His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  ‘You can be the only bridesmaid,’ Mum said to Ellie.

  ‘What are you going to wear, Mummy?’ Ellie wanted to know. ‘Will you have a proper wedding dress?’

  ‘Ellie, you seem to have forgotten she’s pregnant,’ I said. ‘That’s the only reason they’re getting married in the first place.’

  Silence fell round the table. Mum slapped down her cup of herbal tea into its saucer hard enough to chip the china. I wasn’t used to seeing her the way she looked at me. Really angry. Almost like she hated me.

  Then Mark reached across and took her hand and held it, and carried on holding it, like the two of them were planning on starting a séance or something. The knot of their joined hands lay there on the table and it was both a reproach and a warning: We are as one now. Do not presume to mess with us, or you will pay.

  ‘That’s not actually true,’ Mark said. ‘I should never have stayed with my ex as long as I did. I should have left her years ago. Before you were born, Ava. I should have gone as soon as I met Jenny. I knew there was something special there. We just clicked. But I didn’t trust my instincts. I thought I had to cut Jenny off, and do everything I could to make my marriage work.’ He grimaced. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve regretted that. It was a huge mistake. But I’m trying to make up for it now.’

  ‘So it was really just timing,’ I said. ‘If you’d met Mum before that other woman, you’d have been with her all along. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘It’s very tempting to play at might-have-beens. I try not to. I’m just relieved and happy that we’re together now.’ He smiled at Mum. ‘You’re a wonderful mother, Jenny. A true natural. And this time I get to be there for you. I can’t believe my luck.’

  Ellie looked pleased by this, as if it had been enough to reassure her that he really did love Mum enough for all of this to work out. She said, ‘So what about the honeymoon?’

  ‘We haven’t decided yet, but we thought we might go to Italy,’ Mum said.

  ‘Oh! Where in Italy? Would we go to Florence? And Rome? I’d love to see the Sistine Chapel.’

  Another shared look between Mum and Mark – a pained one this time. I said, ‘Ellie, they’re not planning on taking us with them. They’re going to go on their own.’

  I’d never seen her so crushed. She seemed to fold up into herself as if she wanted to disappear. In the smallest possible voice she managed to say, ‘Are you going to look after me, then, Ava?’

  I was about to say yes, but Mum spoke over me: ‘Actually, we were going to ask Mark’s mother if she’d come and stay, and keep an eye on you both while we’re away.’

  ‘Stay where?’

  ‘Well, at Mark’s house.’

  ‘Home,’ Mark said. ‘Your new home. One thing I haven’t mentioned about my house is that I have three bedrooms. You’ll be able to have your own rooms. It’ll do us all for now, but we’re going to have to start thinking about extending. Or moving.’

  ‘Is it an old Victorian house?’ Ellie asked.

  We all stared at her. Mark said, ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I just wondered if it was one of those kinds of houses,’ Ellie clarified. ‘You know, the red-brick sort with pointy roofs and a big walled garden all around it.’

  I said, ‘What are you expecting, Wuthering Heights or something?’

  Ellie pulled a face. ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but it isn’t,’ Mark said. ‘It’s a new-build with no history whatsoever.’

  ‘Mark was very generous to his ex-wife when they divorced,’ Mum said. ‘He let her have the house they’d lived in.’

  ‘Yes, well, we really don’t need to go into that,’ Mark said stiffly.

  The waiter arrived to clear the table, and Mum asked if I wanted to do anything after dinner and I said I just wanted to pack and have an early night. ‘I’ll help Ellie pack, too.’

  ‘I don’t need help,’ Ellie protested.

  ‘You look like you should get an early night, too, Mum,’ I said, ignoring Ellie. ‘You look done in.’

  She yawned and stretched. ‘I am,’ she said. ‘Believe me, I am. I really had no idea it was going to be so hard third time round.’

