Home Truths

by Tina Seskis

  Eleanor stared at Rufus, her mouth open, a hollow feeling in her throat.

  ‘And so now, well . . . look, when I saw you again, I just knew . . .’ His voice lowered even further, so she could hardly hear him. ‘Nelly, it was always you.’

  ‘No!’ Eleanor stood up. ‘Sorry, Rufus, but no.’ It wasn’t only what he was saying, which she scarcely believed anyway, or what Alex would think about the situation. It was something more profound than that. Had she been right all along, that she and Rufus had been made for each other? Had her fear of rejection, born out of being a ping-pong kid, never quite wanted anywhere, been so strong back then that she’d overreacted to what Rufus had been trying to say? Had she simply bolted without listening to the full story? Should she have stayed in that sunny little flat in Hampstead to hear it? Where would she and Rufus be now? What was this parallel life that might have been theirs? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Eleanor, I’m so sorry.’

  Her heart was hammering, although she strove not to show it. She had to stay strong. ‘Rufus, it’s been great catching up with you but, well, I’m married now, and I don’t think us seeing each other again is a good idea.’

  ‘All right,’ said Rufus. He seemed a little hurt, even as he cocked his eyebrow. And then she decided that it wasn’t that at all. Maybe he was pleased he was having this effect on her. Perhaps he found her more desirable now she wasn’t available, saw her as a challenge. Once an arsehole . . . she thought.

  ‘It was good seeing you, Nelly.’

  ‘And you, Rufus,’ Eleanor lied. ‘And you.’ She turned then and made her way between the cramped tables as quickly as she could manage, and it was only once she got out into the busy choked air of the high street that she realised she hadn’t paid. Never mind, she thought. After what Rufus had done to her all those years ago, buying her a latte was the least he could bloody well do.

  43

  ALEX

  Alex was pretty sure that Eleanor didn’t know his mother had died on the fourteenth of January. But then again, why should she? The anniversary of her death felt like a private thing – not a secret as such, but just something that had no meaning to his wife. And seeing as Eleanor had virtually no relationship with her own parents these days, albeit partly because there was an ocean in the way, why would she be interested in his? Secretly, though, Alex always felt edgy at this time, as if the very day of the year, the position of the sun in the sky, the alignment of the stars, did for him. He could feel his teeth aching at the back of his mouth. Another year gone. Surely that must mean something.

  Brianna’s silence was noticeable as she sat in the passenger seat, playing on her mobile. Alex was dropping his daughter down to Euston, so she could catch the train back to Coventry after the Christmas holidays. It still seemed unbelievable that she’d left home already, that she was at university now. Where had the time gone?

  ‘So, you looking forward to going back, Brianna?’ he proffered, as a potential opening. The name still grated on him a little, and maybe it was just too American for his northern roots. Eleanor had loved it, though, and Alex hadn’t minded enough to object.

  ‘Yeah, it’ll be all right,’ she said.

  ‘Looking forward to seeing everyone?’

  Brianna wasn’t biting. ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘And how’s the love life?’ he persisted. He turned on to the Camden Road and switched into third.

  Brianna sighed. ‘Fine.’

  ‘So, when are we going to meet him?’

  ‘Oh, Dad, you are so embarrassing.’ Brianna paused, and Alex could feel the tension in her body, resonating through the car seats. ‘. . . And anyway, Mum’s already met him.’

  ‘What? When?’

  ‘When she came up for the Christmas show.’ She didn’t need to follow up with, ‘You could have met him too, if you’d come.’ The thought was as good as audible.

  ‘Oh,’ Alex said. He was furious that Eleanor hadn’t told him. A pang of remorse hit him, that he seemed to be always missing things lately, but that was the nature of his situation. He couldn’t be in two places at once. It couldn’t be helped. He kept his eyes on the road as he made his way across the roundabout, nipping in front of but perilously close to a school bus.

