She went pale then. I saw the colour drain from her face, the way she swayed a little in the morning sunshine. I saw Mr Traynor coming up behind her, his stride brisk, one hand holding his panama hat firmly on his head. He was muttering his apologies as he pushed through the crowds, his eyes fixed on me and his wife as we stood rigidly a few feet apart.
‘You … you said you thought he was happy. You said you thought this might change his mind.’ She sounded desperate, as if she were pleading with me to say something else, to give her some different result.
I couldn’t speak. I stared at her, and the most I could manage was a small shake of my head.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, so quietly that she could not have heard me.
He was almost there as she fell. It was as if her legs just gave way under her, and Mr Traynor’s left arm shot out and caught her as she went down, her mouth a great O, her body slumped against his.
His hat fell to the pavement. He glanced up at me, his face confused, not yet registering what had just taken place.
And I couldn’t look. I turned, numb, and I began to walk, one foot in front of the other, my legs moving almost before I knew what they were doing, away from the airport, not yet even knowing where it was I was going to go.
25
Katrina
Louisa didn’t come out of her room for a whole thirty-six hours after she got back from her holiday. She arrived back from the airport late evening on the Sunday, pale as a ghost under her suntan – and we couldn’t work that out for a start, as she had definitely said she’d see us first thing Monday morning. I just need to sleep, she had said, then shut herself in her room and gone straight to bed. We had thought it a little odd, but what did we know? Lou has been peculiar since birth, after all.
Mum had taken up a mug of tea in the morning, and Lou had not stirred. By supper, Mum had become worried and shaken her, checking she was alive. (She can be a bit melodramatic, Mum – although, to be fair, she had made fish pie and she probably just wanted to make sure Lou wasn’t going to miss it.) But Lou wouldn’t eat, and she wouldn’t talk and she wouldn’t come downstairs. I just want to stay here for a bit, Mum, she said, into her pillow. Finally, Mum left her alone.
‘She’s not herself,’ said Mum. ‘Do you think it’s some kind of delayed reaction to the thing with Patrick?’
‘She couldn’t give a stuff about Patrick,’ Dad said. ‘I told her he rang to tell us he came 157th in the Viking thing, and she couldn’t have looked less interested.’ He sipped his tea. ‘Mind you, to be fair on her, even I found it pretty hard to get excited about 157th.’
‘Do you think she’s ill? She’s awful pale under that tan. And all that sleeping. It’s just not like her. She might have some terrible tropical disease.’
‘She’s just jet-lagged,’ I said. I said it with some authority, knowing that Mum and Dad tended to treat me as an expert on all sorts of matters that none of us really knew anything about.
‘Jet lag! Well, if that’s what long-haul travel does to you, I think I’ll stick with Tenby. What do you think, Josie, love?’
‘I don’t know … who would have thought a holiday could make you look so ill?’ Mum shook her head.
I went upstairs after supper. I didn’t knock. (It was still, strictly speaking, my room, after all.) The air was thick and stale, and I pulled the blind up and opened a window, so that Lou turned groggily from under the duvet, shielding her eyes from the light, dust motes swirling around her.
‘You going to tell me what happened?’ I put a mug of tea on the bedside table.
She blinked at me.
‘Mum thinks you’ve got Ebola virus. She’s busy warning all the neighbours who have booked on to the Bingo Club trip to PortAventura.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Lou?’
‘I quit,’ she said, quietly.
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think?’ She pushed herself upright, and reached clumsily for the mug, taking a long sip of tea.
For someone who had just spent almost two weeks in Mauritius, she looked bloody awful. Her eyes were tiny and red-rimmed, and her skin, without the tan, would have been even blotchier. Her hair stuck up on one side. She looked like she’d been awake for several years. But most of all she looked sad. I had never seen my sister look so sad.
‘You think he’s really going to go through with it?’
She nodded. Then she swallowed, hard.
‘Shit. Oh, Lou. I’m really sorry.’
I motioned to her to shove over, and I climbed into bed beside her. She took another sip of her tea, and then leant her head on my shoulder. She was wearing my T-shirt. I didn’t say anything about it. That was how bad I felt for her.
‘What do I do, Treen?’
Her voice was small, like Thomas’s, when he hurts himself and is trying to be really brave. Outside we could hear next door’s dog running up and down alongside the garden fence, chasing the neighbourhood cats. Every now and then we could hear a burst of manic barking; its head would be popping up over the top right now, its eyes bulging with frustration.
‘I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. God. All that stuff you fixed up for him. All that effort … ’
‘I told him I loved him,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘And he just said it wasn’t enough.’ Her eyes were wide and bleak. ‘How am I supposed to live with that?’
I am the one in the family who knows everything. I read more than anyone else. I go to university. I am the one who is supposed to have all the answers.
But I looked at my big sister, and I shook my head. ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I said.
She finally emerged the following day, showered and wearing clean clothes, and I told Mum and Dad not to say a word. I implied it was boyfriend trouble, and Dad raised his eyebrows and made a face as if that explained everything and God only knew what we had been working ourselves into such a fuss over. Mum ran off to ring the Bingo Club and tell them she’d had second thoughts about the risks of air travel.
Lou ate a piece of toast (she didn’t want lunch) and she put on a big floppy sunhat and we walked up to the castle with Thomas to feed the ducks. I don’t think she really wanted to go out, but Mum insisted that we all needed some fresh air. This, in my mother’s vocabulary, meant she was itching to get into the bedroom and air it and change the bedding. Thomas skipped and hopped ahead of us, clutching a plastic bag full of crusts, and we negotiated the meandering tourists with an ease born of years of practice, ducking out of the way of swinging backpacks, separating around posing couples and rejoining on the other side. The castle baked in the high heat of summer, the ground cracked and the grass wispy, like the last hairs on the head of a balding man. The flowers in the tubs looked defeated, as if they were already half preparing for autumn.