‘We thought it might be easier for you,’ she says. ‘Daddy and I discussed it, and we thought – but you can talk to him about it, of course you can. And there are other people you can speak to, if you want. Professional people.’
Kitty looks at her.
‘But you’re a professional person,’ she says. ‘You can explain things.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Flora is deeply touched. ‘Of course I can, darling.’
There’s a moment, then, when she feels that other things could be said, but she hesitates too long and suddenly the waiter is there beside them.
‘Tuna salad,’ he says, ‘and lentil omelette.’
Flora can’t recall what she ordered, but she’s sure it wasn’t this, which must be the least appealing item on that peculiar menu. The omelette is damp and pallid, and from between its folds oozes a greyish mass of lentils. Kitty looks at it too, and she makes a snorting sound that Flora recognises as laughter.
‘Share mine,’ she says. ‘That looks disgusting.’
‘I thought this was a place you liked,’ Flora says. ‘Did I get that wrong?’
‘They do good cakes.’ Kitty spears a chunk of tuna and holds it out to Flora. It, too, looks greyish. ‘We could always just eat cake instead.’
‘Why not,’ says Flora. ‘Throw caution to the winds.’
She feels a little dizzy now. Perhaps everything looks simpler from Kitty’s point of view than hers. Perhaps it’s parents who complicate matters with adolescents. It occurs to her that lurking somewhere in the shadows is a different conversation they could have had: if she turns her head a little, she might be able to see another Flora and another Kitty, sprung from the confines of their habitual manner of dealing with each other.
‘It’s awful about Dad,’ Kitty says, and Flora can see she intends more than the words suggest. They don’t have enough common language, she thinks, for Kitty to say what she really means, but at least Kitty can say something. At least she has understood.
‘He’s going to have a grim time, I guess,’ Kitty says then, and she looks at her mother straight on.
‘We all are.’ The sound of that pleases Flora, the sense of them facing something together, as a family. Another insight: that good can come out of bad things. Although not often, her experience tells her. Not very often, in the long run.
49
Flora was still wide awake, despite the exhaustion that seemed to permeate deep into her bone marrow. Her brain churned, fuelled by brandy and electricity and the pent-up suspense of twenty-three years. It would keep up its restless enquiry with or without her volition, she realised, so she might as well direct it; might as well make some use of it.
What mattered most was how Kitty came out of all this, and she really couldn’t tell how Kitty had taken the news. She remembered Lou’s words: It’s a lot for her to take in. It’s more than you realise. It seemed to Flora that there was more for her to take in, too, than she’d dreamed of. Had she done the right thing? Would she, after all, have been better to say nothing?
She’d been famous, as a surgeon, for her decisiveness, but decisiveness wasn’t the same as the ability to think through difficult issues. As in this case, surgical decisions had most often been black or white – to operate, or not to operate? – knowing that one option was reversible, and the other was not. The decision to operate was rarely criticised, at least to your face, because it was what surgeons did; and the decision not to operate, once you were too senior to be suspected of cowardice, was clothed in an almost zen-like aura of restraint. The whole business, it seemed to her now, had been designed to encourage action based on whim, dressed up as professional instinct, rather than rational analysis.
But surgery wasn’t the point here, Flora reminded herself. As her mind clicked back to this evening, to her daughters, it struck her quite suddenly that she might have kept her family together, all these years, only for it to be broken apart now Henry was dead.
A whirlpool was spinning in her head now, whisking her off to a realm of unhappy sleep where accusations and betrayals loomed out of the shadows at every corner. Her heart was still beating furiously, but she was too tired to stay awake any longer; her mind was already slipping and sliding between fact and speculation, between the present and the past.
*
The next thing Flora was aware of – whether after seconds or hours she couldn’t have said – was a knock at the door, and the squeak of a hinge.
‘Hello?’ she called, in a half-whisper. ‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s me.’
Kitty’s voice. Flora pushed herself up on one elbow.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’m awake.’
The door squeaked again, the strip of light down the side of it widening and then narrowing again as Kitty shut it behind her.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello.’ Flora moved to the side of the bed to make room for her daughter, but Kitty sat down at the far end, right on the edge. Flora felt a pulse of – not quite disappointment, more a registering of signs; a blip on the monitor.
‘So I thought we should talk,’ Kitty said.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s OK,’ Kitty said next, her voice so bland – like a recorded message, Flora thought – that it was impossible to impute any meaning to the words.
‘Is it?’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
Flora nodded slowly. God, I hope that’s not all, she thought. I hope we can go a little further.
‘I mean,’ Kitty went on after a moment, sounding not so much reluctant as uncertain, as though she were constructing a sentence from unfamiliar blocks of code, ‘I mean, it’s a shock, of course, but it’s not . . . I needed to know.’
‘Darling,’ Flora said. ‘My darling, I’m so sorry. I just don’t know when the right time would have been to tell you.’
‘Now was the right time,’ Kitty said. She moved, quite suddenly, to nestle against her mother. ‘I don’t think you waited until Henry was dead so you could have the last laugh. I know you didn’t want to hurt him.’
