Things I Want My Daughters to Know (27 page)

Donald’s mum was a tartar, but his dad was lovely. When Donald and I started going out together I would go by the shop after work and wait for Donald. He was often out doing deliveries and things, so I’d sit and talk to his dad for ages, waiting. He was a lovely man. He’d been in the navy, during the war. He had these blue tattoos, all up his arms. He’d married Donald’s mum before he was called up, in 1939, and came home to a bride he didn’t know
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all that well, and a small son he didn’t know at all. God, what that war must have done to families. I think he married in haste. I know he repented at leisure. She was scary with an upholstery hammer in her hand, that woman. I think I was as much in love with his dad as I was with Donald, in a way. He was so different from my own dad.

Marriage to Donald represented escape. In my day, you didn’t just go off and get those things for yourself, like you can. You needed a man. It meant a home of my own. Freedom. It meant his dad was my dad. Besides, it was what everyone was doing. You couldn’t have sex until you got married, apart from anything else, and it was pretty much all any of us ever thought about—the normal ones at least. We were married within eighteen months of meeting. Too fast. We didn’t know each other well.

Which is not to say we weren’t happy. I don’t want you to think that. We had a lot of fun. It was all a big adventure—having our own place. I learned to cook. I can’t tell you the laughs we had over my experiments in the kitchen. Not that this is news to you lot.

Never improved much, did I? We used to have to retire to the pub for a Cornish pasty quite often. We spent a vast amount of time in bed, learning how all of that worked. That was fun, too. I have to really cast my mind back, because the truth is that when we split up, I didn’t love your father anymore. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t love him then. I remember walking up the aisle to stand beside him on my wedding day, and thinking I would burst with joy. He was a handsome bugger. My mum said handsome brute.

And there was something brutish about him. You know who he reminded me of—Marlon Brando in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Without the brooding violence, of course.

He didn’t really know what to make of you two. He was better when you were older. But babies, babies left him cold. He was too big, too awkward for you when you were small. He couldn’t change nappies or do up the buttons on your clothes, not that many men 198 e l i z a b e t h

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did, in those days. But you frightened him a bit. And he was a bit jealous, to be truthful. Some men are, I think. They get usurped, knocked down the pecking order. He loved you, I know that. He just wasn’t all that interested in you. I never once saw him get down on the floor and play with you. He hadn’t the patience for your games. The three of you learned to ignore each other, mostly.

I fought badly with his mother. She helped out a lot, when you were very little. But there was a price, and I decided early on that I wasn’t willing to pay it. She wanted to interfere, to tell me where I was going wrong. All our worst arguments were about that. He used to side with her. I thought he was a spineless git when it came to her, and I used to tell him so. He would wince and shout back and disappear off to his mother’s house and not come home for his tea, and when he did come home, I’d sometimes throw it at him, cold and congealed on the plate. I’d never do a thing like that now.

Apart from anything else, it was me who had to clean mince and potatoes off the walls. But I was young, and I got so cross. In the early days we made up easily. Had fun making up, in fact. We both had a temper, and we knew it.

But gradually, the fights got more frequent, and they got worse, and the making up got harder and less entertaining. It was like each time we moved a little further apart—like each argument moved us a notch away; then eventually we couldn’t find our way back. I remember the first night we fell asleep without making friends.

I think that was the beginning of the end. Don’t do that, will you?

Don’t fall asleep without making friends.

We started fighting about money as well, about the shop. After his dad died. He had a bad heart, too. He wasn’t as good as his dad had been with money. He wasn’t forward thinking. I was full of ideas. My dreams of my own shop might have been shelved when I had you two girls, but I had plenty of ambitions and plans. He didn’t
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like that, I don’t think. He had me in a compartment, and he wanted me to stay there. Wife and mother. Homemaker (although his gibes about that increased all the time). My not being able to cook wasn’t so funny anymore, and I was too tired to distract him with my skills in other arenas, like I used to. He would take business problems to his mum, not to me, and that drove me mad.

It was like he was trying to keep me in my place, and I was frustrated and thwarted.

