by Fiona Harper
He’d made the mistake of letting the deception drag out way past its sell-by date.
If this thing was going to go anywhere between them, it had to move beyond emails and texts. He was going to have to do this communicating stuff face to face eventually. He just hoped he could take what he’d learned and turn it into actual, real live conversation.
A thought dropped into his brain, cool and simple and perfect.
He wanted to tell her the whole story in person, but that didn’t mean he was restricted to email. After all, he had her phone number …
He picked up his phone and started to dial, but then he realised there was something else he needed to do urgently. He flipped open his laptop and logged onto Facebook. Once there, he searched for ‘Erica Conway’ and, as soon as her profile page popped up, he clicked on the button that said ‘Friends’ and chose ‘unfriend’ from the drop-down list.
*
Claire had been glancing at her phone on her bedside table while she’d been reading, hoping it would ding with a reply from Nick, but when it actually rang she almost dropped her book. She picked it up, heart beating.
‘Hello?’
She knew it was him from the caller display, but she could hardly believe it.
‘Hey.’
Claire closed her eyes. It was him all right, with that rich, warm voice that always held a hint of laughter. ‘Hey,’ she breathed back, cradling the phone with both hands and hugging it to her a little. She was only sad it was a thin little sliver of a thing, not one of those big chunky phones with a curly wire that Doris had used in Pillow Talk. This moment felt just like that.
She knew she was being a total and utter sap, but for some reason she just didn’t care. She imagined her grey vest top and shorts away and envisioned herself in a filmy blue negligee the colour of a summer’s sky.
‘You got my email about the chips, then?’
He chuckled and the sound seemed to curl right out of her phone and wrap itself around her. ‘Yes, I got it, but I also “got” it, I think.’
‘Good.’ She sat up a little. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you phoning me? Is there a problem?’
‘No problem,’ he replied casually. ‘Just wanted to hear your voice.’
Oh, good answer.
She draped her arm on the pillow above her head as they started to chat about anything and everything.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Won’t You Dance With Me, Papa?
Claire pulled up outside a nursing home in a wide and leafy street not far from Crystal Palace Park. The road was full of massive red-brick Victorian villas, the sort that must have been owned by wealthy middle-class families when they were first built, but now had been carved into flats or converted into private schools and old people’s homes. She got up and stared at a huge oak tree towering overhead. The passenger door clicked open and soon Maggs was standing beside her.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you?’
Claire shook her head, still staring into the branches of the tree. ‘No. It’s fine. I want to do this on my own.’
Maggs looked in the direction of the park, which could just about be glimpsed at the far end of the road. It was a pleasant afternoon, sunny, not too hot, with a light breeze. Strange weather for something like this, Claire thought. Everything seemed so pleasant, so benign. It should be thundering or, at the very least, overcast.
‘I’ll take a stroll, then,’ Maggs said. ‘I’ll get back here in about forty-five minutes.’ She patted her handbag. ‘If you need me before then, text.’
Claire nodded. ‘Will do,’ she replied, but her voice was soft and faint. She transferred her gaze to the red-brick building in front of her. Someone on the staff must be a keen gardener, because there were window boxes overflowing with colourful flowers.
Maggs walked over and pressed a kiss to her cheek, saying nothing, and then she turned and walked down the road. Claire watched her go. Some old ladies stooped, their backs irrevocably rounded, a lifetime of poor posture solidifying their muscles and bones, but Maggs was ramrod straight as she walked away.
Claire wondered what Maggs was going to do about George. She’d told him he could take her out to lunch, as long as it wasn’t somewhere ‘full of old farts’, but Claire was still worried for poor George, and once she started worrying about him that got her on to worrying about Maggs, but then she realised she was only doing it so she didn’t have to think about what came next.
She relaxed her tense rib muscles and dragged in a breath and, following Maggs’s example, pulled herself up and walked through the gate and up the path of St Elwin’s nursing home. A friendly nurse met her and said she’d show Claire to one of the smaller lounges, where she confirmed she and her father would have a bit of privacy, then she gave Claire a sympathetic smile and left her standing outside.
Claire stared at the door. It was panelled. Once varnished wood, she guessed, but now it had been painted in brilliant white gloss, recoated so many times over the years that the beading inlaid in the panels had started to lose its definition. She knew she should knock, but she didn’t. She just stood there, feeling the cold creep up from her toes, chilling her calf bones, making her thighs tremble.
That suffocating feeling was back, that horrible, frozen state she remembered from standing in the yellow hallway of her parents’ home, waiting for a bark of an instruction to enter, to come and receive judgement. She found she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. All she could do was let it wash over her in a stinging icy wave and hope the first surge would be the worst, that after that she’d be able to ride it.
No voice came from the other side of the door. No command to enter. He must have known she was there. He must have heard the nurse talking to her. She seriously considered turning tail and racing through the corridors until she could burst through the front door and out into the fragrant June air again.
But then, almost without consciously deciding to do it, she lifted her hand and pushed the door open.
