Paradise City (18 page)

‘I never so much as looked at another man when I was with your father,’ she is fond of saying. ‘And he
adored
me. Worshipped the ground I walked on.’

Esme’s recollections are different. She remembers her parents arguing when she was younger. Not the normal type of arguments you saw on domestic TV dramas, where voices are raised and glasses smashed, but something far more insidious. Their disagreements were always dangerously quiet. The cruellest accusations were the ones left unsaid; the most lethal weapon in their joint armoury an atmosphere of perpetual, unspoken discomfort. But to listen to her mother now, Esme thinks, it would be easy to forget any of it had actually happened.

In any case, Lilian Reade has never found any man who can compete with her hagiographical recollection of her dead husband so Esme is duty-bound to make frequent phone calls and visits. Robbie, by contrast, stays away as much as possible but somehow manages to remain his mother’s favourite.

Last year, the two of them had come up for Lilian’s fifty-fifth birthday. Esme had searched high and low for a present. Lilian had mentioned in passing having seen a ‘darling’ pair of jade earrings in a jeweller’s shop window in Hereford and Esme had taken it upon herself to hunt for them, presumably out of a sense of guilt, which was her motivation for most things. She’d finally tracked them down in a tiny antiques shop after several hours, handed over an unreasonably large amount of money and presented them with a flourish on her mother’s birthday, only to watch Lilian attempt to mask her disappointment as Esme realised they were not, in fact, the right ones. Robbie, by contrast, had forgotten all about their mother’s birthday until the day before, when he had rushed out at the last minute to buy a teapot painted with Union Jack flags and an apron emblazoned with ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ from a horrible little gift shop round the corner that was famous for never changing its window display. Lilian had been disproportionately delighted with Robbie’s gift, calling both items ‘charming’ and ‘jolly’ and festooning him with kisses.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he had said after Esme had unsuccessfully tried to brush it off. ‘It’s nothing personal.’

‘It’s entirely personal,’ she had replied. And she couldn’t help but feel it still was.

At least once a month, out of some negligible sense of duty, Esme does the three-hour train journey to Hereford where Mrs Reade will be waiting in her small red Fiat, her face painted with too much make-up, her hair freshly blow-dried, her pearl necklace accessorised with cream-coloured bangles and a jaunty silk scarf.

Esme plays it all through in her mind as she sits in the train carriage, head resting against the glass. She promises herself, as she always does, that she won’t let her mother get to her. Not this time. She will be mature and forgiving and generous. Her mother is lonely and values her daughter’s company, even if she has a funny way of showing it. Esme will be the bigger person. She will smile and laugh and compliment Mum’s cooking and she’ll tell her a bit about her life in London and make it clear that she’s doing well, professionally speaking, and she’ll field any questions about boyfriends with deft politeness.

But as soon as she steps onto the platform at Hereford and slams the train door shut behind her, Esme feels herself revert instantaneously to the moody teenager she’d vowed not to be. There was no one else in her life who had this effect on her. Did other people have the same problem with their families?

‘Darling! Coo-ee! Over here!’

Esme hears her mother before she sees her. Squinting against the sunlight, Esme follows the general direction of her mother’s beautifully enunciated screeching (the result of several years of elocution lessons as a child). Lilian is in the far corner of the railway station car park, leaning out of the Fiat’s open door and flapping her hand frantically. Esme waves back. She starts walking across, trundling her wheeled suitcase behind her.

‘Over here, darling!’ her mother shouts. When Esme gets to the car, Lilian envelops her daughter in a graceful hug, their bodies not quite making contact.

‘Hi, Mum. Thanks for picking me up.’

The car is sweetly scented with lily of the valley. On the back seat is a neatly folded tartan rug. It has been there for approximately fifteen years and has never, to Esme’s knowledge, been used.

‘Of course I’m going to pick you up! It’s not every weekend I get to see my daughter, after all.’

She turns the key in the ignition and forces the gearstick into first with an agonising clunk. Lilian is a terrible driver.

