After You (8 page)

‘Whoa,’ he said when I’d finished. ‘That’s …’ He gave a little shake of his head. ‘You think she is who she says she is?’

‘She does look a bit like him. But I don’t honestly know. Am I looking for signs? Am I seeing what I want to see? It’s possible. I spend half my time thinking how amazing that there’s something of him left behind, and the other half wondering if I’m being a complete sucker. And then there’s this whole extra layer of stuff in the middle – like if this is his daughter then how is it fair that he never even got to meet her? And how are his parents supposed to cope with it? And what if meeting her would actually have changed his mind? What if that would have been the thing that convinced him …’ My voice tailed away.

Sam leaned back in his chair, his brow furrowed. ‘And this man would be the reason you’re attending the group.’

‘Yes.’

I could feel him studying me, perhaps reassessing what Will had meant to me.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. ‘I don’t know whether to seek her out, or whether I should just leave well enough alone.’

He looked out at the city street, thinking. And then he said: ‘Well, what would he have done?’

And just like that, I faltered. I gazed up at that big man with his direct gaze, his two-day stubble, and his kind, capable hands. And all my thoughts evaporated.

‘You okay?’

I took a deep gulp of my drink, trying to hide what I felt was written clearly on my face. Suddenly, for no reason I could work out, I wanted to cry. It was too much. That odd, unbalancing night. The fact that Will had loomed up again, ever-present in every conversation. I could see his face suddenly, that sardonic eyebrow raised, as if to say,
What on earth are you up to now, Clark?

‘Just … a long day. Actually, would you mind if I –’

Sam pushed his chair back, stood up. ‘No. No, you go. Sorry. I didn’t think –’

‘This has been really nice. It’s just –’

‘No problem. A long day. And the whole grief thing. I get it. No, no – don’t worry,’ he said, as I reached for my purse. ‘Really. I can stand you an orange juice.’

I think I might have run to my car, in spite of my limp. I felt his eyes on me the whole way.

I pulled up in the car park, and let out a breath I felt as if I’d been holding all the way from the bar. I glanced over at the corner shop, then back at my flat, and decided I didn’t want to be sensible. I wanted wine, several large glasses of it, until I could persuade myself to stop looking backwards. Or maybe not look at anything at all.

My hip ached as I climbed out of the car. Since Richard had arrived, it hurt constantly; the physio at the hospital had told me not to spend too much time on my feet. But the thought of saying as much to Richard filled me with dread.

I see. So you work in a bar but you want to be allowed to sit down all day, is that it?

That milk-fed, preparing-for-middle-management face; that carefully nondescript haircut. That air of weary superiority, even though he was barely two years older than me. I closed my eyes, and tried to make the knot of anxiety in my stomach disappear.

‘Just this, please,’ I said, placing a bottle of cold Sauvignon Blanc on the counter.

‘Party, is it?’

‘What?’

‘Fancy dress. You going as – Don’t tell me.’ Samir stroked his chin. ‘Snow White?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘You want to be careful with that. Empty calories, innit? You want to drink vodka. That’s a clean drink. Maybe a bit of lemon. That’s what I tell Ginny, across the road. You know she’s a lap-dancer, right? They got to watch their figures.’

‘Dietary advice. Nice.’

‘It’s like all this stuff about sugar. You got to watch the sugar. No point buying the low-fat stuff if it’s full of sugar, right? There’s your empty calories. Right there. And them chemical sugars are the worst. They stick to your gut.’

He rang up the wine, handed me my change.

‘What’s that you’re eating, Samir?’

‘Smoky Bacon Pot Noodle. It’s good, man.’

I was lost in thought – somewhere in the dark crevasse between my sore pelvis, existential job-related despair, and a weird craving for a Smoky Bacon Pot Noodle – when I saw her.
She was in the doorway of my block, sitting on the ground, her arms wrapped around her knees. I took my change from Samir, and half walked, half ran across the road. ‘Lily?’

She looked up slowly.

Her voice was slurred, her eyes bloodshot, as if she had been crying. ‘Nobody would let me in. I rang all the bells but nobody would let me in.’