Flora put her arms around Kitty. ‘Don’t be too generous to me. I’m afraid it was mostly cowardice.’
Was that right, though? Hadn’t there been times when she’d longed to say something? When the burden of secrecy had been almost more than she could bear?
‘Henry had me for his whole life,’ Kitty said. Her voice sounded small, and Flora’s heart swelled with the sound of it. ‘I loved him. But it’s right to tell us now. It’s . . .’
A little shudder went through her then. Flora waited for her to go on, but the silence stretched out – five seconds, ten, twenty. She felt sure there was something else, something more Kitty wanted or needed to say, but as time passed she began to think she must be wrong. She lifted her hand hesitantly to Kitty’s hair, the texture of it so familiar against her fingertips, and shut her eyes. Perhaps, she thought, they could drift off to sleep like this, propped against the pillows, with Kitty’s head resting on her shoulder. What bliss that would be: what a throwback to simpler times.
‘I’ve always thought you liked Landon,’ she said. ‘When he came to the house, when you were a little girl.’
‘I really can’t think about that now,’ Kitty said. ‘There’s too much else to . . .’
She laid her hand on Flora’s, and Flora was reminded of the game they used to play sometimes when Kitty was little: piling one hand on top of another, faster and faster, until you almost couldn’t tell whose hand was whose. The two of you tangled together, muddled up.
‘My darling,’ she said, ‘I love you so much.’
Kitty’s face wavered. ‘I love you too, Mum,’ she said. And if there was, in that moment, a glimmer of all the things that had not been said, Flora thought, it didn’t matter. This was good enough, the place they had reached, and she was more grateful than she could say.
And then – in a blink, or so it seemed – Kitty was asleep. And far from being in the
embrace of motherly bliss, Flora found herself propped awkwardly against the end of the bed, neither sitting nor lying, with Kitty’s head wedged in the angle of her neck. It was a horribly uncomfortable position, but Flora wouldn’t have dreamed of moving. She couldn’t risk waking Kitty; couldn’t bear her to leave.
This was how it was as a parent, she thought. You had to savour what you could, whenever you could, and whatever the price – especially if you were there so little. The story of motherhood had been, for her, one of opportunities slipping past: occasions she’d arrived late for, or missed altogether; occasions spoiled by Henry, or when she’d been too tired or too distracted to enjoy her daughters’ company. How could she have known how fast the years would pass, and how different her perspective would be at the end of them? She wished she could grasp at just a few of those vanishing threads of memory and make something different of them. How wonderful it would be to find herself back on the landing at Orchards with Lou appearing, tousle-headed, from her bed, or to leave the last case on the list to her Registrar and get home while it was still light and Kitty was playing in the garden.
And then she thought of Landon, whose whole experience of fatherhood had been stolen from him – or rather, perhaps, consciously relinquished. How had he been able to bear that, Flora wondered? Had he not felt the irresistible lure of his connection to Kitty? What kind of person did it make him if he could say nothing, do nothing for twenty years while Kitty grew up as Henry’s daughter?
Landon had always been a mystery, she thought; but assembling her memories of him now as she lay awake, pins and needles radiating up her arm and across her shoulders, she understood that he was a man whose pleasures were so tightly rationed that it was almost never possible to detect any lack of fulfilment, let alone any regret. Once or twice – on one or two obvious occasions she had seen him untrammelled, and even then . . . She felt a shiver of something hot and cold run through her. Did he exist, she wondered, on a knife-edge of control, or had he learned to sublimate his desires and disappointments so thoroughly that they rarely troubled him? Did she pity him – or was it altogether less straightforward than that? Just at this moment, she could almost feel that she despised him. She felt a terrible pang then, lying with the child he’d so loved curled in her arms, for Henry, who had never suppressed anything in his life.
50
The sun was edging around the curtains when Flora woke, and she had a terrible headache. A thumping pain just like a hangover – and the analogy seemed apt, given the extraordinary recollections that pressed in on her consciousness as she lay, taking stock of her situation.
Item one: Kitty, lying crammed into the bed beside her. Kitty whom Flora had finally told – had she? – the secret she’d kept since before she was born, and who had come creeping downstairs in the middle of the night – had she? – to make her peace with her mother. Could all that be true? Certainly here she was, fast asleep, looking more like her five-year-old self than Flora would have believed possible, her hair wildly tangled and her skin sweetly flushed.
Item two: Lou, sitting at the piano last night for the first time in years, her face as rapt as her father’s had been when he played. Lou weeping piteously in the garden because Alice had flown to her mother’s bedside, and Lou couldn’t live without her. That was a pain subtly different from any Flora had ever known, and she felt a shard of envy pricking at the soft flesh of maternal concern.
Item three: Flora herself, drenched and chilled and not a little afraid, fighting her way along an overgrown path while lightning jagged through the branches of the trees above her, then stuttering her way through an explanation as she was driven homewards through the storm-wracked countryside to a supper steeped in suspense and misapprehension.
