by Carol Mason
So this was what love was, I used to think. The slow unbeguiling. The sad thing was, that in having my mother as his wife, my father already had what most men wished for: a much younger woman. They had met when she was a pretty nineteen-year-old art student at London’s Royal College, and my dad was a forty-year old Royal Academician who picked her up in a silver Jaguar, when he could barely afford to pay his rent. Five months later they were married, and after nine more, out came me. But parenthood was the fall to earth they weren’t ready for. So my father moved us to France to live like the culturally superior expats he saw us as being. Hence the French name that I adapted by removing the accent on the first ‘e’, because all the kids in school used to poke fun at me. Somehow my father sold enough paintings, and managed to pay the rent on a small flat in Paris. As one of life’s blusterers, my father got by trading on the image he had invented for himself, of the suave older artist with his beautiful young wife and muse. And the baby. I always imagine I was paraded like a rather ‘in’ accessory, but when no one was there to admire me, they flung me in the cupboard with the handbags and shoes. Then it was time for me to go to school. My dad’s creativity went through a dry patch, and they had no choice but to drag themselves back to Newcastle. Then his “I can’t paint” spell turned into a self-centred trip that lasted forever, and my mother became chronically depressed. Apparently Anthony, as I came to call him over the years—my token step in the direction of fully disowning him—needed a posse of new and naïve women. All he would ever say, when we had a very stiff attempt at ending the cold war between us when I was in my mid-twenties, was that my mother didn’t fulfil her end of the bargain. Which means, I think, that she became a bit too much of a real person for him. But I always sensed that they divorced because when the allure of each other wore off, I wasn’t enough to make them feel like they had something worth sticking for.
‘Did you say you are staying for dinner?’ I re-ask him. Sometimes it’s hard to forget, and difficult to forgive, but time has a way of ensuring you become bored with your own battle. Plus I am powerfully aware that my father is an old man now, and there comes a time in all our lives when we have to start making amends before we exit this life with one too many regrets on our conscience.
‘Not tonight. I have plans,’ he says, coyly.
‘Plans?’ I look at the deep furrows in his brow, and his hair. My father has fantastic hair: the thickest, cleanest, most undulating, most ski-slope white tresses. Then there’s the black and shiny pencil moustache, perfectly centred between his top lip and the base of his nose, which looks like it has been skilfully applied with boot polish. My dad is dapper, and handsome—“for a little fellow” as he calls himself.
‘Where did you meet this one then?’ I ask.
‘At the Grope a Grandma night at the old town hall.’ When he sees me smile he says, ‘At an exhibition at the Laing, actually.’
‘She’s an artist?’
‘Would meeting her at a gallery assume she’d have to be?’ My dad speaks posh for a council housing estate boy, always sounding his ‘ings’. Winning a scholarship to England’s oldest and most esteemed art school was one of those flukes of fate that somehow validated his belief that he was too good for where he came from, and therefore made his fall greater when he had to come back.
‘How old is she?’ I ask him. My father used to love showing off his girlfriends—each one younger and more beautiful than the next—but now we never lay eyes on them. ‘You sure she exists?’ I asked of his last one. ‘She exists,’ he said. ‘She just hasn’t yet had her coming out at the Debutante’s ball.’
‘Which means she’s about seventy-five, right?’ I teased. And he grimaced. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve never gone out with someone my age, and I’m not about to start now.’
Despite the fact that my dad is theoretically past it, he has lost none of his old ability to beguile women. Despite what he’s thinking or feeling, my dad can turn it on for the ladies, at any time. It’s a work of art watching him in action. How he’ll laud the often-invisible minutiae of their beauty, as his hand finds its way to the curve of their lower back, so they are never in any doubt about the masculinity that wrestles in his trousers. But it’s the way he talks about his passion for my mother, and his era as a painter in Paris that makes people recognize that men like my father don’t come around every day. And not only do they deserve you humouring their stories about their life, you do so willingly, for the chance that something they say will change the way you look at your own.
‘How is it relevant how old Anthea is?’ he plays with me now.
‘Oh God! Anthea!’ I have a chuckle. I’m picturing a thirty-year-old wannabe co-host of ‘Dancing With the Stars’, and he knows I am.
