Daughters (6 page)

Battered and bruised, she had lain in bed looking up at him with a drip in her arm, sucking in the blood like a vampire, so eager was she to be up and to show how perfectly all right she was.

Lara remembered now when she had changed from being a trusting girl into something else. The exact moment. She had been in the supermarket, helping herself to a bag
of potatoes – English Whites, the best for roasting. A light clicked on in her head. Blood mounted into her cheeks and her knees forgot their load-bearing duty. At one moment, she was a mass of uncertainty, at the next, fully resolved.

Now the wind whipped strands of her hair against her lips. ‘We never sorted it, did we?’

‘No. We didn’t.’

‘Bill, when Louis was born …’ He held up a hand as warning.
Don’t.

After Louis was born, Bill had held him until they had taken him away.

‘Bill … we always meant to do something in memory of Louis.
Something.
I rather like the idea of a seat in a park so people can sit on it in the sun …’

‘I can’t talk about it, Lara. OK?’

‘Even now?’

‘Even now.’

Why, oh, why had she said anything? Why stir up the memories of how drained and dead, barely alive, she had been at that time? Bill too … with his burdens of sorrow and fear. She knew then, as she knew now, that nothing else would ever be so cataclysmic. It was some knowledge to have on board before you were thirty, and its repercussions ran wide and deep.

She anchored her hair back with both hands and pushed the conversation on to the practical, the normal, the non-threatening. ‘You’ll be occupied with the house. It’ll give you plenty to do. I’m glad you’ll be busy.’

That amused him. ‘I’d hoped to be slowing down.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘You mean
you
wouldn’t.’

‘That’s it,’ she countered. The idea made her flinch. ‘Think of the days when you were forced to stop work at sixty.’ Her feet had made matching dark prints on the icy grass, companionable and humdrum. ‘Nor should you. Anyway, Maudie and Jasmine have a way to go before they’re settled. And there’s the wedding.’

A rusting lawn roller had been abandoned by the paddock gate, and Bill used it as a convenient mud scraper. ‘You shouldn’t take so much on your shoulders. The girls will cope.’ He looked up towards the lawn where a figure was hurrying towards them. ‘Sarah’s coming.’

‘I hope you’ll be happy.’

‘I think we will.’ The roller emitted a thud as he banged his foot against it. ‘I hope we’ve got it right this time.’

That hurt. She wanted to grab him and say,
We could have got it right
,
but she wasn’t quick enough.

‘Hi,’ said Sarah, out of breath. She glanced from Bill to Lara. In her haste, her coat had flapped open and mud speckled her skirt. ‘I was expecting you inside, Bill. We were all expecting you. Eve is beside herself.’

‘Darling,’ he slipped an arm around her, ‘sorry to keep you waiting. As usual, I took a detour.’

‘Good thing I know you, then.’ She was affectionate, possessive, in control.

‘Through and through, sweetheart.’

He meant Lara never had.

Recently the doctors’ practice had expanded, which was not surprising as it served an area of high-density population. Two new full-time GPs had been taken on, which meant Lara had had to move out of the consulting room she job-shared with her fellow therapist, Robin Brett. Space was now at a premium and, eventually, they carved a new office out of a utility room that had been used to store lavatory paper and cleaning equipment. They furnished it with a couple of tables, plastic chairs and cheap carpet tiles.

The new domain was good. Old broom cupboard it might have been, but its latest incarnation as a consulting room represented years of her patient study and consolidation.

Lara got out the files for her morning clients and read through the first two sets of case notes.

Help me … heal me …

This was the cry of much of humanity, the seam of need that ran through the everyday.

‘I’m training to be a counsellor,’ Lara informed Bill, when Maudie was eight and he, she and the children had had time to adapt to their haphazard life. ‘With special emphasis on …’

‘On?’

‘Bereavement.’

He had been astonished. Things were bad then. Rock bottom, in fact. Looking back, they were struggling to learn a new language and neither of them had mastered the vocabulary. Often they had got it wrong. The linguistic gap was evident when Bill had pointed out that Maudie was only eight and needed
looking after
.