I wrestled the key into the door and propped it with my bag, crouching down beside her. ‘What happened?’

‘I just want to go to sleep,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. ‘I’m so, so tired. I wanted to get a taxi home but I hadn’t got any money.’

I caught the sour whiff of alcohol. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘I don’t know.’ She blinked at me, tilting her head. I wondered then if it was just alcohol. ‘If I’m not, you’ve totally turned into a leprechaun.’ She patted her pockets. ‘Oh, look – look what I’ve got!’ She held up a half-smoked roll-up that even I could smell was not just tobacco. ‘Let’s have a smoke, Lily,’ she said. ‘Oh, no. You’re Louisa. I’m Lily.’ She giggled and, pulling a lighter clumsily from her pocket, promptly tried to light the wrong end.

‘Okay, you. Time to go home.’ I took it from her hand, and, ignoring her vague protests, squashed it firmly under my foot. ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’

‘But I don’t –’

‘Lily!’

I glanced up. A young man stood across the street, his hands in his jeans pockets, watching us steadily. Lily looked up at him and then away.

‘Who is that?’ I said.

She stared at her feet.

‘Lily. Come here.’ His voice held the surety of possession. He stood, legs slightly apart, as if even at that distance he expected her to obey him. Something made me instantly uneasy.

Nobody moved.

‘Is he your boyfriend? Do you want to talk to him?’ I said quietly.

The first time she spoke I couldn’t make out what she said. I had to lean closer and ask her to repeat herself.

‘Make him go away.’ She closed her eyes, and turned her face towards the door. ‘Please.’

He began to walk across the street towards us. I stood, and tried to make my voice sound as authoritative as possible. ‘You can go now, thanks. Lily’s coming inside with me.’

He stopped halfway across the road.

I held his gaze. ‘You can speak to her some other time. Okay?’

I had my hand on the buzzer, and now muttered at some imaginary, muscular, short-tempered boyfriend. ‘Yeah. Do you want to come down and give me a hand, Dave? Thanks
.
’

The young man’s expression suggested this was not the last of it. Then he turned, pulled his phone from his pocket and began a low, urgent conversation with someone as he walked away, ignoring the beeping taxi that had to swerve around him, and casting us only the briefest of backwards looks.

I sighed, a little more shakily than I’d expected, put my hands under her armpits and, with not very much elegance and a fair amount of muffled swearing, managed to haul Lily Houghton-Miller into the lobby.

That night she slept at my flat. I couldn’t think what else to do with her. She was sick twice in the bathroom, batting me away when I tried to hold her hair up for her. She refused to give me a home phone number, or maybe couldn’t remember it, and her mobile phone was pin-locked.

I cleaned her up, helped her into a pair of my jogging bottoms and a T-shirt, and led her into the living room. ‘You
tidied up!’ she said, with a little exclamation, as if I had done it just for her. I made her drink a glass of water and put her on the sofa in the recovery position, even though I was pretty sure by then that there was nothing left inside her to come out.

As I lifted her head and placed it on the pillow, she opened her eyes, as if recognizing me properly for the first time. ‘Sorry.’ She spoke so quietly that, for a moment, I couldn’t be entirely sure that that was what she had said, and her eyes brimmed briefly with tears.

I covered her with a blanket and watched her as she fell asleep – her pale face, the blue shadows under her eyes, the eyebrows that followed the same curve that Will’s had, the same faint sprinkling of freckles.

Almost as an afterthought I locked the flat door and brought the keys into my bedroom with me, tucking them under my pillow to stop her stealing anything, or simply to stop her leaving, I wasn’t sure. I lay awake, my mind still busy with the sound of the sirens and the airport and the faces of the grieving in the church hall and the hard, knowing stare of the young man across the road, and the knowledge that I had someone who was essentially a stranger sleeping under my roof. And all the while a voice kept saying:
What on earth are you doing?

But what else could I have done? Finally, some time after the birds started singing, and the bakery van unloaded its morning delivery downstairs, my thoughts slowed, and stilled, and I fell asleep.

I could smell coffee. It took me several seconds to consider why the smell of coffee might be filtering through my flat, and when the answer registered I sat bolt upright and leaped out of bed, hauling my hoodie over my head.

