*
Alice was quiet on the way home. Lou imagined her head filled with whatever language she used to think about her work: strings of shapes and angles, perhaps, rather than words. But when she did speak, what she said was entirely unexpected.
‘What would we do if there was a problem with our baby?’ she asked.
She hadn’t referred to it before as ‘our baby’, but Lou felt no pleasure at the words. Instead she felt a flash of dread, sharp as a gunshot. ‘What kind of problem?’
‘Any kind of problem,’ Alice said. ‘Any of those problems the Parnells’ children have.’
‘Oh!’ Lou’s heart thumped a few times in her chest. She called up the scan picture, a curled-up homunculus with tiny splayed fingers. It had never occurred to her that the baby wouldn’t be perfect. All those tests and scans had seemed proof against flaws.
‘We’d cope, I’m sure,’ Alice said. She smiled at Lou: a smile intended, presumably, to show solidarity. ‘We could take it to Parnells. We could be a Parnells family.’
And then Lou felt a surge of anger stronger than anything she’d ever known before, a flare of hatred and repulsion that burst like a firework in her head. Trapped in the seat beside Alice she couldn’t run away, but that was her instinct: to take her baby and run. She shut her eyes, blood rushing in her head, her chest, her belly – racing to the rescue of the baby in a great gush of maternal reassurance. All this time she’d longed for Alice to take an interest in it, but now . . .
She could feel words swarming in the space around their heads: words that might bruise and scar, on the brink of being said. I’m the mother, she wanted to shout. It’s my baby, not ours. How dare you claim it now? How dare you blight it with your wicked thoughts? But the urge to say them did battle, furiously, with the urge to keep quiet. Some instinct was telling her – as it must have told Flora all those years ago – that her baby needed a protector; that she needed Alice. Oh, but she was so tired of all this compromise and effort. Tired of everything being so hard.
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ she said, hardly believing that she was speaking aloud; hardly knowing whether she was.
Alice turned to look at her. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘How dare you tempt Fate like that?’ Lou said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said again, her tone of voice different this time – but still wrong, Lou thought, fury rising inside her again. Still self-righteous and sure of herself; pleased with her magnanimity.
‘It’s not your fucking baby,’ Lou shouted. The words glittered and fizzed, filling her with terror and exhilaration. ‘We’re not a fucking family. We’ll never be a family. I never want to be like –’
‘Don’t tar me with the brush of your family,’ said Alice. ‘Don’t blame me for that.’
Alice’s eyes were fixed on the road, her shoulders set firm, her chin up to face what was coming. She looked magnificent, Lou couldn’t help thinking, although she banished the thought angrily.
‘This has nothing to do with my family,’ she said.
‘Everything has to do with your family,’ said Alice. ‘Every damn thing.’
‘How dare you?’ said Lou again. The anger was boiling up into grief now; into passionate, agonising self-pity. ‘You have no idea about my family. Just because you come from a line of fucking boring blameless Middle Americans.’
‘Oh, so it’s my family’s fault now?’
‘They made you,’ said Lou. ‘They made you so self-satisfied and thick-skinned and . . .’
‘Well, at least I know now,’ Alice said. ‘Thank you for your honesty.’
Lou was silent then. The firework had fizzled out in her head, leaving behind a buzzing numbness. She shouldn’t have said those things. She could hear her voice still, the echo of her words thrown back in mockery. A boil had been growing inside them both these last few weeks, she thought, and they hadn’t managed to lance it. Mistrust had festered below the surface, feeding on half-truths and hurt feelings. She could feel the poison draining now, the proper shape of their feelings being restored. But still those lacerating words hung in the air, and she couldn’t take them back. She could hear Alice’s words too – At least I know now.
Alice’s hair was held up in a knot that exposed the fine sweep of her neck, the silhouette of a Greek amphora, and Lou longed to reach out her hand, to offer a benediction they would both understand without recourse to more clumsy words. But it was as if a magnetic field had sprung up between them, making touch impossible. She felt so horribly, wretchedly tired. If she closed her eyes, she thought, the tumult in her head would settle and she would be able to see a way forward. There was nothing to be done for now, while the car was bowling along, but let the echoes subside into the rumble of the engine, and . . .
