The House We Grew Up In (29 page)

He stopped completely then. His eyes started to dart about again. Beth drew her breath in. She could feel something bad coming her way, like a rush of dirty water through a tunnel.

‘I’ve, kind of, well, I’m with someone. Well, not exactly
with
someone. But potentially with someone. Someone … urgh,
God
.’ He pushed his hands into his hair. ‘I’m going to live on the commune. In Spain.’

Beth nodded numbly, waiting for the bullet.

‘With Kayleigh.’

Beth felt her hand squeeze itself too hard around the waist of her glass and she put it down. ‘What?’

Colin took off his spectacles and rubbed his sweaty nose. ‘I don’t really know,’ he sighed. ‘It’s all crazy. The whole thing. She came to stay, at Christmas. With Tia. Like she always does. But this time something happened between us. Something …’

Beth felt warm water rising through her gullet. She felt her temperature drop and then rise again just as quickly. She swallowed hard.

‘It’s so wrong. And I promise you, darling, that I did not instigate it. Truly. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I mean, we’ve always got on well, Kayleigh and me. But I promise, I’d never thought of her in that way. And then …’

‘No,’ said Beth. She put her hand between herself and her father’s words. ‘No.’

‘Oh, Beth. I’m so sorry. And truly, I don’t even know what it is yet, what this thing is. She still has her boyfriend. Tia calls him Dad. But it sounds like she’s tiring of him. And he’ll be there. This man. And I’ll be there. And I suppose something or other will transpire …’

‘Fucking hell,
Dad
!
Jesus
. That’s your
granddaughter
. How can you even …? I mean …’ She made a guttural sound
in the base of her throat formed out of all the thoughts she could not stomach and all the words she could not immediately find to express her horror and disgust. ‘I mean, that’s practically
incest
!’

‘Well, no, it’s not quite that, is it, darling?’

‘Yes! It is. It is. Oh, God, Dad, you were the only one in this family I could feel normal about! Please don’t do this to me. Please.’

Her father sighed heavily, any hope he might have been harbouring that this exchange would go smoothly, dying in his eyes. ‘I might still change my mind. I mean, that was partly what this trip was about. I wanted to see Rory, see him eye to eye, really try and understand why he left her, what his feelings are, what he thinks about his daughter and her mother. And honestly, darling, he feels nothing. It’s terrifying. He just walked away from that little family he made and felt nothing at all.’ He shook his head sadly and Beth looked furiously at him.

‘And that makes it all right, does it? That makes it OK to shack up with her. I mean, Dad, she’s half your age!’

‘I know. I know. But she doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t seem like that, when we’re together. She’s lived a lot of life for a young woman. She’s more mature than me in some ways.’

‘Oh,
God
! I just
knew
you’d say that! That’s what dirty old men
always
say. Of course she’s not more mature than you. She’s younger than me, for fuck’s sake, Dad.’

‘Yes, but Beth, without wishing to cause you any offence, you are a very young thirty-one.’

‘So?’ she demanded. ‘What did he say? Rory?’

‘I didn’t tell him.’

‘Why not?’

Colin shook his head. ‘I couldn’t quite find the words. Or the moment. And anyway, as I say, nothing’s actually happened yet. Nothing concrete.’

Beth shook her head slowly in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ she said. ‘You were the only one, Dad, the only one who I could feel normal about.’ Dark shadows skittered around her head, shadows of moments from the past that she couldn’t quite form into memories. Feelings of wrongness and discomfort. She thought of Rhys half-naked in their parents’ bed, of the footsteps outside the bathroom door, of Vicky kissing Lorelei in the kitchen one morning when they didn’t think anyone was looking, the slick of saliva still shining on her mother’s chin when she turned to smile at her a moment later. From nowhere another memory hit her: her mother coming out of Rhys’s bedroom the evening before he hanged himself, a look of sheer black horror on her face, her eyes bright with shock. She shook the memory away, not even sure what it was, not even convinced it was real. And then, as a final gift from her subconscious, she saw herself in a cheap hotel room, being roughly and insensitively serviced by her sister’s partner.

The dark waters pounding through Beth’s head quietened and parted then for just long enough for another thought to occur to her.

‘Does Meg know?’

Colin looked up at her, aghast. ‘Oh, God, no.’

She gulped. For all these years, Kayleigh and her
little secret
,
overheard in the garden of the Bird House that balmy spring night on the last Easter weekend of the old millennium – when Beth’s affair with Bill was still new and sweet and not the rancid old hash of bad habits and careless romance that it had eventually decayed into – had been safely at arm’s length in an incommunicado hippy commune in the middle of nowhere. Now Kayleigh had slept with her dad and would be bringing her secrets to their shared pillow.

