The Good Girl (29 page)

He had already lived in New Orleans, Mexico City and Madrid because his father was a jazz musician and the family followed his work. By some miracle of fate, his parents had rented a house by the beach for six months, where they lived in happy chaos, their daily rhythms dictated by urges rather than routine. There
were no mealtimes or bedtimes. Ailsa came and went as she pleased, which suited her because by this time Adam was drunk more than he was sober. Her mother encouraged her to escape, which meant that Rachel bore the brunt of this last dark period in their father’s love affair with alcohol.

For six months Ailsa and Billy hadn’t gone for more than a day without seeing each other. Then at the end of the summer, just before the new school year started, Billy told Ailsa that his family was moving to California. She went to his house the following week, after he didn’t turn up at school, and found a letter from Billy with a forwarding address and a promise that he would write. The letter said he didn’t believe in sad goodbyes. ‘It’s easier this way.’ Ailsa didn’t hear from him again until the day before her wedding six years later.

Of course she had suspected, especially in the early days. When she discovered she was pregnant she had consulted one of Harry’s medical books and discovered sperm could survive in the Fallopian tubes for up to five days.

She had had sex with Billy the night before her wedding and sex with Harry the night after. Even thinking about it now, Ailsa felt nauseous. She had never told anyone – not her mother, who was waiting up for her when she arrived home at four o’clock in the morning, nor Rachel, who had questioned her about her bridal glow when she got up after just three hours’ sleep the morning of her wedding.

When
she discovered two months later that she was pregnant she knew the baby could be Billy’s. But equally the baby could be Harry’s. But as she now understood, suspicion was knowledge’s more hedonistic cousin. Suspicion left things open-ended and allowed you to imagine multiple scenarios. The problem with knowing something was that it left no room for doubt. It required a reaction.

Ailsa pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and did something that she had resisted doing for years: she googled Billy. Within seconds she knew that he was divorced and remarried with four children and living in San Francisco, where he worked as a cameraman for a local news station. There were a couple of family photos. Ailsa examined them. Even on the tiny screen she could see the resemblance between his youngest daughter and Luke. Something in the curl of the upper lip and the heavy eyelids. This was Luke’s half-sister. She dropped the phone in shock on the seat beside her. If she wanted to she could get in touch with Billy right now. There was a phone number for him on the San Fran News website. A whole range of options had suddenly opened up.

Conflicting currents of thought buffeted against each other, like the sea when the tide was on the turn. She imagined telling Luke. He would surely want to meet his father, and Billy would be entitled to get to know his son. They would discover how alike they were and would
hold Ailsa responsible for the lost years, even if neither of them ever articulated their resentment.

They would demand to know why she hadn’t suggested DNA testing and what right she had to withhold her doubts from them. Back then parenting was all about nurture rather than nature. It seemed incredible now, but people had genuinely believed you could make your child a genius by playing it Mozart in the womb or cause irrevocable developmental damage by going out to work.

A new concern gained traction. Billy might not want to include Luke in his life, especially if he had just embarked on his second marriage. He might reject Luke. Another wave of anxiety broke over Ailsa’s head. Luke would reassess his entire childhood in light of this new evidence. He would see a therapist, who would turn him against his parents. All three of them. He would take even less responsibility for his future. He would be given a perfect excuse to fail.

And what about Harry? They had betrayed each other. Harry was rational enough to balance this equation. He wasn’t a jealous man. He knew about Billy, the sketchy details at least, that he was her first boyfriend and she had messed up her exams because of him, but not that she had seen him the night before her wedding. Her deception had lasted eighteen years; his six months. Maybe her betrayal had inadvertently led to his. Harry’s relationship with Luke had come up at every session
with the marriage guidance counsellor. It wasn’t a reason for what he had done but Harry was right: it gave context.

The truth might make Harry feel less guilty about his inability to relate to Luke. But it might also make him feel worse. And hadn’t he mentioned the other day how leaving London had been the making of his relationship with his eldest son?

Moreover Harry would want to know why when she had had the opportunity to tell the truth in the Italian restaurant all those years ago, she had chosen to lie.

