chapter seven
‘Lara! Apparently you were phenomenally impressive.’ Jeremy smiles at me. ‘Thank you. You see? This is why we had to poach you back from deepest darkest Devon.’
‘Cornwall,’ I say quietly. He ignores me, shaking his head and smiling to himself.
‘You know, Lara. There’s no way we’re going to let you go after six months.’
I leave work feeling happy. This, I think, is where I belong. This is what I’m good at. I love doing a job that stretches me. I stayed up for most of the night preparing for that, and it is appreciated. Jeremy is the one who agreed to have me back for this project, and the fact that he is so pleased with what I am doing makes me glow. The best thing is that I know he is right to be pleased. I went to a meeting to talk about our development and stood up in a room full of people who despise the concept of ‘luxury flats’ and talked them all around. We have now lost a significant degree of local opposition.
I even feel good about Olivia. I am going to tell her, I vow. Tonight we are going to be busy. Tomorrow I will tell her that I’m going to leave and find my own place to live.
I am heading straight to the restaurant. There is no need to change, but I nip into the work loos before I go, pull the hairpins out of my hair and shake it loose. It is shorter like this than people think it is, reaching only just below my shoulders. For a second, I try out a fringe, like a child experimenting. I pull a strand of hair above my forehead, and let its ends hang down. It looks horrible.
When my hair is brushed and shiny, I pin it back up. This chignon thing has become my default style. Anything else looks odd now. I started doing it when I started work, in my twenties, because it made me feel like a grown-up, and I never really stopped. Twisting my hair into place and sticking six pins in it is second nature. It got a lot more casual when I wasn’t working; but now it is back in its full professional glory. It is crucial for me to look impeccable at work; and I enjoy that more than I could ever admit to anyone.
My work shoes are my best ones, red and high, and I am excellent at walking in them. The rest of my outfit is as boring as it usually is, but my shoes are always special. I have two red pairs now, plus a black pair and some yellow ones. People look twice at my feet, and I like that. I worked hard to learn how to walk on tiptoes, and it is a skill I treasure. Sam thinks it is ridiculous, and he is, doubtless, right. All the same, it pleases me.
I redo my eye make-up and put on lipstick, throwing the piece of tissue paper with smudged dark red kisses on it into the bin. As I’m on my own, I do a quick check of my purse: I always have cash, just in case, and my stash of it is safe and growing. I tell myself I will never need an emergency fund; but all the same, it makes me feel secure. I never tell anyone about it, because I know it would sound crazy.
I have known for years that I am in danger. You don’t get to do what I did and walk away unscathed. He is out of prison, and one day he will come to track me down; because I was the only one who got away.
I wish I could tell Sam, or Guy, or someone. It’s too late to mention my past to Sam, and he would never believe it if I tried. I can’t tell anyone else if I haven’t told my husband. I am stuck.
When I am in London, I imagine eyes following me in a way I have never done in Cornwall. I tell myself, again, not to be paranoid. There are enough problems in my real life, without my adding imaginary ones.
Dad is taking us to Pizza Express, again. Of all the restaurants in London, that is his favourite. He has taken us to Pizza Express on every possible occasion, ever since we were small, and he did it on my first week in this job: I spent an evening being bright and cheerful while Olivia, I later discovered, live-tweeted the entire evening with variations on ‘yawn’ and ‘zzz’, hashtagged with the word #family.
We used to complain about dad’s restaurant myopia, quietly, just Olivia and me. Moaning about having to go to Pizza Express all the time gave us some of our few moments of sibling bonding.
‘Can’t we go for a curry?’ Olivia would mutter.
‘But they don’t do dough balls at the curry house!’ I would whisper back, feeling wicked and transgressive.
‘I know! And he’d never get his American Hot. He’d get … other hot food instead. More interesting hot food.’
‘That would not do at all.’
It soon degenerated into sniping, but those conversations give me some of my happiest childhood memories. I tried to do it again with Olivia this morning.
‘Pizza Express, hey?’ I said, looking at her speculatively. ‘We haven’t been there for several weeks.’
She shrugged. ‘If he’s paying, I’m there.’
The shutters were down. The shutters have not risen, even a chink, not once.
