Breaking and Entering (19 page)

‘So the birthday girl's sticking to her guns then, and refusing to honour us with her presence?'

‘She'll … come down a bit later, I expect.' Daniel excused himself to Brian, grabbed a plate of cakes and started passing them round. Whatever happened, they must avoid the subject of Pippa. There had been quite enough fuss as it was: rumblings of disapproval, cluckings of concern, whispered speculations about how and where she was.

Alison took an almond slice, patted the arm of her chair. ‘Slow down, Daniel, for heaven's sake! You've been charging round like a steam engine the whole afternoon. Come and sit beside me and tell me something riveting!'

Okay, he almost said, it's my mistress's birthday too, today, but the only present she's received from me is a short and business-like note informing her that the affair is over.

He could just picture Alison's face – its prurient excitement, or malicious curiosity, or perhaps simple disbelief that stolid worthy Daniel could ever have got involved in an affair. What
he
was finding incredible was that he had absolutely no regrets about sending that curt note, though it did require a huge effort on his part to keep his mind off Juliet entirely. Wounds could easily bleed again if you started picking at the scabs.

‘So I take it nothing very enthralling's been happening in your life?' Alison prised an almond from her cake, nibbled it fastidiously.

‘No, not really – unless you count renegotiating the house insurance! But how about you? How are the drawings coming on?'

‘Oh, they're going fantastically well. I only wish I had a bit more space. But we're doing just the one brochure, you see, for several different palaces, so a lot of what I sketched on Wednesday had to be left out. By the way, what's all this with Pippa? Penny told me she's more or less stopped speaking. I must say I find it hard to imagine any child clamming up like that, but don't you think it's wrong to let her get away with it, and just sulk upstairs in her room? If she was my daughter, I'd insist she showed her face, if only out of common courtesy.'

She's
not
your daughter, Daniel stopped himself from saying, recalling his promise to be on his best behaviour. ‘She hasn't been too well,' he explained, in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone.

‘Yes – so Penny said. Has she seen the doctor?'

Daniel nodded. ‘Several times.'

‘And what did he have to say?'

‘Oh, something about her age, and maybe a depressive reaction following her illness. Apparently these viral things can leave you feeling really low, mentally and physically.'

‘Yeah, but refusing to speak's a pretty extreme reaction, I'd have thought – I mean, more than just the normal adolescent glooms. Didn't he suggest that she ought to see a psychiatrist or someone?'

‘No,' said Daniel tersely.

‘Well, what about school? Aren't her teachers bothered?'

‘Yes, of course they are, but they think it's best to play the whole thing down. It may be just a phase, you see. Though I must admit I'm concerned myself about all the work she's missing.'

Alison laughed sardonically. ‘You would be, you old clever clogs! I suppose you're worried that she won't get her PhD until she's fourteen and a half!'

Daniel bit back a retort, mumbled something about going to fetch a knife to cut the cake. In fact, he was going straight up to see Pippa. How could they cut the cake or light the candles, carry on this fatuous charade that everything was fine and dandy, when the most important person was missing from the ceremony?

His steps began to falter as he approached her room. He would only be intruding, and what was the use of continuing the argument (one-sided and therefore futile) they'd already had this morning? He stood uncertain on the landing, listening to the voices rising from downstairs. He could also hear a noise in their bedroom – a muffled sort of crooning sound. Mystified, he peered in through the open door; immediately ducked back out of sight when he saw Penny in the wicker chair holding Lindsay's baby, humming softly while she rocked him in her arms.

He retreated to the bathroom, assailed by bitter memories of an earlier conflict he hoped he'd left behind. Penny had always wanted another child –
his
child, their child, a new life to complete them. He had dredged up every possible reason to dissuade her; had no desire himself to enlarge their perfect family of three. He still felt guilty about his obstinate refusal, knowing it was totally unfair, but how could he explain the tangled skein of jealousies and fears which engulfed him when he thought about the subject? He didn't want to share his wife with a demanding helpless baby, though that was purely selfish and not worthy of him anyway. There were other reasons – less shaming ones – which he could hardly put into words.

