The Day Of Second Chances (19 page)

If she could tell her father about how she felt, he would know what to say. He would know what to do. Her father would understand; he wouldn't try to pretend that everything was happy or ask for reassurance that she was OK and everyone was normal. He would take her running and he would lift her up to brush the leaves.

And she was not looking at her surroundings, but her legs knew she was thinking of her father. They carried her past the houses into a tunnel of trees. The road inclined upwards slightly, and the air was hushed and cool. And then there was the bridge.

She liked running here sometimes. Her mother avoided it, didn't even drive over it, would go miles out of her way. But Avril thought it was peaceful. She stopped, breathing fast, and took her earbuds out.

The bridge went over a railway cutting. The sides were steep and covered with green, sloping down to the gravel bottom, where four sets of tracks pointed in either direction. In the distance was a bridge just like this one: an arch of red brick with black iron railings.

It was quiet here; something about how the cutting was made, or maybe the trees around it, meant that the normal neighbourhood sounds didn't penetrate. Lydia put her hand on the railing and stretched holding one leg bent behind her with her hand to ease out tightness in her quadriceps. She read the metal plaque attached to the bridge.

IN MEMORY OF
DR STEPHEN LEVINSON
3.9.1970–10.6.2005

The plaque was going slightly green at the edges. She stretched her other leg and ran her fingers over the words. She'd done it so often, over the years, that she could read it with her eyes closed.

‘I love her, Dad,' she whispered. ‘I don't know how to let her go.'

Lydia brushed her palm over the plaque again. Looked out over the open air, the empty space between one bridge and the other, waiting for an answer that didn't come.

She thought about the book she had borrowed from Granny Honor's room this afternoon, the familiarity of the writing in it. Was it, as she suspected, a part of her father's story? Was it something that could help her understand what to do?

Lydia lingered on the bridge, rubbing the words, until a train rushed by below her and disturbed the silence, and then she turned and started running again.

She ran fast enough so that her lungs burned and she didn't have to feel her heart.

‘
TURN IT, GANNY
Honor, look.' Oscar reached over and pushed her plate around. The lasagne appeared in the bottom of her field of vision.

‘Oscar, keep your hands to yourself at the table, please,' said Jo. Honor merely nodded at the child, tacit thanks, and began to eat.

‘I'm going out right after tea,' announced Jo. ‘It's your parents' evening Lydia, so I'll need you to stay in to look after Oscar and Iris.'

There was a challenge in Jo's voice, as if she were anticipating an argument from her daughter. It was the first time Honor had heard her stating a demand to one of her children, rather than pleading a request.

She felt herself nodding involuntarily.

She would never have suspected that Jo had a temper. In the twenty years she had known her, she had never once raised her voice. She had been a beautiful blank: kind, polite, cheerful, letting people like Honor walk all over her. Even at Stephen's funeral, she had been quiet, absorbed in Lydia's welfare rather than her own grief. She had barely cried. At that moment, Honor had hated her for that.

But it seemed that there was a spark inside her son's wife, after all. However small, however weak – she had enough spirit to battle against Honor.

‘More lasagne, Honor?' Jo asked her, and the woman laid down her fork and knife.

‘I believe I will,' she said.

She went back to her room after the meal, as she usually did, and sat in her armchair. She covered her mouth to suppress a burp. Jo, whatever her faults, was a very good cook, especially of comfort food. A few minutes later there was a knock on her door.

‘Granny H?' said Lydia, poking her head in. ‘I wondered if you were bored?'

Boredom is for people without inner resources
, she was about to reply, but something about Lydia's voice stopped her. ‘I am not. But I would be glad to have a conversation.'

‘I have to watch OscanIrie. Do you want to come out and sit on the sofa with me for a while?'

Lydia wanted something, but Honor couldn't tell what. She nodded and came out to the living area, walking slowly to avoid the toys on the floor. She perched on a sofa. The two younger children were sitting on a beanbag on the floor, watching television. Lydia sat down beside her, jiggling her foot. Honor could feel the vibrations through the sofa.

