Vivienne rang that evening, after Poppy had gone to bed.
“I’ve told them about the notes.”
I shut the kitchen door. Tom was watching something about restoring a railway carriage, a subject on which television apparently never ran out of emergencies.
“All of it?”
“That I completed them afterwards. That the time wasn’t taken from a clock. They’re arranging to speak to me.”
“Good.”
She breathed out sharply.
“I didn’t ring for a mark.”
“Sorry.”
I leaned against the worktop. There were crumbs under my palm. I brushed them into the sink while she searched for the next sentence.
“Can you come over? I can’t explain this properly on the telephone.”
I looked at the clock. It was half past eight. A month earlier, I would have gone without asking myself whether I wanted to.
“Half an hour,” I said. “Then I need to come home.”
She met me in the kitchen rather than the sitting room. Peter had gone upstairs. There was no notebook on the table and no plate of biscuits placed to suggest that staying was inevitable.
“Beth had only just got out,” she said. “You know what people were already saying.”
“Yes.”
“They’d have made the whole thing her fault. The marriage, the separation, his death. Some of them still will.”
She pushed a newspaper aside. Martin’s name appeared in a short report below a photograph of the hall.
“I wanted there to be something solid. Something showing she wasn’t wandering about meeting him.”
“Beth has her own account.”
“People don’t always believe women like Beth.”
“Women like Beth?”
Vivienne looked annoyed with herself.
“Frightened women. Women who’ve changed their minds. You know what I mean.”
I did. That made the conversation harder.
She described a woman the fund had helped the previous winter, carefully leaving out identifying details. An employer had wanted explanations, a landlord had wanted guarantees, and every form had seemed to demand certainty at the moment her life contained least of it.
“Sometimes someone has to say, clearly, that a person can be trusted.”
“Did you ask Beth whether she wanted a record made for her?”
“She shouldn’t have to manage everything.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
Vivienne stood up and ran water into a glass. She drank half of it with her back to me.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t ask.”
I waited until she sat down again.
“If that notebook says things Beth knows aren’t accurate, she either has to contradict you or let them stand. You’ve given her another person to worry about disappointing.”
Vivienne’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.
From upstairs, a drawer shut. Somewhere along the street a car alarm chirped and stopped.
“I didn’t think of it like that.”
“Then think of it now.”
The sharpness surprised us both. I had meant to be patient, but patience was beginning to feel expensive when other people were paying for it.
She looked towards the newspaper.
“It wasn’t only Beth. If people stopped donating, we’d have nothing to offer the next woman. Nothing except a telephone number and good wishes.”
“And if the records aren’t reliable?”
She traced a ring left by her glass.
“I thought I could keep things steady until we understood what had happened.”
“You can’t decide which facts people get while they’re deciding whether to trust you.”
She gave a small, humourless laugh.
“Listen to you. You’ve been here a month.”
“I know.”
“You haven’t sat beside hospital beds or fetched anyone at midnight. You haven’t had to tell somebody there’s no money until Friday.”
“No.”
There was truth in that, and I let her have it. Her years of work weren’t imaginary. Neither were the false details in the notebook.
“Would you rather I hadn’t looked?” I asked.
She did not answer immediately.
Then she said, “For about ten minutes this afternoon, yes.”
I smiled despite myself. She almost returned it.
My half-hour was nearly up. I stood and put my glass beside the sink.
“Tell Beth yourself. Without explaining that she ought to understand.”
“She might never trust me again.”
“That’s hers to decide.”
Vivienne looked smaller sitting at the kitchen table. I disliked noticing that. It made doing the necessary thing feel like cruelty, though leaving her comfortable would not undo what she had done.
At the door, she caught my sleeve.
“Do you think Celia knew I would write it?”
I looked back at her.
“I don’t know. You need to tell them what she actually said.”
She let go.
When I reached home, Tom asked how Vivienne was.
“Unhappy with me.”
“That’ll pass.”
I hung up my coat.
For once, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to pass quickly.
I took my own book upstairs. Between its pages was a receipt I’d used as a bookmark, dated before I knew any of these women. I read the list of groceries twice before I could concentrate on the story.