He was struggling to find things to say. Ed was a little frightened.
Amanda still hadn’t moved, and, apart from that first small smile, she hadn’t even looked at him. He felt the enormity of this news, but he knew he was ill-equipped to deal with it. Whatever he felt for her—and what he felt, he’d just contemplated, paying for milk and bread in the corner shop, was a bit of a revelation to him—he hardly knew her. He didn’t know what she wanted.
“So does she say . . . in the letter . . . who your dad is?”
“No. She says I don’t need to know. Apparently I’m the product of some sordid little affair she had when she was married to my dad . . . to Donald. It’s not worth me knowing.”
Ed thought he might agree, though he daren’t say it out loud. What was that aphorism he’d seen written on fridge magnets, or mouse mats, or somewhere? Any man could be a father, but it took somebody special to be a dad? Wasn’t that it?
Amanda got out of bed in a sudden move. She started to pull on clothes—hers this time, and not his flatmate’s borrowed ones.
“Are you okay?”
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“Of course I’m not okay.” There was a new edge in her voice that he hadn’t heard before. As if you would, in the pub, in the bed, in her arms.
“I just read—in a letter—that my mother, my perfect bloody dead bloody mother had been lying to me my entire bloody life.”
She pulled the New Year’s Eve dress roughly over her head, and her new voice was muffled.
“I can’t believe it. I can’t bloody believe it. All these months, I’ve been blaming myself for not coming to see her—feeling really shitty that I wasn’t around, that I wasn’t
there for her,
when everyone else was. I’ve been carrying this letter around like some talisman, waiting and waiting for the right moment, for the right feeling to come so that I could open it and read it. And now I have and I get . . . I get . . . I get
this
!” She was shouting now.
“And I want to ring her up and just yell at her. Really shout. How dare she? Coward? Coward isn’t the word. I mean, this is my life. This is
MY LIFE
. And I’ve been living it without even knowing the fundamental, basic things about myself. Like who my
OWN FATHER
is. And I still don’t. I still don’t. And I never bloody will, because that secret is lying with her, rotting away in some stupid bloody field. Can you believe it?”
Clearly, Ed couldn’t. This wasn’t how he had hoped this morning would go. Amanda was a dervish now, pulling her coat on. It felt to him like she could only wind up a little further before she would have to spin out and out and out of control, and be reduced almost to nothingness, and his plan was to be still and be quiet until that happened. And then, maybe, hold her. If he was allowed.
But her hand was on the bedroom door.
“I’ve got to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. Go home. Go to work.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Just go. Go and see Mark . . . I don’t know.”
She turned and looked at him. He was standing in the middle of the
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room, wearing underpants and a T-shirt, and a startled expression. Even his unstyled Tintin hair looked shocked. She remembered where she was.
“You didn’t sign up for this.”
He moved toward her. She thought of David Attenborough, approaching animals in their native habitat. Very, very slowly and gently.
“I don’t think you should go anywhere . . . just yet. Not until you’ve . . . calmed down a bit.”
He reached out a hand.
“Have I scared you to death?”
He smiled ruefully. “A bit.”
“Not your average one-night stand?” She was looking at the ground, deflating now.
He took two steps nearer to her and tentatively put a hand on her shoulder.
“Two nights.”
When she didn’t shrug it off, he stood right in front of her and raised his other hand to rest on her other shoulder.
“And there was nothing remotely average about it.” He put one hand under her chin and pulled her face up until her eyes met his.
“I just don’t want you to go until you’ve had a think. We don’t have to talk.”
For a moment he thought he had her. She let him pull her into a hug and stood there, his arms around her, for a couple of minutes. He could feel her heart beating. It slowed and became even again. Her breathing grew less ragged. He thought she might cry. He hoped she would. He knew where he was with tears. But she didn’t cry.
She pulled away gently.
“Look, Ed. I
am
going to go. This . . . this is a big thing, you know?
I can’t just pretend I don’t know. That I didn’t read it. I wish I hadn’t. But I did. And I need to be by myself. It’s nothing to do with you.” He hated that line, even though, in this case, he knew it was true. Something stopped him from asking when he would see her again.
