Surprise Me

by Kinsella, Sophie

  Well, to be honest, anything can catch me out.

  ‘Fine!’ I force a bright tone. ‘So, girls, what are you going to put on your pancakes?’

  Distraction is crucial, because the last thing I need is Tessa talking about Grandpa sitting on a cloud in front of Mummy.

  ‘Maple syrup!’

  ‘Chocolate sauce!’

  Anna and Tessa dash into the kitchen, all thoughts of Grandpa forgotten. As I follow them I glance at Dan, still walking right by Mummy’s side, and the sight suddenly cheers me up. Will Project Surprise Me have an unexpected side benefit? Will it bring Dan and Mummy closer together? Seeing them just now, huddled in the drawing room, they had a kind of directness and openness with each other that I’ve never seen before.

  I mean, they do get on, as a rule. They do. Kind of. It’s just …

  Well. As I’ve mentioned, Dan can be a bit prickly about Daddy. And money and … lots of stuff. But maybe he’s over that, I think optimistically. Maybe things have changed.

  Or maybe not. By the time we’ve all finished eating, Dan seems more prickly than ever, especially when Mummy finds out about the snake and teases him about it. I can tell he’s struggling to stay polite, and I don’t blame him. Mummy has a habit of picking one joke and making it too many times. I almost find myself coming to the wretched snake’s defence. (Almost.)

  ‘I always wanted a pet when I was little,’ I say to the girls, trying to broaden the conversation. ‘But I didn’t want a snake, I wanted a kitten.’

  ‘A kitten,’ breathes Tessa.

  ‘Your snake would probably eat the kitten!’ says Mummy merrily. ‘Isn’t that what you feed snakes, Dan, live kittens?’

  ‘No,’ says Dan evenly. ‘It is not.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mummy,’ I say, frowning at her before she freaks out the girls. ‘Granny’s joking, girls. Snakes don’t eat kittens! So anyway,’ I press on. ‘I wasn’t allowed a pet and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters either … so guess what? I made up an imaginary friend. Her name was Lynn.’

  I’ve never told the girls about my imaginary friend before. I’m not sure why.

  No, of course I know why. It’s because my parents made me feel so ashamed about it. It’s actually taking me some courage to mention her in front of Mummy.

  In hindsight – especially now I have children of my own – I can see that my parents didn’t handle the whole imaginary friend thing well. They were great parents, really they were, but that one issue, they got wrong.

  I mean, I get it. Things were different then. People were less open-minded. Plus Mummy and Daddy were super-conventional. They probably worried that hearing voices in my head meant I was going mad or something. But imaginary friends are perfectly normal and healthy for children. I’ve googled it. (Lots of times, actually.) They shouldn’t have been so disapproving. Every time I mentioned Lynn, Mummy would freeze in that awful way she had, and Daddy would look at Mummy with a kind of disapproving anger, like it was her fault, and the whole atmosphere would become toxic. It was horrible.

  So of course, after a while, I kept Lynn secret. But it didn’t mean I abandoned her. The very fact that my parents had such an extreme reaction to her made me cling on to her. Embellish her. Sometimes I felt guilty when I talked to her in my head – and sometimes I felt defiant – but I always had a horrible feeling of shame. I’m thirty-two years old, but even now, saying ‘Lynn’ out loud gives me a queasy frisson.

  I even woke up dreaming about her the other day. Or remembering, maybe? I could hear her laughing that happy gurgle of a laugh. Then she was singing the song that I used to love, ‘Kumbaya’.

  ‘Did you talk to her in real life?’ says Tessa, puzzled.

  ‘No, just in my head.’ I smile at her. ‘I made her up because I felt a bit lonely. It’s perfectly normal. Lots of children have imaginary friends,’ I add pointedly, ‘and they grow out of them naturally.’

  This last is a little dig at Mummy, but she pretends not to notice, which is typical.

  I’ve promised myself that one day I’m going to have it out with Mummy. I’m going to say, ‘Do you realize how ashamed you made me feel?’ and ‘What was the problem? Did you think I was going mad or something?’ I have all my lines ready – I’ve just never quite had the guts to say them. As I say, I’m not brilliant at confrontation, and especially not since Daddy died. The family boat’s been unsteady enough without me rocking it more.

  Sure enough, Mummy has blanked this entire conversation and now changes the subject.

