Things I Want My Daughters to Know (18 page)

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She shook herself out of the diversion. “Anyway, the point is, they moved away that summer, before Amanda was born. It must have been him. . . .”

“Calm down, Jennifer—that’s a bit of a wild leap, don’t you think?”

“Think about it, the timing fits.”

“So what?”

“What do you mean, so what? This guy could be Amanda’s dad!”

“Yeah, and he might not be. Besides, what’s the relevance of that? It’s a quarter-century later.”

“What’s the relevance of
that
?”

Jennifer’s voice was getting shriller and louder. Lisa wanted to calm the situation down.

“Listen, Jen. It’s not like Amanda was close to Dad. They barely even knew each other, really. If she’s ever considered a man to be her father, it’s Mark, and this changes nothing about that. I can’t see what good it could do, raking up the past, naming names, especially when you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I wasn’t naming names. I was just saying . . .”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Now Jennifer looked resentful and somehow hurt. Lisa was glad that she had decided to tell her, rather than leave it to Amanda. If Amanda was planning on telling anyone at all apart from her.

Jennifer could be so brittle.

“What do you think about it?” she was asking Lisa now. “I mean, about Mum. Leave this guy out of it. . . .”

“About Mum?” Lisa was a little sideswiped by the question. She wasn’t sure how to answer it, being reasonably certain that her moral skew would be different from Jennifer’s.

She took a deep breath. “I think Mum and Dad were unhappy for a long time. We know they were, in fact—we were there. Dad cheated on Mum. I suppose I think good for her, to be truthful. I hope it granted her a bit of happiness and restored a bit of self-confidence. I think it was . . . colossally stupid to get pregnant, and if she were here I’d tell
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her so myself. And I think it was a bit cowardly, keeping it to herself all these years. It meant we all carried on being nasty to Dad, thinking he was the real villain. All it proves about Mum is that she was human, and capable of making mistakes. And I wish she’d trusted us enough to tell us, at some point. Because I wouldn’t have judged her. And I’d have felt a bit kinder toward Dad, and Amanda would know who she was, and she’d have had the chance to ask questions, and now she can’t. But if you’re asking me whether I think less of Mum now that I know this, the answer is no. She was a person, Jen, and people aren’t perfect, and she wasn’t perfect. And that’s okay. It all happened a very long time ago. I can live with it.”

Jennifer didn’t speak.

“Can you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

After they’d gone their separate ways, Lisa realized Jennifer hadn’t said anything more about Stephen. She was very good at that. Being evasive. She didn’t know what was wrong between the two of them. And she guessed Jennifer didn’t want her to.

Not that she had time to worry about Jennifer as well as everything else. You were supposed to start the New Year with a clear, fresh head, weren’t you, but she felt like the sky was getting lower and lower, coming down on her. She wasn’t sleeping well, waking at about 3:00 a.m.

every morning, unable to doze off again, her brain already fast-forward-ing, and that hardly ever happened. Amanda had gone a bit quiet on her since the text saying she was going away for a bit. That was vintage Amanda. She didn’t know how her mum hadn’t gone crazy, wondering where she was, and how she was; and in the same breath, Lisa pondered why she now felt somehow compelled to take on the mantle of worry about her sister, when no one had asked her to. Oldest sibling syndrome.

The curse of the firstborn.

Andy. Andy. She realized she was wandering aimlessly around now.

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A noncommittal shopper at the best of times, she was lost in a sea of glassware and cutlery and table linens. She didn’t want any of this stuff.

She felt in the back of her pocket for her car parking ticket and made for the nearest lift that would get her out of there.

Once safe and alone in her car, she rested her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes so she couldn’t see the impatient drivers, their cars filing past at two miles per hour, waiting for her to create an empty space.

For the first time in ages, she let herself really think about what she’d done. To Andy. It was always in the wings, on the periphery of her thoughts these days, but mostly she kept it away, refused to confront it head-on. Now, talking about Mum, she couldn’t stop it.