  Her face had already filled out a little, though I was only aware of that because I knew her so well. It wasn’t at all obvious that she was pregnant, not yet anyway. Her new clothes were mainly loose and flowing, chosen to hide her shape rather than draw attention to it, and although she’d brought a swimming costume she hadn’t actually gone any closer to the water than a quick paddle in the shallows: the selection of kaftans she’d brought with her had come in useful.

  As we made our way out of the restaurant and up to our rooms I actually felt guilty, as if I was the one who was at fault. What they really needed was a daughter who was capable of being a bit more bohemian, who could shrug and say, So what? So things got a bit confused. Big deal. But they’d ended up with me, and I wasn’t ready to let either of them off the hook just yet.

  * * *

  My sense of moral superiority did not last much longer. It didn’t feel like a decision to do something bad, though. It felt like a fait accompli.

  I went to bed at the same time as Ellie – later than usual for her, early for me. Then I couldn’t sleep. I was plagued by a general sense of dread about everything. There were the exams, the visit to Mark’s three-bedroom new-build house, the schools I might go to. The wedding, with nobody we knew there to wish us well. Mark’s mother, who was going to be supervising us even though I was perfectly capable of looking after Ellie myself, and often had.

  And then I’d be starting over. No more Molly, no more Jasmine, no more Brian looking fit from a distance. No more Toby.

  No more of our flat. No more of nice old Peter Carman, the downstairs neighbour, tending his roses and inviting Mum down for sherry and opera. No more of the nurses upstairs, coming home at odd times after night shifts or nights out.

  No more London.

  OK, so we weren’t in London proper but we were close enough for a bit of its dirty glamour to rub off. I didn’t know much about the countryside apart from that there was plenty of empty space, there was nothing to do and people were nosy. Our neighbours were easy to get away from: all we had to do was make a short journey by bus or train to lose ourselves in crowds of people all minding their own business, none of whom knew or cared who we were. In the countryside it would be different. People might be curious about us. We’d probably have to make the effort to be nice to them.

  London let us be. The countryside would kill us slowly and watch us die.

  It wasn’t right. It was all happening too fast and I had no say in any of it. If Mum was so desperate to reunite with my father and have another baby, couldn’t she at least have had the decency to wait till I’d left home?

  I tried to like the idea of a little baby arriving in our lives, but it really didn’t come naturally. Shauna Perritt from the year above had got pregnant before GCSEs and had to leave the school; I’d seen her since a couple of times, walking round pushing a pram looking like she didn’t know what had hit her. I’d peered into the pram and said polite things like you were meant to do, but all I was thinking was, There is no way I am ever, ever letting that happen to me.

  The longer I lay in bed thinking about all of this, the less likely it seemed that I would ever get off to sleep. And there was Ellie right next to me, the supposedly neurotic and anxious one, sleeping like a… sleeping like a baby. Like babies didn’t, usually. I remembered that much from when Ellie was little. Once Mum had given birth, we were in for a whole lot of screaming and crying.

  Suddenly I couldn’t bear it any more.

  I must have been lying there for an hour or more: it took less than five minutes to get dressed and escape.

  My clothes for the next day were the only things of mine in the wardrobe. I’d left out the cardigan and sundress I’d worn on the flight; everything else was packed.


  I got dressed, slid my feet into my sandals, grabbed my purse and my phone and the hotel room keycard and let myself out. The door clicked shut quietly behind me. I was back in the brightly lit, lushly carpeted adult world, where you could please yourself and things were arranged so as to make it easy for you.

  There was no one else around, no sound coming from the next room. Mum and Mark were probably both asleep. Anyway, it was a risk worth taking.

  I marched along the corridor as if I knew exactly where I was going, and headed straight for the hotel bar.

  * * *

  It was quieter than before, but it had been Saturday night then and it was Monday now. An entirely different proposition. The people in there seemed mainly old, and were talking quietly or not at all. There was no music, and as I walked in no heads turned my way.