  ‘Look what I found the other day,’ she says, zapping at the wall-mounted TV, and after a few seconds, a family video appears on screen. It’s from my sixteenth birthday, the part when Daddy stood up to give a speech about me.

  ‘I haven’t seen this one for ages,’ I breathe, and we all fall silent to watch. Daddy’s addressing the ballroom at the Hurlingham Club, where my party was. He’s in black tie, and Mummy’s all shimmery in silver and I’m in a red minidress, which Mummy spent Saturday after Saturday helping me look for.

  (Now I look back, it really doesn’t suit me. But I was sixteen. What did I know?)

  ‘My daughter has the wit of Lizzy Bennet …’ Daddy is saying in that commanding way of his. ‘The strength of Pippi Longstocking … the boldness of Jo March … and the style of Scarlett O’Hara.’ On screen the guests break into applause and Daddy twinkles at me and I gaze back up, speechless.

  I remember that moment. It blew me away. Daddy had secretly gone through all the books in my bedroom, looking for my heroines and writing a speech around them. I glance over at Mummy now, my eyes a little hot, and she gives me a tremulous smile back. My mother can drive me mad – but there are times when no one gets it like she does.

  ‘Good speech,’ says Dan after a few moments, and I shoot him a grateful smile.

  But as we’re watching, the screen starts to go blurry, and suddenly the voices are distorting, and the video becomes unwatchable.

  ‘What happened?’ demands Tessa.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Mummy jabs at the remote, but can’t improve the picture. ‘This copy must be damaged. Never mind. If everyone’s finished, let’s go into the drawing room and we can watch something else.’

  ‘The wedding!’ says Anna.

  ‘The wedding!’ shrieks Tessa.

  ‘Really?’ says Dan incredulously. ‘Haven’t we done family DVDs?’

  ‘What’s wrong with watching the wedding?’ I say. And if I sound a little defensive … it’s because I am.

  So, yet another key fact about my family: we watch our wedding DVD a lot. A lot. Probably every other visit to Mummy’s place, we all sit down to watch it. The girls love it and Mummy loves it and I have to admit I do, too.

  But Dan says it’s weird to keep replaying one day of our life. In fact, Dan hates our wedding DVD – probably for the same reason that Mummy loves it. Because while most wedding videos are about the happy couple, ours is basically all about Daddy.

  I never even noticed to begin with. I thought it was just a lovely, well-produced DVD. It wasn’t until about a year after our wedding that Dan suddenly flipped out on the way home from some gathering and said, ‘Can’t you see, Sylvie? It’s not our DVD, it’s his!’

  And the next time I watched it, of course, it was obvious. It’s the Daddy show. The first shot of the whole DVD is of Daddy, looking gorgeous in his morning suit, standing by the Rolls-Royce we used to get to the church. Then there are shots of him leading me out in my wedding dress … shots of him in the car … the pair of us walking up the aisle …

  The most moving moment of the whole DVD isn’t our vows. It’s when the priest says, ‘Who gives this woman to be married?’ and Daddy says, ‘I do,’ his resonant voice all choked up. Then all the way through our vows, the camera keeps panning over to Daddy, who is watching with the most poignant expression of pride and wistfulness.

  Dan thinks Daddy went into the editing suite and made sure that he featured prominently. After all
, he was paying – he was the one who insisted on hiring an expensive video team, in fact – so he could have it just the way he wanted.

  I was incredibly upset when Dan first suggested this. Then I accepted that it was possible. Daddy was … not conceited, exactly, but he had healthy self-esteem. He liked to be the centre of attention, always. For example, he was desperate to be knighted. Friends would mention it and he’d brush them off with a lighthearted joke – but we all knew he wanted it. And why not, after all the good he did? (Mummy’s really sensitive about the fact that he missed out. I’ve seen her blinking while reading the Honours List in the newspaper. Let’s face it, if he had been knighted she’d be ‘Lady Lowe’ now, which does sound pretty good.)

  Even so, I have a different theory about our DVD. I think the video team were just naturally drawn to Daddy, because he dazzled like a movie star. He was so handsome and witty, he whirled Mummy around the dance floor with such aplomb, no wonder the cameraman, or editor, or whoever it was, focused on him.

