger seat and motioned at her to edge the car past his van. She felt the eyes of the men on her as she passed, acutely aware of her wet shirt, the proximity of the man beside her.
'You can have your music back on now,' he said. She turned it up a little, letting the triumphant sound of the harpsichord wash over her. 'Handel,' she said, when she saw him looking at the tape box.
'Don't te
ll me--'
She giggled. 'Yes. Yes, it is. His Water Music.' And heard his great answering guffaw of a laugh in response.
She was not sure afterwards whether it was relief about the car, despair over her finances or merely some long-repressed emotion seeking an outlet, but as her unreliable old car bounced back up the lane towards her lonely, leaking, costly house, Isabel's giggle escalated and she laughed so hard that tears sprang to her eyes and she was afraid that hilarity would spill into something else.
She pulled up in the drive, turned off the engine and stopped laughing. With the absence of either motion or music the silence within the confines of the car felt suddenly significant.
She stared at her hands, at the darkened fabric where the rain had soaked through her long skirt, the clear outline of her breasts against her damp shirt. She felt, rather than saw, him looking at her, and tried to straighten her face.
'It's nice to see you smile,' said Matt, quietly. His eyes met hers, intense and blue, and appeared to lose their habitual knowingness. He laid a hand on her shoulder.
Something jolted through her, but he opened the car door and got out. He walked through the rain to his waiting van, as Isabel's hand reached up to the warmth his had left.
There was nothing - even for someone earning twice what he took home. Nothing for a man who wanted to live within a reasonable distance of the place he had spent most of his life. Byron sat in his car, the rain beating on the windscreen, the puppies whining and growling at each other in the back, as he searched the local newspapers for the few lines that might offer him a home. There were executive homes, two-bedroom flats, workmen's cottages that no longer housed workmen. But there was nothing for a man on a low income with little in the way of savings.