Opposite me at a table outside a café on the south bank of the River Thames, Lydia sips a glass of red wine. ‘Do you remember when we were at school and we were asked to write an essay on the year 2000 and what the world would be like in the twenty-first century? I remember working out that I would be nearly fifty by then. I couldn’t imagine ever being that old.’ She laughs, making the wrinkles round her eyes and at the corners of her mouth look deeper.
She puts down her glass and gives me a look of appraisal. Then she says, ‘You’re still angry with me, aren’t you?’ She sounds irritated. No, exasperated is closer to it. She thinks I should be able to put the past aside. She thinks that because we’re in our seventies, the things that happened when we were young should no longer be coming between us.
‘Let’s order lunch,’ she says.
I look at the menu. The café was Lydia’s choice and everything is stupidly expensive.
‘Don’t look at the prices; I’m paying. Have whatever you like,’ she tells me.
She is still trying to patronise me. And then, as I look at her, thinking that as much as things have changed, they have still remained the same, it returns. A fragment from the conversation we had so many years ago. The one that sealed our differences and separated Zora, me and Harriet from Lydia for the next forty years.
‘It was Adam, my cousin Adam, who killed Cal. I had to cover it up, I didn’t have a choice.’
The waitress arrives at our table. ‘I’ll have the chargrilled chicken paillard with steamed red quinoa,’ says Lydia. ‘And a side salad – no dressing on the salad.’
I order a fancy version of fish and chips. I wait until the waitress has gone before I speak again. I am not struggling to keep up; this is one of my good days. ‘Why did you testify at the trial that it was Christopher Walker if it wasn’t? Why didn’t you tell the truth?’
Lydia lights a cigarette. ‘The police made me lie. Don’t you remember?’ There is a pause and then she adds, ‘And I knew I couldn’t ruin Adam’s life for one unlucky punch. How could I have done? I’d have had no one then, not once Cal had gone. Christopher Walker would never have made anything of himself. He would never have turned his life around; what use was he to anyone? Adam was at Cambridge; he wasn’t a criminal but they would have sent him to prison. Look what he achieved. He got a double first. He became a Cabinet minister. He was a writer, he won awards, everyone said how gifted he was. His life really meant something – until that photograph was in all the papers.’
‘That woman who hit me – Penny? She was Adam’s husband?’
‘You mean Adam’s wife. I’m sorry she attacked you like that. Adam wanted to know how the papers had got hold of the photograph so I said you and Zora must have dug it up without my knowledge. I couldn’t tell him the truth; I would have lost him.’ Lydia is quiet for a moment and then she says softly, ‘Only I did lose him, of course. I lost him to drink in the end. You have to understand, I didn’t mean for Walker to go to prison, of course I didn’t. I thought if my testimony was weak enough, he’d get off.’
‘He fitted all the stereotypes. His guilt was assumed by everyone from the time of his arrest.’
‘Perhaps. And I’m sorry about that, but what else could I have done?’
Lydia looks at a boat that’s slowly making its way up the river. Tourists will take photographs of one another from the upper deck. We will be captured in the background, barely discernible, right on the margins of the picture. There will be two little dots, not quite recognisable as people. I finger the strap of my camera case but I don’t take a picture. I no longer want to remember Lydia.
There is a long silence. Then Lydia says, ‘Adam was so angry with me for getting pregnant. It was none of his business of course, but men thought they had the right to interfere back then.’ She drains her glass of wine and adds, in a low voice, ‘Still do, a lot of the time.’
Cal is bleeding. His head is covered in blood. An unlucky punch, the barrister says. Zora is trembling beside me.
Lydia slept with Cal. Lydia slept with Zora.
The waitress brings our food to the table. I eat mine slowly; I’m not really hungry. There is a question I want to ask but it keeps eluding me. Light is in my eyes. I shield them with my arm and look towards a duck that’s bobbing on the sunlit surface of the water. Then I know what I wanted to say: ‘Why did you sleep with Zora?’
Instead of answering, Lydia puts out a hand to bring the waitress to a halt as she hurries away from a nearby table. ‘Could we have another bottle of Shiraz?’ She turns to face me again and I think she’s going to speak but she takes her phone out of her bag and checks it for messages.
‘Lydia!’ I say to her.
The fierceness of my voice seems to startle her. She puts the phone down on the table; the lit screen turns dark. Then she says, ‘Why do you want to bring that up after all these years? What does it matter now?’
‘I have to know, Lydia.’ I think I’ve asked this question before but I can’t recall the answer.
