The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  Two years ago Joe had wanted to turn his love for Mexican food, new music and travel into something solid, and an internationally roaming festival burrito van was to be the intersection where these three loves met. I had agreed it was a great idea – it was a great idea, it was romantic! – and as we submerged into our thirties it felt important to cling to any visible signifiers of romance and adventure. It made Joe happy, and initially he was enthusiastic about getting vendor licences, reaching out to festival organizers.

  It was not a great idea, however, to quit his job as a broker in the City at the same time, and to use his inheritance from his dead grandfather to buy a van, and live off the remainder. He needed to convert the interior into a state-of-the-art kitchen, but that, too, ‘would take time’. Joe was stubborn and he did not realize – or would not acknowledge – how brutal and competitive the festival food van business actually was. You had to want it, but Joe only loved it. He was completely unequipped, or unwilling, to push himself.

  Joe’s parents had bought him the flat we shared, and I lived there rent-free. This fact always held my tongue (unless alcohol had been involved) on the lack of progress with Joerritos – I had no stake in his property, so for some reason I had no stake in his behaviour with his business and how it affected our relationship. It was far from ideal. The flat protected Joe like some sort of fairy circle, and in my opinion had left him without much of an appreciation for what hard work really was, and what it felt like not to have a safety net.

  We’d been together nine years. We did have good times, of course we did. Lots of them. Otherwise why else would we have been together? I did love him. I just sometimes wondered if other couples dragged themselves across the seabed like this, and why they did it. Because they all believed in love? Because there was nothing else to do? When we argued, I would know a heaviness to my arms, my stomach, my shoulders, that was not an afternoon slump. Fights with Joe weighted down my body. But more recently, I felt no longer furious at him: it was too exhausting. It was a sulk; it was nothing. Instead, perhaps a new sense of resignation was coming; this subaquatic feeling being mine to keep. Every day I felt I had to carry it. To break up with him was inconceivable. We’d seen each other through half our twenties, and that is no mean feat. Kelly had had many boyfriends, many lovers; so did several of the girls from school. Not me: I’d found my rock and I had clung.

  Joe wasn’t an archetypal wastrel; he didn’t spend lots of money he didn’t have, but what he did have went on ‘investing’ in the business. And love was less appealing when I was the only one remembering to keep us in loo roll, the provider of intermittent dinners out, the means of a holiday for two weeks in the summer, and the only one who ever thought to buy a nice candle or a cushion as some pathetic marker of adulthood in our shared existence. My own grandparents had left me a bit in their wills, and I’d put half of it into Joerritos, without telling my dad. It was unlikely he would ever be able to hand me down a property.

  My anger was sharpening, becoming more easily accessible to me. No one else could tell. I was good at keeping it to myself. But any time I saw a chef on the TV sampling the delights of Mexican cuisine (where there was never even a mention of a burrito), or talking about Mayan civilization or walking round Aztec ruins, I would have to switch over. I had begun to loathe burritos. I had felt the failure of the business to launch every morning when I left for a shift at Clean Bean and when I came back. The van continued to rust on the drive of Joe’s parents’ house, where his mother Dorothy had agreed to house it, providing it was under a canvas cover so that no one could see its hideous burnt-orange colour. She also paid the road tax and insurance. I don’t think Joe’s father knew this.

  The year turned into two, and now Joe’s inheritance from his grandfather was almost gone, and we were in the same state: testing burrito recipes and saying that we would try this county fair or that village fete. It was an astonishing blind spot, and we only argued about it when we were very drunk, because for me to insult the existence of the van was as if I were attacking Joe’s very being, and everything he hoped for – as if I were stamping on his dreams and laughing at his attempts to achieve. He was manipulatively sensitive about the whole thing, and I knew that one false move might turn back the burrito clock even more than it had been turned already.

