A Daughter's Secret (20 page)

Lysette’s always been a championship flirt: it’s charming, not slutty, and, if you cured her of it, you’d lose something precious. I hope that I don’t do that: neuter people’s personalities, cure them of their most charming side effects.

‘What if I just can’t really do it? What if – for all this professional sanity – I’m basically a chip off the old block?’

‘Mia,’ says Lysette, serious now, ‘you’re not like Lorcan. You’re just not. You’re terrible at drinking, for starters.’

‘I see it all the time with clients. They do everything in their power not to make the same mistakes as their parents, and then their subconscious takes over in the most sneaky ways. Suddenly they’re divorcing at the exact same age or going bankrupt, just like Dad did.’

‘Divorce – how shocking!’ I smile, reassuring her it wasn’t a sneaky sideswipe at her. ‘Maybe you’re just mourning being able to flirt about a bit.’

‘Yeah, probably. He’s a bit of a dick really,’ I say, smiling. ‘Muffin man I mean. He’s a total child,’ I add, thinking about how he described a woman as having a fatal attraction for her horse.

‘How does muffin man’s dickishness manifest? Or is that protected under therapist/dick privilege?’

‘He can’t be serious for more than five minutes – it’s all Irish blarney. Not that I’m saying he’s Irish. Welsh blarney.’

‘What else is wrong with Daffyd, apart from the fact that he’s highly amusing?’

‘He’s such a boy! It’s so weird. He’s the last person in the world I should feel comfortable with, but I spent two hours with him and it felt like two minutes.’

‘Do you think Marcus has got wind of it?’

‘Not remotely. He’s been away so much,’ I add, not sure if I’m letting him off the hook or accusing him of something.

Lysette knocks gently on my forehead.

‘You’re totally torturing yourself. I’m not dissing what you do, but it’s not like everything that happens is a symptom, Mia. That’s my point about muffin love. We can’t analyse life to death. Because then it’s dead.’

I hug her – there’s no reply to that.

‘Come on,’ I say, ‘the socks are in crisis.’

‘Are you sure you should be taking your socks anywhere?’ says Lysette, looking at me hard.

‘I can always bring them home again. Their new pad’s a rental. And they’ve paid the deposit.’

I walk Lysette to the tube about ten, giving her time to cross London and get her last train. I so rarely let myself get drunk, but tonight I’m enjoying the sense of the world being slightly out of focus. Focus hasn’t been doing me much good recently. Even so, I still dart a couple of looks behind us as we walk down the backstreets. I’m glad she doesn’t notice. It would be a hard one to explain away without freaking her out.

‘It was so lovely to see you,’ she says, hugging me. I hate saying goodbye to her.

‘I feel like I talked about myself non-stop. I’m like one of those patients I secretly want to kill.’

‘Do you really want to kill some of them?’

‘Oh totally. I am so not a cyborg.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she says.

‘I know. But seriously, next time . . . tell me to shut up.’

We’re being jostled by properly drunk people now.

‘Don’t be silly,’ says Lysette, finding her Oyster card. We look at the metal barriers, neither of us moving. ‘I’ll see you at Saffron’s birthday party?’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘You’d forgotten, hadn’t you? You’d totally forgotten.’

I pull a face, sheepish.

‘Wouldn’t miss it. I won’t now, anyway.’

Lysette rolls her eyes, holds out her Oyster card.

‘Love you,’ she says, quick and firm.

‘Love you too,’ I say, all of me in there. I grab her arm as she’s starting to turn, the words out before I can stop them. ‘Lys, does he ever ask about me?’

She stops, shock in her face.

‘Jim? Yeah. Yeah he does.’

‘OK,’ I say, not sure if I believe her. ‘I just wanted to know.’

Chapter Eleven

Annie’s teaspoon surfs the top of her latte, skimming the froth and flicking it onto the saucer. She’s playing for time. She didn’t want this meeting, but I insisted on it, so here we are, in this hole in the wall around the corner from my office, jolly Australian baristas loudly dispensing takeaway cups of rocket fuel to the morning crowd. I thought meeting outside my treatment room might foster a bit more warmth, but instead it’s just given her props. It took her a full five minutes to take her sunglasses off.

‘Do you understand why I’m concerned?’ I’ve got bored of waiting for her to answer, her spoon endlessly rotating its way round the stout glass that they serve their coffees in. We’re squashed tight against a window, the table tiny. At least the fact it’s so loud means no one’s eavesdropping.

