A Daughter's Secret (37 page)

‘Why do you say that?’

‘All this,’ I say, my stiff hand slicing into the air around me like a karate chop.

Lorcan smiles, the lines around his eyes crumpling like wrapping paper.

‘You don’t have much faith in your dad, do you?’ My face. ‘Understandably. No, this is all me. Once I’d adjusted my expectations . . .’ He smiles again. ‘Unless you’re Mick Jagger, rocking into your dotage is not a good look – I found I could make a pretty good living.’

‘How?’

‘I’ve written some pretty major hits for other artists. Not under my own name. I wanted to keep the two things separate . . .’ His expression speaks to something complicated. Another stab of anger: did he not want us to know, in case we came after him for his hard-earned cash? ‘I’ve done quite a bit of commercial composition too. Have you seen that silly advert with the cows slow dancing in the buttercups?’ He hums the tune, even his humming melodious, and I can suddenly hear it’s his – that amazing ability to stitch a tune together in such a way that it lodges itself in your heart. I’ve heard that song time and time again, and yet I never heard it.

‘Well done,’ I say. I hope he knows I mean it.

He looks sheepish.

‘I knew . . . I knew my parents were still paying your school fees, and then helping out when you went up to Oxford – they were very proud. Trust me, Mia, I didn’t have much for the first few years.’

‘So how did it change?’

I check myself. My therapist voice has crept in.

‘I guess I got over my rock star pretensions. I couldn’t go back to the States, not with a criminal record, and I never set the charts alight here. But if you’re composing, you can do it from anywhere.’

‘It sounds like it’s all worked out rather marvellously,’ I say, anger seizing me again, a tornado depositing me a million miles away from him.
Little ice cube
– it wasn’t just him who got thrown into jail.

‘Mia . . .’

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ I say, voice high and reedy. It’s too late now, surely? If we try and put something back together all we’ll see is how broken it is, a makeshift monument to what’s been irrefutably lost. As I start to stand, Lorcan’s arm shoots out, barring my way.

‘Mia, don’t leave.’ His voice cracks. ‘Not when I’ve only just found you.’

‘You
didn’t
find me,’ I say, hot tears springing up. ‘And there was no finding to be done. I was there. I was always your daughter.’

‘Were you?’

‘You don’t stop being someone’s child . . .’

‘I thought that’s what you wanted. Never to lay eyes on me again.’

‘Don’t you dare try and make it my fault.’

‘I’m not,’ he says, impassioned. ‘Darling, I’m not. This isn’t an excuse, or an explanation. I was ashamed.’

‘You should’ve been,’ I say, looking down at the tiled floor, the words guttural, dredged from the depths.

‘Yes, I should’ve been,’ he agrees. ‘But I was too far gone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I always felt like a fraud.’ His gaze is far away now, lost in the past.

‘How were you a fraud? With us’ –
us
, it catches in my throat – ‘or with your career?’

‘All of it, Mia. Your grandparents disapproved of the way I lived my life, but they always bailed me out. I was playing. I always knew that.’

‘Play’ is not a word I’d ever have associated with them. They’re Anglo-Irish, old money, high Catholic – everything is strictly rationed, even love. Lorcan was an only too, squeezed out of their joyless marriage. He was abruptly dispatched to boarding school when he was seven, tightly clutching hold of Mr Trunk, his toy elephant. Mr Trunk came to a bad end, flushed down the loo in week one, a story which always gave me nightmares when I was small. No wonder he learnt to cut himself off with such brutal efficiency.

‘But you made it.’

‘Yeah, and look what happened as soon as I did,’ he says with a rueful shrug. ‘I’m sorry I was such a grade A fuck-up.’

‘What finally made you stop?’ And why didn’t you come back when you did is what I really want to ask. Not ask – plead, demand. Does he hear the second half of the sentence? I feel like I’m howling it into the silence.

‘I split up with a girlfriend. Actually she left me. I was feeling totally sorry for myself, drinking a bottle of whisky a night, renting a room in a house stuffed with twenty-somethings.’ He looks straight at me. ‘Now
that
made me miss you. I had this fantasy you’d come home one night with one of those girls. Reappear from nowhere . . .’ He smiles, blue eyes twinkling. ‘The Abominable Snowman.’

‘In that case, why didn’t you just ring?’

I’m saying it for show – the weird thing is, I understand perfectly. The fantasy would’ve been so much easier to indulge: the mundane and painful reality of making reparation, if it were even possible, would have been too hard for him.

