Things I Want My Daughters to Know (13 page)

A few kisses—standing-up variety. One brilliant Christmas present, and a few phone calls while she’d been home. He wasn’t her type, he wasn’t in her plan, and she didn’t, for the life of her, know why she was having palpitations standing here in the freezing cold. She should be with her wacky flatmates and a thousand drunken idiots at a rave in Lewisham.

But the palpitations just sped up when she saw him walking toward her. He didn’t say hello, he just pulled her toward him, and kissed her, more seriously than he had done before, his hand on the back of her head, holding her, close and insistent. “I missed you.”

“There are a couple of parties we could go to. Or there’s the big crowd in Trafalgar Square. I know a good pub near there, full of Canadi-ans. We could go there. Or . . .”

“Or?”

“Or we could go back to my place.”

“Who’s there?”

“No one. I’m the only one who’s in London for New Year’s.” He looked sheepish. “It would just be us. But . . . I mean . . . we don’t have to . . .”

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“That sounds good.” It did. She realized that she didn’t want to be in a crowd. She wanted him all to herself. Somewhere where it wasn’t so cold that you felt like your feet might shatter if you took one more step.

He paused, putting the key in the lock. “I don’t want you to think . . . I mean, just because . . . I’m not expecting . . .”

She pulled him through the open door and slammed it closed behind them. “Shut up, Ed.” She kissed him, hard. “I’m expecting. . . .”

Like everything else about this new relationship, this was not really her style. There had been a handful of lovers before Ed. She supposed, if she were ever itemizing them, that they represented an average amount for someone her age. She always knew them really well. She always thought long and hard about moving to the next level with someone. She was circumspect with herself. Her sexual practice was slightly at odds with her free spirit, she knew. Sometimes she wished she were a little more like Lisa, who had slept with, she imagined, and it always sounded like, dozens of guys before Andy. Lisa treated sex a bit like a sport. A highly aerobic, heavy contact sport requiring no special equipment. Although, knowing Lisa, special equipment was almost certainly involved at some points. It was fun, it was healthy, it was good for you, and as long as you were careful, both with your health and with your feelings, it was okay to do it with anyone you fancied who fancied you back. On paper, Amanda believed that there was nothing wrong with that. It just wasn’t how she felt about it. As far as she knew, Jennifer had only ever slept with Stephen, and the boyfriend she had before him, the university one.

So she was somewhere in the middle of the two of them on the morality ladder.

But right now, she didn’t want to think about it, and she didn’t want to wait. She wanted to do what she never normally did, and just go to bed with this guy. She wasn’t pretending this was love—it couldn’t possibly be, could it? Maybe it was just lust, and she was going to give into 92 e l i z a b e t h

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it, and maybe there was nothing wrong with that. And then there was the CD. . . .

Still, the point was, she wasn’t going to analyze it. She was just going to do it.

Twice.

Before midnight.

And once more, while the distant symbolic noise of fireworks still sounded.

Thank you very much. Hip hip hooray for impulsive, reckless behavior. And a happy, happy . . . happy New Year.

It was the best sex she’d ever had. If that was what spontaneity got you, she was suddenly all for it—a converted zealot. Ed was much more domineering in bed than he appeared to be out of it, and if she was momentarily curious about where all this imaginative expertise came from, she quickly put it aside and was grateful that it had come from somewhere. He was like some Fabio-esque hero in an airport novel—he knew exactly what to do, where, when . . . how to move her body all around his own like she was the proverbial putty in his hands. Blimey.

Yummy. Good night.

She slept for about ten hours. It was almost lunchtime by the time she surfaced. Arguably, if he hadn’t kissed her awake, she may have pushed on through to teatime. She protested, pushing his face away. “Mmm. Morning mouth. I haven’t brushed my teeth.”

“Don’t care. You’re gorgeous.” He was undeterred. He nuzzled her armpit. “You haven’t washed yet, either, but you smell fantastic.”

“You’re a randy sod.”

“Not until I met you.” He winked, looking for all the world like a member of Fagin’s gang.

