A Place for Us (21 page)

They were inches apart now. “I’ve forgiven you for that,” Cat said, staring straight at him, and she took his hand. “Honestly.”

“Don’t,” Joe said, but he didn’t move away. “Cat—” He broke off, gazing at her.

Cat could feel his bones, his fingers squeezing hers, a sweet, oddly old-fashioned gesture, and they stayed like that, pressed against each other, shivering in the cold, their warm hands knotted together.

“I’m going to anyway.” Cat closed her eyes, leaned forward, and kissed him.

His stubble brushed against her cheeks, his body against hers, solid and tall; but she was almost as tall as he. She kissed him first, but then she felt his hand gripping her shoulder, his tongue firm in her mouth. He pushed her against the wall of the house, and she pushed against him frantically, feeling his weight on her body, the taste of him, the sound of his breath heavy in her ear. . . .

Then suddenly, he broke away, shaking his head. “Sorry. No.”

Cat laughed, her mouth still full of the taste of him. She felt drunk, reckless. “What?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have. Don’t.”

He was staring at her as though he’d seen a ghost. “Fine.” Anger rose within her. “What’s your problem?”

“I—I shouldn’t have done that. That’s all.”

Cat was sobering up rapidly. “Are you with someone?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. I don’t know.”

“What on earth does that mean?”

He touched his fingers to his mouth, breathing hard. “It means I shouldn’t have kissed you. That’s what it means.”

“
I
kissed
you
. I wanted to.”

“I wanted you to. But I can’t.”

Cat put her hand on the wall of the house, steadying herself. “Karen,” she said suddenly, seeing it clearly, the alcohol all at once like acid in her stomach. “Are you sleeping with Karen? Because Lucy told me she wondered if she might be . . . And when I saw you two in the pub I wondered if . . .” She trailed off. “Oh, God. Oh shit. Of course.”

Joe reached for her hand. “Cat. It’s complicated. I can’t explain it.”

She pulled away from him, laughing. “Wow! You really are a snake, aren’t you? Here tonight, serving our drinks . . . chatting about children’s books . . . sucking up to my grandparents. ‘Oh, Joe’s so wonderful.’ And you’re—you’re sleeping with
Karen
?” she hissed. “You prick. What the hell are you doing here? My uncle, my cousin—why are you here? Why don’t you just get out? Go away?”

“I wish I could.” He shook his head. “I can’t. Not yet.”

“I really don’t think anyone’ll miss you.”

“I’m thinking about it,” he said quietly. “Honestly. Look—”

“Oh, God,” Cat said again. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “I’m so stupid. I can’t believe it.”

“I should have stopped it. But you have no idea how much I wanted to kiss you.”

Cat could feel her eyes burning with unshed tears. She turned away. “I’m going in. Don’t
ever
—”

“Shh.”
Joe gripped her arm, turning toward the garden, alert like an animal on the scent.

“Don’t tell me to—” Cat began, but then she froze as his grip tightened, and she followed his gaze.

On the raised stone path beside the daisy bank and the vegetable patch, a figure appeared, hurrying quietly through the rain, making no sound. Instinctively, Cat and Joe shrank out of sight under the porch, watching as she came closer. The rain was relentless now, and it was impossible to see her clearly, until she rounded the edge of the vegetable patch and stopped. She turned back toward the dark woods.

“See you tomorrow, darling Daisy,” she called faintly, and she blew a kiss into the night air.

Cat held her breath, and found herself reaching for Joe’s hand again, warm, wet, and strong, before pulling away, just as Martha looked almost straight at them, her eyes glinting in the dark. Then she turned back toward the front of the house, and was gone.

Daisy

August 2008

I
SHOULDN
’
T HAVE
come back.

I didn’t realize how much it would hurt.

I’m no good at being this person . . . oh, what kind of person is that, though? A sister who throws confetti and looks pleased for her brother. That’s who.

So Bill marries again, and we all stand there and look happy. I find it bizarre, to be honest. I always thought he was either gay or just one of those celibate types, you know, you’d get them in detective novels, and our old vicar was like that. Just not the marrying kind, they used to say.

