Things I Want My Daughters to Know (19 page)

Mark laughed. “Okay, okay . . . you win. So long as you promise it won’t be Torremolinos. I’ll talk to your sister.”

Hannah was excited by the prospect. She insisted on hot weather, a white sandy beach, and turquoise sea.

“Can’t you come with us, Mand? Otherwise I’ll be stuck with Dad.”

“Oy! You make me sound like sunstroke.”

“Come on, Dad. Just the two of us?!” She grimaced at him, from the computer, where she was happily Googling luxury resorts in the Seychelles, but he knew she wasn’t serious. Not completely serious, at least, he hoped.

But Amanda was engrossed in the photo albums that lined one of the study walls opposite the desk.

This archiving of their lives was, and had always been, Mark’s department. Mum would never have been organized enough. She was absolute rubbish at stuff like that. Gloriously chaotic. Mark was ying to her yang. There was one album for every year of their marriage. They were large, navy blue albums, with the pictures neatly stuck down on real paper. Occasional pencil notations, of dates and places and names, led you through the years of their life together. Each album had its year em-bossed on the front in gold lettering, and they were, of course, in the right order on the shelves. Amanda knew Mum had envied Mark his organizational abilities, but she did it grudgingly, gently mocking him for his neatness, always threatening to go into the study and rearrange things in his absence. “That’ll get him.” Amanda was flicking through them now.

1993: Amanda wheeling Hannah’s pushchair along the pier in Brighton.

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1995: All the girls standing by a hire car in France. She remembered that trip. She’d discovered her first period at a service station somewhere near Limoges.

1997: On a beach in Crete, Mark’s nose sunburned.

2000: Disney World, Hannah in Minnie ears, Amanda in the stance of a petulant teenager.

Mark left Hannah and came to sit beside her, and for a few minutes they looked at pictures together in silence. Then Amanda looked up.

“The pictures from before she met you, of me and Lisa and Jen, and my dad? Did you keep them?”

“Of course.” Mark looked at her, surprised and mildly disgruntled at the question. “I wouldn’t throw those away. There are loads. Not in albums, though. Do you want to see them?”

“Can I?”

“Course you can. They’re upstairs. . . .”

They were in a large box, dusty at the top of a wardrobe in the guest room, stamped with a moving company’s logo. In, of course, spectacular disarray.
Bloody hell, Mum,
Amanda thought, as she sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the bed, and began sifting through them. There were people she didn’t recognize. Places she didn’t remember.

Mark leaned in the door frame, his arms folded. “I should do something with them, really. She always meant to sort them out. . . .” His voice drifted away for a moment, but Amanda seemed to be barely aware that he was still with her. “Are you looking for something specific?”

“Clues. I’m looking for clues.” She didn’t look up and she didn’t elaborate. She said it so quietly that he wasn’t entirely sure whether she was answering his question or just talking to herself. After a minute or two, he left her to it. God knows it did strange things to you, missing her.

Amanda lifted a large handful of pictures out of the box and dropped them into her lap, flicking through them as they fell. They told a thousand stories, didn’t they? The pictures of your life. But they left a lot out, too.

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She found a picture of Mum at her first wedding, young and slim, in a dress with a cinched waist and a big puffy skirt. She didn’t know who the bridesmaids were. Why had she never noticed? Never asked?

Now, she supposed, she would never know. Lisa’s christening, Jennifer’s first birthday party. All the earliest pictures were special occasion shots. You didn’t use a camera all the time, in those days. Not like today, where parents spent years watching their children grow up through the lens of a camera or a video, capturing hours’ worth for posterity.

She didn’t really know what she was hoping to discover. He just disappeared. Donald. Suddenly. He was in the pictures, and then he wasn’t.

There was no shot of him with a pregnant Barbara and two small girls around her. He wasn’t at her christening, he wasn’t at her first birthday party.

Amanda stared at her mother’s face in all the pictures. She couldn’t see what was going on behind her eyes, and her smile. She didn’t look any different after he’d gone. Why would she?

