Another World Read Free

Once, thrusting his hand deep into the mass, he pulled out a blackbird’s nest, full of dead fledglings. ‘Gollies’, they used to call them when he was a child. He looked at them, at the black spines of feathers pricking through the purplish skin, the sealed, bulbous eyes, the yellow wavy rim around the beaks, and then, with a spasm of revulsion, he threw the nest on to the wheelbarrow. But at least he’d managed to expose the lintel with its carved name and date. He looks up at the house now and points it out to Miranda.
    FANSHAWE 1898
    ‘Like Wuthering Heights,’ she says.
    Nick catches a movement behind one of the upstairs windows, a flash of light. Gareth’s staring down at them, the sunlight glinting on his glasses. He doesn’t smile or wave.
    ‘Right, then,’ Nick says, picking up the suitcase and putting his other arm around Miranda’s shoulders. Together they go in.

TWO
    Fran lifts saucepan lids, prods vegetables, each blast of steam leaving her hotter, stickier, more harassed than before. The potatoes have boiled dry; not disastrously, but they’re going to taste ‘caught’. There’s something you can do about that. Mash them? She reaches for the Cheat’s Cookbook . Yes, transfer them to a clean saucepan, mash them with full-cream milk and a knob of butter – she has neither, they’re bad for Nick’s heart – and cover lightly with ‘an aromatic cloud of freshly grated nutmeg and a sprinkling of freshly chopped parsley’.
    She can’t help thinking anybody who could lay that on at a moment’s notice had probably managed not to burn the potatoes in the first place. What she has is half a packet of mixed herbs, grey with age. The nutmeg’s at the bottom of a packing case and the pots of fresh herbs got left behind in the flat. ‘Shurrup, you,’ she says to Jasper, ruffling his hair, amazed by the warmth of his scalp under her fingers. He’s sitting on the floor at her feet, going ‘broom broom’ as he drives a dinky car up her leg. You wouldn’t think he’d been awake half the night. Normally she’d have gone to bed with him, when he had his afternoon nap, but today she couldn’t because of having to get bloody Miranda’s bloody room ready.
    Though she ought to be grateful there’s a room to get ready. In the flat Miranda had slept on a camp bed in the living room. It was odd, that in the first days after the move, even though she had all this extra space, Fran tended to confine herself to a few rooms: the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room. Like a prisoner who takes one look at the sky and shelters in a shop doorway. She’s getting more used to it now. The final months in that flat had almost broken her. It had been all right when Jasper was a baby because he didn’t cry much, but as soon as he became a toddler the trouble started. The woman in the flat downstairs – nicknamed The Grum – was always banging on the ceiling. Fran went down and tried to talk about it, but she wasn’t having any of that. Miss Hardcastle, her name was. She’d taken to tranquillizers in a big way after her mother died, and then, against her doctor’s advice, had gone cold turkey on them. And poor woman, she was to be pitied, she was climbing up the wall. The slightest noise had her shouting and screaming and hammering on the ceiling and complaining to the landlord. On wet days, when Jasper had a cold, Fran would run a bath and sit in it with him, singing songs and reading stories and playing with boats. For hours, sometimes, because it was the only way to avoid another row. Once Nick came in from work to find her sitting in tepid water with tears streaming down her face. That was all behind her now, though. In this house Jasper can make any amount of noise. He can run about and trundle his car up and down the corridors to his heart’s content. OK, it’s a mess, there’s a lot to do, and not much money to do it with, but they’d been right to move. Even when all the dashing about had sent her