Daughters (3 page)

‘I’m setting up a branch of the business in the local town. And Sarah is transferring.’

‘Lara,’ Sarah intervened, ‘here’s the tricky bit. We wanted to talk to you about financial arrangements. This is going to be expensive for us.’

‘It needs doing up,’ Bill offered quietly.

She saw what was coming. Guttering. Windows. Dry rot. ‘Of course, a house like that will eat up money.’

‘I can’t continue with the same level of payments to you.’ Bill was uneasy and on the back foot. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to renegotiate.’

Sarah opened a drawer, produced a spreadsheet from a file and placed it in front of Lara. With immaculate presentation, it spelled out an altered future.

‘I see.’ Bill was proposing to reduce the monthly amount to the extent that it would affect her mortgage repayments.

She stared at them. Both of them imperfectly masked their concern.

‘Bill, I’m not sure … We agreed in court that you would support Maudie until she was launched.’

He pointed to a figure. ‘That I will do.’

Sarah said, ‘Apparently, the manor has a wonderful garden.’

Lara was ratcheting through the implications. ‘Of course you must do what’s best. Can this wait until I make other arrangements? I don’t … I don’t want to lose the house.’

‘We can’t have that,’ Bill agreed.

‘But people do.’

Startled by Sarah’s interjection, Lara looked up.

Bill turned on her. ‘Sarah!’

Lara said, ‘Shush, Bill, there’s no need. Just let me think …’

To date, Sarah had taken pains to conceal her resentment at having to underwrite a previous wife (she should count herself lucky that Mary was dead). Yet alimony
was
the devil and, after a couple of seconds, Lara forgave her.

When she and Bill had divorced, the house in north London had been sold, the money divided and used to buy two very small terraced houses at opposite ends of the same street in the unsmart end of Hackney so that the children could ferry between them. ‘Such an odd arrangement.’ Neither her mother nor her father had approved and told her so.

But it had made sense for Bill’s daughters, the little girls who were desolate at the fracture. ‘Making the best of it is
what matters,’ she had informed her parents. ‘I have to stay here and hold it together.’ At least, she and Bill had managed to keep that
promise (forget ‘for better for worse’), at first, in the grudging spirit of bitter armistice, then, as the years passed, with increasing confidence.

Sarah said, ‘Lara, please don’t think we want to be unreasonable.’

She laid her hand on Sarah’s arm. ‘Of course not.’

God help me.
How many nights had she lain awake over the years straining to push all the pieces into the jigsaw?

Bill said gently, ‘Lara?’

She wondered if he had dismissed from his memory their early days together. The tenderness, the gratitude, the perfect storms of love.

One day she might ask him.

One day, too, she must say to him,
We need to think about Louis. You did promise
.

She got to her feet. ‘Bill, Sarah, I’m truly happy about your news but I need a bit of time to reorganize.’

‘But Maudie is
grown-up
,’ said Sarah, helplessly.

She knew from his expression that Bill was thinking, I must not be unfair – and the old, stubborn regret raised its head.

He said, ‘We could always reschedule but …’

Sarah examined her nails – pearl pink and oval. Her pretty features, once so dewy and (as Lara acknowledged of her own) remaining so courtesy of age-defying moisturizer, reflected frustration. ‘But I’m sure you’ll see it’s fair.’

Of course she didn’t mean to but, at a stroke, Sarah threatened to undo the good work of ten years. Lara
couldn’t entertain that notion – not when they had got so far. She tweaked the edge of the cuff that poked out beneath the sleeve of Sarah’s black jacket. ‘You’re losing a button.’

There was a bang on the front door. It opened, then closed with a snap.

‘Dad?’ Jasmine came into the kitchen and squared up to her father. ‘When were you going to tell us, then?’

Bill ran his hand over his daughter’s dark head. ‘I’ve told you now.’

She was closely followed by Eve, who dropped bag, laptop case and packages on to the floor and tugged at Bill’s sleeve. He turned to hug her.

‘What took you so long, Dad?’ Her big eyes shone.

‘Actually, I’m a pretty fast worker,’ said Bill.