She was cross-legged on the sofa, smoking, using my one good mug as an ashtray. The television was on – some manic children’s confection of brightly clad, gurning presenters – and two Styrofoam cups sat on the mantelpiece.

‘Oh, hi. That one on the right’s yours,’ she said, turning briefly towards me. ‘I didn’t know what you liked so I got you an Americano.’

I blinked, wrinkling my nose against the cigarette smoke. I crossed the room and opened a window. I looked at the clock. ‘Is that the time?’

‘Yeah. The coffee might be a bit cold. Didn’t know whether to wake you.’

‘It’s my day off,’ I said, reaching for the coffee. It was warm enough. I took a slug gratefully. Then I stared at the cup. ‘Hang on. How did you get these? I locked the front door.’

‘I went down the fire escape,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have any money so I told the guy at the bakery whose flat it was and he said you could bring it in later. Oh, and you also owe him for two bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese.’

‘I do?’ I wanted to be cross, but I was suddenly really hungry.

She followed my gaze. ‘Oh. I ate those.’ She blew a smoke ring into the centre of the room. ‘You didn’t have anything much in your fridge. You really do need to sort this place out.’

The Lily of this morning was such a different character from the girl I had picked off the street last night that it was hard to believe they were the same person. I walked back into the bedroom to get dressed, listening to her watching television, padding into the kitchen to fetch herself a drink.

‘Hey, thingy … Louise. Could you lend me some money?’ she called out.

‘If it’s to get off your face again, no.’

She walked into my bedroom without knocking. I pulled my sweatshirt up to my chest. ‘And can I stay tonight?’

‘I need to talk to your mum, Lily.’

‘What for?’

‘I need to know a little bit more about what’s actually going on here.’

She stood in the doorway. ‘So you don’t believe me.’

I gestured to her to turn around, so I could finish putting my bra on. ‘I do believe you. But that’s the deal. You want something from me, I need to know a bit more about you first.’

Just as I pulled my T-shirt over my head, she turned back again. ‘Suit yourself. I need to pick up some more clothes anyway.’

‘Why? Where have you been staying?’

She walked away from me, as if she hadn’t heard, sniffing her armpit. ‘Can I use your shower? I absolutely reek.’

An hour later, we drove to St John’s Wood. I was exhausted, both by the night’s events and the strange energy Lily gave off beside me. She fidgeted constantly, smoked endless cigarettes, then sat in a silence so loaded I could almost feel the weight of her thoughts.

‘So who was he? That guy last night?’ I kept my face to the front, my voice neutral.

‘Just someone.’

‘You told me he was your boyfriend.’

‘Then that’s who he was.’ Her voice had hardened, her face closed. As we drew nearer to her parents’ house, she crossed her arms in front of her, bringing her knees up to her chin, her gaze set and defiant, as if already in silent battle. I had wondered if she had been telling me the truth about St John’s Wood, but she gestured to a wide, tree-lined street, and told me to take the third left, and we were in the kind of road where diplomats or expat American bankers live, the kind of road that nobody ever seems to go in or come out of. I pulled the car up, gazing out of the window at the tall white stucco buildings, the carefully trimmed yew hedging, and immaculate window boxes.

‘You live
here
?’

She slammed the passenger door behind her so hard that my little car rattled. ‘I don’t live here.
They
live here.’

She let herself in and I followed awkwardly, feeling like an intruder. We were in a spacious, high-ceilinged hallway, with parquet flooring and a huge gilt mirror on the wall, a slew of white-card invitations jostling for space in its frame. A vase of beautifully arranged flowers sat on a small antique table. The air was scented with their perfume.

From upstairs came the sound of commotion, possibly children’s voices – it was hard to tell.

‘My half-brothers,’ Lily said dismissively, and walked through to the kitchen, apparently expecting me to follow. It was enormous, in modernist grey, with an endless mushroom-coloured polished-concrete worktop. Everything in it screamed money, from the Dualit toaster to the coffee-maker, which was large and complicated enough not to be out of place in a Milanese café. Lily opened the fridge and scanned it, finally pulling out a box of fresh pineapple pieces that she started to eat with her fingers.

