Things I Want My Daughters to Know (10 page)

Which was, of course, exactly what it was.

The passage Mum had marked, the one she wanted her to read first, was one about Dad. And Jennifer knew why. She wanted Jen to know that she also knew how it felt to be in a marriage that wasn’t working.

The journal entry was the conversation she knew Barbara had tried to start with her a dozen times. The one she had never let her start. Tonight, driving along the M40, with her husband asleep and snoring beside her, she missed her mum as much as she ever had.

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He woke up as they pulled into the underground garage. At the door of their apartment, he put his hand on her arm.

“Take no notice of my dad. He’s a bugger. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry he’s a bugger? Or sorry you didn’t stand up for me in front of him?”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“Apparently not.”

“No one takes any notice of him, anyway.”

But she had gone into the living room and was switching on the television set and didn’t answer.

“Aren’t you coming to bed? It’s late.”

“I’ll be there in a while.”

But she fell asleep in front of the late film and was still there, stiff and chilly, when he brought her a conciliatory mug of tea the next morning.

Lisa

Lisa and Andy were a small child’s width apart on his sofa, watching
Miracle on 34th Street
—the remake, sadly, and not the original—with Cee Cee. Actually, they were pretending to watch. Andy had the Sunday
Times
on the seat beside him, and Lisa was pushing back her cuticles with an orange stick, occasionally pushing at her temples with her thumbs, trying to edge the headache out. They’d watched the same film twice already in the last month. It was a current favorite.

Cecilia Joan Armstrong—Cee Cee to everyone who knew her—was six years old, white blond, brown-eyed, and small for her age, with a lisp currently exacerbated by the absence of her two front teeth. She could read and add units, tens, and hundreds, and Google. She could not, apparently, flush a toilet or digest a meal without ketchup. She liked ballet and rabbits, and she still slept with a piece of her receiving blanket wound around her left arm and pushed into her ear. She did not like big dogs or radio programs where people were just talking to each other with no music. When she was sick, she liked to watch
Maisie
videos, ly-68 e l i z a b e t h

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ing on the sofa with her backside in the air, even though she was too old really and had watched them all a thousand times, anyway. When she was well, she often watched television upside down, hanging by her legs over the back of the sofa, her neck precariously twisting, although she was the right way up today.

Cee Cee loved Andy, her dad. She loved her mum, too, of course, but her mum was less fun. She lived with her mum all the time, so her mum was the person who had to shout at her in the morning, when she was eating her Cheerios one at a time and hadn’t even brushed her hair yet. And who put her to bed when she wasn’t finished watching her program. And made her tidy her room. All of that stuff. Her dad was her hero because he didn’t have to do any of those things. He was her every-other-weekend, half-the-school-holidays, two-weeks-in-the-summer, and each-second-Christmas daddy.

Cee Cee was no fool. She had already worked out what the older children of divorcing parents sometimes took much longer to figure. She had the “two Christmases, two summer holidays” thing all taped up. She knew that Mum was happy with Steve, who was very, very tall and strong, and could fly her around the room, balanced on the palm of his hand, making airplane noises, and that Dad was happy with Lisa, who couldn’t, and that this was a much better scenario—for them and for her—than both of them being unhappy together. Which was what they had been, apparently, and why they decided not to live together anymore. She didn’t remember that, of course. She’d only been two when they split up. But she’d heard that all her life. From Mum, and from Dad, and from her granny Joan, who was Mum’s mum. She’d also heard, about ten times a day, how much they both loved her, and so, having never knowingly lived any other way, she believed them, and accepted it, and was happy.

She could be a little manipulative, but then, who wouldn’t have learned to be under those circumstances?

Lisa might not go so far as to say that she loved Cee Cee, but she had perhaps recognized that she might, one day. She liked her a lot, at least.

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They’d gone ice-skating together the first time they’d ever met. Lisa—

too keen to impress—had fallen so soon and so heavily on the ice that she’d been afraid her coccyx would come out through the top of her head. She’d cried fat tears of pain and humiliation, and Cee Cee had cried, too, and Andy had hugged them both to him and laughed. He’d been so thrilled that day, watching them skate tentatively around the rink, hand in hand. She remembered his grin.

