Scissors, Paper, Stone (10 page)

Once, he had asked her, aged twelve, whether she believed euthanasia should be legalised. They were eating a Sunday lunch of roast chicken that, because her mother refused to cook with salt, was universally bland and watery. The meat looked greyly anaemic; the broccoli was flaccid and damp. She looked up from her plate, wide-eyed and unsure. ‘I think so,’ she said, almost immediately regretting having spoken.

‘Why’s that?’ Charles had looked at her intently, his long fingers forming a steeple under his chin.

‘Well, if you end up being paralysed and you’ve been used to being active all your life or you love horse riding, then it might be too awful to stay alive,’ she paused. Charles was still looking at her expectantly. ‘I suppose . . . you might want to die rather than be trapped . . . and . . .’ She couldn’t think of anything else. Her mother sipped silently on a tumbler of water, deliberately not making eye contact.

Charles put down his knife and fork, balancing them carefully on the sides of his plate.

‘But how would you know that they wanted to die?’

Charlotte gulped. ‘They would tell you.’

‘But what if they were so paralysed that they could no longer speak?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ Charles said, with a strange, shapeless smile. ‘Then perhaps, Charlotte, you should make an effort to find out.’

A dense silence weighed down on them. Charlotte felt her eyes filling with tears. Her mother, who noticed, started to make a noisy clatter clearing up plates.

‘I haven’t finished,’ Charles said, resuming with his knife and fork. For several long moments, the three of them sat in perfect stillness, listening to the sound of Charles chewing, his jaw clicking like the minutes on a clock face.

The feeling of having to perform to her father’s satisfaction, to proffer arguments that were coherent and well researched, to have opinions that were confidently expressed and yet subtly formed, had lasted into adulthood. As she had got older, Charlotte had acquired at least a veneer of self-possession and she knew that she was able to hold her own in conversations with Gabriel or her peers, but in front of her father, she found herself dissolving into the same sort of mute terror. There seemed to be little point in debating a topic with Charles – he was always determined to win an intellectual argument, even if his manner was more impressive than his logic. Increasingly, Charlotte preferred not to say anything, or to steer the conversation entirely in the uncontroversial direction of what was happening in
The Archers
. When she went home for Christmas, she would try to withdraw from the dining table as soon as possible under the pretence of doing the washing-up.

So the email had come out of the blue. She noticed that he had signed off ‘Charles’ rather than Dad – something that he had started to do in recent years, with no warning or explanation, as if he were actively trying to distance himself from fatherhood, as if he felt that theirs should now be a relationship of equals. Charlotte disliked the habit. Because, whatever else she might think of him, she still desperately wanted him to be her father. She wanted him, more than anything, to be proud of her. However much she tried to dismiss it, Charlotte realised that his opinion mattered to her above anyone else’s.

They had met for dinner that evening in a small tucked-away café behind Piccadilly Circus. The interior had not been touched since the 1950s and it felt like stepping into a film set, with the formica bar, fake leather banquettes and chrome lightshades hung low over the tables on long brown wires. Charlotte ordered the cottage pie and Charles produced a bottle of wine from his briefcase because it was a place where you could bring your own. The waiter took out his corkscrew with a flourish before noticing that the bottle was a screw-top. All three of them laughed.

‘I’m never sure about screw-top bottles,’ said Charlotte, hoping to make the burst of good humour last as long as possible.

‘I know what you mean,’ her father replied agreeably. ‘But I read somewhere that modern screw-tops are so precise that a winemaker can adjust the tightness of the seal to allow exactly the right amount of air into the wine without the risk of cork taint.’

Oh dear, Charlotte thought, here we go again.

But it turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant dinner. A little strained, yes, but Charles proved to be relatively easy company. He didn’t say why he had suggested meeting and Charlotte did not ask, choosing to believe that this was just the type of normal thing a father and an adult daughter should be doing.

‘How’s Mum?’ she asked dutifully towards the end of the night.

‘She’s fine. She’s painting the study. It’s her new project.’ He stopped, thought for a short moment, and then added: ‘How’s your friend . . . Gabriel, is it?’

Charlotte was stunned. She had never, ever spoken about boyfriends to her father. She hadn’t even mentioned Gabriel’s name to him, aware, as she was, that she would be forced into an immediate defensive position. ‘He’s very well, thanks,’ she answered. And then he asked for the bill and the shutters slammed down on that brief moment of intimacy.

Later, as they made their way outside to a night sky lit up by the flashing neon Fuji and Coca Cola hoardings, there was an oddly charged atmosphere between them. As they walked, her father seemed to be standing slightly too close to her, his shoulder level with her chin, the thick felt of his coat rubbing up against the sleeves of her jacket. He was close enough that she could smell the wine on his breath, mingling with the lactose tang of the crème brulée he had ordered for pudding.

‘I’ll hail you a cab,’ he said.

‘No, honestly, there’s no need. I can get a Tube from Green Park.’

‘I want to get you a taxi. I’ll pay.’

‘It’s not the money . . .’ she protested, but then he turned suddenly to face her, grabbing her by the wrist so that she almost tripped over the pavement kerb. He stared at her so intently that the clear, light blue of his eyes seemed almost to dissolve into tiny pixellations of colour, before coalescing again into something darker, something hidden and unspoken. ‘What?’ she said and she noticed she was trembling. The bitter wind blew her hair across her face with such force it felt like a slap. There was the sound of a faraway siren, a hideous catcall that slipped gradually into the distance.

