Daughters (24 page)

‘
Louis
,’ she said angrily. ‘That’s his name.’

‘Mary and Louis.’

‘But it was my body and Mary’s that failed, Bill, not yours.’

There had been the stupid tape of womb music she had planned to play to Louis. The thud of her system and his heartbeat, the only companions he ever knew. There had been the equally stupid furry blackbird, which, when squeezed, replicated its song. There was the tiny Babygro in blue and white stripes, with ‘Ahoy There’ stamped on the chest.

Lara closed her eyes.
Think sane, sensible, garden things.
She bent down and placed a finger under the spiky petals of a daisy. It felt as light as a baby’s breath on her flesh. ‘
I
couldn’t carry Louis to term.’

‘There were too many coincidences.’ His voice sounded a long way above her.

She addressed the daisy. (So ordinary. So beautifully structured.) ‘You must forget all that, Bill.’ She straightened up. ‘Really. It’s time.’

‘OK. OK.’

They were now filing alongside the stream – and she knew, absolutely knew, that Sarah was watching them from the house. She took a deep breath and asked him about his long-term plans for the garden. He replied with a description of restructuring and planting, which she only half grasped – for the wedding he would do this and that; afterwards he planned big relocations – but it
was good to hear his voice rise with anticipation and pleasure.

When they reaching the landing-stage, he halted. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me about something.’

Actually, she had wanted to discuss Andrew and Eve, to ask his opinion about what she had seen.
As Eve’s father, what would you do?
But she had to ask something else first. Now. The rest could come later. ‘I read a book the other day about old houses and their gardens. Apparently, there was a tradition of planting a guardian tree in the north corner of the garden. It was supposed to protect the house from harm, and ward off the cold. I thought …’ she placed a hand on his arm ‘… you … we could do something similar for Louis.’

He took time to answer. ‘I’ll think about it.’ He sounded clipped and upset and she knew he wanted the conversation to finish. She couldn’t blame him.

‘Promise.’

‘I promise.’

She brushed wet fingers down her coat. There was one more thing to get off her chest and then it would be done. ‘I hated you for leaving me, Bill.’ Her fingers tingled against the material. ‘But I hated you more for not dealing with his death. And myself. There. I’ve told you.’

She tried always to avoid replaying the images of Louis’s birth. When she did, it was to reprise Bill blundering away, out of the ward, down the corridor, leaving her marooned in silence. She had concentrated on the jug of water by the bed, the mound her legs made under the
sheets, the picture hanging on the wall of lush purple moorland – anything – so that she didn’t give in to the scream of despair and guilt.

She added, ‘But I understand better now.’

‘Can we stop this?’ he said.

‘Go and find Sarah.’ She smiled politely at him. ‘After the battle of the flowers, she’ll need reassuring.’

She was heading back along the stream when he called something after her. She couldn’t make out the words and didn’t turn.

Her feet and ankles were damp and muddy but she didn’t care. In the water, the weed was sucked this way and that. She thought: Not only does an unhealed wound sap strength, it poisons too.

She and Bill had been poisoned.

Her foot slipped on a branch lying across the path. She stumbled. Fox fire darted up her leg and the impact shifted the branch aside, revealing ants tracing rapid geometric patterns. Rubbing her ankle, she stooped to observe them. Clever creatures. The mêlée was purposeful. They knew where they were going. A few seized pieces of food (almost bigger than they were) in their mandibles and dragged them away to a place of safety. The rest quick-marched in a column into the grass.

Regroup and save. Not a bad principle.

Carefully, Lara eased the branch back into place. If hers had been a place of dissonance – and its echoes were still audible – she could ensure that the ants kept their home.

The night before the Harvard interview, Maudie caught the train to London, then made her way down a street lined with expensive but uninspiring hotels and met her father in the Plantagenet Bar at the Sussex. On the journey up, a railway vista – cuttings, back gardens, sidings and suburban stations – had slipped past and she had watched it with some irritation. She didn’t want to see her father.

She spotted him at once in a chair by the window. He got up and kissed her. ‘What will you drink?’

‘Orange juice. I need to sleep well.’

He ordered it, and pushed a bowl of upmarket nuts towards her.

