Things I Want My Daughters to Know (32 page)

She stood up and bent over him. “You’re lovely. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Very, very welcome.”

She kissed Nancy, who stroked her head. “Thanks,” she whispered.

“I can’t believe they would do that for us.” They were
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curled into each other in Ed’s bed. The wind was howling outside, and the branches on a tree near the window tapped against the glass, but their minds were already in Rio.

“I can. It’s very them.”

“So you’re just a spoiled rich bastard, are you?”

He pinched her bottom. “And you’re just a spoiled rich bastard’s girlfriend.”

“Ouch.”

“Not really. I mean, I’ve had jobs since I was a teenager. They paid for college and stuff, but not for extras. I didn’t get a new car or anything.

They’re not interested in that kind of thing. It’s the travel thing that excites them, I think.”

“And me.”

“We’ll go into town tomorrow, get some
Rough Guides.
And we should check out flights.” She could hear the excitement in Ed’s voice. It would be
so
nice, traveling together. She’d always traveled alone. She might have hooked up with people she met along the road, and sometimes she traveled for a week or so with a group from a train, or a bar, or a boat. But eventually, she always broke away again and continued on her own path alone. It was what she did, to feel free. Now she could hardly wait to be traveling
with
someone.

“I better go home. See my family.” She hadn’t even spoken to them for ages, she realized. Lisa texted, checking in with her. She should make the effort. “Maybe next weekend?”

“Yeah.” He held her tightly. “I’ll miss you.”

“You soppy sod.” But she loved it.

�

March

Mark

It was a long time since Mark had been on a date. He’d only come on this one to shut Hannah up. He hadn’t expected to enjoy it.

She was divorced. She and her husband had split up four years ago.

He had moved a hundred miles away. She had given up work when their children were born and never gone back, even when the youngest one—

Hannah’s classmate Susie—was at school full-time. She said that was half the problem. She should have. By the time she realized that, it was too late, and the marriage was over. She didn’t blame her husband. She was retraining as a teacher. She felt a bit silly, having discovered something that she was so good at so late in life. She loved the teaching, loved feeling that she might be making a difference in a young life.

She told him this over a bowl of pasta and a bottle of Valpolicella at the local Italian restaurant.

She was a little too thin. Ash blond, with a modern, feathery haircut and green-gray eyes, she must have been very pretty when she was young. She was still attractive now. Well maintained and neat, but soft, too. He liked the faint lines around her eyes. She smelled nice. Her black sweater had little sequins sewn into it, and they sparkled in the candle-light. He wondered why her husband had stopped loving her.

Over tiramisu, she told him she’d been on a few dates since her hus-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 237

band left. Mostly set up by well-meaning friends, although she had, briefly, joined a dating agency. She was funny—self-deprecating and honest—when she talked about the application form she’d had to fill in, and the various unsuitable men she’d met. None of them had been worthy of a second date, apparently. One she had watched come into the pub, see her, and surreptitiously turn and leave. She said the woman who ran the agency told her that her age would be an advantage. She was post-menopausal, and so men could relax about her biological clock—she wouldn’t be desperate to entrap them into parenthood. She laughed loudly when she said that she’d wanted to hit the woman repeatedly in the head with a shovel. She had a warm laugh.

While they drank a cappuccino, she’d asked him, tentatively, about Barbara. She’d known her, just a little. Their girls weren’t really friends, but they had once sat on the PTA together for a couple of terms. He answered her gentle questions briefly and steered her away from the subject, which did not belong at their table.

He drank a grappa. She had the last of the wine. It seemed to him that it was a little more than either of them was used to drinking. He went to the bathroom and felt just a fraction lighter, giddier, than he could remember feeling.

She lived within walking distance of the restaurant, in the home she had been married from, and raised her children in, and been granted in her divorce and so, without discussion, they walked, even though his car was parked right outside. It was pretty warm outside for March.

When they reached the door of her small cottage—well maintained and neat, he noted with a smile—she was talking about council recycling policy, but he wasn’t listening.

He didn’t especially see the desperation in her eyes when she asked him if he would like to come in for a moment, and maybe have another drink. Her daughter wasn’t there, she added. She was sleeping over at a friend’s.

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themselves at each other. They were both surprised they’d lasted so long. He wasn’t so much kissing her as consuming her, and she completely surrendered to it. They got no farther than the sofa just inside the door. They began to tug at each other’s clothing, but quickly realized it would be more efficient to undress themselves. Mark pulled impatiently at the buttons of his shirt and kicked himself out of his trousers.

He was so hard he wasn’t sure he could wait. She was as thin naked as she had looked dressed. He could see her ribs in the half light, and her stomach was totally flat and smooth. He was kissing everywhere he could reach—her neck, her nipples, her shoulders. There was no plan beyond having her. She clawed at his back, equally fervent. He was inside her before they even lay down. She was hot and wet and he began thrusting fast, banging relentlessly against her sharp hipbones. Her kisses made his face wet. He left one hand under her and brought another around to squeeze her tiny breast. It felt unbelievably good to be fucking her. If he cared at all how it felt to her, she seemed equally into it. In fact, she came first, fast, her legs straightening out under him as though she had cramp, her pelvis suddenly still as she concentrated on the sensation. She kept shouting, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” He kept moving, and then she moved again, her mind on him now, digging her nails into his buttocks, pushing him into her, kissing the side of his neck. When he came, it felt like the orgasm started from his spinal col-umn, and it lasted forever.

Mark fell on her, so heavily that he forced a guttural breath from her.

She stroked his back languorously, but she didn’t speak. Neither of them had the breath.

And that wonderful, thoughtless, “we’re not so different from the other mammals” feeling lasted exactly as long as it took for his breath to slow down and return to normal.

