The House We Grew Up In (35 page)

‘Well, that’s not quite true. She met her a few times. Thought her a great person. And besides. It’s an Irish thing. An Irish Catholic thing. Paying respects. The need to observe the rituals. You know.’

Kayleigh turned, looked at Meg and nodded a judicious greeting. Meg caught her breath, hesitated for a split second and then nodded back. Kayleigh looked different. Softer. Prettier. Older. Her hair, which had been brilliant scarlet the last time she’d seen her, was long, highlighted and held on top of her head in a ponytail. She was wearing a baby-pink jacket, a Chanel rip-off type of thing with braiding and gold buttons, and a high-necked Victorian-style blouse underneath. And her face, which had once been a sharp thing, all angry angles and set-in lines, had loosened and mellowed into something almost beautiful.

And then the girl turned round, to see what her mother was looking at, and Meg gasped. This was Tia. The name in countless emails. Countless bitter conversations. The purely conceptual child who had been discussed and abandoned
over the years but never before been made flesh. And here she was. In, as her children often said,
real life
.

The child was beautiful. Ethereally, classically, remarkably beautiful. She had Rory’s white-blond hair, falling down her back in fat ringlets. And she had Rory’s fine features: his dark-lashed blue eyes, his full lips, his aquiline nose and high cheekbones. She gazed questioningly at Meg. And then she saw the three boys standing behind her and blushed, turned her head away. But her face stayed on in Meg’s consciousness like a sunspot. Her niece. Very nearly seven years old, only a few months younger than Stanley. The image of her father. The very image of him.

Other people were filing into the crematorium now. Some of them looked curiously at Meg and Beth, at Colin, at Lorelei sitting alone at the front of the chapel. Some of them had no idea of the significance of this arrangement of people and the unfinished conversation that hung between them.

‘We’ll talk afterwards,’ said Meg, her voice softer for the shock of seeing her niece’s face. She put out an arm, touched her father’s sleeve, and then headed to the front, to sit next to her mother. Beth and the boys followed behind.

‘Are you OK?’ she whispered into Lorelei’s ear.

Lorelei nodded and kept her gaze to the front. ‘Arsehole,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Fucking
arsehole
.’

Stanley snorted and Meg glared at him, then said, ‘Please try not to swear, Mum.’

Lorelei tutted loudly and stared resolutely ahead.

‘I cannot believe it,’ whispered Beth. She looked pale and
clammy and Meg squeezed her hand and said, ‘Are you OK? You’re not going to faint again, are you?’

Beth shook her head tightly and swallowed hard. ‘I’m fine,’ she muttered. ‘I just, I can’t believe she’s here …’

Meg handed the baby a small toy to occupy him in his buggy and passed Polo mints around. ‘She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?’ she whispered, after a moment, to Beth and her mother. ‘The girl? Tia?’

Lorelei tutted and shook her head. Beth nodded and smiled. But neither of them replied. And it hit Megan, then, really quite hard, just exactly how odd this was. That girl was her niece. That girl was Lorelei’s granddaughter. She was six years old but none of them had ever met her before. She had not seen her own father since she was a baby. Her grandfather shared a bed with her mother.

‘Total and utter fucking
prick
,’ said her mother.

Megan nudged her hard.

‘Well …’

‘I’m not going to the wake,’ said Beth quietly.

Meg looked questioningly at her.

‘I can’t do it. Not with her there.’

‘Beth! You have to! I can’t do it alone!’ Meg whispered urgently.

The chapel was starting to fill up now. They shifted up the pew a few feet to allow Tim and his new girlfriend to squeeze on.

They all smiled tightly and politely at each other and the conversation ended and another one began, about motorways and the rather irreverent humanist funeral celebrant
who’d been appointed as per Vicky’s instructions, and the cardboard coffin and the wild meadow flowers that had come from the garden of the house where Vicky had grown up.

Lorelei had agreed to give a eulogy. Megan had never seen her mother stand in front of a crowd before. She had never heard her speak in public and could not quite imagine how it would be. She was feeling slightly anxious about it. But she needn’t have worried. Her mother took to the small stage and adjusted the height of the microphone and she let her eyes range across the room, taking in everyone, stopping at Colin and Kayleigh and redirecting themselves back to Sophie and Maddy, where they lingered and filled with tears.