She had had an affair herself, of course. She was amazed no one had guessed. In her mind, the scarlet letter had been neon, and flashing.

How else could she have become so practiced at the justification, and the excuses, and the mitigation, if she hadn’t spent months talking herself through the same things? The mantra of the unfaithful.

It was over. It was so over. But it had happened. No one knew, except for the two of them. She had gotten away with it. She was supposed to do the justification thing and move on, forget about it. Mum had clearly tried to do just that. But Lisa guessed that Amanda’s letter proved what she was beginning to believe must be true—that you could never forget about it, or really forgive yourself. However great the justification, however much time might pass . . .

His name was Christopher Absalom. He had been managing a new development of town houses and apartments, out in the part of the East End of London that was being gentrified. Her firm had won the contract to decorate the show apartments, and she’d met him when she went out there for a site visit. He had made her wish, the first time she’d laid eyes on him, that she wasn’t wearing a hard hat.

It had been purely physical. What did that mean? She’d asked herself that question, confessing out loud to herself alone in the car. Purely
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physical. It meant she didn’t want anything from him, apart from what he gave her in bed. Apart from the sensations of his hands and his mouth and his body on hers. She didn’t want him to really like her. Or to get to know her. Or to introduce her to his mother. She just wanted him to want to fuck her. Purely physical. As if that made it better. For Andy, it would probably make it worse. Chris had had that twinkle in his eye that had always worked for her. He’d worn jeans fashionably low on his hips, and she’d glimpsed a muscled, tanned stomach beneath his T-shirt when he raised his arm, pointing at something above their heads.

The whole thing had smelled of her youth. A meeting moved to the pub, others had melted away, an invitation had been extended, and accepted. She’d put in a call to the machine at home, from the ladies’

room—the meeting was overrunning, Andy should eat dinner without her, she didn’t know what time she’d be back. She was surprised at how easily the lie came out of her mouth. She’d gone back to Chris’s place.

He lived in an old warehouse in Shoreditch. Just the space itself was sexy—high ceilings, brick walls; it was anonymous. He had almost no furniture. A couple of worn leather armchairs, an almost empty book-case, a vast white bed, unmade and vaguely grubby.

The development took four months to complete. It was last summer.

Lisa had sex with Chris regularly, once or twice a week all that time. She never fell asleep with him, she never stayed the night, and she never left a single thing that belonged to her in his home. They never ate dinner in a restaurant or watched a film together. She never met a friend of his or heard about one. By September, she knew him no better than she had in June. She knew how every inch of him looked and tasted and felt. But she didn’t know what the last book he’d read was, and she didn’t know where he grew up. He didn’t know, while they were fucking each other (and that was the only way she could ever describe it, even in her own mind) in the big leather armchairs, and the freestanding bath, and on the big white bed, that she lived with a guy. Or that her mother was ill. If he’d known, the time that she’d shown up, naked beneath a thin white 134 e l i z a b e t h

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cotton dress, and made him touch her, pulling at his jeans before they even got out of the lift, that her mother had died two days before, he might have thought she was messed up. Maybe she was.

There was no discussion about it coming to an end, as there had been no discussion about it beginning. She finished the apartments, and she stopped showing up.

She didn’t even understand it herself. The behavioral pattern was familiar. Before Andy, there’d been a lot of guys. At university, at work.

She liked men, she liked sex, she liked to have fun. But she hadn’t ever been unfaithful to Andy. Until the first time, with Chris, she didn’t think she was capable of it. But it wasn’t just once. She had kept on doing it.

She couldn’t tell herself it was just lust. It wasn’t that simple. The sex was good, that was undeniable. She liked that Chris didn’t really want to talk to her. She liked that Chris was happy to keep it on one level, that he saw no need for their emotional relationship to evolve as their physical one did. But she knew it wasn’t about Chris at all. It was all so . . . straightforward and simple. Empty and clean. When he was inside her, his eyes bored into hers, but they saw nothing, because they weren’t looking for any of that. He did it because it was sexy, because he wanted to gauge her physical reaction to his touches, his tempo, his rhythm. He didn’t care to see anything beyond that. So it had been okay to stare back.