‘What's on your mind?' Honor asked.

‘I wish Dad were here,' said Lydia. ‘I really wish he were here. I'd like to talk with him. I could talk with Mum, but she's so … I don't know if she'd really understand. She thinks that if you're nice, then everything will work out for you.'

‘That seems like rather a lot to expect from mere niceness,' said Honor. ‘In my experience, that is not how the world works.'

They were silent, listening to the television. The programme appeared to be about some sort of creatures who could do yoga but not speak English. It was a wonder that children learned any language skills these days.

They had never been close, she and Lydia. As a very young child she had been boisterous, too full of energy, never settling. And then once Stephen died, Honor could not look at her without seeing Stephen.

Jo had brought her to visit not long after the funeral, and when Lydia had walked into the house, even at age six, the light had caught her face in exactly the same way as it had used to catch Stephen's when he returned home from school. The hair was different, the clothes were different, but the expressions were exactly the same, and Honor had been struck with longing so sharp it was like a knife. She wanted to grab this little girl and hold her and never let her go. She wanted to stare at her for hours, tracing the resemblance to her father, to Honor's dead son. She wanted to cry and to kiss Lydia, over and over, and spend every waking moment with her, shutting out everyone else in the world. Reliving her son's childhood through her granddaughter's.

And of course none of that was possible. It was irrational and frightening. It was unreasoned love, far too close to loss, the same way she had loved Stephen and, at one time, Paul.

So Honor withdrew. She loved Lydia too much and therefore she could not love her unrestrainedly. They were careful with each other, with much unspoken.

This girl was Honor's only living relative. Honor had no idea how to make small talk with her, or how to talk about their lives. They had never done it. The only thing they had ever discussed at length, were books.

‘What have you been reading?' she asked now.

Lydia stopped jiggling. ‘I borrowed your copy of
Hamlet
. I hope you don't mind. You were out taking a walk.'

She had gone for a walk up Keats Way. Carefully, step by step up the wide pavement, returning exhausted.

‘Of course I don't mind. You are welcome to any of my books, you know that.
Hamlet
is a wonderful play. Have you read it yet?'

‘I started. I …' Lydia shifted on the sofa so that she was facing Honor. ‘Actually I wanted to ask you about what's written in the front of your copy.'

‘Oh. I see.'

Honor knew what was written inside it; knew the shop it had come from in Oxford, knew the high shelves and the smell of paper and binding. She knew the moment it had been bought. She could see his hands selecting it, handing over the money. The smooth motion of his writing, with his favourite gold fountain pen, on the flyleaf. She knew the moment he had passed it over to her, at a corner table in a café where they would not be seen, and she had opened it to read what he had inscribed within.

‘It says
H. I think of you always
,' said Lydia. ‘And it's signed
P
.'

‘Yes,' said Honor.

‘Was that … were you …'

‘It was written by your grandfather. Yes.'

On the television, she heard the strange creatures crying out in nonsensical joy as they floated into the air. How strange to call Paul ‘your grandfather'. How strange to be speaking about him at all.

‘I … don't know anything about him,' said Lydia. ‘Is he … is he still alive?'

‘I don't know. He wasn't much older than I, so it's possible.'

‘You're not in touch?'

Honor folded her hands in her lap. ‘Paul Honeywell was my professor. I was a junior lecturer, newly appointed. And he was married.'

‘Your professor? So – like your teacher?'

‘No, the Head of the department where I worked.'

‘And you were in love with him? Did he leave his wife?'

‘Yes, I was. And he with me; at least then. And no, he didn't.'

‘Did you think he would leave her? I mean, you must have hoped, right?'

‘He never told me that he would leave his wife for me.'

‘So what happened?'

Honor closed her eyes. The falling moments replayed themselves.