Then she smiled, her lips closed over her teeth and she pulled a piece of paper out of the pink handbag slung across her chest, unfolded it, cleared her throat, and began to talk.

‘I first met Vicky in 1991. She’d moved in next door, taking the place of a rather precious friend who I’d assumed I’d be friends with for the rest of my life. So I was rather cross about this interloper. As it turned out, I never saw the old neighbour again after they moved out and it was Vicky who became that lifelong friend. I invited her over for Easter, her and her nice-looking husband and adorable little baby.’

She nodded and smiled at Maddy.

‘I thought she’d say no, make her excuses, but she said yes. Just like that! On the spot! So rare in people, that quality. Most people have to check and double-check, keep their options open, you know. Nobody wants to commit to anything on the spur of the moment. And they came and it was lovely, and
I thought, what a charming woman. What a vibrant, joyful person.’

She paused and surveyed the congregation again.

‘Well, as some of you know, but most of you don’t, poor Vicky was witness to a terrible, terrible tragedy that Easter day. Awful, just awful. And I could not have got through it without her. She’d experienced a similar tragedy herself, her first love, a young girl, who’d hung herself simply because she was gay and couldn’t deal with it.

‘And yes, Vicky was a lesbian. Albeit one who’d made a magnificent marriage with a good man for many years before, made beautiful babies with him and been a kind and wonderful wife. But she was, at heart and fundamentally, gay. I’m not sure I ever was. But that wasn’t really the point somehow. The point was, we loved each other. We found each other to be beautiful and desirable and lovable. We were nuts about each other. I needed her. She needed me. And I am going to miss her more than any words could ever express. She simply was the world to me. And without her I am untethered and lost.’

She stopped then, her eyes shining with tears. She folded the piece of paper into a small, tight cube and smiled. ‘Sorry,’ she said. Then she came down from the podium and slid back next to Megan in the front pew.

Meg squeezed her hand. ‘Well done, Mum.’

Lorelei shrugged. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now it’s done. Now,’ she whispered sadly, ‘I really am all alone.’

The wake was in a pub a short walk from the crematorium. It was a classic Cotswolds pub, yellow-brick, pale-grey paint,
Georgian fireplaces and high ceilings. A function room with five tall windows overlooking the countryside had been hired and bedecked with pink balloons and stocked with bottles of pink sparkling wine and pink fairy cakes. There were French doors out on to a small terrace where there was a table with a pink book of remembrance and a number of photo albums. People were bustling about this table, looking thoughtfully for the right words, champagne flutes held between their fingers.

The boys had found themselves a table for two where they sat and played on their DS’s and ate crisps from a pink paper bowl. The baby was asleep in his buggy, tucked away behind a curtain. Beth, quite uncharacteristically, was drinking a pint of lager and Meg was making her only permissible glass of wine last as long as possible.

She’d had to beg and cajole Beth to get her into the pub. They’d seen Colin, Tia and Kayleigh heading in the opposite direction from the pub after the service and Meg had persuaded Beth that they probably wouldn’t be coming. And certainly there was no sign of them yet. Megan felt herself fill slowly with relief, but Beth still looked tense and terrified, clutching her pint glass tightly between her blue-white fingers and casting her gaze about anxiously.

The service had been wonderful. Meg first thought this and then repeated it, over and over, each time she encountered a new person. ‘Oh, yes,’ she would say, heartfelt, again and again, ‘yes, it really was wonderful. Vicky would have loved it.’

Beth, meanwhile, stood silent and teenagery, shoulders tensed, letting her older sister do all the conversational work. Megan was growing tired of this state of affairs and was about
to walk away and leave Beth alone to fend for herself when the door to the function room opened and they walked in.

Now that Kayleigh was standing up, Megan could see that she had paired her demure woollen jacket and buttoned-up blouse with a pair of leather trousers tucked into well-worn spike-heeled boots decorated with silver studs. Tia was wearing a slightly grubby silver-sequinned dress with ripped pink tights and pink Flamenco shoes. Colin was wearing grey combat trousers, with a white shirt and a pink cravat. His thin silver hair had grown long, covering his face which was brown and gaunt. He had an earring. He looked strange. The three of them looked strange. She thought of an exhibition that Bill had staged a few months back at his gallery, a series of photographs of families living in homeless shelters in dead-end towns in unfashionable US states. Each family had been requested to put on their best clothes for the shot, and the portraits had been heartbreakingly poignant, the bittersweet fusion of pride and hopelessness visible in their eyes. Particularly the fathers.