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He nodded. “Okay. I understand.”
She kissed him once, on the lips. It was warm, but chaste, and brief.
“Thank you. I’ll see you.”
“I’ll see you.”
Ed wondered if he would. Amanda let herself out, and he watched her walk away from the upstairs window until she turned the corner and disappeared from view.
The purposeful walk she had adopted, striding away from Ed’s house, suspecting that he was watching her, evaporated when she got around the corner. She didn’t know where to go. She slowed to a me-ander, and that pace took her, within a few minutes, into a warm café, where she realized that she looked ridiculous and inappropriate, but she no longer cared. She kept her coat buttoned over the party dress, smoothed her bed head hair behind each ear, and ordered tea and toasted teacakes. No one took much notice of her, to her relief, but the tea came quickly and she drank it down, though it burned her throat.
She didn’t know what to think about first. She tried to concentrate on her childhood, as though thinking back to the familiar might throw up clues to something she ought to have been looking for all along. But it didn’t, of course. Who would think about something like that? It was totally bizarre. She ruled out calling Mark. He didn’t know. She couldn’t tell him. She pulled out her phone and called Lisa.
Her sister answered on the third ring.
“Lisa?”
“Mand? Happy New Year!”
“You, too.”
“You okay?”
“Not really.”
“What’s wrong?” She heard the alarm in Lisa’s voice.
“No. Nothing. Much. I’m okay. I just . . .”
“What?”
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“I wondered if you were free, today, this morning, sometime . . . to meet up . . . for a coffee or something. . . .”
“You sound weird. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Stop saying nothing, you idiot. Did something happen with that guy? Are you okay? Where are you?”
She hadn’t meant to frighten Lisa, and for a moment, she wished she hadn’t called. She couldn’t tell her over the phone. She wasn’t even sure she could tell her face-to-face.
“Nothing happened. Listen, Lisa, please. Calm down. I’m fine. I promise. I’m in London. I just wanted to see you—for a chat. Honest.
I’m fine.”
Lisa sounded reassured. “Okay. Okay. So . . . today . . .”
“If you’re free.”
“We’ve got Cee Cee. We were going to take her to a film. But . . .”
“I don’t want to interrupt. . . .”
“Glad of the chance to get out of happy families, to tell you the truth.
Tell me where and when.”
Amanda looked down at the dress, sticking out beneath her coat. She needed to go home, take a shower, think of what the hell to say. “How about lunch? Covent Garden? One o’clock.”
“Long as we can hit the sales afterward.”
“You’re on.” She made her tone light.
“And you’re sure you’re okay? How did the date go?”
“The date went great. I’ll fill you in when I see you, okay?”
“See you later.”
The hot shower felt good. She stood for long minutes under it, the bathroom filling with steam. She’d been glad to discover that neither of her flatmates was home, so there’d been no need to explain the dress, or, for that matter, her absence. Nor was there any need to share the shower, so she stood there, motionless, until her skin was 110 e l i z a b e t h
n
o b l e
red and the hot water ran to lukewarm. She wrapped herself in a towel, turning another into a turban, and stared at her blurry face in the wet mirror. “Whose daughter are you?” she asked her reflection.
She thought she heard her mum answer. “You’re mine. All mine.”
She dried the mirror off and looked at her body. Under the shower redness she blushed as she remembered Ed, remembered his hands on her, all over her. And her responses. And his eyes, boring into hers. She went back into her bedroom, found her phone in her bag, and dialed his number.
When the computer-generated voice answered, asking her to leave a message, she glanced at her watch. She’d only left him an hour ago. He had to still be there. He was still there, at home, and he had his phone in his hand, and he was looking at it, seeing who was calling, and he was choosing not to speak to her. She must have been that terrifying. He didn’t want to talk to her.
She lost her nerve and hung up.
Dialed again. Got the same recorded message. Took a deep breath, and spoke.
“Ed? It’s me. I just . . . wanted to say that I’m sorry, for going psycho on you this morning. It was a stupid thing to do, opening the letter then.
