Daughters (20 page)

As she explained to Kirsty, ‘You devised a strategy as a child to combat your fear and loneliness. This was eating and it was a good strategy because it helped you at that point. I have to persuade you that, now happy and successful in your life, you no longer need that strategy. I’m going to help you to abandon it because it’s now impeding you, not helping.’

Kirsty would take time to absorb that one. She could tell.

One day, after she and Robin had collaborated in a long session and were packing up for the evening, she asked, ‘How is Wesley-in-Chelsea?’

He winced. ‘Think of your worst problem and double
it. His parents are now divorcing and his mother is off to the Bahamas. The only thing that can be said is that it’s not a shock for him.’

‘Does it work like that?’

He considered. ‘Was it a shock when Bill left?’

She wasn’t prepared for the question. ‘Actually …’ Grief that went on and on. Recriminations. The loss of trust. ‘Actually, it had an inevitability.’

‘Same here.’

‘You mean you and Carey?’

‘A long time ago and far away.’

Up went her eyebrows. ‘Nice phrase.’

‘Pinched from Ursula Le Guin. It’s impossible for two people to develop a friendship, which is what’s required, after raging lust’s died down, if one of them is hunting bandits, a.k.a. peacekeeping, in the Middle East, and the other one … well, the other one is diverted.’

Infidelity?

‘Raging lust? What’s that?’

Up went his eyebrows. ‘Did I mention it?’

‘Must have misheard.’

Pity mixed with laughter was a useless combo (Maudie’s word). It took away one’s capacity to think.

‘It’s just as frightening for those left behind at home,’ he said. ‘Waiting for the knock on the door. Not daring to look at the news. But it’s also frightening because the person who comes back isn’t the same. They can’t be. Ever.’

She had a vision of a tall blonde keeping vigil in grim army quarters.

‘Carey was very angry with me in the end. I kept
promising to come back home and try to to live a normal life. And I didn’t keep the promise. I couldn’t keep away from the action. Then I was wounded. It was a mess all round.’

‘I think I know and I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘See you.’

Thirty seconds later he was back. ‘I forgot. That battle in 1516 you asked about, the Mamelukes versus the Ottomans. The Mamelukes lost. They were old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat soldiers. The Ottomans had got hold of gunpowder. That’s how the world changes.’

Five minutes later, as she was locking up the office, a message came through on her phone: Drink Friday evening? R.

Thus, she found herself plaiting her way through a late-evening drift of tourists and commuters on London’s South Bank. She was more or less on time. The day had gone well. It was much warmer than it had been. Here and there, tucked into odd patchy corners under concrete buildings, rogue daffodils drooped exhausted but the tulips still bloomed.

It was odd how one could ‘possess’ parts of the city – the places to which one gravitated. Hers was the strip of Embankment that ran from Vauxhall, past the SOE memorial and St Thomas’s Hospital, snaking under the graffiti-adorned underpass and streaking east towards Shakespeare’s Globe. Perhaps she had lived there in a previous life – a grubbing mudlark on the shoreline, a doxy working the streets, a toff in search of stimulation, or her ancestors had done – and memories of its sights and sounds were buried in her genetic subconscious.
Whatever: she felt she
knew
the slap of the river on the starlings, its dark, powerful undertows and the life that spilled over from the streets to the shoreline.

Water and its secrets.

Looking down into it, she fancied the ghosts of … mudlarks, costermongers, ferrymen, merchants, the dung collectors, the suicides ripping past in the tide.

And of her own past.

Flashback.

Bill asks: ‘How many children do you need, Lara?’

‘I just long to have another baby, Bill. I can’t help it.’

And, for once, Bill confesses openly to an emotion: ‘Don’t you understand, Lara, I’m frightened? It’s tempting Fate …’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’

‘But do you understand me?’

‘I do and I don’t.’

But it’s impossible for him to share the all-encompassing, ravening ache usurping her body.

Yet they can, and do, share the loss.

Oh, yes.

After Bill had left, she had thought of herself as an empty shell, shunted by the wind and slapped by the water.

Empty.

The wind from the river picked up, bringing with it the smells of the rank, exposed mud.

