This may have been true, but it was not cheering. I had wanted to give Alice the perfect life, and now I was not going to manage it. I had always pitied those people who had to talk about
my dad’s girlfriend
. I would now, sooner or later, have to explain to Alice that Jo was her stepmother, and that Oliver was her brother, and that we had not known anything about them until Daddy’s wife had tracked us down. She would have to find a way of explaining that to her friends.
My dad’s girlfriend
was nothing next to
my dad’s secret wife
.
My half-brother is two months younger than me
would also take some explaining. I wished Jo had told me the facts when she came calling. That is what she would have done in the Hollywood version, and we would have concocted a plan to get even with him, humiliated him horribly, and become best friends for life.
I knew that the situation was not her fault, but I hated the way she had handled it. She had tricked me. She had used me. She had insinuated herself into my house, armed with facts that I would never have suspected. I had liked her. She had manipulated me into liking her. In a detached way I admired her self-possession.
The worst thing about Jo was that, manipulative and sneaky though she clearly was, Matt had chosen her. He liked her better; loved her more.
The bath was small, but I lay back with my knees sticking up, and the water was hot and comforting. The TV was showing a terrible dubbed film, starring Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. I washed my hair with some horrible two-in-one shampoo from a tiny plastic bottle. I scrubbed my body clean. Then I wrapped myself in a towel and ordered a cheese and ham sandwich on room service. I forced myself to eat it. I called Bella and explained that I had not been able to make it through the storm and would be back in the morning. I lay on the bed and drifted in and out of sleep. At five o’clock I got up, washed my puffed-up face, and checked out. It was a cool, silent morning. I watched the sun rising as I drove home on empty roads.
The house was dappled with the early morning sun shining through the cherry trees. The morning air was perfectly still. A few birds were singing and there was a distant rumbling of an early tractor. Bella had locked up too well. All the shutters were bolted from the inside, and I could not get in. I walked round to the back garden and wished the builders had got around to making the windows there. The door was bolted. I was locked out. I sat at the little table where the terrace was going to be, and looked at my garden.
The house lifted my spirits a little. It was a beautiful house. I was proud of it. It was slightly renovated, and that had been my doing. I had done everything. The garden was looking good. I made a mental note to cut the grass. It was almost overgrown, and dandelions and daisies were pushing through everywhere. I walked over to the dahlias and pulled off their dead heads. I decided that we should get some chickens. Everybody else had chickens. I could hear a cockerel crowing.
The storm had gone and the air was fresh and cool. The sky was a pale, eggshell blue. The leaves on the trees were not moving at all. I walked around my garden. I was happy there. I was happy at that moment. I did not think I could live there for long, not as a single mother. I could not imagine myself being that isolated. It would be impossible to live here with no other adult in the house. It would, however, be silly to sell the house with the building work half done. Alice was about to go back to school for the autumn term. We would, I decided, stay until Christmas. Then we would sell the house and go straight back to Brighton.
I was desperate to see Alice. I went back to the front door, and banged on it. After a couple of moments, I heard keys turning in locks. The hinges creaked, and there she was.
‘Mummy!’ Alice shouted, lifting her arms to be picked up. I looked beyond her, to Bella, who looked sleepy and anxious. ‘Mummy! You’re home! I love you too much, Mummy.’
I picked her up. But when I looked at her eager face, everything changed. I didn’t see Alice. I saw Matt’s child. She was half Matt. All I saw was him.
‘I love you, too,’ I told her, fighting the horror. She was smiling and nuzzling me.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ she asked.
I didn’t answer. I handed her abruptly to Bella, ran to the edge of the road, and was violently sick.
Christa and Geoff arrived that afternoon with Bella’s Jon and the twins. They brought presents for me – perfume, body lotion, bubble bath, alcohol – but I barely noticed. They brought half the Disney Store for Alice. She wanted me to play with her. I told her that Felix and Oscar would like to see her new toys. She gave me a disappointed look before she trotted off to find her cousins.