  *

  I was not apprehensive about our forthcoming lunch at Joe’s parents’, because although I never enjoyed myself particularly, it was all familiar. Joe had a sister, Daisy, who was three years younger than us, but married with two children, who diverted the bulk of attention and enabled me to avoid too much scrutiny. It had long been a source of tension for Daisy that she’d got everything right: school grades, gap year before university, graduate-training scheme, charity bungee jumps, a marathon, a solvent spouse, two kids, lost the baby weight – and Joe, who had done literally none of those things, was imperceptibly but nevertheless undoubtedly their parents’ favourite. I’d met Daisy’s friends at her wedding to her husband, Radek, and they were as competitive as she was. Compared to them, Daisy fancied herself as a little outré, because she smoked a bit of weed and had a small tattoo of a peace sign on her inner arm. She was not outré, and the peace sign looked like a Mercedes Benz badge. She’d been in the City like her father, before having her children. Radek was still there, working every hour God sent. I figured I might be out all the time too, if I was Daisy’s spouse.

  At these Sunday lunches, we often talked about six-year-old Lucia’s schooling or baby Wilf’s ‘fevers’. Joe’s mum was a GP. His dad, Ben, was due within the year to retire from some sort of CEO-ship of something financial I’d never quite understood. Ben was easier to deal with, a lifetime of networking and delivering his own voice across boardrooms made him predictable, manipulable company. Dorothy was more difficult. I always had the impression that she felt Joe had not reached his ‘potential’, and that somehow it was me who had failed to make it happen for him. It was possible that she thought it was entirely my fault. More recently it was making me feel rebellious and irritated. She’s his mother: she was there first! I thought.

  *

  Approaching Dorothy and Ben’s house, there was the burrito van, hidden under its tarpaulin. I pulled the roses I had purchased from the Shell garage out of my handbag, and peeled off the label. We passed the van, saying nothing, and made straight for the front door, lifting the brass knocker.

  Lucia opened it. She was wearing her riding helmet. ‘You’re the right height for a jockey,’ I said to her, stepping inside.

  ‘I know!’ she cried, galloping down the hallway on her invisible horse, into the large extension that contained the kitchen. ‘They’re here!’ she shouted.

  ‘Hullo!’ called Ben, from the front room.

  ‘Hi, Ben!’ I said brightly. He appeared at the doorway and we kissed each other on the cheek.

  ‘Can I get you two a drink?’ he asked, patting his son on the shoulder.

  ‘A glass of red would be lovely,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ said Joe, slouching off to the kitchen like he was fourteen.

  ‘Coming up,’ said Ben, making his way to the cellar stairs. They had a wine cellar, but they wouldn’t have called it that. They would have just said they had a couple of wine racks down there.

  I followed Joe, passing the pretentious grandfather clock and the studio portrait of Daisy as a young teenager. There were endless school pictures, and the deliberate-casual engineered photo collages of the family on holiday through the nineties, everyone cut out in their stripy swimsuits, Dorothy with an ill-advised perm. I could feel a cloak of claustrophobia envelop me and paused a moment to breathe.

  ‘Ah!’ said Dorothy. ‘The wanderers return!’

  I smiled at her and gave her a kiss. ‘These are for you,’ I said, handing her the roses.

  ‘Oh, thank you darling,’ she said. ‘Oh, they’re from Morocco! I wondered how a rose would grow this time of year. Luce, do you want to put them in a vase for m
e?’

  ‘I’m riding,’ said Lucia.

  ‘It won’t take a minute,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. I took the roses back, feeling their North African identity had courted Dotty’s disapproval: carbon footprint or racism? It was hard to tell.

  ‘How are you?’ she said.

  ‘Good, thanks,’ I replied, feeling a malaise melding with the claustrophobia and settling rapidly into the centre of my stomach. Daisy appeared at the kitchen door. ‘Hello!’ I said.

  She too kissed me on the cheek. ‘Hi, Rose.’

  ‘Where’s Rad?’

  Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Stag do. You’d think they’d all be married by now.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Actually, this is a second marriage. They’re far more suited.’

  Dorothy sighed. ‘Will you tell your father to come and cut this beef? What on earth is he doing in there?’

  ‘I think he’s getting wine,’ I said.

  ‘No, he’s trying to set the Sky player to record,’ said Lucia.

  ‘Again? Go and do it for him, Luce. I don’t want everything to get cold. You two made it just in time,’ Dorothy added, but she only looked at me.