When he was young, my father took himself way too seriously; now he uses our mutual ability to find him slightly funny as something that brings us closer.
‘Anyway, how is the Love Market these days?’ he asks, with scoffing emphasis on my company’s name. A romantic like my father finds it morally indefensible that anyone would actually pay someone to find them a partner. I look over and see him peering at a report from the University of St Andrews on “Face Values Applied to Love Game”—the latest research on what people believe your face says about your attitudes to sexual commitments. My bedtime reading.
‘It’s doing well. Thanks for asking.’
‘And how are you?’ he exaggeratedly lets the paper float out of his hands, making sure I see, to emphasise his scathing regard for it.
I stop clanking things on the bench. What is it about an innocent inquiry about your wellbeing that makes you realise you’re actually not doing well at all? ‘I’m all right, Dad.’
‘That doesn’t sound very convincing.’
I shrug. Even though we’ve been largely absent from one another’s life, my father still has a way of knowing things without my having to tell him.
‘Remember, what Gwyneth Paltrow said. The best way to mend a broken heart is time and girlfriends. And from my experience it has always worked.’
I smile at his joke. ‘’Why is your heart broken this time?’
‘I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about you.’
I scan the table for my decree absolute. ‘Have you been reading my personal mail—my letters?’
‘No. Would I? But if you leave things lying around they become public property.’ Then he adds, ‘But this is a sad day.’ Because my dad always liked Mike.
We meet eyes, and in that moment, all the things I want to say line up for me to speak them, only I can’t speak them, and he knows I can’t. So he stands up, because he knows we’re not going to have a big heart to heart. And inwardly, we will use the fact that Aimee is right here as the excuse to keep this uncrossable emotional bridge between us. He slips his raincoat on over his button-down-collared shirt—my father is always dapper, turned out like a lovable little pimp, as my half-sister Jacqui will say—then he goes and kisses ‘his favourite granddaughter.’ Aimee will usually remind him, disdainfully, that she’s his only granddaughter. Although, lately, Aimee seems to act as though she considers everything and everyone to be beneath her, not just her granddad and his tired jokes.
‘I better be off, diddle-doff,’ he says. ‘Anthea will be waiting for me.’ He shoots me a prankish smile.
I go over to him and give him a quick cheek-kiss, wishing I could cuddle him, but how do you suddenly start being huggy when you never really have? What you do is you hug your daughter all the more, when she’ll let you, to give her what you never had. ‘Don’t do anything you shouldn’t do,’ I tell him, affectionately, just glad that he’s alive and he’s got this much spirit left in him, and hoping I’m half as frisky as he is in my old age.
‘Oh, I’ll try,’ he says, with a wink.
Three
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask Aimee, as we sit in an empty Italian restaurant called The Godfather, down a Newcastle City Centre side-street, on Monday lunchtime
. Three bored Italian waiters stand watching our every move, while the Gypsy Kings sing Bamboleo.
I kept her off school today. Not that I make a habit of encouraging my daughter to play hooky. But sometimes they call it retail therapy for a reason. And I know from experience that satisfying Aimee’s addiction to shoes once in a while has healing powers that all the mothering in the world can’t compete with. ‘It’s about your dad and me, isn’t it?’ I ask the top of her head as she stares for a disproportionately long time at the four lunch specials on the menu. She could be me, twenty-four years ago. Although my mother never took me out for my favourite food and asked me how I was doing.
She shakes her head. I look at her shiny mane of hair; the porcelain skin like my mother’s, her lowered gaze and the heavy Garbo-esque sweep of her eyelids. My daughter, who turns herself out like a rebellious street urchin, in her new habit of wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt over the top of a long-sleeved one, denim skirts, and colourful chequered tights—sometimes with holes deliberately poked in them. ‘If you want to talk about it, we can.’ The waiter swoops, brandishing a note pad. We both order the lasagne.
And then she says the words that cut me open. ‘Why don’t you love him any more?’
I close my eyes, and it’s a moment or two before I can look at her again. ‘I do love him, Aimee. Probably as much as you do. But the love between a husband and a wife is different. It’s not quite as unconditional as the love your dad and I have for you.’ In the way she looks at me now, I can tell that explanations are just fancy word games to her. She’s asserting that one selfish right we both know she has: to have us be a family. And I know that because I’ve been there.