She stepped into a small lounge with a sofa and a collection of assorted armchairs. The carpet was a rich royal blue and the walls, in an ironic twist of fate, were the same bright buttercup that her mother had chosen for her house. French doors led onto a well-tended mature garden. She could see an elderly couple taking a stroll and a nurse pushing a woman in a wheelchair. Only when she had taken in all these things did she look at the only other person in the room.
The door whispered shut behind her, the fire-regulation closer attached to it having slowed its progress. Just as well, there was nothing her father hated more than a door being slammed. This place must be like heaven to him.
Her father. She looked at him. Mentally totted up the years since she’d last seen his face. Twenty-three. That was two-thirds of her life just about. They stared at each other.
‘You came,’ he said flatly.
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t sure you would.’
Claire said nothing. She hadn’t been sure she would either, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. She didn’t want to agree with him about anything.
‘What do you want?’
He nodded to one of the other armchairs. ‘Sit,’ he said. It wasn’t an order but a request, but Claire still felt the tiny hairs on the skin covering her spine lift, and she sat in a different chair from the one he’d pointed out to her.
She sat on the edge of the seat, knees together and palms on top of them, and then she lifted her face.
He looked her over thoroughly and, for the first time since she’d entered the room, Claire took a really good look at him too. It was if, in the shock of the moment, she hadn’t been able to process all the information her senses had been sending her, and now it all arrived a bit late, jumbled and out of breath.
He was sitting in the chair, arms on the armrests, gripping the ends with his long fingers, as he always had, but that was where the similarity to the man in her memory ended. She remembered
him with black hair and dark slashes for eyebrows. There’d always been something quite regal about him, as if he’d always known he was born to rule others, but the man who sat in front of her was grey and balding, his shoulders slumped and, even though he was still broad and tall, his limbs seemed skinny inside his clothes.
Was this the monster? The one she’d run from all these years?
‘You look a lot like your mother,’ he said, startling her out of her observations.
Claire kept staring at him and answered in an even tone. ‘I know.’ She had her mother’s snub nose, her freckles and her smile.
‘Your eyes are mine,’ her father added.
She showed no trace of emotion on her features. ‘No,’ she replied firmly and slowly, as she stared at a pair of eyes that matched her own for blueness and shine. ‘They’re nothing like yours.’
He frowned. Claire realised it was only the second time in her life that she’d contradicted him. During her childhood, once had been enough. It gave her a sense of power. She ought to have felt happy about that, but somehow that emotion was swallowed up in the deepening and darkening furnace that was burning inside her.
‘Are you ill?’
He didn’t flinch, didn’t bat an eyelash. He’d always been that direct himself, she supposed, so maybe it didn’t surprise him that she’d been so blunt. It bothered her that she remembered things about him like that, especially after she’d done her best to erase him from her consciousness, but little details, little comparisons, kept popping into her mind the longer she sat here opposite him.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Are you going to die?’
He blinked. For a ghost of a moment, she almost thought she saw something resembling dark humour in his eyes. ‘Yes, because that fate is shared by us all, Claire.’
Her stomach lurched when he said her name. She wanted to lunge at him, push it back inside his mouth. She didn’t want to hear him use it.
‘But, no, I’m not about to die. Not just yet, although I probably won’t reach the ripe old age of my mother’s darling Doris.’
Good, Claire thought. And she meant it.
‘So what do you want with me?’ she repeated. ‘Why summon me after all this time? Have you got something to say?’
There was a long silence as he folded his arms in his lap and continued his appraisal of her. Claire refused to look away. She had a feeling she’d never forgive herself if she did.
He drew a large, heaving breath. ‘I wanted to see how you turned out, that’s all, to see what kind of person the child I produced has become.’
Through no thanks to you, Claire answered silently. She realised she could have said it out loud if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t bother. Somehow it didn’t seem worth it.
‘That’s all?’ she said, nodding gently to herself, answering her own question before he did. Of course that was all. It was curiosity, plain and simple, that had caused him to call her here. Not love. Not remorse. Not a sudden and transforming need to redeem himself.
For the first time since they’d started talking he looked away. ‘Yes.’
‘In that case, I’m going to leave,’ she said, standing up. She’d only been sitting for five minutes and yet her limbs felt stiff and unfamiliar. ‘Please don’t contact me again.’
She promised herself she wouldn’t look back as she walked away. Even so, she couldn’t help it as she passed through the doorway. Afterwards, she was never sure it was because she’d been weak or because her head had just naturally turned that way as she’d passed through the doorway. For some reason that bothered her.
He was slumped even further in his chair, looking steadily and determinedly out the window.
She thought all hope had left when he’d answered her question, but she found it was this moment that erased it completely. With shame, she realised that if he’d turned and looked, if his eyes had begged and said what his mouth had not been able to, that she might have sat down again. What a sad, deluded loser she was. Maggs might talk about icebergs and hidden motives, but there was nothing beneath the surface of this man but hardness and coldness, just as one would have expected.
She walked to the exit, passing the smiling nurse without reacting. How odd, she thought, as she crossed the threshold into the sunshine. She’d expected this moment to tear her neatly ordered world apart, but instead she found herself totally and completely numb.