She had exploded, ‘She needs a father.’

‘She’s got one, Lara.’ He had whirled around, faster than she had ever seen him move before. ‘Don’t you ever forget it.’

After qualifying, she had been fortunate to find a GP practice with an enlightened view on therapeutic services. She worked three days a week for them and another full day at a private clinic, which gave her a day’s leeway to study and catch up. In theory, this left the evenings and weekends free to concentrate on the children. In practice, it took time to build up her list of clients, of whom a sizeable majority wanted to see her early in the morning or in the evening. The irony did not escape her either that, having been sad and blighted for so long, she was earning a living from other people’s misery.

A stream of people washed in and out of her consulting room.
I hate myself/my partner/my children. My life has no meaning. I’m frightened.
There were some to whom life had been unbearably cruel. Others had painted themselves into psychological corners and, unwilling to take the first step out of them, thrived on being miserable and self-conscious. Then there were the plain bloody-minded – who frequently included teenagers. Each contributed a piece
to the mosaic. Each provided a strange kind of antidote to her own predicament …

‘Is it justifiable,’ she asked her professional mentor, at one of their regular meetings, ‘to use others for oneself … if only in a small way?’

‘Physician heal thyself,’ was the response.

If she had ever been tempted to write a blog, it would have been entitled: ‘The Divorcee’s Guide to Cheeseparing: how to keep sane with three children, a job with anti-social hours and an income that depends on the misery of others’.

As her practice grew, communicating with Bill became easier. Perhaps, in listening to others, she learned the missing vocabulary.

It had not always been so.

Flashback.

They talk more in court than outside it. Must improve, she thinks.

‘My ex-husband is tucked up down the road,’ this was the modern divorce, she plans to say in the blog she never writes, ‘with Violet, his new partner. We have regular contact.’

Each week, Lara asked him, ‘What time do you want to pick them up?’

Each week Bill replied, ‘Five thirty,’ or ‘After work.’

Had Shrinking V. still been around when Lara began work?

Chronology did a melting trick whenever she thought about that period of pain and readjustment and it was impossible to be precise about dates and events. It was the other stuff – the loss, the anger and a persistent sense
that she was off-balance – that remained pin sharp. All that – loss of confidence, a fear she would go under, her terror of never being whole – plus the death of a childish faith, which had persisted for so long, that life always worked out for the best.

‘Consider it this way,’ said her professional mentor. ‘You can face your patients knowing you are as exposed as they are. You can’t tell them anything about yourself, but you will know their journey.’

Robin knocked and put his head around the door.

She smiled.

Case Notes

Brett (Lt Col.), Robin. 51. Retired. Technical Officer (TO) Royal Logistic Corp. Served: Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Iraq. Survived (just). Left arm rendered inoperable after IED exploded too close. Since leaving army, lived in Syria, published well-received memoir. Three languages, including fluent Arabic. Now qualified counsellor, working primarily with teenage boys.

Robin and she had joined the practice at roughly the same time, and divided the job between them. (Naturally they had different mentors to supervise their progress as counsellors.)

‘I promise not to tread on your toes,’ he had said at their first meeting. ‘First rule of operations.’

She laughed. ‘So that’s how it works.’

‘Conflict is the way of the world. I try to avoid it.’

‘Why did you choose to do this?’ She gestured at the consulting room.

‘I didn’t. It chose me.’ He levelled at Lara the look – grave with the hint of a smile – she had come to know well and distrust, for it gave nothing away. ‘The same reason as you, I imagine.’

‘Survival,’ she replied, thinking:
Jasmine, Eve, Maudie.

‘Exactly. Having risked it many times, I value my life. Please can we make other people value theirs?’

They had talked over the areas they would cover between them. He had filled in Lara with some detail about himself but no more than was necessary: divorced, childless, etc.
I am
, he informed her, by censoring the detail,
a closed book.

