After Ever After (50 page)

It seems that the audience have hardly even noticed the change in their leading lady, except that instead of laughing and whispering amongst themselves they are sitting in rapt silence as Clare take centre stage.

‘
Once I had a secret love
,’ she sings, ‘
that lived within the heart of me
…’ A sigh ripples through the audience as she begins, her voice as pure and as clear as glass as the song reaches its sweet crescendo, her face illuminated by a delighted smile. As she sings I realise that Fergus is still holding my hand, and carefully I extricate my fingers from his, for all my new-found strength still confused and uncertain by what his apparent volte-face means, or what I might want it to mean.

Clare walks to the edge of the stage, holding her hands out to the audience as she sings the final line. ‘
Now my heart’s an open door, and my secret love’s no secret any more
…’

Applause ripples through the hall in breaking waves, and soon cheers and shouts for an encore are joining them as gradually the whole hall climbs to its feet.

Clare stands caught in the spotlight, looking off stage, shaking her head and laughing, ‘But it’s not the end yet!’

‘Oh, just sing it again! Give the crowd what they want, girl!’ Caroline calls from the wings, and the band strikes up once more.

‘But what did you say to him?’ Dora and Camille walk slightly ahead of us, their arms linked through Mr Crawley’s.

‘I rather think it would get lost in the retelling,’ he says amiably. ‘Suffice it to say that he’s gone, and that he knows better than to try anything like that again.’

My friends giggle and flit around him like a couple of butterflies, stepping over the threshold of the front door and leaving it open for Fergus and me. I stop him at the door, my hand on his chest.

‘Will you bring Ella back in the morning?’ I say.

Fergus looks at me, clearly not understanding. ‘But I thought I could give Mum a ring, and she could bring her now …?’

His mouth continues to move as if he had another question to ask that he can’t quite articulate. ‘Isn’t it over? Isn’t everything okay now?’ he says at last.

I shake my head. ‘Isn’t what over? It doesn’t seem like long ago that you told me we were over, and for good.’

Fergus reaches out to touch me, but his fingers hover millimetres above the surface of my skin. I step away and walk back on to the road, away from the welcoming light and warmth of the hallway. ‘Yes, I know, but surely we can put that behind us now. Surely you can see that I love you …’

‘Do you know what day it is today, Fergus?’ I ask him, leaning on the gate and letting it swing slightly under my weight. I turn around and face him, seeing him desperately sort through our various anniversaries. ‘It’s twenty-four years today since Mum died. Since everything in my life went out of control. I thought that when I met you, you were the one who was going to change that for me. But I was wrong. It’s got to be me. It had to be me all along.’

I look at his face in the half light and I want to kiss every part of it, bury my face in his neck and just forget about everything that needs to be done just for one second, but I know that I can’t, not yet. I owe that much to my mum, to myself.

‘I think I’ve been putting important things behind me without trying to sort them out for too long, Fergus. I don’t think we can just go back. If we go anywhere, it has to be forward. I need to think, I need to straighten things out, okay? There’s no point in us going back to the way it was, we’d just end up here again – sooner or later. Give me a couple of days to get everything straight here.’ I tap my forehead. ‘Do you understand?’

Fergus takes a step closer to me and encircles me with his arms briefly before stepping past me, through the gate and back on to the street.

‘I think I understand,’ he says. ‘Do you understand that I’m so sorry, so very sorry, and that I love you?’

I nod my head and watch him for a while as he disappears into the shadows. I almost run after him, I almost call out, but I’m afraid to. I’m afraid of what I might say to him before he’s ready to hear it. I know he really means it when he says he’s sorry, but what he doesn’t realise is that sorry isn’t nearly enough to mend our relationship. It’s only the hint, the faintest hope of a beginning. The scent of blossom heavy in the trees suddenly swells and seems almost to caress me.

‘I understand everything now, Mum,’ I say into the soft sweet dark. ‘At last I do.’

‘See, what I don’t see,’ Dora tells me over a film about cheerleaders and werewolves which none of us has been watching, ‘is that he believes you, he loves you, he wants you. The end. Geddit?’ She settles back in the armchair and looks at Camille. ‘Don’t you think she’s sort of lost the plot a bit? This is the “Happy Ever After” bit, right?’

