Things I Want My Daughters to Know (16 page)

“I’m sorry, Mand.”

Amanda shrugged.

“I don’t know what to say, really.”

“I know.”

“What does it make you feel?”

Amanda blew her nose noisily.

“Fucking angry.”

“Angry?”

“How dare she tell me something like that in a letter? That’s what I feel. I’ve spent the last six months—the last year, practically—feeling like shit, like I was a coward for running away. I felt so guilty I couldn’t even open the damn letter she left me. And when I finally do—I get this.”

“Would you rather not know?”

“I don’t know. I’d rather never have known if the alternative was not being able to talk to her about it. Not being able to find out who he was, what happened.”

“She tells you what happened.”

“She tells me whatever the hell she wants me to believe. Sticks it in an envelope and waits to die so she’s not around when I read it. She could say anything she wanted in a letter like that. She knew she wasn’t going to be around to answer my questions.”

“It sounds true to me—what she says and the way she says it . . . for what it’s worth.”

Amanda looked like she might laugh. She sat back against her chair and folded her arms. “I should have known you’d defend her.”

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“I’m not defending her.”

Amanda didn’t respond.

“Listen—Amanda. Honestly, I’m not. I think this is a rotten thing to do. You’re right—she knew she wouldn’t have to answer to it. That’s inexcusable. I’m not defending it. I’m just saying—I read it, and I believed it. You did, too. You’re just too upset to realize it. You know Mum wasn’t a liar.”

“I thought I knew she wasn’t. I thought she was brave, too.”

Lisa thought about Barbara dying. About a face pinched with pain that was rarely mentioned. About a woman so tired that she couldn’t walk upstairs unaided, but who didn’t moan about it. About a mother who listened to Hannah blathering on about some pop song or some homework assignment or some boy even though you could see in her eyes that all she craved was silence. About all the things Amanda hadn’t seen because she hadn’t been there to see them.

“She
was
brave, Amanda.” She tried to make herself sound gentle.

When she replied, Amanda’s voice was just as soft and quiet.

“Not about this.”

“No. Not about this.”

It wasn’t easy to watch Amanda’s pain. Nor was it easy to know how to ease it.

“You should talk to Mark.”

Amanda’s eyes flamed. “No. I don’t want him to know. I don’t want anyone to know. Promise me you won’t tell the others?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want them to know.”

Lisa obviously didn’t look convinced.

“It’s up to me, isn’t it?”

She supposed it was. “Why did you tell me?”

Now Amanda didn’t know why she had. It was a lapse. A crack in her shell. An impulse. But an essentially pointless one. Lisa couldn’t fix it, any more than she or anyone else could.

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“Promise.”

Lisa put her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I promise.”

Amanda nodded emphatically, obviously underlining the end of the conversation, and signaled at the waitress. “You want another glass? I’m having one.”

�

January

Hannah

Hannah lay on her stomach across her bed, with her mother’s original journal spread out on the duvet. She’d been reading and rereading it. It had been hard to read, last year, when Jennifer had first given her sisters a copy. She’d read it once and put it away, in the fabric-covered box she kept in her wardrobe, the one with the ballet certificates and the sports day medals. Jennifer had brought the original down for her, before Christmas. This year she could read it more easily. She wanted to. She’d read some bits of it over and over again. It was comforting now, not painful, hearing Mum’s voice in her head. Some of it made her laugh.

Some of it made her realize that her mum was even cooler than she’d thought—and she’d always thought she was pretty damn cool. All that stuff about setting up on her own, after she broke up with the others’

dad. How she got the shop started, brought them up herself—that was amazing. She hoped she was half as strong. It was weird, thinking about Mum when she wasn’t Mum.

