A Simple Life. Rosie Thomas
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as it led deeper into the woods. There were no more houses to be glimpsed between the trees, nor were there any mailboxes at the roadside.
‘Have we missed it?’ Dinah wondered as she drove, peering ahead to where oblique shafts of sun filtered through the branches. The leaves were showing the first margins of butter-yellow and crimson. In another two weeks the fall would be in full blaze.
In the back seat Merlin looked up from his GameBoy.
‘101 was miles back.’
They were looking for 102, the Parkeses’ house.
‘How do I get to the next level of this? Jack?’
‘Give it here. You’re so dumb, I’ve shown you this already. Look, there’s another sign.’
A yellow arrow stencilled 102 pointed onwards.
‘I wouldn’t want to live out here,’ Jack said.
‘Aw, too creepy for you? The deep dark woods are full of monsters?’
‘Too boring, in fact, Merlin. Like you.’
‘Stop bickering,’ Dinah snapped.
‘Mum, we aren’t bickering. Can’t you tell the difference between argument and conversation?’
Opposition to her was the only factor that united them, Dinah thought. Nothing was new.
‘Sandra Parkes complains that Camilla is difficult. She can’t be as bad as you two.’
‘Camilla, what a totally sad name.’
‘Sort of like some disgusting pudding, Camilla-and-custard.’
‘Pink and wobbly. I bet she’s really fat.’
The boys snorted and retched, united also by their unwillingness to make the visit to the Parkeses.
Matthew seemed to hear none of this. He had been silent most of the way, sitting with his eyes turned to the woodland flickering past.
He was thinking about his work; ever since the summer, when the present avenue of speculation had properly opened up to him, the thought of it had never been far from his mind. Even when he surfaced from sleep he was aware of it rising again through the membranes of semiconsciousness.
He was thinking about his engineered molecule now, his inner eye turning it so that it twisted elegantly, three-dimensional, a dense cluster of atoms floating free in black computer space. Which group should he change, to make the molecule more active?
Frustration and excitement simultaneously prickled within him.
The first tests were encouraging. His technicians had demonstrated that the enzyme material he had engineered was beginning to function as it should, partly binding to the surface of IM-9 lymphocytes, and so indicating that it would bind to some extent to insulin receptors on the surface of cells. The question now was which part of the beautiful structure to change, to make it work better, to make it perfect?
His eyes were unfocused but he saw the sign first. And the mailbox beneath it. Matthew pointed.
‘There, look. I thought the place would be somewhere at the top of this hill.’
The road was dipping downwards ahead of them. Dinah compressed her lips but said nothing as she swung the Jeep sharply into the driveway. There were more trees, conifers and birches pierced by airy columns of sunlight, and then they emerged into a wide space at the crown of the hill. The Parkeses’ house rose in impressive stone and timber tiers against a sombre belt of firs.
Before Dinah had parked beside Ed’s Porsche a door opened in the bottom tier and Ed himself emerged.
‘Great, so you found us okay, no problems? Come on, come on in. Sandy’s looking forward to it.’
Obediently they followed him through a hallway and into the centre of the house. The huge room soared up through complicated levels, its cool space enclosed by squares and rectangles of wood and rough stone and shimmering glass. Beyond the glass was blue air and the reckless colours of the trees.
‘Cool,’ Jack murmured.
‘This is an amazing house, Ed.’
‘You like it? I designed it myself, with a bit of help from an architect.’
Matthew looked around him, his hands in the pockets of his shabby khakis.
‘Is there no end to your talents?’
Ed turned on him, grinning and sharp-eyed.
‘Beginning, doesn’t the line go?’
Matthew was easy in the company of other men, particularly men as successful in their fields as he was in his own. He laughed now, genuinely amused by Ed’s disarming self-satisfaction.
‘That’s not what I said or what I intended. Hi, Sandra.’
Sandra appeared on one of the balconies projecting over their heads, and then fluttered down some steps to join them. Her hair was knotted close to her small skull and she was wearing a loose cream tunic that revealed the knobs of bone at the base of her throat. She kissed Matt and Dinah in turn, resting her hand for an instant on Dinah’s wrist.
Dinah and she had had lunch together the week before.
At Sandra’s suggestion they had met in one of the potted-fern-and-scrubbed-boards café bars that were popular in Franklin. They sat at a window table looking across the green towards the campus. Students streamed past in pairs and groups, on their way between morning and afternoon classes.
‘Would you like to be that age again?’ Sandra asked.
Dinah made the conventional response without thinking about it. ‘Only if I could be forewarned and forearmed against making all the same mistakes.’
‘Did you make so many?’
Dinah could not look at her. She felt an instant of fear that this woman was a threat. She might come too close and Dinah would not be able to fend her off in the way that she could keep Nancy and Dee Kerrigan and the others at bay. She heard herself laugh, a false high-pitched denial.
‘No, not really. What about you?’
Sandra turned her wineglass full circle on its stem. A spilled drop broke into shining globules on the polished table top. Dinah’s deflection of her question had been too sharp. She hesitated, on the brink of offering some truth of her own, and now thinking better of it. They looked at each other, suspecting an opportunity missed before they had even become properly aware of it.
Sandra said, ‘Mistakes? I couldn’t lay claim to too many, could I? Ed’s a good man, as well as a very successful one. I have everything I want. A husband, a daughter I adore …’
Family, wealth, travel, ease, luxury, Dinah silently supplied for her. Only Sandra did not have quite everything she wanted, evidently. Not her own freedom, perhaps, from her husband’s dictates. Dinah wanted to ask her why they had only one child. But she could not. The ripples that the question would make might stream back and rock her own precarious equanimity.
‘How is your daughter?’ she tried instead. Sandra had said the child was difficult. Fourteen …
Sandra drank her wine. ‘Milly’s quite unusual. Very strong-willed, very certain in her opinions. And we’ve probably spoiled her. But I expect most of the difficulty is just to do with her age, isn’t it?’
‘I should think so,’ Dinah murmured. ‘I daren’t think what will happen when Jack gets there.’
That was all. The spectre of intimacy had shivered between Dinah and Sandra and they found that they had somehow brushed it away. After that they talked about missing England, and all the places Ed and Sandra had travelled to when Camilla was smaller and more tractable.
Now, a week later, they were all in the Parkeses’ gleaming glass castle in the woods. Ed was herding them