“Yeah. You had the tentative approach of a virgin, I felt.” She pinched the delicate skin under his arm.
So
not the case.

“Just practicing for you, my lovely. Just practicing.”

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“Charming. All those girls would be thrilled to hear you say so.”

“Must you say all those girls, like it’s been the cast of
Ben Hur
?” He pretended to look hurt.

“It’s either a long and varied list, or you spent your formative years in a brothel.”

“Is this your way of telling me you enjoyed yourself last night, Amanda?” Now his face was mock serious, but the twinkle never left his eye.

“Can’t remember much about it, matter of fact.”

He climbed on top of her, pinning her down with his powerful legs.

“Then I better remind you, I think. . . .”

“Again?!”

“Oh yes. Again.”

So teatime it was, then. New Year’s Day was already New Year’s Almost Night by the time they did brush their teeth, wash, and emerge from Ed’s apartment, hand in hand, in search of food and drink, neither of which had been taken since the previous afternoon. He’d lent her some jeans and boots one of his flatmates had left on the drying rack in the kitchen, assuring her she wouldn’t mind, and an old rugby shirt of his that smelled of Persil. You wouldn’t run a marathon without piling in the carbs, and they were both a little lightheaded and woozy. Thankfully the pub at the end of the road was serving Cumberland sausages with mash and onion gravy, and within minutes they were wolfing down giant portions and sipping whiskey macs by a suitably roaring fire.

Unsurprisingly, given what they had just spent almost twenty-four hours doing, Amanda felt incredibly close to him. She was as happy as she could remember being. She felt like she had a neon sign on her forehead, flashing satisfied at the world. For twenty minutes or so, they just ate. They sat so close that their thighs touched, all the way down.

Hunger assuaged, they started to talk. They were still talking when the landlord called time, reminding them gruffly that there had been a 94 e l i z a b e t h

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lock-in the night before, and that now he was tired and wanted to go upstairs and watch telly.

In many ways it was a typical getting-to-know-you conversation.

One she’d had around the world, a thousand times. But in other ways it was more. Like in taking off their clothes back at his place they’d peeled away a few layers of the social onion already. This wasn’t an exchange of facts. This was more real.

Ed told her about his Christmas in Cornwall. His dad was much older than his mum—twenty-five years. He was seventy-five now, and he’d seemed frail to Ed this visit, suddenly older. He was still sharp as a tack, though. Evidently they were incredibly close; he’d retired from the law firm where he was a founding partner when Ed was still relatively young—at primary school—and the two of them had spent far more time together than most fathers managed. He’d been married before—

had four children with his first wife, who was rich and thin and bitter—Ed said they all called her the Duchess, as in Windsor. Ed’s half brothers and sisters were all weird, he said, poisoned against his father by too many years of listening to the Duchess deride and castigate him, although it was her, and not him, who had left the marriage. He didn’t see much of them or their children. He told Amanda he thought his dad’s relationship with his four older children had a lot to do with why he was so close to the three more he had had with Ed’s mum, Nancy.

“It’s like he knew he’d played a part in losing them, even though what happened wasn’t really his fault. It made him determined to be really close to me and my brothers.” Amanda nodded.

“And I was the youngest, which helped. Tom and Dan were at senior school when Dad retired, and they were always busy with sports and girls and stuff. I had him to myself a lot. We used to go fly-fishing and tinker with engines and things.”

“Sounds pretty idyllic.” Amanda smiled.

“You know, it sort of was. He and Mum have always been really, really happy together. That filters down, you know.”

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She nodded. “My mum was happily married, too.”

“To your dad?”

“No!” She laughed. “Sounds a bit like your dad, actually. My father—

he’s dead now—he went off with someone, before I was born. I’ve got two big sisters—Jennifer and Lisa—they’re quite a bit older than me. I suppose I must have been the Elastoplast baby. Or an accident. One of those. Didn’t work. He scarpered when Mum was about four months pregnant, I think. Bugger. But they were not happy together. That’s what Mum always said. And I don’t think Jennifer and Lisa have many happy family memories from before. It wasn’t a big shock or anything, I don’t think. Probably he just had the opportunity first.”

