Play Dead by Peter Dickinson Page A

have some tea. I’ll tell Peony to put Toby’s clothes in the tumbler and they’ll be dry by the time you go home. What about you, Mrs Tasker?’
    Poppy fastened the Velcro shoulder-strap on the loaned overalls and took off her specs for a final wipe.
    â€˜I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘It mostly went over my face. I’ll steam off during tea. I was going to wash my hair this evening anyway.’
    She settled her specs on and saw that Mrs Capstone was gazing at her, openly weighing her up, as if considering whether to hire her as an employee. She did this in a perfectly straightforward way, so that it didn’t seem an intrusion on inner privacies. It was the sort of look the young give you sometimes on meeting, those adventurers for whom the decades seem to spread away before them like rich provinces waiting to be sacked. Mrs Capstone still had that look of youth, though she was thirty-nine according to Janet, a child of the squirearchy, reared and educated to marry her kind and breed more of the same. She must have decided that the power which was her birthright had left the ancestral acres, and she must seek it elsewhere for herself, but she still had that look about her, the forthright gaze, the slightly plump assurance, the blonde and tended hair, the good bones.
    â€˜More baa?’ said Toby hopefully, now that he had a whole set of dry clothes to soak again.
    â€˜Tea now,’ said Poppy.
    It went well enough. Baked beans and ice cream for the children, tea and digestives for the adults. Toby was too interested in his surroundings to feed himself with proper attention, so spread his meal lavishly in the general area of his mouth. Deborah concentrated on eating with the same attention as that with which she could concentrate on her scream. At home she seemed a half-different child, a handful still, but neat and self-possessed.
    Poppy, meanwhile, coped with Mrs Capstone’s inquisition. Mrs Capstone had that kind of quick, superficial intelligence which needs to be fed a mass of fact which it will then store with great efficiency, so that if they were to meet in a year’s time she would immediately know Poppy’s name and ask whether there were any more grand­children in New Zealand and what her doctor son-in-law thought of the health system there. The process wasn’t mechanical. She was genuinely­ interested, within the limits of a not very subtle imagination. Long ago Poppy, faced with the occasional need to account for her separation from Derek and knowing the impossibility of explaining­ (even to herself) the involved, self-generating network of motives and actions, of understandings and misunderstandings, which had led to the event, had decided it was simplest to say flatly ‘He left me for a younger woman.’ This was at least true, though really a crude and, in a way, unimportant part of the truth.
    Mrs Capstone sighed, shook the blonde waves and said just as flatly ‘They will do it.’
    There it was. Life. Airlines overbooked flights. Maintenance engineers failed to keep appointments after you’d waited in for them all day. Boys hit tennis bails through neighbours’ conservatories. Men left wives for younger women. Not impersonal facts, but all worth a perfectly genuine brisk sigh. It was easy to see why Peony had found her kind.
    â€˜But your son is still in England?’
    The awkward moment was coming. Not that Poppy intended to lie, or even to conceal the truth if the conversation came anywhere near it. Mrs Capstone was perfectly capable of handling the trivial contretemps with complete aplomb, but the danger was that she might be able to make something of it later, to Janet’s disadvantage.
    â€˜Hugo, yes. He’s in charge of the legal list at an academic publisher’s. I can’t say …’
    â€˜Deborah, no!’
    Poppy turned her head and saw that while Deborah had finished her ice-cream Toby,