‘Oh, you’d find a way.’ It was an accusation not a compliment. She turned round, the nostrils of her small neat nose flaring slightly. ‘You would go on a teaching course in England or something. You would make it happen. I know you hate it here. I know how you resent Dad – are jealous of him—’
‘I do not hate it here. And I am neither resentful nor envious of your father.’
‘The trouble with you, Nick Wharton,’ she snapped, ignoring these reassurances, ‘is you don’t love me properly. You never have.’
‘Yes, I—’
‘You don’t. Because if you did you wouldn’t even talk about going to England.’
The obvious counter-challenge, that evidence of her affection for him had grown pretty scant in recent years, would get him nowhere, Nick knew. It would produce ructions. He could already feel her anger brewing. He had run out of ways of dealing with it other than stonewalling; and that night he didn’t feel he had the strength even for that. He felt battered already, exhausted.
‘To have doubts about a career choice and own up to them has got nothing to do with not loving you,’ he said instead, speaking wearily now, while inside a deeper tiredness heaved, for the whole sorry business of what they had become. With hindsight, it was pitifully obvious that they had married barely knowing each other; fallen for notions of what each might be, rather than with any firm grasp of one another’s needs and personalities. Lately, Nick had found himself dreaming of Donna leaving him. But then, each time, he would hit the roadblock of the girls. It took no crystal ball to imagine how hard Donna would make it for him to see them, or how rigorously her parents would take her part. The notion of being deprived of contact with his daughters, not seeing them for weeks on end, not being around to catch their breathy everyday stories about this and that, all the myriad, daily disarming moments when they forgot about trying to be anything other than themselves, Nick found impossible to contemplate. The pain of anything was still preferable to that.
Somewhere deep inside his pocket, his phone rang.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ Donna’s sapphire eyes glittered. She was still teetering on the precipice, assessing her own levels of frustration and how to let them play out. She was gripping her upper arms so tightly the skin had gone white around her fingertips. ‘Or perhaps I should?’
For one mad moment, Nick feared it might indeed be Lindy – which, he decided was what Donna herself was thinking. Both their neighbours had drunk a lot and there had been no disguising the way Lindy’s soft sad mouth had landed a little too close to his as they said their goodbyes.
But the number flashing was Sasha’s, their youngest.
‘Hey, Dad, sorry to call.’
‘No problem. Is everything okay?’
‘I didn’t want to try Mum in case she was asleep.’
‘Quite right. Good girl.’ Famously within the family, Donna was a delicate sleeper – easily woken and finding it hard to drop back off once disturbed. Nick’s doctor’s training meant he was the opposite, or so Donna had always told the girls once they were old enough to process and pay heed to such information. That this was not the case, that Nick too was, and always had been, a light sleeper, was one of the countless small deceits and disconnections that had threaded its way between them over the years, harmless in itself, but not so harmless in conjunction with everything else. Working the long hours he did, Nick had in fact been happy to let the myth ride, taking whatever opportunities he got to be a father, even if that meant being the first to soothe night terrors, strip bedding or hunt for a thermometer.
‘It’s Sasha,’ he mouthed, in response to Donna’s questioning look. She was at his side in an instant, clutching Nick’s arm and trying to get her head near enough to hear the conversation. He eased Donna’s hand off his arm and switched his phone to speaker mode so she could hear without straining. She was a good mother, he reminded himself. It was just him she had difficulty with. She needed to be able to let go, she had confessed once, a rare moment of candour piercing the calm that had followed a particularly bad explosion. She had thrown a butter dish that time. It had caught his cheekbone, leaving a red lump. It was because she trusted and loved him, she said, which meant being able to show her worst. And what if he were to show his ‘worst’, Nick had growled on that occasion, cupping his throbbing face, the shock at her behaviour numbing him as it always did, while inside the optimist in him wondered if so rare a disclosure might mean they had reached a turning point at last. For, in those days, he had still believed that every situation had its rock bottom from which good might yet emerge.
