by Lisa Jewell
‘Oh, look, look. It’s my kitchen again! Look at my lovely kitchen! My Aga! My sink!’
Vicky had come in with the little ones and they all stood and smiled at each other and Vicky said, ‘You’ve clearly got more sway over her than me. Never in a million years would she have let me do this. And believe me, I’ve tried.’
Meg had smiled sardonically and said, ‘It’s because she’s scared of me.’
And Vicky had sighed and said, ‘Ah, yes, indeed. That’s where I always went wrong with her. I just always wanted her to like me, more than anything.’
Vicky and the girls left and then they all drove up to the supermarket by the roundabout and had what could only be described as a fun time shopping for Easter lunch. Finally uncoupled from her long-standing embarrassment of her mother’s ‘little ways’ and distracted anyway by her marauding tribe of children, she saw, for possibly the first time since her very early childhood, some of Lorelei’s charm.
Viewing her objectively, she was still very beautiful. She had tied back her unruly hair inside a willow-print headscarf and was wearing what looked like one of Beth’s dresses, left behind when she went to Australia – a pink cotton thing with white trim round the hem – with a battered denim jacket over the top. She looked bohemian and youthful, only her haggard hands and slightly drooping jowls giving away the real extent of her age. But it was her manner, her movements, which made her truly a sight to behold. So tall and lean and graceful, so light on her feet, so different from her own rather lumpen eldest child who had inherited the body of some distant relative from a very different, rather stolid branch of the family tree. She swooped about the supermarket like a swift, touching things and exclaiming over their beauty.
‘Look, Meggy, look at these tiny little aubergines, aren’t they precious? Do you have any idea how to cook them?’
‘Rhubarb-and-custard flavoured yogurt, look, darling! Do you think the little ones would like them?’
‘Did you see, Meggy, they’re selling these lovely speckled eggs, now? Look, all those lovely different shades of blue and green, aren’t they exquisite?’
And then of course they came to the Easter egg display and Lorelei stood and for a moment just stared in silence. ‘Every year it gets more beautiful,’ she said. ‘Look at them all. And look! Look at these. Three for five pounds. What a bargain. Kiddos!’ she called out to Meg’s three. ‘Look, see these little eggs here – choose one each. A treat from me.’
All three stared up questioningly at Meg. She nodded. How could she not? It was Easter, after all. Then Lorelei located the packets of pastel-foil-covered eggs she chose every year and bought three of them because they too were on special offer. They bought an egg for Vicky, and two more for her daughters. ‘I already have eggs for you and the kiddos,’ she said. ‘I bought them days ago. Even before I knew you were coming.’
Then they got home and drank wine and prepared the lamb and suddenly it was nine o’clock and time to take the children next door to bed. Lorelei came too and eyed Colin’s home suspiciously from the front door. ‘Your father,’ she began, her wine glass still held in her hand, ‘has no eye for a room. No aesthetic sensibilities whatsoever. Look at this place,’ she tutted. ‘It looks like a caravan.’
It wasn’t a pretty house, it was true. He’d painted the walls magnolia and hung them with dreary, framed watercolours. His furniture had been a job lot from the DFS sale, and not from the funkier end of their offering either. Cold-looking leather in washed-out colours, pale ash veneers and glossy white Formica. Colin had done exactly what Meg had done at the very first opportunity after leaving the Bird House and put order and minimalism above any other kind of aesthetic consideration. Colin’s house was neat and clean and soulless. And yes, Megan did have to agree with her mother, more than reminiscent of a caravan. But she could breathe in here. The children could sleep in clean beds with a clear path to the bathroom in the middle of the night and an unimpeded transit down an empty staircase in the morning.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, pulling clothes over heads and folding them into neat squares even though she’d be throwing them straight in the washing machine when she got home tomorrow night. ‘It’s perfectly pleasant.’
‘It’s not perfectly pleasant and you know it.’ Lorelei sat on the arm of Colin’s ugly leather sofa and sighed. ‘It’s all such a shame, isn’t it?’
