The Lives of Women (29 page)

I ended up taking the afternoon off, we went drinking and then we went to bed. The next day, he said, ‘How do you feel?'

‘Hungover,' I said.

‘I know. But do you feel – you know, awkward…?'

‘Awkward?'

‘Embarrassed in any way?'

I thought for a moment and said, ‘No, actually. Do you?'

And he said, ‘Not in the least.'

And then we nearly fell out of the bed laughing.

I called in sick – my first sick day ever – even though everyone had seen us go off together and knew exactly what Miss Tightass had been up to. I just didn't care. We stayed in bed all day. We stayed in bed the following day, and I would have stayed for many days more, only he had to go back to work on a construction site in Queens and so I went back to the restaurant.

 

We were together for almost six months. During that time, we often talked about Agatha and everything that had happened. We talked about it a lot. It became a sort of project, each of us bringing a little something to it every time we met. But we moved slowly. I only knew so much, Michael even less. And of course, there was that one thing I could never tell him. Even so, neither of us knew the full story. Nobody did – except maybe Agatha.

We asked each other questions. I asked how his parents found out and about their reaction. He told me that his mother took the call in the middle of the night. The call came from my father. A short while later, Mr Caudwell knocked on the door with news from the hospital.

‘Then there was that meeting in your house,' Michael said.

‘There were three meetings. One with all the parents and us. Another one with just the fathers – and me.'

‘What was that like?'

‘Oh, Jesus! A mini court case with all these questions over and over. Then I was sent to my room. They were afraid, though. I could see that. Afraid of the scandal, the newspapers. The legal implications – as Caudwell and my father kept saying. The final meeting was between Serena and my father.'

‘You ran away,' Michael said. ‘I remember, everyone out with flashlights, looking for you all over the valley.'

‘Jonathan told them where to find me.'

‘Then you were gone.'

‘Then I was gone, off in a taxi with Serena and Patty.'

 

One night we were walking home from a restaurant and Michael asked me if it was true that Karl Donegan was the father of Agatha's child.

I said, ‘Well, she was always in his house.'

‘But does that mean he's the father?'

I shrugged. ‘Everyone thought so, anyhow.'

‘Did you?'

I said, ‘I suppose…'

I was glad we were out of the restaurant, that I was walking beside him when he asked me instead of facing him across a table. It was the only deliberate lie I ever told him.

 

One afternoon in bed – almost always in bed – he told me about the Shillmans. A few days after I left with Serena and Patty, they
left; first the neighbourhood, and then about a week afterwards they were at the airport and heading for a new life in London, where his father had managed to find another job. The week in between was spent in a country hotel about an hour's drive away from their own house. They took two rooms. Rachel and Mrs Shillman slept in one. Danny, Mr Shillman and Michael took the other. Rachel never stopped crying the whole time they were there. He never knew if his parents went back to the house – it wasn't discussed. But his father did go out a lot during that time. The car was sold; he spent a lot of time on the phone. Eventually, he found a job.

‘It's not a patch on my old job,' he heard his father tell his mother, ‘but it's a fresh start.'

‘Is it?' his mother said. ‘Oh, is it, really?'

He remembered this because it was one of the few conversations his parents had during that time. One way or another, the whole thing was a big strain on their marriage. About a year after they moved to London, they split up.

 

In the end, it was an argument over Mrs Shillman, of all people, that would break us up. Marvellous Martha, and I sticking up for her. Michael was telling me about the split. She was the one to leave the house. Rachel was left to take care of the family. His father really hit the bottle then, ran out of money, eventually gave up working altogether, died a few years later.

He had already told me how Rachel was an overweight nurse living in Australia and how Danny was something of a drifter but
for the past two months had been working as a doorman in a bar in Barcelona.

‘And your mother?' I asked.

‘She still lives in London.'

‘Do you see her?'

‘When I have to. I find it too much having to listen to her rewrite history. She joined AA, you know. They tell them they need to look after themselves before they can look after anyone else. They allow them complete exoneration. It's okay that you fucked everyone up while you were drinking. But you can also swan off and let everyone else clean up all your shit. I sometimes think it gave her the excuse she'd always been waiting for – to leave us.'

‘I don't think you should blame your mother for everything,' I said.

‘She fucked off. Danny was only a little boy. My father was a good man up till then.'

‘I just don't think it's fair to say she's completely to blame.'

‘Oh, what the fuck do you know about it?' he said.

And that was pretty much that.

 

Michael is still my friend. I can call him if I want – as long as I call him in work and not at home: his wife doesn't care for me. I can meet him for an occasional coffee. He is someone who understands me. We haven't gone to bed in years – we never did after we broke up – and there have been many men between my sheets since then. But yet in a way we have remained intimate. In many ways we are more intimate now than we were when we used to lie naked
sniffing each other and screwing around the clock. Michael knows me as much as anyone could. He knows the bits I keep hidden, even from myself. Maybe that's what bothers his wife.

I wipe my little tears for Michael, flap the side of the quilt over my legs and stare up at my little scrap of the sky. I wonder if I could call him now and what time it is in New York and if it's snowing. And then, like the dog at my feet, I'm asleep.