‘Did you see Billy again after he disappeared?’ he had asked Ailsa in the middle of that meal. She was eating a mouthful of pasta arrabiata and somehow managed to keep chewing without losing eye contact.

‘No. Why are you asking?’ she asked, leaning forward so the zip dug into her pregnant stomach.

‘Something your mum said.’

It was the biggest lie she had ever told. She told it to protect herself, Harry and the unborn baby. And because she didn’t know for sure. A few weeks later, when the midwife placed Luke in her arms and she stroked the shock of dark hair and drew a line across the luscious perfect lips, she still wasn’t sure. All babies looked like little old men, Harry observed, his voice choked with emotion as he decided Luke most resembled Adam.

What else could she have done? Were the choices that she didn’t make any better than the one she had made? She
remembered the newspaper piece about conscience that Romy had shown Harry and rubbed the soft dimple above her eyebrow. Her lateral frontal pole must be in overdrive.

Ailsa squirted water onto the windscreen and turned on the wipers at full speed to get rid of the dead insects. Her mind turned back to Matt, who had emerged as the improbable lynchpin of this unexpected drama. Could she count on him not to say anything? Ever? This defined the range of options that lay before her.

It seemed reckless to rely on someone she had known for less than six months. Yet if someone had asked for an objective appraisal she would have said that Matt was a trustworthy person who was discreet and unlikely to become loose-tongued when drunk. The likelihood was that he would never mention the issue again and would try to forget he ever knew.

Ailsa was reassured by the fact that he hadn’t asked any of the obvious questions. Did Luke’s father know he had a son? Did she ever see him? Did Harry know? Did Luke? She could see from the pained expression on his face last night that he understood what the truth could do, perhaps not its seismic quality, but certainly the fracturing of relationships that would have to be dismantled and recast. He wouldn’t want that responsibility. And nor did she. She decided to live with the status quo for another couple of weeks.

Ailsa jumped as she realized there was someone knocking on the car window. She saw Loveday peering
through the glass and swore under her breath then understood from the hurt expression on Loveday’s face that she could lip-read. She fumbled with the electric window and realized that it wasn’t working because the car engine was switched off. She turned on the ignition and lowered the window.

Loveday crouched down until she was eye level with Ailsa. ‘We need to talk contraception,’ she said dramatically.

‘Contraception?’

For a split second, through the fog of paranoia and exhaustion, Ailsa thought that somehow Loveday had intuited her dilemma or read her post on Mumsnet. She must have noticed the panic in Ailsa’s face.

‘Not yours,’ she teased. ‘I don’t want to become a grandmother before the age of fifty, do you? It’s too ageing.’ It slowly dawned on Ailsa that she was talking about Romy and Jay.

‘I assume that you don’t want Romy pumping her body full of hormones, and condoms are so unreliable. I’ve discovered a local person who fits the honey cap and was thinking that maybe we could all go together to get Romy fitted?

‘Honey isn’t as irritating to the vagina as spermicide and it immobilizes the sperm,’ Loveday continued when Ailsa didn’t say anything.
Some things never change
, thought Ailsa.
Having a son makes you liberal and having a daughter makes you conservative.

‘I really don’t think they’ve reached that stage yet,’
said Ailsa. She paused for a moment. ‘Do you and Wolf want to come round for a drink tonight?’

When she proposed to Rachel earlier in the week that Matt should join them for a drink the evening before their father began his week-long trial at Prince’s Court, Ailsa wasn’t acting entirely altruistically. It was a judgement call. Meeting Matt would take Adam’s mind off the real reason for the get-together. The presence of an outsider would make them all behave better. And there would be enough people that any residual awkwardness between Ailsa and Matt over his relationship with her sister would be tempered.

The theory had been good. But this was before Matt had lobbed his hand grenade with his bloody blood group project. So Ailsa was glad Loveday and Wolf were coming to dilute the evening further. There were never any awkward silences when they were around and they owed them from New Year. Harry was mildly surprised by this softening of Ailsa’s line on their next-door neighbours and promised to make quesadillas that they could all snack on around the coffee table in the sitting room. It would be more relaxed than sitting at the dinner table. Making food had become Harry’s way of proving his loyalty to Ailsa. She offered to grate cheese. It was a subliminal acknowledgement of her guilt, she decided.

