The Outcast
feeling from it. He wanted to hold him hard and kiss him and make Lizzie come back to them through loving him badly enough. He wanted to hide his
    face and never think of it again.
    ‘We’re home,’ he said.‘Out you get, Jane will have supper for us.’

    Through the Christmas holidays Gilbert took the train to the office as he had used to and spent most nights at home so that things would seem more normal. He never mentioned Elizabeth, and Lewis, responding by instinct, never mentioned her either. The silence around her memory became brittle and dangerous and neither dared break it. It had been both a good thing and a very lonely one that at school, too, almost no one ever mentioned his mother.Working and doing normal things was all right, and he developed a technique for going to sleep, which worked even if his nightmare woke him up. He would imagine he was in her wardrobe, in her bedroom where he’d often played. It was very easy when he was tired to put himself there, on top of the shoes, with the smell of lavender and wood, and the material of her clothes very soft in his mind.Then the water

    70
    that filled his head sometimes would drain away, and he’d be asleep very quickly. The first night home from school, alone upstairs and getting ready for bed, he went to the door of his parents’ room, not to go in, but to look, but the wardrobe wasn’t there, just the empty wall where it had been.

    After his mother’s death Lewis instinctively cast around for other attachments. It was a blind instinct, like the way an animal, if the parent is taken away, will hook onto anything for survival, so Lewis attached himself to Jane and his father. He spent the Christmas holidays following Jane around, trying to help in the kitchen or just sitting and watching her, then, at half- past six, he would wait at the end of the drive for his father. Gilbert would come around the big bend and see Lewis hovering at the gate. He’d stop the car and say, ‘Jump in’, and Lewis would drive the short distance to the house with him. Gilbert began to dread seeing him there and it got so that as he pulled away from the station, he would begin to feel anxiety at the thought of the small figure waiting for him. If it was a wet day, or cold, like today, he’d hope Lewis wouldn’t wait, but there he was, kicking the gravel and then looking up with his intense gaze.
    Gilbert stopped the car, but he didn’t lean over and open the door, he gestured impatiently for Lewis to walk. Lewis peered at him through the glass, muddled and waiting for the door to open. Gilbert wound down the window.
    ‘For God’s sake, you haven’t even got a coat! Go up to the house.’
    As he opened the front door, Lewis reached him, running to catch up. Gilbert wouldn’t look at him.
    ‘Go on in then.’

    71
    Lewis went into the hall, waited to see which room his father would go into and then followed him. Gilbert hadn’t wanted to be angry with him today, he wanted to be kind. He had bought his Christmas presents in London and they were hidden in the boot of the car.
    Lewis hovered about in the doorway and watched Gilbert make himself a whisky and water.
    ‘Lewis, would you sit down?There’s something I want to talk to you about.’
    Lewis sat opposite his father, like on school report day, and waited.
    ‘Lewis, I’ve some very good news for you.You’re to have a new mother – you know, a stepmother. I met a lovely young lady some weeks ago, who I think you’ll like very much, and in the spring we plan to be married.’
    Lewis’s grey eyes looked at him without blinking.
    ‘She’s called Alice.Alice Fanshawe. I thought you could meet her on your birthday, we’ll have a special lunch in town, would that be nice? Lewis?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘I don’t want you to be difficult about it.You’ll see it’s the right thing. Now run along, there’s a good boy.’

    Gilbert finished his drink and went up to change for dinner at Dicky and Claire’s.

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