Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (46 page)

“But you do now? You believe me now. Why suddenly now after all these years, after me practically shoving it in your face?” Willow asked her, a confusion of relief and anger flooding through her. Imogene steadied herself, pulling herself up in her chair and squaring her narrow shoulders.

“When I look back, I can see that something was wrong between him and me. I knew he was withdrawn and cut off. I thought it was because of you two, because he couldn’t love another man’s children. Because you, especially, didn’t seem to want to be anywhere near him. He said he’d make a fuss of you, spend extra time with you. He said I wasn’t to worry, he’d bring you round. I didn’t know, I promise you. I believed him.”

The tears tracked silently down Willow’s face, running into her parted mouth so that she could taste the salt.

“I loved him, you see,” Imogene said. “I loved him with every bit of me. I’d been waiting so long for something good to happen, for the grind of day after day of struggling alone to be over, so that when he showed an interest in me, I was so grateful. I was so relieved and he was easy to love. I wanted him to be happy, I wanted to be the perfect wife, to make his home a haven for him. To have everything be just so. And I thought that’s what he wanted too.” She paused, her expression tightening. “I noticed a change in you. But children do change when they are growing up. Everyone said it was your hormones.”

“You never asked me,” Willow said, her voice stony cold. “You never asked me what was wrong. Why?”

“Perhaps I was afraid of the answer, perhaps I sensed something but I was too afraid to look, to ask,” Imogene said, her tone brittle. “Then when he died, one minute you were inconsolable and then the next you’d tell me . . . unspeakable things. How could I believe that of the man I loved, the man I brought into your life?” Imogene’s voice crackled and broke. “You were such an angry girl, so nasty. I’d lost my husband, and all I had left were you two, but you weren’t there. I felt like you drove him away at the end and that you were taking Holly away from me too.”

“I was trying to deal with things I barely understood myself!” Willow cried, incredulous. “All I wanted was my mum, but you weren’t there.”

Imogene shook her head. “I know. I know.”

“So when did you find out then?” Willow sobbed. Reaching out, Imogene put her hand on the back of Willow’s head, stroking her hair.

“I wasn’t in bed when this episode struck, I was in Ian’s office. It was the middle of the night and I woke up, and I could just hear all the emptiness around me. I could feel all
the empty rooms and I missed him so much. So I got up to sit in his room, like I told you. I’ve done it before. Not often, but every few months I just go in there and I sit. I was sitting there looking around, and I had the most terrible headache, the start of this bother, I suppose, when I saw his diary. It was sitting in the top drawer of his desk, bold as brass. Not hidden or anything. Funny, after all of those years of not touching a thing I just wanted to see his handwriting. I thought it would be a business diary, but it wasn’t, it was a personal diary.”

“About me?” Willow asked, sickened.

“No.” Imogene shook her head. “It was written in the year that he died, the year, thank God, he was too sick to go out. It was about the neighbor’s daughter, do you remember her? Of course she’ll be all grown up now, but then she was about eight. I remember the day he met her, she’d called round to collect a ball that had come over the fence. He’d shown her the summerhouse.”

“Did he . . . ?”

“No, but in his diary he wrote about her, he wrote . . .” Imogene pressed her fist to her mouth. “He wrote terrible things, Willow. Oh, Willow, oh, Willow, I’m so sorry. I just couldn’t bear it to be true, I didn’t want it to be true and it was. All these years I’ve pushed you away. All these years, I’ve called you a liar. I really believed that’s what you were, and it was there all that time. All that filth he thought and did, written out in those neat little letters. All those years I should have been there for you, gone, forever.”

Willow folded in on herself, her head dropping to her knees, her arms cradled over her head.

“When you came I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t be strong enough.” Leaning forward in her chair, Imogene reached for her daughter, bending forward as far as she could, pulling Willow toward her and into her arms. “And
you will never be able to forgive me, you should never forgive me, Willow. I won’t ever forgive myself.”

