Kate Atkinson - When Will There Be Good News?

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright 2008 by Kate Atkinson

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

www.hachettebookgroup.com

First e-book edition: September 2008

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

The line from Cargoes by John Masefield is reproduced by permission of the Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of John Masefield.

ISBN 978-0-316-03979-6

ALSO BY KATE ATKINSON

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Human Croquet

Emotionally Weird

Not the End of the World

Case Histories

One Good Turn

For Dave and Maureen Thanks for many good times, The best is yet to come.

We never know we go, when we are going

We jest and shut the door;

Fate following behind us bolts it,

And we accost no more.

Emily Dickinson

In the Past

T he heat rising up from the tarmac seemed to get trapped between the thick hedges that towered above their heads like battlements.

Oppressive, their mother said. They felt trapped too. Like the maze at Hampton Court, their mother said. Remember?

Yes, Jessica said.

No, Joanna said.

You were just a baby, their mother said to Joanna. Like Joseph is now. Jessica was eight, Joanna was six.

The little road (they always called it the lane) snaked one way and then another, so that you couldnt see anything ahead of you. They had to keep the dog on the lead and stay close to the hedges in case a car came out of nowhere. Jessica was the eldest so she was the one who got to hold the dogs lead all the time. She spent a lot of her time training the dog, Heel! and Sit! and Come! Their mother said she wished Jessica were as obedient as the dog. Jessica was always the one who was in charge. Their mother said to Joanna, Its all right to have a mind of your own, you know. You should stick up for yourself, think for yourself, but Joanna didnt want to think for herself.

The bus dropped them on the big road and then carried on to somewhere else. It was a palaver getting them all off the bus. Their mother held Joseph under one arm like a parcel and with her other hand she struggled to open out his newfangled buggy. Jessica and Joanna shared the job of lifting the shopping off the bus. The dog saw to himself. No one ever helps, their mother said. Have you noticed that? They had.

Your fathers country-fucking-idyll, their mother said as the bus drove away in a blue haze of fumes and heat. Dont you swear, she added automatically. Im the only person allowed to swear.

They didnt have a car anymore. Their father (the bastard) had driven away in it. Their father wrote books, novels. He had taken one down from a shelf and shown it to Joanna, pointed out his photograph on the back cover, and said, Thats me, but she wasnt allowed to read it, even though she was already a good reader (Not yet, one day. I write for grown-ups, Im afraid, he laughed. Theres stuff in there, well...).

Their father was called Howard Mason and their mothers name was Gabrielle. Sometimes people got excited and smiled at their father and said, Are you the Howard Mason? (Or sometimes, not smiling, that Howard Mason, which was different, although Joanna wasnt sure how.)

Their mother said that their father had uprooted them and planted them in the middle of nowhere. Or Devon, as its commonly known, their father said. He said he needed space to write and it would be good for all of them to be in touch with nature. No television! he said as if that was something they would enjoy.

Joanna still missed her school and her friends and Wonder Woman and a house on a street that you could walk along to a shop where you could buy The Beano and a licorice stick and choose from three different kinds of apples instead of having to walk along a lane and a road and take two buses and then do the same thing all over again in reverse.

The first thing their father did when they moved to Devon was to buy six red hens and a hive full of bees. He spent all autumn digging over the garden at the front of the house so it would be ready for spring. When it rained the garden turned to mud and the mud was trailed everywhere in the house; they even found it on their bedsheets. When winter came, a fox ate the hens without them ever having laid an egg and the bees all froze to death, which was unheard of, according to their father, who said he was going to put all those things in the book (the novel) he was writing. So thats all right, then, their mother said.

Their father wrote at the kitchen table because it was the only room in the house that was even the slightest bit warm, thanks to the huge temperamental Aga that their mother said was going to be the death of her. I should be so lucky, their father muttered. (His book wasnt going well.) They were all under his feet, even their mother.

You smell of soot, their father said to their mother. And cabbage and milk.

And you smell of failure, their mother said.

Their mother used to smell of all kinds of interesting things, paint and turpentine and tobacco and the Je Reviens perfume that their father had been buying for her since she was seventeen years old and a Catholic schoolgirl, and which meant I will return and was a message to her. Their mother was a beauty according to their father, but their mother said she was a painter, although she hadnt painted anything since they moved to Devon. No room for two creative talents in a marriage, she said in that way she had, raising her eyebrows while inhaling smoke from the little brown cigarillos she smoked. She pronounced it thigariyo, like a foreigner. When she was a child she had lived in faraway places that she would take them to one day. She was warm-blooded, she said, not like their father, who was a reptile. Their mother was clever and funny and surprising and nothing like their friends mothers. Exotic, their father said.

The argument about who smelled of what wasnt over, apparently, because their mother picked up a blue-and-white-striped jug from the dresser and threw it at their father, who was sitting at the table staring at his typewriter as if the words would write themselves if he was patient enough. The jug hit him on the side of the head and he roared with shock and pain. With a speed that Joanna could only admire, Jessica plucked Joseph out of his high chair and said, Come on, to Joanna, and they went upstairs, where they tickled Joseph on the double bed that Joanna and Jessica shared. There was no heating in the bedroom and the bed was piled high with eiderdowns and old coats that belonged to their mother. Eventually all three of them fell asleep, nestled in the mingled scents of damp and mothballs and Je Reviens.

When Joanna woke up, she found Jessica propped up on pillows, wearing gloves and a pair of earmuffs and one of the coats from the bed, drowning her like a tent. She was reading a book by torchlight.

Electricitys off, she said without taking her eyes off the book. On the other side of the wall they could hear the horrible animal noises that meant their parents were friends again. Jessica silently offered Joanna the earmuffs so that she didnt have to listen.