Lost Daughter

by Ali Mercer

  Obviously he passes muster, because she steps back to let him in. It is cool inside the flat, which is an immediate relief. Perhaps he won’t need to take his jacket off after all. It is silly to care about making a good impression… but he can’t help himself. It seems that he has reached that stage of decline; he is that desperate, that defeated, that any halfway pretty girl’s opinion has become important to him.

  ‘Nice place,’ he says.

  ‘I know, it is, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

  She frowns slightly. ‘What makes you say that?’

  He shrugs. ‘I don’t know. You just seem like the kind of person who’s come here from somewhere else. I am, too.’

  She relaxes a little at that, though not completely. ‘I grew up in London,’ she says. ‘But I love it here.’

  The obvious reason to move from London to somewhere like Kettlebridge would be having kids. Obviously not in Leona’s case, though. And even though he is rarely curious about anyone, and has been accused countless times of being wrapped up in himself – and not only by his wife – he finds himself saying, ‘So, what brought you here?’

  Leona stares at him almost resentfully, then thinks better of it and answers. ‘I got some work experience with a company out here, and then they took me on. That’s where I met Rachel. My stepdad fixed it up – he knew the guy who owned the business.’

  ‘Nice stepdad.’

  ‘Yeah. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but it was my fault, not his. When he passed away he left me the money I used to buy this flat. Nobody could have been more surprised than me.’ She gives her head a little shake as if startled for having disclosed so much. ‘Anyway, would you like a coffee? I’ll make you one, and then I’ll show you the things I’m working on.’

  The coffee is good and strong, the way he likes it. She has some kind of herbal tea that smells of ginger. They take their drinks out into the overgrown but pretty courtyard garden, where they talk about art – or rather, he talks and she listens, which makes a change. Becca glazes over when he attempts this kind of conversation, and Rachel had always been preoccupied with other things. Work, mainly. It was a long time since she had been interested in what he might have to say, and who could blame her when he had turned out to be such a failure as an artist?

  But Leona is receptive. Surprisingly so. She doesn’t seem to think less of him for once having had some limited success before falling by the wayside; she seems genuinely impressed by the work he had once done, even if it was ages ago. It turns out that they have been to some of the same exhibitions over the last few years, and when she mentions something that is coming up at the Ashmolean in Oxford and suggests they could go together, he doesn’t say no. After all – why not? It’s not as if he has anyone else to go with. Becca has taken to refusing to accompany him to that kind of thing.

  Eventually she stands up and says, ‘Right, better get this over with. Time to show the great artist my stuff. I hope you won’t be too unkind about it.’

  ‘I’m sure your work is delightful,’ he says gallantly as he gets to his feet, suddenly ashamed to remember how down he had been on the whole idea of meeting her when Rachel first suggested it.

  She shows him into the front room and says, ‘This is where I keep the bigger pieces,’ and waits patiently while he takes it all in and attempts to muster a suitable response.

  It’s bonkers. Completely bonkers. It’s a beautiful room, with fine proportions, an original fireplace and the cornicing still intact. He can almost hear what an estate agent would have to say about it – if it wasn’t packed full of odds and sods of furniture, almost as much as it’s possible to fit.

  There’s a birdcage, a schoolkid’s desk, a crib, and bric-a-brac, too: lampshades, vases, candlesticks. It’s like being in a mad old lady’s attic. Or an artistic kleptomaniac’s junk shop. He finds he is at a loss for words.

  Leona doesn’t seem wounded by his lack of response, though. She looks amused. It’s almost as if she knows exactly what he is thinking.

  She says, ‘Feel free to check out anything that catches your eye.’

  He squeezes past the crib to the desk, lifts up the hinged lid, peers inside. Someone has drawn a heart with an arrow through it in blue ink, scrawled names on either side. He shuts it again.

  ‘I don’t suppose you had a chance to check out my website?’ Leona asks.

  ‘I didn’t, I’m afraid. But maybe you could show it to me in a minute, if you wanted to. I mean, I’d love to see it.’