Camille shrugs and purses her lips, looking at me with faint disapproval. I know what she’s thinking, I know what they’ve both been thinking for the last couple of days, they’ve been wondering why Fergus isn’t back home, why they are both still here nursemaiding me and why all isn’t right with the world.

‘It’s not that I’m not on your side, Kits, it’s just that haven’t you punished the poor man enough?’ Camille asks me gently. ‘The look on his face when he dropped Ella back yesterday. It was like you’d ripped his heart out and stamped on it. And as for Ella, did you see
her
face?’

I had seen her face, of course I had, I’d felt it in every fibre of my being. I could see her wondering why her daddy hadn’t come in with her, why things suddenly weren’t the same as they always had been. Maybe she didn’t think quite that clearly but she felt it, I knew that she did.

‘Look,’ I turn to them. ‘Don’t you think I want us all back together again? But it’s just not that easy. This mess isn’t something you just sweep up under the carpet and pretend it’s all fine. Something’d happen and we’d just be back to square one before you knew it. And I don’t want that again.’ I find myself gripping hard on to a cushion. ‘I don’t think I could
survive
it again.’

Camille crosses the room and sits on the arm of my chair, hugging me briefly.

‘But what then? You can’t just go on in this, in this …’ She waves her arms in the air. ‘This kind of suspended animation. You need to break the spell, Kitty, get things moving again. Makes things right.’

Dora nods in agreement.

‘I know,’ I tell them. ‘It’s just I’m sort of scared to. I’ve lived my life this one way for so long – always in pain, always alone, always expecting the worst – that if I let that go and just let myself be happy, I’m scared of losing myself. That sounds pretty stupid doesn’t it?’

Dora shakes her head. ‘No, no, I know what you mean. There was a time when I’d rather have killed myself than be happy. Who knows why we’re so fucked up, Kits? Maybe there was something in the water when we were kids. After all, Cam seems peachy.’

Camille bites back a smile. ‘I have my moments, not quite as life changingly dramatic as yours, but I do have them. We all do at some time in our lives.’ She leans her cheek against mine.

‘What’s the first thing you need to do to get things on the right track again? Maybe Dora and I can help you?’

I reach my arm up around her neck and hug her. ‘Oh, God, I wish you could, but you know what? The first thing I have to do is something I have to do by myself.’

Dora and Camille exchange a glance and look the question at me.

‘I have to go and see my father.’

It’s not that I haven’t thought about all those things he said to me that day, it just that somehow, with everything that’s happened, is seems like for ever and a day since he told me he’d always blamed me for Mum’s death. I put off dealing with it initially because that’s my preferred way of approaching complex emotional issues, to tuck them away at the back of my mind in the file clearly marked ‘denial’ and face them when, and only when, circumstances meant I could no longer ignore them. In fact, if it hadn’t been for this whole mess, the entire incident might have quietly sat there for years until I’d gone mad or forgotten about it altogether. But my life has turned upside down and those circumstances I was talking about mean I can’t go forward – with or without Fergus – until I’ve found out what exactly is left of my relationship with my dad.

Dora and Camille took Ella out for the day until Fergus was due to collect her. I told them where I was going and they both gave me speeches about rushing into things, running before I could walk, but I told them. Some things can’t just be left unsaid, not if I’m ever to be at peace with my future. Some things need to be resolved.

As the train rattled and shuddered its way towards London, I thought of the last time I’d made this journey, full of uncertainty and anxiety, wondering if and when the real me would ever come back. I don’t think I realised then that the real me, the essence of me, had vanished in that moment when I found Mum all those years ago, or rather had retreated so far inside myself that it took someone or something like Gareth to make it come charging back out to defend me. As the train pulled into Euston I felt none of the apprehension and misgivings I’d felt the first time, nor the longed-for homecoming that I had thought I should feel. Instead I just felt perfectly relaxed and calm as if I was in the arms of a very old friend.