‘What?’ Megan folded up a pair of small boy’s pants and reached over for the pyjamas that were folded up inside her weekend bag.
‘This,’ said Lorelei, gesturing around the room. ‘Me and your father. Me and Vicky. I mean, I’d never have got together with Vicky if your father had fought for me. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ said Megan, stopping for a moment. ‘No. I didn’t know that.’
‘Yes. It was all just …’ She sighed again. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think your father had fallen out of love with me, a long time before. And I must say, it’s pretty awful living with someone who’s not in love with you. It doesn’t exactly—’
‘I’m hungry,’ interrupted Stanley.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Meg. ‘You’ve had a huge supper and a whole Easter egg and anyway, under normal circumstances you’d be asleep by now and wouldn’t even know you were hungry.’
‘But I am, Mum. I’m starving.’
‘Shall I make them some hot chocolate?’ asked Lorelei.
‘No!’ snapped Meg. ‘I’m trying to get them into bed, for God’s sake!’
‘Yes,’ said Stanley, ‘hot chocolate!’
‘Yes,’ agreed Molly, ‘please, Mummy, please can we?’
All three nodded and clenched their fists in excitement and there it was again, thought Megan, there it was. Lorelei’s magic, peeled away from its unsavoury backing of hoarding and self-centredness, bright and mesmerising. Hot chocolate at bedtime. They’d often been allowed hot chocolate at bedtime. It hadn’t needed much of an excuse. A late return home. A wet day. A triumph. A disaster. A birthday. An illness. Her mother would make it for them in her peacock-print silk dressing gown, her heavily ringed fingers fluttering around the kitchen at what felt like the middle of the night, collecting mugs and spoons and once even some tiny multicoloured marshmallows that Pandora had brought back from America, while her brood sat in a row on the bench at the table, watching and waiting. It would be poured from a battered old saucepan, the same one she’d heated their milk in as babies, the same pan that still hung overhead in the kitchen, replete with the brown rings of old burned milk. And then they would go to bed, contented, not feeling that there was one more thing that could be wrung from the day to expand their sense of gratification.
Megan rolled her eyes and said, ‘OK then, but you all have to be in your pyjamas, hair brushed and faces washed. OK?’
They cheered and her mother jumped to her feet to see what she could find in Colin’s ‘sad little kitchen’. And they never did get to the bottom of what had happened to bounce Lorelei from Colin’s bed and into Vicky’s.
As Meg put her children to bed that night, Molly whispered out into the dark, ‘Mummy!’
‘Yes, darling,’ Megan whispered back.
‘I had a really nice time today.’
‘Good.’
‘Grandma’s really nice. I prefer her when she’s not got anyone living with her.’
‘Oh,’ said Megan, slightly surprised. It hadn’t actually occurred to her before, but her daughter was absolutely right. For all her talk of loneliness, her mother seemed happier than she had been in a long time. She’d put it down to their visit. Their presence. But now she thought about it she could see that Molly was right. Her mother was happy because she finally had the house to herself. She was in control. The master of her peculiar castle. No one to touch anything, move anything or complain about anything. Just Lorelei and her house. At last.
Beth’s eyes searched for him in the arrivals line at Sydney airport and when she saw him she barely recognised him. He was tanned and r
angy, his greying hair bleached to the colour of old newspapers. His arms were brown and bare, and there – Beth could barely believe it – was a tattoo. A black inscription in Thai lettering encircling his upper arm.
‘Daddy!’ she exclaimed before she’d even said hello. ‘You’ve got a tattoo!’
Colin held his arm away from his body, eyed his tattoo and smiled happily. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s marvellous, isn’t it. It says, “My children are the stars that light the sky.” I think. Something like that anyway. And look at you, Bethy. Look. So brown. So happy.’ He opened his arms out to her and embraced her. He smelled foreign. He smelled hot. He smelled a tiny bit in need of a hot shower and some soap.
They walked to Beth’s car in the short-stay car park. Overhead the sun was fierce and white.