  ‘Sure. I mean, only if you have the time.’

  ‘I have time.’

  He sucks in his breath. What is he saying? He’s been here quite long enough – now is the time to thank her for the coffee, wish her well and leave. There’s absolutely no way he can afford to get involved in some kind of friendship with an ex-colleague of Rachel’s. Or with anyone. If he wants to preserve his sanity, he needs to steer clear of all complications from now on. So what on earth does he expect to achieve by staying here any longer?

  ‘You know, you’re a lot nicer than I thought you’d be,’ Leona says.

  ‘Oh, really? Is that because of what Rachel said about me?’

  ‘No, no. She doesn’t really talk about you. It’s just, you know, I never met an artist before.’

  That does it. He had thought it might be pleasurable to have someone admire him, but it turns out to be unbearable.

  ‘I am not nice,’ he says firmly, ‘and I’m not really an artist any more, if I ever was. I’m nothing special, Leona, whatever they might have said about me once. I’m an under-employed househusband, and when Rachel and I get our divorce sorted I’ll be an under-employed ex-househusband. So I don’t really know why you want my opinion or advice about anything.’

  Having delivered this outburst, he can’t bear to look at her. He stoops to inspect a wooden stool painted with a design of roses – Leona’s handiwork, presumably. The roses are clumsily done, but there’s nothing wrong with the stool.

  He can even imagine it – maybe denuded of the flowers and decorated with something more subtle – in the kitchen at Rose Cottage. It might have come in handy back in the days when Becca used to come and talk to him while he made dinner, before she went all moody and withdrawn. Her marks seemed to have picked up since he and Rachel had been called into the school for that awful meeting, but the moodiness remains, and it’s tedious. No, worse than tedious: sad. There’s no one to distract him from his loneliness.

  ‘You’ve got a good eye,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you,’ Leona says. ‘I can visualise what I want, I just don’t have the skill to do it myself.’

  He straightens up and gives the crib a little push. It is like an artefact out of a fairy tale, suspended from an overarching stand, and rocks as smoothly as a swing, though it has a very slight squeak that wants sorting.

  ‘Bit of oil would probably fix that,’ he says.

  She shrugs helplessly. ‘Where?’

  ‘Just do all the hinges. That’s what I would do.’

  What was that old lullaby? If your something something… Daddy’s going to buy you a diamond ring?

  He tries to imagine the infant Becca curled up in the cradle, tiny again, eyes shut tight. But Rachel would never have bought this. It would have been too fussy for her. Too unnecessary. She liked plain, sturdy things bought from reputable department stores. Out of the two of them, she had always been the practical one – at least, in the normal way of things, before she’d lost the plot.

  And whose fault was that? Not his. It really wasn’t.

  He’d been protecting her, in a way. And he still was.

  Her mother’s death had tipped her over the edge; another shock could have had an even more catastrophic effect. It wasn’t so much that she was gullible, as that she was vulnerable. What good would it do anybody for the whole truth of the situation to come out? What good would it do her, or Becca? None at all, and that was a fact.

>   The near-miss had been quite explosive enough. That was the thing about Rachel; she was the kind of person who kept soldiering on, and then eventually blew up.

  His mother had tried to warn him, and he had ignored her: Bad blood will out. The tendency must have always been there, the potential violence, along with the instability. It wasn’t surprising, really. You had to make allowances, considering her background.

  He looks up and catches Leona watching him. Her expression is neither pitying nor embarrassed. She looks as if she wants to ask him something, or maybe to tell him something.

  ‘Come on upstairs,’ she says. ‘I’ll show you the textiles and the jewellery.’

  He can’t help but take in the view of her retreating form as he follows her; it’s part and parcel of looking where he’s going. The dress doesn’t give much away, anyway. A vision of her without it comes to mind – Leona as a 21st-century Botticelli Venus, perfect and new – before he makes a decisive effort to reject it.