There’s a photograph of Harriet. It should be in my wallet. I am relieved to find it there – these days there’s always the chance that something has been misplaced. Harriet is coming down a slide, clutching my old teddy bear. I place it on the table, in front of Lydia. It’s the very first photograph of Harriet I ever took. She is missing her mother. There are tears on her face.
Harriet screams and screams. She won’t be quiet. I have to phone Zora. Once Zora is here with me again, everything will be all right.
Lydia puts down her knife and fork.
‘Why did you sleep with Zora?’ I ask.
Lydia is quiet for so long that I don’t think she’s going to reply. She glances at the photograph of Harriet, sighs and says, ‘I’m not like you and Zora. You were always so incredibly close, you felt everything with such intensity, bleeding from every pore – Cal too. I don’t really feel very much, most of the time. It takes a lot to make me feel something. I just wanted to feel, even vicariously. Amy said something to me once: she said, “You have no feelings, Mother,” in such an accusatory way. Perhaps she was right. I always envied you and Zora your relationship with one another, with all its highs and lows. My life has been flat.’ She pushes the photograph away from her.
I push the photo back again but Lydia won’t look at it anymore. She picks up her knife and fork and prods at the quinoa, pushing it to the edges of the plate. ‘When I was young with Joyce, it was all just flat. It wasn’t that different with my father; we barely spoke to one another. I knew next to nothing about him as a person. I couldn’t have told you what was important to him – apart from his rather dubious business deals, of course. Did you know that he and his brother – Adam’s father – were in business together? They were so alike. I suppose the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in many respects. When Adam hit Cal, it wasn’t out of rage. It was cold. You couldn’t even describe it as moral outrage about my pregnancy, though he convinced himself it was. He wanted to teach Cal a lesson, he said, and he’d been fired up by that speech of Enoch Powell’s. He gave me all the usual spiel about immigrants taking over, but I doubt if he really cared about that. It was more that, in taking action, as he saw it, he was able to see himself as significant, and not the rather hollow person he actually was. That was how we functioned as a family.’
The waitress brings the wine to the table. Lydia pauses to take a few sips. Then she says, ‘Being pregnant changed things for a little while. Everyone was so critical, so harsh in their judgement of me, and I think I felt that, and it was good, in a funny sort of way. And then after Harriet was born, and after the trial finished, it was back to flatness again, feeling nothing. When I left Harriet with you, it wasn’t because I was afraid I would hurt her, not in the way you must have thought I meant it in that letter I sent. I actually thought she would die of neglect, born out of my indifference. Indifference – that’s been the strongest emotion I’ve experienced for most of my life, if you can call indifference a feeling. Perhaps I’ve been lonely, Selina. Perhaps that’s why I agreed to meet you that day in the café. Perhaps that’s why we’re here now.’
Lydia is still speaking. I think I’ve missed something she said, but I’m not having any trouble keeping up – this is one of my good days.
‘But I’m not sure,’ she continues, ‘because I don’t really know what loneliness feels like. If you don’t know how an emotion feels, how can you know if you’ve felt it? Does an emotion actually exist in someone if it’s not felt?’
Sometimes, when I’ve lost the words, all I have is feelings. They envelop me. They offer comfort, of a sort. When I feel, even when I feel afraid, I know I’m still connected to the world outside myself.
I put the photograph of Harriet back in my wallet.
Lydia looks at me. She’s wanting absolution again. ‘When I slept with Zora I think I was trying to make sure she would always want me, always need me in her life. And I knew it would stir things up, especially when I got with Cal. As long as you and Zora were at odds with one another, one of you at least would always have to turn to me. In part, that’s why I decided against an abortion. You and Zora would be the baby’s aunts, so you would always be in my life, one way or another. Loneliness is dull. Flatness is dull. It sucks the life out of you slowly, like the cancer that’s destroying my lungs.’
Lydia gets out her purse. She wants to pay the bill. ‘I gave you that photograph, remember? The one my father kept? The one of Adam in that ridiculous uniform? I did it out of my friendship with you and Zora, and for Harriet. And in the end, I lost Adam because of it. I lost the only person who knew what it was like for me when we were growing up. He and I had the same memories – family birthdays, family Christmases. He even remembered my mother. He died young – far too young – because of everything he lost when that photograph was published. I wanted to help you all, and I lost Adam because of it. I lost you and Zora too, and my eldest daughter. You’re the oldest friend I have. We won’t lose touch again, will we, Selina? We will always be friends, won’t we?’
We were friends once, Lydia, Zora and me. I put my share of the bill on the silver tray and walk towards Waterloo station.