Willow heard the door shut quietly, slowly, as Sam left, and the old piano fell silent. Willow didn’t know how long she stayed there with her head in her mother’s lap, Imogene stroking her hair as they talked, but the sun sank behind the trees and Holly and the girls had left long before Willow raised her head.

“I want to say it’s fine, I want to say I love you and we can start again but . . . it helps to know you believe me now. That at least helps.”

“I can’t die now,” Imogene said, eventually.

“But you’re not going to, are you—isn’t that what the doctor said?” Willow was unable to take in everything that had just happened, all that had been said. It was as if she were watching it from another room. All that outpouring of pain and poison and now here they were, making small talk?

“I don’t think I’m any more likely to die now than I was yesterday,” Imogene said. “But what I mean is I can’t die, not until I’ve made you realize that I have always loved you, just as much as I loved that little angel in her bedsheet dress. That never went away, Willow. And I can’t die until I come to terms with the fact that . . . I should have protected you and I failed.”

Saying nothing, Willow sat up, running her fingers through her hair. At that precise moment it felt as if every single emotion had been bled from her. She felt utterly empty.

“Starting tomorrow,” Imogene said, “I’m going to get rid of everything, everything in this house that ever belonged to him. I’m going to burn it. And I’m going to put the house on the market. It’s much too big for me now. I’ll get a smaller place, somewhere modern, no stairs. A little flat, like the one we used to have, and maybe sometimes you will come and stay. But starting tomorrow—no, starting now—I’m going to
make sure that there is not one trace of him left on this earth to hurt you.”

“That’s good,” Willow said. “Mum, I want this to be a beginning, a new start between us. I know that I have to move on. I just don’t know if I can ever feel for you the love that I once did. Right now, I don’t know if I can ever feel anything for you, not even hate.”

“Willow . . .” Imogene hesitated. “That’s okay. I’ll be here if you ever want to talk more, tell me more. Help me understand.”

When Willow finally pulled on her coat, every bone in her body ached. Her mouth was dry and she felt something at last, something so faint it almost wasn’t present. She felt possibility. Possibility opening up a future for her that for the first time ever might go anywhere she wanted it to.

Chapter
            Eighteen

W
illow slipped her coat off her shoulders and looked in her bedroom mirror. She ran her hands over her waist and hips, turning this way and that as she appraised herself. Her body hadn’t changed, she thought, not really. Perhaps she had lost a few inches here and there; there had been too much to do and too many people in her house of late to be able to sit and watch TV with her bra off while eating a takeaway meant for two. Her clothes were a little looser, they fitted better, but she was still a very curvy woman who wouldn’t see the right side of size ten without some serious dieting. The curious thing was that, as Willow observed the swell of her breasts and the rise of her hips, she didn’t mind anymore. Gone was that nagging dissatisfaction that she was not the size her sister had always been; gone was the feeling that her true self was slathered in self-inflicted fat, a punishment for her own irreversible failing. Instead, Willow felt a little breathless as she took in her reflection, because it occurred to her, exceptionally late in life, that she was actually rather beautiful.

Willow smiled down at her shoes, her faithful companions since all this had begun, gleaming faintly as if they were made from a piece of van Gogh’s starry sky.

Willow took the shoes off and looked at them. Everything
had changed the moment she had slipped them on her feet. She mused for a moment on the possibility that there was something more to the shoes than their sheer beauty and perfect fit. The mysterious shop that appeared out of nowhere, the possibly mad, possibly insightful old shopkeeper who might be an oracle or a shaman or maybe just a lonely old lady. And yet everything had changed from the moment that Willow slipped on those shoes and put on her coat. Suddenly, wishes came true, Chloe came back, Sam forgave her, and Daniel . . . well, if James was to be believed Daniel wanted her at last. There had to be something, some catalyst that set off this miraculous chain of events. Surely it couldn’t be something as fanciful as a pair of magic shoes.

