Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘I took a call at work this afternoon. From Bob Hathaway.’ Ah. Amanda’s father.

  ‘Tried your mother this morning – ‘he pointed in my direction, ‘but you weren’t there, apparently.’

  ‘I told you,’ I said, feeling my neck redden. ‘I had a meeting at Gatwick.’

  ‘At Gatwick?’ It was as if we hadn’t spoken earlier. He hadn’t been listening at all.

  ‘A breakfast meeting. I told you. At the Meridien Hotel.’ The words would never sound the same again. Jonathan rolled his eyes. ‘Of course,’ he said disdainfully. ‘Your American chums. Anyway – ‘he turned back to Kate. She had her face in the juice carton. ‘What’s this I hear about you and Amanda getting drunk?’

  ‘I…er…’ began Kate.

  ‘They went to the pub after rehearsals,’ I answered, before she could blunder in and antagonise him further with a spate of defiant denials. ‘They went to the pub and they had a little to drink and I had to go and pick her up and bring her home. That’s all.’

  I waited for him to digest this. Which he did. And then spat it out again.

  ‘That’s all? And you didn’t see fit to tell me about this? Like this morning? Before I had Amanda’s father regaling me with my daughter’s disgraceful behaviour down the phone?’

  ‘I’m telling you now,’ I said quietly. He ignored me and looked hard at Kate.

  ‘A little?’ he asked her pointedly.

  ‘Look, Dad –’ she began.

  ‘From what I hear the pair of you could hardly stand up! And what the hell do you think you’re doing going into pubs anyway? You’re sixteen!’

  I could see Kate’s brain computing the number of times her parents had used those two words, and reaching the number ‘too bloody often’. She inhaled through her nose and clenched her fists.

  ‘For God’s sake, dad! Almost seventeen, OK? And for your information, there is no law against seventeen year olds – or sixteen year olds for that matter – going in pubs. Not on this planet anyway. Not the one normal people live on.’

  His face became redder. Oh, God. Off we went.

  ‘Oh, right,’ he snarled at her. ‘Oh, right, young lady. So you’re about to tell me you were not drinking alcohol illegally, are you? You’re about to tell me that Amanda’s father was imagining it when his daughter spent the night throwing up, are you? Well?’

  More justice. I felt very slightly cheered by this news. Though not that much.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s true. They did have too much to drink. And I have told Kate off, in no uncertain terms. And I’m quite sure Kate has learned her lesson. Haven’t you?’ I said pointedly to her, willing her to just shut her mouth and climb out of the gaping hole she was about to plunge herself deeper into. When would she learn that this sort of confrontation with her father was pointless? ‘Jonathan, look, ‘I said. ‘We can talk about this later. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by us rowing about it again now. Kate –’

  He glared at me. ‘Oh, right. So I’m not allowed to take my daughter to task when she behaves like a complete idiot, then am I? That’s your job, then, is it?’

  My turn now then. ‘Jonathan, you weren’t here. I told you. I have dealt with it. I –’

  ‘Dad, I’m sorry, all right? ’said Kate, her voice far from sounding it. ‘I have learned my lesson. I will not do it again. Now can’t we just leave it?’

  ‘No we will not just leave it, young lady!’ He glared at me again. ‘I’m supposed to believe that, am I? I’m supposed to trust you when all you ever seem to do these days is abuse that trust? What are you coming to, for God’s sake?’

  Trust. Such a powerful word. Kate narrowed her eyes.

  ‘I told you –’

  ‘Jonathan, please,’ I entreated, dishwasher powder clutched to my chest. ‘Can’t we just leave it for now? Talk about it in the morning? We’re all tired, and Kate and I have –’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said, picking up the racquets again. For one terrible moment I thought he was going to throw them at me. But he didn’t. Just shoved them under one arm and waggled the other one in the air. ‘Oh, right,’ he said again. ‘None of my business then is it? Well, fine. You go ahead and undermine me. I’ll leave you to get on with it then shall I? You’re the expert, Sally. Don’t mind me.’

  ‘Look, I’m not saying that, Jonathan. I just think it would be better if we could sit down and discuss this calmly in the morning. That’s all – ‘

  ‘When it suits you, you mean. Fine.’ He turned on his heel and marched back outside again. I could hear his car engine start up.

