by Lisa Jewell
He got to his feet, turned around and said, “OK then, big boy, up you jump.”
Beau hooked his arms around Adrian’s neck and his legs around Adrian’s waist and tucked his chin into Adrian’s shoulder.
“Night night, everyone,” said Beau.
Adrian carried this boy-giant, the tallest in his class and the heaviest, carried him up three flights of stairs and placed him in his bed, as if he was no more than a bag of air.
He put him into his pajamas and he kissed his cheek and tucked him in under his duvet.
“Night night, my baby boy,” he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And under his breath, too quietly for Beau to hear, he said: And hopefully all the tomorrows after that.
46
The following morning Adrian answered a knock at his front door. He was expecting a postal delivery or a local politician but instead he found a beautiful blonde.
“Carrie,” he said, his eyes taking in the statuesque lines of her, the warmth in her eyes, her scruffy red car double-parked in the street with its hazards flashing. “Do you want to . . . ?”
“No”—she gestured at the car—“I’m in a terrible rush. I just, er, the children—they wrote their letters. Here.” She pulled them from her handbag. “One from Cat, from Pearl, one from Luke and this one is Beau’s. Otis was still working on his when I left.” She shrugged.
Adrian took them from her and smiled. “Thank you,” he said.
Caroline craned her neck to check her car and then turned back to Adrian. “Listen,” she said, “we should talk. You and I. What are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing,” he replied.
“Can you meet me for a drink? At the Albion? Seven thirty?”
Adrian smiled uncertainly. He could not begin to imagine what Caroline might want to say to him. But he knew that his entire future rested on it. “Sure,” he said. “I can be there.”
A horn sounded in the road behind them and Caroline turned anxiously. “Got to go,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”
He watched her dash towards her car, wave apologetically at the driver of the waiting car, strap herself in quickly and speed away. And then he took the letters into his flat and he opened them.
Dear Dad,
First of all I want to say that I’m not perfect either. I’ve spent a lot of my life blaming you for my shortcomings, but I think a lot of that was because I felt like everyone was just letting you get away with it. Like I was the only one who could see the truth. But no, it’s not your fault that I’m doing nothing with my life. It’s not your fault that I have nothing important in my life and no focus. You did everything you could, you paid for my education and I do appreciate that so much, especially as you didn’t pay for anyone else’s. I know you and Mum thought I’d be prime minister by now! And I’m aware that I’ve let you down, but I’m young still. Hopefully there’s still lots of time left to make you both proud of me.
As for what you can do for me now? Well, first of all I hope you’ll forgive me. It was shit what you did: leaving me and Cat and Mum down in Hove when we all needed you so much. But if Mum can forgive you, then I can be a bigger person and try to forgive you, too. I’ve been waiting for fourteen years for you to say sorry and you finally did. So now it’s just onwards and upwards, I hope.
I also think you should move out of that flat. You’re only forty-eight but since Maya died you’ve aged about ten years. You need a fresh start. You’re an architect, for God’s sake, living in a crap conversion with no light and no space! That place is dragging you down.
I also need you to not have any more children. Seriously. You always said it would be “another person to love.” But I don’t agree. I think it would be another person to take you away from us, especially the small ones. Don’t do it. You’ve got five totally amazing children. Enough. Stop. Move on.
But mostly I’d like us to try and be friends, instead of two spoilt boys sharing a house.
I really love you, Dad. I’m glad we’re getting a chance to start over.
Yours, always,
Luke
Dear Dad,
I know you said not to talk about the e-mails. But I have to talk about the e-mails. If I don’t talk about the e-mails I’m going to end up in a nuthouse. It was me, Dad. I know you probably already know that. That woman in the pub probably told you because I’m pretty sure Maya worked it out that night. She saw a Skype chat that me and Otis were having. It wasn’t very nice. She probably put two and two together.
Dad, when I saw those e-mails again after all that time I actually couldn’t believe I’d written them. They looked like they’d been written by a psychopath, by someone evil and twisted. I felt like there must have been some monster living inside me. I hated myself. I still hate myself. I truly can’t believe I was capable of such a thing.
The last year and a half has been like pure torture. When I heard about Maya I was on my way to work and I literally threw up into my own hands on the bus. I thought I’d murdered her. Christ. I wish I could explain how I was feeling, what made me do it, but it’s hard.
I was so angry with you when you left Caroline. If you’d had any idea how hard I worked to accept you leaving Mum, leaving us, how hard it was to carry on loving you when my heart was broken. I couldn’t have done it without Mum. She was so forgiving. So gentle. I totally took my cues from her. I couldn’t let my anger out, for her sake, so I focused instead on being a part of your new family. I never blamed Caroline and I made her a friend. And I loved each and every one of those babies as if they were fully my own flesh and blood. I took the “if you can’t beat them join them” approach. AND THEN YOU FUCKING LEFT!!! I wanted to kill you!! I hated you! Much more than I did when you left us. And then I met Maya and she was so sweet and so young and so bleugh. I just totally didn’t get it. You know, you left Caroline—for that. Sorry, that makes me sound like such a bitch. Clearly I am a bitch. But I wasn’t the only one. Nobody understood what was going on. The children said things to me that they couldn’t say to you. And I just thought that maybe for the sake of all the children I could get her to leave. I thought I was doing it for everyone, you know, for the greater good. Nobody knew I was sending them. Not even Otis.