She thought about what Mark had said, about Mum moving further away from them as time passed. It was weird. You looked at a picture of her, and it just looked weird. Like when they show a photo of someone dead on the news. Like you fooled yourself into thinking you could see some kind of aura or something—some foretelling of their fate in an ordinary photograph.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Mark asked her, when she emerged from the spare room some long while later. Hannah was sprawled on the sofa, watching television, and Mark was reading the paper and drinking a glass of wine. He poured her a glass when she came in and pulled out the chair next to his.

“Not really.”

“Can I help?” He was watching her face. He looked concerned. For a moment, she thought about telling him. Trouble was, she believed her mum when she’d written that he had no clue. And she didn’t want to be the one who told him. She loved him. Lisa was right—he was, by a very 140 e l i z a b e t h

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wide margin, the best father of the three of them. She pushed the urge back into her throat and smiled at him.

“You can give me a hug.”

Barbara’s Journal

Today is a bloody awful day. I don’t know whether I should write for you on days like today. It won’t make easy reading. Still . . .

Today I feel sick and tired. In every sense of the words. I’ve thrown up so many times my diaphragm aches. There’s been nothing to get rid of for hours, but it doesn’t stop convulsing me.

And tired . . . ? So tired. I saw my reflection in the mirror (Note to self: Get Mark to cover all the mirrors) and it’s just possible my hair is having a worse day than I am (what’s left of it, but that’s a whole other story). But, do you know, I can hardly bear to lift one hand above my head to brush it. Don’t suppose I’d win any prizes for penmanship, either . . . Do you have any idea how debilitating it is to be this exhausted? The main problem is that I haven’t the energy to drag myself out of this mood. This terrible, black, desperate mood. I’m so bloody sad. I said I wouldn’t do this, but I can’t help it.

I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. I’m not finished. You’re not finished. Nothing is over. I don’t want to die.

It’s like the world is suddenly all new and wondrous and exciting again. Like I’ve been wearing blinkers, or something, all these years. Never lay back and watched clouds changing shapes.

Or raindrops hit leaves. Or saw just how perfectly smooth a baby’s skin is. Never really listened to children laughing or choirs sing or how beautiful an oboe sounds.

All at once, the world—the same one I used to view with
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indifference—is the most perfect, fascinating, amazing place that I cannot bear to leave.

And you, my girls. I don’t want to leave you. I haven’t finished.

I haven’t told you often enough how much I love you and how amazing you are. I haven’t helped you enough. Confronted you enough. Listened to you enough. SEEN you enough.

Every minute you already had that I wasn’t with you feels like a waste, a missed opportunity. I should have homeschooled you. I should never have left you with a babysitter because I thought I’d scream if I didn’t have an hour without you. Why did I ever think that, anyway?

I sound like a crazy person, I know. I just never knew I didn’t have that long. I never heard the tick-tock.

If we all knew—if there was some fortune cookie you could open and find out what your allotted time was—would we all live entirely different lives? Would we waste less time? “Carpe” the

“diem” more. Really?

I daresay I’d still have felt like I was going to strangle you if I didn’t get away for an hour. I wouldn’t have homeschooled you. (God knows you wouldn’t have a maths qualification between you if I had’ve done.) But I’d have played in the playground more. Swung, climbed, hung. Instead of hogging the bench and reading the paper.

Could I have loved you better? Maybe. If that’s true, then I’m sorry. Could I have loved you more? I don’t think it’s possible.

Jennifer

Home alone. Jennifer was home early. These days she was clockwatch-ing, switching off the computer on the dot of 5:30, leaving the calls she would once have returned until tomorrow. Work wasn’t as much fun as it had been. She used to think she had the dream job. She organized perfect upmarket holidays for people who weren’t counting the cost. Trips 142 e l i z a b e t h

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for men to propose, honeymoons, tenth wedding anniversary holidays.

Five-star suites in European cities. Impeccable ski lodges in Whistler.

Luxury safaris, the kind where you could watch hippos bathe from your own private horizon pool. The Orient Express, hot air balloons, first class. She loved the minutiae of the details. Nicolas Feuillette, not Moët and Chandon. Evian, not Perrier. Teak loungers, never plastic. Fantasy, not reality. That’s what it was. She let people pretend, for a while, that everything in the entire world and their own tiny lives was absolutely flawless and . . . perfect. That was what she had fallen in love with, and that was what now bothered her so damn much.

