Kelly made a phone call to her mother.
‘I’m going away for a little while,’ she said.
‘Another holiday?’
Kelly hadn’t been thinking of it as a holiday, but she said, ‘Sort of.’
‘It seems to me your life is one long holiday, Kelly. Going somewhere nice?’
‘The States.’
‘Oh really?’
Her mother now found this holiday a topic of passionate interest since she knew that romance and intrigue, a man, had to be in there somewhere.
‘Is Dexter taking you?’
‘I’m taking myself.’
‘But you’ll be there with Dexter?’
Kelly wanted to deny it. It sounded so obvious, so mundane when her mother described it and yet what was the point in lying; that only granted her mother even more power.
‘Yes,’ she conceded. ‘I’ll be there and Dexter will be there. But it’s not quite like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘It’s not some cheap holiday romance, like I met a rich American who swept me off my feet and now he’s taking me home with him.’
‘Then what is it?’
What indeed? How could she explain, to her mother of all people, that she felt compelled to go with a strange man to a strange place in a strange country, in order to look at a building that her father had built? Why couldn’t she say what was really on her mind? ‘Look Mother, I’m travelling six thousand miles on the off chance of feeling some sort of connection with my dead father. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the way I am.’ Yet how could she change the habit of a lifetime?
She might also, although only if she and her mother had been two completely different people, have asked her if she knew anything about this strange house in the Californian desert built for the Dexter family, the Cardboard House, as she now knew it to be called. Yet it seemed obvious that her mother didn’t know anything. If she’d known then surely she’d have mentioned it at some point over the years. As family secrets went it seemed quite devoid of shame or embarrassment, yet it appeared to be a secret her father had kept totally to himself. Then again, another, a better, daughter would no doubt have wanted to share this discovery and revelation with her mother, whereas Kelly wanted to hug the information to herself, to wrap herself in a private intimacy with her father.
‘You’re right, Mother,’ it’s a holiday romance.’
Her own reasons for subterfuge were simple enough to understand, but her father’s seemed far less explicable. She could come up with possible reasons but she couldn’t tell which ones applied. She could see there was a neatness, a philosophical purity in being the greatest modern English architect never to build a building. It had more clout, more cool, than being an architect who only ever built one building. But another, more uncomfortable, possibility was that perhaps this building in California just wasn’t very good. It looked fine in the photographs and as a maquette, but maybe it didn’t work in reality. Perhaps it had been a failure and her father had simply wanted to forget about it.
Kelly said to her mother, ‘You know when you said that Dexter reminded you of Dad, what was it about him?’
Kelly’s mother tried to sound dismissive. ‘Oh, I don’t know, something in his manner, perhaps something in his eyes. Nothing very serious.’
‘I realize this is a silly question but did you think Dexter looked like he might be a bit … dangerous?’
‘All men are a bit dangerous if they’re remotely attractive. That’s why women are attracted. Not that women can’t be dangerous too.’
It sounded like a confession.
‘You thought my father was dangerous?’ Kelly asked.
‘Dangerous but not fatal. Not to me, anyway.’
‘And George?’
‘No, George wasn’t dangerous.’
It felt as though they were straying into an area of emotional revelation. Silence fell like a dropped blanket.
‘So you and Dexter are an item?’ her mother asked breezily.
‘I’ve slept with him if that’s what you mean, but as a matter of fact I don’t plan on sleeping with him again.’
‘So you’re flying to America to be with a man you’re not even going out with?’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘It’s all right, Kelly, I understand’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘All right then, I don’t.’
‘Good. I’m glad you realize that.’
‘But I don’t know why you’re so pleased not to be understood.’