by Terry Tyler
I fought back the extreme annoyance that statement provoked in me. My dad fell in love with my mum; it happens, people fall out of love with the person they’re with and in love with someone else every day, all over the world. What was he supposed to do, stay with Cathy forever even though he didn’t want to be with her anymore? Exactly how much of a wasted life would that have been?
I bit my tongue, of course. “It’s very generous of you to come here and tell me that.” I had to ask. “Do you forgive my father, too?”
She smiled at me, rather sadly. “I forgave him a long time ago. He was bewitched; unfortunately, he was always so weak. He let evil into his life too easily. He didn’t know how to fight the temptations offered so artfully by the dark forces that try to envelop us all.”
“My mother wasn’t evil.” I didn’t like the way this was going.
“No, she was weak, too, like poor Harry,” Cathy said. Her smile was very kind, and she didn’t seem too nutty, although her words were a bit full on. “She was led astray. I pray for her.”
“Thank you,” I said. My voice comes out as a mad squeak, sometimes, when I’m either frantic or am trying very hard not to say something else. This was one of those times. Ah well, all was fine and dandy, at least. Mum and Dad were both absolved by Cathy of their sins.
She reached across and clutched my hand. “You look so like both of your parents,” she said to me. “Don’t let the advantages of physical beauty distract you from the true meaning and purpose of life.”
I couldn’t argue with that bit of advice. “I’ll try not to.”
“And remember that marriage is sacred.”
I wasn’t sure about sacred, but I appreciated her sentiments. “I don’t intend to get married, Cathy,” I said.
“What a shame,” she said. “So you’ll be the last Lanchester.” She looked sad. “I doubt whether Isabella will ever give me a grandchild, now.”
“She’s got a few years yet.”
“Yes, but no husband. At least, not living with her. I think it’s important for a child to have married parents, even in this day and age.”
Yes, I thought. Just look how much good it did Isabella. I thought it best not to say that I hadn’t ruled out having a child, even if I didn’t fancy the crappy speeches and meringue dress. There was no point in upsetting her; she meant well. Even if I did now realise where Isabella ‘got it from’, as it were.
“Well, you never know what might happen,” I said, “and I have the other side of my family, too; my Aunt Mary’s daughter, Caitlin, had a baby at Christmas time. Letty. She’s lovely, so dark and pretty. Granddad says she looks like Mum did when she was a baby.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “Your grandfather. And Mary Hever. I remember her all too well.”
Did I detect a smidgeon of bitterness as yet un-soothed by the strength of her faith? I changed the subject, quickly. We talked for a little while longer, about people we both knew, though these were very few. Then she said she must leave, because Hannah was waiting for her in the car.
“Oh—goodness, I’m so sorry, how rude of me!” I said. “I had no idea; I’d have asked her in, of course!”
“No, no.” She finished her cup of coffee and placed it back in the saucer. “I wanted to see you on my own. Hannah’s fine. She’s reading a book on one of those little screens that people have these days.”
I smiled. “A Kindle. Or an iPad, maybe.”
“That’s it!” Cathy laughed, and I saw a glimmer of the young woman I’d seen in the faded photos in the family album; the fresh-faced girl with her long hair parted in the middle, wearing flared velvet trousers and an afghan coat. The ones taken even before she was married to Dad, when she was engaged to my uncle Alex who’d died more than forty years before. Another world, far away in time.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us today?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. I think Isabella would prefer it was kept low-key rather than turned into a family excursion. I’ll come and visit her when she’s settled in and feeling a bit better.”
“I don’t know when that will be,” her mother said, sadly. “I don’t think she’ll ever be up to the world of business again; I don’t think you’ll see her back at Lanchester Estates.”
“No. I think maybe she was never suited to it, anyway. But it’s early days, we’ll just have to hope her condition levels out so she can find some peace.”
She stood up and we walked out to the hall. I opened the door and waved to Hannah; to my surprise, Cathy gave me a huge, motherly hug. She smelt of musty churches.
“You’re a good girl,” she said. “We’ll keep in touch.”
As I watched them move off down the drive, I looked up at the sky. I could imagine my dad looking down on us, and laughing his head off.
***
Robert was very subdued during the months following Amy’s death, as was to be expected. Despite his avowal never to go near Norfolk again, he felt obliged to visit the Robsarts once a fortnight or so, even though, he said, he wasn’t sure they wanted him to.
“The worst thing is that they’re childless now,” he said. “Phyllis, she said to me, ‘I’ve been a mother for twenty-four years, and now I’m not anymore’. That’s so sad, isn’t it?”
He told me they were pouring their love into Phyllis Robsart’s nieces, now. Amy’s cousins. Kind of adopting them as substitutes, which can’t have been easy for the two girls. But people just cope in whatever way they can, don’t they?
Whatever the circumstances of her death, he still considered himself entirely to blame. Three months on, he was still diving between happiness because he could be with me, and clouds of black, guilty gloom that he was deriving any enjoyment from life at all.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been together; we hadn’t questioned whether or not we would be because we were so close that there was nothing to discuss. I knew what we had was strong enough to weather his guilt, but I thought it imperative for his psychological wellbeing that he found a way to deal with it.