‘Lily?’

A voice from upstairs, urgent, female.

‘Lily, is that you?’ The sound of footsteps racing down.

Lily rolled her eyes.

A blonde woman appeared in the doorway. She stared at me, then at Lily, who was dropping a piece of pineapple languidly into her mouth. She walked over and snatched the container from her hands. ‘Where the
hell
have you been? The school is beside themselves. Daddy was out driving round the neighbourhood. We thought you’d been murdered! Where
were
you?’

‘He’s not my dad.’

‘Don’t get smart with me, young lady. You can’t just walk back in here like nothing’s happened! Do you have any idea of the trouble you’ve caused? I was up with your brother half the night, and then I couldn’t sleep for worrying about what had happened to you. I’ve had to cancel our trip to Granny Houghton’s because we didn’t know where you were.’

Lily stared at her coolly. ‘I don’t know why you bothered. You don’t usually care where I am.’

The woman stiffened with rage. She was thin, the kind of thin that comes with faddy diets or compulsive exercise; her hair was expensively cut and coloured so that it looked neither, and she was wearing what I assumed were designer jeans. But her face, tanned as it was, betrayed her: she looked exhausted.

She spun round to me. ‘Is it you she’s been staying with?’

‘Well, yes, but –’

She looked me up and down, and apparently decided she was not enamoured of what she saw. ‘Do you know the trouble you’re causing? Do you have any idea how old she is? What the hell do you want with a girl that young anyway? You must be, what, thirty?’

‘Actually, I –’

‘Is this what it’s about?’ she asked her daughter. ‘Are you having a relationship with this woman?’

‘Oh, Mum, shut
up
.’ Lily had picked up the pineapple again, and was fishing around in it with her forefinger. ‘It’s not what you think. She hasn’t caused any of it.’ She lowered the last piece of pineapple into her mouth, pausing to chew, perhaps for dramatic effect, before she spoke again. ‘She’s the woman who used to look after my dad. My real dad.’

Tanya Houghton-Miller sat back in the endless cushions of her cream sofa and stirred her coffee. I perched on the edge of the sofa opposite, gazing at the oversized Diptyque candles and the artfully placed
Interiors
magazines. I was slightly afraid that if I sat back as she had, my coffee would tip into my lap.

‘How did you meet my daughter?’ she said wearily. Her wedding finger sported two of the biggest diamonds I’d ever seen.

‘I didn’t, really. She turned up at my flat. I had no idea who she was.’

She digested that for a minute. ‘And you used to look after Will Traynor.’

‘Yes. Until he died.’

There was a brief pause as we both studied the ceiling – something had just crashed above our heads. ‘My sons.’ She sighed. ‘They have some behavioural issues.’

‘Are they from your … ?’

‘They’re not Will’s, if that’s what you’re asking.’

We sat there in silence. Or as near to silence as it could get when you could hear furious screaming upstairs. There was another thud, followed by an ominous silence.

‘Mrs Houghton-Miller,’ I said. ‘Is it true? Is Lily Will’s daughter?’

She raised her chin slightly. ‘Yes.’

I felt suddenly shaky, and put my coffee cup on the table. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand how –’

‘It’s quite simple. Will and I were together during the last year of uni. I was totally in love with him, of course. Everyone was. Although I should say it wasn’t all one-way traffic – you know?’ She raised a small smile and waited, as if expecting me to say something.

I couldn’t. How could Will not have told me he had a daughter? After everything we had been through?

Tanya drawled on: ‘Anyway. We were the golden couple of our group. Balls, punting, weekends away, you know the drill. Will and I – well, we were everywhere.’ She told the story as if it were still fresh to her, as if it were something she had gone over and over in her head. ‘And then at our Founders’ Ball, I had to leave to help my friend Liza, who had got herself into a bit of a mess, and when I came back, Will was gone. No idea where he was. So I waited there for ages, and all the cars came and took everyone home, and finally a girl I didn’t even know very well came up to me and told me that Will had gone off with a girl called Stephanie Loudon. You won’t know her but she’d had her eye on him for ever. At first I didn’t believe it, but I drove to her house anyway, and sat outside, and sure enough, at five a.m. he came out and they stood there kissing on the doorstep, like they couldn’t care who saw. And when I got out of the car and confronted him, he didn’t even have the grace to be ashamed. He just said there was no point in us getting emotional as we were never going to last beyond college anyway.