The stolen glances, the accidental brushing of hands. The awkward pauses, full of things unsaid, at the end of departmental drinks. The time he called her back, saying ‘Honor,' her name in his voice meaning more than her name.

And she had gone back to him. She had touched his face, in the shadows, before they heard someone coming and sprang apart. The impression of his skin stayed on her fingers for days.

The first time had been that weekend in Copenhagen at the convention. They'd had too much wine at dinner, knowing what was going to happen, both afraid of it even though they both wanted it so much. And then the unimaginable luxury of his hotel room: that bare hotel room, with an unshaded light bulb and scratchy sheets, a smeared glass of cloudy water. All that time together. All those hours till morning. She touched him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, drinking in every part. She had not known she could be so greedy. She had never suspected it of herself, before then.

‘I loved him anyway,' she said to her granddaughter. ‘I loved him without hope.'

She felt Lydia's gaze on her face. She knew what she was thinking: she was wondering how such an old lady, dried out and hobbling, could have been capable of a passion so strong that it had made her forget reason.

One day, you will be eighty, and you will feel thirty-five. Some days, you will feel twenty, or ten, or six. You will stretch out your hand for people long dead. You will feel a shock when you touch your own papery cheek.

There was no point in saying that to someone Lydia's age, of course. She would never believe it. The young think they will be young for ever. Honor certainly had.

She felt a fierce stab of protectiveness for this girl with her coltlike limbs and her careless hair and her smell of fruit-flavoured sweets.

‘Anyway,' she began briskly, ‘you'll enjoy
Hamlet
. It's all about death, of course, and Hamlet is a fool, but that's rather the point.'

‘But … if he never left his wife, how did you manage with having a baby? My dad, I mean?'

‘I went to live with my father in the house in Stoke Newington. My mother had died some time before, but he took me in. I was grateful. I was a grown woman, in my thirties, and old enough to know better. Not all parents would have been so accepting.'

‘And didn't he want to know where the father was?'

‘We didn't discuss it.'

They didn't discuss much, Honor and her father. Shimon Levinson had been a man of few words. Not an affectionate man, either. As a child she had never received kisses or cuddles from him; would have considered it unthinkable. Honor's mother had been the one to soothe hurts and give kisses at night. Her father had been a constant solid source, not of love, but of presence. Reliability. Even after he sold his hardware shops and had retired, you could set your watch by his habits.

But when Stephen was born, he had come to the hospital and held the baby, his grandson, with a tenderness that brought tears to Honor's eyes. He kissed Stephen's downy head.

‘It's a new beginning,' he said to her, his voice hoarse with emotion.

And Honor suspected for the first time that her father's lack of affection had not been because of a lack of feeling. That perhaps it was precisely the opposite. He felt too much to express it easily in caresses or words.

Even though he was gone, she understood him more as the years passed. She saw his own nature in hers.

Now, Honor reached out. She touched Lydia's hand and she took it into her own. The soft, unblemished skin, halfway between a child's and a woman's.

‘We have perhaps not talked enough, you and I,' she said.

‘Was it worth it, to love him?' Lydia asked her. ‘Even knowing what you know now? Would you still have done it?'

Honor rubbed her thumb against the back of Lydia's hand. She remembered other hands in hers. Paul's, and Stephen's. Her father's, at the end.

‘I would not have changed anything for the world,' she said.

Lydia went upstairs to put the children to bed and Honor stayed on the sofa, thinking about what they had said. She never spoke of Paul to anyone. This was perhaps the first time she had mentioned his name on purpose in forty-five years. It was not easy to say aloud.

But there was a thread, running from Paul through her, to Stephen, to Lydia. Honor had been raised in a religious family and although she had discarded those traditions, they had tethered her to the past in a way that she imagined Lydia did not have.

Perhaps it was time to speak of him. Perhaps she should have spoken of him long ago, but she had done her best not to think about that.

Why did you never tell me?
Stephen had asked. Honor swallowed, hard.