Happily Ever After (56 page)

“That’s rubbish,” she said, not wanting to sound like the bratty kid who shows off in front of her boyfriend by being rude to her parents. But she had to call him on it. “Dad, you told me to go to New York. You were the one who said—” She stopped.

“Said what? No, I didn’t,” her father told her.

Elle tried to catch his eye. “Well—OK.” But she couldn’t leave it, like a bite you can’t stop scratching once you’ve started. “You told me to leave Mum behind, you said I needed to make a clean break, that she was selfish and manipulative, she was using me.” He looked blank. “You don’t remember? I do, that’s why I went, that’s why I left her behind. And I shouldn’t have gone.” She clutched her hands under the table, not looking at Rhodes or Melissa, standing next to each other with bowls of food in their hands, looking blank.

“Mandana was like that,” John said. “It was best for you. You took the decision yourself.” He sipped his wine, and looked around him, as if the conversation was over. “Well, this is very—”

Elle dreaded talking about her mother. She avoided any situation where it might come up. But now, she couldn’t help the anger that bubbled up inside her. “She shouldn’t have died, Dad. She wasn’t a bad person. She was a good person. She was my m-mum.” She could see her, smell her, hear her laugh, as if she were in the room. She was going to cry, she knew it.

Underneath the table, Gray’s cool fingers stole across her lap and gripped her hand in his.

“Sorry,” Elle said. The rest of them were looking at her, frozen as if they didn’t know what to do next. “I just think we let her down.”

This is what I didn’t want, this is what I was trying to avoid, this is what happens.

“You can’t just come back here and start making these accusations,” Melissa said calmly. “You weren’t here. We tried. We had no idea how bad it was. We should have got her into rehab. A long time before.”

Elle thought of the night before she drank herself to death. “I nearly did,” she said. It sounded so lame, she winced. Melissa looked at her.

“‘Nearly’?” she said. “Wow, Elle, well done. Nearly. Gosh.” Elle hung her head. Melissa said wearily, “Look, I know—”

Rhodes interrupted. “OK, Melissa. I think we’re all to blame.” He looked at his father. John put his napkin on his lap, carefully smoothing the cotton, as if this conversation simply wasn’t taking place. “Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Are you listening?” Rhodes asked. Elle watched him.

“It’s in the past now, Rhodes.”

“It’s not, though,” Elle said. “It’s right now. It’s stopping me from doing things, from moving on with my life. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. ’Cause I blame myself for letting Mum die, and it just…” A lone tear plopped onto the table. “It makes me doubt everything.” She took her hand away from Gray’s. “Rhodes, you know what I mean?”

“No,” said Rhodes flatly. He put the bowl down on the table. They all looked at it, as if food were an unexpected afterthought.

“I don’t doubt myself and you shouldn’t, Elle. I think she was selfish and mean. I think she was a monster,” Rhodes said. He took two serving spoons out of a Le Creuset jug by the Aga. Elle watched him, thinking how at ease he was. “She loved drink, she didn’t love us. She was embarrassing. If she’d loved us properly she’d have done something about it. Selfish, yes, like I say, selfish.”

“That wasn’t her fault,” Melissa said. “Rhodes, that’s not fair, it was a disease. It is a disease.”

“She chose to have it, for fuck’s sake,” said Rhodes, viciously chucking the serving spoons onto the table.

“No, Rhodes,” Melissa said. “I wasn’t her biggest fan, you know it. I don’t think she liked me much either.” Rhodes nodded; Elle realized with a start that she didn’t much either, but it struck her then that that was life, perhaps you just got on with it, sent birthday cards and presents for Lauren and tried not to let it bother you. “But I think it was beyond her control. I saw it with my dad and he learned to control it, and now it rules his life, not drinking. She couldn’t do it,” said Melissa. “I just think her life didn’t turn out how she wanted, and she used alcohol to help her deal with it.”

