One day the following spring, she found herself back in a church for the first time since she’d left England. She didn’t know why she’d gone in exactly, but it was a curious and emotional experience. She sat at the back and didn’t sing or pray. She just watched and listened, monitoring the doubts and uncertainty that lived between the bruises on her heart.
She walked out after the service, cursing the world, and the church, and the fact that humans are so flawed and full of contempt. But, two weeks later, she went back. Then the week after that. Gradually, she came to realise something that felt important. The church is made up of sinful people, just like her mother and father, just like Peggy herself, just like everyone who’d never set foot in heaven. But in this dark and destructive world, it could also be something else: a beacon of light.
It wasn’t long after Peggy and Gerald married, in a short service in the mairie, with only his mother and two friends present, that news reached her that her father had died of throat cancer. She went home for the funeral and dutifully stood beside her mother, a timid and unhappy stranger, whose hair had been eaten away by alopecia. As Peggy reached out and briefly held her hand, her mother turned to her. The gratitude that shone in her eyes sent a surge of pity through Peggy, a feeling that would bother her for many months afterwards.
They moved back to Liverpool the following year and were happy and in love in their quiet and unshowy way. Their love was the kind that made him run a bath for her at the end of a long day, and made her never feel so safe as when wrapped in the folds of his borrowed sweater. Soon after, an everyday miracle happened.
Peggy became pregnant again.
*
Those nine months were a very different experience from the first time she’d been expecting. Her happiness was tinged with an anxiety that came from a very different place than before. Her fear was primeval, almost superstitious. And all Gerald could offer was his gentle, persistent reassurance that this time would be different: her baby was going nowhere.
Christine was born in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital in Liverpool, with the help of a jolly Glaswegian midwife called Agnes and with Gerald at her side, pretending that his fingers hadn’t turned blue as she squeezed them. Afterwards, as hazy winter sunshine shone through the window, she gazed into the eyes of her new baby and for the first time allowed herself to believe that her husband might be right.
‘We still haven’t settled on a name, have we?’ she said.
‘Apart from Philip.’
She chuckled. ‘I don’t think that’ll suit her somehow, do you?’
Gerald had thought of a girl’s name a long time earlier, but something had stopped him from suggesting it until now. ‘What would you think about . . . Christine?’
Peggy froze and he immediately regretted it. He’d just thought that perhaps she might find some comfort in the name, a nod of recognition to her lost little brother Christopher. Now he felt crass and insensitive, until a tired smile appeared on his wife’s lips. ‘I think it’s a lovely idea.’
*
As a baby, Christine had piercing blue eyes, soft, skinny legs and a rosebud mouth capable of the loudest cries Peggy had ever heard. She was permanently hungry and rarely inclined to sleep. But each time she heard Christine grizzling in the witching hour, Peggy didn’t roll over and hope she’d drift off again. She’d be eager, too eager really, to lift her out of her cot and to her breast. To be a mother.
As a little girl, Christine was clever, bright and had a precocious sense of humour. She could read before any of her peers and would have Peggy and Gerald in stitches with the funny faces she’d pull, the jokes she’d make up.
By the time she hit puberty, Christine was strong, beautiful and wilful – a combination that other parents might consider a headache. She got into trouble at school a few times. Once, notably, for calling out a teacher for repeatedly referring to her friend Saiqa as ‘the little foreigner’, despite the fact that she’d been born less than two miles from the radius of the school. After a heated debate about what constitutes racism, Peggy and Gerald were called in to see the head teacher, where they were supposed to agree that their daughter’s refusal to back down was intolerable.
But the best Peggy had been able to offer was: ‘We’ll have to agree to disagree,’ before Christine was suspended from school for a day. Peggy took her shopping, followed by afternoon tea and cakes. She was proud that her daughter was feisty. She wanted her to be fearless and worldly, a girl who stood up for herself and others. None of the things that she’d been.
She’d always loved music and had eclectic tastes. She’d go to HMV every Saturday and spend every last bit of her pocket money on a new record, gradually building up quite a collection. She was constantly organising and reorganising it – sometimes alphabetically, other times by colour, all just an excuse to treasure each glossy sleeve.
This passion for music led to her joining a punk band at fourteen – The Rancid Peacocks. She had a romance with its chain-smoking, tattooed lead singer, a man Peggy tried to like but still couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed a good wash. After the punk singer, Christine had two other short-lived romances, one with a boy whose father was a merchant banker and clearly fancied himself more than her; another with a boy who – even in Gerald’s presence – couldn’t stop glaring at her daughter’s chest like an Alsatian eyeing up a cream bun.
Then, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Christine did the most shocking thing of all: she met a lovely, decent boy who loved every wild contradiction about her.
The first time Peggy was introduced to Joe, he stood on her front step clutching a yellow crocus packed tightly into a ceramic pot and tied with a nylon ribbon. His young face was dappled with freckles and topped with a mop of thick, blond hair, but his shoulders were those of a man, broad and strong.
‘Hello, Mrs Culpepper,’ he said, and although he didn’t sound nervous, his neck turned pink when he spoke. ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’
Peggy had never been much of a cook, but she could rustle up a ham salad and a lemon drizzle cake, and if that wasn’t enough there was always Marks & Spencer. ‘You’ve got a really nice house,’ he said.