Dad hadn’t asked her about it. She supposed he could have snuck into her room, while she was at school or something, and read it, but that wasn’t really his style. She guessed he thought it was private, between Mum and them. Anyway, she was going to give the original to Lisa, when she came down next—she’d hogged it long enough. She liked the
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folder. It was just a cheap one, from WHSmith, but Mum had chosen the most colorful one, of course. It was turquoise and hot pink, with a pattern of palm trees and flamingos on the front. The pages inside were all different. Some of it was written on hotel notepaper, some on lined pages that looked like they were from one of her A4 pads. Some on white Basildon Bond. Mum’s handwriting was consistent, although she occasionally used a pencil. They had a pot that they kept by the telephone, and it was supposed to be full of pens, but, however often she filled it up with cheap Bic biros, it was emptied—people took them to write something and then wandered off with them, tucked them behind their ears or into their back pockets, and they were never returned to the pot. Hannah could hear Mum huffing and puffing to herself, complaining about the absence of a pen, before resorting to a pencil.

Mum screamed out of all of it, she supposed, and that was why it was so precious.

She stood up, and switched off her stereo. This part she was bringing downstairs now was written on lined paper. She wanted her dad to read it. She wanted him to remember how much Mum had loved him.

Mark sat on the deck, bundled up in a coat and hat, watching the sun set, with a glass of red wine in his hand. When Hannah touched his shoulder, and he turned to her, she saw that there were tears in his eyes, but she said nothing. He had the right to sit on the deck and shed a private tear for his wife, didn’t he? Talking about it wouldn’t help.

She’d grown used to tiptoeing around his grief. These moments were getting rarer. Last summer, and in the autumn, it had happened all the time—she would come in from school, or down from the shower, and find her dad in tears. Sometimes he pretended he hadn’t been doing it, but she knew the signs. Sometimes he didn’t even try to cover it up.

Now he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sniffed hard.

“Hiya, gorgeous. What you got there?”

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“Part of the journal. It’s about you. I thought you might like to read it.”

He put his wineglass down and took the paper from her.

“Thanks, Hannah.”

Barbara’s Journal

How I Met Mark

So, picture the scene. I’m divorced. I’ve been on my own with my daughters for almost eight years. Things ended pretty badly with Donald, so his involvement has been sketchy. He pays. He pays every month. But he doesn’t come around at all, and there is certainly no every other weekend or two weeks in the summer holidays arrangement going on. (That’s another story, not for today. . . .) So I’m doing it all by herself. The house, you girls, the job . . . Lisa, the oldest, she’s nearly twenty-two now. Which makes me feel incredibly old—she’s practically the age I was when I had her. She doesn’t live at home, of course—she shares a flat with some girlfriends. But she comes home at the weekends, loaded with laundry and hungry for home cooking. Jennifer—she’s at university.

She just left. I try not to mind that she chose St. Andrews, in Scotland. Of course, it was the best course. But it’s so far away. It feels like rejection. Amanda is the only one who still lives at home permanently. She was eight a couple of months ago. Sometimes I worry that she’s lonely without a sister or a brother around. But she’s great company. She has that adult way about her that only children—which is what she virtually is, given her position in the family—sometimes have.

I love being a mother. Always did. I’m bloody good at it, too, I think, and I’d defy anyone to tell me the girls lacked anything in their lives. I made sure they had plenty of adult male, role-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 119

model-type company. And I worked hard to make a good home for them.

I own this gift shop. I love that, too. It’s never going to make me rich, but I wake up every morning and want to go in, and I know plenty of people who can’t say that about what they do. And it’s all mine, and, let’s face it, I know that I like to be in charge.

There haven’t been any men, not since the divorce. As far as that part of myself, it isn’t so much that I was unhappy. More like cryogenically frozen. When I was first divorced, there just wasn’t the time. I had three girls at home, one a small baby. The shop was in its infancy, too. I would work all day in the shop and all evening in the house, washing and ironing and tidying, and fall into bed exhausted barely an hour after my daughters. It was pride, and determination, and, probably, obsession.

