Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Pity you didn’t share that insight with Mum,’ Fran said pointedly. ‘You’d have saved her about half an hour of her life – her only life.’ I remember wondering if she was angry because Dad was fawning over Kit and ignoring Anton, who wasn’t Oxbridge-educated, whose parents lived in a static caravan on the outskirts of Combingham.

  A few seconds later, there was a thud and a stifled scream. The special wine wasn’t all Mum had found in the cupboard under the stairs. We all rushed out into the hall. She was on her hands and knees, leaning over a cardboard box. Inside was a lumpy black mess, part solid but mainly liquid. The smell was overpowering; it made me gag. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Dad asked, bending to pick up the hallowed bottle, which, in her shock, Mum had dropped.

  ‘I think it must have been a cabbage,’ she said. ‘I remember putting a cabbage in there ages ago, in a box . . .’

  ‘Well, it’s not a cabbage any more,’ said Dad, elbowing Kit in the ribs as if to say, ‘Another hilarious episode in the life of the Monk family!’

  ‘I’ll get rid of it for you, Val,’ said Anton. He moved my mother to one side like a bomb-disposal expert preparing to secure the scene.

  ‘Anton to the rescue,’ said Dad for Kit’s benefit, as if Kit might not understand what was going on; subtitles might be required. ‘There’s no one better in a crisis.’

  ‘Yup,’ Fran muttered. ‘When it comes to disposing of decaying vegetables, no one can touch him.’

  I looked at Kit, dreading the disgust I was sure I’d see on his face. He grinned at me and widened his eyes in a secret signal, as if to say, ‘We’ll talk about this later.’ I smiled at him, grateful because he’d made me feel like a fellow outsider, not part of the Thorrold House madness. Not implicated.

  We all watched as Anton opened the front door and carried the box containing the former cabbage outside. ‘Right.’ Dad clapped his hands together. ‘Back to what matters: food and wine.’

  We ate our cold lasagne – which Dad kept insisting was still ‘piping hot’ and Mum kept threatening to heat up in the microwave – drank the wine, which was nice but nothing spectacular, then drank some ordinary wine when the over-hyped stuff had run out. Dad carped at Mum for dropping the bottle on the carpet, rotten cabbage or no rotten cabbage, because ‘it could easily have smashed’, even though it hadn’t. Kit tried not to let Dad fill his glass again and again, Dad bored me and Fran and shocked Kit with his views on drinking and driving: ‘As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t drive responsibly when you’ve had a few, you’re not fit to drive at all. A good driver’s a good driver, tipsy or sober.’

  Then, apropos nothing, Mum burst into tears and ran from the room. Taken aback, we listened to her weeping as she ran upstairs. Dad turned to Fran. ‘What’s the matter with her? Too much vino, do you think?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Fran. ‘Why don’t you make her drive up and down the A1 for a few hours? If she crashes, she’s pissed. If she doesn’t, she isn’t. Or is it the other way round, according to you?’

  ‘Go and check on her,’ said Dad. ‘One of you. Connie?’

  I stared down at my plate, resolutely ignoring him. Fran sighed and went off in search of Mum.

  Dad said, ‘We’ll have a nice cup of tea in a minute, and pudding – apple and rhubarb crumble, I think it is.’ He meant that we would have both when Mum came downstairs. I bit back the urge to say to Kit, ‘My dad might suck up to you and force his best wine down you, but he will never, ever make you a cup of tea, no matter how many years you spend sitting at his kitchen table, no matter how thirsty you are.’

  At that moment, it struck me as a form of cruelty: to know and supposedly love someone – your own daughter – and yet never to have offered them a cup of tea or coffee in thirty-four years, unless it was with the certainty that someone else would make it.

  Fran reappeared, looking annoyed. ‘She says she’ll be down in a minute. She’s upset about the cabbage.’

  ‘Why, for goodness’ sake?’ Dad was impatient.

  Fran shrugged. ‘I couldn’t get much out of her. You want more information, ask her yourself.’

