On the third afternoon of Oliver’s visit, the doorbell rang. I was spooning mouthfuls of Sugar Puffs at the kitchen table and watching two flies circle in the thick heat. Every time their paths crossed, they buzzed at each other in irritation. I had to unstick my legs to raise myself off my chair and so Oliver, with only an orange towel around his waist, got to the front door before me. I hung back at the end of the hall, waiting to see who the visitor was.
“Hi,” said Oliver in a way that roused my curiosity and made me want to see beyond his body to the doorstep.
“Oh,” said the person. “Hello.” The voice, a girl’s, hesitated. “Is Peggy in?”
“Come in,” said Oliver, then turned back into the house and yelled, “Peggy!”
I saw Becky standing on the doorstep at the same time as Oliver saw me loitering near the kitchen.
“You’ve got a visitor,” he called to me. “Come in, come in,” he said to Becky.
He held the door open and she walked past him, wide-eyed and smiling but looking at anything except the unknown semi-naked man in my house. Oliver followed her into the kitchen and went to the sink.
“Either of you kids want some water?”
He filled a glass for himself and we stood and watched his Adam’s apple bobbing while he drank. He filled the glass again and held it out to us, but Becky, breaking from the spell we were under, grabbed my hand and pulled me back down the hall and up to my bedroom.
“Who was that?” she said, flinging herself onto my bed.
“Just my dad’s friend, Oliver Hannington.” I stuck my head out of the window to try to breathe cooler air. “He’s staying with us for a bit.”
“He looks just like Hutch.”
“Who’s Hutch?”
“You know,” said Becky, “the blond one from Star-sky and Hutch.” She had pushed off her shoes and was propping up her bottom and cycling her legs, her school skirt falling around her waist, revealing regulation blue knickers. Just looking at her exercising made me feel hot.
“Anyway, where have you been? You’ve got loads of catching up to do.”
“What do you mean? I’ve been here.”
“Mr. Harding keeps asking me where you are. We’ve been doing right angles. I said I didn’t know, maybe you’ve been poorly. Have you been poorly?”
“Not really,” I said.
From the garden we heard Oliver shouting something about ice. Becky crawled across the bed, pulling herself along with her arms onto the carpet and letting her legs flop behind her. The two of us crouched at the window and watched Oliver lying full out on the swing seat, reading a book. He had bent the cover back so he could hold it in one hand, and he had swapped the towel for a pair of shorts.
“Well, you’d better come tomorrow,” said Becky. “It’s the last day of school.”
In the garden, my father appeared with two glasses filled with an orange drink. He handed one to Oliver and they chinked them together.
“I’m going to bring in Buckaroo,” Becky said.
In the morning, I dressed in my grey skirt, white shirt, and blazer, made a packed lunch, and went back to school. Everyone was already at their desks when I arrived. Mr. Harding peered at me over the top of his glasses but made no comment as I sat in my chair.
“What game did you bring?” whispered Becky.
“KerPlunk,” I said, and she nodded her approval.
Mr. Harding must have written a note in the register, because when we were setting up our games Mrs. Cass, the school secretary, came and said the headmaster wanted a word with me. I had been expecting it and, anyway, I was embarrassed to discover that most of the straws were missing from the game I had brought in.
“So, Peggy Hillcoat, where have you been?” Mrs. Cass asked as she marched me down the corridor. It smelled of sweat and plimsoll rubber. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve telephoned your house at least four times in the past two weeks, trying to get hold of you or your mother. I even came round once and it’s not exactly on my way home.”
We turned the corner, where the smell wasn’t as strong and the floor changed from linoleum to thin green carpet, indicating that we were approaching authority.
“You can’t take holiday willy-nilly, you know. You’re in a lot of hot water, young lady.”
She told me to sit on one of the comfortable chairs outside the headmaster’s office. The fabric showed the tears and stains of years of pupil and teacher distress. Through the frosted glass door, I caught a glimpse of the headmaster sipping at his teacup, making me wait until called for.
“I understand from Mr. Harding that you’ve been absent for two weeks, without your mother informing the school,” said the headmaster after he’d called me in.
“She died,” I said, without a plan.
“Your mother?” said the headmaster. His eyebrows rose and plunged madly, and he managed to look both desperate and surprised. He pressed a button on his desk, which set off a buzzer in the office across the hall.
“She was killed in a car accident in Germany,” I told them both when Mrs. Cass had responded to the headmaster’s summons.
“Oh my gooodness,” Mrs. Cass said, her hand going to her mouth. “Not Ute. Oh no, not Ute.” She looked around and behind her as if she wanted to sit down, but became distracted and instead said, “You poor, poor child.” She clasped me to her, pressing me into her soft bosom, then took me back to the chair and brought me thick, sweet tea in a cup with a saucer, as if it were me who had just learned of the car crash and not her.
Through the door, the headmaster said, “Surely we would have heard. Isn’t she that famous piano player?”
Mrs. Cass’s answer was too quiet to hear but it involved a lot of gasps, head shaking, and hand clasping.
When I had finished the tea, she guided me back to my classroom, her hand on my shoulder, both caressing and propelling me forward. She took Mr. Harding aside and had a whispered exchange with him; his expression moved from boredom to shock to a crinkled face of sympathy when he glanced at me, waiting at the front of the class.
On the first row, Becky mouthed, “What did you say?” and I tried to mouth back, “I told them she died in a car crash,” but the words “car crash” were too difficult to communicate without saying them out loud. Rose Chapman nudged and leaned toward Becky, who, in a hiss, translated my words into “Tabitha died in a rush!” The whisper spread from group to group, where children gathered around marbles, counters, and dice. Mr. Harding told me I was excused; I packed up KerPlunk and left.
At home, I saw little of my father and Oliver. Once, they went down to the high street and brought back fish and chips, which they laid out on plates and ate with knives and forks at the dining-room table. Oliver got out the cutlery with the ivory handles and selected Ute’s crystal Spiegelau goblets from the sideboard for the red wine they had bought at the off-licence.
“Prost! Toast! Der Bundespost!” shouted my father, and both men laughed in a slurred way while the crystal chinked. I carried my dinner, still wrapped in newspaper, into the sitting room and ate it in front of the telly. I went up to bed soon after. I lay still with my eyes shut, but sleep didn’t come and I worried I had forgotten how to do it. I hummed the theme music to The Railway Children and imagined that Ute was downstairs, conquering the piano, while at the kitchen table my father was flicking through the newspaper. Everything and everyone were where they were supposed to be. But I was still awake when my father and Oliver stumbled upstairs, calling goodnight to each other.