When I come back downstairs, I'm not sure how much later, I discover my list is missing. The kitchen is so tidy, there is no point in looking but I do anyway: in the drawers, then the cupboards, then between the pages of my mother's old cookery books, which have, despite my note, been neatly inserted back into their box. I try the kitchen bin – empty: the pouch of a new black plastic bag neatly puckered inside.

On the table, the large brown envelope sits alone, surrounded by shiny laminated wood; the crest of the American lawyers stamped on the top right-hand corner. There is no way my father could have missed it.

Cursing Mrs Larkin, I go out to the yard and begin rummaging through the recycling bin that's supposed to be exclusively for waste paper. I know my father can see me through the French doors, but I don't care. I want my list. Eventually, I do find it, soiled and stinking in a plastic bag in the other bin along with the everyday garbage.

I pinch the corner of it and shake it out. It's my list.
My
list.
I take it back inside, smooth it out, brush off a few tealeaves, mop a damp stain with a paper towel.

I take the rest of the groceries out of the bag and put them away for tomorrow's recipes: lemons, unsalted butter, a lobe of foie gras. Then I unwrap the two new ramekin dishes I've bought for the soufflé. I remove the fish from the fridge: a soft, cold, futile pile on my hand. I open it out on the kitchen table and Mr Turbot, in his brown speckled coat, shows me a sulky profile. I could throw him out. Or I could cook him anyway. It's a large fish, too big for one – but if I don't cook it tonight, it stays on the list.

Shallots, white wine vinegar. Knife. I lift the enamel pot out of the cupboard.

Piano notes strike into the house and I hear his brisk fingers trot up and down the flights of scales. I fetch the ice bucket and pile in the cubes. By the time I open the sitting-room door, I'm walking through the first fragile rays of Debussy's moonlight.

I place the glass down beside him and he stops playing.

‘You're not having one yourself tonight?' he asks and I shake my head.

‘Keeping a clear head then?'

And I nod my head.

He takes a sip from his drink. ‘That turbot,' he says, ‘if you're still making it, I might try a bit – that is if you don't mind.'

‘Not in the least,' I say.

As I leave the room, I casually say, ‘I have some papers from my lawyers in New York. I wonder if you'd mind taking a look at them later on?'

‘Not in the least,' he says, echoing my own reply.

*

I open the fish along the spine and begin to ease the fillets from the bone. It's been a while since I've performed such a task and I need to hold my nerve. Behind me, the piano music is steady and measured.

When I was a child, I believed no one could play the piano like my father. I used to think that, instead of prancing around courtrooms in silly wigs and gowns, he should be playing on a concert stage or at least have his own television programme. I know now that he is a competent pianist: he plays safe but he plays without distinction.

I stop working the knife for a moment while I listen to him enter and then scramble through that tricky batch of notes at that last bend in the piece, and I find myself worrying for him. It's unlikely he'll falter or make a mistake – he has practised this piece so many times in his life, even more in recent days. But he plays it as if he is searching for something and I think, now, that is what makes me uneasy.

I want to go into him and tell him what Simon Fischer said to me a long time ago – ‘It's not the moonlight that makes the music, honey, but the sea that moves beneath it.'

But then, there are many things I would like to be able to tell him. Many things I wish he would tell me. We are leaving so much unsaid between us, and it feels mutually disrespectful somehow. As if I'm handing him a bag of my dirty underwear and he is handing me a bag of his.

I stand back and look down at my own little piece of work laid out on the slab. I lift a roll of green flecked butter in my hand,
insert it under the turbot's dank skin, pleased and more than a little proud that I have managed to keep it intact.

 

After dinner, I take away the clean plate on the tray and bring him the envelope. By the time I come back in, maybe ten minutes later with his evening mug of tea, he is sitting at his desk, specs down on nose, pen angled in one hand, thumb pressing down on the top of it, click after urgent click.

I go out to the car, bring in the final bag from today's shopping expedition and take it up to my room. There, I remove a new hard-backed journal from the bag, followed by a new ballpoint pen. It feels nicely weighted between my fingers. The journal smells reassuringly clean. I sit at the dressing-table and open it.

The dog wanders off; the dog wanders back. He lies down and sighs out a fart that appals the air. I open the bedroom window and send him downstairs in disgrace. He rambles through the house, comes back up the stairs, manoeuvres himself stiffly down on the rug and sleeps. And still I have nothing.

Through the ceiling I hear the first self-important notes announce the arrival of the nine o'clock news. Some time later these notes strike out again, this time in farewell. And still I am here, and could be here till morning, cowering over the wide open space of this journal, my pen poised and, at the same time, paralysed.

As I sit here, I begin to feel a – by now familiar – prickly sensation heating up under my skin. I look into the dressing-table mirror, ready to catch it in the act. There's my fading skin, the tweaks of grey at my temple, the prickles starting to crawl across
my chest and in short, narrow patches up along my neck. I remember another occasion when I looked in a mirror in this room after Agatha had said something to embarrass me. An adolescent blush then, so forceful I thought it would blow my whole head open. It seems like such a short time: the first flush of youth to the first flush of age.

I catch a glint of my mother's expression in my eyes: a sort of gloating. And now I am looking at her, looking at me, through a small window in a darkened room.

I go back to the bed, arrange my pillows around me, draw up my knees and begin.

My name is Elaine.