The Other House

By the time they reached the bypass, Sophie had asked whether they were nearly there four times, although she knew perfectly well that they weren't. Eleanor had stopped answering after the third. Daniel, who apparently regarded his daughter's questions as a form of entertainment, had begun supplying increasingly useless estimates. 'About forty minutes,' he said. 'You said forty minutes ten minutes ago.' Sophie had been keeping track from the back seat, as though an accurate account might oblige them to arrive sooner. 'We're making excellent progress, then. I do it at work all the time.' Eleanor turned down the heating on her side of the car. Sunlight came through the windscreen, but her feet were still cold. She had brought a jacket she would probably end up carrying for most of the afternoon. Daniel had refused a coat altogether, which meant he would spend some portion of the visit asking whether she was cold and looking hopefully at the jacket. 'It's another hour at least,' Eleanor told Sophie. 'An hour?' Sophie leaned forward between the seats as far as her belt would allow. 'Dad said forty minutes.' 'Dad has been saying forty minutes since we left the drive.' 'I prefer my version,' Daniel said. 'Mine has a better ending.' Sophie dropped back against the seat with an exaggerated sigh. There was a brief disturbance as she looked for something inside her bag, followed by the unmistakable sound of a packet being opened. 'What have you got?' Eleanor asked when the crinkling continued. 'Sweets.' Sophie had begun with 'nothing', which hadn't fooled anybody. She tore the packet open farther. 'I had breakfast ages ago.' 'Half an hour,' Eleanor said. 'Exactly. I'm having sweets now.' Daniel made a small noise of appreciation. Eleanor gave him a look, and he returned his eyes to the road. She'd made pancakes that morning because Sophie had found an old photograph of herself helping Daniel make them when she was six and decided it was a family tradition they were neglecting. Daniel had managed three before announcing that he was full. He was now angling the air vents towards himself in the manner of a man expecting a sugar crash. They were going to see his mother in a village outside Chichester, with lunch booked at a pub Moira liked and the afternoon left deliberately loose. It would have been a simpler journey without the proposed diversion to the seafront, but Sophie had discovered that the little amusement arcade near the promenade had installed a claw machine filled with enormous stuffed sea creatures. Sophie had apparently researched the arcade more thoroughly than Eleanor had researched the route. 'Can we go to the pier after lunch?' Sophie asked. 'It's not really a pier,' Daniel said. 'More of a bit of promenade with machines designed to take your money.' 'Fine. Can we go to the bit of promenade with machines designed to take your money?' 'We'll see how your grandmother's doing,' Eleanor said. 'We've said we'd spend the afternoon with her.' 'Nan likes the sea.' 'She likes sitting near the sea with a cup of tea,' Daniel said. 'She doesn't necessarily want to watch you spend sixteen pounds trying to win something that costs six.' 'You can't buy that particular one,' Sophie said. She knew this with great certainty but refused to explain where she'd checked the price. Sophie sent a photograph to Eleanor's phone despite sitting directly behind her. When Eleanor opened it, a large blue plush octopus filled the screen. It had a deeply unimpressed expression and eight limbs short enough to look like a manufacturing mistake. 'Oh, that's hideous,' Eleanor said. 'It's cute,' Sophie protested. 'It's judging me.' Daniel glanced over at the picture while they waited behind a tractor entering a roundabout. 'That looks like your uncle Graham.' 'It looks nothing like Graham,' Eleanor said, although she could see what Daniel meant about the eyes. Sophie started laughing, delighted that her father had joined in rather than criticised her choice. Sophie laughed and asked Eleanor to send the photograph back, apparently forgetting she already had it. Then she settled down with her headphones and the sweets, which Eleanor knew meant they had approximately fifteen minutes before the next question. The traffic opened out beyond the roundabout. Daniel took the inside lane and passed a delivery lorry carrying pallets under blue tarpaulin. At the next junction, a sign announced roadworks that did not seem to exist. Eleanor had been looking forward to the drive. Once they were on the road, nobody could ask her which cupboard handles she'd chosen. 'I've told Darren we want the original quote confirmed before he orders anything else,' Eleanor said. Daniel raised his eyebrows. 'I thought we weren't doing kitchen talk today.' 