‘Everyone’s always concerned about my little girl. She makes sure of it.’

‘Are you concerned?’

‘I wouldn’t have found a shrink for her if I wasn’t!’ she says. ‘Sorry, I just—’

‘No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t questioning whether you care about her. I just wanted you to know that me sharing personal information with her might have been a mistake. Perhaps she needs to see a therapist who keeps the boundaries absolutely rigid.’

‘Is this about that stupid present? That’s just Gemma. She likes buying things.’

I look at Annie’s large leather tote, ostentatious gold buckles holding it shut. She’s not the only one. I feel a stab of pity for Gemma. Is that what love is for her? Twisted confidences and a credit card burnt to cinders around Selfridges? I don’t want to abandon her, but, even more than that, I don’t want to fail her.

‘It’s not about that, no, although I do think that’s a symptom. She’s obviously deeply confused about her dad. I don’t know whether the fact she knows I had a confusing relationship with my father has made her relationship with me more confused. It feels like she’s baiting me.’

‘You can’t cope with her?’

‘No, I can cope with her, but I just wanted to be honest with you about how the work is going. It might be that we should do a limited amount of sessions together, like an introductory course, and then she should work with someone else if it’s something she wants to keep doing.’

Annie looks at me, her eyes hard.

‘You can’t cope with her.’

‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ I check in with myself. Maybe part of me is wondering if I can cope with
this
. With the darkness of it. With the shadows I can’t chase away. I hate the way I’ve started compulsively looking behind me. Perhaps moving into the fridge will soothe the creeping unease I can’t seem to shake. The iPad was back in session this week, the screen turned my way, nearly close enough for me to read the messages but not quite. I try and explain why it makes me so uneasy, but Annie doesn’t so much as nibble on the idea.

‘I know what you’re thinking. How can she be spending that sort of money. Gemma’s dyslexic. She needs it for her schoolwork.’

We can’t keep spinning round in these dizzy-making circles.

‘This isn’t about money – your finances are none of my business. I want to make sure I’m helping to keep her safe, not doing the opposite.’

‘You are.’

‘I’m still deeply concerned about the self-harm too. She absolutely refuses to talk about it. The fact it was at school – to me, it links it straight back to Christopher.’

‘She hasn’t done it again!’

As far as we know.

‘I’m glad about that, but it’s not just about her cutting herself. It’s about what it indicates, the level of pain she’s in.’ I pause, force Annie to look at me. ‘Annie, are you sure she doesn’t know more than she’s told the police? I don’t want to win her trust and then have to betray her by telling them what she’s confided. The last thing she needs is another adult she believes in letting her down.’ I think about it, think about Patrick’s theory that the best thing that could happen to her is to have it flushed out. He’d hate to know I’m here, seriously contemplating withdrawal. ‘Or at least seeming to let her down.’ I pause a second. ‘When she talks about Christopher she makes it sound like she’s just seen him.’

Annie looks away, her eyes unseeing. It’s not the caffeinated commuters she’s watching, it’s something else, far from here.

‘He was always obsessed with her, even when she was this tiny little blob in her carrycot. I know it’s bad to say it, but I’m not a baby person. She didn’t latch on, she was colicky. She was my first, and I didn’t really have a clue.’ She looks back at me properly, and I wonder if she’s searching for signs of judgement. ‘You don’t have any, do you?’

Is it that obvious?

‘No.’

‘Our Christopher,’ she says, vowels suddenly more Northern as she skims the surface of the past, ‘he’s an achievement junkie. He’d get up with her in the middle of the night, give her a bottle. They’d just sit there together, in the nursing chair, all tranquil, like they were a sculpture or something. Then he’d be up for work at six, like the Duracell Bunny, like he’d had eight hours. Made me feel like crap.’

‘God, poor you. I bet that was hard. Was he like that with the other two?’

Annie shakes her head slowly, as though the weight of all those years is bearing down on her.

‘She was his firstborn,’ she says, her voice inflecting upwards, like she’s heard him commandeer the phrase too many times to own it herself. ‘He’d never had his own flesh and blood before. He’s adopted.’ It all starts to make even more sense, like a photograph developing, smudgy outlines coming into sharp relief. Poor Gemma, I think – no, not think, I
feel
it with my whole body, my heart sore and heavy. ‘He’d look at her, her little nose, her eyes hardly open, searching for himself. Used to drive me a bit mad, if I’m honest.’ There’s guilt in her face, all these years later. It makes me suddenly furious; whichever way you cut it, motherhood’s so often designed to make women feel like they’re failing, and ducking out of the race altogether is deemed the biggest failure of them all. ‘She was just – just a blob! She was our blob, and of course I loved her, but she wasn’t this – this fucking heirloom!’