But Donna had expertly flipped the dynamic, as she so often managed, visibly shrinking from him and asking in a terrified whisper, ‘And what exactly do you mean by that… your worst?’ She had fumbled for her mobile, keeping big scared eyes pinned on his as she pressed the numbers – whether to call an emergency service or her father, Nick had no idea – the threat in itself being enough to make him backtrack.
Sasha’s words were muffled, delivered with her hand over her phone, by the sound of it. She was feeling sick, she said. In spite of it being gone midnight, Nick could hear the dull thumps of the sleepover, which had been for her best friend, Adrienne’s, thirteenth birthday, still going on in the background. She didn’t want to make a fuss, she said, but could she be picked up and taken home. Nick said, of course, that he would be there as quickly as he could. Adrienne lived in Muizenberg, a good forty-minute drive away.
‘I’ll phone Mia, say you’re on your way,’ said Donna, patting a yawn away as she bent down to retrieve her silver shoes.
Nick had drunk too much to drive, but neither of them referred to it. It was a relief for both just to have the spotlight shifted from their own dysfunction, to step back into the safe world of parenthood.
‘Drive carefully,’ Donna called from the doorstep, waving Nick off as he nosed their hefty four-wheeler through the gates; as if they were any ordinary couple, who trusted and loved each other.
‘You just say if you need me to pull over, okay?’ Nick glanced sideways at his youngest. She had her head out of the car window, like a dog on a hot day. Her long hair, a sandier brown than his, streamed off her ears and neck. The mountain was a hulking shadow behind them, Cape Town a pincushion of lights, twinkling through the red alders flanking the road. ‘What was it, too much chocolate cake?’
Sasha flashed him a scowl that quickly became a sheepish grin. ‘No it was not.’ She pulled her head into the car and then threw herself back into her seat with a sigh.
‘Mind if I close it?’
‘Sure.’ She turned on her side to face him as the window whirred up, folding her legs onto the seat and making a pillow of her hands under the headrest.
‘Just tired?’
‘Dad, I’m not going to throw up in the car, okay?’
‘Good.’ Nick smiled. ‘Because that is all I am worried about, as you well know.’ He reached out and touched her forehead with his palm, relieved to feel the coolness of her skin, but saying teasingly, ‘Whatever it is, I think you’ll live, Ms Drama Queen.’
‘Am not. Just felt rubbish. I really did.’
‘It’s fine, I know you did. I’m glad you’re a bit better now.’ Nick drove faster as the road levelled out, enjoying the emptiness, keeping one eye on his mirrors for cops and one eye on her.
‘Dad, can we get a dog, like as a Christmas present to the whole family?’
‘An Alsatian, by any chance, like Adrienne’s?’
‘Bruno is the greatest dog. Ever. But no, it could be any kind of dog. Mum always says we can get one, but then it doesn’t happen.’
‘That’s because Mum knows all the work of looking after it would fall to her.’
‘It wouldn’t. Nat and I would do it.’ She yawned.
‘And what about those other four-legged pets you lot keep at your Grandparents – Geeno and Lester and Impi? How would you have time to keep them exercised too?’
‘A do
g could come for riding at Grandad’s – it would be perfect.’
‘Except your grandfather doesn’t believe in dogs as pets, does he? He just has his for guarding. And I’m not sure how those horses of yours would react either. You know how Impi likes to have you all to himself, doesn’t he?’
Sasha smiled, as he had meant her to, temporarily defeated. The subject would be raised again in due course, Nick knew. It was because Donna hadn’t said an outright no but kept them dangling with promises. It maddened him.
‘Hey, Dad, it’s not because of maybe going to England, is it? Because Mum says you want to make us all leave here and that you want to be a teacher instead of a doctor. Is that true?’
Nick reeled. This was low, even for Donna. ‘No. Those were just thoughts that crossed my mind one day. Mummy was wrong to tell you about them.’
‘Don’t you like being a skin doctor?’