“Well. Like father, like daughter,” John said. He peered at the salad bowl. “She always thought she’d killed him, you know. Ridiculous. This looks delicious. Is that goat’s cheese?”

“What does that mean? ‘Like father like daughter’?” Rhodes asked.

“Yeah—what do you mean, Dad?” said Elle.

“Well, you know.” John cleared his throat. “He was an alcoholic. He had a cerebral hemorrhage right in front of her. You must have known that.”

“We were kids,” Rhodes said, dangerously. “How would we have known that?”

John sighed. “Sorry. I thought she might have told you. She was drinking too much already. Always had done but it had got much worse. I’d given her leaflets, got her to a colleague of mine; she wouldn’t listen. She went up to see him, her dad I mean. Had this idea all these things were all his fault; he’d knocked her and her mother around.” He looked down at his hands. “Mandana always blamed him for all her problems, you know what she was like.”

Elle had the curious feeling their father had forgotten he was talking to them. “Anyway, they had a huge argument. He told her she was out of order. He hit her again. The mother—well, she wouldn’t say boo to a goose, ever—just watches. Mandana starts screaming at him. She hits him. He shouts and shouts. Then suddenly he collapses to the floor. Stone dead.”

He cleared his throat again and looked around, as if suddenly remembering where he was, with whom he was. “You know, the holiday in Skye was only a couple of weeks later and by then she’d decided she was to blame. She was… It was like a switch just flicked.” He shrugged.

With a force that almost overtook her in its violence, Elle suddenly ached to slap her mild-looking, calm father, to shake him out of the wall of protective complacency that he’d built up, that stopped him from troubling himself about his ex-wife’s problems or his teenage son’s delinquency, or the lives
and dreams of his older children once they were the slightest bit out of step with what he thought was proper.

“I didn’t know any of that,” Rhodes said.

Gray’s hand tightened around Elle’s. She shook it off. “Did you—know he was an alcoholic?” she asked her father.

“Oh, yes. He was a nasty fellow, really. Looked all right from the outside. Respectable. Beat her mother up. Spent what money they had on alcohol, spent all evening in his study drinking it. We hardly saw them, you know. M-Mandana went up on her own, from time to time.” He stumbled over her name. “They disowned her when she got pregnant, wouldn’t come to the wedding. Broke her heart,” he said, almost casually.

Rhodes and Elle looked at each other. “I never knew that either, Dad,” said Elle, smoothing her fingers over the tablecloth. “And he hit her too?”

“Oh, yes. A few times. Not regularly, but when he was in a bad way. That’s why she ran off to the States the first time, when she was only eighteen. Then again when she was in her twenties, and she started doing stupid things like selling pot. She was pretty off the rails when I met her, I see it now.”

Elle realized her mouth was hanging open. She stared at Gray, but he was gazing at John too. Her eyes met Rhodes’s, across the table. He shook his head slowly.

“And don’t you think all that might have a bearing on the fact that she became an alcoholic?” said Melissa, in her clear, precise voice. She went over to the counter and fetched a water jug. “You know alcoholics are three times more likely to have had parents who were alcohol dependent. You never thought to discuss it with her? You must have known that, you were a doctor.”

Elle wanted to hug her. John shifted in his seat. “Melissa,” he said coolly, “look, dear. Maybe I’m an old-fashioned sort of chap. But I don’t care to discuss my first marriage with you. It wasn’t a happy one. I love my children, but—”

“You can’t airbrush her out like that,” said Rhodes. “That’s rubbish.”

Elle sat there, watching them. The images were stronger than ever now. Mandana reading to them; Mandana in the library, walking shy children in Clothkits pinafores around to the children’s section; Mandana rolling around on the lawn with their smelly dog Toogie. And there it was back again; she blinked, it was horrible: the words
Sorry Ellie
on that piece of paper,
Sorry
.
I’m sorry.