*
She must have gone to sleep, Lou realised. When she woke, the car had stopped and Alice had got out. She sat for a while sleepily piecing together the day she’d slipped out of. She remembered children’s faces, radiantly happy, and Alice looking at a blank plot of land and seeing something wonderful – and then an explosion of rage and bile.
They were at a motorway service station. Through the windscreen Lou could see Alice standing on a grass verge, talking into her mobile phone. Had she stopped for this call, Lou wondered, or for some other reason? She realised with a plummet of fear that she had absolutely no idea what Alice might be saying. Would she turn in a moment and smile to show that everything was all right, or was she was even now arranging to move out of Veronica Villa? She should get out of the car, Lou thought, and rush over to Alice and pour apologies into her arms – but she didn’t move.
The dashboard clock read 4.55. She must have slept for a couple of hours. She felt better for it: better for her outburst, too. Ready to make amends. She would explain herself, put things in context, plead the turmoil of pregnancy. Surely it was only a matter of degrees of apology and restitution. She remembered that she’d booked some annual leave next week; the two of them could go up to London to see an exhibition, have lunch somewhere nice.
And then Alice turned and that cosy image evaporated. Her expression made Lou’s heart thud: in the seconds it took Alice to walk back to the car Lou flailed in search of something to say; some way in.
‘Alice?’ she said, as the car door opened. ‘Has something happened?’
‘It’s my Mom,’ Alice said. ‘She’s been in an accident.’
Relief suffused Lou’s whole body, followed by a backlash of guilt.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘What kind of accident? Is she OK?’
Alice’s mother was only fifty and looked younger; she was the strongest woman Lou had ever met. Lou heard her voice saying fucking boring blameless Middle Americans. Jesus Christ.
‘She’s in hospital,’ Alice said. ‘It was a truck, it hit her head on.’ She plunged a hand into her hair, a gesture Lou had never seen before. ‘I need to get on a flight,’ she said. ‘We’re not far from Heathrow.’
‘What about – don’t you need to book?’ Lou asked. ‘Don’t you need to pack?’ Her mind felt muddy and jumbled: the only thing she could see clearly was Alice flying away from her.
‘I guess you’re right.’ Alice’s face was taut.
Lou unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘Then you can use your phone.’
Alice was still standing with her hand on the driver’s door when Lou got there. She looked like a hovercraft that had slumped back to the ground, heavier and more ungainly than usual. Lou put a hand on her shoulder, wishing passionately that she could gather her in her arms and make her feel loved.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’
Alice said nothing, but she stumped away round the car and climbed in.
‘Home,’ said Lou. ‘Full speed home.’
Inside, she felt like a young wife being left for the war.
31
Kitty was fast asleep when the doorbell rang, and it
took her a while to come to. She reached for her phone to check the time: not quite ten. Perhaps it was a parcel. Or Daniel had lost the key she’d given him. By the time she’d hauled herself out of bed she feared whoever it was might have gone away, but they hadn’t. Through the intercom she heard a voice she didn’t expect.
‘Kitty? It’s Martin Carver. Did I wake you?’
‘Yes,’ said Kitty, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want to come up?’
She pressed the buzzer and sloped back to the bedroom to pull on a jumper and a pair of jeans over her T-shirt. It was Sunday. What on earth was Martin Carver doing here on a Sunday morning?
By the time he reached the second floor Kitty was waiting, holding the door open for him.
‘You’re just in time for breakfast,’ she said, in what she hoped was a capable tone. If there was a problem at Orchards, she ought to seem competent.
‘I’ve brought supplies,’ Martin said, holding up a paper bag.
Looking properly at his face for the first time, Kitty saw that he looked troubled; not the kind of troubled that went with a tenant’s complaint. Not, surely, the kind that went with an intention to seduce his landlady’s daughter, either, though?