‘Wow,’ said Colin as they walked, ‘culture shock all over again. Amazing what a difference a few hours on a plane can make, isn’t it?’
Beth drove her father back to her cute little apartment in a converted town house in Sydney’s Spanish Quarter. He talked fast and furious about his four days in Thailand with Rory – he seemed almost high on it. Beth turned and smiled as she pulled up the handbrake and said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so animated before, Dad.’
Colin shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe I’m finally finding myself at the ripe old age of fifty-nine.’ He chuckled and ran his hand subconsciously up and down his new tattoo. ‘I always wanted to travel, you know. And I never could. Because of, well, your mother, obviously. I should have started years ago.’
Beth smiled at him again and squeezed his arm. ‘You’ve still got plenty of time,’ she said. ‘Another forty years, potentially.’
He laughed. ‘I think that’s pushing it a bit, Beth. But hopefully another twenty. That would be nice.’
She showed him into her home. ‘It’s small,’ she said, ‘but cosy.’
‘After where I’ve just been staying with your brother, this looks like a veritable mansion, I can assure you.’
Her first home, at the age of thirty-one, was a one-bedroom attic with a terrace from which, if you stood on the wall and stretched, you could see a slice of ocean. It was furnished entirely from local junk shops and flea markets as she’d brought virtually nothing with her from home. Barely a weekend case. She’d started to pack and then realised that everything she touched had a smell about it, a damp, mouldering smell of neglect. She might have been imagining it, it might have been entirely in her head, but she’d left it there, all of it, and taken just a change of clothes and some toiletries. So this now, this place that she called home, was the physical manifestation of her own reinvention. It looked as though she’d been here for years, it looked as though she was surrounded by family heirlooms and mementoes, but in reality it was a stage set, bought in a flat-spin retail frenzy over the course of her first few weeks in Sydney.
She was still rather surprised to find herself here. Things had changed so quickly. She could clearly remember sitting on her bed in the Bird House, listening to her mother screaming about broken plant pots, staring at the cobwebs in the coving, hearing the ping of her phone with that message from Jason – everything that had happened after that felt like a blur. She’d called Bill that very night and told him she had a new boyfriend. That it was over. And what was it he’d said? Oh, yes, he’d breathed an audible sigh of relief. Then he’d chuckled and said, ‘Thank fuck for that, now you and I can get on with being nice people again.’
A month later she’d said yes to Jason’s invitation to be his plus-one at his sister’s wedding, and everything had begun to spiral dizzyingly, sucking her up in a vortex and depositing her in Hobart, just over six months later, with only the clothes on her back.
‘Oh, darling,’ said Colin, ‘this is just lovely. Seriously. What a lovely place you’ve made for yourself.’
Beth smiled and hooked her bag over a vintage coat hook. ‘Thank you. And about time too, eh?’
‘Well, yes, you have been a bit of a late starter. But then so have I.’
Beth nodded and laughed. ‘All Mum’s fault.’
‘Er, yes, and no. I think we both played our own parts in our pitiful existences.’
Beth laughed again. She could not argue with that. Long gone now, Jason. It hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks once she’d established herself in his hemisphere and discovered exactly how many beautiful, beach-burnished girls had been patiently waiting for his return and exactly how delighted he was to see them again. He’d stayed in Hobart; she’d moved to Sydney. And Beth had a new boyfriend now. Just like that. About a week after she arrived in Sydney. A guy at work. A nice English guy. Richard. Thirty-three. Not tall, but very dark and very handsome. No baggage. No wife. No big age gap. No bullshit. She could barely believe it. After all those years with Bill, followed about by the stale stench of their dead attraction, their affair dragged out beyond the point of human decency, the weight of guilt and disgust always heavy on her psyche, she was finally able to sit across a table from a normal man and feel nothing stronger than liking.
She was still not entirely sure that she herself was normal; when she looked in the mirror she was occasionally thrown by the person she saw there – who was she? What was she doing? Why was she looking at her like that? – but her life was normal. Wholesome. Clean. She would work out the rest of it as she went along.
