‘Why - how - what -’ He gestured with both his hands, and then wrapped them around his mug, shaking his head. ‘I don’t believe it.’
I looked at Hugh’s hands. The chunky mug looked small in them. He had artist’s hands - long-fingered, competent, strong.
‘El? You all right? Why are you staring at my tea?’
‘Um . . .’ I felt my face flush. Why was I staring at Hugh’s hands? I’d seen them before millions of times, but never really
seen
them. Never really thought about touching them, or having them touch me. I wasn’t sure if I was thinking about it now.
Did the fact that I was thinking about thinking about it mean that I
was
thinking about it, or was I making myself way too paranoid here?
I gathered my thoughts back to the conversation.
‘I didn’t believe it either,’ I said, ‘but after she told me, I called my mother - I mean, my grandmother.’ I shook my head. ‘Sheila. And she told me it was true.’
‘Did you ever have any clue? Has June ever—’
‘Acted like a mother? Never. She’s not exactly the motherly type.’
‘Do you know who your father is?’
‘No. It could be any male who attended St Michael’s school in Upper Pepperton in 1980. Or someone older than that.’
Without warning, my eyes filled with tears.
Hugh wrapped his fingers around my wrist. ‘But there’s one person who never was your father. Oh, El, I’m sorry.’
I swallowed. Hugh had never met Stanley Connor, the man I’d thought was my father, because he’d died of a heart attack when I was sixteen. But he’d heard me speak of him, even more than I spoke of June. I had a photo of him in my bedroom and one of his cardigans hanging in my closet. I put it on when I needed extra comfort.
He wasn’t my father any more.
‘He was your grandfather,’ Hugh said. ‘He belongs to you that way.’
‘Yeah.’
Hugh passed me his serviette and I wiped my eyes.
‘Anyway, I thought that was worth a Mr Tasty’s lunch.’
‘It’s worth a whole month of them. So what are you going to do now?’
I wasn’t going to eat this omelette, anyway; it was even more disgusting than usual. I pushed it away.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who are you angriest with?’
Bingo. The man read my mind. He knew exactly what was making my guts roll around and my hands shake and my head feel too small for my brain.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘June. Or maybe my mother, I mean Sheila. Or maybe the kid who knocked up some thirteen-year-old girl.’ I shrugged and laughed shakily. ‘Everyone, I guess.’
‘Including me. Eleanor, about last night—’
‘Don’t.’ I held up my hands. ‘I don’t want to talk about it at all, Hugh.’
He looked at me as if he were assessing me and then he nodded. ‘All right.’
He twirled noodles around his fork and put them in his mouth. The end of one of them didn’t quite make it past his lips and I watched, fascinated despite myself, as he caught it with his tongue. When he chewed, his jaw became even more defined, and swallowing set the muscles in his neck working in a way I had never noticed before in the million-and-one times that Hugh and I had eaten together.
Or, at least, I’d never consciously noticed.
He licked a trace of chilli sauce from his lips and I wondered what words I would use to describe them. Manly? Sensual? It was always so difficult to describe a man’s mouth without resorting to cliché and yet Hugh’s mouth was unique, so expressive and so Hugh.
And I was thinking about this because I was planning how to describe the Chancellor in my book. Obviously. I straightened in my chair and looked away from Hugh.
‘Where’s June now?’ he asked me.
‘I left her at home, sleeping off her hangover.’
He nodded, then checked his watch. ‘I’m sorry, El, I’ve got an assessment in half an hour.’
‘No problem, you go.’
‘Are you all right to be alone?’
‘It’s probably best. I’ll go for a walk, clear my head a little.’
We stood and he hugged me tightly. He smelled of soap, and of his woolly jumper. I let myself relax against his chest and thought,
Friendship, Eleanor.
I kissed him goodbye as I always did, on his cheek, and turned to pay at the till instead of watching him leave.
Reading is not, as a rule, very scenic, but it does have its places. One of my favourites was the walk along the bank of the River Kennet. It started under a damp bridge, and the path eventually wended its way along a dual carriageway and past the site of the former Whitley sewage treatment plant, but in between there was a stretch of beauty, in a peculiarly Reading way.
On one side of the river was the path, muddy in places, and on the other was the back of a row of terraced houses. From the front, these looked like normal Victorian terraces, brick and two-storey, like the ones Hugh and I lived in. But when you walked along the Kennet, you could see that in the back the ground sloped away from these houses to the water. An extra storey was revealed below the road line.
Every garden was different: some cluttered, some landscaped, some overgrown, some overdecorated. In good weather you often saw people sitting in the sun. Most days you saw at least one man huddled at the end of his garden fishing. It was as if from the front, these houses were ordinary but when you looked behind, they were revealed in all their richness.
For whatever the reason, this stretch of scenery helped me think, especially when I was trying to be creative. I hoped it would help me think now.
The greasy rain had slipped into a drizzle and the mud squished under my trainers. On this side it was all yellowing leaves and wilted last-summer’s nettles, though over the water, in the gardens, there were still some flowers, as if time passed more slowly over there.