‘She’s been dusting since seven this morning,’ Christine whispered and Peggy swiped her with her tea towel, which made Joe laugh and relax for the first time. Then the three of them chatted through a very nice lunch, if she did say so herself, even if she’d forgotten to buy salad cream and the butter was too hard to spread.
The more time Joe spent around Christine, the more obvious it became that he’d do anything for her. By this stage, she’d got a little job in a chemist on a Saturday and come rain or shine, he’d be there at the end of her shift, just so she had someone to walk home with. They’d stay for hours in Christine’s room. Joe, a music lover himself, was probably the only person except her allowed to touch those records.
He’d often turn up at the house with a tatty acoustic guitar he had, a hand-me-down from his brother that he’d tried to scrape the stickers off but was still left with a gluey residue that never quite disappeared. He was shy about it at first, but eventually she coaxed a song out of him and loved listening to him.
‘I will get a proper guitar one day,’ he used to tell Christine. ‘A Gibson Les Paul, or a 335, like BB King’s.’ But it never mattered to her what he played on, just that he was playing and that, with every chord, she felt herself falling a little bit more in love with him.
Although his sweet, calming personality juxtaposed her fiery impulsiveness, somehow they worked. With this lovely boy in her life, Christine seemed to relax for the first time in her life. It was as if she could finally stop trying so hard.
That’s not to say she didn’t fight for the things she believed in. At seventeen, she joined a group of friends and hitchhiked to the Greenham Common Peace Camp – to protest against nuclear weapons with 70,000 other women. When she returned, just as Joe had won a job in the fire service, Peggy had wondered if there migh
t have been a gulf between them, but the opposite was true. He was enthralled by her passion, by everything about her.
‘Joe has told me he wants to marry me,’ Christine said soon afterwards. And when Peggy replied, ‘God help him,’ she was only half-joking. Because, for all her daughter’s loveliness, Peggy always knew she had the capacity to hurt him right there in the palm of her hand.
Chapter 50
I was determined not to be jealous of Julia. I was not going to be that woman. But as they flew off to Paris on their honeymoon, my thoughts began eating me up from inside. It didn’t feel like sadness as I’d experienced it before, more an emptiness that made my head foggy and my chest acidic.
But at least I had my job. I threw myself into work, spending hours in the lab, well beyond the point at which everyone else’s lights had gone off, then returning to my new flat to polish my lecture plans until they shone. I worked most weekends too, though made time to go to the cinema or for lunch in the Georgian quarter with Petra, with whom I’d already formed a strong friendship.
Then there was Dad who, a few weekends after the wedding, I joined on a fishing afternoon. I had never fished in my life, but on that particular day, the only alternative was going into the lab again and the bags under my eyes were starting to tell me that perhaps I was overdoing it. I worked out within twenty minutes, however, that if I was looking to stay busy to stop my mind wandering to other matters, I’d picked the wrong pastime.
‘There’s not much action involved in this, is there?’ I said.
‘I have enough action at work,’ he shrugged.
‘Have you saved anyone’s life lately?’
‘Well, I got an old lady out of a first-floor window after her electric blanket set the bed on fire.’
‘Seriously?’
‘She was in the bathroom when it started, but thankfully had an emergency cord. We managed to get her out before the damage had spread, so the only treatment she needed was for minor smoke inhalation. And probably shock at being thrown over my shoulder while she was still in her nightie.’
‘Well done, Dad.’
‘Oh, it was a team effort.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Well, it always is.’
‘I can see why you’d like to just sit around when you’ve been doing that kind of thing,’ I said.
‘It’s just a way of slowing down sometimes. Gives you space to think and contemplate the big stuff, you know.’
Precisely why it was a terrible idea for me. Because any contemplation I did these days involved the way Ed looked on his wedding day, in fact the way he always looked around Julia. It wasn’t that he glowed in her presence, the way teenage boys do when the most popular, pretty girl in the school agreed to go out with them. It was subtler than that. It was as if he wanted to be better than the man he already was. His love was so big that it filled every corner of a room, it was already working so hard. But then that was Ed. He never has approached anything half-heartedly. If he was going to run a business, it was going to be the best he could make it. If he was going to be a husband, he was going to be the best it was possible to be.
‘If you want action, I’ll show you how to cast a fly properly,’ Dad said, and I snapped out of my thoughts.
‘Okay.’
‘Once you’ve got the technique right for this, it’ll set you up in the long run.’
‘What long run?’
He gave me a few instructions, and told me I needed to aim for between ten and twenty metres from the bank. After four attempts, my rod was in the water and we sat and . . . well, we just sat.
‘I once tried to persuade your mother to come fishing,’ he told me. ‘She was bored stiff. She was a bit like your grandma in that sense, could never sit still.’
I smiled. ‘So, if not this, what did you and Mum do together at weekends?’
‘Oh, we went out with friends, or to gigs, or the cinema. She loved movies. “Anything as long as it’s not soppy.” That’s what she always said. So, Hitchcock films, comedies . . . she loved The Lost Boys – we saw that twice. It helped that it had a great soundtrack. She loved her music as much as me.’