*
The numbness pervaded as Claire walked through the main gate of Crystal Palace Park and down the wide avenue of beech trees. Maggs couldn’t have got far. They’d left each other maybe fifteen minutes ago, max. Claire decided to take a wander and see if she could spot her, and if that didn’t work, she’d text.
It was quiet, even though it was close to eleven o’clock on Friday morning. There were a few people in sensible shoes walking their dogs, a handful of parents and children in the playground. As Claire went past the sprawling play area, a child’s shriek cut through the birdsong and sound of gently rustling leaves. She quickly turned her head to see where it had come from, sensors on high alert, but the alarming noise was quickly followed with a high-pitched giggle. Another shriek. Claire scanned the playground.
It wasn’t hard to identify the source. A lone pair was at the swings – a father pushing his daughter, aged six, possibly seven. She was calling for him to push higher and higher and when he did she let out a scream of half joy, half fear. Her long wavy hair fluttered behind her like ribbons as she swung forward, then flipped to cover her face when she changed direction.
She looked so happy, an expression of pure bliss on her features every time she swung high. Claire stepped forward to the edge of the black-painted railings that ran round the edge of the playground. She stayed there watching them, feeling the momentum of the swing, its rhythm, tug at something inside her.
She transferred her attention to the father. He was grinning too, wider every time his daughter shrieked. His eyes shone, never leaving her, not even for a second.
The tugging inside continued, but now it became uncomfortable.
The unravelling happened so suddenly that it took Claire completely by surprise. One moment she was experiencing a simple moment of joy in a beautiful park and the next a trapdoor opened inside her, revealing a pit that was vast and dark.
And then she felt the heat that billowed from it. It started in her feet then rushed up her legs and into her torso, threatening to suffocate her, burning away the mist of numbness that had been clouding her since she’d left St Elwin’s. Her hands began to shake.
A fireball exploded through her, scorching where it touched. She had to grab the railings in front of her to steady herself and heaved in a lungful of warm air and closed her eyes.
Oh, how she hated him for dragging her back into his orbit again, for making her feel like the little girl who had starved for his approval, even before she’d left. And she hated herself too, for still wanting it from him, even after all he’d done to her and her mother and her grandmother.
He wasn’t worth it. He didn’t deserve this emotion. Not one bit of it.
Tears blurred her eyes and shame washed into the mix with the other swirling emotions.
She was vaguely aware of a hand being placed on her arm.
‘Claire? Are you all right?’
She recognised the voice. She knew she recognised it, but for a fleeting second she couldn’t match it with anything in her memory banks. She turned her head and found Maggs looking at her, face full of concern. She slapped Maggs’s hand away and her features contorted in disgust. ‘This is all your fault,’ she said in a low, growling voice. ‘You made me come! You made me believe there was more, that maybe I’d misjudged him, done the wrong thing by keeping away all these years!’
Maggs couldn’t have looked more shocked. ‘I—’
‘Don’t!’ Claire shouted. ‘Don’t you dare defend yourself!’
She had to get away. From this woman who’d manipulated her into
coming here today by cooing about how much it would have meant to her grandmother. From this place. From anywhere close to where he was. She needed to get back on her side of the Thames.
She turned sharply and started to stride towards the park gates. She knew she was walking faster than Maggs could keep up with but she didn’t care. She hardly noticed her journey back to her car, because her mind was full of shouted conversations, with Maggs, with her father … And all the time she could see him hunched in that chair, pretending, once again, that she didn’t exist.
She unlocked the car, got in and turned the keys in the ignition. She sat there for a few seconds, looking towards the end of the road. There was no sign of her travel companion, but she still took the handbrake off, put her foot on the accelerator and drove away.
She’d gone three streets before she turned round and went back for Maggs. She was still angry, but the fireball was starting to burn itself out. As much as she wanted to yell and scream at her grandmother’s friend right now, she couldn’t leave a seventy-year-old stranded in Penge, of all places, miles away from home.
But when she got back to St Elwin’s, Maggs wasn’t standing outside, looking this way and that, wondering where Claire was.
Claire began to panic. She drove up and down the road, trying to spot her. Maggs, while fit for her age, didn’t walk fast. She drove round the block looking for her and when she came up empty she parked back outside the home and pulled her phone out of her bag. Why hadn’t she thought about that earlier?
Her calls just went through to voicemail. That was when she really started to get scared. Oh, God. What had she done? How could she have treated Maggs that way? Finally, everything she’d been feeling caught up with her. She laid her head on the steering wheel and sobbed.
She didn’t know how long she stayed there. She lost all sense of time and space. All she could do was listen to the ugly howling, feel the shape and depth and colour of her own sorrow. It blotted everything else out, raging like a storm, wearing itself out with its own fury.
Flip, she thought to herself, in a tiny lucid moment when she seemed to be watching herself, as if she was in the passenger seat of her own grief, there’s been a lot locked away for a long time, hasn’t there? She hadn’t even cried like this when her grandmother had died, had just stuffed those unwanted feelings down into the pit, believing she’d disposed of them.