The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  ‘She’s been hanging out with us a bit, since you and Jay got together.’

  ‘Marley?’ asked Romy hopefully.

  Luke shook his head. ‘Stuart.’

  ‘For real?’ she said with disbelief. ‘That’s messed up.’

  ‘I don’t get it either, Romeo.’

  They noticed their parents listening and stopped.

  ‘So when is this great event?’ Harry squinted from over the top of his book.

  Romy ignored him.

  ‘In two weeks,’ said Luke. ‘The night after mocks finish.’

  The same night as the teachers’ party, Ailsa noted. She was about to ask about parental supervision, surely an oxymoron where Wolf and Loveday were concerned, when Ben wandered into the kitchen still dressed in his pyjamas. Ailsa glanced at the clock. He was seriously behind schedule.

  ‘Morning, Grub,’ said Romy, ruffling his hair with her hand. Drops of milk dripped from her teaspoon into his thick curls.

  ‘Why aren’t you dressed for school?’ Ailsa asked. She turned to Harry. ‘You’ll have to take him.’

  ‘Because I’m not going,’ said Ben. He crossed his arms defiantly.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Harry, putting down his papers and pulling him onto his knee. Ben resisted. He tried to summon up anger but Ailsa could tell that he was about to cry.

  ‘Someone’s taken my film off Wolf and Loveday’s website,’ he said, wobbly-voiced. ‘It’s disappeared. I’ve looked for it everywhere.’

  ‘There was an anonymous complaint to the council,’ Harry explained. ‘So Wolf and Loveday can’t start their business at the moment. They’ve probably removed it temporarily. Until everything is sorted.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Grub. Nothing on the Internet ever really disappears,’ said Romy.

  ‘That’s why you don’t want to put some video of yourself pissed and upchucking on Facebook,’ said Luke.

  ‘Luke, I’ll have to rewrite my job description. You’re beginning to sound like a responsible adult,’ said Harry, pretending he was about to pass out.

  ‘I’ll help you load the video on YouTube if you like,’ offered Luke.

  ‘It won’t get the same traffic,’ said Ben. ‘Why would anyone complain about Wolf and Loveday when all they want to do is help people?’

  ‘People aren’t allowed to construct buildings and set up businesses without official permission,’ explained Ailsa, annoyed with herself for not anticipating his reaction. Ben had spent hours filming Wolf building the circular roof frame. He had even helped to lay the wooden floor and wheel heavy barrows of mud from the centre where the fire pit would be. She hadn’t taken on board his emotional attachment to the whole project. ‘Especially if it involves something where someone could get hurt. People who offer expensive cures without any qualifications can be very dangerous.’

  ‘How could anyone get hurt in my sweat lodge?’ Ben asked. ‘It’s where people go to get better.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harry, stroking his head.

  ‘There was an accident in a sweat lodge in America where three people died. The guy who ran it is in prison. You don’t want Wolf to go to prison, do you?’ Ailsa asked.

  Harry’s brow furrowed with disapproval. Ailsa met his gaze. ‘You,’ he mouthed. She nodded and he shook his head regretfully.

  ‘I’d had over ten thousand hits,’ said Ben. ‘Rachel said it could be the start of my career as a film director.’

  ‘It’s an unpredictable industry,’ said Romy, trying to comfort him. ‘But that’s a lot of hits for your first film. You should feel proud of yourself.’

  Romy suggested he should revert to being a spy. Adam said that he could come and visit him the following week during his trial period at the flat in Cromer. Harry said he would try and find out who had complained and convince them they were wrong. He shot Ailsa a pointed look. Ben was inconsolable.

  ‘Now my friends won’t believe that I ever made a film. They’ll think I’m a total loser,’ said Ben with a deep sigh. ‘Life is full of disappointments. I don’t think I can take any more.’

  ‘What else has gone wrong?’ Ailsa asked, worried that she had missed other cues. Ben was finding it difficult to make friends at his new school and had taken to hiding food in his room again, always a sign that he was feeling anxious.

