Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley Page B

and her brother left home; it all went into an investment account. Now Euan had withdrawn some of these savings in cash, to avoid the family’s paying tax on them after he was dead; he really had very little interest in money, but he liked to imagine himself as a man of the world, cunning and knowing when it came to material things. He kept the money hidden, despite all Marian’s pleadings and warnings, in a space under the floor in the airing cupboard that no one was supposed to know about except Marian and Francis, in Toronto. The last time Marian fetched Euan some money from the hiding place, she discovered that two hundred pounds were missing. She didn’t tell Euan, but crossed out in his little notebook the amount that there should have been and deducted what she had just taken out, as if nothing were wrong.
    At home she confided in Tamsin over supper. Tamsin was her younger daughter, who lived at home with Marian and was unnervingly domesticated. Tamsin had had a very wild youth, which had culminated five years before in a dreadful crisis, with a stillborn baby and boyfriend who had accidentally overdosed and died. She had shaved her head, in those days, and had her nose and tongue pierced; but now, at twenty-six, she had her hair cut neatly short, like a boy’s, and saved her wages to buy nice designer clothes. She worked in an office for an agency selling theater and concert tickets and appalled her father, who had in his youth handed out leaflets outside factories for the Communist Party, by announcing that she had voted Conservative at the last election (the one when nobody else did). She also sang with the city choral society, went out nightclubbing occasionally with the girls from the office, and, so far as Marian could tell, slept alone every night in her neat narrow bed.
    â€”Nobody knows where this wretched money is hidden except me and Francis and Daddy, said Marian.
    â€”And me, said Tamsin.
    â€”You don’t know.
    â€”I guessed.
    â€”The most likely thing is Daddy’s taken some of it out himself and just forgotten to tell me. But two hundred? What for? And I think he’d find it quite difficult; you really have to get down on your hands and knees. Then there was the man who came to repair the central heating boiler a few weeks ago. Perhaps he had to look around under the floor for pipes, and he found it. But then why only take two hundred, not all of it?
    â€”Maybe to mislead you, so that it wasn’t obvious.
    â€”And anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t him. This is what’s so horrible about the whole thing. He seemed a nice man, we’ve had him before, and he’d never do anything so stupid, obviously incriminating himself. He was only mending the thermostat, why would he need to look for pipes? Probably the whole thing’s just a mistake: I miscounted, or we miscounted right in the beginning, or perhaps the building society made a mistake in the first place, and we checked carelessly.
    â€”What does it matter, so long as Grandpa doesn’t know?
    â€”Well, it does matter: two hundred pounds! Sooner or later he’s bound to know; he’ll want me to get it all out and count it for him or something.
    Marian helped herself to the last slice of quiche. She was always hungry after one of Tamsin’s suppers. They took it in turns to cook, although Tamsin didn’t really cook, she went to Marks & Spencer’s on her way home and bought selections of things in plastic pots that were somehow enticing but not fulfilling. Marian on her nights cooked hearty platefuls of rice or pasta, which Tam-sin picked at. Tamsin’s lilac silk blouse showed off shadowy hollows in her throat and under her collarbones. Marian had never had those; she had always been tall and heavy like her father; for a while now she had been aware of a sort of girdle of packed flesh between her bosom and her hips that seemed to grasp her tight and make her breathless and