It was like walking back through time, walking back through my teens and my childhood, until eventually I climbed the steps up to our old flat. It was almost like that final trip home from school on that terrible day, the trees still heavy with late blossom, the air thick with exhaust. Dad was still there, still in the same few rooms where it happened, and in some way, I felt, so was my mum.

I knocked and waited, and then knocked and waited again, knowing that my dad’s policy on answering the door was identical to his stance on the phone. Eventually I saw his shadow behind the frosted glass lumbering towards the door.

‘ID please,’ he called through the letterbox.

‘It’s Kitty,’ I shouted, and I half laughed as I wondered if I should produce a credit card or something. I watched the hunched figure freeze for a second before it straightened and opened the door.

‘Kitty,’ he said, and stood aside to let me in.

I expected the fear and the memories to come racing to greet me as I trod the familiar path to the front room, but instead the flat seemed clean and bright and, somehow, empty. We stood there looking at each other, for a moment feeling the strangeness of the situation.

‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ he said simply, sadly. ‘After everything I said. It came out badly, wrongly. I was trying to mend things …’ He trailed off, shaking his head.

‘I know. I didn’t expect to want to see you again,’ I replied. ‘But, well, when you came up, a lot of things were going on in my head, and since then I’ve had a chance to think about what you said, or about what you were trying to say. I wanted to give you the chance to finish what you started. I wanted to give us both a chance.’

He looked at me, and it seemed as if a little colour had returned to his face.

‘Do you want a drink? Tea and a Digestive?’ he asked brightly, but I shook my head.

‘Let’s just talk, Dad,’ I said.

‘After all these years, let’s just talk.’ For an agonising few seconds we did not talk. I sat on the same sofa I had made a camp behind all those years ago – the mossy green velveteen worn bare on the arms and corner cushions – and Dad sat in his old chair, looking out of the window across the city, its myriad of lives reflected minutely in his glasses.

‘I don’t know, Kitty, I feel as if I’m waking up from a long dream, like that fellow, you know, the one who went to sleep under a tree and when he woke up a hundred years had passed?’ He looked at me and I nodded. ‘It wasn’t just meeting Joy that brought it on, it started with your wedding, I suppose. I could see how uncomfortable you were with me there and …’

‘I wasn’t, Dad, honest,’ I protested, but too weakly to be convincing.

‘It doesn’t matter, love. I could see it and I knew you were terrified I’d make a show of you and you shouldn’t have had to deal with that, not on that day.’

I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling horribly guilty and ashamed, because he was right, I would have much peferred it if he hadn’t been there at all.

‘Then when the little one came, and you didn’t bring her to see me and I didn’t try to go and see her, it was then really that things started to change, slowly. I began to realise how much I’d thrown away. You back then with your scrappy pig tails and that frilly red dress you insisted on wearing every day of the week, the minute you got in from school. I think that’s the last time I really felt like I knew you. I thought of your mum, and how furious she’d be with me for letting you drift away like this.’ He half smiled. ‘Her eyes flashed lightning when she was riled, you’re just like her in that respect!’

I smiled in return and a moment’s silence passed before he spoke again.

‘Well, it was then I decided to do something about it, thought I’d try to get out a bit, met Joy at the club and she has been fantastic. She just seemed to be able to listen and understand. It was she who told me that I’d never get you back unless I made a clean sweep of it, unless I told you why or how I was like I was. The thing is, I never got the chance to apologise to you, that day, to say that I’m so sorry. You deserved better than me growing up, you deserved your mum, and someone took that away from us and I’m sorry, Kitty, I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it …’

‘Oh, Dad?’ I crossed the room in two or three steps, and kneeling in front of him I held his hands, not quite ready to fling myself into his arms just yet. ‘Dad, a lot of things have happened to me recently. Things that have made me realise those fairy-tale endings don’t really exist, there’s not a magic wand to wave away all your problems or a way to mend relationships overnight. I realise that now, and I feel ready, strong enough somehow, to face those things head on. I think that you and I, we have to get to know each other all over again. But I want to Dad. I want to for Mum’s sake. And for mine.’