by Lucy Lawrie
It wasn’t going to be a cinematic sort of heartbreak, this. It wasn’t as though I was facing the end of our relationship; I wasn’t going to let that happen. But I felt as though I was at the beginning of a slow, sad process of acceptance. Our relationship seemed to be settling into something different than I’d hoped it would be. Not the shining love of my life, but a lesser thing; a partnership, an alliance, a friendship, perhaps.
I sighed and let my head fall back, wanting to lose my gaze, to let it drift in the darkness. But the sky was an astonishing sweep of stars in every direction.
‘Look at the stars!’
‘The darkness . . . that’s how they know the universe is expanding,’ said Jonathan. ‘If it wasn’t, there would be no space between the stars, and the sky would be white.’
It was something he’d referred to many times before; he loved to expound on subjects such as this.
‘It always amazes me,’ he went on, ‘how the light left some of those stars millions of years ago, and is only just reaching earth now.’
‘And the light has come all that way, has travelled for millions of years, just to fall on the back of our eyes, and be detected by our little human brains.’
‘Well, that would be assuming the light had a purpose in mind, that it was thinking, “Oh yes, I’ll just leave now, and travel for ten million years and that will time it nicely for landing on Cassie Carlisle’s retinas in the early twenty-first century.” It’s just physics, Cass.’ He snapped a twig and chucked it into the darkness. ‘There is no purpose.’
‘Not a purpose, maybe, but it’s quite something, isn’t it? That we’re here, and conscious, to detect it at all.’
‘Yes,’ said Jonathan. ‘I suppose that’s true. How does a bunch of atoms and molecules turn itself into something that can see, and think, and feel—’
‘—and talk . . .’ I added. ‘To other bunches of atoms and molecules.’
In that moment, I seemed to see it for the miracle it was.
Maybe there is no ‘meant to be’, I thought. Maybe the best you can do, with another person, is try to see them, ignoring the chatter in your mind, putting aside your own agenda. And at the same time be brave enough to allow them to see you.
‘I worry about things.’ I resisted the urge to lapse into a childish voice, to give Jonathan the cue to respond like a reassuring parent. ‘My worrying is really very bad.’
‘What things? What things do you worry about?’
‘I worry that something awful is going to happen. Since Sophie was born, I’ve been convinced I’m going to die.’ I paused. Could I say it? ‘Or that something will happen to Sophie. Some days, it’s getting to the point where I can barely function. And I get dizzy, and I get worried about being dizzy, and I think I might be about to have a seizure or a stroke or something, and who will look after Sophie, and I might fall down the stairs and be lying at the bottom of the stairs with her at the top, and how will she get down, because she can’t climb down the stairs herself, and who will get her lunch and dinner for her and—’
I had to stop to breathe. ‘I’ve got a theory,’ Jonathan said. ‘We evaluate risk, all the time, without even knowing it. Like the risk of walking out the door and getting run over by a bus, the risk of marrying someone who turns out to be an axe-wielding maniac, the risk of getting ill or losing your job. At some level, you’re aware of these things, these possibilities, but you have to put them to one side. Otherwise you couldn’t function.’
Was he about to tell me to pull myself together? I couldn’t see his face in the darkness.
‘And I think that maybe – and actually, Cassie, I’ve felt this too – when you have a child, all that gets stripped back. Your whole risk-assessment thing falls away, and you have to build it again from scratch. Maybe it’s an evolutionary thing – designed to make parents protect their kids. I don’t know.’
It was an interesting idea. ‘So, you don’t think I’m nuts?’
‘I certainly do think you’re nuts. I wouldn’t have you any other way.’
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so . . .’ What was it he’d said? ‘So out of reach.’
‘I’ve hardly been much better. It’s been a crazy old year, hasn’t it?’
‘And I’m sorry about the whole . . . Malkie thing.’ I winced, wondering if this was the point where he would change the subject.
