Having It All (33 page)

Reaching out her mother took her hand in hers and held it tight and she was grateful for the comfort. ‘Was it really from you?’

‘Of course it was. David didn’t even ring to say Happy Christmas. His own children! I suppose he was too caught up with thinking about the bloody baby!’

‘What baby?’

Liz could have kicked herself. For her own self-respect she hadn’t wanted her mother to know about the baby. Somehow it seemed the final, indefensible, humiliating betrayal.

Her mother opened her arms. ‘Oh, Lizzie, you poor darling.’

And now that the admission was made and her mother knew her last secret she threw herself into her arms and wept, until Daisy, up till now unmoved by the maelstrom of emotions around her,
suddenly began to howl in unison.

When the phone rang it was such a surprise that both Liz and Daisy stopped crying. Liz reached for a tissue and sniffed. ‘Would you get it, Mum? It’s probably Ginny ringing to say
Happy Christmas.’

But it wasn’t Ginny.

‘Hello, Eleanor. It’s David. Can I speak to Liz, please?’

Panicking, Liz shook her head violently.

‘Sorry, David,’ Eleanor replied in words chipped, letter by letter, from an iceberg, ‘she’s comforting Daisy at the moment.’

David wasn’t going to be frozen out by Eleanor, he’d hardly expected her to be sweetness and light. ‘Is Jamie there, then?’

‘Sorry again.’ Liz wondered if her mother’s voice had given David frostbite yet. ‘He’s upstairs in his bedroom. I’m afraid he’s rather upset at the
moment.’

Liz pictured David staying in some plush hotel with Britt, forcing himself to make a quick phone call to his ex-family so that he could sit down and enjoy his Christmas dinner with a clear
conscience, feeling he’d done his duty. The thought made her angrier than she’d ever felt in her life before.

Jumping up she grabbed the receiver from her startled mother.

‘Hello, David, this is Liz. Would you like to know the reason your five-year-old son is upstairs, sobbing his heart out? Because he hasn’t had a Christmas present from his father and
when I bought him one and pretended it was from you, he didn’t believe me. So, I hope you’re having a really happy Christmas, just like we are! Goodbye David! And thanks a
million.’

And just in case he should try and phone back, she jerked the jack lead out of the wall with such force she almost pulled the wire from its connection.

David sat white-faced and cold with anger staring at the phone. His picture of Liz was of someone warm and understanding, not the hard bitch who’d just shouted at him
down the phone, without even giving him the chance to defend himself. No matter what he tried to do, he always seemed to be in the wrong.

Pouring himself a large whisky he wondered for the first time if Liz had changed and whether, in the last few weeks, he might have been chasing a fantasy which didn’t remotely correspond
to the real woman.

With his finely tuned sense of injustice it didn’t occur to him that if Liz had changed, it was because he had hurt her, and worse still, their children, and that his dream of walking back
into her open arms might just possibly be an unrealistic one. Neither did it occur to him that the way to win back her trust was not by the grand gesture or the clever tactic but only by time and
understanding.

As he stared moodily into his drink he knew only one truth: that he loved Liz and that his instincts told him that she loved him too. So, what was standing between them that couldn’t be
settled between two adult people?

Convinced by his own rationalization that the ground between them was narrow, and the valley green on the other side, he decided to give it one last try.

And when the continuously busy tone told him that she had taken the phone off the hook rather than talk to him he decided there was only one plan of action left to follow: he was going to get
very, very drunk.

Britt had always been blessed with the gift, useful to herself but irritating to others, of getting to sleep the moment her head hit the pillow, but on the night before
Christmas for once it deserted her.

The four walls, so close together after the huge airy spaces of her warehouse flat, seemed to close in on her, and the nylon sheets felt sticky and unpleasant. Used to the starched crispness of
laundered cotton, every little snag in the fabric felt huge and itchy, and like the princess and the pea she found they stopped her falling comfortably into sleep.

On the few occasions her eyes closed, she found herself on the motorway again, only this time the other car didn’t regain control but spun crazily like a top and careered off the road and
down the bank into a pylon where it burst into flames, showering Christmas presents on the rubbish-strewn field below.