  A few minutes later, Mum swept into the kitchen wearing newly applied make-up and started talking with manic cheeriness about crumble and custard. The rotten cabbage wasn’t mentioned again.

  Two hours later, after pudding and tea, we were able to escape. As diplomatically as possible, Kit fielded Dad’s attempts to insist that he drive home despite having had four large glasses of wine. He left his car outside Thorrold House – he completely agreed with Dad about drink-driving, of course he did, but there was the fuddy-duddy traffic police to consider – and we walked back to Rawndesley, which took an hour and a half. We hardly noticed; we were busy discussing my family.

  ‘Fran kept savaging your dad, and he didn’t respond at all,’ said Kit, animated and full of life now that we were free. ‘He didn’t even notice. It was hilarious. She’s like a Culver Valley Dorothy Parker. If I spoke to my dad like that, even once, he’d cut me out of his will.’ Kit was still on reasonable terms with his parents at that point.

  ‘Who’s Dorothy Parker?’ I asked.

  Kit laughed; he obviously assumed I was joking.

  ‘No, really,’ I said. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A famous funny person,’ said Kit. ‘ “When it comes to disposing of decaying vegetables, no one can touch him.” Those are the very words Dorothy Parker would have used, I reckon. Your dad didn’t get it at all – that Fran was taking the piss out of him for damning Anton with the faintest of faint praise: “There’s no one better in a crisis.” True, as long as all that’s needed to resolve the crisis is for someone to carry some decomposing food to the bin. That was the only time your dad acknowledged Anton’s existence all afternoon, he was so busy ingratiating himself with me. No wonder Fran was pissed off.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the smelly cabbage,’ I said solemnly, and we both burst into yelps of laughter. It was a cold February day – getting on for night – and it had started to rain, which made us laugh even more: thanks to Dad and his special wine, we were going to get soaked.

  ‘It’s obvious why your mum got so upset about the artist formerly known as cabbage,’ said Kit, trying to keep a straight face.

  ‘She can’t stand any kind of waste,’ I told him. ‘That’s twenty pence she could have saved last year.’

  ‘She was mortified that it had happened in front of me. If only she’d said so, I could have reassured her that I couldn’t care less. Far be it from me to think badly of someone who keeps rancid liquefied vegetable matter in a . . .’ He couldn’t say any more; he was laughing too much.

  Once we’d composed ourselves, I said, ‘It’s not that, what you said. Yes, she’ll have been embarrassed, but that wasn’t why she had that weird meltdown. Appearances are important to Mum, but control is her God. She works so hard to be in control of every aspect of her life and world, and most of the time she succeeds. Time stands still for her, the world shrinks to the size of Thorrold House’s kitchen, the universe’s energy flow stops in its tracks – it knows better than to argue with Val Monk. And then she finds a cabbage that’s been there for months if not years – that’s been, unbeknownst to her, turning all squelchy and stinky and black, and she had no idea. And then it makes an unscheduled appearance one afternoon when she’s got guests. She tries to move on and pretend it hasn’t bothered her, but she can’t get past it. The cabbage is evidence she can’t ignore – evidence that she’s not in charge. The forces of death and decay are on the march, they’re the ones running the show. They’re inside the building, and not even my sensible organised mother, with her “recipes for the week” notebook and her meticulously filled-in birthdays calendar, can keep them at bay.’

  Kit was staring at me. He wasn’t laughing any more.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘When I drink too much, I talk too much.’

  ‘I could listen to you talking for the rest of my life,’ he said.
/>   ‘Really? In that case, you’re wrong about Fran too.’

  ‘She’s not the Culver Valley’s answer to Dorothy Parker?’

  ‘She wasn’t having a go at Dad, though she’d probably pretend she was if I asked her about it. She was the one damning Anton with faint praise. She loves him, don’t get me wrong, but I think sometimes she wishes he . . . I don’t know, had a bit more to him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to university?’ Kit asked me.

  The sudden change of subject surprised me. ‘I told you: none of my friends were going, and Mum and Dad had offered me a well-paid job at the shop.’

