The Stepmother (41 page)

“It does?” asked Tessa.

“Well, who else would be godmother? And since my mother's barking, I'd expect Liz to step up to the plate and be granny.”

“My pleasure,” said Liz.

“And mine,” I agreed.

“Is there such a thing as a godgranny?” asked my mother.

“There should be,” said Ben. “You'd be perfect.”

The four of us sat in the kitchen, eating and chatting, until light crept through the window and summoned us back to bed. I slept well into Sunday and woke feeling better. The first thing I did was check my phone, but James hadn't called. He had a lot to sort out with Bea, but I would have appreciated a heads-up.

I got out of bed and opened the curtains. I was lying to myself, of course. Did I want to know where I stood on the Bea/Tessa swing-o-meter? Absolutely not, since I now suspected it had always pointed in her favor.

Strangely, I felt no bitterness, because I knew in my heart of hearts that James had had no idea either. He had done what he'd said he'd done. He'd forced himself to get over her, he'd tried his best, but how do you get over the love of your life? How do you ever completely get over anyone you've ever loved? I wasn't sure you did. I think that if you'd loved them at all, then you'd always love them a bit. I got dressed and went downstairs. After all, wouldn't I always love Ben a fraction more than I ought? As the day ticked past, I felt a growing emptiness in the house. It wasn't that Dad had gone altogether, but I was aware of his presence fading. He was leaving us gently. I stared at the daffodils through the kitchen window as the kettle boiled for more tea and thanked him for the strength he'd somehow left behind.

 

T
HE MORNING OF
D
AD'S CREMATION
was gloriously warm. We should have been dressing for a perfect English summer wedding. I stopped
the car outside the single-story red-brick crematorium that crouched in a landscaped garden planted with a variety of primulas. My mother got out of the passenger seat, pushed the Gucci sunglasses Sasha had lent her up the bridge of her nose, and took my arm. Then we walked toward the building.

People had already arrived. Fran and Caspar had come, which was way beyond the call of duty. There were faces from the village I recognized. Then the coffee-morning women stood up one by one and told my mother who they were, in case she didn't recognize their voices. There were the guys from the pub, old friends who'd driven miles to be with us, and a couple of Dad's former colleagues.

Seeing them all made me proud of him. I knew I'd got lucky. Friends had lost fathers in their sixties to strokes and heart attacks. Dad had outlived many of his own friends by more than a decade, so it was not with a heavy heart that I took my seat. Mostly, I felt blessed.

And then I saw Peter, Honor, and the three girls. My heart stopped for a second, then punched a hole through my ribs.

“What is it?” asked my mother, sensing me tense. I didn't have time to answer, because Maddy broke free of Honor, ran down the middle aisle, and threw her arms around me. That was when the lump arrived in my throat.

“You've been crying,” she said.

“Only a little,” I replied.

“Hello, Maddy,” said my mother.

“Can I sit on your knee?” she asked.

“I don't think—”

“That would be lovely,” said Mum, and sat down to accommodate the sprightly eight-year-old. She clambered on, lifted Mum's glasses, lowered them with a nod, and kissed her cheek. Damn that lump.

Honor came to retrieve her granddaughter, but I held up my hand to tell her all was well, Maddy could stay, so she went back to her seat. I was grateful. I didn't want to talk to her and discover here, now, what I already knew. That James wasn't coming. That was that. Amber blew me a kiss, then went to sit with Caspar and Fran. I stared at Dad's coffin. Stay with me, Dad, I pleaded, for just a moment longer.

The vicar said nice things; I read an excerpt from
Moby-Dick,
and
felt strangely removed from the proceedings. What else would they have done? Bea couldn't have brought the girls alone. It would have meant too much. If James had come, I would have read too much into it, and then he would have had to let me down from a greater height. They couldn't possibly have come together, but they had clearly wanted to be represented. My mother and father had made an impact that they had wanted to acknowledge. That was why they had sent Honor, Peter, and the children. It was what I would have done in the circumstances.