‘Do you think . . . you’ll ever meet anyone again, Dad?’
He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know, really. It’s not that I’m a martyr to being alone, or I’m particularly fond of cooking for one. It’s just hard to envisage meeting another person who could ever mean as much to me as your mother did.’
I pushed away a box of bait, hoping to get rid of the stink of what appeared to be prawns.
‘Hey, have the photos come back from Ed’s wedding yet? You haven’t talked much about it,’ Dad said.
‘Haven’t I?’ I lowered my eyes. ‘Well, it was swish. The venue was incredible. I don’t think it would be controversial for me to say that Julia’s family looked more at home in a Grade one listed Georgian mansion than anyone else.’ I flashed him a glance. ‘She’s very classy.’
‘It must be odd for you, having not spent that much time with Ed for all these years and then, when you get back together, he gets married.’
‘We were never together, Dad.’
‘I know, I didn’t mean that.’ Then I focused on the water lapping against the horizon, the orange sun shining bright in a brilliant blue sky and I realised my throat had dried up.
‘All right?’ Dad said gently.
Without thinking I glanced up and the look in my eyes must’ve been like an unfolding storybook. He didn’t need me to fill in the gaps. He already knew what I felt for Ed. I suspect he’d always known.
My chin trembled and I nodded. He shuffled in and put his arm round me. I looked at his hands, the skin on his knuckles, the way they’d cracked and weathered over the years. Those were the hands that had rocked me as a baby and had helped me move house. They were the hands that had held my mother’s as she was dying and the only hands that could possibly make any of this feel better, just for being folded into mine.
‘You’ll be all right, love.’
‘Of course I will,’ I replied, maintaining the pretence that I didn’t know what he was talking about.
He pulled back and his expression changed. ‘The hardest thing in the world is watching someone you love lose their heart to another.’ I didn’t reply.
‘Look, Allie,’ he continued gently, ‘do you think it’s wise for you to continue seeing Ed? Can you handle this friendship when he’s married to someone else?’
I felt my teeth grind. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I just can’t stand the thought of you being unhappy around him.’
I looked up. ‘Do you think that’s what I should do? Break all ties with him?’
He sighed. ‘I honestly don’t know. Ed is a good guy and he’s been a great friend to you. And I know more than anyone that there are some people who are worth keeping in your life, even if you feel . . . they’ve let you down. But only you know if you can do it.’
It was this speech that made me think I could.
Human beings are creatures with a unique ability to recognise that what we want is not always what is good for us, I reasoned. We have control over our actions, can identify desires as harmful and unwanted. People live with unhelpful yearnings all the time without acting on them. We might feel like punching that traffic warden, or drinking that tenth glass of wine, succumbing to our basest instincts as we turn every one of life’s corners, but we don’t. We make choices, and it’s those choices that define us.
I knew then, if I hadn’t already, that I’d judge myself harshly if I simply called time on a life-long friendship, with absolutely no good explanation, at least not one I could share.
‘I wish things were as simple as they had been with you and Mum,’ I continued. ‘You were so young when you met and yet neither of you ever had any doubts. You were unshakeable.’
He picked up the rod and started winding the twine. ‘That’s not strictly true, Allie,’ he replied.
‘What do you
mean?’
A lump moved slowly down his neck. ‘I’m just saying, if you expect fairy tales . . . you won’t get them. Sometimes finding the person you’re meant to be with can be a rocky path. People are complicated, Allie. Your mum was complicated. You shouldn’t ever think she wasn’t.’
*
As I lie in bed on our last night in Lake Garda, the ceiling fan whirrs above me, moving hot air around the room but not really cooling it. My legs jostle under the covers, agitated as I replay that conversation until all I can do is sit up and click on the bedside lamp.
As the room floods with light, so too does a series of flashbacks. Of my mother’s wedding speech. Of my dad failing to answer when the lady in hospital asked if he was my father. Of an undercurrent of a feeling that has perhaps always been there, bubbling under the surface.
A cold realisation sweeps through me.
He knew.
Dad knew that my mother had cheated on him.
Chapter 51
We leave Sirmione the following morning and embark on a train journey that takes most of the day. With every mile closer to the Ligurian coast, a familiar, preternatural dread begins to creep up on me. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the fear of stumbling across Stefano in the street. Now I have an address where I know he lives.
I repeatedly glance at my mobile, my fingers hovering over Dad’s name in the contact book as I contemplate simply phoning him to ask exactly what happened all those years ago. But what if I’m wrong about him knowing about Stefano McCourt and Mum? For all my suspicions, this is not a risk I can take lightly. In the absence of certainty, all I can do is stick to plan A.
Ed is immersed in his book, a collection of modern poems, the sort of thing he loves and that I’d rather eat my own forearm than read. As we zip through the Italian countryside, I watch him privately from the opposite seat as the pads of his fingers rub the corner of each page, before he turns it over, his pupils dilating as they settle onto the new words. I find myself studying the nuances of his expression, as he frowns at something he’s reading, or gently raises his eyebrows in surprise.
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