He kitted out Willa in a long leather apron, some goggles and a pair of thick gauntlets that almost covered her entire arms. Using metal tongs, he took the lid off the top of the kiln and lifted out her pot, now glowing orange-white with heat. “Open that one,” he said, pointing to another smaller dustbin; “that’s the reduction chamber.”
“Reduction of what?” Willa asked.
“Oxygen. Watch.”
It was full of woodchips. Dad positioned the glowing pot inside. Sparks and flames instantly burst out in every direction, hissing and sputtering. We all leaped back. Little spits of fire flew across my dad’s forehead and small puffs of smoke popped around his head. He clamped down the lid over the pot and stood back, a wild grin on his face.
“Give it a few minutes,” he said. A small part of his hair had withered into wiry crisps and one of his eyebrows was smoking. There was a long black smudge across his brow where he’d wiped his glove across his face.
“Kiln Face,” I said.
Dad stood with his hands on his hips. He couldn’t stop smiling. After a while, he gave the metal tongs to Willa so she could pick out her pot. It was still glowing a bit, smoky dark with wood ash and with a few curls of burning wood clinging to the surface. But we could already glimpse the glaze, iridescent and glittering beneath the blackened areas of ash, the colors of a bluebottle. Dad told her to plunge it into a bucket. The water hissed and spat. When he picked it back out, wild crackles had shot across its surface, thin and wiry in some places, dark and deep in others. The base of the pot was a deep copper umber and its rim a bright cobalt blue. It was absolutely lovely.
“Wow,” Willa said, her voice thrilled, “thank you.”
“You did it,” Dad said. “It’s your hard work. Take it home. Give it to your mum.”
***
And that was it. It was just a normal summer. We hadn’t done very much. We’d sunbathed in the garden and watched buzzards make lazy turns of the thermals above; read novels, painted our nails, listened to music and swum in the river. We’d walked the dogs to see wild ponies and had distant sightings of skittish deer. At night we’d sat in deck chairs with my parents and brother and looked at the stars. The weeks had just floated away.
Everyone offered to take Willa to the station on her last morning, so in the end we all went, even Michael, despite the fact it was practically two hours each way, so all three of us rammed into the back of the Landy. My brother sat jammed behind my mum, wearing a newly ironed shirt with long sleeves and a button-down collar, the burnished mahogany of his hair gleaming in the sun. He’s brushed it, I thought. Oh, Michael. He smelt of fresh linen and something else too, something nice. I sniffed in his direction. Aftershave.
On the station platform, I hugged Willa and she hugged Michael, even though his arms stayed clamped fast to his sides. Dad patted her shoulder and Mum held her tight for a moment and then got a little weepy and that set me off too. She’d stayed with us for a month after all, and that made her family as far as my lot were concerned. Dad had given her a pitcher from his pottery as a leaving gift, a tall, rounded vessel in a deep sea-green with an elegant curving handle, which he’d wrapped up together with her pot. He checked the package was safely wedged on the baggage shelf, then we all waved until the train rolled out of sight. And then she was gone.
***
Back in the car, Mum sat with her hands on the steering wheel, staring ahead. “Lovely girl,” she said finally. She turned in her seat so that she could look at the rest of us. “Is it not at all odd that—” She stopped. She looked at us. She took a breath. “If it was me,” she said, “if I was her mum, I know it’s far, but if it was me, I can’t help thinking I would have come to pick her up. I just don’t think I would have made her get the train.” She stopped. Then she said, “After all that has happened to that family.”
“She’s seventeen, Mum,” I said. “She’s not a baby.” Don’t ask me why I felt a sudden need to defend her parents—I’d never even met them.
“Perhaps,” my dad said, rearranging the crux of my thoughts into more diplomatic form, “they don’t want her to be afraid about going anywhere on her own.”
“I mean she’s got to get across London on the underground,” Mum said, “with all that baggage.”
There was a silence.
“I’m just saying,” Mum said, “all I am saying is, if that was my daughter, if Willa was my daughter, I wouldn’t want her doing that. I just wouldn’t.”
And there was no arguing with that.
5 Supper with Friends Robyn
A sound like a small bell pulls me back into the room: a fingernail tapping on glass. Jamie catches my eye and smiles, then nods at his empty glass. I pour him another glass of red.
“Now think about your earliest memory,” Liv says. “Okay, done that?” She looks around the table. “What is it?”
Jamie leans back, placing both hands flat on the table. “Easy,” he says, “sitting on my dad’s knee, drinking beer from his pint. I can even remember what I was wearing—stripy top, blue shorts.”
“How old would you have been?”
“Two, two and a half max.”
“Michael?”
“I remember Robyn being born. I would have been three years, eight months and, let me think, fifteen days old. Mum had her at home. Apparently Mum hadn’t realized how far along she was and suddenly it was all happening. Dad had to deliver her with one ear clamped to the telephone, following instructions from a midwife. I remember seeing her head coming out, then her body. They let me cut the cord.”
“Oh my God,” Willa says.
“That’s not the worst of it,” I tell her, laughing. “I was enormous. Almost nine pounds.”
“What about you, Robyn?”
“Me?” I say. “I don’t know, it’s all pretty vague. There’re a few things I suppose—laughing so hard I got the hiccups. Trailing Michael around.”
“True,” Michael says, “she was like an imprinted duckling. She wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“Willa?” We turn to where Willa is sitting at the end of the table. She shifts a little in her seat.
“I remember my dad tickling me. Bit embarrassing—I wet myself—” Her story is interrupted by Claudette having a fit of coughing and Nate jumps up to pour his girlfriend a glass of water.
“I’m so sorry,” Claudette says, “Willa, to interrupt your story. I had a little something in my throat.” She pronounces Willa’s name Weela. She taps her chest, just below her clavicle. “I do apologize. Do go on.”
“Yes, do,” Liv says, looking at Willa intently, “go on.”
Willa blushes deeply. “That’s it, really,” she says.
Liv holds Willa’s eyes for a moment, gives her a small half smile, and then moves on. “What about you, Claudette?”
