The Other Hand

think I’ve just chucked my life away?”
    “I just want you to think about it. Will you, Sarah?”
    “All right.”
    “And call me?”
    “I will. Clarissa?”
    “Darling?”
    “Thank you.”
    I hung up and looked out over the river. When we first arrived the water had been flowing downstream toward the wild estuary and the untamed waters of the North Sea. Now it was nudging back in the direction of Oxford and the crisp white boathouses of Henley. It is hard, when it comes right down to the actual choice, to know what you want out of life.
    I went down the stone steps to the little shrinking beach. I said to Lawrence and Little Bee, I called work. I’ve got something to tell you both. But they looked so forlorn, standing there, standing apart from each other, not speaking. I realized this was never going to work.
    I thought, Oh gosh, how foolish I’ve been.
    I have always struck myself as a very practical woman, capable of adaptation. I immediately thought, I’ll phone the publisher and tell him I made a mistake. And not just a little mistake but a great, elemental, whole-life mistake. During one whole week of grace I utterly forgot, you see, that I was a sensible girl from Surrey. It was something about Little Bee’s smile, and her energy, that made me sort of fall in love with her. And thus love makes fools of us all. For a whole week I actually thought I was a better person, someone who could make a difference. It completely slipped my mind that I was a quiet, practical, bereaved woman who focused very hard on her job. Isn’t that odd? I’m awfully sorry. And now might I please have my old life back?
    I held out my hands to Little Bee and Lawrence, but then I noticed that Charlie was no longer with them.
    “Um, where’s Charlie?”
    It is painful to think about this time, even now.
    What did I do? I looked all around, of course. I ran up and down. I began screaming Charlie’s name. I raced up and down the shrinking beach, staring into the face of every child playing there in case it should somehow transform into mine. I shouted myself hoarse. My son was nowhere.
    An aching panic took me over. The sophisticated parts of my mind shut down, the parts that might be capable of thought. I suppose the blood supply to them had been summarily turned off, and diverted to the eyes, the legs, the lungs. I looked, I ran, I screamed. And all the time in my heart it was growing: the unspeakable certainty that someone had taken Charlie.
    At the other end of the little beach was a second set of steps leading up the embankment wall, and I ran up them. Camped out on the top step was a picnicking family. The mother—long auburn hair with rather frazzled ends—sat cross-legged and barefoot, surrounded by the peelings and the uneaten segments of satsumas. She was reading BBC Music Magazine. She had it spread out on the rug, pinned down with one foot to stop the pages blowing. There was a slender silver ring on her second toe. Beside her on the step, two flame-haired girls in blue gingham dresses were eating Kraft cheese slices straight from the packet. The husband, blond and stocky, stood a few feet away, leaning on the railing and talking into his mobile. Lanzarote’s just a tourist trap these days, he was saying. You should go somewhere off the beaten track, like Croatia or Marrakech. Your money goes further there in any case. I was out of breath. The mother looked up at me.
    “Is everything alright?” she said.
    “I’ve lost my son.”
    She looked at me blankly. I smiled idiotically. I didn’t knowwhat to do with my face. My mind and my body were keyed up to fight with pedophiles and wolves. Confronted with these ordinary people in this absurdly pleasant tableau, ringed all around by strolling tourists, my distress seemed desperate and vulgar. My social conditioning fought against my panic. I felt ashamed. Instinctively, I also knew that I needed to speak to the woman calmly, in her register, if I was to communicate clearly and get across the information I needed without wasting any time. I have struggled all my life to find the correct point of balance between nicety and hysteria.
    “I’m very sorry,” I said, “I’ve lost my son.”
    The woman stood up and looked around at the crowd. I couldn’t understand why her movements were so slow. It seemed that I was operating in air, while she occupied some more viscous medium.
    “He’s about this high,” I said. “You’d have noticed him, he’s dressed