His Secret Family (ARC)
Page 31
‘You didn’t have any. Did you?’ Ellie was calm as a detective pointing out an elementary mistake.
‘Oh. Oh yeah. Mm. I couldn’t find the machine.’
Ellie raised her eyebrows. ‘Helps if you look. Did you speak to him, then? Or did you just send him a message?’
Ava scowled. ‘What are you talking about?’
Ellie sighed. ‘The man you were thinking about. Whoever he was. It’s OK, I won’t judge. Not given my track record. Though at least I’ve cleaned up my act. I’m guessing you have too, now, Ava.’ She looked Ava up and down, from her seed-pearl tiara to her white silk, silver-buckled shoes. ‘Now that you’re a respectable married woman,’ she concluded.
Ava blushed. A vivid, dead-giveaway, tomato red. A guilty red. Not at all the sort of blush you would expect to see on the face of a bride.
‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘Toby’s a good guy,’ Ellie said. ‘He deserves to have all your love. Not the bits that are left over because you’re still stuck in a holding pattern with somebody else.’
‘Ellie,’ I said, ‘I don’t know where this is coming from, but Ava clearly doesn’t want to hear it right now.’
Ellie shrugged. ‘OK. Fine. Whatever.’
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Ava said. ‘She hasn’t upset me. It’s just… it’s a long story.’ She stared at Ellie. ‘How did you know?’
I said, ‘What did she know?’
‘Oh… there’s this old boyfriend, someone I never told either of you about,’ Ava said. ‘Someone I met on holiday years ago. We… stayed in touch. I just told him not to contact me again.’
‘Good,’ Ellie said. ‘I take it you’re not going to tell Toby.’
‘None of your business,’ Ava said fiercely.
‘Fair enough. I don’t want to pry. Anyway, I think you’ve done the right thing. Just try and be good from here on in, OK?’
Without waiting for an answer, Ellie put her earphones back in.
Ava glanced at me and shook her head. ‘I hope we’re not going to have to get used to this,’ she said, and reached for the bridal magazine again.
* * *
About half an hour later Toby turned up with slices of wedding cake in a box, and while we were eating it the doctor came in to say that Mark’s operation had been a success, he had come round from the anaesthetic and was in a stable condition in intensive care.
Ellie was as relieved and thankful as the rest of us. But I thought she wasn’t surprised.
Twenty-Five
Mark
Two months later
* * *
Here I am, a survivor. Patched up. People don’t always get what they deserve. And believe me, sometimes that can work in your favour.
The thing that happened to me – the sound of something popping like a cork shooting out of a bottle, then the explosion of blood in the brain, the blurring vision, the agonising pain – it could happen again. But then again, it might not. I have been lucky. Or so they tell me. And on reflection, I have to acknowledge that this is true. Just to be here is enough. And as for the people who are missing, well… I know I’ll get my chance to join them one day.
I made a mess of things, didn’t I? And then I made it worse by trying to tidy it up. I thought that if I could keep them separate – the different parts of my life, the two wives, the children – I’d be able to manage. The failures of the old life wouldn’t bleed into the new one. But in the end they did. And now I understand that they never were separate, really, and I’ve stopped trying to manage. It’s all I can do to try to manage myself, let alone trying to draw lines between the lives of other people. It’s out in the open now, all of it. They will just have to fend for themselves.
My recovery has been fast, almost miraculously so, I’m told. You see? Lucky again. I got my mobility back within a month or so, though it’s still not what it was. I’ve given up driving, and have to walk with a stick. As for words, what I mean in my head and what comes out of my mouth are two different things. Luckily I have a patient wife. More patient than I deserve.
And, as it turns out, I also have an ex-wife who is prepared to be forgiving. Again, infinitely more so than I deserve. No wonder that when she found out that Ava was getting married in a church that was a ten-minute walk from our old house, it was an outrage too far. I’d behaved for years as if I could cut her and Daisy out of my life, just like that. She showed me that I couldn’t.
And so here we are, in a cemetery in a village south of Kettlebridge, a quiet, grassy place in a sheltered spot not far from the river. Jenny and I are both carrying flowers. And all of us are on our way to where Felix is.
We’ve walked from the pub in the village – a stretch for me, but just about manageable. I’m the slowest, the one at the rear; Jenny is hanging back to stay at my side, while Ellie and Ava lead the way. It’s a glorious summer day – blue skies, warm but not sweltering, and the air smells of cut grass and flowers. I am doing my best to take it all in, to take it slowly and not get frustrated because I can’t move the way I used to.
At least lunch went well, better than the first time I met Daisy, when Jenny invited her and Paula to the house and Daisy insisted, in that blunt way of hers, that I couldn’t be her father because she didn’t have one. We have agreed to describe me as an old friend of her mother’s, and that seems to make sense to her, for now. Just now, in the pub, she sat quite happily with us all through the main course – she had a ham sandwich, and left the salad – and then Paula took her out into the pub garden, which she seemed to like.