 

D
AD LEFT THIS WORLD THROUGH
an electronic trapdoor. For such a long life, it was a short exit. I knew it was perfunctory, but Mum and I had decided that a happy memorial service when her eyesight was better was what Dad would have preferred.
The Pearl Fishers
was piped through the surround-sound system, presumably so you couldn't hear the flames boost to the exact temperature needed to reduce my father to a jam jar of ash. I watched him go—or the coffin, anyway—and knew that the man he'd been was not inside it.

After that, we were ushered out pretty quickly, and I noticed people emerge from the subtle side doors to gather up our flowers and replace them with the next lot. Morbid fascination made me hang back a fraction longer than I should have, and as the silent flower-bearers finished laying out a carnation creation that spelled
GRANDMA
, hey presto, another coffin emerged from the hold. It wasn't exactly the same as Dad's but it wasn't very different. The door through which I had entered opened as the door through which I was leaving closed. What had Linda said? “The effing conveyor belt of life.” There it was, in a single-story nutshell. Rather than feeling disappointed by the lack of pageantry, I felt comforted by the commonplace efficiency of the production line. Henry Ford would have been proud. More than that, Dad liked efficiency.

 

I
WALKED INTO THE
“
ROSE GARDEN
,” whose name conjured up White House grandeur but failed to deliver, and was surrounded by Dad's friends. I couldn't get near Mum, and was worried about her getting tired, but so many people wanted to talk to her it would have felt churlish dragging
her away. Occasionally, I caught a flash of the girls as they ran around the garden. And then I saw him. James was here. My heart punched another hole in my rib cage. I'd done such a good job of convincing myself it was over that I would have been less surprised to see Dad. He'd chosen me, and I was overjoyed. I wanted to run to him, jump into his arms, wrap my legs around his middle, and hold on forever, but there were a lot of people about who might have thought such behavior inappropriate at a funeral. Besides, he was on the opposite side, looking out over the countryside, and hadn't seen me.

I felt two small hands slip into mine. Lulu and Maddy were at either side of me. “You're still here. I am so happy to see you,” I said, which made them smile.

“Good,” said Maddy. “Because we want you to be happy.”

“Maddy! You just made her cry,” said Lulu.

Maddy looked devastated.

“No, sweet pea,” I said hastily, “it's only because I'm so pleased you all came.”

“See?” said Maddy.

“When did your dad get here?” I asked.

“He's not here. He's at home with Mummy,” said Lulu.

I held back my frown. Lulu often got things wrong—all the time, in fact. She said things she didn't understand or hadn't grasped. I glanced to where James was standing, waiting for me to jump into his arms. But he was gone. I scanned the thinning crowd—there was only so much looking at wreaths people could take before the brew beckoned—but couldn't find him anywhere. Then, walking away with an elderly woman, I saw a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair.

My world collapsed. Of course it hadn't been James staring out over the countryside. He would never stand apart from his daughters, no matter what the occasion. I realized only at that moment how much I had been holding out for him to come back to me, how my calm acceptance of the situation was not courage but denial.

I looked down at the little hands in mine and felt my eyeballs burn. I mustn't cry, I mustn't cry, I must, must, must not—

“You okay?” asked Ben, suddenly at my side.

I couldn't speak, but shook my head.

“Come with me,” he said, then smiled reassuringly at the girls. “See you back at the house for cake.”

I didn't dare look down.

“Perfect timing,” said Ben. He pointed out the vicar. He was walking toward us with a—I squinted. It wasn't…it couldn't be…There really was a fucking jam jar in his hand. If my heart hadn't been breaking, I might have laughed.

“We'll take that,” said Ben. He grabbed Dad's ashes and led me away from the spectators into the garden. He thrust the jar into my hand. It was warm. “You can cry now,” he said.

And I did.

It felt as though someone had wrenched open my jaw, stretched my gullet, thrust their fist down my throat, and pulled out my soul. I hugged my father and Ben hugged me. Occasionally, there would be a break in the tears and I would stare out over the shrubs and rosebushes and, beyond them, the road that brought in the dead.

“Your dad was a lucky man, you know, Tess. Not many people get to leave life as painlessly as that, after such a full life as that, with the people who loved him most by his side.”

“I'm not crying about him,” I confessed, feeling worse because it was true, even though his remains were placed neatly on my lap. “It's James. He's not coming back.”

“You were pretty sure of that on Saturday.”