  ‘Grandpa’s moving out –’

  ‘Only for a trial period,’ interrupted Adam.

  Ben continued: ‘You won’t let me join Facebook. And I thought when we moved out of London we’d move into a house like the Cluedo board.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Harry.

  ‘I thought there’d be a billiard room, a conservatory and secret passages. There aren’t even any doors in this house. I hate it here. I want to go home.’

  Ailsa smiled. Ben’s problems always seemed sweetly innocent beside those of his older siblings, their eccentricity injecting a distracting layer of humour into domestic life. She was forgetting that Ben might not see it this way.

  ‘Why don’t we go and talk to Wolf and see what’s going on? I’ll take you to school after that,’ said Harry.

  Ben gave a sad nod.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ailsa. She hugged Harry for a little too long. He was so good at dealing with Ben.

  ‘Come on, Romeo, let’s go. Juliet’s waiting for you by the front gate to go and catch the bus,’ said Luke.

  ‘Shut up, Luke,’ said Romy happily, checking her face in the mirror.

  ‘Don’t forget your Biology project,’ Ailsa reminded her.

  ‘I’ve got it, thanks,’ she said, patting her rucksack. ‘All ready to hand in.’

  ‘Hope I get a mention in the acknowledgements at least,’ said Harry, almost bashfully.

  ‘Not specifically,’ said Romy, giving him a long hard look. ‘Although you definitely inspired the conclusion.’

  What’s Romy up to? Ailsa wondered as she got in the car to drive to school. Why would she do so much work for a project that didn’t exist? She was obviously interested in the subject of teenagers and addiction. According to Harry, her questions to him had demonstrated a real depth of understanding. But when Ailsa asked if he had actually seen anything Romy had written, the answer was no. And she wasn’t doing it for her university application because Harry had told her last night that Romy was having doubts about studying medicine.

  If Ailsa hadn’t been so distracted by her discovery about Luke she might have taken this argument to its logical conclusion and realized that if Romy wasn’t doing the research for herself then it was probably for someone else. She might have asked her what was going on and Romy might have told her. Could have, would have, should have. Never live life in the conditional tense, she used to tell her English students. It was too full of regret.

  Instead Ailsa found herself behind the school bus at the crossroads at the top of the road thinking about Billy. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and massaged the faint line that was beginning to appear between her eyebrows. There were blue bags of exhaustion under her eyes. What would he think of her now? She stared out of the windscreen and thought how the tiny blurred spots of dead insects smeared on its surface looked a little like the red blood cells that Matt Harvey had found on Google Images yesterday evening as he tried to explain in the simplest terms the inheritance of blood type.

  When she looked up she saw Romy waving her away through the rear window of the bus. It must have looked as though Ailsa was keeping tabs on her and Jay. Ailsa hung back to let the bus get ahead, remembering Matt’s diagram showing the possible outcomes for a child whose parents had A and AB blood.

  After his revelation about Luke, Matt had apologized for embarking on a project that could throw up potentially explosive results. He questioned his ability to be a teacher and wondered if he was really suited to the job. He explained that he hadn’t thought through the repercussions of an anomaly. Except of course it wasn’t an anomaly. Ailsa tried to reassure him by insisting that it was better it inv
olved her rather than another family. Because this was the kind of issue that could get the board of governors really worked up.

  Instead they could forget about it. It was probably a mix-up. Happened all the time. They both expressed relief at finding a satisfactory way out and exchanged a nervous smile. He tore up the piece of paper until it resembled confetti and threw the bits into Ailsa’s wastepaper bin. She tried to disguise her anxiety. She didn’t want him to feel bad. But, more selfishly, she understood that her calm was more likely to guarantee his silence.

  ‘Would you rather I didn’t come to your house with Rachel tomorrow night?’ he had asked. Ailsa had totally forgotten that she had invited them over.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Ailsa. ‘We’re fine.’