  She leads him into a small spare room with an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine on a table in the corner. The jewellery is hanging on a selection of stands next to the sewing machine, and there are neat stacks of tubs of beads and fabrics and embroidery silks next to the table. She shows him the cushion cover she’s working on currently, which is dark grey velvet, embroidered with bluebells. It’s the best thing of hers he’s seen so far.

  He says, ‘You’re fond of bluebells, aren’t you? It’s a bit of a motif.’

  He wants to sound encouraging, or at least as if he’s paying attention. But she grimaces as if he’s just said something tactless.

  On the mantelpiece over the modest fireplace is a line of postcards of various well-known paintings. He spots Chagall holding his wife by the hand as she flies above his head, a creamy Lucian Freud and Dali’s melting clocks. Nothing of his.

  ‘Persephone is in my bedroom,’ Leona tells him, folding the cushion cover and putting it back next to the sewing machine.

  Is he that obviously insecure? He hopes not.

  ‘I haven’t seen the real thing for years,’ he says. ‘It’s in a private collection in New York.’

  ‘Would you like to see it again?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether I see it or not. That’s part and parcel of what I do, when it works. You have to learn to let go.’

  She grimaces again. ‘They say that about being a parent, too, don’t they? But it’s a hard lesson to learn. Even if you know it’s what you need to do.’

  He stares at her. She meets his gaze steadily, but seems to hesitate. Once again he has the impression that there is something more she wants to say, but can’t quite bring herself to come out with.

  ‘Do you have children yourself?’ he asks uneasily. He had assumed that she didn’t… there were no signs at all of a kid of any age living in the flat. It felt very much like a place where someone lived alone. In which case, why was she looking at him as if she had something to confess?

  ‘I have a daughter,’ she says evenly. ‘I had her when I was quite young, and gave her up for adoption.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, I had no idea. I hope I haven’t been tactless.’

  ‘No, no, you haven’t. It’s quite all right. Rachel knows, but she obviously didn’t say anything. She actually drove me to the airport… I’ve only just come back. I’m sorry, I’m not making much sense, am I? I went to see her. Bluebell. My daughter. For the first time since she went to live with Amy, who was her foster mother and then adopted her. They live in France now. Just beautiful. The most amazing place. But now I’m here, and she’s there. And somehow I have to carry on.’

  She presses her hand to her mouth and he realises that she’s about to cry. He pats her ineffectually on the shoulder. ‘There, there. I’m sure you’ve done your best for her.’

  But Leona shakes her head vigorously. The tears are coming now, leaking down her face; she’s disintegrating in front of his eyes. ‘I messed everything up. I was so stupid, I let her down so badly, I’ll never forgive myself.’

  ‘Surely it can’t have been that bad?’ He is now hopelessly out of his depth. ‘I suppose it was bound to be difficult, if it’s the first time you’ve seen her since… since you said goodbye.’

  Leona wipes her cheeks and makes a visible effort to slow her breathing. He waits, and eventually she says, ‘I wasn’t talking about the visit. That went as well as it possibly could have done. I mean I messed up when she was a baby, when I was the one who was supposed to be looking after her.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Actually, there’s something I want to tell you about that.’

  And then she says that she had spent some time in prison, and when she came out her postcard of the Persephone painting was one of the things that helped her start over.

  ‘It helped me because I’d had it before everything went wrong and it allowed me to feel like I might be able to make something out of the life I had left. It gave me hope. I’ve always wanted you to know that. I get the impression you’re not proud of it any more, but I think you should be. Even if you never paint anything original again, you did something that helped change someone’s life.’

  He says, ‘If anything I did was helpful to you then I’m glad, but Leona, when you started over, that was your doing, not mine.’

  She’s smiling at him, but her mouth is quivering as if she’s about to start crying again. He reaches out and takes her hands in his and squeezes them. She looks down at the scar Rachel had given him and rubs it gently and looks up at him as if to ask a question, and he says, ‘Long story.’

  ‘I have a lot of those,’ she said.