I’m not the marrying kind either, I suppose. Whenever I looked at Bill and that rat-faced girl who’s got her grubby red claws into him, I wanted to laugh. It sounds so bloody silly, doesn’t it, when people are scratching around in the dirt for food, or children are dying from insect bites in their thousands, or women are being raped and murdered on a daily basis with no one so much as raising an eyebrow, and here’s this . . . civilized behavior in this Regency Guildhall on this sunny day. Everyone being respectable. My daughter is here. We smile and say, “Hello, how are you?” like we’re distant cousins at a family reunion.

She looks nothing like me and I’m glad. She doesn’t look like her father either, but Giles was a drip so that’s a relief. She looks like Ma; good for her. Ma is getting old. Southpaw’s knee is busted, he can barely walk, and he looks done in. Bill has finally reached middle age, which is what he’s been lurching toward as fast as he can since he was a child. Florence: oh dear. Florence is exactly the same, but she keeps giggling and is wearing a floral Laura Ashley dress, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so
embarrassing. I suspect she’s persuaded some idiot to screw her, and that’s what her tragic bucktoothed grinning is all about.

Oh, God. I hate Bath, I hate being home and going down these paths again. I’m not this person. In Kerala I’m not this person, I’m just not. I get up in the morning and I know what needs doing, and no one looks at me and sniffs out the stench of years of disappointment and fear they all smell here when they come near me. Since I’ve been here I keep telling myself I’ll be back in Cherthala soon and I just need more time to make things work. Then I remember what I did, and how I can’t go back there again.

I’m so stupid, so fucking stupid. I wanted things, I wanted more than I had. A nicer place, nicer clothes, money for a car. A couple of treats for myself, maybe? And people said I deserved those things. And, to be honest, really honest? I did deserve them, after all I’ve done for them. But I was silly about it. I have a trusting nature. I let the wrong people in, and they betrayed me, you see. I have lost everything these last couple of months, and now there’s nothing I’m good at, nothing I can do.

Catherine is very thin. She has shadows under her eyes and she smiles in this shy way, as if she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to enjoy something or not. She has just started living with a boyfriend in Paris and she has a job in fashion. Which is funny, because she seems to me to be a solitary person. I can’t work her out. Never could. “Fashion doesn’t seem to suit her,” I said to Ma, and she only said, “That’s a terrible pun, Daisy. Oh, darling, do you really not see why she’s doing that job?”

Oh, darling. Course I don’t, because I don’t understand anything.

If I could only get some help, something to calm me down, something to make everything distant and fuzzy again. I hate the idea of marriage too, how it chains you to someone else and you stand up there and actually admit to it, in a room full of people who supposedly love you. But then I hate the fact that they think they have a claim on me too.

I’m very tired, to be honest. Very tired of it all. I don’t think anyone understands, either. I shouldn’t have come back.

When Karen threw the bouquet—awful plastic gerberas—Lucy caught it, jumping up like some plump puppy. Everyone laughed and clapped, Karen kissed Lucy, and everyone was saying, “Keep it in the family,” and being jostled on the steps by the next lot of idiots going in to tie the knot. Well, I thought I might just walk off then. I went and stood by the entrance to some sports shop opposite. These little oiks
inside staring at sneakers, they all turned when my family started cheering. I’m there in my smart dress, half in that world of light and confetti and smiling, half in this normal one, gray, sad, boring. The photographer lined them up, started shouting, “Immediate family, please.” There they all were. Grinning, humming with something.

And no one looked for me, no one said, “Where’s Daisy?” I stood back against the racks of sneakers and watched them all, and they didn’t even notice I wasn’t there.

That’s when I realized they wouldn’t notice if I went. I watched them all, and I wanted to hurt them, to make them feel just a bit of pain the way I feel it, to make them hate themselves the way I hate myself. Most of all I just wanted to feel nothing. To know it’s all over.

Saturday, 24 November 2012

A
T EXACTLY
1:00 p.m. the day after the party, Martha stood in the doorway of the sitting room and rang the gong.

“Please go through to lunch,” she said, gesturing, and then she turned and walked through the kitchen, and the rest of the Winters followed her in silence. Cat was the last one out of the room. As she put her hand on Luke’s shoulder, propelling him through the kitchen, she looked up to find Joe’s steady gaze on her, his hands mechanically drying a metal bowl.

