Claudia suggests giving Lottie an allowance. Now that Lottie is fourteen, Claudia says, she should have some money of her own. She says this to Howard, who is a little remote and businesslike, as though he were being informed of some minor by-law that is about to come into force. He stands there in his suit and goes through the post.
‘She ought to open a bank account,’ he says. ‘We should open bank accounts for all of them.’
Claudia looks astonished.
‘Why does Martha need a bank account? She’s only six.’
‘Everyone should have a bank account.’
‘What, a six-year-old child should have a chequebook and pay bank charges, and get letters pouring through the door about personal loans!’
Howard opens an envelope and reads what is inside. Claudia watches his eyes moving from left to right. When he has finished he says,
‘I’m only saying that if Lottie’s going to have an allowance we should pay the money into a bank account.’
Claudia is silent: she wants to give the impression that she is thinking this proposal through. It isn’t that Howard is wrong exactly. It is that the idea of opening a bank account takes away what is pleasurable in the prospect of giving Lottie money.
‘It’s too complicated,’ she says, after a while. ‘All Lottie actually needs is some spending money of her own.’
‘It’s not as complicated as all that,’ Howard says.
‘I think it’s too soon. She’s too young.’
‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, Claude. Then she can begin to save.’
‘What does she need to save for?’
‘All of them should learn to save,’ Howard says sententiously.
Claudia feels that Howard is missing the point. What she wants to know is how much he thinks they should give her. That is what she imagined them discussing. She has already decided that Lottie’s allowance should be twenty-five pounds a month.
‘What do you think we should start her on?’ she says.
Howard muses, considering the ceiling.
‘Fifty?’ he says.
‘A month? You must be joking.’
‘Too little?’
‘Too much – I thought twenty-five.’
Howard seems surprised. He is wearing his reading glasses and he looks at her over the top of them.
‘She won’t get far on twenty-five pounds,’ he says. ‘That’s only six or seven pounds a week, Claude. Hardly enough for a stick of gum.’
‘It’s plenty for a fourteen-year-old girl.’
Claudia doesn’t remember anyone ever giving her money, though they presumably did.
‘And that’s to cover clothes too? Shoes?’
Claudia reconsiders. ‘All right, thirty. And I’ll buy her shoes.’
Claudia informs Lottie that, effective from the first day of the coming month, she is to receive a regular personal allowance of thirty pounds.
‘Okay then,’ Lottie says.
‘Not “okay then”,’ Claudia corrects her. ‘“Okay then” is for when I ask you to do something for me.’ Lottie looks at her dumbly. ‘It isn’t for when I offer to give you something.’
Lottie is silent. Claudia says,
‘I’ll still pay for your shoes, and anything you need for school.’
‘Oka – all right.’
‘Your allowance is for you to do what you want with. It’s your money. If you want to save it, you can. If you blow the whole lot in the first week, then you’ll have to manage till the end of the month without any more.’
‘I know,’ Lottie says.
‘There’s no point coming to me halfway through the month and saying you haven’t got any money. The purpose of the exercise is to teach you how to budget.’
‘I know.’ Lottie looks bored.
‘You’re obviously an expert,’ Claudia says. She recalls that she expected to enjoy this conversation. When she thought about it earlier in the day, it was with a warm feeling of pressure in her chest, as though there were something in there, something waiting to be lifted out and given, like a bouquet of flowers.
‘I’m not an expert,’ Lottie says. ‘I didn’t say I was.’
‘You didn’t say thank you, either.’
Lottie is silent. She looks to one side of her with downcast eyes.
‘Does anyone else at school get an allowance yet?’ Claudia asks brightly, after a pause.
‘Most people do.’
‘I shouldn’t think it’s most,’ Claudia says. ‘I should think it’s some.’
A week later, on the first of the month, Claudia hands Lottie thirty pounds in ten-pound notes. During the week she has experienced a kind of regression in her attitude to Lottie. She wonders whether she has spent so much time trying to see what Lottie is becoming that she has failed to notice what she actually is. In the afternoons, when Lottie comes home from school, she goes straight to the kitchen and stands there eating slices of bread lathered so thickly with jam that her teeth leave an impression in it when she takes a bite. Claudia seems fated to enter the kitchen at the decisive moment of this ceremony, to see Lottie hunched over the counter, her hair hanging over her face, her mouth clamping around the red and white slab and coming away engorged. Lottie makes strange little groans as she eats. Her body in its school uniform seems afflicted and uncomfortable. As a baby Lottie seemed uncomfortable, and afflicted by her own helplessness. Yet Claudia can feel no sympathy for her now. To pity Lottie would be to pity herself.
‘Great,’ Lottie says, when Claudia gives her the money.