‘I borrowed a car from one of them. Borrowed – I nicked his keys. Crashed it into the front of Peckham Budgens.’ And I laugh. God, it feels good: I can breathe again. ‘I’d been late with my rent enough times that he was feeling vindictive. I spent a night in the cells, staring at the walls, inhaling the stench of it. Do you remember the smell?’ I nod, the memory of that fetid air rotten in my nostrils. ‘Thank you for coming then,’ he says, taking my hand, both of our eyes filling with tears.

‘Go on,’ I say eventually.

‘It was rock bottom. I couldn’t fake it any more.’ He smiles. ‘I got on with it.’

‘Not all of it . . .’ I say, my voice little more than a whisper. I scrub at my eyes. I don’t want this. Anger’s better than this.

No, no it isn’t. I think of Patrick – sense him – make a vow to myself that’s more a feeling than a dry stack of words. Lorcan’s watery eyes rake my face.

‘I haven’t got the answer, petal, I wish I did. I should’ve sought you out, begged you to forgive me. Don’t think I didn’t lie awake at night thinking about it, but something always stopped me.’ He pauses. ‘What I tried to say to you on your mum’s doorstep was true. It was because I loved you, not because I didn’t. I was always proud of you, even from afar.’

Mum wrote to him every Christmas, it turns out. It felt like a betrayal when she first admitted it, but it doesn’t any more. I reach my hand out, my fingers spidering across his palm as if they’ve got a life of their own.

‘OK.’

He looks at our hands with a sheepish kind of delight, then looks back up at me.

‘I had this other fantasy, that I’d be dying and we’d be reunited. And we wouldn’t be able to believe we’d lost all that time when we loved each other so much.’

I stand up abruptly.

‘But that’s so stupid! When you had it in your gift to pick up the phone and give us that time . . .’ I sit back down heavily, take a gulp of freezing tea. ‘That’s disgusting. The tea.’

‘Let’s start again, shall we?’ he says, crossing the kitchen and putting the kettle on.

He was right about the pub, there’s not a ploughman’s in sight. It’s a beautiful old inn, with a cosy, dark-wood interior. Even though it’s early summer, it’s pouring with rain, and there’s a fire blazing in the grate. The ruddy-faced manager comes rushing over when he spots us.

‘Hello there, mate,’ he says, pumping Lorcan’s hand. ‘No Caroline today? Who’s this then?’

Lorcan’s eyes rest on me for a few seconds.

‘My daughter,’ he says, the words a little broken. ‘Mia.’ I’m so glad he said it that way round, so it didn’t sound like an afterthought.

‘Your daughter?’ He looks between us. ‘Yeah, no, I can see it. Come and get yourselves settled in,’ he says, leading us towards a corner table near the fire. ‘Heard your song on the telly the other night.’

I can see Lorcan quietly preening.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, some kid with frosted tips was belting it out on
The Voice
.’

‘It was a massacre!’ says Lorcan dramatically.

‘Most certainly was. Good tune though.’

‘You’re too kind. Darling, what do you want to drink? I’ll have a lime and soda, and – tell you what, Gavin, get the bar staff a round on frosted tips.’

He’s still Lorcan – still the Pied Piper, even with blood, not whisky, flowing through his veins. He looks over the menu, insists I have steak. ‘You’re pale,’ he says. ‘You need feeding up.’ I don’t argue, decide to simply enjoy letting him parent me, even if it’s only for this one, strange day. He met Caroline in AA, he tells me. I’ve seen photos, so I’ve already rid myself of the nightmare that she’s a Russian twenty-something with a pneumatic body and a five-year plan. She sounds like a kind, stable woman who’s had her own dragons to slay. He asks me about Nick, teasing me for details. He met him briefly that night, but it was hardly the time for small talk.

‘Just didn’t see your mum with a baldie. She’s a very beautiful woman.’

‘His baldness is not the point of him, Lorcan.’ Will there ever be a time when I reclaim ‘Dad’?

‘Mmm.’ I can tell that on some crazy level he’s jealous. Would Mum be a little bit pleased, or would it just infuriate her?

‘He really looks after her,’ I say pointedly. ‘He worships the ground she walks on.’

‘So she’s the star?’

‘Does someone
always
have to be the star?’ I ask, waspish. Surely what we want is balance? I think about what Patrick said to me when we were being rained on in King’s Cross. I don’t want him to make me a star, and then lose interest when he finds I’m just another civilian.

‘Trust me, Mia, someone’s always the star.’