  Oh great.

  ‘Well done,’ I said to Kate. Now your father’s in a rage. ‘Thanks Kate. Very good job.’ Now she rolled her eyes.

  ‘Well, good,’ she spat. ‘Good. Because I hate him.’

  ‘Kate, you don’t –’

  ‘Yes I do!’ She whirled around and slammed the fridge door shut. ‘He obviously hates me. He never has a good word to say to me! He doesn’t care about anything I do. He hasn’t once asked me how my exams have been going. Hasn’t ever asked me about my dancing. He hasn’t even been to see me in a show since I was ten! All he ever does is criticise and moan and tell me I’m useless, and criticise my friends and tell me Carl’s a waster – as if! – and drone on about how horrible young people today are. Well, thanks a lot! He knows nothing, mum! He knows nothing about me! He wishes he never had me, you know. He does! That’s what it is. It’s all Morgan this and Morgan that and Morgan the bloody other!. Just because she’s so goody two shoes with her hoity toity friends and her brilliant career and…oohhhh! He makes me so mad.’

  I was too tired for this. ‘That’s not true, Kate,’ I said wearily.’ It’s just that he… well, he just doesn’t know how to deal with you. He’s doesn’t really understand how to relate to you, that’s all. If you could just try to see things from his point of view – he works very hard, you know, and he gets home tired and irritable, and if you could only use a bit of savvy and tread a little more carefully – ‘

  She snorted at me. ‘Why the hell should I, Mum? I get tired and irritable too, you know? I’ve just done a shedload of revision and some really hard exams and –’she gulped back a sob. ‘Does he ever think of that? Does he ever think about anyone but himself? No. He does not. Look at you! Does it ever occur to him that you might be tired? No. You run around after everyone all the time – everyone! Him, me, Morgan, Gran – and you never get any appreciation from him. Not a bit! And yet you spend all your time defending him and pussy footing around him and letting him treat you like a doormat!’ I began shaking my head. ‘No, no,’ she said, shaking her own. ‘That’s fine, mum. If that’s the way you like it, then fine. That’s your business. But just don’t think I’m going to let him push me around like that, OK? ’

  She ripped half a dozen sheets of kitchen paper from the roll and stomped off to bed.

  The air in the kitchen was ringing. All I could see of Merlin was his nose. I thought he might come out from under the table and nuzzle his head into my outstretched hand. But no. He knew when to keep his head down.

  I picked up a plate – Jonathan’s from earlier, presumably – and held it aloft, swung my arm back, took aim.

  Then I dropped my arm. Dropped the plate into the dishwasher.

  And reflected, unhappily, as I finished tidying the kitchen, that I was really rather good at being quietly unhappy. Getting on with it.

  An expert, in fact.

  Chapter 18

  I didn’t hear Jonathan come in. But when I woke at three thirty he was right there beside me, hogging the whole duvet and breathing regularly and deeply. Sleeping the sleep of the just, no doubt.

  No such comfort for me. I slid silently from the bed and padded out across the landing into the spare room, a nagging anxiety crowding my consciousness, as it always did when there was tension in the house. And that seemed to be pretty much all the time these days, my own sit
uation notwithstanding.

  My own situation. The idea that there was a situation on the go and that I was its leading lady was making my mouth dry with fear. That I had spent a significant part of yesterday kissing another man was only the tip of this particular hunk of iceberg. It was everything else that scared me so much. The way my physical being seemed to be outside my control all of a sudden. The way I had become someone I suddenly didn’t recognise. A selfish person, pursuing my own gratification despite so much of me knowing it was wrong. I’d never known guilt of this magnitude – hardly known it at all, in fact – yet it wasn’t stopping me. Why?

  The sky outside, as I had known it would be, was clear and bright, the stars winking down at me as I gazed out from the spare room window and wondered quite what it was I was going to do next. What I most wanted to do next was to go downstairs and text Nick, but every next thing I seemed to be considering right now just seemed like one more nail in my marital coffin. One more nail in my perception of myself. One more nail in my belief that I was a good person. It was pathetic. I would do absolutely nothing, that’s what I would do. But I went down anyway. It was too hot upstairs.