This family standing in the doorway, looking around nervously as they pumped themselves with resolve, in their cheap clothes, their out-of-placeness, their delicacy, reminded her of those families.

Meg saw Colin find Kayleigh’s hand and squeeze it in his. She saw Kayleigh squeeze his hand back.

She gulped back a swell of emotion and turned away, back to her sister.

But Beth was gone, a lipstick-imprinted pint glass on the table the only sign she’d ever been there.

‘Here,’ said Lorelei, ferreting through her shoulder bag, an empty champagne glass slung loosely from the crook of her thumb and forefinger, dripping its last drops all over her dress. She smelled of wine and a sweet, cinnamon-noted perfume. She also smelled of damp and must. ‘For you,’ she said, pulling a small package from the bag and handing it to Megan. ‘From Vicky. Where’s Beth?’ She looked around herself, full circle, then spun back to Meg. Her green eyes were slightly unfocused.

‘She’s out there somewhere,’ Meg replied. ‘Did a runner the minute they arrived.’ She pointed towards Colin and Kayleigh with her eyes. ‘I was just on my way out to retrieve her.’

Lorelei wrinkled up her nose, in distaste, in the general direction of her ex-husband. ‘They look horrible,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t they?’

Meg muttered something neutral under her breath. But couldn’t lose the tender spot in the pit of her stomach that had formed when she saw them walking in together, looking so pitiful. ‘Wait there,’ she said. ‘I’m going to get Beth.’

She was leaning against Meg’s car, staring ahead, looking clammy and tense, an almost-empty champagne glass in her hands. Meg frowned. ‘You’re drinking,’ she said. ‘Why are you drinking?’

Beth shrugged, like a teenage girl. ‘There’s no law against it.’ Her words were slightly slurred. Beth was drunk. Meg had never seen her sister drunk before. She shook her head and let it go. ‘Come on. Come in,’ she commanded. ‘We need to get this over with.’

‘What, you mean talk to them?’

‘Yes,’ said Meg. ‘We need to talk to them. That’s our niece in there. That’s our father. Forget everything else. They came all the way here. They’re really poor and they came all the way here.’

Beth shuddered. ‘Christ, you almost sound like you feel sorry for them.’

‘I do. A bit. I mean, you can’t help who you fall in love with, can you?’

Beth shuddered again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been more open-minded about stuff than me, less emotional, and I just can’t … I can’t even bear to look at them.’

Meg felt herself tense up with frustration. ‘Beth,’ she said, ‘you are a grown woman! You’re not a teenager. This is the real world. We are real people. This is real life. And things sometimes happen that don’t fit in with how we think the story should go, but we just have to take a deep breath and get on with it, not sit there in the corner sulking because it’s not what we were hoping for. Come on!’ she barked. ‘Stop being a big baby and get in there and talk to your bloody father!’

‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said, ‘as long as
she’s
not there.’

Megan sighed and paused. ‘She’s his partner,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing much you can do about that.’

‘It’s disgusting.’

‘It is what it is. Nobody’s breaking the law. Nobody
died
. Come on …’

Beth sighed and pulled herself away from the car. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ she muttered under her breath.

Colin and Kayleigh were talking to Tim when they returned to the function room. Tia was standing between them, her arm held around her mother’s waist, her head nestled against her ribcage.

Kayleigh looked at Meg and Beth with carefully concealed surprise as they approached.

‘Hello,’ said Meg. ‘Lovely to see you.’ She was spared the discomfort of a physical greeting as she knew that Kayleigh was not the type.

Kayleigh smiled laconically. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

‘It certainly has. It was Easter, wasn’t it? The Easter before your daughter was born.’ She looked down at Tia and Tia looked up at her, curiously. As well she might, thought Meg, as well she might. ‘Hi,’ she said to Tia, ‘my name’s Meg. And those boys over there –’ she pointed at Alfie and Stan, now engaged with scraping the pink buttercream icing off the fairy cakes and depositing it into the empty crisp bowl – ‘they’re my sons and I think –’ she looked enquiringly at her father, who nodded, just once – ‘they are your cousins.’