“Andy can’t forgive me, Mark. He’s made that pretty clear.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t just need more time?”
“I don’t think time will make any difference at all. Truly . . . I don’t think this is one of these ‘time heals all’ situations. I think I have to accept that it’s over.” Her voice broke. “And if I accept that, I have to get on with my life. ‘Move on’—isn’t that what they call it?” She sounded sarcastic, and harder than normal.
“But this is move
out,
not on.”
“They’re the same thing, Mark.” She smiled right at him for the first time and put her arm up, round his shoulder. “You’ll live. It’s not like I’ve been doing your laundry.”
“I meant to mention that, actually. Why not?”
“Dream on. I’ve never done a man’s laundry in my life, and I’m not starting now.”
“God save me from feminism.”
“Huh!”
“I’ll miss you.” Mark’s tone was suddenly serious. He sounded wistful.
“I’ll miss you, too. But we can’t keep playing Derby and Joan, you and me. Watching crap TV and going to bed early. Waggling our fingers at Hannah.” She wiggled, didactically, to emphasize her point. “We’re both hiding out here a bit, aren’t we?”
Mark leaned his head on her arm. “Where did they teach you to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Take a conversation about you and make it into one about me?”
“Classic deflection?!”
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“Exactly! You know who.”
“Mum.”
He was right. She had been a master at it. It was how she had tackled every one of the issues she and Lisa had ever had.
“So . . . back to you, my evasive one. Where are you going to go?”
“Local, I hope. Somewhere I can afford, obviously. I’ve been spoiled, I’m afraid, by the whole double-income thing. Andy paid the mortgage, I did the bills. Doing both will be a stretch.”
Mark hated the idea of her struggling, but he knew her well enough to know that she would rather eat baked beans in a freezing hovel than take money from him to help out. He didn’t think it would come to that.
He wondered whether he should raise the trust. He and Barbara had matching wills, but Barbara had had her own plans for the money she’d made with the shop. The girls knew Barbara had put money in trust for them, after they’d sold it. There’d been a difficult, sad meeting at the lawyer’s office where it had all been explained to them, last summer, after the funeral. Mark was a trustee; so was the lawyer. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was probably the deposit on a flat. At least she knew it was there if she needed it. Lisa picked up the paper.
“There are a few possibilities in here. I’ll make a couple of calls later.
Go and see some places, maybe.” She sounded halfhearted, even to herself.
“I’ll come with you, if you want. Second pair of eyes.”
She squeezed his forearm. “Thanks, Mark. I know.” It was neither an acceptance nor a refusal. “You’ve been a bloody star, letting me stay, listening to all my bleating.”
“I think the bleating has been fairly mutual.”
“Maybe. See—we’re manic depressives anonymous. Got to shake it off.”
“You’ll be all right, you know?”
“I know I will. Eventually.”
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He pulled her into a sudden, fierce hug. Lisa let herself be held for a while. He felt her relax into him.
“I miss my mum.” She sounded muffled and instantaneously tearful in his sweater, like she was five years old again.
“I miss her, too.”
They felt themselves teetering on the edge of an abyss they had both fallen into too many times in the last few months. They both smelled the self-pity in the fibers of each other’s clothes and the air around them.
Lisa moved first. She pushed herself back from her stepfather, open palms on his chest. “Right,” she said, her tone no-nonsense. “Come on.
Enough of this wallowing.”
He aped her tone. “Okay. What’s on your agenda today, Gidget?”
“Well . . . I’ll be procrastinating a little bit on phoning the estate agents. So, I’m going to meet Jen for lunch. She just got back from skiing, so there’ll be venting to do! You?”
“Not a lot. Thought I’d try and engineer some ‘quality time’ with Kevin.” He grimaced. He and Lisa had recently started calling Hannah Kevin behind her back, after Harry Enfield’s belligerent, monosyllabic teenage character. Having your own Kevin wasn’t quite as funny as watching one on television. “A bit of gardening, maybe. It’s all about to go crazy out there.” It had been raining for what felt like weeks. Spring was about to spring in a big way.