It was about Andy. It was about Andy loving her. It was about Andy wanting to marry her and make a life with her.

It was almost as if, by sleeping with Chris, she was trying to prove herself unworthy. Not good enough. Or trying to hold him at arm’s length . . .

She’d rehearsed telling Andy. Decided against it. It had ended, and she’d gotten away with it. He hadn’t caught her. No one knew. He never needed to. But it hadn’t gone away. Guilt gnawed. It was always in the way. It probably always would be.

She’d nearly told her mum one day. She’d come to visit after work
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one day, not long after it had started, with Chris. Barbara was in the garden when she arrived, sitting on one of the Adirondack chairs with her back to Lisa. She’d had a plaid blanket on her knees, and the blanket, with all its connotations, had made Lisa want to cry. As if she knew, Barbara had pulled it off when she saw her daughter. “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone, come sit by me. . . .” Lisa had kissed her cool cheek, caught the Fracas, and something else, unfamiliar and medical, and sat on the grass at her mother’s feet, Barbara’s hand grasp-ing hers at the side of her neck. And she nearly told her then. But the

“not nice” was about her, and she couldn’t do it. And Barbara had died before it ended.

If she’d known—about Amanda—she might have told Mum. And it might have helped.

Amanda

“How are you doing, kid?”

“I’m all right. How are you doing?”

Amanda had come to visit after work, on the train. Mark had picked her up at the station, when he’d finished at the office, and now they were driving home. It was a wet, cold hibernating sort of a night, and he felt a father’s relief and gratitude that two of his daughters would be under his roof tonight. Rain pelted against the car windows and on the soft top. It was good to see her.

Mark shrugged. “It does get easier. I knew it would. Time. Passes, doesn’t it?”

“I’m glad.”

“I am. Most of the time. Sometimes I resent it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sounds daft, I know. But it getting easier means she’s getting further away from me. Does that make sense?”

It did. Amanda held her stepfather’s hand for a moment, on the gear stick, and he squeezed her fingers.

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“So, enough of the wallowing. Tell me about you? You’re still in England, for a start. Must be some sort of record. What’s that all about?!”

“Ah . . .”

“This bloke, I presume . . .”

Amanda raised her eyebrows at him.

“Sorry—hope you don’t mind. Hannah told me.”

“Big mouth! I don’t mind, no. It wasn’t a secret. God knows I went on about him, to the others, when we were all home, like an idiot. But, no. It isn’t a bloke. That’s over, I think.”

“I’m sorry—touchy subject?”

“Not really.” She tried to sound breezy. But it was, of course. “Just a bit of fun.” That wasn’t true. “Actually, I am thinking of going away again.” That, at least, was.

“That’s more like it. Where, when . . . Details, please. Let me have a little vicarious globetrot on this truly foul night.”

Amanda laughed. “You make it sound like you don’t have your own passport. Actually, when did you last have a holiday?” She looked at his face, lit by streetlights. “Now that I think of it, you haven’t been away for ages. Not since Mum . . .”

“This is true. Explains my pallor, at least.”

“And those baggy eyes.”

“Charming.”

“Hey—I don’t do soft soap. But why don’t you go away, the two of you?”

“I’ve got work. Hannah’s got school. . . .”

“Pah. You get holidays, she gets holidays. You
should
get away.”

“You’re right. We should.” Mark realized he hadn’t thought about a holiday. Which was odd. They’d always had holidays, before Barbara was ill. She’d been leisure director, of course. Planned everything. Booked everything. Packed. Put the SPF 30 on everyone’s shoulders.

“I guess your mum just always took care of all that.”

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“Well, you know what, she isn’t going to anymore. Does that mean you’re never going on a holiday again?”

“No, of course not. What’s this—tough love?!”

“If you like. So, that’s sorted. I’ll help you. At home. We’ll go online and find you a fortnight in Torremolinos. . . .”