by Ali Mercer
‘That’s ridiculous! It’s like saying her whole value is dependent on whether she has her big day in white.’
‘That’s not what I mean and you know it. Look, you can have the house and everything that’s in it. You’re welcome to it. Just as long as I never have to see either of you again.’
‘You’re just saying that to hurt me. You might feel that about me, but I don’t believe you really feel that about Daisy.’
‘Oh, but I do. I don’t feel anything for her. I never did. And it seems to me that the feeling’s mutual. Half the time, she barely seems to know I exist. So what difference will it make to her if I’m gone? She’d be more upset if someone took a hammer to that wretched keyboard. And don’t kid yourself I haven’t thought about it.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘But I would, Paula. To be honest with you, if I stay in this house any longer I don’t know what I might take a hammer to.’
We stared at each other. I said, ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘No, Paula. I’m leaving you. Both of you. Because otherwise, you’re going to drive me mad. And you can’t stop me.’
‘You’re a bastard.’
‘You’re a bitch. But that didn’t make us compatible, did it?’
I moved closer to him. He was taller than me by several inches, and stronger. I wanted to hurt him but I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it with my hands. He had to look at me with fear in his eyes. The least he could do was to show me that respect.
‘You don’t get to talk like that about my daughter,’ I said. ‘One of these days I’m going to come for you. And when I do, you’re going to regret this for the rest of your life.’
He pulled a mocking face. ‘Are you trying to threaten me? Right now, that is an infinitely less terrifying prospect than staying here with the two of you.’
And with that he picked up his case and sauntered out, closing the front door behind him.
I listened to the car start, reverse out of the driveway, turn in the road and roar away.
And then I heard something else: the beginning of ‘Greensleeves’.
I went into the living room. Daisy had got down off the sofa and was sitting on the floor. She looked up at me uncomprehendingly, but with a kind of startled hopefulness, as if I might be about to make sense of a few things for her.
‘Just you and me for supper tonight, Daisy,’ I said. ‘Daddy’s gone.’
I had no idea whether she had understood or not. She pressed the keyboard and ‘Greensleeves’ started again.
I sat down on the sofa and stared at her for a long time. She didn’t seem to mind. Then I pulled myself together and went into the kitchen and set about the business of figuring out what we were going to eat.
For once, looking after Daisy didn’t seem like a chore. It seemed like a lifeline, and I knew I was going to need it. I’d use it again and again and again, and eventually the day would come when what Mark had said wouldn’t hurt me any more.
* * *
After Mark had been gone for a month I wrote to Ingrid saying that she was welcome to remain part of Daisy’s life, regardless of Mark’s decision not to have any contact.
There was no reply.
I didn’t hear from her until two years later, by which time the divorce was done and dusted and I had come to think of myself and Daisy as belonging to a family of two. Mum had recently emigrated to live on her Australian boyfriend’s sheep ranch and I missed her more than I would have expected, though we talked about as often as we ever had. She retained her ability to offer up opinions I really didn’t want to hear, even when chatting via FaceTime from a distance of more than nine thousand miles.
By then, I’d learned to cope with being the only adult in the house. I was lonely, but you can get used to loneliness and I wasn’t isolated. The mum friends I’d made in the town hadn’t shunned me, and I gave as much time as I could spare to supporting Daisy’s school. We’d raised funds for a sensory room for children with special needs – a little haven with fairy lights and a bubble lamp where they could go to relax. Daisy and I had even been pictured in the local newspaper, and I’d wondered what Mark would have said if he could have seen us. Then I had remembered the scorn with which he’d rejected us when he was leaving, and was inspired to hate him all over again.
Naturally, my hatred for Mark was something I kept to myself. I wouldn’t have admitted to anybody how often I thought about him, or how vengeful I felt. I didn’t have a lot of time to spare for thinking about Ingrid, but I wasn’t exactly fond of her either. The sight of her small, neat, crabby handwriting staring up at me from the doormat was all it took to reawaken my old resentment.
Daisy and I had just walked back from school. I scooped up the post, put the bills aside for later and took Ingrid’s letter with me as I followed Daisy from the kitchen to the living room. She settled on her favourite spot on the sofa and started playing with an app on her iPad that made sparkling noises as she scribbled on the screen with her finger. With the sound of a magic wand playing over and over again in the background, I opened Ingrid’s letter.
It was set out the old-fashioned way I’d learned at school decades ago, with Ingrid’s address at the top on the right-hand side.
* * *
Dear Paula.
* * *
Dear! I was surprised that she had brought herself to write that. Maybe she’d crossed her fingers.
* * *
Mark has asked me to get in touch to let you know some news that I’m afraid may come as a shock to you. We felt that you ought to know and not to find out by chance.
Around the time of my sister’s funeral, during the very difficult time when you and Mark were living separately, Mark had a brief relationship with a young woman called Jenny.
* * *
Jenny? Who the hell was Jenny?
A brief relationship? Did she mean a one-night stand?