Anger animates her, burns through that simmering control that normally surrounds her like a heat haze.

‘It’s a huge change for any couple, first baby, even without that. I bet it was a big pressure on Gemma, too.’

Judith always says that babies are like wise Buddhas, more conscious than anyone realizes, and I think she’s right. Gemma would’ve been steeped in that energy like a little pickled onion, no defences.

‘Trust me, she rose to the challenge,’ she says acidly.

I’m going to keep asking until she stops me – besides, I think she wants me to. She seems ragged around the edges, easier to touch than she’s ever been previously.

‘How did you two meet?’

‘Sixth-form dance. Grammar school plus our girls’ school. Quite the party.’ She’s smiling at the memory, but it’s a smile that never quite reaches her eyes. ‘I wore red. My mum was ho-rri-fied. Ruched at the top, tight on the skirt. Christopher said he couldn’t keep his eyes off me.’

‘How about you?’

‘I was after Vincent Collins. To be fair, he was after me too. I wasn’t chasing.’

‘I’m guessing that died a death?’

‘He didn’t stand a chance. Wasn’t like Chris was captain of the rugby team, or an amazing dancer. But he had this certainty. He always used to say he decided that night he’d met his soulmate. It was like he knew me better than
I
knew me – I know it sounds daft. He talked like an adult, and it made the rest of them seem like silly little boys.’

‘Sounds incredibly seductive.’

‘It was,’ she says, the words like tombstones, past tense writ large.
Why didn’t you leave him?
I can’t ask her that. ‘I followed him to university – he said he couldn’t be apart from me – and that was that. I thought I was the only one who knew
him
. Adopted, never met his real mum. Seemed so tragic to me, made me wanna wrap him up in love.’ I can just about see a softer Annie, far off in the distance, waving at me from a gentler past. ‘But the truth is, no one really knows Chris. Not even my darling daughter, whatever he tells her when I’m not there.’

‘She says the school suggested you go for family therapy.’

Her smile is crumpled, guilty.

‘They did. Chris wasn’t having it, of course.’

‘Did you want to?’

‘Bit of me did, bit of me didn’t.’ I can understand that. A tug on a single thread could have unravelled the whole tapestry. Poor Gemma – it’s been cut to ribbons instead. ‘I was so glad when we found you, though. He can’t meddle now, can he?’

She looks up at me, blue eyes like rock pools, imploring me from their very depths. Is Judith right? Is the fact that every fibre of my being is telling me to help them exactly why I should walk away?

‘Are you not worried by the fact she talks about him like she’s seeing him?’

‘No, cos I know what he’s like. He gets in your head, colonizes it. Maybe now she’s got a fighting chance of shifting him out.’

I look back at her, searching her face. She’s attractive, Annie, not pretty. I think he probably took her prettiness from her, along with so much else.

‘Do you think he’ll come back?’

‘I . . .’ That single syllable sounds strangled, trapped in the back of her throat. She looks down, looks up, face neutral. ‘I don’t know, Mia.’

She nearly forgot herself. Not quite.

‘Let’s keep going for now, but you and I need to keep in regular contact. This situation isn’t static. Gemma’s welfare is what matters, but what’s best for her could change at any time.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, already standing up, sunglasses heading for her suspiciously perfect nose. She only drank half her coffee, the saucer a soggy mass of cold foam. I stay a few minutes longer, twirling the spoon in the milky debris. I don’t feel safe. Not even from myself.

‘It’s just a sandwich.’

‘With us, there’s no such thing as just a sandwich.’ There’s a pause.
Because of the case
, I tell him silently, defensively, aware it will sound even more so if I say the words out loud. I shouldn’t have picked up, but I couldn’t keep myself in check as strictly as I normally do. My conversation with Annie has been running around my head all morning, a shape-shifting animal, all claws and teeth, its form constantly changing. I know I could talk to Judith, but I don’t necessarily want to hear what she has to say. When I saw her earlier in the week, she was visibly relieved I was contemplating making a grateful exit – the fact Annie’s talked me round so easily is unlikely to impress her. Which leaves only one person I can discuss it with, however opaquely.