I hurry to tell Sylvie, ‘And then I read everything that I could find.’ I did my homework.
Immediately, she puts this to the test: ‘So, then, what are my chances?’ Her chin is jutted to receive the blow.
I have the figures at the ready: ‘If you do have the gene, and you meet someone who has the gene –’ meet? another euphemism ‘– then any children that you have will have a one in four chance of having cystic fibrosis.’
Very quickly, she asks, ‘How many people have the gene?’
I tell her, ‘You can test for the gene,’ before I answer her question. ‘One in twenty,’ then I add, ‘and they can test your baby before it’s born, to see if it is a one-in-four.’
And this is the whole truth, this is everything that I can tell her.
The floorboards flutter as a passing car booms a beat which is louder than a loud-hailer; than election promises.
‘Listen to that,’ I say, pointlessly.
Tentatively, she asks, ‘Is that a lot, one in twenty?’
Is it? ‘I don’t know.’
For quite some time, I have been standing, leaning on to the back of my chair, sometimes heavily. Now I move around the chair and sit down.
She frowns, and once again focuses upon, reaches for, the milk bottle. ‘Why didn’t he tell you that it was hereditary?’ Her fingertips slide down the neck of the bottle, on the haze of moisture.
‘Oh,’ I have to put her straight, ‘he never knew that I was pregnant.’
The fingers stop, her gaze snaps back into mine, the eyes blank but fierce because they are unfathomable, unanchored. ‘How did he not know?’
Simple: ‘He was my boss, I left my job,’ left him with a lie, told him that Bernie had a new job and we were moving away. I do not know if he knew that it was a lie, because I did not look into his eyes when I told him. I had not looked into his eyes for three Weeks. In fact, I had probably only ever looked into his eyes once, three weeks before, and then look what happened: Sylvie.
Who, now, laughs, ‘Your boss, oh God, what a cliché.’
His eyes were nearly green but nearly transparent, simply the colour of whatever it is that eyes are: the colour of the soul, I suppose. A mere smoke of colour. A smoky soul. Not dissimilar to tarnished jade, and I knew the rule for jade: it has to be touched, worn, warmed, or it will darken. When I looked into his eyes, I saw that his soul had been darkening for years. I knew all about darkened souls.
‘The occasional quick screw on his desk?’
She is laughing, but this is bravado, she is angry with me and I will have to sit this out.
I cannot stop myself, though, from a brief, prim defence, ‘No.’ Not occasional. Not quick. Not on his desk, on no one’s desk, there was no desk.
‘You were having an affair, and then suddenly you went, and he never wondered?’ About you. About whether there was a me. A peep of fury, now, from her carefully constructed calm, like a snapped twig in a piece of occupational health wickerwork.
‘It wasn’t an affair –’
‘– Oh,’ mock delight, ‘a one-night stand: I’m the result of a one-night stand with some old sod in a suit? Better and better.’
I slam back in my chair, fold my arms, ‘Whatever you prefer, Sylvie; whatever you want to think. Because I can tell that you’re not going to listen to me; you already have your own little version.’
She creeps from her chair, but upwards; seems low, but leans over me, ‘Now you listen to me,’ her tone is the verbal equivalent of this position, an unnerving and compelling mix of high and low, ‘I’ll have the truth, please, because I’ve had sixteen years of a lie.’ The brown irises have a green haze, but her eyes are too much her own to remind me of him: less a reminder, more a coincidence, like certain words in someone else’s mouth, an expression which chimes a chord.
‘You were wrong about the old: he was twenty-seven.’ Of course, twenty-seven is old, to her; but I sense that when she referred to him as an old-sod-in-a-suit, she was working to a different scale, she was thinking of the beer-gutted model, forties or fifties. As if I would – I am not defending him, so much as me. ‘And sod? No, he was a lovely man.’
‘So lovely that he cheated on his wife.’ She is back in her chair, but up on her knees; she is small enough to be able to do this. She is sitting high, in sceptical judgement.
I mumble, ‘Well, our marriages were really very rocky.’ An understatement.
Suddenly she is down and closer, forearms on the table. ‘What did you feel for him?’ And I see that her eyes are twitchy with hopes.
This is quaintly old-fashioned: what did I feel for him? The memory is the sheer pain of my undeclared love: like glass in my skin – the more I tried to pick over and free myself, the worse the pain. I had to hope that, in time, I would shed the pieces; that as I grew old, I would grow new, too. And, in time, I did.
‘Were you in love with him?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And now?’
‘Now?’ Beyond us, on the main road, there are sirens: a new variation, show-off sirens, several of them shaken up together, tumbling away, losing their rhythm.
‘Yes, what do you feel for him now?’
‘Now?’ She wants the truth? ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
I can see that, as far as she is concerned, this is not how the story should run. But she wants the truth.
‘Well, I know that I was in love with him, I know that he was lovely, but …’ how can I explain this to her?
