The Road Between Us (47 page)

He is at the foot of the stairs now, the card still in his hand. ‘Hannah? You here?’

Again, silence.

She has been staying with friends in Brighton for a few days – something about her band having reformed, though Edward hadn’t been aware that they had split. They have a new drummer, apparently, and she has a friend who has booked some studio time for them so that they can put together a demo.

Edward had taken the opportunity to visit some friends of his own: a couple with a farm in the Peak District. He had known them since university and, over the past year, they had written several times to insist he visit them, and suggested other old friends who could come along at the same time, but Niall had advised against it on the grounds that he wasn’t ready for social contact as demanding as that.

As it turned out, Edward had enjoyed the trip. They had gone on long walks, drunk too much, used long wooden spoons as microphones as they sang out of tune to old hits. And in the mornings, before the others were up, he had gone for walks on his own.

He had hoped that the break would clear his head of the chatter curdling there: unresolved questions about his father, about what was said about him by the old man at the funeral; but also questions about the circumstances of his release by the Taliban, why, seventeen months on, Niall’s version of events was ringing false in his ears.

The unease was to do with the way Niall had gone from being merely controlling to paranoid, insisting he should be the first to read the memoir; that he should be the one Edward turned to, about anything that was worrying him, ‘anything at all’.

But what was worrying him, what was making him increasingly angry, was the thought that if Niall hadn’t had him declared dead, Frejya would still be alive, and he wouldn’t be having these dreadful, crippling thoughts about his own daughter.

In France, he had experienced an emotion so long buried he hadn’t recognized it at first. Love. It had approached in disguise, as stealthily as an assassin, and then it had shifted in his imagination from noun to verb. What would it feel like? It? The act itself? His
mind shied from the questions, yet, as he pictured himself with her, he felt intoxicated as well as repelled.

He had even persuaded himself that she might be complicit in these dangerous thoughts, that his feelings for her could be reciprocated. But as he listened again to the echo of her words – ‘I will do whatever it takes to make you happy’, ‘You don’t have to feel guilty about being with me’ – they seemed ambiguous.

The funeral had reduced his fever, helped take his mind off the gnaw he felt. But as soon as they were alone together in Parsons Green again, his tension, as well as his confusion, had returned. He had found himself lost once more in a dark and steaming jungle. And, what was worse, Hannah seemed to sense his appalled fascination with her: the glances, the unexplained frowns, the tight, self-conscious smiles.

His meditative early-morning walks in the Peak District had provided him with only one resolution. That he must not discuss his predicament with anyone else – not her, not his friends in the Peak District, not even Niall. Of these dark thoughts he must remain silent.

He is in the sitting room now. On top of the piano is a full ashtray: roaches from joints as well as cigarette butts. There are five empty wine bottles here, too, some on their sides, but no glasses. He wanders around the house, checking rooms. The heavy, colourless smell is permeating the whole house.

Hannah does not respond when Edward knocks lightly on her bedroom door. He pushes it ajar and sees her suitcase open on the bed. He also sees the door to her bathroom is open. With a chill in his heart, he walks towards it and looks in. There is no sign of her. Back in the bedroom he sees a large canvas stretched on a wooden frame, facing the wall. He pulls it back. It is the portrait she did of him in France. Finished now.

Striding to the window he sees his daughter on the floor by the bed, partly covered by a duvet. He is about to check her pulse when she turns on her side, adjusting her pillow. There is a damp patch where her mouth has been.

He hardly recognizes her. Her face looks thinner and she has not only had a pixie crop but she has dyed her hair black.

It looks like the dye has run down her face, but then he realizes this is smeared mascara. She has been crying. Drinking, too. Even from a few feet away he can smell the alcohol coming through her pores. There are three empty wine bottles on the floor and another on the bedside table.

‘Han?’

She opens her eyes and shields them against the light. ‘Oh it’s you. Hi. When did you get back?’

‘Just now. You OK?’

She yawns, pulls back the duvet and reveals that she has been sleeping in her clothes, a baggy sweatshirt and jeans ripped at the knees. A wipe of her mouth now. A feel on the bedside table for the glasses she has taken to wearing instead of contacts. ‘Yeah, fine, I must have …’ She glances at her alarm clock and sits up. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

‘I like your new look.’

