Elisabeth never broke down, just spoke slowly, mechanically, for the first time ever, of the events on the last day of her honeymoon, and as she spoke she felt like it had happened to a different girl, in a parallel life. She never faltered, even as she described to her daughter how she hadn’t screamed, because of the knife, how much it had hurt, how she had run back to the cottage and locked herself in the bathroom, shouting through the door that she’d just fallen over, that she was fine; how she had scrubbed at herself, had screwed her torn costume into a ball and disposed of it later in the dustbin; how she’d finally come out, smiled, dressed, cooked dinner, but said sorry, she was too tired for anything else tonight, after all. She’d been too tired for anything for weeks, apparently. Elisabeth told her daughter how much she desperately hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, had wanted to be sure she wasn’t, before she resumed anything like that with her poor bewildered husband. But then when her period hadn’t come she’d been terrified, and she’d told Alan she didn’t want to have a baby, and she’d even tried to abort it (abort me, Juliette thought), but it hadn’t worked, and so she’d suggested they have it adopted, and her husband had gone mad and said no. But he gave in, in the end, Elisabeth had been so insistent, and even though they arranged the adoption she thought secretly she still might keep it – what were the chances of it being the rapist’s rather than her husband’s after the honeymoon they’d had? But when the baby had been born and she’d seen that unmistakable curly red hair, even at birth, that had been it. It had destroyed her marriage, she told Juliette. She left unsaid what it had done to her.
Juliette tried to process what Elisabeth had told her. She and Camilla had guessed right: her father was a rapist. She, Juliette, was a product of rape, a mistake, the end result of a vile act, an unnatural aberration. As Elisabeth looked bleakly, helplessly at her daughter, Juliette felt like she was brittle, might even break.
Juliette thought of her own husband then, with whom she had shared a bed for so many years, raping her best friend long ago in America. She’d known for two months now, since the night of the picnic, when Renée had screamed it out through the trees and across the water, that it was Stephen who had raped her, not the stranger she’d always claimed – although he’d tried to as well – before collapsing in hysteria. Juliette had been trying to deal with the fact that her husband was a rapist, and now it turned out her father was one too.
Juliette sat for long empty minutes in the kitchen of her mother’s grim little council flat. To her astonishment she found that, in a place beyond the horror, she started to feel oddly exhilarated, free even – of guilt that she hadn’t ever really loved Stephen, at least not how you should love your husband; of rampant hatred for her mother, whose actions she could finally understand – and although she knew it was the shock (the pain of who her father was, what he had done, the way she’d come into the world not yet able to sink in), she felt in this moment a connectedness at last, an understanding. She felt desperately sorry for Elisabeth then, and for Renée too. She spoke gently.
‘So that’s why you were so against poor Mum having me.’
Elisabeth flinched at the word Mum and it surprised Juliette. Usually she didn’t react to things.
‘Maybe it sounds selfish,’ Elisabeth said. ‘But I didn’t want any reminders in my life. How could I look at you, and not think of how you were conceived? I tried to get Cynthia to understand, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell even her the truth – I felt so ashamed, and besides I couldn’t bear poor Alan to know – and when she wouldn’t listen, insisted on carrying on with the adoption, I just cut myself off from her and the rest of the family. I’m not proud of it, but it’s all I could think to do.’
‘But why did you have another child so soon afterwards?’
Elisabeth hesitated.
‘I don’t know, that’s what people did I suppose. And it must have been to do with my body as well. It had carried you and then it had nothing. My milk drying up was excruciating.’
Elisabeth looked far away, as if deciding what to say next, if anything – and then she continued, but almost like she was talking to a ghost, a phantom daughter, a gorgeous girl from another life, not the one sat opposite her now in her miserable kitchen in North London. She had never said the words out loud before, it was as if they bewitched her.
‘Once you were gone I found that I craved you, Mandy, and I so wanted to believe you were Alan’s, but when I saw you I knew you weren’t, I just knew it. So I had another child, another daughter, to … to take your place I suppose.’
Juliette said nothing, just stared at her mother. Amanda Lily.
‘You just called me Mandy,’ she said.
Elisabeth seemed young again, girlish for an instant, and then it was gone. She looked straight at her daughter.
‘You’ll always be Mandy to me, Juliette.’
And that’s when Juliette cried, and instead of scolding her for a change, so did Elisabeth.