She slammed the car door and locked it. She was supposed to tell them, before they saw it. Explain.
Keeping her head down, Kate marched after Jack to the front porch.
‘Hello! Have you grown again, young man?’ Helen called, flinging open the door.
‘Not since last week, I don’t think, Helen,’ Kate said. Why did she do that? They all knew he was small. Pretending he wasn’t, was not doing Jack any favours.
‘Gosh, you’re going to be tall like your dad.’ Helen laughed, ignoring her. She placed her arm round Jack, and led him along the hall to the kitchen.
‘Everything OK, Kate?’ she called back. ‘Traffic?’
‘Yup. Sorry.’
Kate couldn’t help it. She gritted her teeth, as she turned to close the door behind her.
‘Let me take those.’
Rapidly, she ungritted them, and turned to see Richard striding towards her, his hands outstretched, without any apparent awkwardness at having let himself into his daughter-in-law’s house. His imposing frame filled the hallway. ‘How did you get on? Traffic?’
‘Hmm, sorry,’ she said, giving him Jack’s homework. Richard’s usual fragrance of pipe smoke and TCP drifted over to her.
They stood for a second, fumbling their fingers between the plastic bag handover. Kate looked up at Richard’s brown eyes, waiting for them to check that Jack was out of earshot, then glance up to the upstairs landing above them, then firmly fix back down on her face, serious and questioning. But they didn’t. Instead, he turned on his heels and bounced after Helen and Jack to the kitchen at the back of the house, grinning through his grey-flecked beard at the sight of his grandson.
‘So did you beat their socks off, sir?’ he boomed at Jack, who was stuffing a muffin in his mouth.
Kate glanced upstairs.
It was still there.
Richard just hadn’t seen it. This was interesting.
She checked her watch. Five-twenty. The woman wanted to see her at six sharp in north Oxford. The traffic was so bad she was going to have to cycle. Concentrating, Kate worked out a few figures. Thirty-four . . . Eighty-one – or was it eighty-two? Damn it, she needed that new laptop. It was high, anyway.
She shook her head. It would have to be OK.
She followed Richard through to the kitchen, opened a cupboard and bent down to find her helmet.
‘Helen, do you mind if I rush off?’
‘Of course not, dear,’ Helen replied, filling up a jug at the sink. ‘Something interesting?’
‘Um . . . just a woman who might have some renovation work,’ Kate said, avoiding Helen’s eyes.
‘Where?’
‘In Summertown.’
‘Oh well, good luck, dear.’
‘Thanks.’
Kate turned to see Jack, his mouth still too full of muffin to answer his grandfather’s question about the match score in this afternoon’s tournament final. He was grinning and sticking up two fingers like Winston Churchill.
‘Peace, man?’ roared Richard. ‘It’s the 1960s, is it? No! Two all, then? No? What? A bunny rabbit jumped on to the pitch?’ Richard chortled, his arms wrapped round his rugby player’s chest, as his grandson shook his head at his jokes. ‘What? Two– nil, then?’
Jack nodded, laughing, dropping crumbs out of his mouth.
‘Aw – well done!’ Helen clapped, cheeks as pink as fairycakes.
‘Good lad!’ Richard exclaimed. ‘Was he good, Mum?’
Kate grabbed her helmet from the back of the cupboard and went to stand up. ‘He was. He made a good save, didn’t you?’
As she turned round, the sight of Helen and Jack together took her by surprise.
A pit of disappointment opened up in her stomach.
Jack was a clone of her. You couldn’t deny it.
Kate buckled up her helmet, watching them. It simply wasn’t happening. However desperately she willed her son’s hair to darken and coarsen like Hugo’s, or his green eyes to turn brown, it was Helen and Saskia whom Jack took after. As he sat, arms touching with his grandmother, the similarities were painfully obvious. The same pale hair that was slightly too fine for the long skater-boy cut he desperately wanted; delicate features that would remain immune to the nasal bumps and widening jaws that would wipe out his friends’ childhood beauty; the flawless skin that tanned so easily and would remain unmarked by Kate’s dark moles or Richard and Hugo’s unruly eyebrows.
No, he was nearly eleven. Nothing was going to change now. Jack would be a physically uncomplicated adult, like his grandmother and aunt, with none of the familiar landmarks of his father.
Kate stood up straight and tried to think about something else. She walked to the fridge and opened