‘Goodness,’ her mother says, glancing at Esme’s case. ‘You’ve brought enough to stay a week! What have you got in there?’

‘Oh, you know, drugs. Crack pipes. Empty bottles of vodka. The usual,’ Esme mutters.

Her mother doesn’t smile. As she indicates left onto the main road, she mutters, ‘All right, I was only asking.’

Esme glances at her watch. Barely ten minutes have elapsed since her train arrived. Already they’re annoyed with each other. And that, Esme thinks as they chunter through an amber light just as it starts to turn red, is how it starts.

They stop at Sainsbury’s on their way home to pick up some groceries.

‘I thought it’d be easier if you came with me because I can never keep track of what you like,’ says Lilian, picking up a basket by the entrance and passing it to Esme to carry. ‘You keep chopping and changing.’

‘Do I?’

‘You know you do, darling.’ She bends forward to inspect a bunch of asparagus, wrinkles her nose, then places the vegetable back on the shelf. ‘What is it you’re having for breakfast these days?’

‘I don’t have anything.’

Her mother recoils. When she speaks, her voice has a staccato quality.

‘You. Mean. To. Say. You. Don’t. Eat. Breakfast?’

Esme stays silent, her gaze level.

Lilian shakes her head, as if to get rid of water blocking her ears.

‘It’s the most important meal of the day, Esme.’

‘So people say.’

‘It’s the key to staying slim.’

Lilian looks pointedly at her daughter. She doesn’t add anything else but the implication is already there. Esme glances down at her wrists: they have always been the slenderest part of her. She checks them now to reassure herself that she hasn’t put on weight. She is relieved to see they are the same as ever – pale and thin as a strip of silver birch.

‘Pâté! I almost forgot,’ her mother cries, rushing off to the deli counter. Esme stares at Lilian’s retreating figure: a round-shouldered, middle-aged woman trying to make the best of herself in a knee-length navy skirt and court shoes. From this distance, she looks unremarkable. Unremarkable and alone.

Esme reminds herself to stay calm. She makes a deliberate effort to smile.

The tension lifts as soon as they get home. Lilian opens the door to the Old Rectory with a flourish and all at once, Esme can smell the distinct fragrance of family: a jumbled-up mixture of coffee grounds, washing powder and dusty potpourri.

‘Home sweet home,’ Lilian says. She gestures towards the hallway with a genteel flourish and waits for Esme to walk in first. ‘Welcome back, darling.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ Esme says, carrying her case and a bag of shopping over the threshold. ‘It’s good to be back.’ And she means it too.

Her bedroom is on the right-hand side at the top of the stairs, with a window overlooking the garden. A few months after Esme had moved to London to start on
Trucking Today
, Lilian had unsentimentally announced that she was renovating. As a result, Esme’s room, which had once been a hallowed shrine to the musical and aesthetic talents of various boy bands, was now almost unrecognisable from its previous incarnation. The dog-eared posters, each one painstakingly ripped out from music magazine centrefolds and Blu-tacked onto the flock wallpaper, had been the first casualty of Lilian’s manic interior decoration. In their place, Esme’s mother had sponged rough-edged circles of yellow paint onto the walls in an attempt to give a rustic feel to the room, reminiscent of a Mexican cabana she had once read about in a glossy travel magazine. In reality, the effect was rather slapdash. Every time Esme saw it, she thought not of glorious South American sunsets but of mouldering oranges left to shrink and pucker in a neglected fruit bowl.

The bed is the same metal-framed single she had slept in all her young life. The duvet, with its pattern of dancing penguins, is gratifyingly familiar. Esme sits on the edge of the mattress and slips off her ballet pumps. She unpacks a pair of hotel slippers from her bag and puts them on – her mother doesn’t like ‘outdoors’ shoes to be worn inside. She is pleased to have remembered this.