He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, noting how his frown-lines were becoming a permanent feature; mentally comparing Brian's relaxed and cheerful grin. Great to be a parent like Brian – approachable, affectionate – but what if he turned out more like his own father? His parents had conceived him late, almost as an afterthought, and he had always felt daunted by their high ideals and philanthropic work. His father had been frequently away, travelling the length and breadth of Zambia in his capacity as an education officer. As a boy, even as a teenager, he'd been frightened of that aloof and distant figure. His own life had seemed so puny – a timid, greedy, shallow life – compared with a man who was half despot and half saint. He couldn't bear the thought of any child of his feeling the same way, or accusing him (with good reason) of being too involved in his job.

He unlocked the bathroom door, walked slowly back to the bedroom, resolving to tell Penny how sorry and ashamed he was; swamp her in apologies, as he had eight years ago. Now, as then, he marshalled all his arguments, determined to convince her that he wasn't just a selfish brute, but had considered her daughter too. Pippa might well be jealous of a sibling, especially one who was more his child than she was, so surely he'd been right in thinking that the only reasonable compromise was to accept her as his own?

And I've
done
that, he pleaded silently to Penny. She's Pippa Hughson now, not Pippa Clarke. And you know I've made a will, for no other reason than to ensure that she'll inherit in exactly the same way as any natural child of ours.

His hand groped for his cigarettes, then realized they weren't there. He hadn't said a word yet, but was standing in defensive silence watching Penny rock the baby; her cheek against its face, its pudgy hand clasping at her pendant. He felt utterly superfluous, an intruder, a voyeur.

Penny raised her head and saw him, put a warning finger to her lips. ‘Have you escaped too?' she whispered, her doting gaze returning to the child. ‘I came up to change Simon, but then he went all sleepy on me and I hadn't the heart to disturb him. But I'm getting really desperate for a pee. Here, hold him for a moment, darling. I'll be back in two ticks.'

His first instinct was to resist, but before he could say anything, she had motioned him to the chair and handed him the bundle. He sat stiffly with the dead weight on his lap. He had never learned the knack of handling babies, and they never failed to rouse in him a whole set of different fears: fear they'd scream, reject him; fear of their vulnerability, their terrifying smallness; fear that he was freakish for not wanting one of his own. He stared down at the fuzz of reddish hair. In fact, this could be their child, the son they'd never had. Weren't men supposed to crave sons – to carry on their line, or to complete them or fulfil them or extend their individual lives? Anne Boleyn had been put to death for failing to produce one. So what was wrong with
him
?

‘That's better!' Penny said, returning from the bathroom, still straightening her skirt. ‘And now I'm about it, I think I'll change my shoes. These sandals of Ros's are pinching at the toes.'

He watched her balance on one foot, wrestle with the buckle, then kick the sandal off. At first he had found it distasteful that she and her sisters should swap their clothes so readily, wear each other's cast-offs, as he put it, but now he almost envied them that special sort of intimacy. You could only really share your clothes with people who were close; whose sweat and stains and body-smells you accepted as freely as your own. Perhaps he'd been wrong about Pippa's reaction to a sibling. Instead of being jealous, she might have welcomed another child, someone she could have turned to as an ally or a soul-mate, a support against the grown-ups.

‘By the way,' said Penny, rubbing her cramped toes, ‘Ros is pregnant again. Her doctor's just confirmed it.'

Daniel shifted the baby, which seemed to be slipping from his knee. Penny's tone had been studiously casual, but he could guess the depth of feeling she was struggling to conceal. He had never realized till this moment how acutely she must suffer every time she was presented with a newborn niece or nephew, without ever producing a new infant of her own. He stroked a tentative finger across Simon's downy hair, trying to imagine it erupting into Pippa's wiry mop. There was still time to change his mind. Penny was only thirty-one, three years younger than Ros. If he could somehow overcome his fears, they could actually conceive a child tonight. Penny would be ecstatic at the thought, and it would set the seal on his new start, his renunciation of the past – and Juliet.