‘Is this advice for tomorrow?’ She grimaced. ‘More advice?’

‘Yes and no. I thought I should touch base.’

The bar was non-flashy. Comfortable chairs scattered around the room. Polished glass tables. ‘Are you enjoying Membury?’

His eyes lit up. ‘Very much.’

‘But the important thing is that you and Sarah are happy.’

His face softened. ‘Yes, that. It
is
important.’

She forgave him a lot for that answer.

‘Did you always know that Sarah was going to inherit?’

He hunted down a cashew in the bowl. ‘No. Crucially, before you jump to any conclusions, neither did Sarah.’

‘Would I jump to conclusions?’ She was beginning to enjoy herself.

‘Knowing you …’

‘But you don’t know me.’

He shrugged. ‘You ran away to me, Maudie.’

‘That was
years
ago.’

‘I took it … wrongly, perhaps … After the initial shock I was pleased you’d come to me.’

It wasn’t that she had hated her mother. It was more irritation that had screwed up into such a pitch that she couldn’t stand one more day of
Is that essay done? Why didn’t you eat your supper? Do you ever brush your hair?
But, just as much, she couldn’t take any longer the noise and crowdedness of home: the constant attrition on the ears, the lack of space, even the crumbs on the kitchen floor. She longed for peace, for clean white rooms and to be autonomous, which made her different from her half-sisters. She wanted a room to herself and the peace to read all the books she wanted.

Packing her rucksack, sneaking out of the house when she knew her father would be back from work, running down the road as fast as the rucksack would allow, knowing perfectly well that her mother would be frantic when she discovered she was missing. Her father opening his front door – at that stage he was between Violet and Sarah.
His face
. The terrible realization that she had made a mistake, but refusing to acknowledge it. ‘You will take me in,’ she had insisted. ‘I won’t live with
her
 …’

‘If I remember, you called your mother quite a few names.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh?

‘Uncaring. Selfish. There were others. You also said she hated you and loved the others.’

Maudie peered at her father. ‘And you’ve come all the way up to London to tell me that? It wasn’t exactly true, you know. I played you off against each other. That’s what teenagers do. If they spot a weak link they throw dynamite at it. If they’re given a chance to cause trouble, they take it.’

Hindsight was ever golden.

Memories of that episode (‘aberration’ would be a better word) were uneasy. All the to-ing and fro-ing and emotional upheaval that had gone on as her parents negotiated what to do next. She had been stubborn, hysterical, obdurate. ‘I want to live with Dad,’ she had repeated, over and over again, because she felt she could not back down, and watched, aghast, as her mother dropped her head into her hands and cried.

It was as if a tempest had struck the household, catching up Lara’s heartbreak in its path. Jasmine and Eve refused to talk to her. With every day that passed, Maudie’s apprehensions deepened as she contemplated the consequences of her action.

Such a mistake. The most basic mechanics of living eluded her father, who showed no interest in learning. No food in the house, no clean sheets, no Cif cream for the bath or sink. Worse, she hadn’t known she cared about these things until she didn’t have them. Her vision of a
cool, white, ordered world vanished in a tumble of dirty laundry on the floor and hairs blocking the plughole.
And
it transpired that her father did not understand her any more than anyone else did. Hardly surprising: she didn’t understand herself.

‘Can’t you be nice to Mum?’ her ten-year-old self asked him, as he tried to throw together a supper of scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes.

‘I am nice to her.’ He beat the eggs with a fork. ‘Do I put milk in this?’ He answered his question by pouring in a quarter of the bottle. The result was a greyish-yellow liquid.

‘Jas and Eve said you left Mum in the bedroom all by herself, crying.’

‘My God,’ Bill said. ‘I have the worst press in the world.’ He caught her by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me. I may be faithless, but I’m not heartless. Nor am I criminal. I made sure your mother was looked after. Now I make sure that I know as much about you all as I can get out of Mum.’ He pressed his forehead against hers. ‘I may not live with you but I need to know about you. Your lessons, your friends, the whys and wherefores …’

She stared up into his handsome face. For the first time, she experienced doubt and worry about someone whom hitherto she had trusted and certainly not questioned. ‘But you left Mummy and us alone.’