I think the death knell sounded when his mum got sick. I so wanted to do the right thing, but even when she was really, really ill, she didn’t like me, and she wouldn’t take help from me, and that drove such a wedge between us—me and Donald. He spent more and more time up there, and by the time she died, he was pretty much like a stranger to the three of us. I couldn’t get close to him. I couldn’t help him, and I wasn’t even sure I always wanted to.

I was glad when she died, the old battle-axe (I know that’s terrible, but it’s true), and he knew I was, and he couldn’t forgive me.

The affairs started when Lisa was about ten, I suppose. He was replacing me, and his mother.

The first time he cheated, it was with a stranger—I never knew her name. Nor how they met, when exactly it started. It didn’t last long, and I honestly don’t think it meant much to him. Believe me, girls, details don’t help. The second time it was someone I vaguely knew. The third time it was a so-called friend. Meg, she was called.

We weren’t really friends. We had children the same age, and so we went to the same playgrounds and sat on the same benches. That doesn’t exactly make you buddies. God—I haven’t thought about her for years. She wore French knickers. I should have known. But it was never really about the women. They weren’t cheating on me, were they? It was him. It was like he made it crueler every time. Brought it closer to my door. Made it more about me. I stopped thinking about 200 e l i z a b e t h

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it after that. I don’t know how many more there were. I ignored it.

Which was pretty hard sometimes—eventually his attempts to cover up his behavior were pretty minimal. He goaded me.

When someone has cheated on you, it is easy—and almost obligatory—to blame them entirely. You have the facts, don’t you?

You have the proof. It is THEIR fault.

It can take years for you to realize that you were in there, too.

When I first found out, I was shattered. Devastated. Angry and hurt. All the things you think you would be. But I was also ashamed and embarrassed. And it was that, more than anything else, that kept me in my marriage. For years. Long wasted years. Wasted for both of us.

He hit me once. Just once. Please don’t think that I was a battered wife. I don’t want you to see me that way, or him. Your dad was many things, but he was never a violent man. He had a temper, but shouting and ranting was as far as it ever went, until this one time. God knows I’d been violent toward him often enough, over the years. I’d thrown more things at him than I can count. Punched him, too. It really was just the once, and I’d provoked him, believe me. I was totally shocked. He’d never even raised a hand to me, and seldom his voice, before then. It was a slap—straight across the face.

It was hard, though, and when I looked in the mirror I could still see the shape of his fingers, red and angry on my cheek. He was sorry afterward—straight afterward—and sorrier than he’d ever been for any of the affairs. I think he frightened himself; I don’t think he had ever believed that he was capable of something like that. He begged me to forgive him. Almost crying, he was. I don’t think he would ever have done it again.

But it was the final straw, for me. That slap woke me up and made me realize what I fool I was for still being in this marriage.

Or maybe that slap gave me the chance I’d been waiting for. I was gone within a week, just as soon as I could find somewhere to
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take Jennifer and Lisa. I was pregnant. I never told anyone that he hit me.

Lisa

Reading her mother’s journal, Lisa realized that she’d never really thought about her dad as a person. She supposed she wasn’t the only child to do that, to compartmentalize a parent that way. He was just Dad, as dads everywhere were just dads. In her case he wasn’t even a good one.

She hadn’t lived with him since she was fourteen years old. That was a pretty lousy age at which to lose a father, however rotten he was. Actually, she corrected herself, he wasn’t a rotten father then. He was a totally crappy husband. By then, Lisa’s loyalty and devotion to her mother would have been formidable. Jennifer’s, too, although it was less fiery and passionate than hers. Everything about Jennifer was, when she was that age. She’d never kissed a boy, and Lisa had been spending vast chunks of her lunch hour behind the proverbial bikesheds for at least a couple of years by then.

The fighting was nothing new to them. Lisa remembered when Gran—Dad’s mum—had been ill; that was probably the most volatile time. Mum and Gran had never been close. Mum resented the amount of time Dad was spending with her. Dad always said that if Mum would let Gran come and live with the family, he wouldn’t need to be away.

