Free Night Music by Jojo Moyes Page A

brother looked up hopefully.
    ‘No,’ said Isabel.
    ‘I can’t get the grill to work, but there’s cereal and we have bread and butter. The two men who work in the village shop make the bread themselves. It’s quite good.’
    ‘Homemade bread. How lovely.’ A lump rose in Isabel’s throat. Laurent, you would be so proud of her, she thought.
    ‘There’s only jam to go on it, though.’
    ‘Jam is perfect,’ said Isabel. ‘Kitty, you’ve made that range look wonderful. Perhaps today we’ll be able to get it going. I think they’re meant to heat the whole house.’ The idea of warmth provoked a kind of hunger in her.
    ‘Thierry had a go at it earlier,’ said Kitty, ‘but he got through a whole box of matches and nothing. Oh, and the telephone’s on. We had a wrong number.’
    Isabel surveyed her new kitchen. ‘A telephone! Kitty, you’re a wonder.’
    ‘It’s only a telephone. Don’t get too excited.’ Kitty shrank away from her mother’s embrace, but she was smiling.
    Two hours later, the mood in the house was less optimistic. The boiler resolutely refused to start, leaving them with the prospect of another day without heating and hot water. The range would not light, and the yellowed instructions that they had found in the knife drawer were incomprehensible, as if the diagrams had been drawn for another system altogether. Thierry had gone out to fetch wood for a fire, but had laid the grate with damp logs, which smoked, filling the drawing room with soot. ‘Perhaps the chimney’s blocked.’ Kitty coughed – and a decomposing pigeon fell on to the wood. They all shrieked and Kitty burst into tears.
    ‘You should have checked the fireplace, stupid,’ she yelled at Thierry.
    ‘I think it was already dead,’ said Isabel.
    ‘You don’t know that. He might have killed it.’
    Thierry stuck two fingers up at his sister.
    ‘How could you be so stupid as to use damp wood?’ she snapped. ‘And you’ve trodden mud all through the house.’
    Thierry regarded his trainers, which were caked with claggy soil.
    ‘I don’t think it really—’ Isabel began.
    ‘You’d never have done that if Mary was here,’ Kitty interrupted.
    Thierry stormed out, ignoring Isabel’s outstretched hand. She called after him, but was met with the slam of the front door. ‘Darling, did you have to be quite so mean?’ Isabel said. If Mary was here  . . . The words smouldered inside her.
    ‘Oh, this place is bloody hopeless. Everything’s hopeless,’ said Kitty, and stamped past her mother to the kitchen. The cheerful home-maker had disappeared.
    Isabel stood in the middle of the smoky room, and lifted her hands to her face. She had not had to deal with squabbles in her old life. Mary had had all sorts of ways by which she could divert them, or persuade them to behave nicely towards each other. Did they argue more now that it was just her? Or was it that she had been shielded from the bickering and name-calling of everyday life?
    ‘Thierry? Kitty?’ She stood out in the main hallway, calling them. She hadn’t a clue what she would say to them if they came.
    Some time later, when she went back tentatively into the kitchen, she found Kitty hunched over the table, a magazine and a mug of tea in front of her. She looked up, guilt and defiance in her eyes. There was a soot mark on her cheek. ‘I didn’t mean to get at him,’ she said.
    ‘I know, lovey.’
    ‘He’s still upset about Dad and everything.’
    ‘We all are. Thierry has . . . his own way of showing it.’
    ‘It’s just this place is impossible, Mum. You’ve got to see it. There’s no water, no nothing. We can’t keep ourselves warm and clean. Thierry’s got to start at his new school on Monday – how are you going to wash his clothes?’
    Isabel tried to look as if she’d already considered this. ‘We’ll go to the launderette. Just till we get the machine plumbed in.’
    ‘Launderette? Mum, did you see the village?’
    Isabel sat