Item four: item four Flora wasn’t sure she wanted to catalogue, just now. Item four was altogether less amenable to scrutiny and interpretation, better folded away again and stuffed in the back of a drawer. Instead she began the slow, painful process of removing limbs set hard as concrete from beneath the slumbering form of her daughter. It was seven thirty: everyone else, she imagined, would sleep for hours yet. She could bathe and dress and assemble her thoughts at leisure, a luxury which seemed, just now, both the greatest of felicities and the least she deserved.
*
There was still a faint smell of smoke and dampness downstairs, and the remains of supper sat where they had been left on the dining room table. On the threshold of the kitchen Flora stopped abruptly, her heart racing at the shadow of a movement in the room. A ghost, she thought, wildly. Martin’s ghost, or Martin himself, just as she had met him that morning aeons ago, holding out a plate of croissants. Or no one: just a movement of air. On the far side of the room the French window stood ajar, reminding Flora that she’d forgotten to lock up last night. Her mind’s eye trailed outside, wondering how the garden had fared in the storm, imagining it sullen and bedraggled this morning. A marathon of dead-heading and tidying awaited, she thought. And there would have to be an expedition to the shop. They had eaten the last tin and crust in the house last night.
An image of the next few days fell into her mind then: two or three careful, well-ordered days of activities spun into neat skeins, with elements of her old St Rémy life augmented by outings to the market in Champigny or the troglodyte caves further west; by reading in the garden and judiciously regulated conversation. Two or three evenings of more elaborate cooking than any of them really had the appetite – or indeed the skill – for, washed down with as much camaraderie as they could manage. There would not, she knew, be the kind of conversations other people might have in these circumstances. Could she bear it? Could she stand the dissembling cheerfulness, the studied disregard of subterranean currents of feeling, the surreptitious dread of saying something unguarded?
Henry would have been amused by the situation, she thought – not the matter of Kitty’s paternity, of course, but it was possible, conjuring the dead in one’s head, to allow for certain things to be overlooked. No, Henry would have been entertained by the notion of the four of them circling each other, drawing together and apart, watching each other’s steps. He would have had the name of some sixteenth-century courtly dance at his fingertips; a witty analogy. The thought of Henry was strangely consoling, even the wrench of grief a matter of certainty and familiarity. It made Flora feel she had something small and intangible, something unnameable, to congratulate herself for.
And then, putting a hand to the kettle, she found it hot, undoubtedly recently boiled, and her heart crashed again. It could be Lou, of course, who had made a cup of tea and taken it out through the open door, but . . .
Item four, she thought. Item four not consenting to stay hidden away in a drawer at the back of her mind after all. That elegant neck, its upper reaches left smoothly vulnerable by the pressure of the razor; that long face and Modigliani features, dark and shapely and striving for geniality. That habit of surprising her sometimes with his capacity, sometimes with his failure, to do the right thing. A man too familiar for her to have seen him properly for years.
For a few moments she stood absolutely still, letting realisation filter through to the furthest reaches of her mind and her body, to settle in her hypothalamus and dance on the nerve ends of her fingertips. No rationalising this time; no riders or defences or special pleading, but a straight line of history that began long ago with tree climbing and dinosaur bones and his amused adolescent face hearing her out as she put her case in whatever argument absorbed them that day; that trailed unswervingly through her indifference to his music and his faithful attendance at her mother’s parties to his tall figure beside Henry in the church as she advanced up the aisle, and a snatch of Mozart in the middle of the night in her mother’s bleak, dead house. And then sitting in her garden, just a few days ago: for years I thought you were in love with me, she’d said, and he had replied I was, in a way. She shut her eyes, remembering now not just the night that had followed that conversation, but that
other night two decades ago. The one she could see, now, had altered the course of her life.
Oh God, she thought. Was this the plain and terrible truth? Was her heart’s fulfilment standing out in the wet garden beyond that door, contemplating the hours, the days, the years ahead? And how did he see them? What did he hope for, beneath the tight leash of self-restraint?
*
Landon was standing at the far end of the garden with his back to the house, examining something in the flowerbed that ran along the back wall. For several moments Flora stood on the terrace, taking in his presence; his outline against the dull yellow of wet stone. It was no use pretending that she could walk away now. She was halfway across the garden when he turned, and then she felt sure he had known all along that she was there – that he had counted out the seconds while she stood by the door and gathered her resolve.
‘You’ve lost some stones here,’ he said, as she approached.
‘What?’
‘Some stones have gone from the wall.’ He turned towards her. ‘Given way in the storm.’
‘The wall?’ Flora’s heart constricted, shrinking in on itself like a sea anemone. But this was the moment for courage, she told herself. This was one of those moments when life could change if you willed it hard enough.
‘Landon,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you. There’s something I need to say.’
Landon looked at her for a moment, his head poised, and then he turned away again and pointed at the place where the top of the wall had crumbled.
‘Do you have a handyman?’ he asked. ‘I feel sure your excellent host would wish you to do something about the damage.’
Flora shook her head. She couldn’t care less about the wall, and she couldn’t bear the casual cordiality of Landon’s tone of voice. Just a trace of awkwardness would have been enough, but . . . She had forgotten how glacial he could be; how ruthlessly imperturbable.
The Things You Do for Love Page 32