  Maybe the barman wouldn’t serve me. And what if they told Mum and Mark – my parents – that I’d been there?

  But it couldn’t be a crime just to go in. It wasn’t even that late.

  I’d just ask for a lemonade and drink it, and then go back to bed.

  There was someone sitting at the bar already, a vaguely familiar someone with his big back turned towards me. Part of me flinched from the idea of going over there to stand next to a lone man, but I carried on regardless.

  And then I recognised him. It was the piano player from our first night there. I recognised the barman, too; it was the waiter who’d served us dinner the first night.

  I asked for a lemonade in my best French. I had just enough money to pay for it. And then – to be polite, to make conversation, because I was lonely – I said, in French, to the man sitting next to me, ‘You’re not playing the piano tonight?’

  He inclined his head and looked me up and down.

  ‘I don’t do that every night. It’s a hobby, really,’ he said in English. ‘I do it as a favour to the manager as much as anything else. Also, it’s a very good piano.’

  ‘You’re English,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘So are you.’

  That seemed to make what I was doing safer. In that environment, it was virtually like bumping into a neighbour. I settled onto the bar stool next to him, because why not? Who else was I going to talk to?

  The barman tactfully withdrew to the other side of the bar and started discreetly polishing glasses. I said, ‘So where are you from?’

  ‘London, mostly. I have a flat there, but I move around. I have a job selling holiday apartments, here and in other places. You?’

  ‘Oh… We live near London. For now. But my parents have decided to move.’

  My parents. Not a phrase I’d ever had much use for. I didn’t really talk about my family, with Molly or Jasmine or anybody else.

  But at one time, if I had decided to open up a little, I might have said something like: My parents are divorced, I don’t see my dad very often…

  And now my parents meant something else, and so did my dad. It meant Mark taking over, basically. His sudden and enormous power over all our lives.

  I carefully sipped my lemonade and set my glass down on the bar.

  ‘I take it you don’t get on,’ the piano player said.

  ‘I don’t really know whether we get on or not,’ I said. ‘I’ve only known my dad for a couple of months.’ There, I’d done it. I’d called Mark my dad, though not when he was there to hear. ‘That scene in here a couple of nights ago? That was when he told me he was my father.’

  So this was the point of hanging out in bars. Maybe this was why Sean liked it. You said things that mattered to you, things that you would have thought were impossible to say to anyone.

  There was a long pause, so long that I thought maybe he hadn’t taken in what I’d just told him. Eventually he said, ‘So that’s what’s been going on. I thought he looked like he felt bad about something.’

  ‘I guess he did.’

  It was reassuring to picture the scene as he must have perceived it. It turned it into something that could be reviewed and picked over for little nuggets of insight or truth, the way you might analyse a set text in an English literature exam.

  The barman broke off from drying glasses and took us in with an expression that was disconcerted and resigned and impressed all at once, a mixture of is that really happening? and so that’s the way the wind’s blowing.

  I said, ‘What did you think was going on?’

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t really try to figure it out. I just thought, What a beautiful girl.’

  That was all it took: that little affirmation, that little compliment, as sweet and heady as Armagnac sucked off a sugar cube.

  It was a rush I hadn’t realised I’d been craving. He’d noticed me, and I wanted him to notice me more. More than that, I wanted him to like me. I needed him to like me. I was new to this, but I knew what it meant anyway, and I didn’t care what I might need to do to make it happen.

  * * *

  By the time I went back upstairs I had his name and number in my phone. He was called Jake Hillerman: a name I could already imagine myself doodling, then destroying all evidence of. Ellie didn’t stir as I let myself into our room, and as soon as I got into bed I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  A few weeks later, on the free day between my final Maths paper and my first History exam, I lied to my mother, caught the train into central London and met him at the Barbican.

  I wore a dress that I’d taken with me in my schoolbag, and changed into in the ladies’ at Waterloo station. I’d agonised about what to wear; I wanted to look sophisticated – I didn’t want him to be put off by how young I was.