  ‘You’re incredibly bright and perceptive, Connie. You could be a lot more than your parents’ book-keeper if you wanted to. You could go far – really far. Further than Little Holling, Silsford.’ He stopped walking and made me stop too. It struck me as wonderfully romantic that he’d bring us to a standstill in the rain in order to tell me I was brilliant and full of potential.

  ‘My teachers at school almost got down on their knees and begged me to think about university, but . . . I was suspicious of it, I suppose. Still am. Why spend three years being ordered to read certain books by people who think they know more than you do, when you can choose for yourself what you want to read and educate yourself without anyone’s help – and without paying for it?’

  Kit brushed a droplet of rain off my face. ‘That’s exactly the sort of philistine thinking I’d expect from someone whose education was prematurely curtailed at the age of eighteen.’

  ‘Sixteen,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t do A-levels either.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Next you’ll tell me you were raised by wolves.’

  ‘Do you know how many books I read last year? A hundred and two. I write them all down in a little notebook—’

  ‘You should go to university,’ Kit talked over me. ‘Now, as a mature student. Connie, you’d love it, I know you would. Cambridge was the best thing that ever happened to me – without a shadow of a doubt, the best three years of my life. I . . .’ He stopped.

  ‘What? Kit?’

  I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me any more. He was looking past me, or through me, seeing another time and another place. He turned away from me, as if he didn’t want my presence to interfere with whatever he was remembering. Then he must have realised what he’d done, because he made a concerted effort to bring himself back. I saw that look in his eyes, the same one I saw ten years later, in January, when I asked him why 11 Bentley Grove was programmed into his SatNav as his home address: guilt, fear, shame. He’d been caught out. He tried to make a joke of it. ‘The second best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said quickly, reddening. ‘You’re the best thing, Con.’

  ‘Who was she?’ I asked.

  ‘No one. That wasn’t . . . No one.’

  ‘You had no girlfriends at uni?’

  ‘I had lots, but no one significant.’

  The week before, I had asked him how many times he’d been in love before me, and he’d dodged the question, saying things like, ‘What do you mean by in love?’ and ‘What kind of love are you talking about?’, while his eyes darted around the room and refused to meet mine.

  ‘Kit, I saw your face when you said Cambridge was the best three years of your life. You were remembering being in love.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  I knew he was lying, or I thought I did. Something inside me darkened and curdled; I decided to become the bitch I can be so effortlessly when I’m feeling miserable. ‘So you were thinking about lectures and tutorials, were you, with that wistful expression on your face? Dreaming of essay notes?’

  ‘Connie, you’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘Was she your lecturer? Your lecturer’s wife? Wife of the master of the college?’

  Kit denied it and denied it. I kept up my inquisition all the way back to his flat – was it a man? Was it someone underage: the college master’s not-quite-sixteen-year-old daughter? I refused to share a bed with Kit that night, threw a completely undignified tantrum, threatened to end our relationship unless he told me the truth. Then, seeing that he wasn’t going to, I scaled down my threat: he didn’t have to tell me the truth, but he had to admit that there was something he didn’t want to tell me, to reassure me that I wasn’t mad and hadn’t imagined the fervour I’d seen in his eyes, or the guilt. Eventually he admitted that he might have looked a bit sheepish, but it was only irritation with himself for having been so stupid as to give me the impression – mistaken, he assured me – that his university education was more important to him than I was.

  I wanted to believe him. I decided to believe him.

  The next time the subject of Cambridge came up between us was in 2003, three years later. I’d moved into Kit’s Rawndesley flat by then, and Mum had taken to chirping, ‘Hello, stranger,’ when I turned up for work each morning. I ignored her, and left my defence to Fran: ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum! Rawndesley’s twenty-five minutes by car. You see Connie every day.’