Her father was slightly red in the face. She was glad, as if they’d got to him. “We don’t blame you, Dad, but—you mustn’t do that,” she said. “I wish we’d known. She didn’t—what a waste,” Elle said simply, twisting her hands in her lap.

“It sounds like you do blame me,” said John.

“Well, you left her,” said Elle. “You broke her heart, you went off with someone else and had a great life. And she didn’t.”

“It wasn’t like that,” said John. “I never cheated on your mother. I was just…” He rubbed his face and looked up. “I was just very tired, by then. Perhaps I should have done more. Things weren’t right, I know, but after her father died, she changed. It was like a trigger, it was all out in the open. She drank and drank and I couldn’t stop her. And then I’d stopped caring. I just wanted to get away.”

“But you didn’t mind leaving us behind,” Rhodes said.

John bit his lip and then shrugged. “I knew she wouldn’t hurt you, you know. And you’ve turned out OK, both of you. She was a great mum.”

It was a neat speech; there was no way of undoing it without criticizing the person they’d been trying to defend.

Elle wanted to say,
But she crashed the car twice with us in it when she was drunk. And… and I used to drink too, I nearly became an alcoholic, I can say it now. And it nearly killed me when
she died. We aren’t a family anymore.
She wished she could say it out loud. And then she wondered why she didn’t.

She took a deep breath, and said, “Dad, but she nearly killed us in the car, twice. I used to drink over a bottle a day and I nearly went the same way as her. I nearly went under when she died. We aren’t really a family anymore. I can’t believe you knew all that, and you never told us, or tried to help her?” There was a pause. “It’s not all your fault, but some of it is.”

“I—” John said immediately, defensively, and then he stopped again. “Well, I suppose some of it is. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

In the novels Elle read, whenever there was a reckoning between the family and the wayward son or parent or whomever, people hugged and cried and said, “Forgive me, can we be happy now?”

Real life wasn’t like that, and they weren’t like that. Rhodes turned and glanced at Elle, and then he nodded, as if replying for both of them.

“Fine,” he said.

“Very good,” Gray said softly. He smiled at Elle. “Very good indeed.”

Elle didn’t know if it was good or not. It annoyed her that Gray was nodding, as though everything was OK now. She was very tired, and tired of trying not to give in and sob, because to think of her mother and how life had twisted and turned out of her reach so that she could never keep up with it made her feel totally hollow and angry, but she couldn’t work out who to be angry with. Her grandfather, for drinking and hitting Mandana? Her dad, for leaving her? Rhodes, Melissa, Bryan, Anita, whoever saw her and failed to help her? Most of all herself, she, Elle, for believing her mother’s lies because she wanted to ignore them, for burying her head in the sand. There was no neat answer, and she couldn’t turn the final page and think, as she could with a novel,
That’s the end of the story, all neatly tied up
.

She poured water into the glasses. “Let’s have a toast to Mum,” she said, desperate suddenly to change the subject, to move away from the past. “Water, not wine, I don’t care if it’s bad luck. Wine wasn’t good luck for her. To Mandana.”

The five of them clinked their glasses together, in the warm, quiet kitchen.

Damerel strode to the door, and locked it. “And now, my love,” he said, returning to Venetia, “for the fourth time…!”

Georgette Heyer,
Venetia

MY DEAR ELLE,

Thank you for your time yesterday. It was good to catch up and to tell you about our plans for Aphra Books. I know how busy you are; my thanks.

You said you weren’t interested in a move, but I would ask you to reconsider. I don’t know why I keep asking you. But you would be perfect for this job and I dare to say this as someone who has known you a while now, this job would be perfect for you. In this light and just in case it is of interest, I thought I’d break down the terms of our offer.

Editorial Director. £—salary plus—shares in Aphra books. Seat on the board with monthly board meetings. You would be expected to buy a minimum of 4–5 books a year and contribute to the overall shape of the list. You won’t be managing anything unless you’d like; you’ll be doing what you love best. You, more than most people, know the value of a good book.