You wouldn’t want to swim across the Kennet in Reading; the bottom was likely to be littered with rusting shopping trolleys and rotting fast food. But I imagined what it would be like if I could swim across, and climb out on the other side, into the past. Into, for example, eight days ago, before June turned up at my house. When I knew who my parents were, when my house was my own, when my heroines were (as far as I knew) fictional, when, while most things about my life might be boring, they at least made sense.
I kicked at a wet rope of nettles. I’d
worshipped
June. Had done all my life, even though I was also a bit frightened of her. I’d looked up to her like a little kid blinded by fairy dust, and did she care about me? No. Instead, she’d left me blithely behind, lied to me for twenty-five years, and only shown up to take over my house, sleep with my best friend, eat my cake, and generally make me feel like an old fuddy-duddy.
And she’d taken my father away from me.
Gentle Stanley Connor who let me knot his tie on Sundays, Stanley of the bedtime stories and the piggyback rides and the scratchy bedtime kisses.
Suddenly I wasn’t only angry at June; I was furious at her. I wanted to wrap my hands around her swanlike neck. I wanted to drag her down to the Kennet and throw her in, watch her mascara run and her hair become straggles and let her get eaten by the shopping trolleys.
I grabbed a fallen branch from the path and whacked it, as hard as I could, against a tree trunk. It was about the thickness of my wrist and it made a satisfying crack as it broke.
‘I hate you!’ I yelled. I hit the branch on the tree again and again till it was in little chunks all over the path, and then I looked up, panting, and saw a huddled fisherman two gardens down staring at me from underneath his waxed jacket hood. He quickly looked away when I met his eye.
I hurried onward, over the concrete bridge where another stream emptied into the brook with a whirl of foam and crisp packets, out of the fisherman’s sight.
Got to tell Hugh about acting crazy for a fisherman,
I thought, and then I stopped again.
I’d nearly been lusting after Hugh over a Mr Tasty’s lunch. What the hell was that all about?
It wasn’t as if Hugh had changed. I saw him every day and I’d known for some time that he’d grown out of geekdom. He had loads of girlfriends. He’d always had those artist’s hands, that unique mouth, he’d always been tall.
Yet it was as if there had been a missing jigsaw piece in my perception of him that only now was slotting into place, and I could understand that he was sexy.
And now I was just going to have to forget about it. Who else in the world would eat lousy Thai food because I needed him to? Who else in the world knew the right questions to ask, the right things to say? Who else had that hug and that smell and made the best chocolate cake in the world?
Hugh was the only important person in my life whose position hadn’t taken a seismic shift, the only constant.
I couldn’t fancy him. And that was all there was to it.
The drizzle deepened and turned back to rain. I shoved my hands into my pockets and turned around. I was cold, I was wet, I had a splinter in my hand, and I was suddenly remembering that if I really didn’t want to be like June, there was one more thing I had to find out.
The house was quiet when I got in. I checked upstairs and saw that the door to the spare room was still closed.
I felt hung over myself, though I’d barely touched alcohol since my vodka binge two and a half weeks earlier. I’d been feeling this way for a couple of days, and I’d been putting it down to stress, but there was another, very remote, possibility.
The pregnancy test was still in the drawer where I’d stuffed it yesterday. I was thankful I’d forgotten to throw it away. The rubbish was much more unpleasant these days with all of June’s cigarette butts.
I went into the bathroom and read the instructions through twice. It had been a day of revelations. I hoped I wasn’t about to be subjected to another.
I peed on the stick and then carefully put it down on the edge of the sink. Wait three minutes, it said, and then look for the number of pink lines.
I wanted to hover over the plastic stick watching every nuance of its changing from white to pink. Instead, I forced myself to sit on the toilet seat and look at the blue bathroom tiles.
Had June done something like this twenty-six years ago - sat and waited in dread? How much had that moment changed her life?
How much had I changed her life?
I stood up and left the bathroom and the pregnancy test. Gently, I knocked on the spare-room door.
‘June?’ I called softly. ‘June, can you help me with something? I’d like your advice.’
When she didn’t answer, I pushed the door open.
The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and it looked less cluttered than it had been that morning. It took me a moment to notice that June wasn’t there, and another moment to realise that the room was less cluttered because none of her belongings were there, either.
I turned on the light and had a good look round. Her dresses, her tobacco, her make-up had all disappeared, along with the big duffel bags she’d brought with her.
‘June!’ I called, although I knew she wasn’t anywhere else in the house, and I went downstairs. The stuff she’d strewn around my kitchen and living room was gone, too. There was no sign of a note, no forwarding address or phone number left behind.
My sister had turned up, stayed a week, slept with my best friend, told me she was my mother, and then disappeared.
‘Son of a gun,’ I said.
I turned around and went back upstairs. The little white stick was still on the side of the sink. From a distance you could mistake it for a toothbrush. I wondered whether in 1980 the pregnancy tests were so small and discreet, or whether June had had to go to the doctor. Wasn’t there something about a rabbit dying if you were pregnant?