I was desperately trying to get over what I was not feeling for Alice. I reminded myself that I had loved her creamy cheeks, her long lashes, her eyes. I stared at those features, but I could only see duplicity. Alice was her father. Loving her was supposed to be the most natural thing in the world for me. I tried and I tried. I couldn’t even join in an Incredibles game.
Christa hugged me. Geoff hugged me. They looked at each other. They looked at Bella.
‘Stop looking at each other,’ I told them. ‘I can see you’re doing it.’
Geoff laughed, too loudly. ‘Stop looking at each other? Any other house rules we don’t know about?’
I frowned at him. ‘Stop trying to talk about me without saying anything. I know what you’re doing. You’re making snap assessments of me and giving Bella meaningful glances. Just come out and say it.’
Bella rolled her eyes. ‘Emma. We’re all concerned about you. Mum and Dad are desperately worried. Nobody’s victimising you. Look. It’s very hot. Why don’t we all sit out in the shade and relax. Or you could have a nap. You’ve had a hell of a couple of days.’
‘I’ll be upstairs,’ I announced.
‘We won’t disturb you,’ promised Christa.
‘Disturb me if Matt phones,’ I decreed, and went to lie down before they all started looking at each other again. I lay on the bed trying to hear what they were saying about me, but all I could hear was a general concerned murmur.
I stayed in my bedroom until Bella sent Alice to fetch me down for dinner. Alice was barefoot in red shorts and a dirty white T-shirt. Her hair was damp and she was giggling.
‘Mummy,’ she said, climbing up on the bed as she always did. ‘We’ve been in the paddling pool. Oscar can kick the football into the top of the tree. Felix climbed up and throwed it down. Oscar can put his face in the water for a long time.’
She wriggled close to me, sweaty and happy. I closed my eyes and tried to capture my maternal instinct.
‘Felix can jump right over the ditch,’ she continued, as I lifted my arm and put it round her shoulders, as I normally did. ‘I did try but I did fall in.’ Alice lifted her leg into the air and showed me a livid red scratch down the side of her calf.
‘Did you cry?’ I asked her.
‘Yes. I cried and then I was better.’
‘Did someone kiss you better?’
‘Felix fetched Bella. Bella kissed me better and then Christa kissed me better and then Geoff gived me a Kinder egg and it had a witch inside.’
I studied her face as I pretended to be concerned and interested. Alice looked like me, but she had more of Matt in her than I had ever realised. She had his eyes. Her top lip was exactly the same as his top lip. I thought their ears were similar. The worst things, though, were the mannerisms. She held her head on one side like Matt. She said ‘It certainly is!’ in exactly the way he used to say it. Suddenly, she was a little Matt, and that meant she was treacherous and it meant I wanted to take it all out on her.
I knew that I was failing her utterly, just as Sarah had failed me when I was Alice’s age. I felt fatalistic, certain that the pattern had always been destined to be repeated. I now knew that, whatever she had tried to say, my mother had not loved me enough. I knew this because I did not love Alice enough.
Alice was curled up against me happily. I let her stay there because I knew I shouldn’t push her away. She chatted on, idolising her cousins, until there was a knock on the door, and Christa stood there. She looked at us cuddled up together, and smiled.
‘You two!’ she said. ‘It’s dinner time. Geoff’s made his special pasta for us. It’s quite an event. And it’s just about on the table.’
Alice sat up and bounced on the bed. ‘Come on, Mummy.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not hungry. You go without me. Enjoy the pasta. Tell Geoff I’m sorry to miss it.’
Christa frowned. ‘No, come on, Emma. You need to eat.’
‘I don’t. I’m fine.’ I looked at my aunt and I hardened slightly. ‘You have a nice family dinner. Alice will enjoy that. I’m still getting myself together here. Let me have a day or so to collect myself, hey?’
She sighed and nodded. ‘Of course. Take all the time you need. Come on, Alice. I’ve put a place for you in between Oscar and Felix. How does that sound?’
The beach was too busy. Even though it was September and the holiday period was officially over, this was a hot, sunny Saturday and Biarritz was packed. The
Grande Plage
was crammed with sunbathers, with topless women, small children, and surfers. Most of them looked happy, and those who didn’t look actively joyful still seemed to be calm and serene. I looked at them curiously. Being happy seemed a strange, deluded state. As I stared, I began to see that every single person was on the edge of a crisis. They smiled, they stretched, they felt the sand running through their fingers, but their lives were fragile.