Cee Cee wasn’t the problem. At least, not entirely. Although Lisa had been a little surprised, and even ashamed, the first time she had realized that she was capable of being jealous of a six-year-old child, it wasn’t that.

It was Cee Cee’s mother. Karen. Andy’s first wife. That . . . she . . .

that was what Lisa could not move past.

Andy’s previous marriage had never been a secret. When they started working together, there was a picture of a baby Cee Cee on his desk.

She’d known it before she got to know him, before the day that led to the night that led to the beginning of the two of them. Of course, it was a while after that that Lisa really started to care about Andy. At the beginning it was just fun, which was all she was ever really looking for.

He’d insinuated himself under her skin, though, and within a couple of months the casual thing had become more serious—more serious than anything she’d been involved in. That first year, for her birthday, he had surprised her with a weekend away. He’d booked a little bed-and-breakfast in the Cotswolds, in Bourton-on the-Water, and not told her until the day before. They’d slept, and eaten, and read the papers, and laughed, and walked. On Sunday, driving back leisurely, unwilling to let the weekend go, they had parked and walked again, spread a blanket under the sunshine on a quiet hillside, and made love. Afterward, dressed again and lying spent (a phrase she had often read, but believed she never fully understood until that day), perpendicular to each other, her head on his stomach, she had asked him to tell her about his marriage. Andy had taken a deep breath and told her, answering all her questions—many and detailed—with disarming honesty, and more than a little courage.

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Karen and he had met the summer he’d graduated from university.

He’d taken a job with a company that ran sailing holidays on the Turkish coast. He’d grown up on the water, in Norfolk, and boats were his passion. He taught novice sailors. Karen worked in the office at the resort.

She’d just graduated, too, in hotel management. It was one of those long, glorious summers, where their responsibilities were straightforward and their free time was their own. In the evenings, and on their days off, he would sail them to a nearby cove and light a fire on the beach. They fell in love that summer, he said. Karen was light and funny and free.

Lisa knew all of that already. A few months earlier, Andy had left her alone in his flat one night when he went to the off-license, and she’d gone snooping. She wasn’t a woman on a mission, but she was, by now, mildly curious about him. And he wasn’t a man who seemed to have secrets . . . but . . . he was gone, and
Coronation Street
had finished, and she was the sort of girl who snooped a little. She always opened people’s medicine cabinets, too, when she went to their loos. She’d opened a stiff desk drawer and found a shoe box full of photographs. They’d been taken somewhere hot and sunny—now she knew where. The girl was tall and lean and white blond. She was topless (and how Lisa stared at those innocuous breasts) and golden, squinting against the sunshine, her hand pushing her hair back from her forehead. She had looked exactly as Andy had described her, only now he didn’t say anything about how sexy she was. That had jolted her. She’d heard his key in the lock and pushed the drawer closed hurriedly so that he wouldn’t know what she had been doing. But, although pride and something like fear prevented her from asking questions, she couldn’t stop thinking about the pretty girl in the photographs.

Now, though, she was free to ask him whatever she wanted to know.

And she wanted to know everything. She thought that if she probed every detail, understood everything, then she wouldn’t be able to imagine anything else. That knowing would enable her to put it away, that chapter of Andy’s life, and not worry about it.

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It hadn’t exactly worked that way.

Karen had changed, Andy said, as soon as they left Turkey. Slowly, at first. He didn’t notice until after they were married. He hadn’t seen the ambition and the drive and the slight streak of ruthless selfishness. Maybe it hadn’t been there on the beach. Maybe she grew into it. Andy said he had almost admitted to himself that he wasn’t in love with her anymore when she’d gotten pregnant with Cee Cee. It had been an accident. (Lisa didn’t understand how that happened. She’d had a lot of sex, with a lot of guys, and she’d never come close to having “an accident.” She never entirely believed intelligent people who said they did.) For a few weeks a sullen and sick Karen had talked about “the pregnancy” and not “the baby,” and Andy suspected that if it were up to her she might not stay pregnant. He tried, he said, for Cee Cee. He said she did, too, although Lisa found that harder to imagine.