But he let the words settle, and then spoke carefully. ‘Well, you loved him once, didn’t you. Sometimes it’s easier to see love from a distance than when you’re standing right in the middle of it.’
There it was again – he had taken me utterly by surprise. And his arms went round me and he held me now, this man who I still had so much to learn about. Looking up, I traced the patterns of the constellations, some of which I’d never seen before, but remembered from school textbooks or trips to the planetarium.
Amazing, to think that all this was up here in the sky all the time, but was visible only on the darkest of dark nights. The rest of the time, you just had to take it on trust.
33
We got home just after five o’clock on the Sunday. Jonathan pulled up in the driveway and turned off the engine. But he didn’t move to get out of the car.
‘Cassie.’ His voice was heavy. God, was he about to say he was leaving me or something? But he was opening his hand, showing me something.
‘I took this stone from the stream,’ he went on, his cheeks faintly pink. ‘You know, on our walk yesterday. I think we should make it a worry stone.’
‘What do you mean?’ This was so unlike Jonathan.
‘Well, I read about it in one of your magazines. Both of you have to sit down, and whoever is holding the stone gets to speak. The other one has to listen. The listening person is not allowed to say anything at all until they’ve got the stone in their hand.’
‘You’ve been reading my magazines?’
‘I was racking my brains, darling. I couldn’t think how to make things better. You just seem so . . . I don’t know. Weighed down. Bothered by things. I just wondered if I could help at all, with any of it.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I twisted my wedding ring round my finger. ‘I’m not sure I could say any of it out loud.’
‘Shall we start now?’ He handed me the stone – a cool, smooth weight in the palm of my hand, flecks of mica sparkling amidst the greys.
I swallowed. It was one thing to have a deep and meaningful discussion halfway up a mountainside, in almost total darkness. Quite another to turn and face your husband, at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, parked up in your front drive, and tell him all the things you didn’t want anyone to know. But could it be all that difficult? All I had to do was open my mouth, and speak.
So I took a deep breath, and jumped off into the unknown.
I told him about the dizziness first, how I worried about brain tumours and about how Sophie would feel growing up without a mother.
Jonathan gave a deep nod once I had exhausted the subject of neurological diseases, so I moved on to the next item. I was halfway through telling him about my possible impending blindness when he suddenly shouted out.
‘Mr Caravaggio!’
‘Jonathan, shut up! You’re not holding the stone!’
‘No. There’s Mr Caravaggio!’
Dita’s old lover . . . what would he be doing here? I looked, and saw a slight, grey-haired man walking up the steps to the front door. He slipped something through the letterbox, and squatted down to peer after it.
‘Hang on,’ said Jonathan. ‘There’s something not right about this.’ He launched himself out of the car and reached the man in a couple of strides. I followed a few steps behind.
‘Would you mind telling me what you are doing?’
The man turned towards us with a look of surprise. It wasn’t a threatening sort of face. But still, there was something odd about it, something that pulled my gaze. I couldn’t quite think what.
‘Jonathan! Don’t you remember me . . . I�
�m Tony . . . ah . . . a friend of your mother’s!’
‘I know who you are. I’m more interested in why . . .’
The door swung open to reveal Dita. Sophie was peeping out from behind her legs.
‘Mama!’ she cried, holding out one arm – the other remained entwined around Dita’s knee. I edged past Jonathan and Mr Caravaggio and stooped to pick her up. There was a little slip of white paper lying by her left foot, where it had fallen through the letterbox.
You have ruined my life but I will always love you.
Dita’s stalker then, not mine. I handed her the note.
Sophie patted my face with damp, exploratory hands. She was covered in strawberry juice and moist crumbs of scrambled egg. Through her splayed fingers I regarded Mr Caravaggio once more. To think that this was the face behind my imaginings – this old man with his beige trousers and mushroom-coloured polo neck. This was the evil mastermind, the shadow in the corner, the creak on the stairs, the almost-heard whisper in my ear.
‘Dita!’ he moaned. ‘I only want to talk to you. Just hear me out. Dita.’