Robin was perfect with the boys, those restless, under-parented, disengaged, sometimes violent boys for whom life was a trudge, a blank, a disappointment. Lara had listened in on a couple of his sessions, during which quietness fell over even the most antagonistic and twitchy patient.

Over coffee, she also listened to his Tales From the Frontline. Sometimes she pictured him and his men spread out across the ochre desert. There, they followed him over difficult terrain, positioning their boots in his footsteps, pleased to be able to place their faith in someone. At the same time, they knew that that faith would not protect them. But it was better than nothing.

He shut the door because Daniella was known to eavesdrop. ‘I’ve had a journalist on the phone wanting to do a feature about our kind of work.’

She envisaged the article, complete with headline. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not.’

‘I’ve told him to stuff it.’

‘Politely?’

‘Ish.’

‘Fascinated to know what your “ish” is like.’

‘It’s a mystery, Lara. Let’s say he got the message.’

Publicity was never worth it. Any publicity. It ripped up the privacy that was so essential to the relationships.

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Sometimes, when they were talking, Robin looked at her in a certain way. It made her feel a little breathless, light-headed. (‘Inconvenient and inappropriate’, to quote the rule book. Never, ever sleep with your colleagues.)

‘By the way, are you happy with the workload?’

He cradled his bad arm, then eased it back into a normal position.
Blackened flesh. Splintered bones.
‘Sure. But I can always take more on.’

‘It’s possible I might have to expand. Various reasons.’

He was quick. ‘
Have
to expand rather than
want
to expand?’

‘Some negotiations with my ex-husband. He’s getting married again, and it looks as though I might have to make up a financial shortfall.’

‘You could do,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, you don’t have to be bullied either.’ Again a quick rub of the arm – a dusting-off gesture. ‘There’s a danger that the most significant relationship in one’s life turns out to be with
one’s ex, whether happy or unhappy. Unlike the marriage, they’re there for life.’

‘There’s always a connection,’ she said.

‘You mean the memory of a connection.’

Point taken.

He looked at her. She looked at him.

Their respective lawyers had got together and the upshot was that Bill’s solicitor phoned Lara early the following Tuesday morning. ‘I’m told this is the best time to get hold of you.’

‘And?’

‘Mrs Russell,’ he barely concealed his impatience, ‘I don’t suppose either side wants to prolong negotiations.’

The implication behind the smooth inflection was that she was tricky, and she wasn’t having it. ‘We’ve been through that stage,’ she replied calmly. ‘After I was left.’

The rebound took a couple of seconds. ‘My client has honoured his side of the divorce agreement to the letter.’ True. ‘He now wishes to renegotiate the schedule. He will, of course, provide for Maudie as agreed until she leaves university. It’s the other payments.’

He continued for some time in this vein, pointing out how punctilious her ex-husband had been and arguing that the proposed amendments to the settlement were fair. His smoothness irked her. Not good. Peering down the tunnel of the past, as she had done so many wearisome times, she couldn’t resist challenging him: ‘If it’s a choice between keeping up mortgage payments and behaving well, guess what ranks lowest on the list?’

He had heard it before, but he didn’t like it.

Once, before the divorce was done and dusted, she had spotted Violet and Bill emerging from a restaurant. Violet was in a pair of coupe cigarette trousers, as skinny as malinky, he in his best grey flannel suit. They looked so unencumbered, so pleased with life, so
at liberty
. It was cold and they were busy fastening their coats, adjusting bags and briefcases, neither of them having to think about buggies or bottles or keeping a child warm.

And she went home, where the noise of children hit the ears, the needs of children tugged the heart. Three small heads clustered around her, drawing her deep into the conspiracy of their love.

Would she have had it different?

Bill’s solicitor was persistent: ‘May I remind you that when the original agreement was drawn up you were not earning. I am informed that you have been doing so for some years now.’

Impossible to refute. ‘I would have to renegotiate my mortgage. Failing that, I will have to make plans to expand my practice.’

He did not say,
But that is what most people do
. His silence said it.

Cue sleepless nights and several evenings in the consulting room spent configuring and reconfiguring the numbers.