Recipes for Melissa (22 page)

Yesterday I did your hair in my bed in the morning and suggested that Daddy might like to learn how to do it and I sensed from the way you reacted that you have probably guessed more than I would wish.

I hope not.

But today – here’s the truth. I am not feeling very well at all so I have been in touch with the lawyer by phone – explaining what must happen with this journal. He is to come and collect it very soon. By Wednesday at the latest. But I am hanging on as long as possible –
hoping, hoping, hoping
… that the test will come back.

And now – deep breath – that other thing I may now have no choice but to tell you.

You may well have noticed a few pages stuck together? I am trusting and hoping that you have not meddled and torn them open. My thinking was that you would assume some mistake. The truth actually is that I was hoping I would be able to tear them out. And this page too. But obviously if you are reading this and the ‘stuck pages’ are still here… Well. It’s not gone as I hoped.

The important thing to say before you read them is that I love you and your father more than life itself. But even good people can carry things in their head and in their hearts that they wish they did not have to.

So separate the sticky pages very, very carefully my darling girl. I stuck them like that so that you would not flick through the journal the minute you got it and jump to the most difficult part without giving me a chance to talk to you a while.

I just hope you will remember, please, to be kind and to believe that this has all run away from me – turning out very differently from how I planned…

Melissa closed the book and looked around her. Not for the first time she felt the extremity of this shift. From the black ink and the terrible place in which her mother was writing, to the banality of the place in which she was reading.

Every single time she looked up from the page, ever since the whole theme of the book had seemed to change – to
darken
– she would feel this same shock at the normality around her. Yes. The sheer banality of it all. All these people smiling over their lattes and their cupcakes, their crosswords and their mobile phones. All these people who knew absolutely nothing of the world to which the words now took her.

For a time, in this dazed state, she watched a woman sitting with a friend, leaning in with some apparent gossip. They were in their late thirties, well-dressed and with that hairstyle that everyone was still copying from
Friends
, as if in mourning that the series was no more. One of the women was laughing and then took out a small compact to refresh her lipstick before checking her watch and signalling that they should get on.

At the next table – a younger mother with a toddler in a high chair, its flat plastic tray covered with cake crumbs. The mother took out a packet of wet wipes from a tartan rucksack and cleaned up the tray and the child’s face – to loud protest.

It all made Melissa feel like such an outsider. All this normality. It made her feel angry on her mother’s behalf and now it also made her feel very, very alone.

She remembered her father lecturing her once when she was a child about this very thing. Shutting herself off. Sitting ever so quietly and just overthinking.

You try to carry too much on your own shoulders. You can talk to me, you know, Melissa.

But there were some things simply too difficult to share. With people who, for instance, considered it perfectly normal. All the ups and down with their own mothers. The fallings in and out. People who had never lost someone and assumed that after a couple of years grief would surely drift away, leaving only the happy memories behind.

Bullshit. Grief, Melissa had learned through her childhood, did not actually go away. It was the thing that had shocked her most of all and in the end set her so apart. The ugly truth that the emptiness did not disappear. It just hid itself and tricked you into believing you were perfectly fine until you turned a corner one day – and
smack
, there it was again. Like the first day she won the merit badge in school and was suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow as it was pinned to her jumper. When she got into university. Fell in love with Sam. Got the job offer. All these things that her mother
would never know
.

Even in that restaurant when Sam produced the ring, she was thinking – not just that she did not actually believe in happy ever afters, that she could not risk it – she was thinking also that she had no one to choose a dress with her. No one to wear a silly hat and cry in the front row of the church.

She could not talk to anyone about any of this because it made her feel selfish and utterly ridiculous.

It had been
seventeen years
…

It was not supposed to be like this.

And now, suddenly, after all the good things in her mother’s book. After the happy memories had been slowly and preciously stirred, it was taking her to a very different place now and she was more confused than ever. No longer just cricket on the beach and happy birthdays and cupcakes and biscuits.

Melissa was feeling more and more uneasy. She was thinking about the children playing in the fountain. How there was no way she could get married and become a mother. Not when she knew what it felt like to be
left.
And – no. She could not talk to Sam about it because he would say – you could not live like that. Worrying. That it was ridiculous. That anyone could get run over by a bus.

But she wasn’t just anyone. And she suddenly had no idea where the hell her mother’s book was going.

27

ELEANOR – 1994

Eleanor read back through the last few lines of the journal and checked her watch. Just time.

She looked over to the bed alongside which there was Melissa’s hairbrush and a carved wooden bowl containing her collection of hair ties. A tumble of colours and textures – polka dot silk. Deep burgundy velvet. Faux fur black. Why had she not thought of handing this ritual over to Max sooner?

She ran her finger around the two, glued pages about two thirds into the journal – just before the special section on motherhood.

Eleanor had written these secret pages only recently, using a glue stick to seal the edges. It was a risk. All a bit basic; a bit boy scout – she was banking on Melissa assuming a mistake; that she would read the rest of the journal first as she was supposed to. If it came to that…

What was contained between the two pages was the memory of what she and Max had come to call ‘the madness’. It was their one cataclysmic blip in the early part of their relationship. A time when all hope of the happy, married future she had come to dream of had been suddenly yanked from beneath her like a rug on a polished floor. Whoosh. Gone.

It was Max who had started it and yet she could never quite bring herself to blame him entirely. For, like so many blips, it was complicated.

For two blissful years with Max after that first meeting at her school, Eleanor had never doubted that they would end up together. It was a ‘when’ not an ‘if’.

Everything seemed set and everything seemed simple. Max loved his job. Max loved Eleanor. And then suddenly and entirely out of character he started stressing completely irrationally about money.

