The Making of Us (45 page)

And Robyn rested her cheek against her mother’s shoulder and considered her sweet, loving parents, her gentle, beautiful boyfriend, her crazy best friend, and now her child-like brother and her quiet, elegant sister, and she thought that, yes, she was, most definitely, certainly, completely and totally, happy. And she smiled.

Maggie sat flat against Daniel’s sofa and allowed her body to leave a firm and undeniable imprint in the upholstery. Daniel was gone and would not be coming back. She no longer felt it was necessary to leave no trace of herself inside his home. Marc was upstairs, getting changed, and she was waiting to take him back to the hospice, where Daniel’s body had been prepared for burial.

When she’d got home from the hospice the night before, she’d been unable to switch herself into the state of normality necessary to find sleep. So she’d pulled out the carrier bags, the ones she’d filled at Daniel’s house a few weeks earlier, and begun to leaf through the notebooks. She had brought them with her today. She wanted to show them to Marc because they were written in French and because she thought they seemed, from what little she was able to translate, somewhat significant. Marc came downstairs a moment later and smiled at her. ‘I am ready,’ he said, ‘shall we go?’

She returned his smile. He was wearing a white shirt and beige trousers and looked fresh and scrubbed. But from his eyes she could see that he had quite possibly been crying. ‘I’ve got some things,’ she said, ‘for you to look at.’ She held up the pile of notepads. ‘I think they might be your brother’s journals. I was wondering … maybe you could have a look at them, if you thought that was appropriate? Maybe you could tell me what they’re about?’

She made two cups of coffee and brought them out on to the terrace a few minutes later where Marc was sitting in the shade of a red parasol, leafing through the books. He did not look up when Maggie emerged and his hand found his mug of coffee without any assistance from his eyes. Maggie sat gingerly on the chair next to his and stared into the distance. She waited until Marc was ready to talk and then she smiled at him. ‘So,’ she said, ‘anything interesting?’

‘Well,’ said Marc, closing a book and blinking at her, ‘these are his journals. They are very, how you say: sporadeek? Yes?’

She nodded.

‘But it seems that we can now solve the mystery of how my brother lived such a life –’ he gestured behind him at the comfortable flat ‘– without a job. It seems that he had a benefactor. A lady, called …’ he leafed through the book again to a particular page ‘… Bettina. It seems they had a long affair, and then she died and she left him this flat and all her money. It also seems, my dear Maggie, that my brother was very much in love with you.’

Maggie blanched.

‘Yes. He says it here: “Finally, I have found a woman with whom I could truly wish to grow old, a beautiful woman, a refined woman, a woman with class and style and a good, kind heart, and it is too, too late. Oh, Maggie, I do love you. I hope that one day I will tell you this, but knowing me, I will not.”’

Maggie gulped and turned away from Marc so that he could not read the expression on her face. She felt tears pressing against her eyelids, bruising and sore. She felt her stomach lurch, once with happiness at the fact of his love for her, but again with misery as she thought of what she’d lost. She waited a beat until the tears had been forced down and then she turned to Marc and smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘isn’t that nice? Oh, and how funny about the rich lady! Imagine that! Only Daniel,’ she said, ‘only Daniel could possibly charm a lady into leaving him her entire estate.’ She laughed, a nervous laugh. She was uncomfortable with this peeling back of the mysterious layers that had surrounded him. Maybe, she thought to herself, maybe she would rather leave him like this. A strange, sad and perfect memory. Maybe she should leave these journals with his twin, let him explore the interior life of his brother. Maggie didn’t want to know. No, she really did not want to know. Not now that it was too late to do anything with the knowledge.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we should probably get going. Let’s go and say goodbye to your brother.’ She held out her hand for Marc and he took it shyly.

‘Yes, Maggie,’ he said, ‘let us say goodbye.’

Lydia’s empty house echoed with the sound of her arrival. Juliette didn’t work on Sundays and Bendiks was out. Queenie ran down the stairs at the sound of her entrance and immediately began to love her, rubbing herself frantically against Lydia’s legs and smiling at her with delight. Lydia lifted the cat and carried her through the house, checking rooms as she went, checking them for change, for disturbance, and more than anything for signs of Bendiks. But everything was as she’d last seen it. Clean. Immaculate. Sterile.