She poured her father a glass of cold water and handed it to him. ‘So,’ she said playfully. ‘What’s with the tattoo?’
He shrugged and stroked it again. ‘Your brother’s covered in the things now, you know, head to toe almost. I felt practically naked in comparison. And this guy –’ he pointed at the tattoo – ‘he’s done all of Rory’s. I was having the time of my life, I just wanted to kind of mark it. Somehow.’ He shrugged. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time. Does it look ridiculous?’
Beth looked at the tattoo and then at her father and thought, no, in the context of her father here and now, tanned and shaggy, loose-limbed and free, no, it did not look ridiculous. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a nice tattoo. It looks good. But you’ll have to keep up the attitude to go with it, once you’re back home.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, glancing from his tattooed arm to the gnarled wooden floorboards between his feet. ‘Once I’m home. Hmm.’ He pulled his hands down his face and grimaced. ‘You know, darling, I won’t be going home. I don’t think.’
His eyes darted about as he said this. He looked both nervous and guilty.
‘You mean, not back to the cottage? Or not back to England?’
‘I mean, not back to England.’
‘Oh, my God.’ She clasped her hand to her breastbone. ‘Why not?’
He shrugged and caressed the sides of his water glass with his fingertips. ‘It’s not home,’ he said. ‘That cottage, that place. I didn’t choose it. You know. I kind of ended up with it, like the burned edge of a slice of cake. What your mother let me have. And I took it because I wanted to be close to you all and now of course none of you are bloody well there!’ He laughed hoarsely. ‘And your mother, she has Vicky. And frankly, she’s better living on her own. The more people she has flapping about the place the harder she is to manage. And …’
He stopped completely then. His eyes started to dart about again. Beth drew her breath in. She could feel something bad coming her way, like a rush of dirty water through a tunnel.
‘I’ve, kind of, well, I’m with someone. Well, not exactly with someone. But potentially with someone. Someone … urgh, God.’ He pushed his hands into his hair. ‘I’m going to live on the commune. In Spain.’
Beth nodded numbly, waiting for the bullet.
‘With Kayleigh.’
Beth felt her hand squeeze itself too hard around the waist of her glass and she put it down. ‘What?’
Colin took off his spectacles and rubbed his sweaty nose. ‘I don’t really know,’ he sighed. ‘It’s all crazy. The whole thing. She came to stay, at Christmas. With Tia.
Like she always does. But this time something happened between us. Something …’
Beth felt warm water rising through her gullet. She felt her temperature drop and then rise again just as quickly. She swallowed hard.
‘It’s so wrong. And I promise you, darling, that I did not instigate it. Truly. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I mean, we’ve always got on well, Kayleigh and me. But I promise, I’d never thought of her in that way. And then …’
‘No,’ said Beth. She put her hand between herself and her father’s words. ‘No.’
‘Oh, Beth. I’m so sorry. And truly, I don’t even know what it is yet, what this thing is. She still has her boyfriend. Tia calls him Dad. But it sounds like she’s tiring of him. And he’ll be there. This man. And I’ll be there. And I suppose something or other will transpire …’
‘Fucking hell, Dad! Jesus. That’s your granddaughter. How can you even …? I mean …’ She made a guttural sound in the base of her throat formed out of all the thoughts she could not stomach and all the words she could not immediately find to express her horror and disgust. ‘I mean, that’s practically incest!’
‘Well, no, it’s not quite that, is it, darling?’
‘Yes! It is. It is. Oh, God, Dad, you were the only one in this family I could feel normal about! Please don’t do this to me. Please.’
Her father sighed heavily, any hope he might have been harbouring that this exchange would go smoothly, dying in his eyes. ‘I might still change my mind. I mean, that was partly what this trip was about. I wanted to see Rory, see him eye to eye, really try and understand why he left her, what his feelings are, what he thinks about his daughter and her mother. And honestly, darling, he feels nothing. It’s terrifying. He just walked away from that little family he made and felt nothing at all.’ He shook his head sadly and Beth looked furiously at him.