“Do you want to come with me? We’re going Chinese, in town. The one next to Tesco. You haven’t seen Jen for a while, have you?”
“No. No. You go. Girls lunch.”
If Lisa noticed a tightening in his tone, she didn’t say anything.
As he watched her drive away, he wondered whether he should have gone. Faced Jennifer. It had to be done at some point. Otherwise there would be a rift, and that rift would have to stop being a secret and then it would have to be explained to Hannah. Everyone else had sorted themselves out. He knew it was up to him to offer Jennifer absolution. He sighed. Speaking of Hannah—he glanced at his watch. Eleven thirty a.m.,
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and, as far as he knew, she was still snoring upstairs. It seemed to be what she wanted to do these days—stay out, sleep late, watch Channel 4
in her pajamas all afternoon, and go out again. He put the kettle on. Perhaps she would respond to a cup of tea. . . .
Jennifer arrived first and chose a table in the window of the restaurant. She sat, watching the world go by from behind a red-and-white gingham café curtain, and sipping a Diet Coke. While she waited, she thought about her sister. Sentences she wanted to speak formed in her brain, and she rehearsed them quietly. She supposed she must get this urge to want to fix things from their mother. It was her big theme, this year. She’d fixed herself, or at least she believed she was on the way. Now she wanted to fix Lisa. She’d never realized how much alike they were. Both, in their way, commitment phobes. Nonbelievers.
She hadn’t recognized it in herself as readily as she had seen it in Lisa.
You could see Lisa holding herself back from Andy. She might blame all sorts of things. Andy had been married before. Weren’t the statistics for second marriages always lousy? Andy had a child. All of that. But that wasn’t it. She wasn’t prepared, never had been, to commit. Jennifer had told herself she’d bought into the whole commitment thing. She’d married Stephen, hadn’t she? She’d put on the dress and walked down the aisle and said the vows in front of everyone. But that just made her more of a fraud than Lisa. More self-delusional, too. It was the baby—that was what represented the real commitment to Stephen. That was where she’d fallen down. So they had more in common than either of them thought.
They’d been nothing alike, as kids. Jennifer liked dolls and dress up.
Lisa had matchbox cars, and an encyclopedic knowledge of tractors. Jennifer had liked to play with girls; Lisa preferred the company of boys, years before she even knew what she really wanted to do with them. If they had homework, Jennifer did hers on Saturday morning. Lisa was a Sunday-night girl. If not a Monday-morning-on-the-bus one. When they 306 e l i z a b e t h
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were both at university, they’d visited each other—once. Jennifer had come to Lisa first. Been dragged to a smoky party where the music was too loud for conversation, and friendships were forged through the passing around of a joint. Gone home alone to a messy room in a damp shared house, full of unironed laundry and cups of half-finished tea while Lisa stayed behind to work on a guy she was interested in. When Lisa had been to visit Jennifer, her room, in a civilized hall of residence, with an en suite shower room, no less, smelled of washing powder and Anaïs Anaïs. Jennifer’s friends all seemed to be girls. They existed in a girly, giggling gaggle completely alien to Lisa. They did a yoga class and ate at a vegetarian café. Jennifer introduced her to John, a man Lisa found so anodyne that she barely addressed a remark to him through two rounds in the student union. He had rounded shoulders, Lenin glasses, and a shaving rash. Lisa believed she knew the type, and she just wasn’t interested. Jennifer was cross with her, she knew—she said she hadn’t given him a chance. Lisa retorted that Jennifer had been going out with him for almost the entire year, which was surely chance enough for any guy. Jennifer didn’t come to the station at the end of the weekend to say good-bye. The whole weekend had been a disaster.
By tacit agreement, neither visited the other again. They had no interest, at that point, in anything about each other’s lives. They were sisters, of course, but it seemed they were not destined to be friends. What common ground the shared experience of their childhood had given them had ebbed away as soon as they had moved away from that home.
It might have been more of a wedge, if it hadn’t been for Mum. Mum and Mark. That gave them, finally, a reason to come together again: shared, indignant disapproval.