‘So, what, you’re the star with Caroline?’

‘In a way,’ he says, smiling to himself. I guess it’s a relief on some level that he’s not had a complete personality transplant. There’s a part of him that will always be a child, always be that little boy who watched Mr Trunk get flushed down the bog and vowed he’d never be made so vulnerable again. I feel a little internal shudder, a reminder that the things we hate the most in other people are the things we secretly know to be our own demons.

‘Yeah, I don’t think that’s ever been carved into a stone tablet. Mum loves Nick just as much as he loves her.’ Thinking about them – their earnest struggles to protect their small, precious life – makes me feel overwhelmingly sad. ‘They’re having a really hard time right now.’

Lorcan’s alert, worry immediately blossoming in his face. I’m shocked by how much relief there is in seeing that he still cares about her: it makes me feel whole, not lopsided.

‘She’s not ill, is she?’

‘No, God, not that. But she’s going to lose the house . . .’ I tell him about it, trying my hardest not to sound judgemental or accusatory. How Mum never quite managed to pay off the mortgage, remortgaging instead, always scraping by on just enough. Nick’s divorce settlement was a bloodbath, so he’s not had much to put in the pot, and the lack of contingency has left them with nowhere to go now he’s lost his money to Stephen Wright. Lorcan sits there, absorbing my words, his eyes mournful. By the time I’ve finished he looks like he might cry.

‘Should I ring her?’

‘And say what?’

He sits there, pensive, then takes a thoughtful sip of his lime and soda, like he’s playing for time.

‘Say I’ll lend her the money. No, I’ll
give
her the money!’

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Who says?’ he asks, his face ablaze.

‘It’s loads. What, you’d buy the house and sign it over to her?’

He waves an airy hand.

‘However it has to be. Don’t care, my accountant can make a plan.’

All the times I risked believing him, before I finally learnt it was too dangerous. The birthdays, the Christmases. The parents’ evenings – oddly, they stung the most.

‘Don’t just chuck out these grand promises! You don’t know how much it’ll cost. You haven’t asked your wife—’

‘My cows,’ he says, putting his glass down heavily, and staring at me, ‘dance all over America. They dance in Texas, in Chicago, in bum fuck nowhere Indiana. If I want to make amends for my appalling decisions, I’ve got the right to do it.’

‘Well Nick might have something to say about it,’ I say. He can’t just buy his way off the hook – it’s not the way hooks work.

‘Baldie might well have something to say, but I’m going to give it a good go. You getting in contact when you did . . .’ He’s still got that infectious excitability: the truth is, it would be amazing if he could save Mum the indignity of losing her beloved home. If she could see it as her rightful compensation for what’s gone before then perhaps she’d be able to convince Nick? ‘There’s no such thing as a coincidence, Mia.’

‘God, has AA made you all weirdy-woo? Of course there’s such a thing as a coincidence.’

‘’Fraid not,’ he says, steepling his long fingers under his chin. He looks surprisingly unravaged, considering the years of hard drinking. He’s lined, but the lines work with the angular planes of his face, and his light dusting of grey stubble looks distinguished on him.

‘Well thanks for clearing that up.’

He hugs me like he might never let me go.

‘Am I allowed to call you?’

We’re standing by my car, rain drizzling down.

‘Yes.’

What if he doesn’t? What if he says that, and then doesn’t? The fear quivers through me, and yet – I think I’ll survive. I think I’ll still be glad I took the risk. He tips my face upwards.

‘I will. I’ll come and see you. I’ll introduce you to Caroline. You have to let me know as soon as you know you’re free to practise again.’ He looks into my eyes, smiling. ‘I’m . . . I’m so proud.’

I shake my head, ready to shake off the compliment like a dog shakes off water, but then I force myself to breathe it in instead.

‘Thanks.’ I squeeze his hand. ‘Thanks for today.’ I realize I’ll have to just climb into the car. I give him a short, sharp hug. ‘Bye, Dad,’ I say, quick and low, jumping into the driver’s seat, not looking back.

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Murr-lot,’ declares Patrick, pouring an extravagant splash into a dingy-looking wine glass and swilling it around. Everything in this flat feels a bit bachelor-tastic. ‘Ruby red, from the foothills of Tuscany, the grapes squeezed dry by fit peasants.’

He looks at me – a questioning sort of smile on his sweet face – and I sink more deeply into the broken-springed embrace of his velour sofa. It’s the most uncomfortable thing in the world and the most comfortable thing in the world, all at the same time.