Daughters (29 page)

How obstinate she had been about her own well-being. Refusing to understand. Refusing to forgive. Refusing to heal herself.

Now it was different.

‘Worth waiting for?’ she asked the reflection in the mirror.

She let herself out of the room.

There was no answer to her knock on his door. She
tapped a second time, and was rewarded with a muffled ‘Come in.’

Hands clasped between his knees and head bent, Robin was sitting on the bed. He was still dressed. At her entrance, he lifted a chalk-white face. ‘I’m sorry, Lara. It turns out that I’m no company.’

‘What’s happened?’

There was sweat on his upper lip. ‘It gets me like this sometimes. It’ll take a few hours and then I’ll be fine.’

‘The flashback?’

‘They come out of the blue.’

‘Do you want me to go?’

He closed his eyes. ‘No, I don’t. But I can’t bear it if you pity me.’

She sat down beside him. ‘Nothing wrong with pity. I could have done with it myself many times.’

‘I’ll order some.’

‘I’ll stay, then.’

He nodded.

Concerned by how white and clammy he was, she poured water from the bottle on the tray. ‘Do you need anything else?’

He dropped his head into his hands. ‘A reconstituted memory.’

‘I’ll try to arrange it.’

‘Please.’

‘Tell me.’ She touched his shoulder. ‘Tell me.’ Quietly, she took off his shoes and eased him back on to the pillows, then climbed in beside him. ‘Hold on to me,’ she instructed.

His bag was on the luggage rack. His passport and wallet were neatly placed on the table. His boots were aligned side by side under the chair. The window was open. The city’s night hum was a settled
legato
.

But the scent of jasmine floating in from the garden under the window was almost unbearable.

She took his hand in hers.

‘It’s like a record stuck in a groove. It plays over and over. It’s the syndrome. Some people go mad with it.’

She plaited her fingers with his.

‘There was Jack,’ he told her, ‘who had his leg blown off by a mine. He was the fastest runner I’ve ever known. They found his foot ten metres down the road. Then there was Rab. He lost his head. Literally. He’d only got married a month before. And you know what all this did to us? It made us hungry for revenge, and out we would go and try to hammer other human beings into the little bits they’d turned our mates into. But that wasn’t it. I could cope with all that. It was the little boy who got in the way of the crossfire.’ He was silent. ‘He was somebody’s son. He could have been my son.’

She released his hands, slid her arms around him and drew him close.
Go on.

‘But you never again see such colour as with death and fighting,’ he said. ‘Or feel so alive.’

‘Go on.’

‘The price of survival is the disbelief that I’m alive, and an inability to process the memories. And, on top of all that, there’s still the hunger to … have it all back.’

She stroked his hair, conscious of every movement,
every sensation. The gestures felt as new to her as if she was performing them for the first time. It wasn’t exactly love … but a tuning in as closely as was possible to someone else. Behind her eyelids there was a light and, for that moment, her body and spirit were balanced in a perfect equilibrium and purpose.

‘Hold on to me,’ she repeated, and curved her arms the better to clasp him to her.

There was more. A lot more. As the night slipped away, Lara held Robin until, eventually, they slept.

Maudie was in the exam room. Her pen scratched over the paper, which was blotted with moisture. It wasn’t so much hot in the room as saturated with the candidates’ nerves and sweat.

She glanced at the clock.

Maudie’s mantra (adopted by hundreds): Divide your time equally. Do not overrun the allocation but move on to the next question. Say what you’re going to say. Say it. Say what you’ve said. The headache that had been threatening for the last week sat triumphantly above her left temple.

Yet she found it exhilarating to rise above her discomfort. It was a testing point where a good mind slotted into play. So, if the thud above her temple was making her sluggish, she would fight it with logic, reason and knowledge.

This was her final paper. English. Shakespeare. The questions were difficult. ‘How far, and in what ways, do you see politics as a central concern in
Antony and Cleopatra
?’ The public versus the private? How far should they interface? Increasingly, she was conscious of her ignorance, and it would not be unreasonable to demand of the examiner how eighteen-year-olds were qualified to judge? She didn’t doubt that her life had been easy up to this
point. Now it would grow more difficult. The idea that she was at an end, and at a beginning, prompted her to write feverishly.