There were some conversations in your life that you remembered vividly, forever. Mum telling them she was pregnant, that she was going to marry Mark—that was one of
those
conversations. The three of them had been in the garden at Carlton Close. It was June, the start of the long summer break from university. The significance of home had shifted in-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 307
exorably for both of them in recent months. It had taken its place as a stop on their journey, no longer the destination. They loved their mum, and their kid sister, Amanda, whose delight at their return almost compensated for her irritating tendencies to climb on their beds, chattering inanely, at six in the morning. They were fond of their familiar rooms, the spaghetti Bolognese, and the fact that their laundry disappeared and then reappeared, miraculously folded and ironed. But they were just passing through now. It wasn’t really where they wanted to be.
Jennifer was going inter-railing with John, in a few weeks—a trip they had dreamed of and meticulously planned. Lisa was in far too much debt to consider a trip like that. She’d spent what money she had by the sixth week of the term, raced through her overdraft limit with similar alacrity, and seriously needed to earn some money. She was going to Weston-super-Mare, where her friend Emma lived, to chambermaid with her in a three-star hotel, as soon as the season started. Long hours, but good pay. And all the bars and nightclubs of an English seaside town to explore after the evening turn down. Characteristically, both sisters thought they were the most likely to have fun.
They’d known Mum was going out with someone. She would never have kept something like that a secret. She’d never have had the nerve, after she’d extracted every nugget of information from Lisa about every boy she’d been out with. She’d told them, on the phone, that a guy had come into the shop and that they’d got talking, and that he’d asked her to lunch. They knew she liked him. Beyond that, neither of them had thought about it much—Jennifer busy trying to read train timetables in six different European languages, and Lisa spending days and weeks and terms passing in a fog, literally and metaphysically.
So it was a bit of a conversation stopper, when it came.
“I thought you should know, it’s getting serious.” She’d mixed them all a white wine spritzer, laughing, as she had done before, because she was so glad they were both finally old enough to drink with her.
“How serious?” Jennifer had asked.
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“Very serious, actually . . .”
“How serious is very serious?” Lisa echoed, taking in the inane grin spreading across their mother’s face. “Are you in love with him?”
“Oh, yes. Very much in love with him.”
Jennifer had squirmed a little. This was far more Lisa’s territory. She wasn’t sure she wanted to think about Mum being in love.
“I suppose I’d better meet him, then, hadn’t I?”
It hadn’t happened, so far. Now Jennifer couldn’t remember whether that was by Lisa’s design, or by her mother’s. It hadn’t seemed important.
“I’ve met him,” Jennifer added unnecessarily. She was pleased, for once, to have something to lord it over Lisa about. Lisa always made her feel so . . . gauche, and immature. No one else did that.
“Good for you!” Lisa’s tone told her that her remark had hit home. Of course, reprisal was swift. “But forgive me if I don’t think you’re the ultimate judge of men.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say. Pot calling the kettle black. Do any of your blokes stick around long enough for you to get to know them?”
“Girls . . . don’t fight.” Mum’s tone was light. Like she wasn’t really listening to the squabble.
“Did you hear what she said, Mum?”
“I heard what you both said. This isn’t about you, believe it or not.
I’m trying to tell you both something.”
“What?”
“Mark’s asked me to marry him. And I’ve said yes.”
Jennifer spat a mouthful of spritzer back into her glass.
“Bloody hell, Mum!”
“Yes, well, I’m sorry to shock you. Seemed to be the only way I could get your attention.”
It had worked.
“And while you’re busy catching flies and looking stupefied, I better tell you the rest.”
“There’s more?”
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“There’s a lot more. I’m having a baby.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m having a baby, with Mark.”
“What do you mean, having a baby? You mean you want to have a baby, with Mark? Mum, you’re forty-five. You’re . . . like . . . well, you’re way too old to have a baby.”
“I do not mean I want to have a baby. Well . . . that’s not true. Of course I want to. You’re making me nervous. . . .” For the first time, they heard a slight tremor in her voice. “I mean I
am having one.
I hate to defy medical science and burst your bubble, Lisa, but I’m pregnant. I’m three months pregnant.”