“I was pretending,” I said. “I don't know what real love is, if it even exists, but I felt…I felt in my core that this was something…oh, I don't know…”

“Go on, Tess.”

“This is hard to say to you.”

“Why?”

It took a long time to answer. Ben waited patiently.

“I suppose because I thought you were it, and it turned out I was wrong about that, so what the hell do I know? I'm a fantasist. I cling to whatever's on offer around me and make it fit my ideals.”

“I don't think that's true, Tess.”

“You give me too much credit. I threw myself at you and nearly
made you wreck your marriage, which, as marriages go, is a pretty good one.”

Ben prized my fingers off the glass jar and held them in his. “I'm not sure it can ever be either/or. I don't even know if it should. I think you can love more than one person, just not in the same way exactly. Everything I said to you I meant and still mean. In many respects we're so right for one another but no one's perfect, and I don't want you getting up close and personal with my imperfections. Sasha and I can bash it out. Our relationship gets better for the beating, because we end up with a deeper understanding of one another. It's a lifetime's work and it's not always fun, but it's good, it's rewarding, and I do love her. You and I, we already have a lifetime in the bag. I'd rather keep it safe and occasionally think about where I would take it if a parallel universe were ever to open up.”

I sniffed loudly. “You always make me feel better,” I said.

“Not if I was your husband.”

He was right, of course.

“So tell me about what you feel for James.”

I sat back on the bench and felt a copper plaque, which commemorated a previously departed soul, cool my shoulder blade. “I wanted to be a better person for him. I wanted to make him proud. I wanted to love his children. I wanted to bring out the best in him. He made me want to raise my game. He made me want to grow up. I feel steady with him, even-keeled. I feel like it just fits, you know, everything. Got to be honest, the kissing wasn't bad.”

“That's better,” said Ben.

“What?”

“You're smiling.”

“It wasn't perfect—how can it be when there's such a lot of baggage to deal with—but I was looking forward to rising to the challenge. For both of us.” I put my head on Ben's shoulder. He kissed my forehead. “And now he's back with Bea, which part of me knows is the right place for him, but there's a larger part of me that's just devastated we weren't given a chance to find out how good
we
could be.” I rolled the jam jar in my hands. “Because I think we would have been pretty darn good and I feel absolutely fucking shit about it.”

Ben squeezed my shoulders.

“We had potential,” I said, in a mock U.S.-agent accent.

“You still do.”

“Not with James, though.”

“But you still do, Tess. Bundles of it. Don't forget that.”

Didn't feel like that right then. It felt like I was back on the slag heap with all the other discarded goods that had “faulty” stamped on them. No one wanted me. Or no one wanted me enough. Which amounted to the same thing. I had been beaten by an overweight alcoholic ex-wife, even taking into account how much I had come to like her. That said it all, really. I had come so far and yet I was back at the beginning. I was old enough to know that I could cope on my own, I wouldn't fall to pieces, I'd be all right in the end, but there was no doubt about it: life was a fraction easier when you had someone else on-side. It brought complications of its own, of course, but, still, the pod felt better with two.

“I'd like to take Dad to the pub for a final pint before we head home. Would you join me?”

“It'll be my pleasure.”

We stood up. “You know what, Ben? You should adopt those children. You'd never ask them to be the perfect kids you might have had, because you never wanted them and therefore they can never let you down. You'd be a wonderful father.”

“Well,” said Ben, taking Dad out of my hands, “I know who I'd model myself on.”

 

M
Y MOTHER SEEMED COMPLETELY UNFAZED
that I had absconded with Dad, simply hugged me on my return and then we were separated again. I never made it out of the kitchen. People came and went, some I knew, some I didn't, to tell me in a variety of ways what a grand man my dad had been. Maddy and Lulu were playing Scrabble. New rules. When it was Maddy's turn, Lulu got out her replacement letters; when it was Lulu's turn, Maddy went back to reading her book. Amber was outside with Caspar. Every time I looked out of the window, they had their tongues thrust down each other's throats. It made me smile. An old man might have died, but there was kissing to do. Fran was miraculous and took over, with Honor, as hostess, leaving Mum and me to concentrate on snippets of a life we still didn't know everything about.