At six-thirty Britt woke up in a pool of sweat that the nylon sheets had failed to absorb. She had had the worst night she could ever remember. Retching slightly as she tried to sit up she
realized that morning sickness had arrived and she ran for the bathroom.

But by the time she was leaning over the toilet, the sickness had passed. Shivering in the unaccustomed cold she cursed her parents for not having central heating. She could see her breath, for
God’s sake, and when she leaned in to the mirror it frosted up before she could see whether she looked as bad as she felt.

For a second it all came back to her. How numbingly cold it had been growing up in this house. She smiled, remembering how she had developed a technique for survival. Before she went to bed, she
had laid out all her school clothes and then, when her mother knocked on her door to wake her, she would reach out for them and dress in bed, eyes closed, pretending to be a poor little blind girl,
only emerging from the warmth of the bedclothes when she was fully dressed, at which point her sight would be miraculously restored to her and she was able to put on her heavy black school lace-ups
unaided and rush downstairs for her morning Ready Brek, noticing bitterly that the tasteless sludge didn’t ring her body with a visible glow of warmth as the TV advert proclaimed.

In Yorkshire the answer to every problem was a cup of tea and Britt decided to go down to the kitchen and make herself one. It was only when she got to the bottom of the stairs and saw the small
tree, its fairy lights flashing a weird pink and red like the neon Motel-sign in a hammy Hollywood movie, that she remembered that it was Christmas morning and she saw that Christmas or not her
mother was already up and kneeling in her old quilted nylon dressing gown, laying a fire.

‘Hello, love, did you sleep well?’

On the point of confessing that she had had the worst night of her life, something stopped her and she smiled back. ‘Yes, Mum, fine.’

Watching her mother quietly for a moment she remembered the photographs of her in the family albums. Her mother, now faded and anxious, had once been pretty and lively and had glowed with
happiness as her married life began. And yet, looking at her kneeling there in her dressing gown, Britt felt herself to be a cuckoo in this poky suburban nest. And she realized, with an unfamiliar
twist of regret, that hers was a classic story.

Her parents, always believing that education was power and that it was a gift to which girls should be as equally entitled as boys, had scrimped and saved to give her the best opportunities they
could. With their encouragement she had gone to grammar school and on to Oxford. And steadily, with each new achievement, she had moved further and further away from them, until she had, now,
almost nothing in common with them at all.

And as she sat sipping her tea another memory, deep and repressed, sprang up bringing with it a sick feeling of shame which even twelve years hadn’t managed to blot out.

It had been Degree Day at Oxford, for parents the one moment where the saving and the sacrifice seemed to have all been worth it. The day when their sons or daughters, dressed in gown and mortar
board or cap, trooped into the rococo splendour of the Sheldonian Theatre and collected their degree from the Vice-Chancellor before submitting themselves to the most sacred ritual of all: the
taking of the graduation photo for the place of honour on mantelpiece and in family album.

And she had deprived them of it, their one moment of reflected glory, because she was ashamed of them. To Britt, groomed and sophisticated now and in with the university’s smart set, the
idea of her father in an ill-fitting suit and her mother wearing Crimplene and a borrowed wedding hat, wandering uncomfortably among the rich businessmen and titled parents of her new friends, was
too much to face. So she had put them off, telling them she would be on holiday for Degree Day and would collect hers by post.

But she had gone all the same. And as she stood amongst a group of laughing friends she had turned to see the only other student from Rothwell Grammar standing watching her with her parents, and
she had gone cold and sweaty, and her day had been ruined by the fear that her parents might, after all, discover the truth. That she had been too embarrassed to invite them.

If they did hear, nothing was ever said. But as she looked at the empty mantelpiece this morning, where their only child’s graduation photo should have proudly stood, she felt so ashamed
that she had to look away.

Her mother smiled her faded smile at Britt perching on the arm of the uncomfortable sofa, in a raw silk kimono which had probably cost more than the entire three-piece suite.

‘Warm enough, love? The fire’ll be ready in a minute.’