  When I got down into the kitchen, the floor bathed in the milky light of another almost full moon, there was already a message icon on the display. I felt my stomach muscles tighten as I pressed the button and read it. It simply said ‘Hello. How are you? N.’

  I held the phone in my hand and stared at it for a good ten minutes. Then switched it off and put it back on the charger before the urge to communicate with him became so irresistible that it smashed my tenuous resolve into shards.

  How was I? I was quietly unhappy. Still quietly unhappy. I walked wearily upstairs and back into the spare bedroom. Kate was right, I thought with dismay. I was a doormat. I was the prototype for doormats the world everywhere. It was a shock to discover this. I had never thought of myself in those terms before. I was just good at compromising, wasn’t I? Just a good negotiator. A carer. A rescuer. A model of all those wholesome things psychologists prattle so enthusiastically about. A person who looked after other people. Not a doormat. A carer. And yet she was right. I spent so much time worrying about how everyone else was feeling, I had lost the ability to attend my own needs. And not only that, I realised with growing alarm, my whole sense of myself as a worthwhile human being was based on exactly those qualities. My usefulness to everyone else. I didn’t even acknowledge I had any needs of my own. I didn’t use the words ‘me’ or ‘no’. Ever. Because I didn’t want anyone not to like me. It was really that simple. Really that damning. Mother Teresa I was not.

  But there was nothing to be gained from feeling sorry for myself. I left the bed in the spare room and returned to my own one. Then heaved on the duvet and clambered back under it. It was my bed, and I had to lie on it.

  I only lay on it until twenty to seven, but by this time Jonathan was already downstairs. I walked down them taking mental deep breaths. The thing about arguments you go to bed on is not just that they don’t disappear in the night, it’s that they swell up still bigger, like canellini beans.

  But Jonathan, much to my consternation, was not sitting in wait with a face like a mastiff, but calmly reading the sports pages of the Times, in reflective rather than pugilistic mood. It was as if he had assimilated the events of the previous night and instead of continuing on his ‘I’m the head of this bloody family and what I say is testament’ crusade (which would have been usual and given me scope to insert a little chagrin and righteous indignation into the proceedings) had decided to both pre-empt and disarm me by drawing up a ten point corrective strategy, which he aimed to implement forthwith.

  ‘I’ve made a decision,’ he announced gravely, but not aggressively. ‘When do Kate’s exams finish?’

  I looked at him, trying to assess what new and unworkable regime was about to be wrought on my life. It was all very well him laying down the law, but he was never around trying to quash the inevitable mutiny. It had been thus since Kate was five. He raised his eyebrows in calm enquiry and I wondered anxiously how much of my own inner turmoil was creeping across the table towards him. Like a dose of CS gas.

  ‘Friday,’ I told him. ‘Her last one’s this Friday.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Excellent. That’ll work then.’

  I went over to the teapot and took off the lid. ‘What’ll work?’

  He glanced up at me and smiled. ‘I’ve decided she can come with me to Malta next week.’

  ‘Malta? With you? What – on your conference?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he went on. ‘She and I are at loggerheads all the time at the moment –’he lifted a hand and held it out palm towards me. ‘– my fault,’ he said. ‘I’ve been very preoccupied with work just lately, and I think my lack of input is something that needs to be addressed. I think it’s time I stepped in and spent a bit more time with my daughter, don’t you?’

  Well, yes, frankly, I thought. But didn’t say so. I wondered fleetingly whether he hadn’t in fact driven anywhere last night. Just lurked inside the garage and listened to her ranting about him. But no. I had heard the car crunch over the gravel. No. He had just been thinking. Like me.

  ‘Well, we’re clearly not getting on, are we?’ he said, in a tone that made me feel, however wrongly or rightly, that it was a state of affairs that was largely my fault. Was it my fault? I’d got so used to being left to deal with Kate over most things that this sudden appraisal of procedures and outcomes felt like a bit of an affront. What did he mean ‘needs to be addressed’? Was I not doing a good enough job?