The cheap paper under her fingers was both slinky and rough. Across the room, Tess coughed. Their private signal. Three places behind her was Nick and, every so often, she felt his gaze on her back.

The clock crept onwards.

At the finish, she slumped back in the chair. Exhausted. There followed the minutes of nothing as the papers were collected. She turned her head. Nick was looking directly at her. She knew what he was telling her, and it wasn’t so very unwelcome.

The invigilators were taking their time. Maudie closed her eyes. She wanted to experience the moment of freedom. Intense. Velvet. Reverberant.

An emptied, drifting mind.

Yet Nick’s scrutiny got in the way, and she tugged at the hair at the nape of her neck.

It was making her think of sex. Up in the woods with Nick. Those afternoons. Hazy. Dozy. Intense.

A couple kissing passionately in the cold, stale dark. He was pressed up hard and greedily against her. She, sprawled against the vertical wall, her blue dress hitched up over her thighs where his hand rested.

Oh. My. God. Maudie’s eyes flew open and she took a huge, shuddering breath.

How stupid she had been. How unseeing.

The significance of what had been swimming at the back of her subconscious came into focus.
Andrew?
It had been Andrew with his hand up another woman’s dress.

To her surprise, her first thought was to talk to her mother. But Lara was away. Then, as rapidly, she concluded it was the
last
thing she would do. Today was the day that put down the formal marker between her adolescence and the rest of her life, so why go backwards?

They filed out of the exam hall – Maudie’s new knowledge tucked under her heart like a canker. Nick found his way to bump against her. ‘OK?’ he asked.

Flashing him a smile. (She couldn’t help it.) ‘OK. You?’

‘It’s nearly over. One more.’

‘I’m done.’

Under the cover of the exiting bodies, he found her hand. She allowed it to rest in his. He muttered, ‘Come over to mine, Maudie.’

There had been so much stuff between them. Then no stuff. Plus she wasn’t going to be here for much longer. She had got rid of him for reasons that were no longer clear to her. At the time, she had thought she understood them. Not now.

She missed him. ‘OK.’

Nick lived at the smarter end of the city, the house big and semi-detached. ‘It’s ridiculous, really,’ his mother’s painted lips had let drop, in the days when Maudie had visited it regularly, ‘to have such a large house with only the three of us living in it now.’ Nick’s father had long ago struck out for pastures new.

Yacketty-yack
, went Mrs Yates on seeing Maudie, her brittle body betraying a lifetime not only of trying not to eat but of trying not to think about food.

She led Maudie into what she always referred to as the
‘the family room’, which was pretty big too. Confected by an expert, the décor was a symphony of neutrals, so much so that the room almost disappeared. Everything was eye-wateringly expensive – curtains, upholstery, lighting – and appeared not so much untouched and unused as cryogenically preserved.

Flanked by a laptop, and copies of
Now
and
Loaded
, Nick’s sister, Charis, sat at a circular inlaid table by the window.

‘Here’s Maudie,’ said her mother, in a bright, ingratiating voice. ‘You remember Maudie?’

Charis looked up briefly from the laptop. ‘Hi.’

Blonde-highlighted hair scraped back from her face. Heavily made-up eyes ringed with exhaustion. On her right hand black nails. On the left pale green. Maudie rather approved.

She and Nick exchanged a look. Charis was the thorn in the family’s flesh. Charis didn’t care about anything much, and was consistent in expressing this position. She had, Nick explained on the way over, failed most of her GCSEs the previous year. She was supposed to be working for the resits, but Charis wasn’t interested.

Mrs Yates muttered that she had an urgent meeting and left, shutting the door behind her, leaving them entombed in taupe.

‘Have a good shop, then,’ cried Charis, after her. She addressed the magazine. ‘What meeting?’

‘How’s it going?’ Maudie asked.

Charis gave Maudie the once-over. ‘OK.’ She shoved a magazine under Maudie’s nose. ‘Cool?’ A Goth fingernail tapped the photo of a bikini-clad celebrity blonde
along whose bare shoulder ran the legend ‘die young and beautiful’.

Maudie gazed into a parallel world – a strange, ungrateful, dangerous place that didn’t consider life a gift. ‘Cool,’ she echoed. ‘But I’d rather be alive.’

The faint gleam of curiosity was blotted out of Charis’s expression, and she took back the magazine. ‘Sure.’ She splayed her nails on the table surface.

