The House We Grew Up In (34 page)

‘No. I know. But still. It’s not something I can look at in
those terms. It should never have happened. I was sick.’

‘Charming.’

‘No, but I was. I wasn’t normal. I mean, I’m still not normal. I’ve got a long way to go before I can contemplate normal. But back then … I don’t know what I was thinking.’ She shook her head.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Bill. ‘You’re making out you were a basket case. I can assure you that you weren’t. You were charming. You were adorable. You were—’

‘Sleeping with my sister’s partner.’ She shook her head again. ‘No, Bill. I don’t know how you’ve processed the thing, but I can assure you that I have processed it to the point of negation. Do you see? It can’t have happened. It mustn’t have happened. There can’t be fond memories or, or, rose-tinted nostalgia. It
did not happen
.’

Bill slowed his pace and looked at her. He looked as if he was going to say something. But then he sighed and turned back.

‘I can’t be that surgical about it, I’m afraid. It was a terrible mistake. I should be shot for the risk I put our relationship at, for what I could potentially have done to my family. And believe me, I’m glad it’s over, too. Really. But it was also amazing. Wasn’t it? At the beginning, you know. I mean, do you remember—’

‘Stop!’ Beth spun round and pushed her hands against Bill’s chest. ‘No.’

He smiled, put his own hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep my memories to myself.’

‘Good. Yes, please.’

He sighed theatrically and for a moment they continued in silence.

‘So,’ he said, after a moment, ‘anyone in your life at the moment?’

She shook her head.

‘What happened to the Aussie?’

‘Jason?’ she asked, slightly surprised to be using his name again after so long. ‘God, nothing, no, that lasted a nanosecond.’

‘But it got you out of your rut?’

‘It did. Yes. Just in the nick of time. And then there was Richard.’

‘Ah, yes, I think I remember Meg mentioning a Richard …’

‘Yes, he was British. Lovely, too lovely. Everything was lovely. I had a great job, I got my citizenship, nice flat, and then … I had a nervous breakdown.’

Bill raised a pale eyebrow.

‘I think, if I’m honest, I’d been on the cusp of a nervous breakdown since I was a teenager. Since Rhys died. I think I’d been hanging on to this precipice. Without even realising it. If I hadn’t met Jason, if he hadn’t been so bloody insistent, I’d probably never even have left home. Isn’t that terrifying? That I could have just let myself stay there, in that disgusting house, for ever? So, anyway, the whole “new me” thing in Sydney, it was all a total facade, none of it was real. And it was like the foundations beneath the dream house were made of sand and the whole thing collapsed. And that was me – six months in bed. Bye-bye, job. Bye-bye, Richard.’

‘He didn’t stick around?’

‘I didn’t want him to!’ she replied crossly. ‘He was part of the problem. He was a prop. On the stage set. That was my life.’ She shuddered. ‘I’m not recovered,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I should have stayed at home.’

‘Home.’

‘Yes. Sydney. Home. But Mum insisted.’

‘Might do you good.’

Beth glared at him. He was an idiot. She had no idea,
no idea
what she’d been thinking for all those years. They were in front of the boys’ school. It was a red-brick Victorian block, five storeys high. It looked very urban and very imposing. Clusters of parents stood around the playground and the gates. Some of them were smoking. Beth would not send her children here. She would want them to go to a small village school, cosy and cartoonish, like the one she had been to.

‘Are you going?’ she asked, as Bill negotiated the buggy up the three steps into the playground.

‘To the funeral?’ he asked, nodding hello to a mother in a headscarf.

‘Yes.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t, really. Work is nuts at the moment. But, Vicky, I don’t know, I always had such a fond spot for her. We were quite close. In a way …’

‘Mmm,’ she said, non-commitally.

‘I’ll decide tomorrow.’

‘It’s going to be horrific,’ she said. ‘Those girls.’

He nodded. And for just a moment she saw something in
his eyes, something that reminded her what she’d loved about him for all that time. They clouded over, for just a second, with a film of tears. He was a human after all. He pulled Charlie out of his buggy and held him tight.

‘I kicked him out,’ said Meg later that evening over a large glass of wine. ‘About three years ago.’