‘I do like it.’ Nick patted her leg, smiling. ‘But we’ve each only got one life and sometimes I think about trying out other things too, things that being a doctor doesn’t give me time for.’
‘But you play tennis a lot.’
Nick laughed. ‘Yes, I do, and I enjoy it very much, especially when you lot are off riding.’
‘So what else do you like doing?’
‘Books… reading. You know I like that.’
She snorted. ‘Yeah, you’re always reading.’
Nick couldn’t help laughing again at the derision in her voice. ‘Yes, mostly boring medical stuff.’
‘So what would you teach?’ For a moment she sounded as scathing as her mother.
Nick knew it was time to stop the direction of the conversation, make her feel safe. ‘Nothing. It was just something I mentioned to Mummy one day. She shouldn’t have bothered you with it. And when we go to England it will just be to visit Granny.’ As Nick spoke, a vivid, unsettling image of the young Kat chose the moment to burst back into his mind; the mad frame of alabaster curls; the scores of faint freckles, invariably concealed under a layer of powder that had tasted like some strange dusty soap; the eyes, blue bottomless pools, drawing him in but then never seeming to take him anywhere, no matter how desperately he had wanted them to. He shuddered, relief coursing through him. The sudden certainty of a bullet dodged.
For a moment the big car seemed to drift out of his control. Nick wound his own window open to clear his head. Sasha had fallen asleep. He glanced at her, finding solace in the fatherly love that flooded his body like warmth. She had shifted into an endearingly gormless pose, her cheek squashed against her pillowed hands, her mouth wide open, showing the very slightly gappy teeth of which he was so fond but which the orthodontist – and Donna – insisted would soon be clamped into brace-tracks.
Nick sped on, keeping a close eye in all his mirrors. He must get home safely. Make sure Sash really was all right. Sleep. Get up. Go to work. Christmas was barely three weeks away. There was a lot to do. There always was. And the secret to a smooth life, as he had been in danger of forgetting, was taking one step at a time, resisting gawping over one’s shoulder at what might have been, or straining to see too far ahead. That was when the trip-ups came. It was like playing good tennis, Nick warned himself: the key was to stay balanced, to keep one’s eye on the ball instead of the place where one wanted to hit it.
20
2013 - Sussex
Trevor,
I know we had a session booked for next week, but I am afraid I have to cancel it because my sister…
Eleanor slumped back, hurting her spine against the hard, unforgiving angles of the kitchen chair. Overhead, the bunches of dried herbs which Kat, with her usual arty flair, had strung up along the kitchen’s handsome beams, stirred in the warm air rising off the Aga. The email to Trevor came in and out of focus on her laptop. Eleanor narrowed her eyes, but still the words wavered. How could one begin to describe the weight of someone’s absence anyway? It was an oxymoron. As she had tried to explain to Nick once. A million years ago. Back in the days when he thought he was writing to Kat. Back when Kat was sick, as opposed to dead.
The doctor had put it best. ‘She’s gone,’ he had announced gently, arriving minutes after Howard’s summons two nights before, shaking his round grey head as he pressed Kat’s thin wrist between his fingers in a bid to find a pulse. Eleanor had watched from the end of the bed, unable even to blink, aware only of being very still. She could still smell Evie’s skin on her from their bedtime reading.
The spare-room door had been closed against the possibility of prying children. They would need to be told, obviously, when Howard was ready. The need to be supportive to her brother-in-law had coursed through Eleanor, a hot energy. Kat had once requested that of her and she would do her best to manage it. This unhappy ending was what had been expected, what they were all supposed to have been ready for.
In fact Kat had died moments before the doctor got there. Eleanor had realised but said nothing because Howard, having laid her back on the bed, had been stroking her sister’s arms and fingers, crooning endearments and reassurances, hanging on to his hope like a man on a cliff-face. Eleanor had already been at her stance at the end of the bed, gently cradling Kat’s feet through the covers. The dying had been almost invisible – no discernible last breath to speak of, no dramatic finale. Kat’s face had simply seemed to tighten as a shadow passed across it, infusing a tinge of grey into its delicate pallor. Instants later, the doctor was ushered through the door by a puffy-eyed Hannah, who, with her usual tact, then quickly withdrew.