‘And then, of course, college finished, which was something of a relief, to be honest, because who wants to be the girl Will Traynor dumped? But it was so hard to get over, because it had ended so abruptly. After we left and he started work in the City I wrote to him asking if we could at least meet for a drink so I could work out what on earth had gone
wrong. Because, as far as I was concerned, we had been really happy, you know? And he just got his secretary to send this – this
card
, saying she was very sorry but Will’s diary was absolutely full and he didn’t have time right now but he wished me all the best. “All the best”.’ She grimaced.

I winced internally. Much as I wanted to discount her story, this version of Will held a horrible ring of truth. Will himself had looked back at his earlier life with utter clarity, had confessed how badly he had treated women when he was younger. (His exact words were: ‘I was a complete arse.’)

Tanya was still talking. ‘And then, about two months later, I discovered I was pregnant. And it was already awfully late because my periods had always been erratic and I hadn’t realized I’d already missed two. So I decided to go ahead and have Lily. But –’ here she lifted her chin again, as if braced to defend herself – ‘there was no point in telling him. Not after everything he’d said and done.’

My coffee had gone cold. ‘No point in telling him?’

‘He’d as good as said he didn’t want anything to do with me. He would have acted as if I’d done it deliberately, to trap him or something.’

My mouth was hanging open. I closed it. ‘But you – you don’t think he had the right to know, Mrs Houghton-Miller? You don’t think he might have wanted to meet his child? Regardless of what had happened between the two of you?’

She put down her cup.

‘She’s
sixteen
,’ I said. ‘She would have been fourteen, fifteen when he died. That’s an awful long –’

‘And by that time she had Francis. He was her father. And he has been very good to her. We were a family. Are a family.’

‘I don’t understand –’

‘Will didn’t
deserve
to know her.’

The words settled in the air between us.

‘He was an arsehole. Okay? Will Traynor was a selfish arsehole.’ She pushed a strand of hair back from her face. ‘Obviously I didn’t know what had happened to him. That came as a complete shock. But I can’t honestly say it would have made a difference.’

It took me a moment to find my voice. ‘It would have made every difference. To him.’

She looked at me sharply.

‘Will killed himself,’ I said, and my voice cracked a little. ‘Will ended his life because he couldn’t see any reason to go on. If he’d known he had a daughter –’

She stood up. ‘
Oh
, no. You don’t pin that on me, Miss Whoever-you-are. I am not going to be made to feel responsible for that man’s suicide. You think my life isn’t complicated enough? Don’t you dare come here judging me. If you’d had to cope with half of what I cope with … No. Will Traynor was a horrible man.’

‘Will Traynor was the finest man I ever knew.’

She let her gaze run up and down me. ‘Yes. Well, I can imagine that’s probably true.’

I thought I had never been filled with such an instant dislike for someone.

I had stood to leave when a voice broke into the silence. ‘So my dad really didn’t know about me.’

Lily was standing very still in the doorway. Tanya Houghton-Miller blanched. Then she recovered herself. ‘I was saving you from hurt, Lily. I knew Will very well, and I was not prepared to put either of us through the humiliation of trying to persuade him to be part of a relationship he wouldn’t have wanted.’ She smoothed her hair. ‘And you really must stop this awful eavesdropping habit. You’re likely to get quite the wrong end of the stick.’

I couldn’t listen to any more. I walked to the door as a boy
began shouting upstairs. A plastic truck flew down the stairs and crashed into pieces somewhere below. An anxious face – Filipina? – gazed at me over the banister. I began to walk down the stairs.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m sorry, Lily. We’ll – perhaps we’ll talk some other time.’

‘But you’ve hardly told me anything about my dad.’

‘He wasn’t your father,’ Tanya Houghton-Miller said. ‘Francis has done more for you since you were little than Will ever would have done.’

‘Francis is not my
dad
,’ Lily roared.