  ‘Hey, careful, Dad. You’re not on a blue light now, y’know.’

  Alex kept his voice as even as he could. ‘It’s perfectly safe, Bree. You’re just like your mother.’ He patted her knee in an attempt to be conciliatory, but inside he was roiling still.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said.

  Alex pulled up outside the strip club just along from the side entrance to the station. He always stopped here when he was dropping someone off at Euston.

  ‘See you in a few weeks,’ he said. ‘Be good.’

  ‘Bye, Dad.’ Brianna leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Thanks for the lift.’ As she jumped out of the car and sashayed across the street Alex felt a pull of poignancy. His little girl, away at university, sleeping with someone. She looked so like her mother had once done, and it made him feel old somehow, and sad, and as if life were passing him by. As if Eleanor were passing him by. It was a tortured kind of a feeling, as though he didn’t know what his wife wanted any more. What she was thinking. Who she was seeing. He needed to sort it out. He put the car into gear and pulled out into the traffic, preparing to do a U-turn.

  ‘Hey, Dad!’ yelled Brianna, from across the street.

  He pressed the brakes, wound down the window, rolled his eyes. What had she forgotten now?

  ‘I forgot to say happy birthday!’

  Alex grinned, blew her a kiss and then, only when his daughter was gone, did the sudden, entirely unexpected, tears come.

  44

  CHRISTIE

  In the weeks after Paul’s death Christie found it hard to be on her own for any length of time. She still missed her husband so badly it was as if the world had come undone, split right apart at the seams, spilling out unknown, unmanageable gunk from its deepest core. Christie found Paul’s absence disorienting, unreal even, to the extent that, whatever she was meant to be doing, she’d often think, I’ll just check with Paul about that, and sometimes she’d even go to her phone to call up his number, before remembering all over again that he was dead. She hadn’t realised how dependent she’d become on her husband, until it was too late. It hadn’t ever felt unnatural or weak for her to be like that; it was just the way things had been between them, after so many years together. You either grew together or drifted apart, she’d thought, and unlike many of their friends, in her and Paul’s case they’d very much grown together. They’d been a team, in the best possible sense of the word. Hadn’t they?

  Christie was still in shock, the doctor had said, perhaps in an attempt at being reassuring, as he’d put her on ever-increasing doses of Valium. But the drugs weren’t helping. The nights were interminable, with pictures ingrained and framed in her memory, coming and going, waxing and waning . . . and then pouncing, like rabid monsters. Her husband hanging, dead, in the landing, dead in the middle of her mind’s eye, dead in the centre of her universe. A picture lying beside him. There was no coming back from death: not from any death, let alone this one. And yet despite her nocturnal terrors, Christie never wanted the nights to end, to have to face another day without him. Daisy had tried her best, but she was in pieces too, and Jake had barely spoken to his mother since the funeral. Christie tried to understand, pretty sure that both her kids felt almost as distraught at the way their father had died as at the fact of his death itself, even though they’d never say so. But there again, Christie couldn’t face talking about it either, and although her memory of that night was slowly returning, she was not at all sure it was helping. It was hard recalling the moment she’d first set eyes on her drawn, newly fatherless daughter, who’d rushed from university to be with her. Christie’s response had been primal, and nothing else. There had been no room in her innermost psyche for any kind of play-acting, of even attempt
ing to fulfil the role of mother that night. She’d been a wounded animal first and foremost, and no daughter should have to witness that. The excruciating nature of the pain and remorse had felt like Christie’s stomach had been ripped out – and it was still like that now, as if nothing would ever knit the wound back together. She had no idea how she felt in her head either. Calmer certainly, but not better. There was a strange kind of vacant sensation that followed her wherever she was, whatever she did. Neither here, nor there. Neither this, nor that. Time had become abstract, as random as unformed, half-finished sentences.