‘I thought it was him that day in B&Q,’ said Jonathan. ‘Mum, did you speak to him in B&Q when we went to look at mixer taps?’
‘Yes, we passed the time of day, but . . .’ She turned to face the man again. ‘Was that when you started this . . . this watching business?’
‘It was long before that,’ said Mr Caravaggio. ‘I was driving the taxi. The one you and Jonathan took home from the airport. Sophie was five weeks old. You were going to visit her for the first time. You didn’t recognise me.’
A flicker of a chill went down my back. I wasn’t sure whether it was the casual use of my daughter’s name, or the hollowness in his voice.
‘Oh, but Tony!’ cried Dita. ‘Why didn’t you say anything? We couldn’t see you, sitting with your back to us, behind the glass. We didn’t know it was you. Oh Tony, we didn’t know . . .’
But something didn’t add up. I recalled the last note, tucked into Sophie’s changing bag on the day that Workplace Phantoms had been shown (of course – Dita had taken her to the Botanic Gardens that afternoon). Mr Caravaggio, mad as he might be, could surely not think himself to be Sophie’s father?
But Sophie’s name hadn’t been mentioned in the note. The only name mentioned had been . . .
‘Jonathan? What . . . do you think . . . Jonathan . . . is your son?’ I could barely frame the question.
‘Well isn’t he?’ He was still addressing Dita. ‘Come on now, be straight with me for once. The timing speaks for itself.’
I glanced at Dita. She caught my eye and gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
‘No, no, Tony. You’ve got mixed up. Our . . . affair . . . was later, much later.’ She spoke gently, as though addressing an overwrought child. Or perhaps an old person who was losing the plot. I almost expected her to ask if he’d been remembering to take his pills.
‘Oh, Dita,’ he said. ‘We need to sit down and talk it over. There’s so much we need to sort out. And Jonathan and I need to have a chat.’
‘Tony, listen . . .’ began Dita, in a ‘let’s all be reasonable’ sort of voice.
Jonathan simply stood there. For once in his life, he seemed unsure what to do next.
With a sigh, I walked inside with Sophie. I took her upstairs and lowered her into her cot with a firm kiss, ignoring her outraged cries as I left the room. Mr Caravaggio was clearly one sandwich short of a picnic, and one had to take that into account, when considering the harassment campaign. But now he had committed an offence that seemed to me, at that moment, to be a hundred times worse. It was his assumption that, now he’d been discovered, we would all stand around and pay attention, all jump to his pathetic little agenda and go inside for ‘sorting out’ and ‘chats’. After all these years of pissing around, I had finally found the guts to look my husband in the eye and risk a proper conversation. And he had finally found the guts to look me in the eye and listen. Well, if this pitiful grey streak of a man thought he could just walk up to my front door and interrupt . . .
I strode downstairs and through the hall to the front door, with a short diversion to the bookcase and Animal Farm.
I stood in the doorway and steadied myself, feeling the weight of my body transfer through the soles of my feet onto the ground. I raised up the wasp spray can so that it was aimed directly into his eyes.
‘If you come near my family again, I’ll rip your fucking head off.’
He jerked back in surprise. He shot a shifty glance at Dita, then at Jonathan. Then he turned and half walked, half ran, down the front path and off down the street. My hands only trembled a little as I handed the can to Jonathan and ran upstairs to respond to my baby’s cries.
*
‘So what did he say to you in B&Q that time?’ I asked Dita later, while we all had tea in the kitchen. I sat holding Sophie on my knee – I hadn’t let her go since our visitor had departed.
‘Oh well . . . he was quite charming. Said how delightful it was to bump into each other again. He asked if I would meet him for a drink, for old times’ sake, but I fobbed him off with an excuse, said I was only in Edinburgh for a short time. I guess that must have made him angry – if he had been watching the house, he’d have known that wasn’t true.’
‘I feel stupid,’ I said. ‘Just assuming the notes and everything were all meant for me.’
