After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (22 page)

M
y hopes
that my friendship with Katya would ease our discussion were not so much dashed as ground into dust when she opened the door. She emitted a chilliness that made me want to keep my coat on. She led us into the kitchen that Mark had grafted on for so long. If I totted up all the hours he’d spent on it, I swear he’d have been earning minus thirty pence an hour. We’d stopped discussing it in the end.

Sean was sitting at the big oak table with Eleanor. She was braless under a thin vest top, the outline of her nipples clearly visible. If she was my daughter, I’d have strapped her up in a hessian sack by now.

I was glad Mark had persuaded me to leave Jamie at home. ‘I think he’s more focused on the fact that Eleanor won’t answer his calls than what deep trouble he’s in. Still thinking with his willy rather than his brain. Plus if it does turn nasty, I’d like to respond without Jamie listening.’

My relief that I could just hand over the lead to someone who loved Jamie as much as me made me realise – again – how deranged I’d been to entertain the idea of Tomaso. The man who missed his child so much, but couldn’t quite be bothered to get a job in the same country.

Sean stood up and shook hands with Mark. I put my hand up in greeting.

‘Hi there. What can I get you to drink?’ Sean’s voice was deflated and strained, but not accusatory.

‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Mark said, pulling out a chair at the table for me. He sat next to me, while Katya parked herself opposite with Eleanor.

Katya took a large gulp of wine. She already looked a bit flushed. She was worrying at some fine hair near her temple with her thumb and index finger. ‘I’m really disappointed in Jamie. I thought he was such a good boy.’

Sean put his hand out. ‘Katya,’ he said, ‘this is not all down to Jamie.’

‘It is as far as I’m concerned. Eleanor would never have sent a picture like that to him unless he’d forced her to.’

All my good intentions of not getting dragged into apportioning blame took turbo-charged flight. ‘Hang on a minute, Katya. I don’t think Jamie “forced” her to do anything she didn’t want to do.’ It was only the fact that Eleanor was sitting opposite me that stopped me adding, ‘In fact, I think Eleanor has been quite an eye-opener for Jamie, if anything.’

I turned to Eleanor. She still had that lick of defiance about her, as though I was just slightly too stupid to be sharing the same air as her. I would have to resist the whole ‘blame and shame’ malarkey that my mother had rolled out with such aplomb. I reminded myself that she was only fifteen and had to be feeling terrible. Her way of dealing with it was just different from mine.

‘I am sorry, Eleanor, though I hope you know that it wasn’t Jamie who sent the picture around the school.’ I forced myself to soften my voice.

Katya made a harrumphing sound that I decided to ignore.

Eleanor shrugged, though I saw her eyes glisten.

Mark stepped in. ‘Clearly, we need to contact the school to explain what’s happened.’

Katya flicked her hand in a gesture of impatience. ‘Christ, I should think it will be on the fucking
Ten O’Clock News
tonight. They won’t need to wait to hear it from us.’

Mark coloured slightly but pressed on. ‘What I meant was I think we should present a united front, talk to the head and try to work out a damage limitation plan.’

Sean was nodding opposite me. For a man who usually ran the show, he was displaying as much verve as an under-inflated balloon. His burly, blokey manner had slipped into something distressed and uncertain. After all these years of wishing curses upon him, I was astonished to find that I found no pleasure in his discomfort.

Katya folded her arms. ‘I can’t see what the school can do. I mean, the photo is out there for all to see. It’s probably on the internet right now, with all sorts of weirdos perving over it. How is the school going to legislate for that? Bit late to suggest Jamie takes better care of his phone, don’t you think?’

I started to understand what Sean had lived with all these years. Katya in heat-seeking missile mode, determined to sear the blame into someone, regardless of the facts. I glanced at Eleanor, who looked as though she was just beginning to realise what a massive deal this was. She edged closer to Sean, who put his arm round her shoulders.

With the breath that I’d been holding in case a great jet of dragon’s fire came out of my mouth, I released a light, gentle-sounding sentence. ‘Come on, Katya, it’s probably not that bad. It’ll be the talking point for a couple of days and then they’ll all move onto someone else. What’s done is done. We just need to help them through it.’

I tried to catch Eleanor’s eye but her head was down.

