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31
April 2017
‘Baby. You look tired. Have you been getting enough sleep?’
Rachel looked up at her father from her desk where she was tapping numbers into her accounting software. Her father appeared to her through a haze of bleary eyes, bleary thoughts, a darkly shifted perception of the world.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Absolutely fine. Just been a long week.’
‘Well, you need to get that husband of yours to whisk you away somewhere. To one of his many houses. I can’t believe he still hasn’t taken you to Antibes and you’ve been married for two months. I can’t believe he’s not …’ He sighed and she felt the weight of unsaid words and unasked questions in the air between them. ‘But everything’s all right, is it? Between the two of you?’
Rachel nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine.’
She was at home. Not her home, but her parents’ house, the house she was brought up in, the house where she once lived with a mother and a father and a rolling succession of small dogs that her mother rehomed every time she needed to go away for more than a month. It was a beautiful house, with tall windows and a gated driveway, lacy jasmine tumbling over the front wall and her father’s valet-fresh Range Rover parked outside. Her father lived now alone, since Rachel’s mother died five years previously. For five years Rachel and her father had been a tiny team of two, meeting for breakfast dates at the Wolseley, for tea and cakes at his favourite patisserie in Soho, for shopping expeditions to seek Rachel’s opinion on his sartorial choices, which inevitably ended with Rachel carrying home silky-handled shopping bags from out-of-her-budget boutiques. Rachel and her father had always been compatible, more than Rachel had ever been with her mother, whom she found infuriating and unpredictable. Her mother’s death had served to bring Rachel and her father even closer together, but ever since Rachel had met Michael she’d felt her father drifting away from her, becoming vaguer and smaller, an outline, a sketch. Even here, standing over her, a cup of coffee cradled inside his hands, his socked feet sinking into the thick cream carpet that her mother favoured and that had to be shampooed professionally once a year, even now, mere inches from her, she couldn’t locate him. As if the signal was poor.You’re breaking up.
Her father squeezed her shoulder and said, ‘You would say, wouldn’t you? If anything was worrying you?’
Rachel nodded tersely. ‘Of course I would.’
‘I just think … your mother, she would have asked more questions, maybe, you know. She might have urged a little morecaution. Possibly. I mean, three months. Even with a catch like Michael. Quite quick. When you think about it.’
Rachel typed noisily. ‘Everything is fine. Honestly. Don’t overthink it. You’re being like mum.’
Being like mum. It was always the most galling thing that Rachel could say to him.
‘Sorry.’ Her father took his hand from her shoulder. ‘Sorry.’
She heard his footsteps, muted in the velvet carpet, moving away from her, the smell of his coffee lingering in his wake. She breathed in hard to stop the tears, turned the pages of her paperwork, started to type in another row of numbers.
She left her father’s house an hour later. It was starting to rain. ‘Wait,’ her father said decisively from the doorstep. ‘Wait. I’ll drive you, let me just grab my coa—’
‘No. It’s fine. I’m happy to walk. I’ve got an umbrella.’
‘I can drive you.’
‘No. I’d rather walk.’
She glanced at him. Brian Gold. In his navy lambswool and his socked feet and his hair still thick and dark even in his sixties, his soft face full of concern. She felt something hot and liquid rush through her, a sickening jolt of love and sadness. ‘Bye, Dad.’
She took the long chrome escalator down from pavement level at St John’s Wood tube station and stared into the terrifying drop below, imagined herself hurtling from the top to the bottom, landing as a mass of broken, splintered bones, people’s mouths wide with screams, while she would be free.
Her phone beeped just before she ran out of signal. It was Michael.
Hey, beautiful. What do you want for dinner? I’m just heading out to shop.
She typed fast, before she lost signal.Pasta wd be nice. W prawns?
She pressed send and stared at the phone, willing it to get to Michael’s phone, breathing a sigh of relief when it went. It would set the evening off on the wrong footing if he didn’t hear from her before he went to the shops. He would come back with something she didn’t like, deliberately, and say,Well, I didn’t hear from you, so, y’know?He’d be clipped. He’d withhold his bonhomie. And if there was one thing that Rachel wanted to maintain, at all times, it was Michael’s bonhomie. The darkness that existed beyond Michael’s bonhomie was immeasurable and she thought, as she did so often, of a parallel world in which she had not brought the sex toys on honeymoon, had not answered Michael’s question about whether she had used them before with other men, and had contented herself with their perfectly good vanilla sex for another fifty years, and felt anger with herself for changing the track of her marriage so completely for something which now seemed so unimportant.
On the tube she sat blankly rolling her engagement ring round and around her ring finger. She looked up at the shadowy impression of herself in the window opposite and sighed at it. It had stopped raining by the time she got off the tube at Fulham Broadway, the pavements stained petrol grey, the traffic hissing through dark puddles. She checked her phone and saw a smiley face from Michael in her text replies. She felt her mood shift, her gait lighten. He was unpacking shopping in the kitchen when she entered the apartment. He beamed at her. ‘Hey, gorgeous. How’s your dad?’
‘My dad is just great.’ She went to him and lifted her face to his and let him kiss her on both her cheeks, felt the suggestion of evening stubble against her skin. She moved away from him. ‘He sends his love.’
‘And how were the accounts looking?’
‘The accounts are looking rosy.’
He beamed at her again. The setting sun burst through the thick cloud outside and cast itself all over him. He looked golden. ‘That’s great. That really is. Because, y’know, I am going to need some help this month.’