  *

  At lunch, we talked mainly about the impending wedding of a couple none of us knew except Daisy. I watched her mouth moving, and thought how utterly exhausted she looked. I tried to tune out, thinking of Constance Holden and how she might have fallen for my mother, but Daisy had a persistent voice, and as she went on and on, I began to yearn for a change of subject. A new update on Wilf’s phlegmy lung, or Lucia’s curriculum, and the latest way Daisy’s daughter had excelled beyond her classmates – (‘although it’s a far better idea to keep her with them, because it’s really important that she knows how to deal with people her age?’). I had a vision, suddenly, of what Lucia might be like in fifteen years’ time. I saw her, friendless, cluelessly brainy. It was bleak. I stared round the blandly decorated dining room, at the aspirational portraits of Dorothy’s distant Victorian relatives. The grandfather clock chimed in the hall.

  ‘And talking of weddings, what about you two?’ Daisy said as I cleared away the plates.

  Joe stiffened and I smiled blankly. ‘You’ve been in that flat so long!’ said Daisy gaily. I wasn’t fooled. ‘When are you going to make an honest woman out of her, Joe?’

  ‘Oh, god,’ said Joe.

  ‘It’s just a question.’

  ‘It’s a shit question!’ Joe said. ‘What if I’m happy with the way things are?’

  Daisy snorted. ‘Mummy’s a pig!’ said Lucia, and I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘Don’t you two believe in marriage, then?’ said Daisy. ‘It’s fine if you don’t!’

  ‘Oh my god. Thank you, Daisy. I was so worried for a moment there about your thoughts on the matter,’ said Joe. Yet, regardless of Daisy’s invasive tactlessness, I was disturbed by how furious he was. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her to shut up. She always does this. It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘But don’t you want the security, Rose?’ said Daisy.

  I looked at her. What, if anything, did she really know about her brother’s life? Could she not see that aside from the flat with its four walls and roof, Joe brought me no security whatsoever? That these days, his emotional offerings were hazy, sketchy things, underlined by his own preoccupations? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was well hidden to those who did not care to look. I laughed, not knowing what else to say or do.

  ‘Rose, why are you always laughing at me?’ said Daisy.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  Daisy looked at me with dislike. Dorothy intervened. ‘Daisy, for Christ’s sake, put that wine down. You’re tired. She’s so tired,’ she said to me directly, as if I had provoked this garbled projection of insecurity and bile from her adult child. ‘Young children are exhausting.’

  ‘She wouldn’t know,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Daisy,’ said Dorothy sharply. ‘Go and sit in the front room.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Joe.

  Ben remained silent. Daisy got up and walked out of the dining room with the air of a hurt duchess. I knew from my friends that young children were exhausting, but none of them acted like this when they were tired. I wondered if Daisy was depressed.

  ‘They’re having problems,’ Dorothy said quietly.

  ‘Dot,’ said her husband, finally speaking up with a warning in his voice, his eyes in the direction of Lucia.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Dorothy, sighing. ‘Everyone has their ups and downs.’

  There was something of the prairie matriarch in her voice, and it irritated me. Daisy should not have been let off the hook for what she said to me, but she was – she always was.

  ‘Dad, shall we go and look at the van?’ said Joe.

  Dorothy, Wilf, Lucia and I were left behind, sitting in the aftermath of another Sunday lunch. ‘Luce, poppet, go to the playroom and find a puzzle for us to do,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘I hate puzzles, Granny.’

  ‘Don’t we all, darling. But go and do as Granny asks.’

  Robotically, Lucia laid down her pencil and slunk out of her chair like she was pouring herself onto the floor.

  Dorothy sighed again. ‘How’s your father, Rose?’ She always said it like that – never, ‘How’s Matt?’

  ‘He’s well, thank you. He’s in Brittany.’

  Dorothy ran her finger round and round an embroidered peony on the tablecloth. ‘I expect he misses you.’

  ‘He’s got Claire.’

  ‘Will you go there for Christmas?’

  I felt alarm. Dorothy liked to plan Christmas early. Did she want me to go to France for Christmas? Was this some sort of attempt to get me away from her son? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay with Joe. Wherever Joe is.’