‘Aimee, I have never stopped loving your dad. I’m just trying to learn how to live without him and it’s very strange place to be. I may have to figure it out as we go along. Other than loving you very much, that might be the best I can offer you right now. It might be all I have.’
Nothing. I can’t read her. I sometimes want to beg her to cry, scream, anything. Not this. This flatness. She used to be such an expressive child. Then Mike left, she fell, and a part of her has stayed fallen. ‘We tried, Aimee, that’s what I’m trying to say. We tried to make our marriage work. But sometimes you realise it shouldn’t require all that effort.’
The Gypsy Kings are singing Volare now, and the waiter sets down garlic bread that we didn’t ask for, angling for a flirtatious glance. Aimee stares at the top of the table. I can almost see her young little mind grappling its way around adult truths.
But am I lying to both of us? Now that my daughter is the very thing I hated being—a fixture moved back and forth between two parents; no longer part of a mathematical set determined precisely by what’s in it—did we try hard enough?
‘We didn’t really split up,’ Mike said, shortly after we split up the first time. ‘We were just taking a little break from each other.’ He rubbed the tear off my cheek with his thumb. ‘I’ll never part with you,’ he said, as though I was his favourite record from his prized seventies collection. I can still feel the way his thumb stretched the skin under my eyes.
I never had to ask myself if Mike only came back for Aimee. In Mike’s mind I knew he’d never really left.
‘I hate this dumb song,’ Aimee says. The waiters are leaning up against the nearby wall, watching us, in competition for our attention. ‘Who are they?’ she asks. ‘Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest?’
I have a small chuckle at her childish cruelty. Looking at her, it’s like living my life over again, analysing myself. ‘We could go shopping after this for something for you to wear to Rachel’s party.’
She lifts a sheet of bubbling mozzarella with her fork, her long T-shirt sleeve coming to knuckle-level. ‘I’ll get third degree mouth ulcers if I eat this,’ she says, wafting a hand at the steam coming off it. Then she adds, ‘Why? It’s not like I’m going.’
I set my fork down. ‘Since when?’
‘Since she didn’t invite me.’ She meets my eyes. ‘But I’m not upset or anything.’
‘Why didn’t she invite you? Did you ask her?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘How would it be better if I knew?’
I try to find an answer for that, but as often happens, my daughter outsmarts me. What she lacks in school marks, she makes up for in her ability to cut through the chaff and tell it like it is. ‘You’re not distancing yourself from her because she won the Gymnastics championship and you resent her for it, are you?’
She drops her jaw now, and rolls her eyes again. I regret asking her. But something in her expression… I am not convinced. ‘You had a fall, Aimee. Yes it was bad, but imagine how worse it could have been if you’d hit your head. Your bones are young and will heal and be good as new. You will win other competitions.’ I know that my “You can still lose the battle and win the war” line isn’t all that much consolation, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.
I look at her fingers seized around her fork. They are long and gangly and pale and perfectly tapered, with their pearly painted nails. I have adored them from the moment I first laid eyes on them. Sometimes I think I’ve watched Aimee grow through her hands. I’m like a fortune teller, only I don’t read palms, and I only see the present. If only I could see what was even a short distance ahead for all of us. That might have been a gift worth having right now.
‘Her mum said that marriages only break up because one person has met someone else.’
It’s me doing the jaw-dropping now. ‘Aimee! You shouldn’t listen to things like that! Yes, people sometimes do fall in love with others. But in our case neither one of us was looking to meet someone else, Aimee. We never were. It was about us, not other people.’
We eat the rest of our food in silence. When we’re done, I glance over and accidentally catch the waiter’s eye, which seems to make his day.
‘You’ve got yourself a boyfriend,’ Aimee says.
‘And hands off, he’s all mine.’ I catch a hint of a smile. ‘Listen, we’re going to pay up and shop till we drop. And we’ll plan our own party. How about that?’ I pull out my money to pay the bill. The waiter is on me in a split second, panting for some more eye contact.
‘Who’ll be left to invite?’ she says, pulling a smile. ‘They’ll all be at Rachel’s.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I rub the top of her head. ‘We’ll think of somebody. Even if we have to pay people to come, just for show.’