There were too many people here. Fear assaulted me, and I stopped walking. I looked to Bella for help.
‘Sure this is a good idea?’ I asked in a monotone. A day out with three small children was, according to my sister, guaranteed to bring my focus back to the present. Today was supposed to pull me out of myself. Naïvely, Bella was counting on me to look at Alice playing on the sand and realise that I had been gravely neglectful of my little girl. She was assuming that the outside world was going to flick a switch and bring ‘the old Emma’ back.
I was sick of hearing about the old Emma. I did not like her.
This was the first time I had agreed to go out in three weeks. Jon and Christa had gone back to England to work within a few days of each other, but Bella and Geoff had stayed behind, with the twins. I supposed they were missing work but I never asked because I didn’t care. Every day, they tried to get me to snap out of myself. Every day, I disappointed them. I was rude to them constantly. When Alice had started back at school, I had gone with her, reluctantly, in the back of the car. At the school car park, I had refused to get out. For one thing, I was wearing my pyjamas, and my face was somehow at once both shiny and grey. For another, I knew that everyone would be gossiping about me. I sank down in the back seat so no one would see me, and I waited for Bella to take Alice in and hand her over to the capable hands of the teachers.
I had sunk into a pit. If I let myself think about where I was, it would have scared me, but because I simply existed from one moment to the next, I felt nothing. I saw no future. The past was ruptured and destroyed. Alice was a part of Matt and I could not bring myself to be her mother any more. Nothing mattered. I cared about nothing. The days passed by around me, and that was the only way I could exist. I identified with nobody apart from Sarah. I wondered if this was how her lows had been.
Selfishness was a revelation. I had divested myself of all responsibility, even for Alice. I kissed her when I had to, then pushed her away. I answered her questions in monosyllables, and let Bella chat with her. I had not fetched her milk or made her a meal in three weeks. I had not bathed her or washed her clothes or put her to bed. She was brought to me, each night, for a goodnight kiss, like a Victorian child. Then she was taken away and cared for. Bella told me she cried for me. Christa said she asked for Daddy. Geoff told me she was doing ‘just fine’. Even I could see she was confused. I told Bella to tell Alice that Daddy was working in London for a while. She rolled her eyes, and said that ‘obviously’ she’d already done that.
I took no responsibility for the builders, who had started working in earnest. I did not care if they saw me in pyjamas, with baggy jowls and bird’s nest hair. They managed to give me a wide berth.
I knew that Andy and Fiona had been coming round to see me. I knew that Coco had called. I had heard Bella speaking to her on the phone about me, in a mixture of English and French, several times a day. I refused to see anyone.
Bella and Geoff were torn between indulging me and trying to bring me back to my senses. Geoff was patient, probably because he was desperate to avoid confrontation. He buried himself in endless games with his grandchildren and left Bella to deal with me. Bella, I could tell, was itching for a fight. That week, she had marched into my room each morning, opened the shutters and said pointedly, ‘I’ll take Alice to school, shall I?’
I had rolled over and shut my eyes. I could not bring myself to give a fuck whether Alice went to school or not, beyond a vague feeling that it was better for me and for her if she was out of the house. I wasn’t going to take her anywhere. I sometimes laughed in Bella’s face at the idea that I might.
I generally levered myself out of bed later, when there was no one around. Sometimes I bothered to brush my teeth and wash myself. Sometimes I didn’t. I drank a bit of water, and ate if Bella forced me. I was somewhere different, somewhere I had never been before. I was aware that I was behaving strangely, but my capable self – the old Emma – steadfastly refused to come to my rescue. I could not snap myself out of it. I swore at Bella, and even at Geoff, when they tried to jolly me along with platitudes. As the weeks went by, I found myself keeping further and further away from Alice. I was certain that if she began even one sentence with the word
why
, I would have told her to fuck off. I knew I could not do that. Sometimes I saw her looking at me with hurt bewilderment. I always looked away.