Katya jumped up and pointed at me. ‘It’s all right for you. Your son comes out of this quite well – the cool kid whose girlfriend is putting her foofoo on display for him. You’ve no idea what it’s like for Eleanor. She’s going to have to walk in there tomorrow and face everyone. They’ll all be thinking she’s a right little tart. “Eleanor McAllister, wasn’t she the one who…?”’

Somewhere in the far corner of my brain, I knew that Mark would make a joke about ‘foofoo’ at a later date. But more immediately, I recognised my mother’s words from a couple of decades ago, delivered in the same withering tones. Eleanor cried quietly, all her earlier bravado crumpling under Katya’s prophecies of doom.

Sean and Mark both rushed to answer. I all but shouted them down with the force of my maternal urge to protect, rumbling through the room with the power of a tank towards its target.

‘Actually, Katya, I did have a bit of a similar experience when I was younger, so I do understand what it’s like for Eleanor.’

Mark jerked round and shook his head imperceptibly. But I wasn’t going to be derailed by anyone.

Mark leapt up and took Eleanor’s arm. ‘Come on, love. The adults might need to have a bit of a private discussion. Can you give us five?’ As she followed him out with no resistance, I recognised the numbness in her. I remembered that feeling of wading through crushed ice, where my body had shut down to a level where it could still function but not feel. For all her bravado, she was still a child.

There was a moment of silence, while Katya and I out-glared each other. Mark hurried back in, clicking the sitting room door shut behind him. He sat down and squeezed my knee.

‘Thirty years ago, my boyfriend took a picture of me naked. A teacher found it at school and it created a right old hoo-ha. It really wasn’t “all right” for me. Obviously, what’s happened now isn’t ideal but I do know that Eleanor – and Jamie – are going to need us to help them, not cause more problems by falling out with each other.’

I didn’t look at Sean but I was aware of him staring at me. Mark’s hand relaxed and he breathed out. I realised he’d been expecting me to blurt out the whole story.

Katya looked at me as though she hated me, a far cry from the complex, funny woman who giggled on our walks together.

‘The internet wasn’t even invented then. How many people saw the photo? Five? Ten? Whoop whoop. You can’t compare the two.’

‘I wasn’t trying to make out that what happened to me was worse, just that I understand what this situation feels like. I’d be really happy to have a chat with Eleanor to help her appreciate that she’ll get through it.’

Katya pointed a finger at me. ‘You? You think you’re going to have a nice little tête-à-tête with my daughter when we wouldn’t even be in this situation if it wasn’t for your son? Jamie hasn’t even had the decency to come round and apologise. He’s just let Mummy and Daddy do the talking for him.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘We were the ones who wouldn’t bring him.’

Sean put up his hand for silence. ‘Katya.’ His voice held reproach. ‘I think tempers are running high enough, without putting all the blame on Jamie. I know you’re upset, but Eleanor did take and send the photo. Jamie didn’t push the button to distribute it to everyone.’

‘Trust you to side with everyone else. Maybe one day you’ll actually stick up for your own family rather than turning on the charm for Joe Bloggs down the road. I suppose you’re feeling sorry for Lydia with her pathetic little sob story rather than your daughter, who’s a total laughing stock.’

Katya topped up her glass and took a big slug of wine. ‘If Eleanor fails her GCSEs because of this, I’m going to sue you two for the money to repeat the year.’

The looks I’d always envied – Katya’s little elfin features, the sort of face that could carry a short crop, a contemporary version of Twiggy – twisted into something hard and vicious.

Sean frowned. ‘She won’t fail her GCSEs. Anyway, they’re a good six months away.’

‘How do you know? You can have a delayed reaction to these things. If she loses focus for a few weeks, that’ll be the end of eleven A*s.’ Katya made it sound as though she was coming to terms with a terminal disease, not the prospect of a C in Geography.

‘Let’s not panic. All I meant was that Lydia’s well-placed to help Eleanor because she’s been through it herself.’ Sean tried to reach for her hand but she snatched it away.

‘I knew you’d think she’d handle it better than me. Perhaps if I ran my own business conning people with the happy-ever-after bullshit so they’d pay me a fortune to organise the big day, you’d have a bit more respect for me. I’m clearly doing a crap job bringing up my own daughter.’