As was her habit, she slowed down under the arch where the second-hand books fanned out like conquered dominoes on trestles. Novels, some hideously bad,
obscure volumes of poetry, out-of-date manuals were marshalled in rows. The operation pretended it wasn’t out-and-out commercial but it was. She liked that.

With a finger, she traced the books running in a spine along one of the trestles.

Grandmother’s Secrets: her green guide to health.
So, Grandmother, what do you have to say?
Soupe au pistou
and
pesto
soothe the digestion. In a troubled age, ran the foreword, digestions were awash with acid. This was a condition of contemporary life: heartburn and nerves.

She progressed to the classics.
Jane Eyre
(very tatty),
Pride and Prejudice
(almost new),
Wives and Daughters
(untouched). She applied the marriage litmus game that she and the girls had played over the years. Two out of three novels she had lighted on (admittedly nineteenth-century ones) ended at the altar. Because the author had died, the third was unfinished although it was obvious that the hero and heroine were heading in that direction.

Smiling to herself, she looked up … 
Wives and Daughters
slipped out of her grasp back on to the trestle.

The soft notes of a boat’s engine came and went. Lounging against the balustrade was a couple. She – young, incredibly slender, glowing. He – tall, clean-featured, graceful, his arm around her shoulders.

Abruptly, Lara turned away. Then turned back – to face whatever she had to face. She picked up the book and replaced it in its slot.
No,
she
wasn’t going to be sick
. She recognized the girl. Of course she did. At the party she had worn the blue dress and knocked over the flowers. She
also recognized him –
of course she did
– and the manner in which he was holding the girl. It was not friendship. Neither was it friendship when he bent over to say something into her ear.

Andrew.

A jumble of booksellers, tourists, hawkers and commuters separated them on the walkway but, inevitably, their gazes locked.

A pulse beat at the back of her knee and a second deep in her pelvis. Warnings of danger.

She walked towards them. Frowning, Andrew disengaged himself from the girl, but by the time Lara reached him, he had mastered himself and the frown was replaced with his customary smooth good manners. ‘Hello, Lara. Did you ever meet Fern, an old friend?’

‘Of course. At the party.’

Reliant as ever on his charm.

On closer inspection, Fern was even more faun-like than Lara recollected, with huge kohl-rimmed eyes. At Lara’s approach, she shrank back.

‘Fern, you must remember Eve’s stepmother.’

Fern gasped, and her eyes turned into rock pools of distress and embarrassment. ‘Of course. So nice to see you again.’ She turned to Andrew. ‘Andrew, I have to go.’

The words sounded as insubstantial as her frame.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘There’s no need.’

But Fern was determined, and was gone, melting into the human river that ran alongside the watery one.

She faced him. ‘Andrew?’

‘Lara?’

‘Is it what it looked like?’

‘Lara, if you don’t mind I don’t have to answer that.’

‘I think you do.’

There was a touch of anger. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Forgive me, but you’re marrying Eve.’

‘So?’ He held her gaze, steady under pressure. He knew how to do that – years of practice at work. ‘It
isn’t
your business and Eve and I understand each other very well.’

He was so plausible and she wanted badly to believe him.

‘I promise you,’ he added, more gently. As if that solved the problem.

She raised her face to his. ‘What you do does not concern me except when it involves Eve. She’s my
daughter.
’

He thought for a minute. ‘Lara, you can’t interfere.’

‘I
know
Eve.’

To her surprise and indignation, he took her hand. ‘Perhaps you don’t.’

Before leaving for work, the doorbell had rung and the postman delivered two Hungarian goose-down pillows, one traditional American quilt and a large red-leather photograph album.

She snatched her hand away. ‘You must know that under her practicality, her smart exterior, lie all sorts of terrors, not least of being abandoned or betrayed.’

‘I do.’ He shifted his feet. ‘Funnily enough, Eve and I do know each quite well.’

‘
Why then?
Isn’t she enough?’

The thin little girl striving to hide her panic: ‘You won’t die, will you?’ The thin little girl who had stood by the back door in the dead of winter when skin puckered with
cold and holly crackled, looking up into the sky: ‘Is my real mother up there?’

‘Eve would never do it to you.’

‘I’m not going to answer that.’

She breathed in dank whiffs and the tourist smells of hot dogs and candy floss.