Belatedly, Willow remembered that there was one other thing, the locket that had been nestling quietly in the coat pocket since she’d put it there, half forgotten in the midst of everything else. Impulsively she reached into the pocket and found it. Suddenly, after everything that had happened on their way back home, it seemed very important to know what was inside.

Chloe had gone home with Sam for dinner. He was bringing her back to sleep later, which Willow knew pained him, but the fact that she wanted to spend any time alone with him at all was a gargantuan leap forward. They were starting to feel like a team again, not least because only a few hours ago they had decidedly slain the dragon that had been terrorizing Chloe for months.

Chloe’s relief had been palpable when Sam had reacted in a measured and calm way to the news about the baby’s father. It wasn’t so much his anger over what Chloe had been drawn into that the girl had been so worried about, Willow realized as she watched the two of them chucking lumps of stale bread at the scores of swans in Christchurch harbor, it was what Sam
thought of her that Chloe was so afraid of. Willow didn’t know what words were spoken between father and daughter in the hour they spent alone together after she’d told Sam about Mr. Jacobs, but whatever it was, it had put a light of belonging back in Chloe’s eyes.

They had gotten back to the outskirts of London at just after one, and Sam had driven without comment away from the route to Willow’s flat, heading west instead. It hadn’t taken long for both Chloe and Willow to figure out that he was heading to her former school.

“Dad, do we have to do this now?” Chloe asked him, leaning forward in her seat, glancing warily at Willow.

“Chloe, darling,” Sam said mildly, “I have to do this now. You’ve got to understand that I’m your daddy. It’s my job to protect you, and I cannot, will not, let this man spend even one more minute thinking he’s going to get away with what he’s done. It’s okay. You and Willow can wait in the car.”

“Fuck that,” Chloe said as Sam pulled his car into a teacher’s parking space. “I’m coming too.”

It had taken some minutes for Sam to get past the receptionist, who tried to tell him he couldn’t see a teacher in the middle of the school day and who rang the police when he ignored them and went off in search of the drama room, Chloe and Willow trotting behind him.

Chloe had paused for a moment when Mr. McClaren, the principal, came out of his office to see what the commotion was.

“Chloe? What’s going on?” he demanded imperiously.

“Oh, my dad’s going to kill Mr. Jacobs for getting me pregnant. Not sure that’ll go down well with the board of governors, hey, Mr. M.?”

The delight Chloe took in leaving her former principal standing speechless in the hallway, all the color draining from his face, was certainly a sight to behold.

Willow caught up with Sam just as he pushed the classroom door open.

Ed Jacobs, in the middle of reading from some script, stopped suddenly as he saw Chloe appear behind her father, clearly understanding exactly why they were there.

“Whatever she’s told you,” he said as Sam walked between the rows of seated students toward him, “it wasn’t that way. She came after me. . . . I tried to resist, but she wouldn’t give up and if you hit me that will be assault.”

Sam stopped a couple of inches away from the teacher, towering over him. “The police are on their way. I’ll be having you charged with sex with a minor, and then I’ll be making sure not only that you lose this job, but that you never work with children again, not after your name has been added to the sex offenders’ register forever. I’m not going to hit you, you disgusting little coward. I don’t need to touch you to make sure your life is always a misery from now on.”

“I do, though,” Chloe said, stepping in front of her father, and she threw a punch so hard in Ed Jacobs’s face that he went down like a lead balloon, crashing into the pile of stacked chairs in the corner with a satisfying crash.

“It’s okay,” Chloe told her stunned and notably impressed father. “It’s a first offense and I’m a minor, I’ll probably get off with a warning.”

Chloe had grinned and waved, lapping up the attention and applause that the shocked and then delighted students gave her. Willow watched as Chloe looked at the man who changed her life so utterly lying splayed on the floor, and she knew that Chloe was free of him, that all the hurt, guilt and confusion he’d brought to her life had been exorcised in a single and powerful right uppercut.