Two Fridays in April (4 page)

And before she’d had a chance to get back to the cake, the doorbell had rung.

In the nightmare days that had followed his death she replayed his message incessantly, pressing the phone to her ear, drinking in the last eight precious words he’d addressed to her, inhaling them through every pore. When the message was automatically deleted a week later she was flooded with fresh grief, as if he’d died all over again.

And to add to her anguish, there had been no baby.

I can’t
, he told her before they got married. She’d known Una
wasn’t his from the start; he’d never made a secret of that.
I’ve been reliably informed
, he said,
that I’ll never be able to father a child
– and devastating as this news was, Daphne had gone ahead and married him anyway, because by then the idea of life without him was unthinkable. She’d put aside her yearning for a child because she loved him too much to be able to give him up.

She lifts her cup and drinks tea, and gets on with the day.

At one o’clock precisely she hears the beep of a car horn outside: punctual as ever.

‘Your chauffeur’s here,’ Joanna says, fingers continuing to fly across her laptop keyboard. Joanna joined the company a few months before the downturn, replacing Don who had retired. Late thirties, divorced and childless, with the bone structure to carry off her severely cropped marmalade-coloured hair, a tiny star tattooed inside her left ankle, and a younger boyfriend with some high-up job in Google, Joanna has a master’s in marketing and an Italian grandmother, and happens to be very good at selling houses.

‘See you later,’ she says, as Daphne pulls on her jacket. No mention of the anniversary from her either: forgotten it, or decided to avoid it.

‘Well,’ Daphne’s father says, sliding back into the traffic as she buckles her seat belt, ‘you doing OK?’

‘I am, not too bad.’

‘We’ll go home, yes?’

‘Yes, please.’

He doesn’t always bring her to his house when they meet
for lunch. Sometimes he parks the car and they walk down the street to Minihan’s for a pot of tea and a baked potato. If the weather is good they might get a sandwich at the deli and take it to the nearby park. But today home sounds good: she’s happy for the two of them to spend lunchtime in the house where she grew up, a five-minute drive from the estate agency.

He feeds her a soft poached egg sitting on a warm crumpet, their mutual comfort food of choice for years, and tells her about a woman he’s teaching to drive who refuses to touch the gear stick or steering wheel before cleaning them both enthusiastically with a tissue soaked in some kind of antiseptic.

‘Car smells like a hospital after her,’ he says. ‘I’ve tried spraying air freshener, but it hangs around for the rest of the day. Brings one of those wedge things too, to sit on. Says her chiropractor told her to get one.’

He’s been a driving instructor all his life: it was how he and Daphne’s mother, Isobel, had met. Taught her to drive when she was twenty-one, married her before her twenty-third birthday. Had his heart broken by her when she walked away from him eight years later, leaving six-year-old Daphne behind with him, deserting her daughter along with her husband.

‘I’m going to value a house this afternoon,’ Daphne tells him, dipping crumpet into the oozing egg yolk. ‘Bridestone Avenue – you know it?’

Isobel had run off with Con Pierce, who had drilled and filled the teeth of Daphne’s parents for several years until Isobel decided she preferred him to her husband. Mr Pierce the dentist, who’d visited Daphne’s junior-infant classroom once to tell them about his job, who’d used a giant toothbrush and a big
doll with enormous teeth and a head that flipped apart so he could show the class how to brush properly.

The runaways didn’t last: before the year was out the dentist was reunited with his wife and children, back living in the house he still occupies today, separated by just three streets from Daphne and her father. Within a month or two of his return he was once again gainfully employed in a new dental practice, the scandal of the past ostensibly forgotten by him, or at any rate folded up and tucked into some little-used part of his mind, like a pair of deckchairs leaning all winter against a lawnmower in a corner of a shed.

For several months and years he was ashamed enough – or possibly cowardly enough – to cross the road if he spotted Daphne or her father approaching, but eventually this practice was put aside. Now he gives a noncommittal nod whenever their paths cross – and while she suspects her father might be more forgiving, Daphne has perfected the art of pretending not to see him. Why should she acknowledge him after the part he played in breaking up her parents’ marriage? How dare he assume she’d want to interact in any way with him.

After the eggs are gone her father makes coffee.

‘Pity you can’t come to dinner,’ she says, spooning in sugar. He’s busy with lessons till nine, the brighter evenings extending his working day. ‘Do drop in on your way home for cake.’

‘I will,’ he promises, and she knows he’ll bring a present for Una. Doing the right thing like he always does, even if Una will hardly notice him there, even if she couldn’t care less whether he appears or not.

Doing the right thing when his wife walked out all those
years ago, careful to say nothing to Daphne that might poison her mind against her mother. Never confronting Con Pierce on his return to the neighbourhood – never once entertaining the possibility, Daphne bet, of punching the face of the man who had stolen his wife.

Doing the right thing all his life, except when he married a woman who subsequently showed herself well capable of doing the wrong thing.

Isobel didn’t come back when she and her fancy man parted company. She didn’t come back but she made contact, a week or so after word of the dentist’s return had reached Daphne and her father. There was a phone call one evening – he went downstairs to answer it in the middle of the bedtime story – and sometime after that there was an encounter that included Daphne, still aged six, wearing a green and white striped knitted dress. How does she recall it so clearly? She can see the white Peter Pan collar, the belt tied into a bow, the scalloped edge of its hem.

The meeting took place at a café in a newly constructed shopping centre on the far side of the city, almost four months after they had last laid eyes on Isobel. Apart from the dress, Daphne’s memory of the occasion is haphazard. Did she and her mother embrace on coming face to face? Did Isobel reach down to hug her? That part is blank.