‘You remember Billy Allen, when you were fourteen?’ Remember how, for a year, he was everything to you, you wrote his name over everything that you owned, traced his every movement, but now he is nothing, someone else’s boyfriend, demoted from your dreams into real life, into the sleepwalk of everyday life?
‘Oh come on,’ she winds herself back down into her chair, her arms around herself, ‘that’s hardly the same.’
‘No? Neil was a long time ago. That time has gone.’ I can see from her bristling shoulders that she regards this as callous. I will have to try hard to explain, ‘Passion is not something that you can take with you.’ Try harder, ‘My love for him was never written into me, but was something that happened to me.’ And this is the wonder, surely: that it happened at all. Because if I had looked the other way, if I had lived in another town, if I had failed to see the advert or not applied for the job … the ifs are everywhere, running into one another, the full effect is like a cut diamond. But, something which happens will eventually stop happening. And I can live with that. ‘He was a lovely man, he was lovely-looking, he was funny and kind. And by then, Bernie was a dead loss.’
This mention of Bernie prompts her. Cautiously, her arms still wound hard around herself, she shifts in her chair, settles, allows, ‘Yeah, well,’ I can believe that.
Then, ‘His name was Neil?’ Her eyes are wide to drink down whatever I can give her.
‘Neil James.’ No harm, surely, in telling her something as simple as his name, and such a simple name.
‘Did he love you?’ Suddenly she has leaned so far over the table that I have to move my cup. I know what her question means, I am not stupid: she wants to think that he would love her, too. She presses on, ‘Did he ever say that he loved you?’
Since when did she ever believe what anyone said?
I am going to have to tell her the whole story: ‘Look, we worked alone together in an office, all day long, day in, day out, for seven months.’ This could be anyone’s story, but now, to my surprise, my body begins to recall our laughter, a warmth like the sun on my back. There was no sun in our office because of the Venetian blind, the dense ribs of the blind, yet an image is burned into my eyes, I do not know if it is under-exposed or over-exposed, but somehow the light is wrong, because there is only the light: the X-ray glow of the Venetian blind, making moonlight in the day; and his shirt, far too white, fallen to slack folds around his forearms. But even if I squeeze my eyes shut, I cannot quite reach th
e forearms, cannot quite slide into the space between the cotton and his skin, into the air which is warmed by him, the air on which, in which, he moves.
When I had to go away from him, to go home in the evenings or for the weekends, I felt that I was holding my breath, I was merely holding onto life. And when I saw him again, the next day, or on Mondays, that air came spilling from me. There was never quite enough air in me, or going through me. When I went away from him for ever, I felt that I was going down into a black airless hole to die.
‘But anyway,’ back to the story, for Sylvie, to her story, the story of her, ‘we went to a conference, where we had to stay overnight.’
She stops chewing a nail to remark, sourly, ‘Don’t tell me, he made his expense account work hard on you in the bar.’
‘Very late, I went up to his room and knocked on his door.’
Going up to his room was like going up onto the roof, and knocking on his door was like throwing myself off. I did not know that he would catch me, but he did. I sliced through my life, and he broke my fall.
The wet nail hovers, shining, but her mouth is a hard dry line which cracks just enough to complain, ‘So, why did you walk away?’
‘Because very soon I knew that I was going to have you.’ I had become pregnant on the last day of my cycle: a miracle baby, almost.
‘How do you know which one is my father?’
‘I knew that you had nothing to do with Bernie because, for quite a while, I had had nothing to do with Bernie.’ Smiling my apology for this euphemism, I wince inwardly to think how I had had to cover my tracks: I had to seduce Bernie. ‘I was going to have you, so I needed to stay married.’
She wails, ‘To the wrong man?’ The line has flown from her mouth but landed on her eyebrows.
‘I was married. He was married.’
She squeezes out a whine, ‘So?’
‘Apart from anything else, he had three children. And one of them was very ill. And if I had broken up one or both of our marriages, what would have happened to us? I would never have managed on my own, there was no maternity leave or equal pay or anything. His wife would never have managed on her own, and what about those children? Marriage was different, in those days; marriage kept women and children alive. You did not break up a marriage, your own or anyone else’s. What we did was bad, but was nothing, compared …’
Sunk back down onto the nail, she slurs, ‘Three years later, you did divorce.’
‘Ah, well, yes, three years later,’ when I was able to manage. But was this a miscalculation, my second mistake? To have stayed with Bernie for those few years? Should I have taken a chance and gone? My mistakes gather around Bernie like flies.
She seems to haul her head from her nail, holds her head very high to send the accusation, ‘You must hate me for mucking up your life.’
My heart turns over and sends up a laugh, which I quash, but which unfortunately leaks out as a titter, ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? You were the one wonderful consequence of the whole mess.’ She will have to take my word for this: one of my hands has flown as far as the table, but twitches, terrified to go after her. ‘I cut my losses, but I didn’t lose: I had you.’
Her eyes remain narrow, her tone considered, ‘And you know what I hate you for, don’t you?’