“You didn’t treat her badly,” I said. “You weren’t unfaithful to her, you did your best to maintain a marriage you didn’t want anymore.” I was so, so glad we’d never had an affair behind her back. I don’t think we would still be involved now, if we had.
“I was unfaithful to her every day,” he said, “because I loved you. Even when I was happy with her, I still would have left her if you’d given the word.”
“Oh, why on earth did you marry her? Why did you allow it to go that far?”
“Because I was very fond of her. I thought, well, Erin doesn’t want me, and Amy’s a lovely girl, and how can I break her heart? I was everything to her; how could I have done that to her?”
“I did want you, though.”
“You didn’t show me that.”
“No, because you were married. And before that you were engaged. You’d made your choice.”
Yet again I wondered why people can never just spend a bit of time on their own, instead of tying themselves into relationships that aren’t right. Is everyone so insecure that they’re unable to face life without the back-up of a partner? I voiced this, and Robert said that it was human nature to pair up, because of the instinct to propagate the species.
“But surely our intelligence is what sets us apart from other animals,” I said. “We possess conscious thought that enables us to make decisions beyond our primal instinct.”
“Fair enough, but I hope you don’t end up as one of those people who is married only to their work,” he said.
“It’s a bit early to talk about me ‘ending up’ as anything. I’m not even twenty-four for another month.”
I hadn’t allowed him to discuss his marriage with me before, but now I let him pour everything out. He told me how clingy Amy had been, how she centred every single day around his homecoming, the high point of each day being the preparation of an elaborate dinner, which he came to dread.
“If I went for
a drink with you, or with anyone else, after work, I’d get the pursed lips,” he said. “She was supposed to be my be-all and end-all, because she was my wife. God, it was always that. ‘But I’m your wife!’ if ever I put something before her.”
“It’s a strange one, that,” I said. I was thinking of my sister, too. “Sometimes the people most lacking in self-confidence are the most demanding. They’re so terrified that they can lose everything in a moment that they become clingy, which gives the impression that they see their own needs as all-important. Their lack of self-esteem makes them self-obsessed. It’s a curious contradiction.”
He smiled. “When did you get so wise?”
“All the time I was reading books and thinking about stuff instead of cooking men’s dinners,” I said. “And earning a living, observing people and the way the world works, instead of getting stoned at student parties and swotting up a load of crap for stupid exams that I’d forget within a couple of months.”
He ran his hand down my stomach; we were in bed at the time. “Never change,” he said.
“Not much chance of that,” I said. My stomach let out a huge rumble; we both laughed.
“I felt that!” He sat up. “Shall I go and make us some breakfast?”
“Yes please.” I grinned at him, and pulled the covers up to my chin. “You’re better at eggs than I am. And bacon. You’re great at bacon. Ooh, and those mushrooms you did the other day—”
“Erin,” he said, “I was only going to make toast, not bacon and eggs, and everyone is better at cooking virtually anything than you are.”
“I’m not stupid. If I carry on being rubbish at it, it will never be my turn to make dinner.”
He stood up and pulled on his shorts, those sexy, tight white ones he looked so totally hot in, then turned to face me again. “Marry me,” he said. “I mean it.”
I looked at him standing there and thought, he’s every woman’s dream. So tall, dark and handsome he could have adorned the cover of any romantic novel, intelligent, funny, sexy, fabulous in bed, hardworking, and he adored me. He had so much natural charm I think he must have been handed out a double helping of it by mistake, at birth; women fancied him, men wanted to be his buddy. But even if I wanted to say yes, now was certainly not the right time.
“Don’t spoil things,” I said, and he laughed.
“I ask her to marry me, and she says I’m spoiling things,” he said. “And this, my darling, is why I want to so much. Ah well. I can wait.”
Even if I’d been dying to say yes, I could never have done so. There were still some people, the type who thrive on such gossip and theories, who reckoned that Amy had been ‘disposed of’. Many presumed that, because he and I were so close, his marriage had been little more than a trifling inconvenience. I had no desire for us to become a source of muttering and disapproval amongst my staff. Though I had worked at the company for nearly eight years and my father had been well loved, I was made aware several times a day that I was incredibly young to hold the position I did.
“Though there is no one better qualified and more determined to make a good job of it,” Will told me more than once, when I was momentarily struck down by insecurity. “You’ve worked so hard for this, and I think you’ll actually do a better job of it than your father did, because you don’t have his ego. You’re more down to earth, realistic.”
I asked him if he could write that down so I could look at it each day. Have it embroidered onto a Victorian sampler, perhaps. I was so lucky to have him, Robert and the wonderful Cecilia to help me through the difficult decisions I had to make. I didn’t think I would ever become totally married to my work, but my priority was running a watertight ship, and I certainly wasn’t about to flaunt my relationship with a man who’d been widowed under such gossip-worthy circumstances only a few months before.
Especially not with my history.
You know, the bit I’m so ashamed about.
I’m talking about Aiden Seymour, of course.
I still think about what I did, and hate myself for it.
It started off as a game, when Dad was still alive and married to Kate.
