The children ate at the table now, every night at six, in the green room with the paper napkins, and three nights out of five the head of the table was occupied. Marcus Doyle at dinner was not yet a relaxed phenomenon. He arrived like a man entering a church of a faith he'd lapsed from: punctually, silently, unsure of the responses. He asked Jack about school and received a report. He asked Maisie, once, whether she had had a good day, and Maisie, who had not addressed a voluntary sentence to an adult in weeks, considered the question with the gravity of a hanging judge and said, "There was a worm," as if that were a complete account of a good day, which, Nora saw him realise, it possibly was.
The second was the piano.
Nora had not asked permission for the piano, because the piano was in the children's hours and she had decided to interpret her treaty the way generals interpret treaties β generously, and in writing nowhere. On the Saturday morning of the second week she took the grey cover off in one pull, standing on no ceremony at all, and the dust came up in the parlour light like the ghost of the last two years leaving by the windows. Underneath: dark wood, a vase mark, Eleanor Doyle's piano, with a row of framed photographs still standing on its top where the cover had hidden them all this time, which explained a number of things about why the cover had stayed on.
She didn't touch the photographs. She opened the lid and played, badly and cheerfully, the entire repertoire of a kindergarten teacher β songs with hand motions, songs about ducks, a song in which a spider has a waterspout and an unconquerable spirit β and the sound went through the brownstone like weather through a valley.
Maisie appeared in the parlour doorway the way animals appear at a forest edge. Then, nearer. Then, by increments a zoologist would admire, beside the piano bench. Nora played the duck song again, slower, and pressed one key with great ceremony and waited, and Maisie pressed the next one, and by the time Mrs. K came in with the tea things neither of them was using, the little girl was picking out the tune with one finger and her whole body, and laughing under her breath β not a performance, not for anyone β just the small, involuntary music of a five-year-old discovering that a machine in her own house made joy when you touched it, and that nobody was going to stop the noise.
Homework migrated, by Jack's own unspoken negotiation, from the schoolroom table where he stood like a clerk to the kitchen counter where he sat β sat β on a stool, amongst the onions, with his maths book propped against the fruit bowl. It transpired that Jack Doyle at a kitchen counter was a different citizen entirely: he had opinions. He had opinions about the soup. Mrs. K's soup, unimpeached for twenty years, was reviewed by a nine-year-old critic with a pencil behind his ear and found too smooth β "it's nice," he said, in the tone of a man delivering a verdict he regrets, "but it doesn't have anything in it to find" β and Mrs. K, to the astonishment of the entire staff, began putting barley in it, and demanded to know the next evening if there was now sufficient matter to find, and Jack, tasting at the stove like a small inspector, allowed that there was.
Maisie took up criticism of the mashed potatoes. Maisie took up criticism of the carrots' shape. The kitchen, which had run for two years on the silent efficiency of a submarine, developed a debating society.
And it was at breakfast β the dining room at seven now, daylight, toast in a rack instead of soldiers on a tray, because Nora had simply started setting it that way one morning and no one had found the authority to stop her β that the thing happened which Mrs. K would repeat to the staff that night like news of an armistice.
Nora was doing the voices. Breakfast had acquired, without any vote being taken, a story. She was being the bear β she had a bear voice, low and affronted β and the bear was explaining to a hat why it was entirely the hat's fault, and Jack, nine years old, a sentry, a soldier, a boy who did his homework standing up because comfort had to be earned, forgot.
He forgot everything, all at once, and laughed.
It was a real laugh, the kind that arrives from the belly and takes the shoulders with it, loud in the dining room, and Maisie caught it the way children catch things and laughed too, and for perhaps four seconds the green room held exactly the sound it had been painted for.
Then Jack heard himself.
Nora watched it happen β watched the laugh stop as if it had been switched off at the wall, watched the boy go still and pale around the edges, watched him glance, automatically, terribly, toward the door and the hall and the study beyond it, as if laughter were an alarm he had set off, as if there might be a price list for noise and he had just spent something the house could not afford. He stood up from the table with his napkin folded β folded, at seven in the morning, in the middle of breakfast β and said, "Excuse me," to no one, formally, like a man leaving a meeting that has gone wrong.
"Jack," Nora said, gently.
"I'm finished," he said. "Thank you for breakfast." And he went out with his plate β he had taken his plate to clear it himself, because in the old house that was what you did so the trays could be managed, and old training outruns new mercy every time.
Nora sat in the wreckage of the best breakfast the house had had in two years, with Maisie watching her and the bear book open on the table, and she understood that the laugh was not the victory she had thought. The laugh was the easy part. Children are springs; press them and they store the laugh, release it and it comes back by itself. The victory β the whole war β was the stopping. Somewhere in that boy a rule had been written in a hand too big for him to read: joy is loud, loud is dangerous, dangerous is how houses lose things.
She cleared the table herself, slowly, thinking about what kind of war makes a nine-year-old stand guard over his own happiness.
Behind her, Maisie climbed back into her chair and finished her toast, swinging her feet, humming the duck song under her breath, and Nora noted that too, and held on to it: one of them, at least, had stayed at the table.
Chapter 6: The Garden
The garden behind the brownstone had been dead for two years, and it looked like it knew.