  She put the car into gear and edged towards the crossroads and stopped again. Her head was boiling over with memories of Billy, a man she had thought about for the past seventeen years only in the most impressionistic terms. She couldn’t go into school and deliver an assembly on the importance of punctuality, especially now that she was going to be late. She opened the car window to get some air and switched off the engine. Compose yourself, she ordered the panicked woman in the mirror.

  Ailsa liked to deal in facts. Facts were soothing. And the facts were these: Luke’s father, Billy Weston, had joined the upper sixth of Ailsa’s secondary school when he was seventeen, one term into the new school year. He arrived tanned from a summer spent in the Mediterranean. He had a surfboard, wore his hair long and grew his own marijuana from seed, and was impossibly exotic for Norfolk in the late 1980s.

  He had already lived in New Orleans, Mexico City and Madrid because his father was a jazz musician and the family followed his work. By some miracle of fate, his parents had rented a house by the beach for six months, where they lived in happy chaos, their daily rhythms dictated by urges rather than routine. There were no mealtimes or bedtimes. Ailsa came and went as she pleased, which suited her because by this time Adam was drunk more than he was sober. Her mother encouraged her to escape, which meant that Rachel bore the brunt of this last dark period in their father’s love affair with alcohol.

  For six months Ailsa and Billy hadn’t gone for more than a day without seeing each other. Then at the end of the summer, just before the new school year started, Billy told Ailsa that his family was moving to California. She went to his house the following week, after he didn’t turn up at school, and found a letter from Billy with a forwarding address and a promise that he would write. The letter said he didn’t believe in sad goodbyes. ‘It’s easier this way.’ Ailsa didn’t hear from him again until the day before her wedding six years later.

  Of course she had suspected, especially in the early days. When she discovered she was pregnant she had consulted one of Harry’s medical books and discovered sperm could survive in the Fallopian tubes for up to five days.

  She had had sex with Billy the night before her wedding and sex with Harry the night after. Even thinking about it now, Ailsa felt nauseous. She had never told anyone – not her mother, who was waiting up for her when she arrived home at four o’clock in the morning, nor Rachel, who had questioned her about her bridal glow when she got up after just three hours’ sleep the morning of her wedding.

  When she discovered two months later that she was pregnant she knew the baby could be Billy’s. But equally the baby could be Harry’s. But as she now understood, suspicion was knowledge’s more hedonistic cousin. Suspicion left things open-ended and allowed you to imagine multiple scenarios. The problem with knowing something was that it left no room for doubt. It required a reaction.

  Ailsa pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and did something that she had resisted doing for years: she googled Billy. Within seconds she knew that he was divorced and remarried with four children and living in San Francisco, where he worked as a cameraman for a local news station. There were a couple of family photos. Ailsa examined them. Even on the tiny screen she could see the resemblance between his youngest daughter and Luke. Something in the curl of the upper lip and the heavy eyelids. This was Luke’s half-sister. She dropped the phone in shock on the seat beside her. If she wanted to she could get in touch with Billy right now. There was a phone number for him on the San Fran News website. A whole range of options had suddenly opened up.

  Conflicting currents of thought buffeted against each other, like the sea when the tide was on the turn. She imagined telling Luke. He would surely want to meet his father, and Billy would be entitled to get to know his son. They would discover how alike they were and would hold Ailsa responsible for the lost years, even if neither of them ever articulated their resentment.

  They would demand to know why she hadn’t suggested DNA testing and what right she had to withhold her doubts from them. Back then parenting was all about nurture rather than nature. It seemed incredible now, but people had genuinely believed you could make your child a genius by playing it Mozart in the womb or cause irrevocable developmental damage by going out to work.

  A new concern gained traction. Billy might not want to include Luke in his life, especially if he had just embarked on his second marriage. He might reject Luke. Another wave of anxiety broke over Ailsa’s head. Luke would reassess his entire childhood in light of this new evidence. He would see a therapist, who would turn him against his parents. All three of them. He would take even less responsibility for his future. He would be given a perfect excuse to fail.