‘Lara,’ he began again, ‘this will change things.’ Andrew was persuasive, assured – the man who achieved the big City deals. ‘I mean between us. We’ll no longer deal with each other in the same way. I’m sorry about it, but I understand it. Completely. But I must ask you not to interfere.’

‘Sounds like a bad script,’ she said, wondering if she should call him the names surging through her head. ‘And you’re right, things will change between us. I’ll have to think about this.’ For the first time, a flicker of concern briefly crossed his features. ‘If you
had
to be with the girl, why weren’t you discreet?’

He looked at her with a bleakness that shocked her. ‘You of all people know – the therapist or whatever – sometimes things just don’t tally up. Sometimes you’re overtaken …’

Was she missing something? Did the sexual narratives of her children run to footnotes and addenda?

Tell Eve? Keep quiet?

Andrew laid a hand on the balustrade. ‘Not everything is straightforward. I wish … I wish it was.’

Grab a pair of scissors and rip away his platitudes? The savagery of her response jolted Lara. ‘Promise me you’ll never hurt her.’

His gaze slotted past her to the river. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘What I’m asking? Of course, you’ll hurt her. We always hurt people, even when we love them to distraction. We hurt the people we live with and love but usually,
hopefully
, without intention. What I should be asking is, are you
serious
about Eve’s well-being? If so, what are you doing?’

He didn’t answer.

Enough
, she thought, and turned to go. ‘I don’t know what to say to you any more, or how I’ll deal with you either.’

‘Nor I you,’ he said. ‘But we’ll have to try.’

As walked off, he called after her, ‘Lara.’

Reluctantly, she halted. ‘What?’

‘
Are
you going to tell Eve?’

‘I’ll leave you to worry about that,’ she said.

She met Robin at the designated bar. He noted at once that something was wrong. ‘You OK?’

‘I think so.’

‘You don’t look it, Lara. Can we dispense with the polite bit? Life is short.’ He made her sit down at an empty table. ‘I’m going to buy you a glass of the lightest and fruitiest wine I can lay my hands on.’

He headed for the bar. She lectured herself on maternal ethics. (1) Do not pry into your children’s lives, particularly not their sex lives. (2) Remember, their sex lives are infinitely more exciting and ambitious than their parents’. (3) She knew nothing.

She knew nothing
. Except … she knew something of
betrayal. She had sampled humiliation and lived with the kind of regret that, after a while, became a prison. In her work she had confronted deceptions, become intimate with the stratagems to which people could resort, the things they hid and pretended did not exist.

‘The wine’s gorgeous,’ she told Robin, after downing a mouthful.

It worked chemically, and raised her spirits, plus Robin’s shirt was a shade of blue she loved – Wedgwood with a touch of Greek summer sky.

‘Does my shirt please you, Lara? It’s got all your attention.’ His eyes danced. ‘Should I be jealous of it?’

Her smile felt stiff. ‘It does please me. It reminds me of sailing over the Aegean. The sort of day when the islands come at you out of the heat mist and it’s blue and hot and you think, I
am
in the land of the gods.’ Alcohol skittered through her system. ‘The children have never got over the day I hired the speedboat in Skopelos. It took years off their lives. But the sky was the colour of your shirt.’

‘That’s better.’ He balanced a bowl of crisps on his good hand. ‘These are apparently hand-cut by a virgin, or some such. Very special. Eat up because I diagnose low blood sugar.’ He watched her bite into one. After a minute, he said, ‘I’m good at listening.’

‘As if you need to say that.’

‘Even so …’

She raised her eyes to his. ‘It would help. But it’s confidential.’

‘As if
you
need to say that.’

She struggled to release the words and he took her hand. ‘Go on.’

Her hand lay in his. Flesh on flesh. Touch on touch. How long since someone had comforted her in that way?

She imagined Eve walking along the Embankment with the sun pointing fingers of light along her path.
I’m looking forward to my new
life, Mum
.
Apart from Dorothea, that is
. She imagined her swinging her arms, enjoying the simple sensations of air and exercise, tugging up the sleeves of her jacket. She imagined Eve slithering to a halt, her hand flying up to her mouth and her gasp of distress.