  And so now, before Christie had known it, it was January and she was currently staying at her father’s house, ostensibly to help look after him, but also so she didn’t have to be at home, and she wasn’t at all sure it was doing either of them any good. It was grief doubled, quadrupled, multiplied by sixteen, expanding, ever expanding, into every hole and crevice of both of their lives, suffocating them. It was unhealthy.

  Christie winced as she opened a jar of jam she’d found in the back of her father’s fridge to find the surface covered in white clouds of mould. Her father shuffled into the kitchen, which, although neat and sunny still, was where the dust danced now. He was clutching the copy of the Sunday Times he had delivered each week and which he’d just picked up from the doormat, and his back was stooped a little from the newspaper’s improbable weight, and his face was so sad and bewildered it made Christie want to weep. Just six or so months ago, everything had been great in her father’s world. He’d been about to go on holiday with his wife to a nice hotel in Malta, like they did every June – it had become a pleasurable habit for both of them, as reliable as Christmas. Yet last year they hadn’t made it to their sunshine island after all, as Jean’s stroke had put paid to that – and then she’d died in the November, and his son-in-law had died too, just before Christmas, and now it was the New Year and his daughter was one step away from a breakdown, albeit doing her best to hide it from him. Poor Dad, Christie thought. He was too old for such tragedy.

  Christie took the proffered pages of newspaper, and although she wasn’t remotely interested in the Money section, she didn’t have the heart to tell her father, who used to know full well that Paul had managed the finances and that Christie barely knew what an ISA was. After a while she picked up the Driving section, but even the act of thinking about cars led Christie to recall the abysmal events of the last night of her husband’s life, which kept looming out of the fog to get at her, knock her down again, just when she thought she was ready to get back up. The ordeal of the drive home. The brief interlude of brightness, when she’d twigged what Paul had been up to, had seen the proof sparkling down the road at her. Those last twinkling seconds, when she’d still thought everything was OK.

  And after that, darkness.

  Christie put down the Driving pages and turned to the Culture section. A famous actor was on the front, reluctantly plugging his latest film. The look in his eyes betrayed him, and she didn’t need to read the interview itself to know how he felt about the movie the critics had already savaged. It made her feel wretched for him. Her own eyes glistened, and that feeling was always there now, as though sorrow was forever lingering, looking for an opening. Seeking a foot in the door, even a vicarious one. But if she was going to feel sorry for anyone, it certainly shouldn’t be for an insanely rich A-lister with a new blockbuster out.

  The phone on the countertop had a shrill old-fashioned tring-tring to it. When Christie picked it up, she was surprised to hear her sister’s voice, although she shouldn’t have been. Of course Alice would be ringing to see how their father was. She sounded awkward somehow.

  ‘Christie, sweetheart, how are you?’

  ‘OK,’ said Christie.

  ‘How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s OK.’

  ‘How long are you staying with him?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Christie.

  ‘OK,’ Alice said. ‘Well, look, let me know if I can do anything.’

  ‘I will,’ said Christie, on autopilot. It’s what everyone said, and what she said to everyone.

  ‘Er, is Dad there?’ Alice said now.

  ‘Yes, he’s just reading the paper. I’ll put him on.’

  As Christie listened to her father’s half of the conversation with Alice she was struck by how animated he sounded suddenly, and it made her realise that she was failing him, bringing him down. They were both stuck in this in-between time, in this in-between world. Neither knew how to communicate with the other, without the buffer of her mother, or the steadfastness of her husband. She needed to do something to break the impasse.

  When her father hung up the phone he sounded more cheerful than he had in weeks.

  ‘Christie?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Go and ask your mother if she wants a cup of tea, would you, love?’

  Christie stared at her father.

  ‘Dad,’ she said at last. ‘Mum’s . . . Mum’s not here.’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘Mum’s not here.’

  ‘No, of course she’s not, love. Don’t be silly.’ And then her father started to cry, and his nose was running clear, thin mucus, and it was awful to witness. As Christie went over and helplessly patted her father’s shoulder, she decided that this couldn’t continue. Something had to be done.