Lydia continued her ascent through the house and then straight to her office. It was early afternoon and there was nothing else for her to do except work. She had a meeting the following week with a client. She had been neglecting her work these last few days. Now that everything had been tied up, her siblings found, her father dead, her history explicated and her life made sense of, it was time for her to get back to real life. She pulled a file from her cabinet and laid it open upon her desk. Then she booted up her laptop and scrolled through some e-mails, and then she sighed, raised her eyes to the ceiling and tried to remember just exactly what it was she was supposed to be doing. It all seemed so unconnected to the person she’d been for the past few days, so far removed from the woman who’d got stoned with her little brother and sister on a terrace in Bury, who’d slept on the floor like a teenager on a sleepover, who’d had sex in a sauna and drunk wine with an uncle in Wales.

For years she had lived and breathed her work. For years her mind had been a clean and ordered thing, spacious and open-plan as a minimalist loft apartment. Now it felt like a crazed attic, piled full of intriguing boxes and odd treasures. The inside of her head was now too distracting for her to turn any part of it to the matter of work. Half an hour after sitting down at her desk, she stood up again and decided to go for a walk. She glanced through the window and saw in front of her a place she’d avoided for months. She heard the sounds that chilled her heart: the high-pitched shrieks and cries of small children in a playground. She’d never really thought about her aversion to playgrounds, assuming it was connected with her ambivalence towards children in general. But now she knew exactly why she avoided them, and she also knew it was time to face that fear and overcome it.

She was halfway down the stairs when she heard a key in the lock of the front door and saw the outline of Bendiks through the opaque glass. She caught her breath against a burst of nervous energy and arranged her face into a smile. Bendiks looked at her with surprise as he came through the door. ‘You’re back!’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

She was thrown, as always, by his beauty, and felt a dull throb deep down inside herself that told her that her attraction to him had not waned even a degree in the light of his transgressions. ‘To see my dad,’ she said, quietly.

Bendiks looked confused. ‘But I thought your father was …?’

Lydia sat on a step and sighed. ‘No. Not that one. My real father. The donor.’

‘Wow.’ Bendiks stopped and rubbed his jaw. ‘Wow. That is a very big deal. How was it? Are you OK?’

She smiled and told him about the hospice and watching her father die for the second time in her life. Bendiks sat on the step below her and looked up at her with sympathy and compassion. ‘You are such a strong person, Lydia,’ he said, sincerely. ‘Really. You are amazing. Is there anything I can do? Would you like to talk some more? I am free tonight – maybe we could have dinner?’

Lydia tucked her hair behind her ear and nodded. ‘That would be good,’ she said. ‘If you’re sure …’

‘Of course I’m sure! I care for you, Lydia. And I want to be here for you …’ He paused then, and cast his eyes awkwardly to the floor.

Here it comes
, thought Lydia,
here comes something bad
.

‘Listen, Lydia,’ he began. ‘I, er, I have to tell you something. I am moving out …’

Lydia’s heart stopped for a moment and she blinked in surprise. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘It is nothing personal, I promise you. It is …’ He paused and looked at the floor while he formed his words. ‘It is me. I am weak. I have been spending again, Lydia. I have been building up new debt.’

‘Oh, Bendiks …’ Lydia felt herself soften with relief.

‘Yes, I know. I had one card left, that they didn’t cut up. And so long as I am living here, in this beautiful house, I can pretend that everything is fine. I can pretend that my life is good, that I am a successful man. But my life is not good. My life is stupid. I am stupid. So today I cut up this card. And I have put on to eBay all my things; my clothes and my shoes and my
toys
. All these
things
that I thought I needed. That I thought were important.

‘See, here …’ He pulled a carrier bag from between his feet and showed it to her. ‘I have bought a pay as you go phone. Ha! Like a teenager! And also, I have found a room, somewhere hideous, I can’t even remember the name of the place, something Park. It is in Zone 3, Lydia! But it is cheap and every morning when I wake up there it will be a reminder to me that I have to work hard and play fair and stay within my means if I ever want to be the kind of man who could live in a house like this on my own merits. You see? So, no, it is not personal. I have loved living here, with you. It has been an honour. But I have to do this if I am to lead a good life.