“Were you and he close?”

She snorted. “Barely. I didn’t see much of him, to be honest. He lived a long way away, and he started a new family. Died of a massive coronary about five years ago. Didn’t go to his funeral. Didn’t especially want to. Wasn’t especially missed, so far as I ever knew. Mum went, and my sisters. But then they’d lived with him, and I never did.”

Ed shook his head. “Families.”

“Don’t know one without a sniff of trouble.”

“Not possible, I don’t think. My mum’s lot, maybe. They’re pretty straightforward.” He shrugged. “So—your mum married again?”

“She did. Mark. The architect—remember, I told you?” Ed nodded.

“They married about sixteen years ago, when I was pretty young. Had Hannah, my kid sister, who’s fifteen now.”

“Christ—four girls!”

“Christ—three boys! What about your brothers?”

“Tom’s a lawyer, like Dad. Works at the old family firm in Cornwall.

He’s in training to be just like the old man. He married a girl called Ginny, and they’ve got a couple of sprogs who’ll no doubt grow up to be lawyers and work at the old family firm. Tom and Ginny live in Mum and Dad’s old house. Beautiful place, with five or six acres. Mum and Dad moved to the sea, to a smaller place, when Tom got married. We 96 e l i z a b e t h

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have Christmas at their place, because there are lots of us—Mum’s relatives descend en masse—and that’s the only place where there’s room for us all. Dan’s a captain in the tank regiment. Went to Sandhurst—the full monty. Career soldier . . . We’re lucky, really, we’ve all gone in very different directions, so there’s no competition, you know—no one treads on anyone’s toes. That helps.” He stopped talking and kissed her on the mouth, pulling back and smiling. It acknowledged how good this felt. “Tell me about your sisters?”

“Lisa is the oldest. She’s most like me, I suppose, if I’m like any of them. She’s meant to be marrying this great bloke, Andy. But I think she’s collateral damage, from Mum and Dad’s divorce—commitment-phobe, that sort of thing. Then there’s Jennifer. Neat freak. Shoes always match the outfit, if you know what I mean; she’s married to Stephen, who is a bit of an enigma. No children—think that might be a bit of an issue, but she’s not a great communicator, our Jen. Hannah’s just a kid, really . . . ridiculously good-looking and a weeny bit spoiled. I’m the definite black sheep. The one with the itchy feet. . . .”

“And the matriarch of all this?” Amanda had forgotten that he didn’t know.

“My mum died. Last summer.”

“Fuck.”

Amanda laughed. That was an honest response. She hated the people whose eyes glazed over with pity as they immediately started apologizing, as though her mother’s death were in some way connected to them.

What could you say to that?

“Fuck indeed. She had cancer. Of course. She was sixty years old.”

“What was she like?” She loved him, really loved him then, for an instant. This, this was easier.

“She was . . . she was amazing. She was larger than life—you know?

Lots of people say that about lots of people, but it’s true of relatively few, I find. It was true of her. She was loud and funny and irreverent and wicked, and contagiously happy, and the most loving person you could
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ever know, and she was fierce about us, passionate about us . . . and . . .

and . . .” Amanda wasn’t, for once, horrified at her own tears. It was okay. “. . . and I miss her. I wasn’t there when she died, because I’m cowardly and stubborn and selfish, and I should have been, I should have been there, with her and with all the others and it’s really, it’s really come back and bitten me in the arse, you know, since. I wish I had been there.”

“To say good-bye?”

She nodded, tears rolling now, down her cheek and into the gravy plate in front of her. Ed had a handkerchief. How old-fashioned and wonderful of him. He pulled it out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand, and she dabbed at her face with it.

“To say good-bye.”

For a while, he just held her, which was all that she wanted. When she had composed herself a little, she sat back, and blew her nose.

“Sorry. S’pose you don’t particularly want that back now?” He winked, and shook his head. She crumpled the handkerchief and shoved it into her pocket.

“She left a kind of journal. Things she’d been writing, on and off, from the time she was first diagnosed. Thoughts and stories and stuff.