Mum would reply that Dad was crazy if he thought either of them would agree to live under the same roof, Gran included. Dad would scream that it was Mum’s fault . . . and on it would go. They never fought in front of them, but it wasn’t a huge house, and you could hear them. Lisa supposed that a psychiatrist would have a field day with them, imagining cowering, frightened children being scarred daily by warring parents.

She didn’t remember it that way at all. Mum was never angry with them, so far as she could recall. What happened downstairs, late at night, with Dad, never came near them, somehow. She sometimes thought the fights were funny. Afterward, Mum would talk about her and Dad a little 202 e l i z a b e t h

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strangely, in the third person—“Mum and Dad had a silly fight, about nothing. Don’t you worry.” As an adult, Lisa knew Mum had been very unhappy—to herself, as a child, she never seemed it. Maybe you couldn’t see what you didn’t know how to look for. The thirty-eight-year-old Lisa recognized what an achievement that had been—for Mum to keep her unhappiness from them. She never saw her cry over it. Of course, if you had been looking, and you knew enough to recognize it, you would have seen Mum come to life, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, once the three of them had left and found a new place to live. The new mum was strong and confident and more colorful. But, of course, then she and Jennifer had been teenagers, impervious to nuance, deeply buried in their own navels, and unaware of so much.

In her journal, Mum said that she was unfair to Dad. But she’d never told them about his affairs. It would have been easy to do that. Maybe they were already enough on her side. It didn’t take a genius to work out that he must have been seeing Marissa before he and Mum split up, though.

She moved into the house so quickly. Mum said she couldn’t imagine why a woman would want to live in another woman’s house, with her curtains, and her cushions, and her crockery. Of course, they hadn’t done so for long. Marissa wasn’t that kind of woman after all. The old family home had gone on the market within six months and was sold quickly. He hadn’t told them he was selling—why should he?—they’d seen it in the local paper. Mum got half the money—Dad was never bad, about money, at least—and that was how they bought the house on Carlton Close.

That was much nicer than the rented flat. Lisa and Jennifer had their own rooms for the first time. Mum let them paint them whatever color they wanted. Lisa had chosen all white. Mum said it made her feel like she was in a hospital, and tried in vain to introduce splashes of color, but Lisa would only hang moody black-and-white postcards of grumpy-looking French couples she bought at Athena. Jennifer had chosen Laura Ashley.

Something pretty and prissy, with too much matching stuff.

Mum’s room was full of boxes for a long time. She said there was no
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way she was going to leave anything personal at the house for another woman to go through and judge her on. She had old photograph albums, and back issues of magazines, and maternity clothes, and stuffed toys, and cookbooks. She’d stripped herself from the house completely and left nothing of her spirit behind.

Donald and Marissa had moved a long way away after that. He’d told them one Sunday, between a matinee of a film they both found too childish, and a packet of crisps and a Coke in the local pub garden. Marissa had family in Kent, he said, and wanted to be closer to them.

Amanda was just a few weeks old then, and he had only seen her once, just after she was born. Jennifer had asked him why he didn’t want to be near to his family, but she only did it to make him feel bad, really. Lisa couldn’t remember what his reply had been.

After he’d gone a change-of-train-ride away, the regular visits had dwindled. This was the early 1980s, and there had been no provision for visitation in their parents’ divorce. It was up to all of them. Lisa remembered spending one or two strange and uncomfortable weekends in Sevenoaks, with Dad and Marissa. She tried too hard. She made elaborate breakfasts and tried to plan excursions. She took them shopping and offered to buy them things in Chelsea Girl and Dorothy Perkins. Lisa suspected that what she wanted was for the two of them to go home and rave about her to Mum, and there was no way she was going to do that. Their house in Sevenoaks was nothing like the home he’d shared with their mother. They had a living room that they never lived in. They just sat in it, like in a Jane Austen parlor, when they had guests. There was no television in it, so why would you go in there any other time? Marissa kept the tissue boxes under embroidered cotton covers, and there were proper fabric napkins on the table at mealtimes, and there was always dessert (and not just Wall’s ice cream). Mum was never into all that then.