She stared back at him, her tired, slightly hungover brain clicking over and over. Suddenly she wished she could close the door on the rest of her family, seating themselves carefully at the long oak table, chairs scraping, murmuring quietly, quiet panic on their faces. They all knew something was coming, like a twister over the plains. Somewhere, someone was having a perfectly nice, normal Saturday, a trip to the shops, maybe playing in the garden with their children on this unseasonably sunny, golden day.

The heavy crystal champagne flutes sparkled in the gleaming autumn sun; the untouched champagne in the glasses glowed like honey in a jar. Plump, snowy linen napkins, glistening silver cutlery, and the ancient Wedgwood dinner service, bought after David’s first Wilbur syndication deal. The pattern on the plates—blue and white trim, yellow and coral at the center—was vaguely Chinese, now worn to pastel, the china veined with a hundred tiny lines after years of family meals ladled onto it, of Christmas goose and baked potatoes on Bonfire Night and roast chicken on birthdays and fish pie on Fridays.

As she sat down, Cat noticed the great green vase of wintersweet at the center of the table, the sparky yellow flowers splashes of sunshine against the dark wood paneling. Her grandmother had taken her seat
at the head of the table, facing down the room toward the kitchen doors. Southpaw was opposite her, staring down at his empty plate. Bill was unreadable, scanning the room. Florence was in her own world, it seemed, buttering the bread and pouring water, but there were bruised smudges below her eyes. Lucy was quiet, breaking bread. She looked scared and young. Next to Southpaw sat Karen. Cat thought how pretty she was without makeup, a grave, boyish kind of beauty at odds with her usual coral lipstick, her boxy suits, her determined manner. Her small hands raked her cheeks, the nails leaving streak marks on the pale skin. She started when Martha stood up, and Cat turned to see Joe in the doorway.

Martha tapped her glass. “Luke,” she said, bending down a little, “Joe’s going to take you to the living room. He’s made you a special pie and chips. You can watch
Ratatouille
while we have lunch.” Luke glanced at Cat, astonished that such a great bounty should befall him. Cat nodded, smiling, and kissed his dark hair as he bustled past her, hurrying to take Joe’s hand.

As Joe’s hand rested on the handle, their eyes met again, and then the sliding doors were closed. Cat could hear Luke chattering to Joe, their feet clattering over the old kitchen tiles. Then there was total silence.

“We will eat shortly,” Martha said, and gestured to a giant rib of beef and bowls of vegetables, resting on the sideboard. She cleared her throat and shook her head, almost smiling. She leaned both hands on the table, shoulders hunched forward as she looked carefully at each of them from under her fringe.

“I have to tell you something, as you know. That’s why I planned this . . . this birthday.” Her mouth twisted. “It’s a special birthday, you see. And it’s time I was honest.”

“No!”

They all jumped, as David’s voice cried out from the other end of the table. “I don’t want you doing this.” A paunch of skin quivered under his chin, his agitated mouth working, chewing his cheeks, his lips. He was gaunt, white. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Martha got up swiftly. She went over to him, squeezing Karen’s shoulder lightly as she passed, and Karen flinched with shock.

“My love,” Martha whispered in her husband’s ear. “You can’t. It’s gone too far.”

David’s voice cracked. “I don’t want you putting yourself in the line of fire. It’s for me to do, not you, Em.”

“No, it is for me to do,” she said quietly. “For me.” She held his hand. “My darlings. All I ever wanted was to give you all a home.” Her gaze swept the table. “The thing is—I failed.”

“That’s rubbish, Ma,” Bill said clearly, and Karen felt her heart clench.

“Is it?” His mother smiled at him. “My sweet boy. You’re the only one who’s still here.” She held up her hand. “I just want you all to understand a bit more. Understand why I did what I did. I’ve been trying for so long to make everything perfect. You know I was evacuated during the war. To a family very much like this. To a house”—she smiled—“a lot like this. And before that I’d lived in Bermondsey with a dad who was never home and a mum who tried to raise us, and I didn’t have shoes, I didn’t have enough to eat, I had lice and rickets and—more wrong with me than right.”