Nick said, ‘Come upstairs.’

Maudie took a deep breath.

‘Another meeting,’ said Charis.

Nothing had changed much. The same posters were tacked up on the wall. The guitar sat in one corner. The room was more or less clean and the computer was on. Maudie sat on Nick’s bed and watched him take off his checked shirt. She reached over and held it between her fingers, relishing its thick, felty texture, gained from too many washes.

When he had undressed, he knelt down beside Maudie and eased off her T-shirt and jeans. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said.

The air played over her naked torso. ‘Thought you were angry with me.’

‘I was. I am.’

She put her arms around him and drew him close. Now it had happened, she was pleased. She remembered his smell and the way his hair grew at the nape of his neck. She loved his neck especially. For all his strength, he had a gentle, slightly hesitant way about him and she liked that too.

‘Nick?’

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘You always talk too much.’

Maudie grinned. ‘The old complaints are best.’

Halfway through she surfaced, and her thoughts took a wayward turn. She remembered Andrew and the girl. It seemed to her that knowing about it was infecting her like a disease. The images were spreading through her mind, tainting the things that had nothing to do with them. She shut her eyes and concentrated on Nick’s beautiful body – the things he was doing, the things he was saying. Yet the more she tried, the more she failed.

A fingernail scratching a blackboard.

Afterwards, their bodies glossy with effort, they lay side by side on the bed. Nick’s fingers twined idly in and out of Maudie’s. ‘Nice.’

Maudie focused on the poster of Radiohead. It had a grainy quality that made her think of old movies. ‘It was.’ She turned towards him – and had the oddest sensation that she was drowning. ‘Sorry … about everything. I’m sorry.’

He grunted. ‘Let’s not go into that. You’re here. I’m here.’

She smiled and traced a pattern on his shoulder. ‘Come to the prom with me?’

‘I might.’

‘Jassy!’ Maudie said urgently. ‘Can we meet?’

‘Of course.’ She cast an eye over the calendar on her computer. ‘This must mean you’ve finished. Congratulations. How do you feel?’

‘Fine.’

A sixth sense informed Jasmine that this was not entirely the case, so when she met Maudie off the evening train from Winchester, she wasn’t surprised to find her pale and preoccupied.

Over
pasta puttanesca
and wine, Jasmine deliberately talked about other things. ‘I’m thinking of dragging Duncan on a whale-watching trip.’

‘Where?’

‘West coast of America. A couple of grey whales were spotted in San Diego bay recently. They’ve probably been left behind on the annual migration, perhaps because they’re too old or ill.’ She cupped her chin in her hands, and let her gaze rove slowly over her younger sister. ‘OK. There’s something the matter.’

‘I slept with Nick.’

‘So? Presumably you wanted to or you wouldn’t have done it.’ She peered at Maudie. ‘Don’t tell me, you
didn’t
want to?’

‘Sure. It was post exam.’ She smiled a little. ‘I did want to.’

Jasmine recognized the smile. It was one of dreamy recollection. ‘So what’s up?’

Maudie lifted her eyes from her plate. ‘Can I trust you? I mean,
really
trust you?’

‘If you couldn’t I wouldn’t be here. I put off a date … with my boss. There’s a big project on. So big we have a code-name that changes every month – I can never remember it. I was supposed to be talking it over with him.’

Maudie’s eyes turned stormy. ‘I can’t understand how a
computer or a bank or whatever is worth all that trouble or money.’

‘Grow up, Maudie. You can trust me. And?’

Maudie twirled the pasta around her fork. ‘Jas, the engagement party. I just realized I saw something and I don’t know what to do.’

Jasmine poured more wine. ‘It’s going to be a long evening. And, since I’ve probably sacrificed my career, I’m having more too.’ She kept her eyes fixed on Maudie. ‘Something that involves Mum? Robin? Harvard?’

‘No,’ Maudie said. ‘It’s Eve.’

‘Evie?’

‘Your favourite sister.’

Jasmine raised an eyebrow. ‘Hey. It’s me, not some cheap movie.’

‘OK. OK.’ Maudie licked her lips and began to speak.

Jasmine listened. Then she asked questions.
Give me
the details.
Some things slotted into place. Eve’s behaviour at the party. Her anxiety. Oh, Evie, she thought, and the seeds of deep outrage began to germinate.