I sense that it’s a relief for Daisy to be outside, away from the slightly strained conversation about Ava and Toby’s honeymoon and Toby’s new restaurant job and the pace of my recovery and what Ellie is planning to do next. Fair enough: it’s a relief to me, too. We have at least that much in common.
Am I learning to love her? Am I capable of it? Is it possible to love someone you have wronged so badly, and carry so much guilt about? It is hard for me to be comfortable with her. If I have learned anything, it is that comfort is not something I have a right to expect.
But I try to bear in mind something Jenny has said to me, once or twice: Don’t worry, just do the right thing now.
Who knows how long I have left? Now may be all I have. I am doing my best to live up to it.
It has been remarkable to see how efficiently and completely Jenny has taken up the reins of the household. To think that I imagined, all those years ago, that I was saving her from a life of poverty and struggle, her and Ava, the child I’d once cast aside without knowing, without even hearing Jenny out: the child who had become the biggest prize I could think of.
It was vanity, really. I could only see my children as reflections on me, to be held close or rejected depending on whether I thought they showed me in a good light or a bad one. Looking at them now, I am struck all over again by what a fool I was. And yet each one of them still reminds me a little bit of me… even though they are so very different, both from me and from each other.
There they are, together for now, though soon enough there will be goodbyes all round and they’ll go their separate ways. Even this little mission, this walk to the grave, brings out the individual in each of them. Ava is leading the way, brisk and purposeful in crisp linen; she is walking along with Paula but they aren’t finding a whole lot to say to each other, and Paula is distracted anyway by keeping an eye on Daisy, who seems calm and cooperative but maybe can’t entirely be trusted not to slip away and get lost as a younger child might. Or maybe it’s just that Paula has got in the habit of being vigilant and can’t let it go even now that Daisy is older and less at odds with her surroundings.
I let Paula down; I let both of them down, and that’s the bitter, unpalatable truth, and for as much extra time as I’ve been granted, I’ll have to live with it. It fills me with guilty admiration to see Paula now, and recognise how she has changed without me. She’s like someone who has passed thr
ough fire, who has survived but come back altered. She sometimes seems frail – strained, tired, worn down – and maybe she is, but at the same time she has become indomitable.
The transformation in Daisy is remarkable. Nothing short of a miracle. The small child I remember, the unpredictable, infuriating, occasionally terrifying little changeling who ruled our home with her dogged and implacable strangeness, has become a gentle girl whose approach to the world is one of both intrigue and bemusement. She smiles; she listens; she even talks a little. Her eyes still slide away from you, but not always; sometimes, just briefly, she takes me in like a kindly scientist peering at something through a microscope. I take that as a sign of trust. It’s clear she bears me no ill will. She tolerates me. Accepts me. She might even miss me when I’m gone.
I had thought her indifferent, unreachable; now it is clear that the world she is in is not one anybody else can share, but is the same one that is around all of us, which, by and large, she seems to find much more absorbing than the people in it. And I think maybe I can see why. It’s not that she doesn’t care for the people, although she finds them sometimes confusing. It’s just that the sky and the trees and the grass are so much more astonishing.
She is still conspicuously different – a tall, thin girl dressed in pink, her favourite colour, with one white sock drooping. She seems younger than she is. Perhaps even when she is old, she’ll still have this child-like quality. But I can see now that there’s something beautiful about it. I have never really appreciated what innocence is. But Daisy has it, and it gives her both vulnerability and freedom.
Daisy doesn’t need to earn other people’s congratulations to make me proud of her. She’s herself and she is here, and that is everything. She herself has shown me what I didn’t want to accept when she was younger: that she is perfect, just as she is.
On Daisy’s other side, slightly ahead of her, is Ellie in an old tie-dye T-shirt and denim shorts and tatty sneakers. She dresses like a rebel, but she still has the nervous focus of the conscientious pupil she used to be before adolescence hit. She looks as if she is expecting something to happen. Good or bad? She seems too apprehensive for it to be clear either way.
At least things are better for her now. More settled. Jenny is certainly less worried about her. The time she gets most anxious about those girls is when Sean reappears in their lives, which he did a week or so ago, freshly returned from his trip to Spain – no idea what he was doing there, running away from himself as usual, I imagine – to take them and Toby out to dinner.
But that seems to have gone off all right. Maybe having Toby there made a difference. Or maybe Sean has just become a bit less important. Less needed. It’s not like when they were little, when him being there or not made a huge difference to their lives. They’re older now, and Ava’s independent, and Ellie almost is. Whatever they feel about Sean – love, or something like it, though he doesn’t deserve it any more than I do, in my opinion – they don’t really need him any more.
And they don’t need me. Not now. And when they did, I wasn’t there.