‘Don’t feel stupid, Cass,’ said Jonathan. ‘Maybe he was deliberately vague about who he was targeting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to intimidate the whole family. I think he saw us as a cosy little unit and he just wanted to poke us and see what happened.’ It was a Jonathan-like thing to say, assessing events, fixing his interpretation on them. But his voice was oddly flat.
‘You’re right, Jonathan,’ agreed Dita. ‘He would have been jealous. He never had a family of his own.’
I pictured our house, the way the lights peeped from behind the curtains as you approached it on a dark night. I wondered how that might make someone feel, if he was out driving the cold streets of Edinburgh in a taxi, nursing a shattered heart from twenty years before.
‘It’s not a logical thing to do,’ I mused. ‘Stalk somebody, I mean. I guess we’ll never really know what it was all about. What he hoped to achieve from it all.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t read too much into it,’ said Dita. ‘He was always highly strung. A bit unpredictable. A little bit crazy!’ She gave a light laugh, and stood up to clear away the cups and plates.
‘There was something odd about his face, too,’ I said. ‘Something unnerving. I can’t quite put my finger on it.’
‘Do you think?’ said Dita, ‘Hmm. Anyway, I’d better get on with my packing. Leaving tomorrow!’
She suddenly seemed in a hurry to leave the room.
‘I’ll get your cases down,’ Jonathan said, following her out.
That was when I realised what had been odd about Mr Caravaggio’s face. It was his nose. His nose and the shape of his eyebrows. They looked really quite like Jonathan’s.
*
Later on, as we were getting ready for bed, I raised the subject.
‘You don’t think there’s any chance that Mr Caravaggio could be your biological father?’ Then, to take the edge off the question, I answered it myself. ‘No, probably not.’
I was sitting at the dressing table, taking off my make-up with cotton wool pads. I couldn’t see Jonathan’s face, but I heard a deep, exaggerated sigh.
‘If my father is a delusional taxi driver who leaves anonymous notes and rearranges people’s rockeries in the hope of getting a reaction, then to be honest, I’d really rather not know.’
‘But Jonathan—’
‘Okay, okay. I’ll speak to Mum about it again when she’s next here. Maybe.’
‘But I don’t get it. If her . . . affair . . . was much later, I mean, many years after you were born . . .’
‘I’m not so sure about that. As much as
Mum would like us to think he’s nuts, he didn’t seem that way to me.’
‘You’ll need to talk to her about it.’
‘I can’t, Cassie, all right? I don’t want to.’
I realised then that, for all Dita’s openness with me, she and Jonathan had never had that kind of relationship. They had never quite connected, not to the point where negative feelings could be safely aired, difficult topics discussed. I wondered whether his angry outbursts and childish hurts had always been squashed with a matter of fact, sensible, school nurse-ish response, just as mine had been.
‘But Jonathan,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to know?’
‘Cassie, I’ve always known.’ He pulled his shirt off and flung it across the room. ‘I’ve always known, deep down. That’s what the bloody argument was about with my dad.’
‘What?’
‘Do you really want to know, Cassie? I’m warning you it’s not pleasant.’
I nodded. He’d gone white, as white as I’d ever seen him.
‘Okay then, Cassie, if you must know, this is what I said.’ His chin trembled as he took a breath in. ‘Okay? Ready? This is what I said: “Who are you to say I can’t go to the rugby weekend anyway? You’re not even my real dad. You’re just a great big sad fucking fake. Don’t try and deny it, I know somebody else knocked her up, and actually, I’m relieved. I couldn’t stand to be related to you. Because I hate you, you fat, balding, freckly, old arsehole.” ’
Bloody hell. How utterly miserable for both of them.
‘Okay, Cassie? Are you glad you know now?’ His voice cracked. ‘Oh God, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’
‘Jonathan, he loved you. Even if he wasn’t your biological father, he loved you and he’d have forgiven you straight away. He must have been prepared that you might find out some day, that you might react badly. He’d have understood why you were angry.’