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘Tea or coffee? I only have instant, I’m afraid.’
‘Instant’s fine,’ he said, though Kitty suspected it was a long time since he’d drunk Nescafé.
She could feel Martin watching her while she cleared the little table that doubled as desk and dumping space, and the impression of fatherliness was somehow more worrying than the possibility of seduction.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ she said, covering her awkwardness with bustle. ‘I’ll open the curtains. Have a seat. That chair’s broken – try this one.’
Martin sat down obediently. ‘You’re really very like your mother,’ he said.
‘People don’t usually say that.’
‘Don’t they?’ He took two Danish pastries out of his bag. A thought occurred to Kitty then, but even if – surely that couldn’t be the reason for his visit?
She fetched their coffee from the kitchen and sat down carefully on the broken chair. Martin passed her a pastry, but she wasn’t really hungry.
‘I assume,’ she said, ‘that if you’d just been passing, you’d have said so by now.’
‘It’s a bit out of the way for “just passing”, ’ he agreed.
‘So . . .?’ Kitty looked at him expectantly.
Martin said nothing for a few moments. Kitty had the impression that he’d prepared a speech, then lost confidence in it.
‘It’s about Daniel,’ he said at last.
So she hadn’t imagined those strange vibes at Orchards. ‘Is he the rightful property of one of your daughters?’ she asked. ‘Betrothed from the cradle, or something?’
‘No, no. I’m afraid . . .’ He sighed. ‘Miranda should have come,’ he said. ‘She would have been much better at this than me. I’m afraid it’s worse than that.’
‘Has something happened to him?’ Drenched suddenly with cold, Kitty’s mind flitted back: she’d last seen Daniel at – what, midnight? Why hadn’t she made him come home with her?
But Martin was shaking his head.
‘Not as far as I know,’ he said, ‘although I haven’t spoken to him since you came to Orchards. We don’t have any way of getting hold of him, since . . .’ He held up a hand, halting himself. ‘Back a bit,’ he said. ‘Back a bit.’ He stopped, brushed his cheek with his hand. ‘Miranda knew Daniel’s mother,’ he said.
Kitty nodded. ‘Daniel told me.’ Her hands were shaking a little. At least she knew now that she loved Daniel, she told herself. Whatever Martin had come to say, it would be OK. She watched his face, another explanation taking shape in her mind: Daniel was the heir to something, and she wasn’t deemed suitable.
‘She knew his father, too,’ Martin went on. ‘Miranda acted as trustee, until Daniel was twenty-one, for the money his father settled on him.’
‘I know that too,’ Kitty said. Or maybe his father was a ne’er-do-well, and they thought they should warn her. A sort of Magwitch scenario. That wouldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t as though she had any illusions about Daniel’s family.
Martin still had his pastry in one hand; his plate was covered with flakes, as though he’d clenched it too tightly in his fist.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be me telling you this. Maybe it’s not you I should be telling, either, but you’re an adult, we thought . . .’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Kitty, ‘just tell me, will you? You’re scaring the pants off me.’
‘Daniel’s father was Henry Jones,’ Martin said. ‘He didn’t want Daniel to know. He didn’t want –’
‘Wait,’ said Kitty. ‘You mean my Henry Jones? My father?’
Martin nodded. ‘It’s the most appalling coincidence,’ he said. ‘If Daniel had known . . .’
‘Christ.’ Kitty lifted both hands to cover her head. Just for a moment she felt nothing except surprise and disbelief and even – possibly – a shred of amusement, but she knew that something appalling was about to come crashing down on her. What were the chances, she thought? Was that why – that awful sense of magnetism, of ambivalence – should she have guessed? Should she have recognised him? Now she knew, she could see Henry in him quite clearly. And then, in an instant, she felt violently sick. Her chair clattered to the floor as she pushed herself away from the table and ran to the bathroom – conscious, all the while, of how miserably small the flat was, how there was no getting away, no hiding anything.