I’m sorry. And I wanted . . . I wanted to say thank you. For the last couple of days. I had a great time. A really great time. I’m sorry . . . that I . . . if I ruined it. Sorry. So . . . that’s what I wanted to say. Take care.
Call me . . . if you want. It’s Amanda. ’Bye, then.”
For five minutes she sat in the chair, in her towel, with her phone in her hand. He didn’t call her back. She shivered with cold then and got dressed.
Covent Garden was heaving with sale shoppers, and Lisa, scanning the crowd for her sister, didn’t see Amanda until she was right next to her. They hugged briefly, and then Lisa thrust her arm through Amanda’s and pulled her in the direction of a restaurant they’d eaten at before.
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“Thank God I called and made a reservation—the world and his wife are out today.”
They were shown to a small round table in the corner, where they sank gratefully into their chairs and ordered two big glasses of red wine.
Lisa leaned forward conspiratorially and grinned.
“So, sis, dish . . . how was it?”
“It was fine.”
“Fine?! You went off from Mark’s on top of the world. . . .”
She didn’t want to talk about Ed. Maybe there was no Ed to talk about, anyway.
“Lisa—I read Mum’s letter.”
“What do you mean?” Lisa looked confused.
“You know the letters we got? When Mum died?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, I hadn’t read mine.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t bring myself to. I felt bad, not being there, I suppose. I wasn’t sure what it would say . . . I don’t know. Anyway”—
she shook her head—“I didn’t read it at the time, and I hadn’t read it . . . until this morning.”
“And . . .”
“And this morning I read it.”
Lisa realized that Amanda was looking pale. Shocked. And she’d been crying. She could see it now—her eyes were red-rimmed.
“What did it say?” When Amanda didn’t answer, she felt awkward. “I mean, not that it’s any of my business, not really, what it said. . . .”
“That’s why I called you. . . .”
“Okay.” Lisa sat, looking at her sister for long moments, her hands folded in her lap, her mind racing.
Amanda couldn’t move the conversation forward. She couldn’t get the words out.
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Her sister felt a flash of anxiety.
“Come on. . . . You’re freaking me out now, Mand. What did it say?”
Amanda smiled weakly, and shrugged her shoulders, trying to sort her words into some sort of sense. “Sorry—I’m making a real hash of this, aren’t I? It’s just not that easy to say.”
Lisa leaned forward and put her hand over her sister’s. “Just say it.
Come on. This is me you’re talking to. I don’t need things sugarcoated.”
“Okay.” Amanda took a deep breath and looked straight at Lisa.
What was holding her up, she realized, was knowing how to describe the man she was talking about. “Donald isn’t my dad.”
“What?”
“Donald . . . Dad. He isn’t . . . he wasn’t . . . my biological father.
He wasn’t my dad.”
“Shit.” They sat in a stunned silence for a few seconds.
Amanda narrowed her eyes in an examination of Lisa’s face. “So you’re surprised?”
“Of course I’m surprised! You thought I knew?”
“You were close, the two of you. Closer than the rest of us. I thought she might have confided in you.”
“Not that close, apparently. I had no idea.” She shook her head incredulously. “Bloody hell, Mand.”
Amanda was almost comforted by Lisa’s incredulity. She didn’t think she would have liked it, if it had turned out that Lisa had known all along. And, in a funny way, it helped that her sister was just as shocked as she was. Well, almost. She still knew who her dad was.
Lisa’s eyes were screwed up now, as she thought. “Do you think Mark knows?”
“She says he doesn’t, in the letter. She said no one did.”
“Bloody hell, Mand.”
Amanda pulled the letter out of her bag and handed it to Lisa. It was easier to let her read it for herself. Lisa’s lips moved as she slowly di-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 113
gested its contents. Amanda stared out of the window at the manic sale shoppers.
When Lisa had finished, she put the letter down on the table. The top corner of it lay on a small spill of wine, and red spread like a stain across the thin paper. Amanda picked it up and dried the corner on her napkin. Lisa looked at her face and saw that she had tears in her eyes.