‘Charlotte . . .’ His hand was still around her wrist. She could feel his thumb pressing down on her veins, leaving its imprint on her flesh. He was clasping it more and more tightly, his fingers opening and closing on her arm with an insistent, uncomfortable motion, as if kneading resistant dough. She began to feel scared and then, without knowing where it came from, she started to cry. A whimpering sound bubbled up from her throat and when she heard it, she wondered who had made the noise.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ he said and his voice was absolutely level, clear and consistent, as it had always been. ‘Do you understand?’

She nodded her head, incapable of speaking. He leaned forward, taking her other wrist in his right hand, and she felt his strength and his power and his protection and his danger all at once. She felt everything that had always made her so terrified and simultaneously so admiring of him, and she knew she was trapped, yet again, in a snare of her own making. He leaned forward. She was crying. He leaned forward. He drew her close and all at once his face was on hers, his tongue squirrelling in between her closed lips, the taste of his wetness at the back of her throat. She could hear him groaning softly, as if in relief. It lasted seconds. He pulled back and dropped her wrists.

She noticed the line of his mouth was crooked and his lips shiny with saliva. She felt the familiar disgust, the sense that she was somehow to blame. He tried to reach out and touch her hair. She turned away. She didn’t run, but she walked so quickly that her breath was ragged and wheezy by the time she got to the Tube. She noticed that she had stopped crying but she could feel the thudding beat of her heart all the way home.

A few days after that, Charles had been knocked off his bicycle and Charlotte had an excuse for not thinking about what had happened. She parcelled the incident up and pushed it far back into the recesses of her mind. She pretended everything was as it was. Or as it should have been. She acted out the part of a dutiful daughter with surprising facility – it was easier to like her father when he was physically incapable of action or speech, she thought dryly – and a part of her knew that this is what her mother was doing too. They were both playing their roles as they usually did and there was an obscure sort of comfort in their mutual lack of closeness; the unspoken acknowledgement of what was really going on.

And so, just for the moment, Charlotte deliberately chose not to think about that night in Piccadilly. She knew, without much self-examination, that it would lead to thinking about other, more troubling, thoughts that she did not want to admit existed. She was not ready to give shape to the darkness inside. Not yet. Not just yet.

Anne walked back into the room carrying two polystyrene cups, steam smoking out of them. ‘I thought I’d get you one in case,’ she said, unsmiling, her eyes cold behind the smudged lenses of her glasses.

‘Thanks,’ said Charlotte, sliding her chair away from the bed and taking the cup in her hand.

Neither of them said anything else. They both knew there would be no spoken apology. That wasn’t their way. Instead, it would be left hanging, unresolved but tacitly dealt with by way of a silent compromise.

‘Janet called while I was getting them,’ said Anne.

‘Oh yes. How is she?’

‘Chatty as ever. She wanted to see if I would go with her to some choral concert that’s happening in Wilton Place.’

‘That sounds great,’ said Charlotte, without much enthusiasm. ‘Are you going to go?’

‘I’m not sure I feel up to it, what with all this . . .’

There was a long pause. Charlotte knew she was meant to offer sympathy, that this was a tactic to get her on side, but she simply ignored it. Anne sipped at her coffee uneasily.

‘The whole thing is exhausting, it really is. All this driving to and from the hospital, endless traffic and the amount of people wanting to have updates on his condition – I’m on the phone constantly whenever I’m in the house.’

‘You’re a saint, Mother,’ Charlotte said under her breath.

‘It’s all right for you, Charlotte, because you have your job. You get to go to the office every day and I daresay it takes your mind off things. You have work to keep you busy. I don’t have anything like that. I wish I could think of a little part-time job, just as a sideline, just to do something worthwhile. But here I am, stuck in this place with your father in limbo. Goodness knows what the doctors think is going to happen.’

Anne heard herself speaking, her voice curiously detached from her insides, a shrill and unfamiliar sound. She wasn’t sure why she was saying all of this apart from a wish to make Charlotte think well of her, to ensure her daughter knew that at least she tried. Anne always felt so ashamed of never having had a proper job and was deeply admiring of Charlotte’s professional success but whenever she attempted to voice either thought, it came across as a sort of festering resentment.

‘Mum, you always do this.’

‘I always do what?’

‘This. This constant harping on about how much you have to deal with, about how you wish your life was different. You keep asking me what you should do as a part-time job and I come up with suggestions and every time I say something, you dismiss it.’

Anne shifted in her chair, her chin dropping down to her chest. Charlotte looked at her sitting by the window and briefly touched her knee, withdrawing from the physical contact almost as soon as it had been made. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m just . . . well, I’m worried about you, obviously, and it’s been a tricky day. I think I’m a bit stressed.’

Anne looked at her daughter, at her drawn face and her anxious eyes, at the faint frown line that extended all the way across her brow, and she felt a sharp internal pain. She wanted, more than anything, to take her in her arms and feel the soft curls of her hair against her cheek.

‘You should take things more easily.’ Anne couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was worried, if she said anything more, that the febrile peace would be broken, that she would once again unwittingly talk herself into a corner and attract Charlotte’s impatience, or worse, her derision.

‘I know, Mum. I know.’ And Charlotte turned away from her, so that Anne could no longer see her daughter’s face.

Anne; Charles

They got engaged the month before graduation. Charles went about everything in precisely the right way – asking for her father’s consent, getting his grandmother’s ruby ring adjusted so that it slid snugly on to her fourth finger and then, eventually, dropping to one knee in the Grantchester fields where they had taken their first bicycle ride together.

She knew what he was going to say before he uttered the words and although she had looked forward to this moment for the two years they had been together, although a part of her had known all along that it would lead to this conclusion and had imagined the joy she would feel, she was surprised to discover that her smile was the forced, slightly rubbery kind that made her cheeks ache. It hung shapelessly on her lips for a few seconds before slipping off her face like a frayed silk dress from a hanger.