She opened the linen cupboard to put away her new towels, and observed, with irritation, that her neat piles had been disturbed. Stephen must have been in here, looking for something. Sighing, she pulled a whole shelf ’s worth out onto the floor and began refolding and restacking. Completely unnecessary, but, for her, always therapeutic. Some people thought while they ran—Jennifer thought best while she was tidying. She thought, for the first time in a long time, about how she and Stephen had met. She knew that if she’d been writing it down, instead of thinking it, it might have had that same tone, of exuberance, and thrill, and thrall. Not right away, maybe, but she had felt it, she had.

Wasn’t there some statistic somewhere she’d read, about where most people meet their spouse, that claimed weddings were the third most popular place, after university and the workplace? She was sure that she had. Something to do with all that romantic optimism in the air, and too much good champagne, no doubt. This wedding, the one where she met Stephen, was nothing like that.

She’d gone with John. Sensible, solid, reliable John. The boyfriend she’d had since university. The boy she had always assumed she would spend the rest of her life with. They’d met early on, when they’d both still been terrified of the whole new experience. Discovering a mutual love of their subject, and vegetarian food, and a mutual an-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 143

tipathy toward some of the more normal student pursuits, they had clung to each other from the start, telling themselves they had found a soul mate. John was serious and studious and wore bookish round spec-tacles. Jennifer thought he made her be a better person. They worked in the library on Saturday evenings and cooked dahl. After university, when maybe they would have parted, they had a relationship renaissance based on how scary this next new world was and carried on clinging.

Lately—well, more like the last three or four years—Jennifer knew her own grip had loosened, but she didn’t think John’s had. It had all started to feel a bit suffocating. There were things she wanted to do. And eat a bacon sandwich was just at the top of the list. She began to realize that the girl she had been at university was a phase. The John that John had been was the real thing. A few months earlier, a girlfriend had told her she was bound to fall for someone else, that this catalyst would finally release her from the promises she had made to herself and to John a million years ago, when she was a different person. And she had half believed her. She hadn’t wanted to go with him, to the wedding. By the time the invitation arrived, she had accepted that she and John were on their last legs, acting out the last pathetic steps in the dance of their relationship. A quiet, difficult, sad tragedy that would surely play out better, and faster, in private. But wasn’t that the problem? After these years together, so many of their friends all knew each other; you weren’t talking about extricating yourself from one relationship, you were talking about walking away from loads. And that made it so much harder. Just lately, though, she felt like the beggar in a Dickensian tale—all the windows she peered through seemed full of promise and excitement and adventure denied to her.

That John’s presence at this wedding was required at all seemed a mystery. Peter was a friend of John’s from sixth form. He’d gone to university in America—his mum was from New York, apparently—and only just finished graduate school. They’d never met. Peter had barely seen John since A levels. The wedding was in Yorkshire—he was marrying some girl 144 e l i z a b e t h

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he’d known forever—at her parents’ house, but under his mother’s obvious influence, there were touches of Americana about the proceedings.

They’d received a “save the date” card about six months earlier (she remembered wondering as she read it whether she would still be John’s plus one by then, and being surprised at wondering) and then an elaborate invitation to what appeared to be an entire weekend of nuptial celebrations, beginning on the Friday night with a “rehearsal dinner” and finishing on Sunday afternoon, with a “survivor’s brunch.” The wedding appeared almost an incidental part. John was to be one of five ushers (she felt disloyal wondering if the groom really knew what he was letting himself in for, choosing John; he was hardly the type to put one on the sleeper to Edinburgh, or shave off eyebrows—maybe he had been chosen for his sobriety . . . as it turned out, he’d been away working, and missed the stag weekend in Istanbul altogether), each to be accompanied down the aisle by a bridesmaid. John had been dispatched for his tuxedo fitting some months earlier and returned with a swatch of fabric from his waistcoat. This, presumably, so that his guest would do her best not to clash with the wedding colors and ruin the photographs. Jennifer felt a mischievous impulse to wear black—wasn’t she in mourning for the death of love?