What she does remember from that day are incidentals: Isobel’s over-bright smile whenever she caught Daphne’s eye across the café table; the squiggle of shiny white icing across the top of the apple Danish that sat virtually untouched on a plate beside her father’s mug the entire time; the wonderful softness of the unfamiliar rose-pink scarf draped across the seat
of the vacant chair next to her mother, when Daphne reached a furtive hand across to stroke it; the warm fuzziness of the tea-scented air; the rise and fall of neighbouring conversations; the muted clink of cutlery; the splatter of occasional laughter.

Nothing threatening, nothing unnatural – and yet her abiding sense of that day, whenever she thinks of it now, is overlaid with a fingernail-along-a-blackboard shiver of anxiety. Her childish subconscious maybe, picking up on the tension that caused her father’s nearside foot to jiggle ceaselessly during the half-hour or so that the three of them spent together.

She has no memory of what was discussed, just a faded impression of her parents’ lowered voices going to and fro above her head as she licked sugar from her fingers and pulled apart the jam doughnut she’d been presented with – but from then on there was a weekly phone call to Daphne, and an afternoon spent with her mother on alternate Saturdays, just the two of them, in the town twenty miles down the motorway where Isobel now lived.

The running order of these encounters never varied. A walk to begin with, weather permitting, around the shops on the town’s main street, during which a new hairband or book or toy would be purchased for Daphne: the rainy-day alternative to this was half an hour in the town’s library, with her mother reading aloud to Daphne from various picture books, and using considerably less animation than Daphne’s father. A visit to the cinema came next, to see whatever children’s offering was showing, followed by a meal in the café at the bottom of the street.

Daphne found the fortnightly episodes challenging. Her
initial loneliness and longing for the woman who had vanished abruptly from her life had long since morphed into a baffled wariness, and being thrown back into contact with her, without the reassuring familiar presence of her father, filled her with unease.

Sitting in the darkened, too-loud cinema only increased her edginess – afterwards she could hardly recall the title of what they’d seen, let alone the plot – and her normally enthusiastic appetite would be nowhere in evidence when whatever dish she’d ordered in the café was placed in front of her.

As far as she can recall, her mother gave no sign of being put out by Daphne’s lack of enthusiasm on these occasions; on the contrary, she seemed hardly to notice when her questions were met with monosyllabic replies.
So what have you been up to at school?
she would ask, and Daphne would scrabble around frantically for something to offer in response as her mother peered into a small mirror and dabbed with a napkin at the corners of her mouth, or thumbed a bright red crescent from the rim of her teacup, face turned towards the half-curtained café window.

There was never a suggestion of visiting Isobel’s home, wherever it was: the meeting point was always under a shop awning in the town’s square. Daphne never discovered – and neither, she assumed, did her father – what kind of living arrangements or lifestyle her mother enjoyed at that time. Similarly, the past was never mentioned: their conversations, such as they were, never travelled further back than the previous week, and largely involved Isobel asking questions and Daphne doing her best to answer them.

Her father invariably turned up to bring her home at precisely the time he had promised, and the sight of him standing at the café door, signalling the end of her ordeal, was always wonderfully welcome. To her enormous relief he never enquired about the afternoon as they travelled back to the city, but would usually suggest stopping on the way to feed the ducks at their local park – paper bag of bread already stowed in the glove compartment – or making a detour to the airport to watch the planes taking off and landing, something Daphne never tired of.

Her father was her constant. He had always been there, before and after Isobel’s departure. Reading her a story, or three, before she went to sleep, dabbing cream on a grazed elbow or knee, kissing better a bump on her temple. Singing her awake in the mornings with his improvised version of ‘Thank Heaven For Little Girls’ – for years she thought the real words were
Thank Heaven for Daphne Carroll
– bringing her to the doctor and the dentist when the need arose.

There were others occasionally – Nana Carroll, Granny and Grandpa Kingston. They’d call with new clothes or shoes, or a doll in a box. They’d talk in mumbles with her father and raise their voices to enquire of Daphne how she was getting on in school, and if she liked her teacher, and who her friends were. And there was Jane, who minded her in the afternoons till Dad collected her. But she was happiest when it was just the two of them.

The fortnightly mother-daughter sessions eventually came to a stop. There was no revolt, no argument that signalled the end of their encounters, nothing as dramatic or final as that. It was more a gradual drawing back on Daphne’s part, a cancellation
now and again when a birthday party, or a holiday, or an illness prevented their meeting. Every other Saturday slid into once a month, and slowly became even more fluid – until seventeen-year-old Daphne realised one day that she hadn’t come face to face with her mother in several weeks.

But the phone call survived, every Friday evening around eight or nine, and is still happening. They take it in turns to call one another now, and their conversations rarely last longer than ten minutes.

They meet occasionally for lunch too, always at Isobel’s invitation, which Daphne feels duty-bound to accept. The awkwardness of these infrequent encounters, the unacknowledged tension that hovers like an over-attentive waiter, brings Daphne back to the every-other-Saturday ordeals of her childhood – except that these days she’s rescued by work rather than her father.

It was at one of their lunches that Isobel revealed she was getting married again.

Alex
, she said.
He’s a lawyer, you’ll like him
– and two things occurred simultaneously to twenty-six-year-old Daphne: she wondered what her father would say when he heard the news, and she marvelled that her mother could find two husbands, when she herself had yet to find one.

In the event, her father heard the news with equanimity.
Let’s hope she’s happy this time
, he said, and not for the first time Daphne wanted to shake him, wanted to hear him rage, and curse the woman who’d thrown him away, thrown both of them away, so easily.