‘Oh for goodness sake, Max, we’ll manage. We’re far better off than most.’

‘But what about down the line – if we have a family, Eleanor? If you go part time. Then the numbers aren’t going to crunch. Not if we want to buy somewhere half decent. Somewhere where you won’t get bloody mugged. Somewhere with a decent school.’

‘Jesus Christ, Max. We’re still single and you’re talking schools?’

‘You know what I mean,’ he was blushing. ‘People have to think of these things. Think ahead. You can’t be an ostrich.’

‘But you’re doing great at the university, Max. Good prospects.’

‘Rubbish money.’

‘Oh it’s not.’

‘Compared to a lawyer or a doctor, it is.’

‘I don’t want to be with a lawyer or a doctor. I want to be with a university professor, thank you very much. A university professor who is brilliant and respected and loves what he does.’

‘And live on the breadline.’

‘And now you are just being silly.’

‘Really? The only reason we’re so flushed now is we’re both working full-time. No dependants. It’s a temporary phase, Eleanor.’

This tetchy to and fro went on for a few weeks with Eleanor failing to make Max snap out of it. She tried everything to distract him, but he seemed suddenly almost depressed. This was most especially ridiculous as he was riding high at the university. One of his papers had suddenly been picked up by the local media and – out of the blue, he was invited to do his first television interview. He claimed to be nervous but turned out to be an absolute natural – bylined as an economics expert with an inside track on the savings and loan crisis in America. The subject was hot as more and more financial mess unravelled. A clip from Max’s interview was used by the national networks. This in turn was used internationally.

Max was suddenly seen as a man who could make complex economics understandable. A bit of a star and ipso facto suddenly in demand.

The university was thrilled. Over the following month there were many more media approaches from national newspapers with one Sunday supplement carrying a lengthy interview on Max’s take on the economic mess. Several American magazines quickly followed suit.

Eleanor could not have been more thrilled for him. Suddenly he was feted at the university with the press office delighted at what the team called his new ‘currency’.

And then one fateful Thursday Max was on the phone to Eleanor, almost exploding with excitement. He told Eleanor he had booked a Michelin star restaurant that night to explain everything.

Eleanor was quietly ecstatic. The university must have given some pay rise to finally snuff out the worrying.

She wore the dress he loved most. She put on his favourite perfume. She took trouble to find matching underwear. Coy. Excited. Nervous.

‘OK, Eleanor? So I have something important to tell you. And to ask you.’

Eleanor put the final forkful of mint pea puree in her mouth and tried to stay calm. She patted her mouth with her napkin and was wondering if he would go down on one knee. She glanced around. Would everyone watch?

‘How would you like to move to New York with the new Communications Adviser for the Unit Two Bank of Minnitag?’ Max was beaming. Ear to ear.

Eleanor had no idea what to say, the room suddenly moving. The air thicker and hazy.

‘America? I’m not understanding. I don’t know what you mean?’

‘I got a call yesterday and they confirmed the details this morning. Offer in the post.’

‘Who? I don’t understand.’ Aware suddenly of the pulse in her ear.

‘The Unit Two Bank of Minnitag. Three times my current salary – Eleanor. Flat provided until we sort ourselves out.
Manhattan
.’

‘But isn’t that the one that’s been in the papers. The one that’s in the shit over this savings and loan crisis. All the stuff you’ve been doing analysis on.’

‘Which is precisely why they need someone like me. Someone with a real understanding of what’s been going wrong and how to put it right – especially with all the new regulation which is bound to come in as a consequence. I’m perfect to advise them. And to handle questions with the media too.’

‘You are kidding, Max?’

‘No. Like I say. I got the job offer confirmed this morning.’

‘But it’s toxic. All the savings and loan mess. You’ve said so yourself.’

Max’s face was now changing.

‘They just want you because of your profile on this. Your integrity. Your paper and your years of research. They want to use you.’

‘Oh thank you very much for your vote of confidence.’

‘Oh come on, Max. You must see that. They’re all going down and they need someone to wheel out at press conferences as the shit continues to hit their fan. The professor from a top British university. On our side.’

‘I might have guessed you would be like this.’

‘And what does that mean?’

‘I get this amazing offer. New York. More money than I had ever dreamed of earning. Security for us. For our future. And this is how you react.’

‘But Max. You’re just not thinking straight. This would be the end of your career, not the making of it. The end of your reputation.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘The Unit Two Bank of Minnitag, Max. Duh?’

‘It’s no worse or better than any other bank.’

‘Which is precisely why you shouldn’t go near it. Not with this whole savings and loan thing going on. I don’t pretend to understand it all. But you do. And you have integrity, Max. A great academic future. You’re a specialist in your sector. Respected. This would finish all that.’

‘Pardon me for hoping you would be excited. Pleased for me. Pleased for us.’ He was looking away; across the restaurant.’

‘How can I be pleased?’

‘Are you saying you won’t come?’

‘Max. You can’t be serious about this?’

There followed the worst three weeks of Eleanor’s pre-married life. Max displayed a stubbornness and blindness that she had no idea he was capable of. He stuck to his guns. He tried very hard to persuade her that she was wrong. That she was naive. That this was what all grown-ups had to do. To shelve their ideals to chase the best future for the people they loved. To grow up.

Eleanor said it was not growing up, it was selling out and it would end badly. Also it was not the way she wanted to live. She would rather have less money. In Britain. If he wanted the Big Apple and its Big cop-out salary, he would have to bloody well go on his own.

She never believed for one second that he would.

Until he was gone – realising too late that they were both capable of extreme stubbornness; each fully expecting the other to cave. This was before mobile phones, so that daily they each checked their answerphone, expecting some message of climbdown. But no. The row went right up to the line and across the Atlantic.