Is it over so soon, after her stupid outburst in bed? Has she scared him off? He’d communicated with her from the very surface of himself in the morning and she had the feeling he was annoyed that she was cluttering up his daily routine: the showering with an astringent body wash (mint – she tried it and it made her privates sting with unnatural cold), the coffee, the dark neatness of his suit. If only she could undo it – maintain her reserve – she might be transformed in his mind into the perfect lover he almost had. Un-haveable Manon. She aches for Alan Prenderghast.
‘Dad?’ she says, propping herself up on her pillows, the phone to her ear.
‘Hello, lovely,’ he whispers. She hears him heaving in the bed, a groan in the background, and Una’s voice saying, ‘What sort of time d’you call this?’
Manon looks at her watch. It is quarter to eleven.
‘Hold on,’ he says. ‘I’ll take it in the study.’
She hears shuffling and the receiver goes down. Click. And then he picks up and his voice is expansive at last. ‘So, my darling girl, what’s the news?’
‘She pissed off again?’
‘No, Manon, don’t do that. Una was just dropping off, that’s all. Don’t … How’s things? How’s work?’
‘Things are all right,’ she says sadly.
‘Is the case getting you down? I saw on the news, that poor Reed girl. Stanton’s taking a lot of heat.’
He is always so very interested, the police his vicarious pleasure. She thinks to tell him the truth about Helena Reed, if only she could grasp where the truth begins and ends, how far her guilt seeps into the corners of it, because he would understand, would believe in her better self. He would tell her it wasn’t her fault while acknowledging that some of it perhaps was. They would be silent on the phone, their receivers pressed to their ears, and it would be honest.
‘Actually, Dad, I’ve met someone.’
‘Really?’ he says, and his voice is genuinely taken aback.
Christ, she thinks, I’m not that bad.
‘So, go on,’ he says.
‘His name’s Alan. Alan Prenderghast. He’s a systems analyst.’
‘A systems analyst?’ he says in the same voice he used to say, ‘It’s a hedgehog, is it?’ when she showed him her pictures from primary school. ‘What’s a systems analyst?’
‘I don’t really know. He lives just outside Ely.’
She could have added ‘drives a Ford’ as if she is saying Darcy, yes, Pemberley.
‘And you like him?’ asks her father, sounding incredulous.
‘Not that hard to believe, is it?’
‘No, no, I’m sure he’s very nice,’ he says.
Can’t he hear the wonder of Alan Prenderghast, her systems analyst from just outside Ely? With the nice glassware? And Nana the dog? Can’t he see how huge this is?
They are silent.
‘When can I meet him then?’ he says eventually.
‘When you grow some balls and come down to visit,’ she says, without malice aforethought, as Davy would have put it.
She pictures her father in his crumpled pyjamas, cupping the phone and casting furtive glances at the study door, surrounded by tartan with stag heads poking out from the walls like surprised intruders, as if he’s living some Highland fling as envisaged by Disney, except Una Simmons has the key to this particular hunting lodge. Una Simmons, their very own Macbeth of Moray, who finds ways in which his daughters – well, this daughter – cannot fit into their busy schedule, reasons why there isn’t room for them to stay at Christmas.
‘Spoken to Ellie?’ he says at last, a shot back across her bows.
‘No, Dad, I haven’t spoken to Ellie. Better go now, it’s late. You hop back into bed with Mein Führer.’ And she puts the phone down.
The feeling in their house had been that Margaret Thatcher was to blame, not just for record unemployment (‘fifteen per cent of the workforce,’ her father said, shaking his head, always behind a newspaper), but for the miners, of course, and for Murdoch breaking the print unions (a soreness close to her father’s heart), and also, in some nebulous way, what had happened in the Bradshaw family. It was all bad, Thatcher and motherlessness. Her father’s sadness, in abeyance while her mother’s forceful nature lit and burned the house, became their whole microclimate after she died. It was global – despair about themselves and the world. He sighed deeply at the news; he sighed at the Guardian and switched to the newly-launched Independent (‘It is, are you?’), but tutted even at that; he sighed at old photographs.
Ellie and Manon listened to Kate Bush in their bedroom – well, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, to be precise (‘Don’t Give Up’) and cried copiously.
The situation continued for a good five years, during which he said he was ‘raising the girls’, though he seemed mostly to be behind a newspaper, harrumphing. He switched back to the Guardian in a further state of disillusionment and became merely grumpy, muttering about the redesign of its masthead (dual font ITC Garamond Italic next to Helvetica Black! What were they thinking?). This seemed an improvement. He went back to writing at the Fenland Citizen, where he was editor (the staff having managed quite well during his Grief-Stricken Years) – book and film reviews mostly, or the odd travel piece when it was a one-nighter to Dublin or some such and the girls could be left alone.
Come 1997, their father began taking an interest in himself. He bought his first new items of clothing since the Seventies – a polo shirt and some chinos. He had a haircut, without being told. He began to whistle in the bathroom, to smile, and crack jokes. The root of all this did not emerge for many months and turned out not to be an organic process of healing but a woman called Una Simmons, who worked with him on the paper and wrote a household advice column called Simmons Solves. On the night of the general election, they travelled together to the printing presses in High Wycombe, ostensibly to make sure the correct front page went off stone, and the rest, as they say, was a Labour landslide. Things could only get better, so the song went, and they certainly did – for Manon’s father at least. And that was more or less when Manon lost him.
She puts the phone on the floor, plumps her pillow and reaches across for the dial on the radio.