  He hadn’t asked my age, and I hadn’t told him. I assumed he thought I was older than I was, and I didn’t want to put him off. I soon realised I needn’t have worried. He complimented me on the way I looked, but it was obvious even to me that he wasn’t really interested in my clothes.

  We looked round a gallery, had lunch. I was scornful about the artworks and made him laugh, and we shared a bottle of wine. All the social muscles I’d always resisted using sprang into action and started working overtime. I was off: I was doing everything I could to hold his interest, to make him want me.

  He told me I was a philistine. I said, ‘You’ll have to educate me, then,’ and he looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘Well, I might.’

  I asked him if he’d fallen in love with me. I meant it as a joke, but actually, I was wondering if he might, or if I would fall in love with him.

  He said, ‘I think I have. You’re charming and funny and bright and beautiful. Why wouldn’t I fall for you?’

  A lie can sound just like the truth, especially if it is what you want to hear, and the biggest and most dangerous lies of all can be the ones you most want to believe. And so I accepted this compliment unquestioningly, as if it was a gift too good to say no to. And then I let him take me upstairs to his small, bare, plainly furnished apartment, and to his bed.

  We spent an hour together before I needed to go and catch my train. And he did educate me, just as he had promised.

  He showed me that you can take something precious from someone without them realising it’s gone, and that the easiest way to do this is to persuade them to give it to you.

  And he introduced me to the comfort of being close to someone, as close as it’s possible to be. But as I found out on the train afterwards, however much you try to make the moment last, and however much you give up for it, sooner or later you’ll find yourself travelling home alone.

  Fifteen

  Jenny

  On the flight back from France I sat next to Mark with the girls behind us, as we’d done on the way out. Ellie and Ava were both quiet, and Ava looked tired. She let Ellie have the windowseat – uncharacteristically generous – and got out one of the textbooks she’d insisted on bringing so she could revise from it, but hadn’t touched all holiday. They both spent the journey with their noses in their books, apparently oblivious to the clouds floating past the plane window and everythin
g else.

  Well, Ellie had always been capable of losing herself in whatever she was reading, and Ava was bound to be preoccupied. Her time out was over, and it was back to the reality of exams.

  It was always a mistake, with girls that age – of any age – to jump to conclusions about what was bothering them.

  If she seemed all right, it was probably as much of a sign as we could hope for that she was. She needed time and space to get used to Mark, and we had to respect that.

  But I worried about her anyway. It was a dull, constant worry, like a niggling toothache that might yet explode into a crisis.

  I was so lucky, so blessed. My mum would have been so happy if she could have known that she was a grandmother of three.

  So why didn’t I feel it?

  * * *

  Back in London it was raining – not heavily, just a persistent drizzle falling from a sunless grey sky. It was like leaving one dream for another, in which everything was familiar but too faint and faded to be real.

  Mark put us in a taxi; he was going to travel separately to his house in Oxfordshire. I said to him, ‘I wish we were going with you,’ and he said, ‘It won’t be for long, Jenny. I’ll call you tonight,’ and closed the taxi door and waved us off.

  We hadn’t got far before Ava fell asleep. She was sitting next to me, and Ellie was facing us because she was the one who didn’t mind travelling backwards. She could read in cars quite happily too, and had Wuthering Heights open on her knees.

  As the traffic stopped and started Ava’s head sagged and her shoulders slumped until she was leaning on me with her head nestled on my shoulder. She was warm and soft and heavy – a little too heavy, given that she was as tall as I was now, but I was very happy to be slightly squashed by her. It was so rare to be this close to her for any length of time. She smelled of Ava, sweet but not too sweet, the way she always had.

  It was humbling to think that she’d once been as tiny as the baby I was carrying now. I was filled with a sudden rush of pity for Mark for having missed all the stages that had passed in between, for not having known Ava the toddler or the little girl or the younger adolescent who had smiled in such a way as to hide the braces on her teeth.