*
On Saturday, Lottie tells Howard and Claudia that she is spending the day in town with Justine and Emily.
‘What about lunch?’ Claudia says.
‘I don’t know. We might get something there.’
‘Your money will be gone in one day if you start spending it on eating out.’
Immediately Lottie looks evasive. She stares off to the side, at something just above the level of the floor.
‘We’re not giving you an allowance just so you can sit in McDonald’s all afternoon,’ Claudia says.
Lottie rolls her eyes. She makes a little snorting sound, like a pony. She is like one of those short, round, bad-tempered Shetlands who flare their nostrils and toss their matted waterfalls of hair. Lottie has the same spirit of animal vigour about her, the same disproportion of flesh to rationality.
‘Is it just you three girls on your own?’ Howard asks her.
‘There might be some other people.’
‘Oh, good,’ Howard says.
Lottie returns from town at half past four. She did not take her coat. Claudia found it still hanging on its peg in the hall. All afternoon she has been aware of it. Several times, walking past, she has caressed it: she has run her hand down the unresponsive fabric all the way from the shoulder to the hem. She has watched the weather out of the window. It is gusty and grey, and sometimes the wind blows the trees wildly this way and that and then for no reason stops again. Lottie’s coat hanging on its peg is like a version of Lottie herself, a discarded stage in her evolution that Claudia has been allowed to keep. She thinks that she loves this Lottie, the coat Lottie, better than the real one. The coat hangs by its hood: from a distance it looks like a little head.
Howard has spent the day making a bonfire in the garden with Lewis. Martha is upstairs with her friend Sadie. Occasionally Claudia passes the door to Martha’s room and sees the two children sitting together on the carpet surrounded by Martha’s toys. Once when she looks they have made long headdresses for themselves out of sheets, which they have secured on their heads with the braided loops that hold back Martha’s curtains. They sit cross-legged in their white veils, locked in endless low-voiced discussion, like two important delegates from distant, miniature countries. When Claudia goes downstairs she can smell the smoke from the bonfire, which has slowly penetrated the house.
Lottie is in the kitchen. Claudia comes in behind her.
‘How did it go?’ she says brightly.
Lottie looks startled.
‘It was just – normal,’ she says.
‘You forgot to take your coat. I found it hanging in the hall. I worried that you’d be cold.’
‘I wasn’t cold.’
‘You might not have felt cold,’ Claudia says. ‘But if you’re not properly dressed you’re more liable to catch things, and then everyone else in the house gets it as well.’
The kitchen is gloomy and untidy. Claudia switches the lights on. She begins putting everything away. She puts away all the pots and pans that stand on the drainer. She puts away everything lying on the counters. The aluminium pans clatter when she sets them on their shelves. She opens the cupboard doors and bangs them shut again. The glasses chatter against one another; the cups rattle in their saucers. She opens the fridge, sweeps a whole armful of things from inside, kicks it shut behind her. She stamps on the lever that opens the bin and the lid crashes like a pair of cymbals as it hits the wall behind. One after another Claudia flings in empty milk cartons, rotten bits of food, old plastic containers. Thud! thud! thud! they go, disappearing into its rustling depths. Claudia feels possessed by a mad kind of genius. She is filled with sound: she is a composer creating a crazy, dissonant symphony. She bangs the cupboard doors again. She takes out the cutlery drawer and spills its contents over the kitchen table in a bright shrieking cascade of steel. Ting! ting! ting! go the knives and forks and spoons as she drops them back in their proper compartments.
At each sound, Lottie flinches.
‘What’s that smell?’ she says finally.
Claudia stops what she is doing. She stands, alert, in the silence. A feeling of great weariness, almost of despondency, passes over her.
‘It’s a sort of burning smell,’ Lottie said.
It is the bonfire. Claudia can smell it too.
She says, ‘Daddy’s been having a bonfire out in the garden.’
Lottie’s expression brightens.
‘Really?’ she says.
The next time Claudia looks, she sees them all out in the garden in the gathering dusk. She stands at the kitchen window. Howard rakes up leaves and Lewis throws them on the fire in big armfuls. Lottie has a long stick in her hand. She is tending the smouldering heap, forcing the new leaves into its hot centre, compacting the top. With her stick she rounds up stray bits of paper and twigs and rams them back into the fire. Claudia can hear Lottie and Lewis and Howard talking. She can’t hear what they say, just the sound they make saying it. The smoke comes out in big grey rolling waves, one after another. Sometimes they roll towards the window where Claudia stands. Then, suddenly, the smoke changes direction and is drawn helplessly upwards into the sky.
*
In the evening, Howard and Claudia are going out.