  All my life, I had assumed that my family was crippled by a disease that affected no one else, of which the chief symptom was extremely narrow horizons. Then one day Kit and I were on our way out for a meal and we bumped into some neighbours, a couple who lived in the flat next to ours, Guy and Melanie. At the time, Kit worked with Guy at Deloitte; it was Guy who had told him there was a duplex apartment available in his building with a great view of the river. While the men talked shop, Melanie looked me up and down and interrogated me: what did I do, was my hair naturally so dark, where was I from? When I said Little Holling in Silsford, she nodded as if she’d been proved right. ‘I could tell from your voice that you weren’t from round here,’ she said.

  Later, at Isola Bella, the better of Rawndesley’s two Italian restaurants, I told Kit how much Melanie’s remark had depressed me. ‘How can Silsford not count as “round here” when you’re in Rawndesley?’ I complained. ‘Culver Valley people are so parochial. I thought it was just my parents, but it’s not. Even in Rawndesley, which is supposed to be a city . . .’

  ‘It is a city,’ Kit pointed out.

  ‘Not a proper one. It’s not cosmopolitan and buzzy, like London. It’s got no . . . vibe. Most people who live here don’t choose it. Either they were born here and aren’t imaginative enough to leave, or they’re like me – born and bred in Spilling or Silsford, and so sheltered and insular that the prospect of moving thirty miles down the road to the metropolis that is Rawndesley feels as exciting as moving to Manhattan, or something – until you get there, that is. Or people move here because they have no choice, because they get jobs that—’

  ‘Like me, you mean?’ Kit grinned.

  Strangely, I hadn’t thought of him. ‘Why did you come here?’ I asked him. ‘From Cambridge, of all places – I bet that’s a buzzy, vibrant city.’ It was the first time Cambridge had been mentioned by either of us since the big fight.

  ‘It is,’ said Kit. ‘It’s a beautiful city, too, unlike Rawndesley.’

  ‘So why leave it and move to the stifling Culver Valley?’

  ‘If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met you,’ Kit said. ‘Connie, there’s something I need to ask you. That’s why I suggested going out for dinner.’

  I sat up straight. ‘Will I marry you? Is that it?’ I must have looked excited.

  ‘That’s not it, no, but since you’ve brought it up . . . Will you?’

  ‘Let me think about it. Okay, I’ve thought about it. Yes.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Kit nodded, frowning.

  ‘You look worried,’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to look blissfully in love.’

  ‘I am blissfully in love.’ He smiled, but there was a shadow behind his eyes. ‘I’m also worried. It’s a massive coincidence, but I need to talk to you about my job, and . . . well, about Cambridge.’

  I held my breath, thinking he was about to entrust me with the story he’d refused to tell me three years earlier. Instead, he started talking about
Deloitte, telling me there was an opportunity for him to lead a new team at the Cambridge branch, doing new, exciting work, how good the promotion prospects would be if he agreed. My heart started to pound. Kit’s words were coming faster and faster; I couldn’t take in the details, and some of what he was saying made no sense to me – phrases like ‘client-facing’ and ‘granularity’ – but I got the gist. Kit’s firm wanted him to relocate to Cambridge, which meant that I, as the person who’d just agreed to marry him, even if I did kind of ask myself, had a chance to escape from my family and from the Culver Valley.

  ‘You’ve got to say yes,’ I hissed at Kit as the waiter arrived with our tiramisus. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. When did they ask you?’

  ‘Two days ago.’

  ‘Two days? You should have told me straight away. What if they’ve changed their minds?’

  Kit covered my hand with his. ‘They won’t change their minds, Con.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I demanded, panicking.

  ‘They’re one of the UK’s leading accountancy firms, not a bunch of hysterical teenagers. They’ve made their offer – an extremely generous offer – and now they’re waiting to hear from me.’

  ‘Ring them now,’ I ordered.

  ‘Now? It’s quarter past nine.’

  ‘What, they’ll be asleep? Of course they won’t be! If I were one of the UK’s leading granulated client-facing accountancy firms, I’d stay up till ten thirty to watch Newsnight.’

  ‘Con, slow down,’ Kit said, taken aback by my desperation. ‘Don’t you want to think about it first? Give it some time, mull it over?’