‘Are you going to tell her?’ she asked in a quiet voice.

‘Hmm. I think, perhaps, I was hoping that if it does happen, which it may well
not
, that she would find out via some form of osmosis. I’m not sure I could find the words.’

‘No,’ she snapped, ‘and I’m not surprised. You know you can’t do this, don’t you, Dad?’

He shrugged. It made him look about ten. ‘Well, actually, I sort of can. The question really is whether or not I will.’

‘It’ll cause mayhem, you know that, don’t you?’

Colin nodded. But then he said, ‘It might not. Your mother dumped me for the woman next door, split up two families, made us all the gossip of the decade. We survived that.’

She grimaced at him. ‘We’re not indestructible, Dad.’

He nodded again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no family is indestructible. But we’re pretty resilient. And this might all turn out to be a storm in a teacup anyway. And I’m not asking for your blessing. I’m just telling you. Because you and I, we’ve always been the quiet ones, haven’t we? We’ve always been the doormats, and now, look at you, finally spread your wings and escaped the evil clutches. Now it’s my turn. That’s all.’

He folded his arms and leaned back into his chair. And
then he smiled at her and Beth honestly felt as though she didn’t know the man sitting across from her. There was something burning in his eyes she’d never seen there before and it was awful.

She sighed and she tutted and she said, ‘You’re making a mistake.’

And he continued to smile and said, ‘Good.’

‘Hello, Dad.’ Meg had sat down in the chair next to him before he’d spotted her walking across the plush reception hall of the boutique hotel in Mickleton.

‘Oh. Darling.’ He got to his feet, still bouncy and nimble at sixty-six. ‘Meg.’ He leaned in towards her and tried to embrace her but Meg’s body would not allow it and the gesture turned into a kind of teenage fumble.

‘You look wonderful, Meg, really amazing. You’ve lost a lot of weight.’

‘Well, yes,’ she muttered. ‘Funnily enough it all fell off me after the last time I saw you.’

‘Vicky’s funeral,’ he murmured, as though Meg had not just spoken. ‘Has it really been that long?

‘It most certainly has.’

Colin sat back down in the plush armchair and looked around. ‘This place is nice,’ he said. ‘Used to be a shoe shop, I think, once upon a time.
Wide fittings
if I recall.’ He winked and laughed and Meg stared at him blankly. ‘Where’s Molly?’

‘She’s in our room,’ said Meg, ‘watching endless reruns of
Come Dine With Me
and texting her friends.’ Her voice was dry as dust.

Colin nodded and smiled. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how are you feeling?’

‘About what?’

Colin let his jolly demeanour deflate a little. ‘Your mother, of course,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling about your mother?’

‘Well,’ said Meg, ‘you know. Pretty much exactly how any daughter would feel upon losing her mother. Who has starved herself to death inside a house so full of filthy shit that it is going to take her daughter two weeks to clear it out and even then there will probably be another two weeks’ worth of crap still left in there. That’s how I’m feeling. Thank you.’

Meg flopped crossly into the back of the armchair and folded her arms across her chest.

Colin stared at her and then leaned towards her and touched her arm. Meg pulled her arm away from him and said, ‘No, thank you. I don’t want sympathy. Or affection, OK. I just want help.’

‘Good,’ said Colin, removing his hand from her arm. ‘Yes. Good. Absolutely. That’s what I’m here for. To help. How bad is it?’

Meg sighed and let her shoulders soften. ‘It’s even worse
than the worst nightmares I’d been having about it. I mean, seriously, it’s … it’s …’ She noticed with some surprise that she had begun to cry. Colin touched her arm again and once more she shook it off. She was not sure she would ever accept her father’s touch again. She pulled in her tears and continued. ‘It’s absolutely shocking. Particularly downstairs. I mean, there’s literally no daylight down there. It’s all piled to the ceiling. There’s like, like, this
corridor
. You know. Through the piles. Like
walls
. And it smells –’ she put her hand over mouth – ‘it smells disgusting. And then there’s her place, her armchair, in the middle of all of this and it’s all stained and shabby and that was where she lived.’ She widened her eyes at her father, finally feeling able to make eye contact with him. ‘She lived on that chair. Slept on that chair. Ate on that chair.’ She shuddered and lowered her gaze to the floor. ‘It’s all so fucking tragic.’

Colin sighed and put his fingers against his mouth. ‘I feel awful,’ he said. ‘I feel—’