He set a plate of scrambled eggs and caramelized tomatoes in front of her. ‘Time you shut up, Maudie. You aren’t old enough to understand.’

Eventually she had repacked her rucksack and returned to her mother and sisters. The sensation of clean sheets
on her bed had been exquisite. And the cramped, noisy house? So comforting, so her home.

Bill had failed to connect with his daughter, but neither had she connected with him. The sisters questioned her closely: ‘What sort of things does he do?’; ‘Does he talk about us?’; ‘Did he let you do anything you wanted?’

To the latter she replied, mendaciously, ‘He did.’ To their first question she said, ‘Lots of things.’ But the truth was that she didn’t really know.

Because she was clever, it was easy – ridiculously so – to bait him from a distance. ‘Don’t let Dad know,’ she would instruct her sisters, about whatever was currently being decided or when there was some ongoing problem. ‘Or, if you do,
don’t
tell him why.’

‘Don’t tell Dad,’ she instructed her mother, after her GCSE results came through, all top grade.

‘Why on earth not?’ Lara’s eyebrows shot up. ‘He’ll be so proud.’

‘
Don’t
tell him, Mum.’

Lara was ironing sheets with a rolling, swooping movement, designed to get it over and done with as soon as possible. ‘He’ll have to know sooner or later. And I would have thought you’d want to tell him.’

‘No. Not.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because it will thwart him.’

Her mother set the iron down with a thump. It hissed in protest. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘The Stasi should take lessons from you, darling.’

Bill sipped some whisky and rolled it around his mouth.
She knew he knew that she knew he was watching her – a situation that was cubed by the reflections in a long mirror by the bar. ‘I want to be sure you’re making the right choices, Maudie.’

She noticed that he had had his front tooth recapped (Sarah?). ‘I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think so.’

‘You sound so old,’ he said.

‘I am.’ (She wasn’t
so
sure about that.) The ice cubes clinked in her glass. ‘If you’re asking have I gone into the detail, worked out the finances, et cetera, I have.’ She raised balled fists. ‘Try me.’

Her father sighed. ‘Is it so odd that I’m concerned?’

Her answer was swift. ‘Frankly, yes.’

He winced. ‘One day, God willing, you’ll know about being a parent …’

Maudie slitted her eyes and her father’s figure diminished satisfactorily. After the running-away episode, he had seemed different to her. No longer was he the person for whom she yearned, to whom she turned. He still loomed large – but she viewed him through a haze of disappointment. Later, she even began to think of him as menacing, a malign presence hunched over her thoughts and ambitions.

Placing her glass on the table with a thump, she asked, ‘Did you, do you, ever have nightmares about leaving a young mother with three of your children?’

‘The prisoner in the dock braced himself for questions, cross-examination and damnation,’ he said lightly. ‘Since you ask, yes. It wasn’t straightforward. There were things. Private things.’

‘Will I never get to the truth?’ she cried.

Her father was silent.

She thought of her mother. For years so stick thin she had been almost transparent. Hair badly chopped. Her habit of saying, ‘I’m fine, don’t worry,’ when, clearly, she wasn’t. Her occasional collapse into real illness. At those times, help had to be conjured out of nowhere. Aunts and friends were summoned, and the sisters knew they were in for a period when
Mum can’t be pestered
.

She hated seeing her mother at bay. When illness hit Lara, it always seemed so
grave.
Older and wiser, she came to understand that Lara’s collapses were an attempt to escape her lot. (For a few hours, at least.) Yellow and silent, she lay beached on the pillows with a range of medicaments lined up like tubular bells on the bedside table.
Nerves
, said her grandmother when she was alive.
Stress
, said the doctor.

Lara was obdurate and interfering, which, Maudie finally concluded, was vital to her survival. Older and wiser now, she understood that her mother was far too nosy and far too loving of her daughters to allow herself to go under. She admired that.

‘Of course there were private things, Dad. There always are,’ she said coldly. ‘Like you sleeping with Violet. But I still think you shouldn’t have left her.’

Then he said something that took the wind out of her sails. ‘I’m not going to give up on you, Maudie.’