I get there first. The young waitress smiles, ticks our booking off on her chart and leads me to a table by the window. I sit and look out at Charlotte Street, wondering how much a little flat in this part of London, Fitzrovia, would set me back. More money than I could possibly afford, for certain. I try to imagine myself telling Sam that I’m spending (and I have to pluck the figure from thin air) fifteen hundred pounds a month, plus council tax and bills, on renting a studio in central London. That is not a conversation I would be able to initiate.
I love this street because it is almost entirely lined with restaurants. If it were up to me, we would be at the Indian vegetarian place up the road, but it is not, and that is fine. I check my phone. Sam has texted me good luck for this evening. I reply quickly, and then, as I press send, see my parents walking past the window and coming into the restaurant.
I stand up and plaster on a big smile. I wish I could kick back with my family, stop putting on a front, be myself. But I am far more myself when I am at work. I am most of all myself, I think suddenly, when I am drinking on the night train home. Guy is in my head again, and I push him away.
‘There she is!’ says Dad. As I look at him, I notice, as I always do, how old he is. In my head he remains about forty, and whenever I see him I have to fast-forward through time, twenty-five years, to the present day. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and slightly stooped now. His hair is grey and slightly longer than it should be in (I think) an attempt to preserve the fine head of hair of which he was always so proud. He is also morbidly obese, but we never mention that.
His eyes, though, are as piercing as ever. They strike fear into me still. I look at him and I crave approval.
‘Hello, Dad,’ I say, and kiss him on the cheek.
‘Lara.’ He smiles. ‘You are looking extremely well. Your sister’s not arrived yet, then?’
‘Not yet. Hi, Mum.’
My mother is blonde and beautiful, but she is also opaque, unknowable, and the least maternal woman imaginable. I rarely give her a moment’s thought. For my whole life she has done as she has been told by Dad. I have no idea what goes on in her head, or, behind closed doors, in their relationship. She is a woman who toes the line. I slightly despise her, while Olivia openly and rudely scorns her.
‘Hello, dear,’ she says, and we all sit down. Entirely predictably, Dad orders a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, his standard Pizza Express tipple.
‘You looked tall just then.’ He leans around the table to look at my feet. ‘I thought so! How on earth do you walk in those things?’
‘I’m used to it. I like them.’
He shakes his head. ‘Women! Your mother’s never gone in for that sort of thing. The whole “ladies love shoes” gene passed her by entirely. You carry them off, though, darling, you really do.’
‘Lara carries everything off,’ Mum agrees, her tone as mild as it always is and always was.
‘She does.’ He smiles at me. ‘So? Ready to chuck it in and run back to Cornwall? Or ready to drag Sam to the city?’
I pout as I ponder this. ‘I’m enjoying work,’ I tell him. ‘Sam hates me being away. He wouldn’t move up here, though. I’m happy as I am for now, but I know that’s selfish because Sam’s not happy at all. I’ll do this and then settle back in Cornwall. Probably.’
‘Hmm.’ He is looking at me with his piercing eyes, but he does not pursue this any further. ‘Leon’s coming along later, by the way,’ he adds, and this cheers me up.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ Olivia takes the empty seat at our round table. It is directly opposite me, between our parents. I look at her, then quickly away. She has done something to her hair, so it is spiked up a little bit on top. In her red and white striped Breton top and tight black jeans, she looks (as ever) like someone from a magazine. Her eyes are rimmed with kohl, her lips bright red.
‘Olivia,’ says Dad. He doesn’t stand up, because she forestalled that by sitting down so quickly, but he leans across and plants an awkward kiss on her cheek. ‘Good to see you. Have some wine.’
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I’ll get a Peroni. If that’s allowed.’
‘Of course it’s allowed.’
They say nothing, but their eye contact is challenging and exclusive. It never takes long.
Now that Olivia is here, conversation becomes stilted. Dad makes a point of looking at her shoes, and wordlessly comparing her tatty-yet-cool Converse with my shiny red heels. Olivia bristles. Mum drinks quickly and fiddles with the stem of the glass so much, in her anxiety, that she knocks it over and smashes it. Dad smoulders with fury and raises his voice at the waiter who comes to clear it away. I try to smooth things over, with him, with Mum, with the waiter. It is a perfect microcosm of the way our family life has always worked.