She reached up and gave him a lingering kiss on the cheek. ‘
Actually
, it’s Sarah who should be congratulated. Think of what she’s had to put up with.’

Lara observed them fondly. ‘You haven’t heard the whole of it.’

It never took much to make Eve anxious. Her tone switched. ‘Has something happened?’

Bill presented Eve with the photograph. ‘Our new home. We hope.’

Eve’s reaction was all that Bill might have hoped for. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she breathed, in the way she did when she was talking about something she rated. ‘Perfection.’

He touched her cheek. ‘Here’s the thing. I want this done and dusted and for us to be moved in by May so that …’

How slow she had been on the uptake. In a flash, Lara
read the ulterior motives behind the projected move – among them, a father wishing to be equal to the occasion.

But Eve was quick to get it. ‘You don’t mean …?’ Now she wore the glowing, happy look bestowed only on those she trusted and loved – otherwise reserved for antique furniture or a painting, objects of special desire.

Father of the bride …

‘I do mean.’ Bill sent Lara a wry look.
Do you really want to throw a
spanner into the works?
‘I’m hoping you’ll want to hold your wedding at Membury.’

Maudie, are you there?

However tired she was, Lara always made time for the weekly Facebook catch-up. Maudie was attending a sixth-form college in Winchester and living with Bill’s sister, Lucy. ‘I want to get out of London,’ she had pleaded. ‘Please let me.’

Lara had argued that Maudie was too young to leave home but Maudie had had her answer: ‘I’ll be with family, and since you have to work early in the morning and in the evenings, it makes sense.’

Lara repeated this to Jasmine, who laughed. ‘Mum, Maudie just wants to leave home.’

Maudie had always been her own person. She had been born with a placard reading ‘Do not mess with me.’ It hadn’t been easy, but when she announced that her best friend, Tess, was also going to the college, Lara had conceded defeat. Arrangements had been made. Maudie
had packed her bags and spent her terms for the past eighteen months lodging with her aunt Lucy.

‘Maudie …’

The things taught to you by having children … One, your body will never be the same again. Two, most parents are schizophrenic. Three, a sense of perspective is vital – this, courtesy of Jasmine, who had considered studying oceanography and marine biology. ‘A humpback whale’s pregnancy,’ she had informed Lara, ‘lasts twelve months and she gives birth to a calf between twelve and fourteen feet long.’ (Nothing like a few facts to put childbirth in its place.) Jasmine had also told Lara, ‘Orcas, the killer whales, maintain a strong relationship with their young throughout their lives.’

Fourth point: she was an orca mother.

‘But, in the end,’ said Jasmine, ‘the orca mother can’t keep up.’

‘I can’t bear it,’ said Lara. ‘That’s awful.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Jasmine. ‘That’s how it should be.’

Maudie … so missed. So increasingly (she sensed)
gone.

From her customary perch at the kitchen table, she could see, hanging companionably beside Eve’s willow-pattern and Jasmine’s black freebie from the local garage, Maudie’s scarlet mug, and the half-empty box of her favourite cereal, which no one else would touch.

Those were Maudie’s markers, which, in her absence, Lara cherished. She reached up and cradled the scarlet mug. A few self-indulgent tears threatened. Stupid, she knew.

Where was Maudie? Not geographically, but where in her journey? Which brought Lara to the fifth point: as
Maudie’s mother, and always wrong, she would probably be the last to know.

Lara typed:

Maudie? How did the week go? Not revising too late, I hope.

It was the sort of question she had posed over the years. First to Jasmine, then Eve. Now Maudie.

‘
Listen
to you, Mum,’ Jasmine would say. ‘Stop
fussing
.’

And Lara would reply, ‘If I was an orca you wouldn’t think twice about answering my questions.’

No wonder, in her dream, Lara was always running.

The brides – those white-clad, luminous girls of which she had been one – had known nothing. Stories about them were legion in books, poems, fable. Some had been willing, some forced. Some had died of fright and violation. Some had lived half-lives of desperation and depression. Some had flowered, if only for a time. (Lara’s story.) Others had lived unremarkably. And the ones who survived, happily or not, found themselves asking these questions of their children.