To Howard, the doctor’s words were terrible. As the man lowered Kat’s eyelids and stepped back, dropping his head in respect, closing his leather bag, Howard threw himself onto the body with a force that made Eleanor flinch. Alive, her sister would have squirmed with pain to be held so hard. Unbreathing, her wasted frame looked even smaller, frailer. Only the extraordinary hair, which she had been so anxious to preserve, looked cruelly alive; big bright curls burning across the pillow. Howard rolled his face in them, sobbing.
Eleanor remained where she was, keeping her distance like the doctor, biding her time, giving Howard his moment. Inside, it began to feel as if something was exploding, slowly. The bedroom floorboards were shifting under the carpet, dissolving it felt like, until she was standing on nothing.
The steady noise of the kitchen clock snagged on Eleanor’s brain. She shivered as the half-written email to Trevor came back into focus. The ticking of time was good, she told herself. It was a reminder that bad moments would pass, just like the good ones. Under her jumper, she was aware of the buckle of Kat’s belt pressing into her stomach. It was on the tightest notch now, her new slimness heightened by two days of consuming nothing but sweet tea. Hannah’s pie had never been eaten. Its blackened remains were in the kitchen bin, chiselled off by her at some unspeakable dawn hour, while Howard, at his own request, had been left alone upstairs with the children. Over the noise of her scraping knife, she had heard the occasional wail or sob, but mostly it had been very quiet.
My sister, who as you are aware, has been ill for many months… Eleanor typed from her slumped position in the kitchen chair, … passed away the day before yesterday. I know you will therefore forgive me for not being able to make our meeting on Monday. I will, however, definitely be able to manage a session before Christmas. In fact, let us say in two weeks’ time, 18 December at eleven. I’ll come to yours as usual. Life, as they say, goes on.
Eleanor signed off and sent the email on its way. She had plucked a date at random. She didn’t care when she saw Trevor. She didn’t care about anything. The emptiness of the spare bedroom was still within her, a coldness. She had ventured in that morning to strip the bed, catching her breath at the smell that had come to mean Kat: a mix of the faint odours emanating from the cluster of medicines still on the bedside cabinet and the richer aroma of Howard’s most recent flowers. She had grabbed at the bedding, the sheets and countless pillows that had done so little in the end to provide comfor
t, wrenching off their covers in what felt like a war, with herself, with Kat, with life’s refusal to be easy.
There had been no grand deathbed reconciliations, but there had at least been some new understanding; a sense of forgiveness, if not the thing itself. And for that she should be grateful, Eleanor had told herself, stumbling through the twisted bed linen to fall against the window. The wintry browns of the garden, tipped still with morning frost, blurred under her eyes. The completeness of her sense of loss was so vast, so overbearing, that for several moments she could not breathe. It bore no relation to what she or Kat might or might not have meant to each other. Her little sister was gone, taking what felt like the past, the present and the future with her. Forever.
‘I suppose he needs to be told. It’s only right.’ It was Howard, speaking from the kitchen doorway.
He looked like a man who had been hollowed out, fragile to the point of translucency. For all Eleanor’s efforts at support, she found that she hardly dared speak to him sometimes, for fear that even her voice might have the power, literally, to shatter him to dust.
Hannah had taken the children back into school that morning. Sticking to their routines would help, someone had said. Eleanor couldn’t quite remember who. Possibly the doctor, possibly a family friend, possibly Hannah herself. The house had steadily filled and emptied each day of helpful people – local friends, other parents, the priest, undertakers.
‘You mean Dad.’ Eleanor slipped her hand under her jumper and clasped the buckle of the belt. The metal felt comfortingly warm from the heat of her body.
‘Vincent, yes. Not that it will mean anything to him.’
‘No, but of course you are right. I feel bad not to have done it already. I’ll go today.’
Good Girls Page 18
