‘Well, I still love you.’

Kate Bush, that was it, it was from a song. He remembered the album cover with her staring out of those large, dark eyes.

‘Am I too late?’ she asked.

Years ago, before Ruby, before everything that would come to matter to them, they’d spent a week at the campsite to which they were now returning. It had been summer then, and early one morning they swam out from the shore until they couldn’t touch the bottom. It had frightened and exhilarated them. They’d taken off their costumes and floated naked on their backs, letting the swell rock them gently up and down. Back on the beach, on the ribbed, hard sand, they touched each other in new ways while the tide broke on their legs and the seagulls squawked and swooped in pious disapproval. Tim remembered Beth’s pale thigh, how rough it felt with the sand stuck to it, he remembered the taste of salt and not knowing if it was the sea or if that was how a woman tasted, he remembered her warm mouth after the cold water.

He hadn’t answered Beth. Without looking he knew, in the way married couples know things about each other, that she was silently weeping. He reached across and put his hand on her leg. Beneath the denim a muscle flexed and then relaxed. ‘You’re not too late,’ he said.

That night, as Tim and Beth backed out of the tent, Ruby put a tiny paw on her mother’s arm.

‘I’m scared, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Can you read to me?’

It was very late, but Beth picked up the book of children’s stories and turned to her favourite, The Little Match Girl. She began to read.

‘Most terribly cold it was, it snowed, and it was nearly quite dark, and evening, the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bare-headed and with naked feet.’

‘How old is she, Mummy?’

‘I’m not sure. He doesn’t say. Probably not much older than you are.’

‘And so the little girl walked on her naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold…’

‘What’s her name?’

‘What do you want to call her?’

‘The snowflakes fell on her long fair hair, which hung in pretty curls over her neck. From all the windows the candles were gleaming, and it smelt so deliciously of roast goose.’

How many times had she read it, had Ruby heard it? She must know every line.

‘Oh, how much one little match might warm her. If she could only take one from the box and rub it against the wall and warm her hands. She drew one out… a warm, bright flame… she stretched out her feet to warm them too; then the little flame went out…’

‘This is a sad story, isn’t it, Mummy?’

‘Yes, honey, it’s quite sad. Shall I stop?’

‘No. I like it.’

‘Now someone is dying, thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star fell down, a soul went up to God. She rubbed another match against the wall. It became bright again, and in the glow the old grandmother stood clear and shining, kind and lovely.’

‘Her granny isn’t really there, is she, Mummy?’

‘She might be, in a special kind of way. If you believe in angels.’

‘I do. Do you?’

‘It would be very nice.’

‘She quickly struck the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother with her. And the matches burned with such a glow that it became brighter than daylight. Grandmother had never been so grand and beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms…’

‘Do you have to be good to become an angel?’

‘I think you have to be quite good. But really I think you just have to love someone very much.’

‘But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the little girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. The New Year's sun rose upon a little pathetic figure. The child sat there, stiff and cold, holding the matches, of which one bundle was almost burned.’

‘Is that what happens, Mummy, when you die? Someone kind comes to get you?’

‘I don’t know. I hope so. It would be very nice to think we could always be together, wouldn’t it? But you don’t have to worry about that. Not for ages and ages.’

For a long time afterwards they laid together quietly, listening to the wind and watching the weak lamplight swim over the tent walls. Eventually Beth reached up and dimmed it. Through the polyester the fire crackled and glowed. She wondered if Ruby was asleep, and what strange things must fill her head. She was only ever really alive when he was there; such a sullen, inward-looking child when they were alone. She thought of the weathered cliché about one hand being unable to clap alone. For the second time that evening she wept. She wondered if she would ever really know her daughter, and if she would ever be the mother she so wanted to be.

‘Mummy and Daddy are very different,’ she whispered. She closed her eyes. Her legs were too long for the short mattress and her feet hung over the edge.

‘That’s okay,’ said a small voice in the dark. ‘I think you’re the best mummy in the world.’

Late that evening Ruby would wake up. She would hear murmuring from the other side of the partition. She’d hear her mother giggle and then something else. She would listen carefully, trying to understand it. It would sound like her parents were passing something heavy between them. They must have put it down again shortly afterwards because it went quiet again, and she would listen to them breathing and wonder whose was whose. She would still be wondering that when she too was soaked away in sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ben was sitting on his bed, turning the letter over and over in his hands. It was creased where he had screwed it up. Fourteen lines, that’s all it was. Just 173 words. He read it again. Words are never just words, as some people like to think. How subtle and wry and treacherous they can be when they get together. An army of anarchists ready to rise up and overthrow worlds. He scrunched the letter up again and hurled it away, watched it scamper off and hide, trembling, under the desk. So you should, he thought, so you should.