  ‘The thing about long stories is that you don’t have to rush them,’ he says, and puts his arms around her and holds her. And then she moves closer and leans against him, and she’s crying properly and then she’s quiet.

  He is conscious of them breathing in time, of his heartbeat and of hers. It’s a shock to him, the way they suddenly fit together as if they are meant to be. It’s like being someone else. Someone younger and bolder, right at the beginning of something new.

  Her closeness blots out everything and everyone else apart from the desire to hold her and not to let her go. The rest of the world isn’t there. It’s only the two of them, in the middle of a room.

  He doesn’t consciously decide to kiss her, it just happens. A stupid thing to do. It’s a hungry kiss. A clumsy one, probably. The really astonishing thing is not that she hesitates but that she kisses him back, and then the clumsiness and stupidity cease to matter.

  Thirty-Two

  Rachel

  ‘How nice that we can sit outside,’ Rachel says, carrying the tray through the open French windows to Viv’s garden.

  There are roses and cherry and crab apple trees, a smooth green lawn and terracotta pots of hyacinths. It is a sumptuous late May evening and the air is sweet with the scent of sun-warmed flowers. She sets down the tray on the big teak table and Viv thanks her, pours the tea and cuts them both a slice of the offering Rachel has brought, a slightly flat home-baked sponge cake.

  ‘I hope it tastes better than it looks,’ Rachel says. ‘I’m out of practice. Actually, I’ve never had a lot of practice. The last cake I made was for Becca’s birthday back in September, and that was a disaster.’

  If only nothing else had gone wrong that day. But still, there had been a time when she wouldn’t even have been able to bear to mention it.

  Viv says, ‘So how is Becca?’

  ‘Oh… not too bad. Things at school seem to have picked up a bit, in terms of her marks at least. She isn’t exactly talkative, though. I’m trying to find things for us to do that minimise the need for conversation, because otherwise we just end up sitting there like we’re on the world’s worst date.’

  ‘It’s a difficult age, isn’t it?’ Viv says, and shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Maybe her back is bothering her. Her aches and pains come and go, but lately the warm weather has helped; this must be some kind of setback. ‘Have you sp
oken to Leona recently?’

  Rachel instantly feels bad that she hasn’t. She’d called once, after Leona got back from France, and they had spoken briefly, then exchanged a couple of emails. Leona had said Mitch had been round to see her, but hadn’t been any more forthcoming than that, and hadn’t seemed at all keen to meet; Rachel had felt a bit brushed off, as if Leona suddenly had more important things to do.

  Maybe the meeting with Mitch had been awkward. When Rachel had mentioned it to him, he had said only that he didn’t think anything more was going to come of it. She should probably have tried to talk Leona out of the whole idea. She hopes Mitch hasn’t hurt Leona’s feelings; he is harsh on himself, and sometimes he can be overly critical or dismissive of other people’s work, too – except for anything Becca does. Becca is the one person who is always exempt, and who he defends fiercely against any perceived slight.

  ‘We haven’t really had a proper chat for a while,’ she says. ‘I guess I’ve let things slide a bit.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s bound to be different now you’re not seeing each other every day at work, isn’t it? You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it,’ Viv says. ‘You’ve got a lot of other things on your plate. I think I told you the other day that I’d called her to find out how things went with Bluebell. We had a bit of a catch-up, but I felt she didn’t really want to talk about it. Anyway, she called me earlier to say she won’t be joining us tonight. She doesn’t want to come to these meetings any more.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Rachel turns towards the pinboard, which is propped up on the chair opposite her. It’s been in her bedsit since she hosted the last get-together back in March. Bluebell, with her direct gaze, looks almost more real than the other two children, the toddler splashing in puddles and Becca in her favourite red dress: at any rate, more as if she belongs to the present.

  ‘I was surprised, too,’ Viv says. ‘But there we are. People come and go, and we don’t always know why. Maybe now her relationship with Bluebell has moved on to a different level, she feels she doesn’t need us in quite the same way. She sounded… distant. As if she has other things going on in her life that she wants to save her energy for.’