  To sum up, Dan’s not the greatest fan. But the girls are obsessed by watching the wedding – by my dress, mainly, and of course my hair. Daddy was insistent that I should wear my hair – my ‘glory’ – down for the wedding and it did look fairly spectacular and princesslike, all wavy and shiny and blonde, with braids and flowers woven through it. The girls call it ‘wedding hair’ and often try to do the same with their dolls.

  Anyway. So what usually happens is that we start the DVD, Dan absents himself and after a while the girls get bored and go off to play. Whereupon Mummy and I end up watching together in silence, just drinking in the sight of Daddy. The man he was. It’s our indulgence. It’s our tin of Quality Street.

  Today, though, I don’t want Mummy and me to gorge on watching Daddy all alone. I want things to be different. Together and relaxed and more … I don’t know. Unified. Family-like. As we head into the drawing room, I put my arm through Dan’s.

  ‘Watch it today,’ I say coaxingly. ‘Stay with us.’

  Mummy’s already pressed Play – none of us comment on the fact that the DVD was already loaded in the machine – and soon we’re watching Daddy and me stepping out of my childhood home in Chelsea. (Mummy sold the house a year ago and moved to this flat nearby, for a ‘new start’.)

  ‘I had the local paper on the phone yesterday,’ says Mummy as we watch Daddy posing with me for pictures in front of the Rolls-Royce. ‘They want to take photos at the opening of the scanner suite. Make sure you get your hair done, Sylvie,’ she adds.

  ‘Have you mentioned it to Esme?’ I ask. ‘You should do.’

  Esme is the girl at the hospital who is organizing the opening ceremony. She’s quite new at her job and this is her first big event and almost every day I get an anxious email from her, beginning: I think I’ve planned for everything but … Even over the weekend. Yesterday she wanted to know: How many parking spaces will you need? Today it was, Will you need Powerpoint for your speech? I mean, Powerpoint? Really?

  ‘Dan, you are coming to the ceremony?’ Mummy says, suddenly turning to us.

  I nudge Dan, who looks up and says, ‘Oh. Yes.’

  He could sound more enthused. It’s not every day your late father-in-law is honoured by a whole hospital scanner suite being named after him, is it?

  ‘When I told the reporter everything that Daddy had achieved in his life, he couldn’t believe it,’ Mummy continues tremulously. ‘Building up his business from nothing, all the fundraising, hosting those wonderful parties, climbing Everest … The journalist said his headline would read, “A remarkable man”.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly “from nothing”,’ says Dan.

  ‘Sorry?’ Mummy peers at him.

  ‘Well, Marcus had that massive windfall, didn’t he? So, not quite “nothing”.’

  I glance sharply round at Dan – and sure enough, he’s all tentery. His jaw is taut. He looks as though he’s sitting here under total duress.

  Whenever I spend time with Dan and Mummy, my sympathies constantly swing back and forth between the two, like some wild pendulum. And right now, they’re with Mummy. Why can’t Dan just let Mummy reminisce? What does it matter if she’s not 100 per cent accurate? So what if she romanticizes her dead husband?

  ‘That’s lovely, Mummy,’ I say, ignoring Dan. I squeeze her hand, simultaneously eyeing her warily to see if she’s going to start blinking. But although her voice is a bit trembly, she seems composed.

  ‘Do you remember the time he took us to Greece?’ she says, her eyes lost in memory. ‘You were quite little.’

  ‘Of course I do!’ I turn to Dan. ‘It was incredible. Daddy chartered a yacht and we sailed round the coastline. Every night we’d have these fantastic candle-lit meals on the beach. Crabs … lobster …’

  ‘He invented a new cocktail every night,’ adds Mummy dreamily.

  ‘Sounds fantastic,’ says Dan tonelessly.

  Mummy blinks at him, as though coming to. ‘Where are you going on holiday this year?’

  ‘Lake District,’ I say. ‘Self-catering.’

  ‘Lovely.’ Mummy gives a distant smile, and I sigh inwardly. I know she doesn’t mean to look disparaging, but she doesn’t really get our life. She doesn’t understand living on a budget, or keeping the girls grounded, or taking pleasure in simple things. When I showed her the brochure for a French campsite we went to once, she blanched and said, ‘But, darling, why don’t you hire a lovely villa in Provence?’

  (If I’d said, ‘Because of the money,’ she’d have said, ‘But darling, I’ll give you the money!’ And then Dan would have got all prickly. So I don’t ever do that.)