  And what about Harry? They had betrayed each other. Harry was rational enough to balance this equation. He wasn’t a jealous man. He knew about Billy, the sketchy details at least, that he was her first boyfriend and she had messed up her exams because of him, but not that she had seen him the night before her wedding. Her deception had lasted eighteen years; his six months. Maybe her betrayal had inadvertently led to his. Harry’s relationship with Luke had come up at every session with the marriage guidance counsellor. It wasn’t a reason for what he had done but Harry was right: it gave context.

  The truth might make Harry feel less guilty about his inability to relate to Luke. But it might also make him feel worse. And hadn’t he mentioned the other day how leaving London had been the making of his relationship with his eldest son?

  Moreover Harry would want to know why when she had had the opportunity to tell the truth in the Italian restaurant all those years ago, she had chosen to lie.

  ‘Did you see Billy again after he disappeared?’ he had asked Ailsa in the middle of that meal. She was eating a mouthful of pasta arrabiata and somehow managed to keep chewing without losing eye contact.

  ‘No. Why are you asking?’ she asked, leaning forward so the zip dug into her pregnant stomach.

  ‘Something your mum said.’

  It was the biggest lie she had ever told. She told it to protect herself, Harry and the unborn baby. And because she didn’t know for sure. A few weeks later, when the midwife placed Luke in her arms and she stroked the shock of dark hair and drew a line across the luscious perfect lips, she still wasn’t sure. All babies looked like little old men, Harry observed, his voice choked with emotion as he decided Luke most resembled Adam.

  What else could she have done? Were the choices that she didn’t make any better than the one she had made? She remembered the newspaper piece about conscience that Romy had shown Harry and rubbed the soft dimple above her eyebrow. Her lateral frontal pole must be in overdrive.

  Ailsa squirted water onto the windscreen and turned on the wipers at full speed to get rid of the dead insects. Her mind turned back to Matt, who had emerged as the improbable lynchpin of this unexpected drama. Could she count on him not to say anything? Ever? This defined the range of options that lay before her.

  It seemed reckless to rely on someone she had known for less than six months. Yet if someone had asked for an objective appraisal she would have said that Matt was a trustworthy person who was discreet and unlikely to become loose-tongued when drunk. The likelihood was that he would never menti
on the issue again and would try to forget he ever knew.

  Ailsa was reassured by the fact that he hadn’t asked any of the obvious questions. Did Luke’s father know he had a son? Did she ever see him? Did Harry know? Did Luke? She could see from the pained expression on his face last night that he understood what the truth could do, perhaps not its seismic quality, but certainly the fracturing of relationships that would have to be dismantled and recast. He wouldn’t want that responsibility. And nor did she. She decided to live with the status quo for another couple of weeks.

  Ailsa jumped as she realized there was someone knocking on the car window. She saw Loveday peering through the glass and swore under her breath then understood from the hurt expression on Loveday’s face that she could lip-read. She fumbled with the electric window and realized that it wasn’t working because the car engine was switched off. She turned on the ignition and lowered the window.

  Loveday crouched down until she was eye level with Ailsa. ‘We need to talk contraception,’ she said dramatically.

  ‘Contraception?’

  For a split second, through the fog of paranoia and exhaustion, Ailsa thought that somehow Loveday had intuited her dilemma or read her post on Mumsnet. She must have noticed the panic in Ailsa’s face.

  ‘Not yours,’ she teased. ‘I don’t want to become a grandmother before the age of fifty, do you? It’s too ageing.’ It slowly dawned on Ailsa that she was talking about Romy and Jay.

  ‘I assume that you don’t want Romy pumping her body full of hormones, and condoms are so unreliable. I’ve discovered a local person who fits the honey cap and was thinking that maybe we could all go together to get Romy fitted?

  ‘Honey isn’t as irritating to the vagina as spermicide and it immobilizes the sperm,’ Loveday continued when Ailsa didn’t say anything. Some things never change, thought Ailsa. Having a son makes you liberal and having a daughter makes you conservative.

  ‘I really don’t think they’ve reached that stage yet,’ said Ailsa. She paused for a moment. ‘Do you and Wolf want to come round for a drink tonight?’