‘Oh, and also …’ He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet. ‘Here,’ he said, pulling notes from it. ‘One hundred and fifty pounds. Yours, I believe?’ He held the notes out towards Lydia and she stared at them mutely. ‘Take it,’ he said, ‘please.’

‘No, Bendiks, honestly. I don’t want your money.’

‘It is not my money, it is
your
money. Which I took from you in bad faith, knowing that I was not in a position to repay you. But this is the money I got for my phone. And I want you to have it. So that I can sleep at peace tonight …’

Lydia continued to stare at the money. She didn’t need it. She didn’t want it. But she knew, for Bendiks’ sake, that she should take it. ‘Thank you,’ she said, holding the notes in her hand. ‘You didn’t have to. But thank you.’

‘No, Lydia. Thank you. Thank you for being so kind to me. And thank you for, well, you know …’ He smiled shyly. ‘And I hope, you know, that we’ll still see each other. If that’s what you would like? Because I would like it. I would like it very much.’

Lydia looked at him and thought,
Yes
. Yes, I would like to see you again. I would like to have sex with you again. And even though I know that you and I will never be a serious item, that we will not get married and we will not live happily ever after, I hope that whatever happens we can always be friends.

‘Cool,’ she said, rubbing her elbows. ‘I can call you on your pay-as-you-go phone.’

‘Yes!’ Bendiks beamed at her and laughed uproariously. ‘Yes! I will give you my number!’ Lydia smiled. And felt all the tiny little bits of her life that had been floating around in a state of irresolution gently slot into place.
There
, she thought,
there. Now everything is as it should be. Now I can get on with it
. But then she remembered there was still one fragment of her life that she needed to deal with.

The playground was packed. It was four o’clock, the schools and nurseries had just emptied and the sun was high in a pale blue sky. She sat on a bench, deliberately facing towards the playground, and stared in awe through the bars.
Look at them all
, she thought to herself,
just look at them all
. Where did they all come from? What would they all become? Were they conceived in love, in duty, in passion, in a drunken blur? Did they know their fathers? Did they know their mothers? Did they have brothers and sisters? Maybe half-brothers, half-sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts. Each child represented a whole fascinating story of meetings and feelings and moments and consequences, and each child would go on to make their own stories too. It was mind-boggling.

Lydia had never noticed before the way the whole thing fitted together into a kind of vast network, how each individual slotted in and affected everything else around them. It had always been just her. Just Lydia. Nothing to do with anything or anyone, destined to have no story of her own. And that was why she hadn’t ever asked Juliette about herself, because that one single question would have brought forth a whole potential sea of other people to think about. That was why she’d got herself a cat even though she was a dog person. A cat didn’t expect you to be friends with it. And that was why she’d been so repelled by Dixie’s baby. Because Dixie was extrapolating herself, bringing forth new people and new stories and new connections. Procreating. The most natural thing in the world. Yet, for Lydia, for so long, a terrifying concept.

But now she could see where she fitted into this whole thing. She had connections and a story. An amazing story. A story unlike anyone else’s. She had a brother and a sister and a brand new, black-haired niece. She had another brother, buried tiny and snug in a quiet corner of her motherland. She had a housekeeper who was possibly a little over-protective and distrustful but with whom she shared a mutual fondness and respect. She had a kind-hearted uncle on her Welsh father’s side and a kind-hearted uncle on her French father’s side. And now she had a man who wanted her, who found her desirable and interesting. She had no mother and no father but she had so much more than most people.

She peeled off her cashmere cardigan and let the sun warm her bare arms for a while. She stared through the bars at the children in the playground, innocent and unaware of their own stories, slowly unfolding, leading them day by day to an unknown conclusion.

And then she thought of a small girl, growing bigger and bigger in a cottage in a village somewhere in the heart of Wales.

She thought of Viola Dixon-Parry, her best friend’s child, a baby she’d never even held in her own arms.