'I said I didn't want to spend the whole day talking about it. That's different. We can manage a brief conversation while we've got forty minutes.' From the back seat came a muffled, 'An hour.' Daniel reached across and briefly put his hand on Eleanor's knee. 'He sent the revised quote last night. The electrics are higher than we expected and he's changed the price on the worktop.' 'Again? Has he explained why?' 'Not properly. I'll call him Monday.' 'You said you were going to call yesterday.' Daniel began explaining that he'd been in meetings until six and that the rest of the evening had got away from him. By the time he mentioned the pancakes, Eleanor had to remind him that she'd made those this morning, not last night. 'Sorry. I'm compressing the week.' His hair needed cutting and he had the faintly defeated expression he wore whenever work and home had both provided lists of things he hadn't quite finished. It would have been easier to stay annoyed if he hadn't looked so aware of the fact. Eleanor watched the road ahead while he passed a slower car, then returned to the question of Darren. 'I'll send him an email,' she said. 'You shouldn't have to do all of it. I'll ring him Monday morning before anything else.' 'I'll put it in your calendar.' 'I'm sure you will.' She turned back towards the road. The kitchen had been their major project for nearly two years, although for most of that time it had existed only in conversations that began with one of them finding a picture online and ended when somebody mentioned the cost. At Christmas, after several weeks of comparing numbers, they had decided to go ahead. The deposit was paid and the work was due to start in July. Eleanor could picture the pale cupboards and dark worktop with a clarity that almost made the present kitchen seem temporary. The old oven worked if you knew which way to turn the dial, and the cupboard beneath the sink had only one broken hinge. They'd been in the house thirteen years. She wanted something finished properly, once, without having to make do. Daniel was excited about the larger table they'd agreed to squeeze under the window. He had started talking about inviting people round more often, which was an odd reason to spend so much money when neither of them had been especially good at inviting people round in the existing kitchen. Still, she'd enjoyed listening to him plan it. 'We could have gone somewhere lovely this summer for what we're spending,' she said. 'We still can. We've got a garden.' 'We bought the garden with the house. We're not spending fifteen thousand pounds to go there.' 'That's a surprisingly hostile position on gardening.' Daniel was already smiling, pleased with himself, and Eleanor decided against pointing out that she would quite like a holiday somewhere neither of them had to mow the lawn. From the back seat Sophie said, 'Can we go to Italy next year?' 'We're discussing this year,' Eleanor said. 'I'm planning ahead.' 'You could plan ahead by saving some sweets for the journey home.' 'I'm only eating the red ones,' Sophie said. 'The green ones are disgusting.' 'You asked me to buy that packet,' Daniel reminded her. 'You can't know until you've tried them.' 'You've had them about thirty times.' 'And every time I'm right.' Sophie tipped another sweet into her hand and examined its colour before eating it. Daniel laughed. Eleanor found the packet of mints in the door compartment and took one. She had married him in part because he made the inevitable bits of family life seem less like an exercise in timetable management. Unfortunately, he had interpreted this as permission to become an enthusiastic contributor to the disorder. They came off the dual carriageway and passed through a village of low brick houses and a petrol station advertising a car wash that looked as if it had been closed for years. Daniel slowed for a cyclist. Behind them, Sophie began a running commentary on the things she could see outside her window: a horse in a field, an old car parked on a drive, a garden ornament shaped like a meerkat. Daniel named the car from a brief glimpse in the mirror and was immediately accused of showing off. 'Your mum sounded a bit tired on the phone,' Eleanor said when Sophie had become absorbed in her screen again. 'She's fine. She's been going to that exercise class. Apparently she's the youngest there.' 'Is that possible?' 'She was talking about attitude.' Daniel had been trying to persuade Moira to join a class for years, and now that she'd gone along she had started criticising the instructor for taking too long over the warm-up. Eleanor smiled. Moira was seventy-two, lived alone since Daniel's father had died, and could be fiercely protective of the independence that she suspected everyone around her intended to remove. Visiting her was never an ordeal. She cooked too much, insisted on sending things home that nobody needed, and usually found a reason to remind Daniel that he wasn't getting enough sleep. The difficulty was that what began as a pleasant plan to see Moira often absorbed the whole weekend, and there were only so many weekends between now and the kitchen being dismantled. 