But then, over a supper of presliced ham and under-seasoned new potatoes, Lilian starts asking her daughter about work and it all begins to slide downhill. Esme feels her hackles rise almost as soon as her mother mentions the
Tribune
.

‘It’s not my paper of choice, as you know,’ Lilian says, slicing a minuscule potato with surgical precision. When she has cut herself an appropriately tiny morsel of carbohydrate, she spears it with her fork and then lets it rest, untouched, on the side of the plate. ‘But I must say I’ve found bits of it very entertaining.’

‘That’s great. I mean, I know you might think some of it’s a bit lowbrow but it’s very good at what it does. The editor . . .’

‘But don’t you think,’ Lilian interjects. She lowers her voice as if imparting a confidence. ‘That it’s a bit
beneath
you, darling?’

Esme flushes. She pushes her knife and fork together, sliding a piece of ham to one side of the plate.

‘No, I don’t.’

Lilian wipes the corner of her mouth with a frayed linen napkin. Her lipstick leaves a mark on the white material.

‘Well that’s good.’ After a few moments, Lilian lapses into silence. In spite of herself, Esme is goaded into a response.

‘I mean, why would you think that?’

Lilian gives a little cough. ‘Oh, I’m sure I don’t know anything about newspapers but it’s just—’ She breaks off.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I did think you were rather hard on that Treherne woman.’

‘Clarissa Treherne? The one who had an affair with the writer?’

Esme has almost forgotten about the pretty blonde on the doorstep in Winchester. She had written up the interview and it had been splashed across two pages, with a full-length portrait of Clarissa Treherne looking chastened and lovelorn in a flowery dress from Marks & Spencer. Chris, the photographer, had turned up with several outfits deemed suitable by the picture-desk. Nothing too black, too short or too slutty. The objective was to make Clarissa Treherne look as Middle England as possible and in that, at least, they had succeeded.

‘That’s the one,’ says Lilian, tapping her fingers on the table. ‘I don’t see what business it is of yours – or anyone’s, for that matter – whether she had an affair or not. They’re both consenting adults, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘It just seemed a bit
tawdry
, that’s all, dear. And I couldn’t help thinking about that poor child. Finding out her father’s not who she thought he was.’

Then Lilian adds, ‘But I’m sure you wrote it beautifully,’ which somehow makes everything worse.

Before Esme can reply, her mother starts stacking the plates and clearing the glasses away. Although her initial response is one of self-righteous indignation, Esme finds that it soon subsides to a vague, unsettled sense that she has done something wrong. For all that her mother can be irritating and hurtful, in this instance she might have a point. And it bothers Esme that, caught up in the triumph of a successful doorstep and the subsequent plaudits from the newsdesk, she hadn’t even considered the underlying morality of what she was doing. All she had cared about was getting her name in the paper, getting a good show for her story, getting Dave’s attention. And Clarissa Treherne’s daughter? She hadn’t given her a second thought.

Esme pushes her chair back. It squeaks against the flagstones. She takes the rubber gloves from underneath the sink and puts them on, running the tap until the washing-up bowl is filled with soapy suds.

‘I’ll do this, Mum,’ she says. ‘You go and put your feet up.’

Lilian squeezes her daughter’s hand.

‘Thank you, darling,’ she says, padding out of the kitchen in her sheepskin-lined slippers. Esme can hear her walking down the hallway, humming a non-specific tune, and she feels a rush of guilt that she does not love her mother enough, that she cannot hide it and that, underneath it all, this makes her a bad person.

She concentrates on washing the dishes. The soap suds pop and burst. Outside, the light mellows, then darkens. The tinny sound of a television starts up from down the corridor. If she strains, she can just about make out the theme tune to the ten o’ clock
News
.

When she goes upstairs, Esme sees that her mother has left something on her pillow. As she gets closer, she realises it is a box of chocolate Brazil nuts, placed on top of a ripped-out page from a magazine. ‘10 Tips To Stop Back Pain,’ Esme reads. She had complained earlier to her mother that long hours in front of a computer had left her with a numb shoulder.