Simon began whimpering and threshing about in his arms. Was he clutching him too tightly, or had he hurt him in some way? That was the whole problem – the way you could damage a helpless child and not have the faintest notion that you were doing anything wrong.

No, he
couldn't
change his mind. The risk was too great, and forty far too old for a nervous first-time father. ‘Look, I … I'm sorry,' he said bleakly.

‘Whatever for? You should be glad, you chump! Brian and Ros are over the moon! You know how they're always joking about wanting their full rugger team!'

‘No, I meant I …' Why bother to go on? There was no point in dragging up the past, repeating the same arguments, re-living the same fears.

‘You do say funny things,' Penny murmured, pulling on her moccasins. ‘There, that's better. Now hand me over Dozy-Drawers and I'll take him back to Lindsay. Aren't you coming down, darling? It must seem a bit peculiar – us both sneaking off upstairs.'

‘I'll just look in on Pippa, see if she's all right.'

‘Okay, don't be long. You know what we agreed – we'd get the party over first, then try to talk to her afterwards.'

He nodded. It wasn't a question of talking: he simply felt he ought to show her that she hadn't been forgotten. He stood outside her room again, as hesitant as before. If only he could get through to her, resume their usual dialogue. They had always been so close, had struck up a rapport almost from the start, reacting to each other at some deep unconscious level, so that he'd sometimes felt she was more his child than Penny's. But now he hadn't the remotest idea of what was going on in her mind. Had she sussed out his affair, and was responding with silent disgust, or did she hold him responsible for ousting her real father? Or perhaps it was less to do with him than with the fact that she'd reached puberty – the age of disillusion, when children no longer saw the world as a cosy, rosy place, or their parents as infallible. He remembered himself at thirteen, becoming more judgemental of the adult world in general; regarding his friends' parents with prissy disapproval on account of their various trifling misdemeanours. Maybe Pippa despised him for smoking (and had scant faith in his promise to give up), or found him introspective and bad-tempered. Once, she had thought the world of him – continually drawing pictures of him in her art lessons at school, or making ‘cakes' for him at home from greyish scraps of pastry, or presenting him with treasures such as a lop-sided desk-tidy, lovingly constructed from half a dozen toilet rolls and rather too much glue. But now she shut him out – literally as well as metaphorically.

He tapped lightly on her door, then opened it a crack, knowing that she wouldn't say ‘come in'. She was sitting on the bed, picking at her thumbnail, her pale face listless; her eyes fixed on the floor. He felt a rush of conflicting emotions: pity and protectiveness, annoyance and resentment, even self-reproach because he had failed in his resolve never to let his eyes stray to the vicinity of her breasts. Those newly developed breasts were an embarrassment to both of them. She did her best to hide them by wearing baggy tee-shirts, but they were both self-consciously aware that she was no longer Daddy's little girl. And yet her face was still so childlike, with its rounded cheeks and translucent fragile skin – no adolescent spots amidst the galaxy of freckles. She seemed a mass of contradictions: the stridently red hair at odds with her diffident expression; her coltish legs and bare and grubby feet contrasting with the womanly curves above.

He forced his eyes away; had to make a constant effort not to look at the changes in her body, but the fact that he should want to look worried and confused him.

‘D'you mind if I come in?' he asked, pitching his gaze somewhere between her ankles and the carpet.

She made the slightest inclination of her head; holding her hand in front of her face, as if even that must be protected from his scrutiny.

He positioned himself just inside the door. If he kept his distance, he'd seem less of a threat. ‘Do you want another cup of tea? There's plenty in the pot.' He noticed that she hadn't drunk the first one, and that the plate of sandwiches he had brought up earlier on had been left untouched on her desk.

‘No, thanks.'

Her voice was so low it was practically inaudible, but at least she had actually spoken. Some days she would say nothing at all, turning meals into endurance tests as he and Penny tried to keep the conversation going across her mutely miserable form. Weekends were still worse – their once gregarious daughter sitting silent in her room, utterly indifferent to what was going on in the house; refusing to join him in the garden or go shopping with her mother; apathetic even when her friends phoned.