Claudia stays upstairs getting ready while the children eat their supper. She puts on black trousers and a black jersey. She puts on the necklace Howard gave her. It is silver, a paper-thin silver leaf on a silver chain. She sits down in front of the mirror and draws her hair back from her face. She is surprised by how finished she looks, how completed. It is as though there is nothing more for her to do. It is as though the mirror has told her that she has come to the end of some long and complicated task, that all is done that needs to be done.
How funny it is not to want anything, not to need! She thinks of the banknotes she gave Lottie. When she imagined this money, it was as the material proof of a developmental stage, like the first spoonfuls of food she put into Lottie’s mouth as a baby. She always does these things a little too soon. She hurries her on. She has wanted to teach Lottie how to want, to need. She supposes it is her way of trying to simplify things between them, for if Lottie needs something, then Claudia has the task of providing it. Lottie would want something and she, Claudia, would be able to give it to her. That is how she has always imagined it, anyway. Lottie never asked for money. It was just that by giving her some, Claudia thought she would align Lottie with herself. They would both be facing the same way, side by side, looking out at the things they wanted. But now it seems that Claudia doesn’t want anything. She doesn’t need anything at all.
Howard comes in. He puts his face into the crook of her neck where she sprayed her perfume.
‘Do you think Lottie enjoyed herself today?’ Claudia asks him.
He raises his head and they look at themselves in the mirror.
‘I don’t suppose it matters one way or the other, does it?’ he says.
Downstairs, the two younger children are watching television. Claudia goes into the kitchen to see if Lottie is there, and then stands at the bottom of the stairs and calls her to come down. Lottie is babysitting. Claudia sits at the kitchen table and writes down the telephone number and address of the place they are going. She hears someone coming down the stairs.
‘I’m in here!’ she calls.
After a while, she goes out and looks in the hall. Then she looks in the sitting room. Lottie is sitting there with Lewis and Martha. The television feels her motionless face with its blue lights. Claudia sees she is wearing a new skirt.
‘Lottie!’ she says softly. ‘Can you just come out for a minute? I want to give you some numbers and things.’
She turns and goes back to the kitchen. There is a pause, and then Lottie comes in.
‘We’re only going to the Carters’,’ Claudia says. The Carters live on the other side of Laurier Drive.
She gives Lottie her instructions. Claudia can hear herself speaking, but she can barely concentrate on what she is saying. She tries to keep her eyes on Lottie’s face but they keep straying – magnetised, astonished – down to her skirt.
‘Did you get that today?’ she says finally.
Lottie looks down at herself, as though to check they are talking about the same thing.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘A shop.’
It is a pink skirt with a ruffle around the hem. It comes down to Lottie’s knees. The pink is a candyfloss pink. The ruffle has been badly stitched. It is both too big for Lottie and too small, sagging around the hips and straining at the stomach. The material is so cheap that Claudia can see Lottie’s underwear through it. It is a child’s skirt, the kind of skirt Claudia might have bought a version of for Martha, but on Lottie it is without doubt the least flattering item of clothing Claudia has ever seen. She wears it with her usual hooded sweatshirt.
‘It’s lovely,’ Claudia says. ‘Well done.’
Lottie seems pleased. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ she says.
*
Later, one Saturday, Claudia has to go into town. She leaves Howard and the children and goes on her own. The streets are thick with people. They roam the pavements like unquiet souls, like hundreds of homeless spirits come to find all the things they have lost. They carry bags, boxes, great plastic sacks wrapped around bulky objects. Some of them can barely hold the quantity of things they have bought. She sees a man carrying a pair of garden shears, a man carrying a plastic lounger, a woman with a child’s bicycle in a giant plastic bag. Its handlebars stick out, each one tied with a tinselly tassel that trembles like a little girl’s ponytails as the woman walks along.
The day is bright and windy. Overhead the sky streams blue. Claudia picks up speed. She strides along the littered pavement, glancing in the windows, glancing at the faces as they pass her. She begins to forget herself, to feel a kind of exhilaration. It is good, after all, to be away from what is yours: from home, where everything either belongs to you or speaks of you or reflects you, until it becomes a kind of consuming sickness, the need to exist, to dominate. Yet here she is, free! Why does she care what people buy, where they go, how they spend their time? What does it have to do with her? She isn’t responsible for them – they are free, like her. It is responsibility that sets its pins and screws in your nature, that warps and gnarls you and makes you ugly to yourself. She strides along, the wind whipping in her hair. Ahead of her she sees a group of teenaged girls coming out of a shop. They come up the pavement, all clutching each other and laughing. They are like a laughing, many-tentacled creature, their arms and their legs and their smiles all jumbled together. They have bags and bangles and earrings, and hair that the wind blows all around them in ribbons, so that you can’t see which hair is connected to which head. One of them catches her attention. She looks at this girl for a long time before realising that it is Lottie.