Had it been revenge – payback for my poor little long-ago crush, that I’d never so much as followed through on?
I’d felt so guilty. I’d tried so hard to make it up to him. And yet he’d had a fling with someone else and had never even come close to confessing. He had slept so peacefully next to me night after night all those years… He’d shared meals with me, lived under the same roof, without ever letting it slip.
How could I not have suspected? How could he have kept it from me so completely?
* * *
He is the father of her daughter, Ava, who is now sixteen.
* * *
Ava.
Sixteen.
This girl – Mark’s daughter – had been there all along. For most of our marriage.
And where had he been? With me. At dinner parties. On holiday. Putting on his suit and going off to work. Living a comfortable, affluent, childfree existence – right up until I had Daisy, at which point it had all begun to fall apart.
Too much noise. Too much mess. Too much chaos.
And then it had become apparent that Daisy wasn’t developing in the same way as other children her age, and he had bolted. We had been in trouble, and he’d gone off and left us for dead.
‘Bastard,’ I said out loud.
* * *
When Jenny discovered she was pregnant, she decided not to tell Mark, as she knew he had gone back to you.
* * *
Jenny the martyr, the mother of Mark’s other daughter, selflessly backing off so he could save his marriage to me. How very thoughtful. How marvellously, idiotically kind. Of course, we were doomed in the long run anyway, but she wasn’t to know that, was she?
* * *
She received an offer of marriage from a longstanding admirer while she was expecting, and accepted it.
* * *
But seriously – this Jenny was something else. What kind of woman would do that? Marry someone while she was pregnant with somebody else’s kid? And what kind of man would make the offer?
Maybe Jenny wasn’t a martyr. Maybe she was Machi
avelli.
Either way, she must have had something going for her. I couldn’t imagine having attracted any offers of marriage when I was pregnant. Even Mark had pretty much stopped fancying me. He’d ended up looking at me as if I was a potentially unreliable co-worker rather than an object of lust – except for the times when I was really hormonal and bad-tempered, when he’d regarded me with alarm.
Well, I wasn’t at all sorry now that I’d frightened him once in a while. Served him right. I only wished I’d frightened him a whole lot more. The lying, cheating…
My hands tightened on the letter. It was an effort to relax them enough to keep the paper from creasing.
* * *
Jenny went on to have another daughter with her husband: Ellie, now eleven years old. Jenny’s marriage broke up when Ellie was a baby and ended in divorce.
* * *
Jenny wasn’t all that perfect, then. She was divorced, too. I shouldn’t have taken any satisfaction from this, but I was meanly pleased by it.
* * *
Following his divorce from you, Mark made contact with Jenny and they quickly became close. They are engaged to be married in the summer, and she is due to give birth to their second child shortly before Christmas.
There is no need to respond to this letter in any way. I’m sure you will appreciate that Mark is preoccupied with his new family, and I am getting in touch only to pass on information that might be relevant to you, given how surprisingly small the world can be. You might be interested to know that they plan to settle in Fairmarsh.
I hope you are able to find it in your heart to wish them all well.
Yours sincerely, Ingrid.
* * *
How many drafts of this letter would Ingrid have written, lining up the bombshell news ready to drop? But then, she’d probably loved it. Best fun she’d had in ages.
It had been two years. Two years of silence, and she hadn’t so much as mentioned Daisy, let alone asked after her.
I dropped the letter and slammed my fist into the palm of my hand.
‘Bitch!’
Daisy immediately let out a roar, scooped up one of her collection of diecast cars from the floor and hit the screen of the iPad with it. I dived forwards to stop her from hitting it again and was immediately plunged back into parental firefighting mode, and a present in which my former mother-in-law had no place, and nor did my ex-husband and his other family.
Twenty
Jenny
The sonographer ran the scanner over my big greased-up belly and said, ‘It’s definitely a boy.’
And there he was on the screen. His bones were like white shadows, hazy but easy to make out: the curve of the spine, the limbs, the skull. He looked like a fossil that had come to life.
He moved abruptly in response to the scanner, and my belly bulged and then subsided.
‘He’s got quite a kick,’ I said. I didn’t need to turn to Mark to know that he’d be grinning from ear to ear.
The baby kept moving. He was definitely going to be the splashiest swimmer in the pool when he was older. I imagined myself taking him into the water, encouraging him, gently letting him go so he could find out that he could float on his own. I hadn’t had much time for any of that with either of the girls.
The scan showed that he was a healthy weight, and developing normally. It didn’t pick up any abnormalities. I hadn’t really expected or prepared myself for bad news, but both Mark and I had been apprehensive, and afterwards we went to a posh restaurant for lunch to celebrate.
Mark looked at me with so much love I couldn’t quite believe it was all for me; even back in the days when he’d been fond of me, Sean had never looked at me like that. He raised a glass of sparkling water to me and said, ‘One of these days, we’ll have champagne to celebrate all this.’