She had no idea how long she was gone – maybe only a few minutes, though it felt much longer, a horrible timeless interval of throwing up until she thought her guts must have turned inside out, of trying and failing not to think, of splashing water on her face so fiercely it soaked the whole tiny room. Martin was still sitting there when she came out.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, and she could see that he was; a little sorry for himself, too, but that was understandable. The worst thing was, Kitty thought now, in a moment of perfect lucidity, that there wasn’t any aspect of this that wasn’t Henry’s fault.
‘Do you know,’ she said, her voice sounding bizarrely composed, ‘my sister told me the other day that my parents had trouble getting pregnant. That’s why she and I were born nine years apart. She thought she thought it was Henry who . . .’ She broke off.
‘Come and sit down,’ said Martin. ‘Just come and sit here for a little while, unless – would you rather I went?’
‘No.’ That, oddly, was the last thing Kitty wanted. She almost wished he’d touch her, hug her, but she couldn’t ask him that. She stared at the massacred remains of breakfast on his plate. ‘We always thought,’ she began, ‘whatever he got up to, we were his children. We thought everything else –’
Martin reached across the table and put his hand over hers.
‘For my mother’s sake, too,’ Kitty went on, struggling to get the words around the bolus of unwept tears in her throat. ‘That was the deal, we thought. We were his family.’
‘I suppose that’s why he didn’t want you to know,’ said Martin, his voice very gentle. ‘I suppose he thought you’d never need to. He never saw Daniel – not after his mother died.’
‘He saw him before that, though,’ Kitty said, suddenly vehement as something slotted into place in her mind. That day at the pond, she thought. The woman and the child: she must have known what it meant all along. That was why she’d run away. ‘He saw him with me, when I was very little. I’m sure he did.’
Martin nodded slightly, as though he was thinking, computing. After a moment he said, ‘Even Daniel’s grandparents had no idea who Henry was. No one did, except Miranda.’
He stopped again. Kitty wanted him to go on, but she couldn’t ask him to. It was awful, she thought, to want to know more: as though the bombshell he’d just handed her could somehow be
defused with talk. As though knowing every detail of Henry’s deception and desertion could take away some of the pain. The instinct to hide under the bedclothes was surely more natural. But she had the feeling this was her only chance to hear the whole story – and she had to do something, just now, to fill the time before she faced up to what happened next. She looked back at him, hoping he understood.
‘Miranda introduced them, Henry and Elizabeth,’ Martin said eventually. ‘They met through her. Miranda was a cousin of Henry’s: second cousin, or even third. They didn’t know each other growing up, but they met at a family funeral – oh, in their twenties, I suppose. They were both musicians; they stayed in touch, saw each other from time to time. And Elizabeth and Miranda had been at music college together. She –’ he hesitated ‘– she’d always been a little unstable, Elizabeth. I think Miranda was horrified, frankly, when she fell in love with Henry, because she could see . . .’
‘Poor Elizabeth,’ said Kitty. The emotion was unexpected, but she understood exactly how it would have been; that it wasn’t Elizabeth’s fault. She could fill in the rest of the details: an affair that lasted longer than the others; a child whose existence no one ever suspected. ‘And she died –’
‘It was a car crash,’ Martin said. ‘She was travelling back from a concert. She played the cello in a chamber orchestra.’
‘Did he love her?’ Kitty asked, before she could bite the words back.
Martin made a little gesture of uncertainty, or perhaps resistance. ‘I never met him,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t –’
‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘Of course not.’
She’d heard enough now. Suddenly enough: she needed to keep something of her father back. Something for herself. She could feel nausea gathering again in her belly, a slow, chronic weight, this time, that she knew would stay with her. But there was something else; something she needed to ask.
‘Will you tell Daniel?’ she said. ‘I can’t . . .’
‘Of course. Miranda should do that.’
‘And would you tell him,’ Kitty said, blundering on, not really sure whether she meant it or whether she just wished she meant it, ‘would you tell him I’m sorry he never met Henry.’
The Things You Do for Love Page 22