  Christie stood up, interlaced her fingers, stretched them, looked out of the window, put her palms to her cheeks. There was nothing going on. Literally nothing. Even the bare branches of the trees, robbed of leaves and birds, were motionless. The air was crisp and unmoving, as if all breath had left the planet. It was unnerving. She didn’t know what to do, how to move on. This wasn’t helping anything.

  It came to Christie then, and it seemed obvious to her suddenly. Before she could be of any help to her father, she needed to be brave – go home at last, sort out the lovely house she and Paul had bought together, face up to things. Face up to her feelings of guilt. Of course, she’d known he was dead the second she’d gone upstairs. He’d been hanging upside down, trapped by his right ankle, his accidental fall broken, but sadly not in time to prevent the clean snap in his neck, which had rendered his body so inapt, physiologically speaking, the sight so catatonic in its ghastliness, that the image lived with her and would surely do so forever. No blood – just broken angles, the maths of her husband’s body all wrong. The horror swarmed and gathered again. The banality of the death seemed to make it worse somehow. The fact that it appeared to be the end result of Paul trying to provide her with a lovely, heart-warming surprise made the pathos almost absurd. But it seemed that one minute Paul had been standing in the loft, and the next he’d taken a step back into thin air, and he must have misjudged it, and he’d been unable to save himself, had had no time even to put out his arms to break his fall. The post-mortem had shown that he’d died almost instantly – and at least that meant he wouldn’t have felt any pain. Thankfully her children hadn’t had to witness what she had, and she would never tell them the truth of how dreadful it had been, or what might have caused it, or how it may well have been all her fault anyway. She was grateful to the police for that, for being discreet. The fact that the truth was a burden she would therefore have to bear herself was better than her children ever having to know.

  Christie moved away from the window and tossed her head, as if the images in her mind were like those of an Etch A Sketch that could simply be shaken clean, but they couldn’t. The house she and Paul had loved was forever tainted with tragedy, and there was no heart to it now, and there never would be again. Not for her anyway. Maybe a new family would make it a home once more, but Christie couldn’t. She needed to accept the fact that Paul was dead, and that nothing could or would ever change it. She needed to deal with it, for her father and her children, if not for herself. The wallowing needed to stop.

  Christie turned away from the window, certain at last of what her new truth was. Paul was in the past. Her mistakes
were there also. That was then. The only place for Christie was now.

  45

  ALEX

  The prospect of seeing his father for the first time since he was twelve years old was an odd sensation for Alex. All he knew was that he’d once tried so hard to make his father proud of him, but he’d failed miserably. And now that it was all too late, Alex was coming today for . . . what? ‘Closure’ was the first word that came to him. ‘Peace’ was the second.

  Alex was going to the funeral alone, in fact hadn’t even told Eleanor about it. He tried to settle back in his seat, but he felt cramped and on edge. He’d decided to take the train up north, as it was quicker than driving, but now that he was squashed into a window seat in a cramped, far-flung carriage he almost regretted it. There was an oversized table in front of him that contained a white coffee and a huge chocolate muffin that belonged to the dispirited-looking businesswoman opposite, and Alex couldn’t help but think how Eleanor would have insisted on having one too, and how fuller of face she had become, especially as he thought she was meant to be on a diet still. Was it so wrong of him to care how his wife would have looked to the family he hadn’t seen in years? Even the thought made him feel ashamed. Eleanor had been such a beauty once – but he was pretty certain that if she walked into his police station now, he wouldn’t be bewitched by her, which was another thought he immediately tried to bury.

  Alex sighed and turned his face to the window. He hated funerals at the best of times, and it made the thought of his own mother’s death feel raw all over again. But perhaps that was normal; he didn’t know who to ask. He hadn’t felt able to confide in Eleanor, and maybe that was where things had started to go wrong. He had felt too mortified.