Mark rolled off her and lay awkwardly next to her on the sofa. He had a sudden, random thought about condoms. How stupid. And ridiculous. He hadn’t used one—and she hadn’t asked. Suddenly exposed,
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embarrassed and a little chilly, she pulled a blanket from behind her and covered herself. He couldn’t look at her straightaway, but he made himself turn and smile at her.

“That was . . .” She didn’t know what to say it was.

“Sudden?” They both laughed, a brittle, sociable little laugh, and fell momentarily silent.

“I haven’t had sex since my husband left,” she finally volunteered.

“Nearly four bloody years. Unless it counts when it’s with yourself.”

And, after all of it, that was what made her cheeks pink.

“It counts, but it’s not as good.”

“Four years. That explains my . . .”

“Hey, mine, too.” He believed her, but he was surprised. She surely could have slept with any number of men. The urgency had been pretty mutual. He put a hand on hers. The chatting seemed more revealing than the sex, somehow. He realized that he wished he was one on a list.

She had made him remember. The last time with Barbara. It hadn’t mattered how much she’d told him that he didn’t need to be gentle with her, that she wanted him to make love to her like he always had, to do all the same things, at the same pace, with the same pressure, to take his own pleasure as much as worry about her own, he couldn’t.

He was frightened. Of the cancer, of hurting her, of it maybe being the last time, each time until it actually was. It was that way between them for almost a year—infrequent, too gentle, apologetic, incredibly unsatisfying physically, and completely overpowered by love.

Once, afterward, he had felt her tears on his chest, and he’d asked her, as if he needed to ask, why she was crying. Her answer had surprised him. She said she was crying because the way he had touched her reminded her so much of how he made love to her when she was first pregnant with Hannah—like she had stopped being a woman, his lover, and become this fragile, delicate thing—a porcelain china model of herself. And that the irony was that then it had been all about life, the new life growing inside her, and that now it was all 240 e l i z a b e t h

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about death, and its inexorable, ugly march through her body. And wasn’t that stupid and sad?

And so, of course, now he was lying with Jane in his arms, thinking about Barbara. Fighting feelings of betrayal and self-loathing, and wanting to get up and run away. She felt it. She was a good woman. She knew the difference between an ex-husband and a dead wife, and she lay, alone beside him, castigating herself for letting it happen. It was just that . . . she really liked him. He was normal. He was handsome, and kind, and he had a great relationship with Hannah—you could see it when you saw them together. He appealed to her, physically and emotionally. Not just because she felt sorry for him.

If she’d met him twenty years ago, she knew she would have liked the look of him. And she was so, so very bloody lonely. If she could script this next bit, they would go upstairs together, hand in hand. They would climb under her duvet, wrap themselves around each other, and fall asleep. She wanted to wake up with someone, with him, far more than she actually wanted what had just happened. But she knew that it wasn’t going to go that way, and if she was quiet for a moment, it was because she was struggling to find a way to make it easy for him to leave her, there on the sofa, without stripping her altogether of the dignity she already felt she might be quite close to losing.

She forced a light tone. “So, thanks are in order.”

“Thanks?”

“For services to womankind.”

He wasn’t self-absorbed enough to buy that, but he knew what she was trying to do.

“You’re more than welcome.” And then, “Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

“I should get going . . . Hannah . . . these mocks . . .”

She stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“That’s fine, Mark. Whatever. I understand.”

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“Do you?” He looked into her eyes.

“I think so.”

“I’m sorry. I know I should . . .”

“There’s no should, Mark. We’re grown-ups. I wanted this. I even sort of made it happen. You have nothing to apologize for.”

Again, he didn’t quite believe that.

He grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head, buttoning the three he’d undone minutes before. “This was . . .”

“This was lovely. Let’s go with that.”

He nodded at her and smiled. “Lovely.”

But it wasn’t. It was shitty and messy, and he felt bad. He felt bad for himself, and for Barbara and for Jane.

She made herself a toga from the blanket while he put on his boxers and trousers. Now they were both self-conscious and shy. When he was ready to go, he pulled her into a brief, awkward bear hug, but he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look her in the eyes again when he left.

After she closed the door behind him, Jane curled up in the corner of the sofa and cried for a long time.

Mark slept badly; he’d been doing that a lot lately. When Hannah knocked on the door and came in without waiting for an answer, two mugs of tea in her hands, he felt like he’d only been asleep for twenty minutes. She still had on pajamas and a dressing gown, and, when she’d put the teas down, she jumped onto the bed, grabbing a pillow to hold across her chest, and crossing her legs. She was grinning.

“So . . . how was it . . . ?”

“How was what?”

He wasn’t ready for this conversation, which was ridiculous, because he should have known he would have to have it this morning, and he’d been awake half the night trying to think of what to say.

“Your date, idiot!”

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“It wasn’t a date.”

“You had dinner with a nice-looking woman. No one else was there.

That’s a date.”

“If you’re a teenager. If you’re as old as me, it’s just dinner.”

“Semantics, Dad, but okay. Question is,
was
it just dinner?”

God. Paxman eat your heart out. He realized that his head hurt. He didn’t want to lie to Hannah—he sort of had a policy on that.

“Do I ask you what happens on your dates?”

“So it was a date!” she exclaimed triumphantly. Mark groaned. “And, since you ask, yes you do. Not that I have that many.”

“That’s different. Me parent, you child. You underage minor, to be precise.”

“Gross. Anyway, stop deflecting. I want details.”

“I ate a tricolore salad, sage gnocchi, and a fabulous tiramisu . . . we had a bottle of their finest . . .”

She hit him playfully with the pillow she had been holding. “Daadd!”

“What do you expect, Hannah?” He drew out the syllables of her name, like she had done with his. “She’s a very nice woman; I liked her.