  ‘Oh, look.’ Mummy points at the screen. ‘Daddy’s about to make that funny little joke before you go into the church. Your father was always so witty,’ she adds wistfully. ‘Everyone said his speech made the reception, absolutely made it.’

  I feel a movement beside me on the sofa, and suddenly Dan has risen to his feet.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, heading to the door without meeting my eye. ‘There’s an urgent work call I should make. I forgot earlier.’

  Yeah, right. I kind of don’t blame him. But I kind of do blame him. Couldn’t he put up with it for once?

  ‘That’s fine.’ I try to sound pleasant, as though I’m not aware he’s just totally invented this call. ‘See you in a moment.’

  Dan leaves the room and Mummy looks over at me.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘Poor Dan seems a little tense. I wonder why?’

  This is how she often refers to him: ‘poor Dan’. And she sounds so patronizing – even though she doesn’t mean to – that my pendulum instantly swings the other way. I must stick up for Dan. Because he has a point.

  ‘I think he feels … he thinks …’ I trail off, and take a deep breath. I’m going to tackle this, once and for all. ‘Mummy, have you ever noticed that our wedding DVD is quite focused on, well, Daddy?’

  Mummy blinks at me. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Compared to … other people.’

  ‘But he was the father of the bride.’ Mummy still looks perplexed.

  ‘Yes,’ I press on, feeling hot and bothered, ‘but there’s more of Daddy on the DVD than there is of Dan! And it’s his wedding!’

  ‘Oh.’ Mummy’s eyes widen. ‘Oh, I see! Is that why poor Dan is so prickly?’

  ‘He’s not prickly,’ I say, feeling uncomfortable. ‘You’ve got to understand his point of view.’

  ‘I do not,’ says Mummy emphatically. ‘The DVD represents the spirit of the wedding perfectly, and, like it or not, your father was the centre of the party. Naturally the videographers chose to focus on the most entertaining character present. Poor Dan is a lovely chap, you know I love him to bits, but he’s hardly the life and soul, is he?’

  ‘Yes he is!’ I retort hotly, although I know exactly what she means. Dan is really funny and entertaining when you get to know him, but he’s not out there. He’s not going to sweep three women on to the dance flo
or all at once while everyone cheers, like Daddy did.

  ‘What a ridiculous thing to mind about,’ Mummy says with just a trace of disdain in her voice. ‘But then, poor Dan is a little sensitive, especially about Marcus and all his achievements.’ She sighs. ‘Although … can one blame him?’ She’s silent for a moment, and her face becomes softer and more distant. ‘What you have to remember, Sylvie, is that your father was a remarkable man, and we were lucky to have him.’

  ‘I know.’ I nod. ‘I know we were.’

  ‘Of course, Dan has many fine attributes too,’ she adds after a pause. ‘He’s very … loyal.’ I know she’s making an effort to be nice, although clearly in her mind ‘loyal’ ranks several fathoms below ‘remarkable’.

  We lapse into silence as the DVD plays on and a lump grows in my throat as I watch Daddy on screen, watching me marrying Dan. His face is noble and dignified. A shaft of light is catching his hair in just the right place. Then he glances at the camera and winks in that way he had.

  And even though I’ve seen this DVD so many times before, I feel a sudden fresh, raw hurt. All my life, Daddy used to wink at me. At school concerts, at boring dinners, as he left the room after saying goodnight. And I know that doesn’t sound much – anyone can wink – but Daddy’s wink was special. It was like a shot in the arm. An instant spirit-lift.

  My inner pendulum has stilled. I’m gazing speechlessly at the screen. Everything has fallen away to the sides of my brain, leaving only the headline news: my father died and we’ll never get him back. Everything else is irrelevant.

  EIGHT

  Next morning, my pendulum is haywire again. In fact, everything’s bloody haywire. I can’t possibly contemplate being married to Dan for another sixty-eight years. The last sixty-eight minutes have been bad enough.

  I don’t know what got under his skin at Mummy’s place yesterday. Ever since, he’s been morose and broody and picky and just … argh. Last night in the car, on the way home, he started on a thing about how my family harks back to the past too much and it’s not good for the girls to keep dwelling. He even said did I have to mention my imaginary friend? What the hell is wrong with me mentioning my imaginary friend?