  Dorothy looked up at me. Her expression! It was so strange. I felt bereft as I looked into it, as if a halo of defeat was framing her head. It seemed to be slipping over her eyes and drawing them shut. ‘Christmas,’ she whispered.

  My eyes flicked to her wine glass. Was she drunk? Christmas – the way she said the word, I saw that season roll round again, as we headed towards the last quarter of the year. All the same dynamics that Dorothy had witnessed for over thirty years would play out once again – the same arguments, the same carols, the same turkey. I felt it in her voice. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, and tell her she didn’t have to do it all – let Joe cook, let Daisy sort it! – but I didn’t. She didn’t invite that kind of intimacy. Even after all these years I was a guest; I never felt like family.

  ‘Are you all right, Dorothy?’ I said. ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’

  ‘No, no, thank you.’ Dorothy looked up at me, and I saw her mentally rearrange herself. ‘Oh, Rose,’ she said. ‘I do hope they haven’t found any more rust on the van.’

  8

  Zoë came good on The Locust Plague, and I devoured it. All women deserve the privilege of failure, but very few get it, Constance wrote. It is a privilege to get something catastrophically wrong, and be given another chance as if nothing really happened. Men do it all the time, and afterwards, are castigated as individuals. Politicians spring to mind. Businessmen. Killers. The white devils who ruin our world. Women are devils too, of course. But when a woman screws it up, it’s usually on behalf of all women, as if we move inside one breast. And yet we should be allowed to screw it up! Self-consciousness in a woman’s life is a plague of locusts!

  I liked the boldness with the exclamation marks. I loved the entire thing. But Constance was being universally political here. I wanted the personal. Women are devils too, of course. I wanted to know what mistakes of hers she was talking about – what had she done in her own life that was so catastrophically wrong, and how might it be connected to my mother? I thought about what my dad had told me, about Elise being in her thrall.

  I had also been doing some deeper digging on the Internet. Constance Holden was ex
-directory: her address had been removed from the public domain, so I couldn’t just turn up at her house. Her books had a presence on the web, however. According to one essay, Green Rabbit showed ‘a woman in the prime of her writing self: fluid, alarming, switching effortlessly between raw pain and aching diffidence’. It had won several prizes in its year of publication, and since then had sold well over a million copies. In both books, Holden seemed preoccupied with mothers and daughters, love, the nature and conditions of emotional punishments, and missed opportunity. Wax Heart had been turned into a perennially popular film called Heartlands. It had won an Oscar for its lead actress – the legendary Barbara Lowden. Neither book was ever out of print, but Constance hadn’t written another novel since Green Rabbit. Some of the press-cuttings posited not that she had suffered writer’s block, but that she had simply opted for a percentage of the box-office takings for Heartlands and decided to retire. This didn’t seem likely to me, but then again: there were no other novels.

  I discovered that there had been an attempt, in 1997, to interview Constance. A journalist for the Observer had tried to do the same as me – to understand why someone would want to vanish at the peak of her powers. Her agent, a woman called Deborah Clarke, had refused to cooperate – at Holden’s request, apparently. The journalist described how Holden had always been ‘cagey’ about her upbringing, often questioning the point of peeling back her layers when the books existed as sufficient codes for a life lived. According to the journalist’s profile, in a previous interview given when Wax Heart was published, but not available online, Constance had mentioned a father who had been in the army, a peripatetic life moving to wherever he was stationed, not staying there long enough to plant roots in the soil. ‘But roots are conservative, anyway,’ the journalist quoted her from the earlier piece: ‘The concept of them is to put us, and keep us, in our places.’ As far as the journalist could tell, Connie was unmarried, and there was never a mention of a partner or children. All the journalist could find out was that for a period of time, Holden went to live in America, then perhaps Greece, then a mooted cottage somewhere in the south-England countryside. He couldn’t find friends, he couldn’t find family. The local shopkeeper in the village where Connie was allegedly living was ‘blunt’ and ‘protective’, which convinced the journalist she was somewhere near. And then the trail went cold. No one would help him. The journalist made a virtue out of this and turned his piece into one of those literary mysteries. But he offered no solutions.