Lara needed to know if a daughter was eating and sleeping properly, wearing clean clothes, had enough money for the bus … and it was her business. Who else’s would it be? It annoyed the children. It annoyed
her.
No one volunteers for eternal sentry duty, she had pointed out more than once. No one wishes to have their senses on permanent receive mode to reassure oneself that everyone is OK.

How do you feel about the news, Maudie?

She dropped her hands into her lap. Immediately Maudie came back:

What news?

Oh, Lord. Bill had forgotten to track her down.

Your father and Sarah are getting married in the spring.

Lara pictured Maudie reading this, gazing intently at the screen through narrowed blue eyes. The shrug – used when she didn’t want to anyone to know that she was hurt.

They’re planning to move to the country. Fabulous house which S. has inherited. Your father wants Eve and Andrew to get married there. Andrew’s parents want him to get married at their house. I think she should be married in London where she lives. Don’t you? Watch this space.

Eve will do what Dad wants

came back the answer.

Maudie, Sarah wants me at the wedding but will you forgive me if I don’t go? I’ll try and explain to the others

… she was throwing sops, trusting that Maudie would feel that, on this point at least, she had been consulted first and was not the last to know …

but I wanted to explain to you before I talked to the others. I don’t want to make a big thing of it but I would prefer not to be there.

I don’t want to be there either. Dad won’t mind whether I am or not. Nor will Sarah.

It’s your father’s wedding.

It’s a formality, the straightforward Maudie replied. Only that.

In the early days after the separation, whenever Lara had met Violet – which she hated doing and avoided – she thought she spotted a gleam of amusement in Violet’s eye. The notion that Bill and Violet joked privately about her was torment.

‘Do you discuss me with Violet?’ she had once asked Bill.

‘Not really,’ he answered. He had lied. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘I thought maybe … I thought discussing me might bring you and Violet closer together.’

‘There are other things to talk about.’

She had flushed.

Of course. Of course. And she was in danger of becoming obsessed with her situation. One of the paradoxes of divorce, she had concluded, with the strange, raw vision she had developed after it, was that it did not bring liberation – far from it: the inner world of regret and obsession became a prison.

As a child, she had watched her mother pin a paper
pattern to dress material. Tongue poking between her lips, she had cut into the fabric and the edges had uncoiled like sleepy snakes, dropping to the floor. Eventually the match between pattern and material was achieved. ‘As good as
Vogue
, lovey,’ she had informed her round-eyed daughter.

But no lasting match had been achieved between her and Bill.

Jasmine had been twelve. Eve nine. Maudie almost four.

The family had sat at the breakfast table.
Two years ago, a baby had been born and died. A son
.

Food had become a burden and Lara battled to eat. Life had become a burden. She poured a glass of juice for Maudie. Maudie ignored it. Jasmine pinched Eve, who cried. A pan of milk heating on the stove boiled over and filled the kitchen with the nose-pricking smell of burned lactose. Lara observed the pan and the milk and thought, It doesn’t matter.

Eventually Bill heaved himself, slowly, heavily, to his feet and switched off the gas. Lara watched him, as tears seeped down her face. When he turned to face her, there were tears on his cheeks too and he was stiff with emotion.

Then he had told her.

He hated himself, he said, but he had to go. ‘I no longer trust you.’

‘How?’ she spat at him. ‘How could it be “for the best”?’

‘Because we can’t live like this.’ He was white with the effort of explanation. ‘You can’t because it’s destroying you. And I won’t because it’s destroying me.’

‘Don’t do this in front of the children, Bill.’

Three anxious faces were staring at him.

‘What am I thinking?’ He checked himself. ‘Of course I shouldn’t be saying this in front of them.’ He clamped his lips together.

There hadn’t been much time to think. Any time, actually. Jasmine and Eve were due on the school run, and Maudie was to be dropped at a child-minder’s. She had got them ready. Coats on. Shoes fastened. A shadowy film of silent to-ing and fro-ing across a chaotic kitchen and hallway.

When the girls were gone, they faced each other across the littered breakfast table.

‘Is there someone else, Bill?’

He sighed. ‘There wasn’t but … It’s more of a friendship. She …’

‘She what?’

‘She’s a comfort.’

‘And I’m not?’