“Martha . . .” David looked up at her. “No, love.”

“And then I met David, and he made everything seem possible.” She watched her husband. “He did. We were from these gray worlds, both of us, and suddenly there was art, and music, and poetry, these things I’d never come across, and my mind worked when I approached them, it worked better than ever. There wasn’t an opera I didn’t know, a poem I couldn’t recite; I lapped it all up, all of it. And when we got married, well, I gave up my idea of being an artist. I’m going to sit down again. I feel rather shaky.”

Martha walked back to her chair, along the length of the room.

“Women weren’t supposed to think we could have both, back then. Do the job we loved, have the family we wanted. And it’s a shame, because I loved doing it.” She lowered herself into her chair and stared blankly at the wintersweet. “I really did. But that was what happened, then. You were all so tiny, and you needed me so much. Especially you, Flo.”

Florence looked down the table at her mother. “Why me?” she said sharply, and Lucy watched her face change, saw something there she’d never seen before.
What does she know?

“You were a surprise to me, that’s all,” Martha said. “A lovely surprise. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I promised myself, when I packed away the easel and the hundreds of brushes I’d scrimped and saved for
over the years, that I’d make the perfect family instead. I think that’s what everyone wants to do, isn’t it? They want to build a home, to lift up the drawbridge and keep themselves and their children safe at night.”

Karen gave a muffled sob, her fingers pressed against her lips. Lucy closed her eyes, hugging herself.

Martha looked out over the dining room to the garden. Poised, calm. She spoke as though reciting lines from a script. “I think we raised you well. I think we gave you everything, tried to keep you safe, to plant you in the world. But we tried so hard I think we went wrong, somewhere along the way. What seemed like small things grew and—they’ve overtaken us now.” She looked at Florence. “We haven’t been honest with you. All of you.”

She drank from the flute in front of her. They heard her throat working, the liquid fizzing in the glass.

“It begins with Daisy. It ends with her too. I don’t really know how to say it.” She gave a small laugh, twisting her rings round her finger. “Funny, after all these years of planning—”

“Ma,” Bill broke in, and his voice was hoarse. “Where is Daisy?”

Martha and David looked at each other, across their children, across the table.

“She’s here,” Martha said, after a pause. “Daisy’s here.”

There was a silence, heavy and pregnant with meaning.

“What do you mean?” Cat said after a few moments. “She’s—here? Where—where is she?”

Martha looked desperately at her granddaughter. “Darling. I’m so sorry.”

“Where is she?” Cat said again, turning her head.

Martha looked out at the sunny garden. In her clear, calm voice she said, “I buried her there. In the daisy bank. Because we planted it together when she was small, and she did like it there. We buried Wilbur there, too. And that’s where I thought she’d like to be.”

“Buried?”
Florence said, her voice shaking, and Bill said, at the same time, “She’s dead? She’s . . . Daisy’s . . .”

“Oh, no.” Lucy heard her own voice. “No, Gran, you didn’t.”

But Martha said, “She killed herself. Here. A few years ago.”

“I don’t believe it,” Karen murmured.

Bill dropped his knife onto his plate. There was a cracking sound.

“She didn’t want anyone to know. She just wanted to disappear back into her life again, you see. Gradually fade and leave you all with the idea she . . . didn’t exist anymore.”

“What?” Florence shook her head. “Ma, you helped her? She did it . . . here?” She clenched and released her hands, resting on the old table, then reached over to take her father’s hand.

But David did not react, just stared into space. A plump tear rolled down his cheek, in a straight, glistening silver line.

Cat didn’t move, couldn’t speak. Her grandmother tried to take her hand, but Cat sat back, hands tightly clasped together. She stared out again into the garden, at the daisy bank.

Martha said, “I repaid all the money. We gave it all back. And more. I have all the records. Daisy—did some good. She wasn’t a . . .” Her smooth, calm face cracked. “She wasn’t a bad person. She tried her best.”

And Martha sank back into her chair again. Her veined hands clutched the tablecloth; she stared at them all, and then, with something like surprise on her face, she started crying.