Ice blooms over my heart, ‘Oh, please, Syl, don’t …’
Her eyes contract, hard, ‘How could you?’ And she spirals, ‘My whole life, you led me to believe that fucking bastard –’
I come down hard on her, ‘Don’t call him a bastard, Sylvie, he’s your …’ father? I stop, just in time.
And now what do I say? Back to the beginning: ‘I felt that you needed a father.’ Everyone felt that everyone needed a father, in those days. Everyone felt that anyone was better than no one.
‘But I had a father.’ Fury has crushed her chin into dimples.
‘No,’ I have to try to explain, ‘he was just a man who –’
‘Couldn’t say no?’ She is up, and whirled to the window.
I grab the milk bottle, to cool my hands. ‘You know your problem, Sylvie? You’re witty and charming, but rarely simultaneously.’
She turns to me. ‘He never knew about me, you never gave him a chance. You played God.’
‘Someone had to.’ You try to do better: there was no one for me, I had to carry my secret on my own, I was alone in my impossibly crowded life, my crowded body. My whole life hung in the balance – two lives – and there was no one to help me.
She is calmer, her fury swallowed, a mere stain of a sulk on her mouth. ‘Does no one know?’ I shake my head but she persists: ‘Not even a friend? Or, I don’t know, the doctor or someone?’
‘No one.’ I sigh, drained. ‘Just you and me, babe.’
‘And only just, in my case.’ A pause before she asks, ‘Were you always going to tell me?’
‘I was always going to tell you.’
‘What will I do when I see him?’
Him, Bernie: I am up from my chair before I realize, and commanding, ‘Nothing,’ I cannot allow her to do this, to change the story of my life, to write me off like this.
But she hardly sees me, she is musing, ‘How will I feel?’
Without taking my eyes from her, I return to my chair. How will she feel? Good question. ‘Much as I have always done, I suppose.’
A spark in her glance, ‘Too right I’m not going to say anything to him,’ and a switch of a smile, ‘because I don’t want him to refuse to pay my grant if I do decide to go to college.’
I run a milk-cooled hand over my forehead and into my too-dry hair. ‘Rather mercenary, Sylvie.’
And she gives me a look which puts me in my place. ‘A matter of survival.’
She comes over, back into her chair, where she hovers. ‘So …’ Her elbows planted on the table, her face in a tulip of hands, she smiles. Conspiratorial? Or the lull before the kill? ‘… where do I find Mr Neil James?’
‘You don’t.’ He moved a lot with work, he could have moved anywhere, even abroad.
‘Oh,’ the smile widens, ‘don’t you worry, I’ll find him.’
Worry? How odd that I never anticipated this: that she would want to trace him. Because I did not want to trace him? I thought that I had thought of us as very different, but now I realize that I have always known how very similar we are: we are both practical, turned hard towards the future. We differ in our methods. So I know that this desire to unearth her origins is utterly out of character. I start to warn her off, ‘No …’
A wash of dismay over her pearl of a face, ‘He’s my father,’ followed by a return of the smile, but brief, conclusive: fact.
But this is not wholly true, ‘Is he? He was your father for a few hours, in a hotel room, nearly seventeen years ago, and wherever he is now, he has a life, he has a wife,’ actually, I do not know if he has a wife, nowadays, or the same wife, ‘and children.’ I do not even know how many children, how many have grown up. And he may even have grandchildren. What I do know, now, is that Sylvie and I have always lived in accord, that this push and pull of ours has been a pendulum, we have held each other in check but moved each other forward through the years. And now she is poised to throw us out of sync, to turn back the clock, to change our past. What will this do to our future?
She is not going to do this, because I am going to stop her.
‘If you turn up now, Sylvie, you make their whole lives a lie, you ruin their lives for the sake of –’ I have to say this, in her own words ‘– a quick screw.’ This will do for the truth, for now.
Her mouth opens, but apparently involuntarily because she says nothing.
So I continue, ‘How can you spend your days trying to prove that parents don’t matter, and then decide to do this?’ I try to be calm: confrontation is not the way, or not my way.
I have lived so many years with the image of us in opposition to each other, but now I see that this is not so: she is in my hands. I can stop her, I can hold her,
I can hold fast. In my whole life I have never fought for anything or anyone, but I have the strength, saved up. I will win. I will work on her, I will turn her around and win her over. Looking at her, and contemplating my options, the advice which was a blur above her head for those ten minutes on the bus comes clear in my mind’s eye: Don’t touch it, Don’t ignore it, Stay calm.
If you enjoyed Tenterhooks, check out this other great Suzannah Dunn title.
Buy the ebook here
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Suzannah Dunn is the author of six other books of fiction: Darker Days Than Usual, Blood Sugar, Past Caring, Quite Contrary, Venus Flaring and Commencing Our Descent. She lives in Brighton.
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
Published by Flamingo 1999
First published in Great Britain by
Flamingo 1998
Copyright © Suzannah Dunn 1998
Suzannah Dunn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
These stories are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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