  But he seemed to read my thoughts. ‘Entirely my fault,’ he repeated magnanimously. ‘I’m obviously not handling things very well right now. So I’ve decided the best thing will be if she comes with me. I was talking to Paul Elliott the other day and he was telling me he was bringing his girls along with him. His wife’s got some college summer school she’s going off to. So I thought ‘why not?’. Kate gets on OK with them, doesn’t she? Be a chance to enjoy a little quality time together. I think we’ve all been a little stressed out just lately. Do her good. Do us both good. What do you think?’

  Do us good? I really wasn’t so sure. And even less sure about this sudden use of such groovy right-on language. It was distinctly unsettling.

  ‘Well, that’s fine by me,’ I said, fishing out a conciliatory smile and finding it not half as difficult to plaster on my face as I might have expected. I should, by rights have been bristling a little, both at the underlying inference that my parenting skills were, in his opinion, a tad on the laissez faire side, and the fact that he hadn’t asked me along too. Which was a worry of itself. Implications mushroomed around me. A seriously serious worry. ‘But I’m not sure Kate will be quite so thrilled,’ I finished, both to steady myself, and before he ran away with the idea that his munificence would be greeted with undying gratitude. ‘What about her rehearsals?’

  There was also some post exam party to consider, but I thought it best not to go there right now. Jonathan closed up his paper and smiled back at me. A honeyed smile. A stuck-on smile. As if he were about to go off into the trenches and was putting a brave face on his imminent death.

  ‘Missing a rehearsal or two won’t kill her, Sally.’ He looked at his watch and pushed his chair back. ‘I’d better get going. Have a word with her, will you ?’He stood up then and smiled a proper smile at me. A rather wry one, in fact. ‘Actually, no. Don’t worry. I’ll pop up and speak to her myself.’

  So that was that sorted. Though it occurred to me as I unloaded the dishwasher how good we both were at skimming over the small scale pot holes of family dysfunction without ever landing in any of the gaping craters where our own relationship as a couple now sat.

  ‘Well, thanks a lot, mum! That’s just marvellous.’

  Kate had appeared in the kitchen shortly after Jonathan had left for the surgery, mouth curled
in contempt.

  ‘This is nothing to do with me,’ I said, removing the last mug from yesterday and starting to load up again with the breakfast things. I would be late for work if I didn’t get a move on.

  ‘But couldn’t you have stopped him? Talked him out of it? Why on earth would I want to go galumphing off to Malta with Dad? I can’t imagine anything more dire!’

  ‘The Elliott girls are going.’

  ‘Quite. I mean, don’t get me wrong. They’re very nice and all that. Just terminally boring, that’s all.’

  ‘Look, it’s only for a few days, Kate, and it’ll be good for you to spend a bit more time with your father.’ I realised I was simply parroting out Jonathan’s line but lacked the energy to do more. Or the will.

  ‘Yeah, right. And what about rehearsals?’

  The conference, as it turned out, was only to be a four day affair, so Kate would only have to miss one rehearsal and would not miss her precious end of exams party at all. So my heart wasn’t exactly bleeding for her. On the contrary (and chipping away at my fragments of resolve still further) it occurred to me at least two hundred and seventy five times that both husband and younger daughter safely out of the country equalled danger zone situation with Nick Brown.

  Oh, God! I thought, as I said my goodbyes to Kate and the dog and reversed out into the lane and off to work. This was no way to live. I was suddenly so, so, so excited. I was bubbling with excitement. Fizzing with excitement. Where had my head gone? Where was the person who normally lived here?. This was surely not how things should be. This unpredictable see-sawing between euphoria and terror. My resolve, clearly, was about as potent a force in my life as a pop sock. I felt like I’d suddenly been slit down the middle. That there we two of me now .

  Thankfully, however, Nick was to be back in Brighton for what was now left of the week. Drug U Like were launching their flagship UK store there – our own turn would come a few weeks down the line. Which meant I wouldn’t have to look at him at least. Which meant I would have space and time and a chance for thinking and reflection and all the other serious and sensible things that I knew I should be doing but for which I seemed to have lost the ability. I could read my book. Think about my marriage. Try to get a handle on what it was I should do. But just thinking these things made me think about Nick, which made me feel so fizzy again.