‘Thanks. It’s one of the requirements for the witness protection scheme they’ve put me on.’ Seeing his look of confusion she adds in a flat voice: ‘That’s a joke.’

When Edward sees that she is unsteady on her feet he asks again if she is OK.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to faint again.’

‘Your mother used to faint, you know.’

Hannah knits her brow. ‘I’d forgotten that … But she did, didn’t she? … She fainted when Uncle Niall told her you had been declared dead … Is it hereditary?’

‘I don’t know.’ He follows her down the stairs. ‘Can you smell something?’

Hannah now has a roll-up dangling from her lip, a half-smoked one taken from an ashtray. She lights it, tests the air and wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s coming from the kitchen.’

She seems quieter, he thinks. Withdrawn and distracted. They walk into the kitchen together and Hannah opens the pantry door.
Winces. It smells like putrefaction. ‘There’s something decomposing in there.’

Edward opens the window and retrieves some sheets of newspaper from the recycling bin. ‘What is it?’

‘I think it might have been a tuna steak. I, like, vaguely recall putting one out to defrost the night before I left.’ She hooks her thumbs in the belt straps of her jeans and shrugs apologetically.

Edward opens the back door, scrapes the rotting fish into the bin and sprays the dead air with a can of something intended to evoke the freshness of mountains. It makes it worse, merely adding a chemical smell to the noxious mix. ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ he says.

Ten minutes later, wrapped in a towel, Edward gathers up his clothes and makes his way along the cool corridor to his bedroom, savouring the air on his tightening pores. Instead of dressing, he looks out of the window and sees Hannah in the garden, her face now washed and clean. She is sitting at the table listening to her iPod through headphones while applying fresh mascara to her lashes. He continues staring as she dips a brush in and out of a tube, then, with delicate little upward flicks, moves down the length of a lash, then across to the other eye, then back to the first, brushing again and again, as if in a trance.

Now she is holding a compact mirror up to her face, her eyes wide, brushing off stray lashes. A crimping device comes next, and all the while she is studying her reflection – her hardened, hopeless face – as if trying to come to a decision.

He hears himself asking: what have I done to you? What have I become? You look so self-possessed as you sit there in the sunlight, so deep within yourself.

In moments such as this, when the fog lifts, when he is feeling morally strong, he understands that he is being selfish, and that there is a sacrifice he can make which will improve things, for both of them. He must leave. And when he does, he cannot tell her the reason.

She looks up. Puts her glasses on and sees him looking down. Neither looks away.

Early the next morning, when he is more awake than asleep, Edward tries to slip back into his dream. As it drifts away from him, losing its shape and colour, he remains lying on his front in an erotic stupor. After half a minute, he tenses his buttocks and shifts his position in the bed, savouring the prickling sensation in the backs of his thighs. ‘I love you,’ he mumbles into his pillow, and the articulation of the words brings him closer to the surface of consciousness.

He now opens his eyes and gasps for breath, as though he has been breathing underwater only to realize in panic that this is impossible.

He rolls over and, feeling evidence of nocturnal emission against his back, sits up and looks around the bedroom, dazed and heavy-limbed. The stillness in the house intensifies and is then broken by a knock at the front door. He blinks. There are three more taps, evenly spaced.

He reaches for his dressing gown and, as he descends the stairs unsteadily, his knees still watery, he curses to himself. Bloody journalists. Why won’t they leave me alone? Niall had promised he would make them stop.

When he looks through the spyhole he sees it is a woman with a grey fringe and glasses, middle-aged. It takes a moment before he recognizes her as Hannah’s therapist. Instead of letting her in, he watches as she knocks again and paces for a couple of minutes before walking away.

More awake now, he draws his dressing gown around himself and knots the cord before heading back up the stairs to his bedroom, pulling his sheet and duvet cover off and carrying them in a loose bundle down to the washroom. He stops. Thinks:What am I doing? This is crazy. Hannah isn’t going to inspect my sheets. He continues anyway and, as he slams the door of the washing machine and clicks the dial to the correct cycle, he hears someone entering the room behind him and flinches guiltily.