We were as giggly and wrapped up in each other as newlyweds, which was exactly what we were; we’d tied the knot a few weeks before, in a quiet registry office ceremony attended by Ingrid and the girls. I’d found a work email address for my sister and had written to her to let her know about the wedding, but I hadn’t invited her and I hadn’t heard back. I’d been a little hurt by her silence, but not enough to spoil anything; after all, there was so much to be happy about.
In the end, we’d decided to go for a short honeymoon that would give us both a chance to relax, and had rejected the idea of an Italian sightseeing trip in favour of a weekend in a cabin by a Croatian lake. It was the longest time we’d ever spent alone together. Then we’d gone home together to the girls in Fairmarsh.
Moving out of our London flat hadn’t been much of a wrench, though I’d been sorry to leave Peter behind – he was the kindest neighbour I’d ever had. But the girls had their own rooms at last… and it was such a good feeling not to have to worry about the three-monthly inspections any more, or feel that we could be turfed out at short notice if the landlady decided to sell up or move someone else in.
I’d stopped working after the move. Mark was concerned about whether exposure to the chemicals in hair dye might be bad for the baby; I wasn’t too worried about that – since the official advice was that it probably wouldn’t be – but I didn’t really have the energy to relaunch my business in a new area. We’d agreed that I might start it up again when the baby was older, but I didn’t feel any particular sense of urgency. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have to worry about bringing money in. It was pretty much like having won the lottery.
But I must have been anxious, even though I didn’t really acknowledge it to myself. Summer gave way to autumn and the girls started their new schools, and as Christmas and my due date drew closer, I began to have strange recurring dreams.
They were about insects. Tides of them. Little bugs, not malevolent, but too numerous to be disregarded. Not dangerous in themselves. But still a threat, if only because there were so many.
Perhaps I just didn’t trust things to keep on going well. I was suspicious of good fortune, and I didn’t expect happiness to last. Rightly, as it turned out.
* * *
The birth was very quick, much quicker than with Ava or Ellie. I went into labour at eight in the evening, after my waters broke – good timing, since it meant Ingrid was still awake when we phoned her to come over and mind the girls. Our son was born five hours later, and then Mark was sent home and it was just me and the baby on the postnatal ward. We both slept a little and then, to my great relief, we were discharged the next morning.
Even after such a short time in hospital, going home felt like an escape. There was the world again, all its goings-on moving past the car windows – the cafés, the parks, the shops, all full of stars and angels and fake snow because it was nearly Christmas.
That evening Mark gave me dinner and waited on me hand and foot. The girls were thrilled. Even Ava. Lit up with the gorgeousness of it, the delight of a new baby in the house. I sat by the Christmas tree in the rocking chair I’d bought because I thought it would be comfortable for nursing, and Ava said, ‘So did you decide what you’re going to call him yet?’
There had been a lot of contenders. Mark and I had been through the baby name book several times, and then we had bought another one and gone through that, too. I looked across at Mark, who was sitting on the sofa watching us as if we were a miracle he didn’t deserve.
‘Your call,’ he said.
‘He definitely seems like a Felix to me,’ I said, looking down at the bit of the baby’s face I could see, which was squashed against my breast. ‘It means happy, doesn’t it? He seems like a jolly little chap.’
‘How can you tell?’ Ava asked, not entirely sceptically.
‘Oh… just a feeling. I don’t mean he’s never going to cry. We already know he’s got a pretty good pair of lungs on him.’
After I’d fed him the girls carefully held him in turn, and then I put him down in the cot and had a deep, uninterrupted sleep in the king-sized bed next to him. I had the bed to myself, as Mark had retre
ated to the sofa to give us all the best chance of a rest. And that was the peaceful end of Felix’s first day.
But in the bright light of the following morning, he didn’t look right.
His skin was tinged yellow. Jaundice. We took him back into hospital. I wasn’t particularly worried; Ava’d had jaundice, too, as a newborn, and it had passed within a day or so. The staff weren’t all that worried either, until a paediatric consultant saw the results of Felix’s blood test. She said there was a marker that suggested he had an infection, and he wouldn’t be able to go home again until they’d figured out why.
Felix and I were given a room to ourselves on the fifth floor, the level of the maternity wing reserved for sick babies and their mothers.
I didn’t panic. Actually, I felt like a fraud. I was sure that before long the mystery would be solved and the jaundice would clear, and we’d be home again and preparing for Felix’s first Christmas.
They treated the jaundice. Correction: I treated the jaundice. Me and the sun. Felix needed milk and plenty of it. They weighed his nappies to check he was taking in enough of it, and he was. Mark went home to relieve his mother and make sure the girls were all right, and Felix and I were alone together.
It was a beautiful day. The sun coming into our room was very bright, and Felix lay in the sunshine after his feed and snoozed. He looked so peaceful, and his skin was turning pink, losing that sickly hint of yellow. I pored over him when I should have been sleeping myself. He looked a bit like Ava and a bit like Mark, and also, a bit like me. But most of all he looked like his own perfect, new-minted self.