Lisa never worried that Andy still had feelings for Karen. That wasn’t it. She was just jealous of the feelings he had once had for her. Mum had told her off about it once. She’d said it was immature. That people were who they were and that included a part of all the people they’d loved before. And that you should be glad of someone’s capacity to love and then love again, not jealous. That virgins—emotional and physical—had far less to offer in an adult relationship. Lisa remembered telling her mum she’d been watching too much
Oprah
on cable TV.

�

Christmas Day

“Delicious. We did good!”

“No amount of chestnuts and bacon could ever make Brussels sprouts delicious.”

“And that’s why we made you carrots.”

“With maple glaze, if you please. Taking the vegetable as near to being a sweetie as the vegetable can get. Just for your sweet tooth.”

“Now
they
were delicious!”

“Forgot the cranberry sauce, but other than that, pretty good.”

“I just wish it took as long to eat it as it took to wash up from.”

Lisa was washing, Amanda was drying.

Jennifer was clearing, and Hannah was sitting on one of the bar stools, eating brandy butter straight from the bowl with her finger.

Jennifer pulled a face. “That’s disgusting. You’ll be sick.”

Hannah smirked. “It isn’t Christmas Day until someone’s been sick.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you at least ate Christmas pudding with it.”

“But Christmas pudding is disgusting.”

“Philistine. Spoiled Philistine. When we were little, we weren’t allowed brandy butter without it.”

“Fortunately for me, they’d chilled out by the time I came along.”

“They weren’t chilled out—they were just knackered.”

“There have to be some perks to being the baby.”

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“Some perks! The whole gig is one long perk. Try being the oldest,”

Lisa shrieked.

“Forget that. Middlie—that’s the tough position. Ask any shrink.”

Jennifer was half serious.

Amanda snorted. “But there are two of us in the middle—what does that mean?”

“It means in this family you don’t even get the worst position in the family to yourself, that’s what it means. . . .”

“Shut up moaning—who wants another liqueur? If we’re stuck in here while the hunter gatherers roam free, we may as well have a drink.”

Mark was outside with Andy and Stephen. Apparently they were chopping more logs for the fire. Actually they were smoking cigars and avoiding the dishes—a perfectly open secret, and the way it had always been.

No one really wanted it to be any different.

Lisa peeled off her Marigolds and grabbed the Baileys and the ama-retto, plus a few of the small glasses Amanda had just dried.

“Then Amanda can tell us what she’s so . . . smiley about.”

“What do you mean?!” Amanda’s question was playful. “Aren’t I always?”

“Not with so much twinkle . . .”

“Is it a guy?” Hannah asked, eyes wide.

“Of course it’s a guy,” said Lisa, winking at her little sister.

“Fantastic.” Jennifer sipped her drink. “Dish, Mandy-Pandy—let’s have a little bit of vicarious romance.”

Lisa caught the faint note of bitterness in her sister’s voice, but Jennifer avoided her gaze, and she turned back to Amanda, who was still wearing her paper hat, rakishly pushed back on her head. On her it looked good. “So . . .”

“Blimey—it’s like the Spanish Inquisition.” Amanda laughed, looking from one expectant face to the others. “Okay, okay. There might be a guy.”

Expectant silence.

“There is a guy. I met him on the underground. Well, actually, I’d 74 e l i z a b e t h

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seen him before, but . . . I . . . long story . . . I really talked to him properly first on the underground.”

“That’s not fair. The only people who ever talk to me on public transport are drunks and beggars.”

“He’s neither. He’s a student.”

“They’re usually both, most of the time.”

“He’s not. He’s studying to be an architect, like Mark, actually, so as you know, that takes longer than . . . I don’t know . . . being a doctor or a vet or something.”