‘I want to see Dean.’
There is nothing I can say. Leo doesn’t like change, and he doesn’t have the life experience to know that people move around, float by, stay sometimes or are gone: that there will be more people. I have that experience but my faith in it has disappeared.
There is a flash in the road, an amber streak across my peripheral vision at the bottom right-hand edge of the windscreen. The bump, when it comes, is more a noise than a feeling.
I stop the car and get out. I know I have hit something, I know it is an animal: a small soft creature versus the metal of my car bumper. Behind me, the removal van pulls over too.
The fox is lying by the side of the drive. It looks perfect except for the one angry gash on its pointed head, almost hidden by the way its tail curls around the small body, for all the world as if it is sleeping.
‘Did the fox get run over, Mummy?’ Leo has got out of the car. He is looking at the sad little corpse.
‘It ran straight out in front of me,’ I say and my voice cracks slightly. ‘Poor thing.’
The fox doesn’t look like foxes did in London. The foxes we’re used to are coloured by the grey landscape, infected by the soot and the brick and the car fumes. This one is vivid orange, glossy and plump. We are used to mangy foxes with scratched-up fur, living out of bins: this one has had an altogether more organic diet.
‘Oh, dear.’ The oldest of the three removal men has climbed down from his van. ‘Poor little bugger. Let’s move him to the hedge.’ He grabs a piece of old fabric from the cab of the van and uses it to protect his hands from the fur. ‘There you go.’
I feel like I should say some words, stroke the still small ribs. I have never killed anything before.
‘We do need to get on, Cate.’ The removal man taps his watch. ‘I’ve got to get that lot home for tonight.’ He gestures towards his colleagues.
‘Sorry, little fox,’ I whisper. I am near to tears. I look in the rear-view mirror as I drive away but his body is hidden by the green hedgerow.
*
One last curve in this dilapidated drive and the left-hand edge of the house breaks out of the trees. And then it keeps going. Across and across, window after window.
‘Where’s our house?’ asks Leo.
This place looks like a hospital, or a boarding school, or – exactly what it is – a museum. ‘This is our house,’ I tell Leo.
‘Daddy’s house?’ This is as much as Leo has grasped of where we are going – and to some extent it’s true.
Richard’s family have owned this house for two hundred years, since they built it. My blood runs cold when I think what might have happened if it wasn’t here, if there wasn’t a trust still running it. I knew all along that the heir to the estate is entitled to live on the premises, although I never imagined a scenario where that might need to happen. Now, with every other avenue closed, we are here at the door.
I reach in my handbag for the solicitor’s letter and the keys. The letter explains that Leo and I will have our own apartment but we will share the building and garden with the museum and its visitors. It’s not ideal, but none of this is. We’re supposed to be greeted by Mrs Buchan – although greeted seems unlikely to be the right word – but we’re five hours late and she’s probably gone home.
I dig into my bag a bit deeper. The keys aren’t there. I’m not the sort of person to lose things, unless you count jobs, husbands, and homes. I don’t lose keys or letters or small, ineffectual everyday details. I get out of the car so that I can tip my handbag onto the seat, but I know they’re not there. Tissues and envelopes, Leo’s asthma pump, my purse, the keys aren’t there. They really aren’t. And I checked at least ten times before we left, I checked once we were in the actual car.
‘Leo?’
He’s got out too, he’s standing on the drive looking up at his ancestors’ achievement.
‘Leo, where are the keys? Did you take them out of my bag?’
Leo looks at his feet. ‘Nope.’
And then I remember the new keyring, the shiny silver abacus that one of my work colleagues gave me as a leaving present and the way its tiny perfect beads slid from one end of the frame to the other. I remember how much Leo wanted to play with it and how I said he couldn’t. And that’s when I know that the keyring, and the keys, are in a lavatory stall at the M20 services.
It’s one of those parenting moments, one where every fibre of you wants to shout, scream, even run away. But another part of you – almost always the dominant one – remembers that you can’t. You’re the grown-up. You can do this the easy way or the hard way. You can suck it up and deal with what you have or you can waste hours of your life on an exercise that will simply result in two of you crying instead of one. An inner part of me, one I ban and hide and silence, asks me whether Richard’s version of parenting was the same and, it whispers in a voice I hate admitting to, ‘Isn’t that why we are where we are now?’
‘Very impressive, Cate.’ The oldest of the three removal men walks towards my car. ‘Your furniture’s going to rattle a bit in there.’ Behind him, the others have pushed up the back of the van and are standing around – stretching out tense muscles, rolling cigarettes, waiting to unpack.
‘It’s a flat, two bedrooms. The rest is mostly empty. And I’ve lost the keys.’ My angry inner voice adds, I haven’t lost the keys, Leo has, but that’s not going to help us right now. I smile at him, trying to disarm the fact that he thinks I’m an idiot.
‘Are they in your bag?’
I’m still smiling, my face rigid with tension. ‘I looked.’
‘The car?’
Leo stops me from explicitly outlining my frustrations by throwing up on the gravel drive. Spatters of vomit moisten the dust on the removal man’s boots.
*
When I’ve cleaned Leo up – and apologised profusely – things seem to have reached a new entente cordiale. The removal men are prepared to excuse my stupidity in the light of Leo’s car sickness and the entire plaintive horror of the situation. They have started stacking boxes near the front door while I sink myself in the task of opening it.
The traffic jam has meant that the solicitor’s office closed long before we got here. All the numbers I have for the museum and the estate office ring out and there don’t appear to be any neighbours.
Leo is being entertained by the removal men – they are lovely with him. He’s been allowed to sit in the cab although, since he confided in the youngest one, Frank, that it was him who lost the keys, they’ve turned the radio off and taken the keys out of the ignition. ‘Just in case, mate,’ they told him when he said he’d like to work the windscreen wipers a bit more.
‘I reckon I can get in there.’ Frank points to an upstairs window that’s slightly ajar. The front door of the house is porticoed, two sandstone pillars flank the wide door, and a tumble of tangled vegetation grows round them. Here and there a wide purple flower turns its face to the sinking sun.
‘Are you sure?’ It’s a long way up and seeing Frank break his neck would really finish the day off. ‘And I don’t know which window is which; you might end up in the actual museum.’