Molly was watching TV next door and the boys were in the back garden playing cricket with Bill. The baby was asleep. It was a watery evening, early dusk, the tired tail end of summer. Beth had a can of Coke on the counter in front of her and was idly watching Bill charging about in shorts, socks and trainers through the bi-fold glass doors, thinking what a fool he looked.

She turned sharply at Meg’s words. ‘What!’ she cried. ‘Bill? How come?’

Meg sighed luxuriously, clearly relishing the prospect of her next announcement. ‘I just got sick of him,’ she said. ‘I mean, I was pretty sure he was having an affair …’

Beth nodded and lifted her Coke can to her lips.

‘Or a
number
of affairs. And he was just so cross all the time. But worse than that, he was horrible to the children. That I really couldn’t bear. I thought we’d be better off without him.’

‘Oh, my God, when was this?’

‘Oh, ages ago. Just after you left for Australia, I suppose.’

‘And was he?’ she asked. ‘Having an affair?’

Meg shrugged and topped up her enormous wine glass. ‘I have no idea. And neither do I wish to know. All I know is that
kicking him out changed everything.’ She slammed her hands down on the kitchen table to establish her point. ‘Everything.’

Beth stared deeply at her own hands on the counter. ‘Well, that’s good then,’ she said. ‘Right?’

‘Yes, from a purely philosophical point of view, yes. Although, honestly, at the time I thought I was in hell. Living with a man who hated me. Who hated my children. When we all loved him so, so much. It was like a nightmare. Seriously. And that’s the thing,’ she said, leaning in towards her sister, ‘that’s what these
stupid
,
stupid
women don’t realise, when they sleep with a married man. They’re not just sleeping with him. They’re sleeping with his whole
fucking family
. His whole
fucking family
!’

Beth smiled tightly, but her eyes did not meet Meg’s.

The following day the sky glowed with illuminated clouds, thin drops of rain fell at intervals. But it had promise. And my God, thought Meg, some sunshine would be good on a day like today.

Bill did not come in the end, and Meg was glad. She wanted her sister to herself. She wanted the funeral to herself.

So he had stayed at home with Molly, who didn’t want to miss school. (An unlikely excuse, Meg had suggested. It was more likely that she just couldn’t stand the thought of numerous weird family members asking her stupid questions about school and telling her how tall she’d got.) It was just the three boys and Beth, zooming up the middle lane of the M40, dressed in pink (Vicky’s last, rather clichéd request) and girding their loins for a testing day ahead.

They talked about Rory.

He’d been in jail for nine months, on remand since the previous Easter. He did not want any help. He did not want any contact. According to their dad he’d been stitched up by that Essex boy he’d run away from Spain with. Apparently Owen had used Rory as a ‘sacrificial lamb’ to get the police off the scent of his underground drug operation. According to Colin, Rory was taking the flak out of some kind of misplaced loyalty.

‘I don’t think so, though,’ said Meg. ‘I honestly don’t. I think it’s more than that. Deeper than that. I think he wanted to be punished.’

‘Punished?’

‘Yes. For letting Rhys fend for himself at secondary school. For being so angry when he died. For leaving Kayleigh and the baby. For being alive when his twin was dead. I think he thought he was due a whipping.’ She shrugged and left the theory there, in the air, to be mulled over.

Beth sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’d never really thought about it like that before, but yes, I think you’re right.’ She paused and turned to gaze through the window for a moment. Then she turned back and said, ‘Do you think that’s why Mum lives like she does? Do you think she’s punishing herself too?’

Meg shook her head. ‘No. I think Mum lives like that because she’s sick. End of story.’

Beth sighed again. ‘Poor Mum,’ she said. ‘She’s going to be in pieces today.’

Meg changed lanes, peering from wing mirror to rear-view mirror and back again, and said, ‘No. She won’t be. She’ll be
fine. She
is
fine. I promise you. She has once again processed her grief through some bizarre, unknowable channel, and come through the other end just as nuts as ever.’

‘Who’s nuts?’ asked Alfie, his voice barely audible from his seat at the very back of the people carrier.

‘No one’s nuts,’ called out Meg. ‘No one. We’re all one hundred per cent sane!’

She laughed out loud at her own words and smiled at her eldest son in the rear-view mirror.

He returned the smile and then popped his earphones back in.

‘I know who you’re talking about,’ said Stan, sitting behind Beth. ‘You’re talking about Grandma.’