‘I won’t ever ask you,’ Madeline had said, ‘that way you won’t have to lie. But I know you’ll tell me when it comes.’

Time was running out. They were awaiting his response and they wouldn’t wait forever. Maybe he could break his leg. That would make the decision for him. He imagined himself wedging a foot inside a rabbit hole and then falling sideways. The prospect terrified him. No, he wasn’t brave enough for that. But if he could sustain an injury naturally… Why did he never get injured, like other athletes did? He knew some people who couldn’t go a month without their bodies breaking down. How convenient that would be; a timely rupture or serendipitous stress fracture. He’d been hoping. He’d even stopped stretching, praying that a tendon might give up the ghost in protest. But no. His body, his finely-tuned, unbreakable, metronomic body just kept on going and going.

‘It’s your dream,’ his father had said. And it was. It had been. He had chased it with all the unswerving devotion of a zealot, he’d been that unshakeable shadow following the sun. But now? Now he wished that winning races was still the greatest climax he could imagine.

Suddenly he jumped off the bed and strode across the room. He changed back into the shorts and T-shirt that he’d discarded in a pile earlier and went downstairs. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table. Did she never move from there? She was facing away from him and he stood in the doorway looking at her. She was hunched forward, a pencil behind her ear. An unforgiving beam of light slanted through the window and singled out a strip of grey hair where the dye had missed. A song was playing on the radio and she sang along quietly even though she didn’t know the words. She always got the words wrong, even to songs she proclaimed to love. Ben thought it was deliberate, borne out of a deep conviction that she was always right and her way was always the right way. Suddenly she turned around and stared at him. ‘Another run?’ she asked approvingly. He pretended not to hear and went out.

He had no intention of going for a second run. He simply wanted to be out, away from things, from one thing in particular. He walked quickly away from the house, turned the corner at the end of the road and kept going. There were the gardens again. There was the front door with the banner still hanging. He glanced over his shoulder. It was following him. He turned around and walked briskly in the opposite direction, away from the park. Soon he was nearing the high street. There were more people here. He might get lost among them. He stopped, half-turned. He knew it was still there. He sat down and waited for it to catch up, to settle down alongside him. He’d read it so often – a hundred times, a thousand times. He knew each of its fourteen lines by heart. When it had first arrived he’d looked up the university on his phone, had imagined himself there, sauntering across the impossibly green lawns under a sun that, so the website promised, shone three hundred days a year. He’d read all about the coaching programme, the scientific approach to nutrition and the inter-collegiate meets. It had been made very clear to him that all he had to do was turn up and they’d make him into a star.

He leant forward and rested his elbows on his legs, cupping his chin in his hands. He studied the pavement in intimate detail. People were walking past. He looked at their shoes as they went by and listened to snatches of conversations.

‘Yeah, but when she does kiss him she’ll be shit at it.’

‘There’s something there. He’s not sure what. I’ve got more tests next week.’

‘Why is he just sitting there?’

He enjoyed looking through these slits into other lives, glancing beneath the Elephant Man’s hood. People’s uncensored selves revealed more in five seconds than their public masks did in a year. He secretly studied them. He sought out those tiny tremors in the skin where ancient shocks still reverberated, wanted to bear witness to the unguarded moments, when the sadness, the loneliness, the bitterness came out. He felt like a thief, but excused himself because he never judged them. Some faces had more of this and less of that, but each was cruel and kind and curious in its own way. He thought suddenly of that slogger in the park. Who was he? What was it about him that had made Ben give up like that? He had felt sorry for him, but it was more than that. Guilt. The word suddenly jumped out at him. Yes. That’s exactly what it was. Not sympathy. Guilt. But for what? Being faster, fitter, younger? No. No, certainly nothing like that. He revelled in his vitality. What then? Maybe in a past life they were… maybe in a parallel world he had… He shook his head. Next time I see him I’ll run him into the ground.

He was growing cold in his shorts and T-shirt. The air was damp and chilly beneath the overcast sky. Last week it was still February. He should’ve brought a jumper. He leaned down and picked up a broken bit of tarmac, rolled it absent-mindedly on his palm. Feet were still landing in front of him. He was on the outside looking in. He always managed somehow to find the periphery. Even running around the track or the park; even that was the edge of the circle. When he felt self-critical he thought he was better at observing life than living it. He flicked the stone away and stood up. And what of Madeline’s face? It hardly moved. The expression she wore was confined always within the tightly controlled parameters. But he knew better. He didn’t know her well, not really, but those telltale tics he searched for, they lived lavishly in the corners of her mouth, beneath her eyelids, at her temple. The stillness she affected was fake, was just the result of muscles always straining to suppress, to conceal. He thought of a rope made taut by powerful forces. He began walking home. He realised, with a shock, he’d never seen her smile. He would tell her. He couldn’t lie any longer. He would tell her that night.