Loveday hadn’t disappointed. Almost before she had sat down between Rachel and Matt on the sofa, she had launched into a diatribe about how many of the
world’s current ills could be explained by the uncoupling of male and female sexual energy. There was a fundamental imbalance that could explain anything from the culture of gang rape in India to the decapitation of Western hostages by ISIL.

‘So what you’re saying is that if these men had a way of expressing their yang energy through intercourse, this wouldn’t happen?’ Harry incredulously asked her from the armchair opposite. He was always blown away by Loveday’s lack of empirical evidence and the way she totally rejected his. Her belief in instinct and self-expression was absolute. But he had stopped jumping out of his chair to adjust the lighting in the room every five minutes, which was good because Ailsa couldn’t cope with anyone else’s jangly nerves.

‘Won’t be much chance to rebalance my chakras in Prince’s Court,’ Adam observed. He didn’t want anyone to forget the real reason for the get-together. He made a weak joke about the assisted bathing facility and how he didn’t know the rules of bingo.

‘Maybe you can teach everyone how to play poker,’ Rachel suggested, putting her arm around him. ‘Always good to bring something to the party other than a bottle of red wine.’ There was no trace of recrimination in her tone.

Rachel sparkled. The changes to her script had gone down well. An idea she had generated about a zombie version of
Northanger Abbey
had created a buzz. She was creating a niche for herself. Less niche and more coffin,
Adam had joked. Everyone laughed longer and harder than the joke deserved.

‘That’s vampires, Grandpa,’ Romy giggled before going back upstairs to finish her project. Romy had been appalled that her Biology teacher was coming to her house and had announced in advance that they couldn’t really expect her to participate in any meaningful way.

Wolf and Loveday outlined the preparations for Marley’s eighteenth-birthday party. There would be vegetarian curry, the trees would be alive with thousands of tiny lights, and Loveday would devise a unique cocktail to mark the occasion. They would be there the entire evening, Loveday reassured Ailsa several times in a way that made Ailsa feel as though she was being judged for being neurotic. Except then Loveday added reproachfully, ‘I’m not such an irresponsible parent.’

When Matt had arrived, an hour ago, Ailsa had searched for his gaze across the room, exchanged a quick polite smile and, as soon as she had got over that hurdle, looked quickly away. Half a glass of wine later Ailsa glanced over at him again. He hadn’t spoken much and looked stiff and uncomfortable in the suit he wore for parent evenings at school. Ailsa felt a stab of pity. It wasn’t his fault that he had become embroiled in her mess.

She noticed he was examining the wedding photograph sitting on the chest of drawers beside the sofa and wished she had moved it. It had been taken just as Harry and Ailsa left the church at Salthouse, when the tension
of the service had been replaced by euphoria that they were actually married. They looked like teenagers, thought Ailsa. She checked Matt again and realized that he was probably doing the calculations and wondering if Ailsa married Harry because she discovered she was pregnant.

Luke came in and accepted Harry’s offer of a beer. Wolf asked how Luke’s driving lessons were going, and Luke said Harry had combined them with a thorough survey of local pubs. Matt stood up abruptly and shook Luke’s hand and muttered something about driving lessons being a good father–son bonding exercise. Mercifully Ben followed close behind. He threw his arms around Rachel and told her about his bad luck with the film of the sweat lodge.

‘It has to be a place which brings people together rather than pushing them apart,’ Wolf told him. ‘I’m sure the person who objected to it will find it in her heart to reconsider when she realizes its power to transform lives.’

It was a pointed comment, but Ailsa’s attention was consumed by Ben, who was handing over a small sports bag to his grandfather.

‘What’s this?’ Adam asked, pulling him onto his knee.

‘It’s a survival kit for you in your shelter,’ Ben explained. He opened the case and lined up the contents on the table. There was a box of matches, a water bottle from the cowboy and Indian kit and a list of phone numbers in code, in case Adam needed help. Ben pulled
out his treasured Swiss army knife from his pocket and with a very serious expression handed it over to his grandfather. ‘In case you need to find your way home alone. It’s even got a toothpick.’