'We could have invited her to ours next week instead,' Eleanor said. 'We did last month.' 'And we've had three Saturdays out of five taken up with driving somewhere.' 'Debbie's birthday was ten minutes from home.' 'We were there until midnight.' 'You enjoyed that one.' Daniel sounded genuinely puzzled, which was irritating in its own right. 'I did.' Eleanor had wanted to stay home this weekend, get the garden sorted, clear the overflowing cupboard in the spare room, perhaps do absolutely nothing for an hour. But Moira had mentioned that a neighbour was unwell, and Daniel had heard something in his mother's voice that he couldn't quite leave alone. He was a good son. Eleanor liked that about him, even when she was the one keeping track of the miles. 'It's just a lot of travelling,' she said. 'I know. I'll get Mum to come up to us next time.' 'Unless she asks us to go again.' 'I'll be firm.' He paused, aware she wasn't convinced. 'All right. I'll try.' Sophie slid one headphone off. 'Are you arguing?' 'No,' Eleanor said, at the same moment Daniel admitted they were arguing a little. 'About Nan?' 'About your dad's inability to say no,' Eleanor told her. 'He says no to me all the time.' 'Only when it's good for you,' Daniel said. 'Then it must always be good for me.' Sophie turned her music back on, satisfied with that conclusion. They approached another stretch of open road, fields on one side and a line of detached houses behind high hedges on the other. The sky had clouded over. Eleanor looked again at the picture of the blue octopus that Sophie had sent and found herself wondering whether the arcade might sell it outright. Then she decided she didn't want an enormous octopus in Sophie's already crowded bedroom and put the phone away. 'Can we have that octopus when we get there?' Sophie asked, as if she'd been following Eleanor's thoughts from the back seat. 'No,' Eleanor said. 'That's so unfair.' Sophie had already pushed her headphones down around her neck in readiness for an argument. 'When you have your own money, you can spend it on whatever you want.' 'I have my own account.' 'That is for uni, not plushies.' 'I'm not going to university for about five years.' 'Exactly,' Daniel said. 'Imagine how many octopuses you could buy if we let the money grow.' 'You'd still say no.' 'Almost certainly.' Sophie put her headphones back on, although she left the music off long enough to hear her parents. Eleanor could see Daniel trying not to smile. 'You've made that worse,' she told him. 'I've introduced her to compound interest. She'll thank me one day.' 'When she's running a warehouse full of octopuses?' 'It's aspirational.' At the next set of lights Daniel asked whether she'd remembered the birthday card for his mother. Eleanor retrieved it from her handbag and checked that the envelope was still clean. Moira's birthday wasn't for another week, but Sophie had made a card with a drawing of the two of them outside a seaside café, and Eleanor had decided it was safer to deliver it now than trust Daniel to remember a stamp. Sophie had written a message inside that included the words 'you're not old old', which Eleanor had considered editing before deciding that Moira would enjoy it. The lights changed. Daniel turned left onto a narrow A-road with a fifty-mile-an-hour limit and patches where the surface had been repaired in long dark strips. Eleanor settled the card back in its envelope, tucked it into her bag and checked that the lid was properly fixed on her travel cup. Daniel adjusted the radio until the reception improved. A presenter was talking about a football result, and Sophie called from the back asking for music instead. 'In a minute,' Daniel said. 'I want to hear this.' 'You know who won.' 'I want to hear why.' 'Because they scored more goals.' 'It's a complicated sport.' Eleanor was laughing when she saw the white van. It came out from behind a high vehicle ahead, crossing into their side of the road at an angle that made no sense at first. Perhaps it was trying to overtake. Perhaps the driver had misjudged the bend. Eleanor registered the solid line, the narrowing strip of tarmac, the speed with which the van's grille was growing in the windscreen. 'Dan—' Daniel moved the steering wheel hard towards the verge. His left hand swept across to brace against her without reaching her. There was the scrape of tyres on the edge of the road, Sophie's startled voice behind them, and a tremendous, close sound as the front of the car struck something. Eleanor felt her body thrown against the belt. Then there was nothing.