After Isabella

by Rosie Fiore

  Lucie seemed to hate them all. She snapped at Esther and was barely civil to Michael. She said she found Luke and Oliver embarrassing, and didn’t want to invite her friends round when they were there. They were big and sporty and loud, she said, but Esther suspected that her resentment had more to do with the way Clara, Zoe and Rebecca turned giggly and silly in the presence of the older boys. Lucie seemed to find every aspect of their home life wanting. All she talked about was Lyla, her little sister, and how she wanted to be with her. She used every excuse to go over to Stephen and Melissa’s house, and stayed there as much as she was allowed to. Esther found it impossible not to be infuriated with Lucie’s behaviour. She was sulky, ungrateful and unhelpful. She resented any request that she participate in family life. At the same time, however, Esther knew that snapping at Lucie and demanding she pull her weight would only make things worse. If she ever asked Lucie to do something, Lucie would inevitably come back with ‘I don’t have to do that at Dad’s,’ or ‘Melissa doesn’t make me…’ Esther tried to keep a tight rein on her patience when Lucie came out with comments like that, but frequently she lost the battle.

  In contrast, Michael was boundlessly kind and tolerant with Lucie, and jolly and easy with his own sons. He always seemed to be defusing tense moments between Esther and the various children. He would come home to find her gazing angrily into an empty fridge and would laughingly blow her a kiss from the doorway and immediately turn around to go to the supermarket and restock. He cajoled Lucie out of her blacker moods and took over driving her to school to save Esther the stress of getting her daughter out of the house on time. And perversely, the better he was at managing the wrinkles of their new family life, the more she resented him.

  As she said to Sally one evening, over a glass of wine on the deck, ‘We’re stuck in this good-cop/bad-cop routine. The kids do something impossible. I snarl. Michael makes light of my bad temper and fixes the problem. I look bitter, stiff and incompetent and he looks like a hero.’

  ‘He is very patient,’ said Sally. ‘Is there such a thing as too patient?’ She looked over the rim of her wine glass at Esther, and Esther caught the twinkle in her eye. She laughed – for the first time in ages, it seemed.

  ‘Oh, now I sound awful again,’ she said. ‘Disloyal and awful.’

  ‘Nonsense. What you’re doing is bloody difficult. Work, Michael moving in, all the kids… It’s perfectly natural that you’re feeling the strain. And when we do, we often take it out on the people closest to us. That’s why they’re the people closest to us. Because they can take it.’

  ‘That was very profound.’ Esther refilled their wine glasses. ‘You should write it down.’

  ‘It was, wasn’t it? In days gone by, it would’ve been embroidered on a tea towel.’

  ‘Now it would be an internet meme. Complete with a picture of a woman doing yoga on a beach.’

  Esther marvelled at how she could still be light and funny and irreverent with Sally – she didn’t seem able to achieve that with anyone else in her life. It helped that when Sally came over or she went to hers, there always seemed to be plenty of wine. And at least Sally didn’t look at her quite so judgementally as Michael did when she filled her glass to the brim again.

  Sally wasn’t Isabella, not by any stretch of the imagination, and never would be. But somehow the long duration of their acquaintance and the history they shared made their interaction lighter and easier than her other relationships. Isabella had freed Esther to be silly, to be a little wild. Isabella had taken a serious, bookish, shy girl and led her to new places, daring her to be brave and funny. That first act of truancy the day they met, when she took Esther to hide in the school gymnasium, was the beginning of a relationship full of adventures and cajoling. Esther had flowered as Isabella’s friend, and with Isabella’s death, she had wondered whether that part of her would die too. But somehow, with Sally, she could find her again, that girl with the lighter touch. She could be, in Sally’s eyes at least, what Isabella had once made her.

  ‘All joking aside, Michael is a very good guy,’ said Sally, interrupting Esther’s reverie. ‘One of the best. I’m sure many women wish they had one like him.’

  Her tone was a little wistful, Esther thought. ‘No one on the horizon for you, then?’

  ‘No, yes… Well… Maybe,’ said Sally hesitantly.