And Britt watched fascinated as her mother finished plaiting old copies of the
Daily Mirror
into neat firelighters and laid them carefully in the grate, covering them with twigs and
coal, then sat back and put a match to the paper and stared at the fire, listening to the hiss and crackle of the kindling as it began to catch. And it struck her for the first time that no matter
what she thought her mother and father were happy with their lives, that they felt secure in their daily rituals and their strong beliefs, pulling together in a tightly knit community. And that it
was she, who believed so passionately in the individual, whose credo decreed that you could have anything you wanted if only you tried hard enough, and that the only person who could really help
you was yourself, it was
she
who found herself pregnant and alone.

For the second time since she’d left London, Britt felt vulnerable and lonely and she knew that it wasn’t her parents who needed her, they had long since learned to expect little of
their remote and haughty daughter. It was she who needed them. Yet she also knew that in this house, where emotions were not displayed or discussed, she didn’t know how to tell them.

Slipping off the arm of the sofa, she kneeled next to her mother and stared into the fire too. Finally she spoke.

‘Mum?’

‘Yes, love?’

‘Next time you make a fire, could you show me how to do it?’

Her mother looked at her in surprise. ‘Course I will, love.’ She smiled shyly at her daughter. ‘Do you know that’s the first time you’ve ever, in your whole life,
asked my advice?’

She glanced at Britt, wondering if she’d gone too far, whether her daughter would bite her head off. But Britt was smiling.

‘More fool me. Oh Mum . . .’

And to her mother’s astonishment Britt threw herself into her mother’s arms, tears streaming down her face, as if she were a little girl again.

‘Oh Mum, I’m sorry . . . I’m really sorry . . .’

Her mother looked at her in amazement. ‘What for, love?’

Britt picked up one of her mother’s hands, black with coal dust and held it against her cheek. ‘For being me. For being such a disappointment to you . . .’

Her mother watched as a thin channel of black drew itself on her daughter’s face where the tears mixed with the coal dust, and she closed her arms around Britt tightly, feeling for the
first time since Britt was a small girl like a real mother and knowing that this was a moment she would always remember.

‘Oh, Britt, Britt. You’re not a disappointment to us.’ She felt her own tears mix with Britt’s. ‘We love you.’

And as she and her mother held each other wordlessly Britt learned the first lesson of families, that they love you whether you deserve it or not.

Over her shoulder she was dimly aware of her father standing at the door in his old-fashioned stripy pyjamas watching them. She saw that he was smiling and the grey, strained look had left his
face.

‘Hello, girls. Nothing like a good cry at Christmas. Anyone feel like a cup of tea?’

David rolled over on to his front in the vast bed and decided he wanted to die. His head was pounding, his mouth was dry and he felt shivery. Dragging himself out of bed he
went to look in the bathroom cupboard, hoping wildly that Logan suffered from hangovers.

But just like everything else he did in life, Logan seemed to do the deed without paying the price other mortals did. There was no Fernet Branca. No Alka Seltzer. Not even that new concoction
– Remorse was it? No, that was his own over-active guilt gland working. Resolve – that was it.

Realizing that, if he wanted to live to see tomorrow, which frankly he wasn’t sure about, he would have to go and get himself some antidote to his currently toxic state, he got up. Washing
his teeth with soap because he’d forgotten to buy toothpaste and gargling with Eau Sauvage, he found that he still smelt like a piss-up in a brewery and that if he didn’t shave he would
be mistaken for a wino and chucked out of the Grosvenor House’s distinguished portals by the doorman.

Slowly he dressed and, putting on his cashmere overcoat, slipped the two empty bottles of whisky into his briefcase and went to look for a rubbish bin and a chemist. Two hundred yards down Park
Lane, it struck him that it was Boxing Day and no chemist would be open. With the empty bottles still in his briefcase he headed into the Hilton, impelled by his belief that a hotel chain
respecting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness must surely sell hangover cures.

He was right. And carrying a paper bag containing Paracetamol, Alka Seltzer and Dextrosol to get his blood sugar going he headed for the bar to wash it down with a stiff Fernet Branca.