You know how when you’re a kid (I was fourteen when they married) you can see exactly how the land lies within an adult relationship, even though no one’s spelt it out for you?
I read somewhere that there is always one person in even the most equal of relationships who loves slightly more than the other—and Dad and Kate’s certainly wasn’t equal. Kate didn’t love Dad as much half as he loved her. I could see it, all the time, and I discovered why not before they married.
Dad and Jaz were in the garden one Saturday morning, and she was sitting at the kitchen table at her laptop. I’d just got up; I was in the hall, flicking through the post. The kitchen door was open, as was the back door that leads to the garden, and I could see right through; it was a lovely, sunny morning. I heard Dad and Jaz calling to her, laughing; she got up and went out into the garden. I wandered into the kitchen to get some orange juice (oh, the days before coffee was my morning drug of necessity!), and her laptop was still open. Being the averagely nosey sort of fourteen-year-old I was, I sidled over to see what she was doing.
Her e-mails were open. She’d obviously been reading an old one, dated some time before Christmas. It was from Jaz’s uncle Aiden, the content of which made clear that they were madly in love, but she’d chosen to marry Dad instead.
I wasn’t angry. I liked Kate very much, and I was glad she was marrying Dad, but I stored up the information for future use; it was interesting, though I did think it was weird that she’d been having a thing with a guy who was (in my eyes) way too young for her.
I didn’t understand, then, that love and sexual attraction have neither age barriers nor logic, and you can’t help who lights your fire.
My sixteenth birthday came, and at my party I couldn’t help but notice a few little looks pass between them. No one else would have caught on if they didn’t know what I knew.
I also noticed him checking me out.
I started flirting with him because I loved my dad so much and wanted him to be happy. I thought that if Kate could see that Aiden was attracted to girls of my age, she’d feel silly about having a thing for him, and start loving my dad more.
The problem came when I started to fancy him for real.
It was during one of mine and Robert’s ‘off’ phases, and I was totally screwed up and miserable about losing Dad. Even now I can’t quite work out my motivations. Yes, it was partly just lust and the lure of the forbidden, but I think I was also kicking out at anything, because I couldn’t deal with Dad being gone, and I resented Aiden for taking his place in our home, at the same time as fancying him like mad. Our living situation was weird, to say the least, and all the emotions flying around were terribly complex, but nothing excuses my actions. I’m appalled at myself.
On the other hand, I’m sure I did Kate a favour in the long run. She’s now married to some wildly rich racehorse breeder and has a fabulous jet set life, whereas Aiden would have broken her heart over and over again. If he’d sleep with me less than a year after their allegedly much longed for marriage, I think we can safely calculate that he was starting as he meant to go on.
He was only a plaything to me. Once the full impact of what I’d done sank in I looked on him only as you would a pretty picture, something to admire then turn away from, and I’d despised him from the moment I knew how faithless he was, anyway.
None of the men with whom I’ve been involved have been anything other than playthings, apart from Robert. I mean, a couple of them I’ve liked quite a lot (Tim Wyatt and Viking Erik), but I’ve never felt love for any of them.
Robert was a beautiful twenty-year-old boy when I met him, and he’s grown up into a drop dead gorgeous man. He’s like his father but less Goodfellas, more Gone With The Wind. He’s kind of a smoothed down, polished up version of Jim.
He first proposed very soon after we started seeing ea
ch other, but of course I said no. He was gutted, we broke up, we got back together, a process that was repeated over and over. During one of the break ups he met Amy, and that was that.
I felt unexpectedly and deeply upset when I saw them together. I knew she meant something to him, you see. He wasn’t just trying to make me jealous, she was special. Oh—I remember that Christmas party in the boardroom when I first saw them. Jaz knew I was upset and he was really sweet to me. Said Amy was ‘minging’ even though she was far from that. And now they’re both gone. My baby brother and little Amy. Sorry—hang on a minute, I’m going to cry. Again.
Fuck.
Death. Hannah says she’s surprised I’m as stable as I am, I’ve seen so much of it. I’m the way I am because of it, though. I want to get the most out of every minute, see all there is to see, establish something great to leave behind. One day, I shall travel all over the world, write a book, learn to paint, bungee jump, speak five languages, tap dance, fly a plane—I want to learn about everything, do all life has to offer. I mustn’t waste a day, because I might be the next one to pop off! Joke. I have no intention of not living to a very old age. I know I will. I want to love intensely, be a decent person, achieve every goal I set, and do it all myself; some days I feel as if I might burst with the ache inside me to create, build, learn, experience.
I want to do all the things Jaz never got to do. I’ve got to do double everything, for me and him.
I used to talk to Mum in bed at night, when I was little. After Dad died I talked to him. Now I talk to Jaz, too.
We sit there, on my bed, all together. Me and my family.
Robert and I learnt to deal with the bad days, which mostly arose through his guilt at having been pretty hellish to Amy for the month prior to her death, which was because of her saying something about his father that he couldn’t forgive. He said he couldn’t repeat it because if he did it would make him feel angry with her all over again, and that was something he didn’t want, so I didn’t press it. I could imagine the sort of thing a po-faced little miss like Amy would have said about Jim, anyway, I didn’t need the exact words.