I know they care for me, I know that one day they’ll grieve for me, but I can already see them moving beyond me, into lives that I am hopeful about in a way that is new to me: the kind of hope you feel for things that you know you won’t see.
Jenny and I pause by my mother’s grave. I find myself thinking about her often… her determination, her ruthlessness. She only wanted the best for me. But if I’m honest, I was as terrified of her as everybody else was. It always felt as if she was at war with the world, and I was essential to her winning. I didn’t allow myself to see that trying to please her meant letting everybody else down, including myself.
And anyway, I could never have given her what she really wanted. Nobody could. She might not have ever been willing to admit it, but I am sure that what she longed for was to have her sister back, whole and unscathed.
And here is Constance, my aunt, in the space next to my mother, where we laid her to rest the day after I’d met Jenny. I’d only just made it in time, and had been suffering from a raging hangover. That was the only time I’d ever seen my mother cry, and as she dabbed at her face with a handkerchief a single thought had presented itself to me: There is no way I can tell her that my marriage is over.
I leave flowers for both of them. White roses. My mother was particular about flowers, but she always regarded roses as an acceptable offering. And as for Constance… who knows? Maybe she once liked roses, too.
Jenny reached out and takes my hand, and we walk on.
Now I can see Felix’s headstone. He was cremated (such a small body, so few ashes), then interred. That was what Jenny wanted. To have him somewhere she could visit, a peaceful place not too far from home, in the company of the other dead. She hated the thought of decay but wanted to lay him in the earth, as if to sleep. Wanted a grave to take care of. And she does: she has brought flowers to lay down, baby’s breath and lavender and love-in-a-mist, and she’ll be back in a day or two to clear them away and to check for weeds.
The headstone is small and simple. It gives Felix’s name and the date of his birth and his death. It says, ‘Dearly beloved.’ And he is. The length of his life, those three short days, is no measure of it. There’s no scale to measure how deeply we feel his absence, how much we miss him, and how much we love him still.
Ellie has stopped in her tracks. I pause to see what she is looking at, half expecting not to be able to see it; there’s something uncanny about her these days, always has been, in fact, but I used to think it was just that she had an overactive imagination and now I am not so sure.
‘Oh, look,’ Jenny says. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? For a moment I thought it was a statue.’
There is a heron on the low outer wall of the cemetery, just by the corner where we are headed. We all stop to gaze at it, even Daisy. We can see it in profile – its fierce beak, the white bulk of its folded wings, its slender legs. I can see why Jenny thought it was carved: it’s so still and poised. It really doesn’t look alive.
It is looking out across the grass that stretches from the cemetery boundary towards the banks of a stream – one of the many streams that flow through Kettlebridge and the surrounding villages, and end up in the Thames. It is standing guard. Its concentration is extraordinary. Superhuman. It’s like an encounter with a mythic beast, a gryphon or a phoenix or a hippogriff, something ancient and possibly only imagined, recorded in ancient texts. It looks as if it could stay there forever, or be gone in the blink of an eye.
And then it bends its neck and opens its wings and launches itself into flight, and swoops away in the direction of the stream.
Ellie turns to see it go and I catch the look of awe on her face. Awe and gratitude, as if something she’s been hoping and waiting for has come to pass. It doesn’t even strike me as odd, because I feel the same.
I open my mouth to say something, and the word I’m reaching for is heron. But these days, none of me can be relied on to do what I want it to. What comes out is my son’s name, and it sounds as light and sweet as a blessing.
If you couldn't put His Secret Family down, you will love Ali Mercer's other novel Lost Daughter – an emotional family drama about motherhood, love and loss that will stay with you long after the final page.
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Order it now!
Lost Daughter
An utterly heartbreaking and unforgettable page-turner
Order it now!
* * *
You’ve lost everything you’ve ever loved, and it’s all your fault… isn’t it? Rachel’s life isn’t perfect, but she’s so happy. Her husband Mitch has stuck by her and he’s an amazing dad. Her daughter Becca makes her heart explode with love.
* * *
And then, in the blink of an eye, there’s no longer a place for Rachel in her own family. Her heart has been broken: her right to see her beloved daughter has been taken away.
* * *
Life goes on
in Rachel’s home – family dinners, missing socks and evening baths – but she’s shut out from it. Becca may be tucked up in bed in Rose Cottage, but she is as lost to Rachel as if she had been snatched from under her nose.
* * *
Rachel can never forgive herself for what happened that day, and the part she played in it. But she’s starting to realise that things aren’t how she thought they were, and her husband Mitch isn’t who she thought he was either. The truths she has been punishing herself for are built on sand. Has she lost sweet Becca forever, or could finding out what really happened finally bring her back?
* * *
A heart-wrenchingly emotional drama for fans of Lisa Wingate, Kate Hewitt and Jodi Picoult.
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Books by Ali Mercer
Lost Daughter
His Secret Family
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