‘No, we’re not,’ said Meg, checking the signs for the next junction. ‘We’re absolutely not.’

‘But Grandma
is
mad,’ he countered. He began to count things off on his fingers. ‘She keeps
absolutely everything
–’ he tapped on his thumb – ‘she doesn’t brush her hair, she’s
obsessed
with rainbows, she does cartwheels and handstands, even though she’s, like,
really old
, she shouts a lot and she called Vicky’s daughter a little shit.’ He leaned back triumphantly. ‘And that,’ he added, ‘is just
some
of it.’

Beth and Meg exchanged a look.

And then they both laughed out loud, a spilling over of all the politeness and strangeness that they had both been banging up against for the past twenty-four hours.

‘What?’ said Stanley.

But the two sisters were laughing too hard to reply.

The cemetery was a sea of pink. In spite of her misgivings about the concept of a pink funeral, Meg was strangely moved by the communal, cross-generational, cross-gender adoption of a dead woman’s wishes. She spotted Sophie and Maddy immediately: two tall, blonde almost-women, in short skirts and ankle boots, with pink flowers in their hair. They looked like adults from a distance, but with every step closer their youth became more obvious, until, as she stepped towards them to embrace them, they were children once more. She breathed into their soft hair and told them she was sorry, and they were brave and stoic and they told her they were fine.

Mum was talking to Tim. She was monstrously thin and looked simultaneously incredible and bizarre, in a fuchsia cocktail dress with feathers, pink zip-up boots and a pink beret with a bobble on the top. She beamed her toothy grin and opened up her arms to her daughters and her grandsons.

‘You’re too thin,’ said Megan, who hadn’t seen her mother in about eight weeks.

Lorelei threw her a sad look and said, ‘Darling, I’ve just lost the love of my life.’ And Meg nodded apologetically and felt guilty. Lorelei held Beth in her arms for a count of at least twenty, until Beth was forced to pull herself out of the tangle of her embrace and adjust her clothing. Lorelei turned to Tim and said, somewhat theatrically, ‘I have not been together with my daughters for almost three years.
Three years
.’ Tim nodded sympathetically and left them to it.

Lorelei took the baby from Meg’s arms and cooed at him and Charlie, thankfully, responded well, gifting his grandmother a smile and an expression of enchantment. ‘What a
lovely, lovely boy you are,’ she trilled. ‘What a lovely, lovely boy!’ They chatted brightly, strangely, to people they vaguely recognised, Lorelei told Meg she needed to get her figure back, Beth looked blank, the boys stood shyly with their hands in their pockets, the baby gurgled and complained when he was strapped into his buggy. And then Lorelei linked her arms into her daughters’ and the three of them walked together into the crematorium, followed by Stan and Alfie, who was pushing Charlie in the buggy. A sudden blast of golden autumnal sun shone on them from behind and this could have been a poignant and tender moment, possibly even the beginning of a new dawn, if it had not been for the fact that upon entering the chapel the first thing they all saw was Colin and Kayleigh sitting side by side, with a small girl on their left.

They were the only people in there and they had been whispering to each other, complicitously, before they both turned at the sound of voices. Meg felt Lorelei turn brittle with shock. She and Beth gawped at each other. ‘Jesus
Christ
,’ said Lorelei, not quite as inadudibly as would have been desirable under the circumstances.

Colin’s face broke open into an emotional smile and he leapt to his feet. Meg and her mother and sister all froze, instinctively, to the spot.

‘Oh, wow! Girls! And boys!’ Colin glanced behind at the row of somewhat shell-shocked grandsons. He walked quickly towards them all, looked as though he wanted to take them all in his arms and squeeze them, but pulled himself up short at the sight of their faces, set hard with surprise and displeasure. ‘Wow,’ he said again, looking in turn from face to
face, ‘you all look so lovely. You all look so …’

Lorelei simply walked off halfway through his declaration. She swanned off, the sound of her pink Cuban-heeled boots echoing across the room, and sat herself down at the front of the chapel, on the pew nearest the front. Beth and Meg looked at each other and then at their father.

‘What is she doing here?’ Meg whispered.

Colin looked from Kayleigh to Meg and shrugged and said, ‘She wanted to come. She wanted to say goodbye.’

‘But she didn’t even
know
Vicky!’ exclaimed Beth.