  ‘What?’ Esther asked excitedly. ‘You mean you’re seeing someone?’

  ‘It’s just been a couple of dates.

  ‘What? Dark horse. Tell me all!’

  ‘Not much to tell. You were right. There were older, nice chaps at the longer races, when I started volunteering at them. And one of them asked me out for a drink after he finished running. Turns out he lives reasonably nearby, and we’ve been out a couple of times. He’s a nice guy. I’m just… not in the market for anything long-term.’

  She looked out of the window and Esther was struck once more by her ethereal prettiness. If anything, she’d got slightly too thin. And Esther had to admit, Sally had it all now. Her own home, substantial independent means, a busy, happy social life. It seemed odd that she wouldn’t be looking to share that with someone. Maybe she had got too much in the habit of being on her own? Or maybe the man she was dating just wasn’t the one.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Michael was away at a conference in Edinburgh, and Esther had had a particularly bloody week at work. She left the university late on the Friday and drove home feeling limp and bruised. It was a small mercy that Luke and Oliver wouldn’t be coming to stay – they hadn’t yet reached the point where they felt comfortable in Esther’s house without their dad – so Esther was looking forward to a quiet weekend with Lucie. A chance to regroup, work on the garden and prepare herself for the trials of the week to come. The traffic was heavy, so it was almost six when she finally got home. As soon as she opened the door, she knew Lucie wasn’t there. The house had the undisturbed quiet of a place no one had entered for many hours. She called out anyway, and listened to her own voice echo up the stairs. She looked around for a note and checked her mobile, but there were no messages. Frowning, she rang Lucie’s mobile. Her daughter answered immediately, and before Esther could ask her where she was, she heard the wail of a baby in the background.

  ‘You’re at Dad’s,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Lucie evasively. ‘Didn’t I say? I came after school. Can I stay?’

  ‘No,’ said Esther. ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘What?’ Lucie’s shriek was high with disbelief. ‘I can’t believe it, Mum! I just want to be with my little sister! How can you be so mean?’ Her reaction was unnecessarily histrionic, and Esther knew the performance was as much for Stephen and Melissa’s benefit as her own.

  ‘You’ve been at Dad’s place every weekend since Lyla was born,’ said Esther as calmly as she could. ‘You knew perfectly well that we were going to have this weekend together at home. You’ve gone over there without letting me know, hoping that I’ll let you stay because you’re there already. Well, I’m sorry, I don’t like sneaky behaviour. Pack up your things and let Dad know I’m getting in the car and coming to get you.’

  She hung up on Lucie’s storm of protest, picked up her car keys and headed for the door. It was a no-win situation – she’d be dragging Lucie home, looking like the bad guy again, and she would now be spending the weekend with a child in the blackest of sulks. Nevertheless, she had to make a stand.

  She hadn’t been inside the house since Stephen had moved back to London – she usually only got as far as the doorstep, dropping Lucie off or picking her up. But this time when she rang the bell, Stephen answered the door, looking serious, and invited her in. She followed him into the living room, where Melissa sat on the sofa, breastfeeding little Lyla with Lucie nestled by her side. They looked the picture of contentment in the warm glow of a lamp – Melissa’s blonde head and Lucie’s dark one bent over the small, snuffling baby. Esther had met Melissa a few times in the pas
t, but she hadn’t seen her since the birth of the baby. She had sent a gift and card to congratulate them but had felt it wasn’t appropriate to visit. Well, she was here now, looking at her husband’s new wife, and at this child who shared half of Lucie’s genes but none of hers.

  Lucie looked up as she came into the room, and the happiness fell from her face like a shadow. She set her features in an expression of stony defiance. Esther felt so tired. There was no way she was going to get Lucie to come home with her willingly. She sat down on a chair facing the sofa and put her handbag gently on the floor. Stephen remained standing in the doorway behind her.

  ‘I didn’t come here to fight,’ she said gently.

  ‘No, just to drag me back to your place,’ said Lucie coldly. Esther noted she didn’t say ‘home’.