I don’t really feel I’m in any position to ask you to do or be anything, apart from forgiving. I know that woman in the pub said that Maya didn’t kill herself, but really, how can she know? How can anyone know, apart from Maya herself? I’ll take it with me always and forever. I just wanted her to disappear. I was an idiot. I have learned. I am a better person. I just hope that one day you’ll be able to look at me again the way you always have done, like I’m the loveliest girl in the world. But I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.
I love you, Daddy. Please come home.
Your Cat xxxx
Dear Dad,
I haven’t written my letter yet. I’ll give it to you soon.
Love,
Otis x
Dear Daddy,
I want you to be happy again. I want you to cut your hair. I want you to go on a date with Mummy. I want you to get rid of Paul Wilson. I want you to do my homework with me. I want you to sleep in Mummy’s bedroom. I want you to stop buying me ice skates for my birthday and buy me something surprising that you thought of yourself. I want you to have a fat tummy again. I want to be part of a normal family, like we used to be. I want you to have tomato soup and bread with me all the time, not just once a week. I want you to be downstairs in the mornings. I want to tell you all my dreams, always, until I’m too old to tell my daddy about my dreams.
I love you,
Pearl
Dear Daddy,
I want you to come home. And tickle my feet. Please.
Love from,
Beau
47
Caroline wasn’t wearing a plastic Pac-a-mac when Adrian
met her in the vine-draped beer garden of a heaving Islington pub that night. She was wearing one of her “Paul Wilson” dresses: tight and swooping down into a V-neck towards her cleavage. Her pale hair was tied back into a stubby ponytail, her blunt fringe swept across one eye. She wore eyeliner and silver earrings and strappy sandals. She looked about twenty-eight.
Adrian stood up when she walked in, greeted her as he always did, with fulsome kisses to each cheek. But the gesture carried more substance than usual. “You look lovely,” he said.
She did not return the compliment. Instead she pulled her phone out of her bag, switched it on, looked at it, switched it off and placed it neatly on the table in front of her, next to her sunglasses.
In the corner of the beer garden there was a huge screen showing the Olympics. Adrian sat with his back to it, not wanting to be distracted for even a second. He poured Caroline a glass of wine from the bottle on the table. His hand shook slightly. Caroline gave him a look that he translated as meaning: Good, you should be nervous.
“How are the kids?”
“They’re good,” she said. “The mood seems lighter after last night. Otis, in particular, seems like a different boy.”
“And how’s Pearl?”
“I don’t know,” said Caroline, running her fingertips up and down the arm of her sunglasses. “She’s quiet. I think she suspects that Cat might have had something to do with those e-mails.” She threw a questioning look at Adrian and he nodded.
“Are you ready?” he said. “Shall I tell you?”
Caroline nodded nervously. “I guess,” she said.
And then Adrian told her everything: about the Skype chat, about Cat’s e-mails, about Luke and Maya.
He stared at Caroline afterwards and said, “How do you feel now, about Cat?”
Caroline shrugged. “I don’t know,” she began. “I feel lots of things. But mainly sad. I can see what she was doing. But she’s just, well, no offense, but she’s not the brightest star in the sky. She’s not very mature for her age.” She shrugged. “It was schoolgirl stuff. It was cruel. And idiotic.”
“You know,” said Adrian, “I was talking to Susie about it last night and she reminded me of something. Something I’d completely forgotten about. When Cat was a teenager she was excluded from school for a week for bullying.”
Caroline raised her brow.
“Yes. When she was about twelve, thirteen. Same age as Otis. A new girl started at her school, partway through a term. Everyone really liked her, apparently. She was a real hit with the boys and the girls. And she started to impinge on Cat’s territory. So Cat pretended to befriend her, and all the while was spreading rumors about her and turning everyone against her. The girl in question told her mum what was happening and her mum happened to be a school governor and so knew exactly how to deal with the situation. It ended up with Cat being excluded and having to write an apology to this girl. It seemed quite petty at the time. Or at least, that was my understanding of the situation from my position in bed with you dozens of miles away from the action.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow. “I just put it down to girls being girls. You know. It never occurred to me that it meant she was a horrible person.”
“You think she’s a horrible person?”
“No.” Adrian sighed. “No. Of course I don’t. I think she is just yet another victim of her runaway serial adulterer juggernaut of a father.”
He and Caroline exchanged a look.
“Do you think she’ll stay with you?” said Adrian.
“She hasn’t said anything about moving on.” She shrugged again. “I guess she’ll stay for a while.”
“Are you OK with that?”
“Sure. Totally. You know how I feel about Cat. I love her as though she was my own. Also, I’d be totally lost without her. So . . .” Caroline smiled a tight, sad smile and lifted her glass towards Adrian’s. “Anyway,” she said, “cheers. Here’s to getting it all out there. All the grubby stuff.”