Now that Lisa and Jennifer were gone, and Amanda was at school and becoming a little grown-up, maybe there was more time. But now there was no inclination. I just assumed the time had just passed. I knew that forty-four wasn’t exactly old, not anymore.

I knew I looked all right, if you didn’t mind a bit of gravity and a few fine lines. . . . But anyway, where were these men you might choose to go out with, fall in love with, or into bed with? Every magazine you bought was full of articles about the lack of available men. Anyone would have thought the First World War had just ended and all the bachelors had been killed off.

When Donald and I had first divorced, I’d allowed myself to think, maybe, just maybe, I’d find someone else who’d had the same thing happen to them, maybe someone with kids, and that maybe we’d lick our wounds together and have a little happiness.

A bit like the Brady Bunch, with darker undertones, and better fashion. That hadn’t happened, either.

And it was okay. I didn’t lie in bed at night weeping with frustrated longing or empty loneliness. I was buggered if I’d give in 120 e l i z a b e t h

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to that sort of self-pity. Most of the time, I just didn’t think about it. . . .

And then he wandered into the shop one day and turned everything upside down. Of course I noticed that he was handsome.

I said I was resigned, not dead. He was Harrison Ford—circa
Raiders of the Lost Ark
—without the earring. Stubbly, which wasn’t a look I normally went for, but it suited him. He looked a little like he’d dressed in the dark, but in a wardrobe full of good stuff, if you can picture that. So, of course I noticed. But he was young. Far too young.

So far, not that unusual. I asked him if I could help. He said he was looking for something for his mother. I showed him the shawls.

They were beautiful Indian embroidered shawls in exquisite jeweled colors. I was impressed when he knew his mother’s eyes were hazel, and even more so when he chose the three colors that would go best with hazel eyes. And then I felt him look right at me, and that was when this average day changed. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?

But it did. He looked right at me and said that her eyes and her hair were a similar color—although he himself was much darker—and asked if I would model a scarf for him, and when I did, I realized that my breathing had quickened. Just from him looking at me.

Which made me blush, because it was so silly, and teenage, and then he noticed me blushing, and I couldn’t turn away, because I was modeling the scarf, and then he blushed, because he’d made me blush, and then, thank God, or damn them to hell, I wasn’t sure which, the door opened and two pregnant women came in to ask for birth announcement cards, and the spell broke as quickly as it had been woven.

But he bought two, and said he’d let his mother choose her favorite, and I knew that he would come back with the one she rejected. And I wondered, that evening, as I cooked frittata for myself and Amanda—God, I even remember what I cooked!—

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whether he had done that on purpose. (Much later he told me that he had. His mum had wanted to keep them both, and he felt bad telling her she couldn’t, because he needed one as an excuse to come back.)

He came back five minutes before closing on a damp Thursday evening. This time there were no pregnant women lurking and waiting to interrupt. This time I blushed even as I was processing the return. He was smarter than the last time he’d come in. But he didn’t say anything out of the ordinary. He thanked me politely and went to the door.

When his hand touched the knob, he seemed to change his mind. He turned back toward me, and, coming no closer, so that he seemed like he might run away at any time, he asked, “Have you got a policy about going out with customers?”

I laughed. It was such a peculiar thing to say. “What? Like doctors and patients?”

“Sort of.”

My heart was racing. “I haven’t needed one in the past.”

“And if you needed one now?”

“Do I need one now?”

“I think you might.”

He was so cute, so young, and so cute.

“Then I think I’d have to think about it.”

And I did. I thought about it on and off all night. Changed my mind. Changed it back. Delighted at feeling girlish. Then castigated myself for being ridiculous. It had been so so long. Years. Decades.

I was more than out of practice. By dawn I’d made up my mind. If he came back the next day, I’d say yes. When I looked at my face in the mirror, peering over the top of Amanda’s head as she brushed her teeth, I thought he’d change his mind the minute he saw me.

You couldn’t get away with a sleepless night when you were my age.

My whole face looked ravaged.