She tuts at me now. But it’s a happier tut. And right now that feels like a major breakthrough. ‘Can we get out of this dumb restaurant now?’ she asks.
‘Gladly,’ I tell her.
Four
‘I was reading an article the other day,’ I tell my half-sister Jacqui while we’re out running and attempting to get fit for summer. ‘It was about how memories of your first love can ruin your future relationships. It said that if you had a passionate first relationship and allow that to become your benchmark, it becomes inevitable that future partnerships will seem boring and a big disappointment. It said ideally we would all wake up and have skipped our first relationship and be in our second one.’ I am panting hard. My legs don’t seem to want to work and my heart has gone out in sympathy.
‘I’d happily have skipped mine,’ she says. ‘Remember Darren who wore the T-shirt that said I LUV LAXATIVES?’
I grin. ‘Did he really?’ I ask her. ‘Love laxatives?’
She chuckles, then says, ‘So I take it you’ve been thinking about Patrick again.’
The mention of his name after all this time is like a groggy regaining of consciousness to a life almost forgotten. ‘I wasn’t. No. But of course now I’m going to. Thanks.’
‘Divorce is like a death, Celine. You have to grieve the marriage but you have to move on too. There’s no point in moping. Divorce means a marriage is over, not a life.’
‘Who said I’m moping, Jacqui?’ My pace slows. ‘And of course I know my life isn’t over! But it’s only been a week. They say it takes two y
ears to get over a divorce.’
‘That’s only when they’ve walked out on you when you’re three months pregnant. Or they’ve been displaying their willies on the Internet. When you’re the one that wasn’t happy, life begins the minute he’s down the garden path. In theory, I suppose.’
‘I don’t believe that. Not for one minute. Even if I wanted to run out and get someone else, I feel a bit like discounted goods now.’
She scowls at me. ‘That’s a thing to say!’
‘It’s true. It’s not exactly an attribute, is it: telling someone you’re divorced.’ I am only saying that silliness because I am feeling sorry for myself.
It’s stopped raining so I take off my nylon jacket and wrap it around my hips as we run, enjoying the April air on my bare arms. ‘Do you think that’s why I’ve never exactly cracked up, Jacq? Because I was so convinced it was what I wanted?’ I nip my dripping nose. The worst I’ve done when he first left was spill the milk when I was putting it on my cereal, because I was distracted by a moment of extreme missing him. ‘I mean, I’ve never totally lost the plot, have I? Never walked around Hexham market in my dressing gown, stockpiled Prozac in the garage, backed my car into a small person who I mistook for a street lamp… What’s wrong with me?’
Jacqui’s striking almond eyes latch onto mine. Even though we’re not real sisters—Jacqui being the daughter of my mother’s second husband—our thoughts and fears definitely seem to spring from the same well. We’ve even been told we look alike. Similar height—I’m an inch taller; similar body-types—slim enough, but prone to packing on ten pounds after two weeks of pigging out. At thirty-six, I’m already going grey and colour my long hair a dark chestnut brown, whereas Jacqui, two years my junior, has naturally mousey hair, and highlights it blonde, and wears it in a bob. When my mum married Len, his kids—Jacqui and Chris—had lost their mother to cancer. Somehow there we all were, a miscellany of identities put together under one roof, trying to be a family: a five-piece family in a doll’s house. I just thought that Len was a pervert, Chris a lame-brain, and Jacqui was always there, trying to be my friend. Maybe I’d not have resented her if she didn’t seem to have my mother’s approval in a way that I never did, even if it was just my mother sucking up to Len—who was there, earned good money, and wasn’t my father. That is, until he started going out in Chris’s shirts and coming home covered in love-bites, then ran off with a nurse, and became exactly like my father. Then Jacqui, Chris and I had a bit more in common. We all had absentee dads, and in a way we were all motherless: theirs had died, and mine was there in body but little else. Chris now lives near Hull with his high-maintenance girlfriend, and once in a while he’ll phone and we’ll end up talking for four hours then he disappears for two years. And Jacqui is the human equivalent of my ligaments, always holding me in place to prevent my dislocation.