  ‘Lucie, you’re thirteen years old. You came here without letting me know where you’d gone. It was dangerous, disobedient and just plain wrong. You know that. It’s not that I want to keep you from Lyla…’

  Lucie snorted and rolled her eyes. Melissa was watching Esther intently over the baby’s head.

  ‘… I just want to keep you safe,’ Esther finished, rather lamely.

  ‘We also want to keep her safe,’ said Melissa, rather sharply. ‘Safe and happy.’

  Esther frowned and looked at her. ‘Are you suggesting she’s not happy?’

  Melissa didn’t say anything, but she raised her pretty eyebrows and glanced over at Lucie, who was slumped on the sofa, arms folded, glowering at her mother.

  ‘Melissa…’ said Stephen, with a note of warning in his voice. Then he turned to Esther. ‘Esther, now seems a good time to talk about the… situation we have here.’

  And in that moment, Esther realized she had walked straight into a set-up. They’d worked it all out. Stephen did the talking. Lucie added a few comments, speaking in an oddly polite, stilted and rehearsed way. Melissa, uncharacteristically, kept silent. They knew, Stephen said carefully, that Esther had been having a very difficult time, both at work and establishing her new home life with Michael and his boys. She was clearly under strain and very busy. Melissa was at home during the day and was happy to drive Lucie to school and collect her. Lucie loved being with her baby sister, and the room she had here in the Islington house was bigger than the one in Esther’s house. Could she not make her weekday home with them in Islington, returning to Esther every second weekend? And in the holidays, of course?

  Esther looked at Lucie’s face. There was a sprinkling of acne on her high forehead, and she kept her lips tightly pursed over her slightly too big front teeth. Her features had been blurred by the changes of adolescence, but Esther could still see beneath them the perfect baby oval that had entranced her and stolen her heart. The pain was visceral and intense. ‘I’ll need some time to think about it,’ she said, standing up suddenly. ‘Lucie, perhaps I might collect you on Sunday afternoon and we could go for a walk and talk?’

  She made her way to the door with all the dignity she could muster and said goodbye to Stephen without meeting his eye. She had asked for time to think, but in the instant Stephen made the proposal, she knew full well that there was only one possible answer. All she wanted to do now was get home, open a bottle of wine, drink the whole thing, forget and sleep.

  She woke up early the next morning – before sunrise – and lay unmoving in the middle of her bed, staring up at the ceiling in the grey pre-dawn light. The house was unnaturally silent. She couldn’t remember the last time she had woken up there completely alone. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, but she couldn’t face getting up and wandering through the empty rooms. She took a book from her bedside table and tried to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. In times gone by, she’d have got up and gone for a run, but she hadn’t run for weeks now, and she could feel the result of that in her softening middle and sluggish lack of energy.

  She could hear the silence in Lucie’s room across the hall, like a presence. She’d have to live with that silence now, week in and week out. She sat up in bed and hugged her knees. It was five in the morning. Michael was asleep in his hotel room in Edinburgh. She had rung him the evening before and briefly told him what had transpired at Stephen’s. He had been warmly sympathetic.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my love,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, Oliver went through a phase like that – pitting Lisette and me against each other, asking to live with the other one every time he was subject to a bit of discipline. Lucie may well find life with a tiny baby isn’t as easy as she thinks and that she doesn’t like the rules in Stephen’s house either.’

  He was right, of course, and in her calmer moments Esther knew that this phase would pass – must pass. But for so long it had been just her and Lucie, and she had imagined their bond to be inviolable and that Lucie’s loyalty belonged to her, as hers belonged to Lucie. Somehow, without knowing how, she had failed as a mother. She smiled ruefully in the dawn light. She could chalk that one up on her board of failures, under her failure as a head of department, as a daughter, as a wife. It was only in her relationship with Michael that she seemed to be succeeding, and that was undoubtedly due to Michael’s almost saintly forbearance, rather than through any action of hers.