As a child, I lived in a constant state of heightened anxiety. I knew that, in Olivia’s eyes, I was the chosen one, and she, by implication, had been discarded. I courted paternal approval, terrified that one day I might accidentally do something horribly wrong and that Olivia and I might change roles in his eyes.
Dad, though, has never wavered. He has always liked me, always approved of what I have done, appreciated my work, liked the way I have lived my life.
No one knows, not even Mum, that I single-handedly bailed out his business, years ago. We never talk about it. He never paid me back. And no one, not even my father, knows that if I had not bailed him out, I would not be uneasy and scared now, every time I imagine someone spying on me. He never asked where the money came from; I have always assumed his instincts informed him that he was better off not knowing.
It was always going to catch up with me, one day.
I look at Olivia across the table, at her petulant mouth and her sulky face, and I am fourteen again.
I got home from school that day as usual. I never dawdled, but walked sensibly with my sensible friends because, even though Dad was at work, that was the behaviour he expected. When I got home, I went around to the back of the house and let myself in at the back door as usual.
‘I’m home,’ I called, and put the kettle on; I was self-consciously making an effort to start to drink tea. I took out a mug and the tin of tea bags. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I called.
‘Yes please,’ said Mum’s voice from somewhere in the house. We lived in Bromley, in the house that is still the parents’ home, an ugly Edwardian place. It looked like nothing from the outside, but inside it was strangely huge. I made us both tea, and took mine to the kitchen table, where I started my homework.
‘Tea’s in the kitchen!’ I called. ‘Shall I bring it to you?’
‘No, darling. I’ll be right down.’
Olivia is right. I must have been insufferable: I was so desperate for ongoing approval that I never, ever risked transgressing in any form at all.
Mum came down, smiled vaguely at me, and took her cup of tea.
‘All right?’ she said.
‘Fine,’ I assured her.
‘Any sign of your sister?’
Both parents call Olivia
my sister
when they speak to me about her. They always have done. She said once that it is because they cannot bear the intimacy of speaking the very name they gave her. She might be right.
‘No. I haven’t seen her.’
I was two years above her at school. Our paths rarely crossed, and when they did, we carefully ignored one another. She was generally around the fringes of the school grounds, smoking with the cool crowd. I was more likely to be found in the library.
‘As long as she’s back by five. Your father’s coming home early today. He called to say so.’
We both looked at the large clock that hung in the middle of the wall. It was quarter past four. Neither of us said anything.
Dad’s key sounded in the front door at three minutes to five. I kept on with my homework, sitting up straight at the dining-room table like a good girl, but my heart was not in it. I was starting to worry, not only about his fury and its consequences, but about Olivia’s safety.
He came in beaming. At this point he really was in his forties, and he was tall and strong, in his prime. He was only slightly fat.
He kissed the top of my head. ‘Doing your homework? Good girl. What is it? Anything your old dad can help with?’
We discussed long division for a while, before he looked at the ceiling, signifying upstairs, and said: ‘And where is that wayward sister of yours?’
Olivia was only twelve. She was banned from doing anything other than coming straight home from school.
‘I’m not sure.’ I did not dare to attempt to lie for her.
‘She’s not home?’
‘Umm. Not sure. I don’t think so.’
‘Victoria!’ Victoria is Mum’s name. It suits her. She needs a formal, unabbreviated name. Like her namesake, she is rarely amused.
Once he had definitively established that she was not back from school, he went straight out to his car. Twenty minutes later he was back, a sulking twelve-year-old in tow.
‘You can go to your room and stay there,’ I heard him say to her, in an offhand way, as they walked through the door. ‘But first, you need to come and see this.’
Then they were in the dining room with me. Olivia was staring at the floor, the epitome of sulkiness.
‘I can’t be bothered with your behaviour, young lady,’ he told her. ‘You can stay in your room until morning, but other than that, this is going to be its sole consequence.’ He took out his wallet, opened it, and peeled out a stash of notes. ‘This is your allowance for the rest of the year, Olivia. Twenty pounds a month, nine months to go. One hundred and eighty pounds. Why would I pay you when you behave like this? Should I give you an “allowance” for ignoring even the simplest of rules? Of course I won’t be doing that. Lara, on the other hand, came straight home from school and started her homework. As she always does. Not only does Lara’s allowance remain unchanged, I’m giving her this on top of it.’