Adrian smiled drily and knocked his glass gently against Caroline’s.
Caroline topped up their wineglasses and then she turned her eyes up to Adrian and said, “Off you go then. You have the Talking Stick.”
“The what?”
“You know, the Talking Stick. It’s what they use in therapy. While you’re holding it, nobody else is allowed to talk.”
“Oh,” said Adrian. “OK then.”
Caroline looked at him expectantly and Adrian felt something at the core of himself soften and then bubble up. Then he felt a thought rise up through the molten flow of his emotions like a golden phoenix. A big dazzling thought that threatened to burst from his head and out of his lips. You are the love of my life.
He swallowed it down, no longer able to trust himself or his own feelings. Because the one thing that had become blindingly apparent to him over the course of the last twenty-four hours of self-reflection was that he really was a total blithering idiot. He’d found himself replaying sections of his life in almost lifelike detail and at nearly every juncture he had seen, as a spectator, that he had been blowing through life without a clue of what he was doing. It was almost as though he was going from golden light to golden light, blindly, like a moth. The moment a light lost its golden glow he would turn away from it and start looking for the next golden light.
Yes, after many hours of contemplation the dazzling conclusion that Adrian Wolfe had reached about himself was that he was a human moth.
But how could he explain that to Caroline? He had no idea. So he sighed and smiled at her and he said, “I am a moth.”
She said nothing, but raised an eyebrow at him and sipped her wine.
“I am a moth,” he said again. “And I need to be a cow.”
Caroline slanted her eyes at him over the rim of her wineglass.
“You know, a cow. It stays in its field. It eats the same grass all day long. It doesn’t think about the grass over there, or the daisies over there, or the possibility of clover in the field across the way. It just stays and it eats the grass and the grass tastes good. And when all the grass has gone, it waits for more grass to grow. Because there will always be more grass. And possibly clover, too.”
Adrian looked at Caroline and saw the impatience in her eyes. He was losing her.
He sighed and leaned across the table towards her. “What I’m saying, in a completely ridiculous way, is that I left Susie because I couldn’t be bothered to wait around for the grass to grow again. And I saw you and . . .”
“I was full of clover.”
“Well, yes. Kind of.”
“So I could have been anyone?”
“Have you got the Talking Stick now?”
“Oh, fuck the fucking Talking Stick. Just tell me. Could I have been anyone? As long as I was shining brightly enough?”
“No,” said Adrian. “No. You . . .” And there it was, the perfect opening for his revelation, but how would she take it? He breathed in deeply, turned his hands palms up and said, “You were the love of my life.”
He watched her eyes while she absorbed this pronouncement, trying to gauge what her response might be.
She looked first surprised, then pleased, and then furious. “Oh, you fucking arsehole,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“No, really. You are the fuckingest arsehole in the universe. Love of my life.” She rolled her eyes. “If I was the love of your stupid fucking life, then why did you bounce off to Maya? Don’t tell me,” she said, “because you couldn’t be bothered to wait for the grass to grow?” She tutted loudly and swallowed down some wine.
Adrian had spent a lot of time the previous night revisiting the days and weeks around his affair with Maya. He had looked at it, like an exhibit in a Perspex box, from every conceivable angle. And then he’d finally seen it. The precise moment he’d made the decision in his big, stu
pid head to fall in love with somebody else.
“Do you remember,” he said, “the summer after your fortieth birthday? When I booked us that night in Paris?”
She rolled her eyes again and groaned. “Oh God,” she said, “not that again.”
“No, honestly, hear me out. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to come. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to leave Beau. It wasn’t even that you said it was a really thoughtless thing to do. Because yes, in retrospect I can see that it was quite thoughtless. You were breast-feeding. You were tired. You’d said about a million times that you didn’t want to do much to celebrate. But that Monday, I went into work and Maya was there and she said, ‘How was Paris?!’ Because she knew I’d been planning it. Everyone in the office knew I’d been planning it. And I said, ‘We didn’t go to Paris.’ And she said, ‘Oh.’ And her face fell. And I could tell she was hurting for me. And she didn’t say anything else. Just that. Oh. And a hand on my arm. And that was it, Caroline. That was the moment that it went from her being this bright young girl in the office to me thinking she was the answer to all my woes. Because, arsehole that I am, I thought that anyone who could hurt on my behalf like that would never do anything to hurt me.”
“And what,” said Caroline, “I was hurting you, was I?”
“I thought you were going to leave me.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m honestly not being ridiculous. I thought that you were going to leave me.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on many things, but mainly on the fact that you are completely out of my league.”
“What?”
“Completely out of my league,” he replied. “Cleverer than me, prettier than me, a better parent than me, a better person than me. And if I couldn’t buy your adoration with impromptu trips to Paris, then I was out of ideas. I had no idea how to keep you. So I left you.”
Caroline stared at him avidly. “You do realize that’s the most stupid thing any person on this planet has ever said since the creation of language, don’t you?”