  The ensuing wave of self-pity drove her out of bed and into the shower. She had to do something. She dressed and went downstairs. In a brief fit of feverish activity, she cleaned the kitchen, put on a load of laundry and made a pot of coffee. She wouldn’t sit and wallow. She fired up her computer and opened the folder which contained her long-neglected book chapter – the one on Austen that she should have delivered months ago. Still, no point in dwelling on what hadn’t been done. She could only do what she could.

  She read through what she had written already. It was completely foreign to her – she had no recollection at all of setting down those words, or indeed what argument she might have been advancing. She hesitated for a long moment, then selected the text and deleted it. She put her hands on the keyboard, looked at the blank page in front of her and began to type fast and fluently.

  Hours must have passed – she had no idea how many. She got up from her desk only to refresh the coffee pot or to find a book for a reference. If she had stepped back to consider it, she might have marvelled that in this time of extreme insecurity, she was able to write with a courage and certainty she hadn’t known since her undergraduate days. When the doorbell rang, making her jump, she glanced for the first time at the word count and the clock. She had written six thousand words, and it was 9 a.m.

  It was Sally, clutching a steaming bag of warm croissants and a wrapped bunch of flowers. ‘Breakfast?’ she said, waving the bag aloft.

  Esther ran her fingers through her unbrushed hair and swallowed. Her mouth tasted foul from all the coffee and she was suddenly starving.

  ‘Hell, yes,’ she said. ‘Come in. Let me go and brush my hair and teeth. Can you pop the kettle on?’

  As she headed up the stairs, she shouted down, ‘Tea for me. I can’t take any more coffee.’

  When she came back down, there was a mug of tea and an almond croissant on a plate. Sally had found a vase and an outrageous tumble of sunflowers reflected a warm yellow light through the kitchen. She was humming at the sink, rinsing out the coffee pot. She came to sit at the kitchen counter with Esther and chatted amiably about the races at which she’d been volunteering and about her plan to drive to Warwickshire for a weekend away. It wasn’t usual for her to talk so much about herself. It took a moment to dawn on Esther that Sally hadn’t asked where everyone was. She didn’t think she had told Sally that Michael would be away, and Sally would usually have asked after Lucie. She frowned a little suspiciously.

  Sally caught her change of expression. ‘Everything okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Why are you here?’ said Esther. ‘I ask this with all the love in the world, and I’m thrilled to see you. But is this just an impromptu Saturday morning visit?’

  Sally sighed. ‘I’m rubb
ish, aren’t I? I’d never make a spy. Lucie rang me last night and said she was a bit worried that you might be upset. I said I’d pop round and see how you were.’

  Esther put her head down on the kitchen counter and sobbed. The tears took her entirely by surprise – she knew it was a combination of exhaustion, stress and sheer surprise at Lucie’s unexpected thoughtfulness. Sally patted her head and brought her squares of kitchen paper to blow her nose on. It was a brief, fierce storm of tears and soon wore itself out.

  ‘What did she tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘Just that she said she wanted to stay at her dad’s, and she thought that she had made you very upset.’

  ‘Did she say why she decided to stay at Stephen’s?’

  ‘No, she mainly wanted to talk about you, make sure you were all right.’

  ‘I don’t know how we could have come to this,’ said Esther, going to the sink to splash her swollen eyes with cold water.

  ‘It has been a hard time for you both,’ said Sally carefully. ‘I’m sure it’s just that she’s so besotted with little Lyla. She always wanted a little sister or brother.’

  ‘Did she? She never said anything to me about it.’

  ‘Well, she knew you weren’t going to have another, and—’

  ‘Hang on.’ Esther turned from the sink to face Sally. ‘How do you know all of this?’

  ‘Know all of what?’

  ‘That Lucie wanted a sibling. That she knew I wasn’t having any more.’

  ‘Oh, I…’ Sally looked stricken. ‘I just know, I suppose.’

  ‘Has Lucie been talking to you?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘When? Here? At your place?’ She tried to think of a time when Sally and Lucie had been alone together.

  ‘Sometimes…’ Sally said reluctantly.

  Esther could see there was something she didn’t want to say – a piece of information that, once divulged, she would never be able to claim back. Esther waited, staring at her.