Katya was twisting her gold bangle round and round on her little bird wrists.

Sean scraped his chair back, stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. He said, very gently, ‘Katya, this isn’t about you. For the record, I think you are very good mum to Eleanor and this is just a mistake – quite a public one, I grant you – but it’s only going to become insurmountable if we let it. Of course you’re going to be Eleanor’s main support but I’m just suggesting that we use all the resources available to us.’

But Katya refused to be placated. ‘She’s
my
daughter for god’s sake. What could Lydia do for her that I can’t?’

Something changed in Sean’s face. I’d seen it before. That switch into reckless, tearaway mode. It was what had made him the ‘McLegend’ on the rugby field at school.

I felt like a goalie on the wrong side of the pitch. It wouldn’t matter how fast I ran or how high I jumped, I wouldn’t be able to save the day.

I put out a warning hand to Sean but he was locked in, towering over Katya.

‘What Lydia is kindly not telling you is that the boy who took the Polaroid was me. And it wasn’t just of her, it was of both of us, completely naked and pretty compromising, much worse than the one of Eleanor. Her dad was the deputy head, he got really upset – a bit like you are now – and we ended up in a fight. The net result of that was that he finished up in prison and Lydia had to move away to a completely new area. So I think, yes, she does know what she is talking about.’

I couldn’t believe the casual way that information flopped out into the world. This huge secret that had been residing in its own mausoleum with pillars and porticoes had suddenly been wheelbarrowed out into the world with no more pomp and ceremony than the dumping of Cheerios into a cereal bowl in the morning.

Wine had dulled Katya’s reactions for a moment. Her eyebrows knitted together while her thoughts kayaked through the alcohol. ‘You knew Lydia from before? She’s the one your mother was going about, who broke your heart? The reason you don’t like talking about your schooldays?’

Her eyes darted from Sean to me, and back again. A pause, as though coins were registering in a parking meter. And then, like a machine gun swivelling on a pivot, she turned to face me. I tried not to shrink back in my chair as Katya’s wrath, bubbling and molten, poured out of her. ‘You bitch. You absolute bitch. There you were pretending to be my friend, the listening ear. Was it just so you could get close to Sean? Some kind of bizarre unfinished love affair that you wanted to have another bash at, thirty years later?’

I leaned closer to Mark, reassured by his solid presence as the bitterness spewed out of Katya.

‘I wanted to tell you. Of course I did. For the record, I wasn’t pretending to be your friend. I really enjoy your company. I had a new identity and Sean had never talked about what happened, so it was just easier to forget that we’d ever known each other.’

Katya turned towards Mark. ‘You knew this, did you? That my husband and your wife had “history” together? That they’d seen each other naked?’

Mark’s calm voice was a complete contrast to the hysterical pitch of Katya’s. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until this week, either. But it’s so long ago now I’m not going to get worked up about something that happened years before I met Lydia. What matters, Katya, is the here and now, our families.’

‘So you all knew, except me? “Poor old Katya, she’d be so upset, best not tell her so she doesn’t have to worry her little head about it.” You’re pathetic, all of you, creeping about with your sordid secrets.’ She swung round towards Mark. ‘So like me, you’ve been living a lie all these years? Being made a fool of?’

Mark ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I did feel a bit like that when I first found out. But they had their reasons, Katya. They didn’t set out to hurt us. More like protect us, actually.’

Katya paused. She glanced at Sean, then at me. ‘You’ve slept together, haven’t you?’

The venom in her voice frightened me. We both hesitated. Silence filled the room, though if brains made a noise, we’d all have been deafened by the collective whirring and assessing of who knew what.

Sean made the first stab at an explanation. ‘We were young and silly, Katya. It was thirty years ago. We didn’t want to rake it all up and upset everyone for no good reason.’ His voice was weary, defeated rather than defensive.

Katya, on the other hand, was generating enough rage to annihilate us all. She glowered at Mark, with a mixture of accusation and pity. ‘You have no idea who you’re married to, do you? What she’s really like?’

I jumped up. Fear flashed through me in a way that threatened to fold my legs underneath me. ‘That’s enough, Katya. We’re here to sort out the kids, not attack each other.’