‘Who was that at the door?’ Hannah says with a yawn.

‘No one.’

‘What are you doing?’

He doesn’t look up, hiding the colour rising in his cheeks by studying the temperature settings. ‘Putting a wash on.’

‘I can see that. Why are you doing it now? You’re not even dressed.’

As he searches for a way out of this conversation, a diversionary tactic of some sort, Edward looks up at her and says with a tight laugh: ‘
Carpe diem
, Frejya.’ He knows it has been a long time since he has mistaken his daughter for his wife, and he wonders if she will hear the falseness in his tone, recognize the deception for what it is.

‘You called me Frejya again, Dad.’ She says it wearily. Exhausted by all this now.

‘I’m sorry. I …’ He knows her question about the sheets has already been forgotten, that he is in the clear. He also wonders whether his pretence might help their situation. If he can convince Hannah that the love he has started feeling for her is not the same as that which he felt for her mother they might yet avoid the fate that seems ordained. ‘How did you sleep?’ he asks.

‘Not great. You?’

‘I had a dream about Frejya, that was why I said her name just now.’

‘Do you ever dream about me?’ Her question sounds like an accusation. She is studying him with furrowed interest.

‘Not that I’m aware,’ he says. Every night, he thinks. Last night. But I cannot tell you that.

‘Mummy never really loved me, you know.’

‘Of course she did.’

‘She didn’t. Not in the way she loved you. She thought of me as a rival. She couldn’t bear it when I made you laugh.’

‘She loved you.’

Hannah raises her hands in an open gesture. ‘She used to cut me out of photographs. I found them. Photographs where the three of us had been together. That’s why I always made sure I
was in between you two, so she couldn’t get the scissors out.’

Edward shakes his head. Looks away.

‘Didn’t you ever wonder why you didn’t have more children after me?’

He meets her eye now. ‘We weren’t able to.’

‘She wanted you to herself.’

‘Stop it, Han.’

‘It’s OK, I can live with it.’

Edward freezes. He sees for the first time a truth that had been glaring at him for years. The way Frejya had looked at him whenever he was playing with Hannah … ‘She loved you with all her heart,’ he says.

‘How could she kill herself, then?’

Edward stares at the floor as he takes two steps towards his daughter and gathers her in his arms. My darling girl, he thinks. How we have failed you as parents, one loving you too much, the other not enough. ‘She did love you, and so do I.’ More than I should, he adds in his thoughts. More than is right. ‘But I don’t know how to be the father you need.’

Hannah finishes the thought as she pushes him away. ‘But I know how to be the daughter you need. If you’ll let me.’

Ambiguity again? The phone rings in the hall. Neither moves to answer it.

Hannah checks the time on her mobile. ‘I’m expecting someone.’

‘That therapist?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You don’t need to see her,’ he says. ‘You can talk to me.’

‘What if it’s you I want to talk about?’

Edward feels as if he has been punched.

‘Sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean anything by that. Perhaps you need to see her.’

‘Waste of time.’

‘Is it?’ Hannah tents her fingers and presses them to her chin in a parody of a psychoanalyst. ‘Is it really?’

He stares at her. ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ he says. ‘That’s all that matters. That I love you.’

Hannah replies with a silence that once again seems like an accusation. She then says: ‘Do you love me more than her?’

‘That’s not a fair question.’

‘I have my answer.’

Edward sees something in her eyes, like a cold wind passing over a Northumbrian beach. Good, he thinks. This is for the best.

‘I thought I wanted to
be
her, you know,’ she says. ‘So that you would love me, but I can’t do it any more. I can’t compete with a ghost.’

‘There’s no competition. No, that sounds wrong. I mean, it’s not a competition.’

‘Oh, but it is.’ Hannah’s voice is tightening. ‘And the funny thing is, Mummy knew it, too.’

The doorbell rings.
Why won’t those bastards leave me alone?
Edward looks through the spyhole and sees that it is not another press photographer but a delivery man, shrunken and distorted. He jumps when the bell rings again. A note is pushed through the letterbox, informing him that a trip to the post office is required. What will it be? There is nothing he wants, nothing he expects. Besides, contact with the outside world seems unwelcome lately.