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“Do you think it’s because I don’t have a father?” Alice mused after a while.
Polly, who’d been eyeing up the waiter’s pert buttocks, asked, “What is?”
“The fact I’m scared of everything. That I can’t, you know, do the normal things other people our age do without even thinking twice? Mum told me the other day I needed to get over my flying phobia. She’s right. I’ve never travelled—never gone anywhere except down the coast on a bus trip. I got first-class honours and here I am, still working in a bookshop five years after I graduated. Living in Mum’s house. Living in Mum’s shadow. Aren’t girls supposed to gain courage from their fathers being in their lives? Has not having one stunted my emotional development?”
Polly shrugged. “I think no father is better than a useless one.”
Alice pinned her lips. Polly had no time for her own dad and his drinking problem. The way he had finally pushed her mum away. And his only daughter, too. Polly used to hate him, but she’d learned to drop that down several notches to indifference.
“Maybe,” Alice agreed. “But it would be nice to know some basic facts.”
“Surely Rowena’s told yousomething?”
“Yes, that he had brown eyes, shethinks. And wasn’t very tall, because she remembers she didn’t have to look up at him. He was a one-night stand at a party and she’s pretty sure his name was Andrew and that he was from Basingstoke.”
“Surely she could have traced him?”
“Apparently it was at some big house party in the countryside and he’d just come for the night with a group of friends and left first thing the next morning. She reckons by the time she found out she was pregnant it was too late to find him.”
“Or she chose not to.”
“Exactly.”
Alice put her knife and fork down neatly in the centre of her plate. She’d had enough to eat. The trembly feeling and nausea had gone.
“I just wonder if having no father has made me hang on to thedreamof Aaron all these years. Maybe I love him because I’ve never had a good male role model.”
“Then invent one.”
“That’s silly.”
“No, go on. Invent how you want your dad to be. Since he’s not around you can imagine him any way you want to. What’s he do for a living?”
Alice smiled. Polly’s ability to find the seed of positivity in every situation was sheer genius.
“He’s a writer. No, better still, a movie director.”
Polly raised a brow. “Impressive. What’s he look like?”
“Handsome, in a lean, haunted, underfed kind of way. You know, the Ralph Fiennes look. He lives in a castle in Scotland. He has a slight limp from falling off a galloping horse at a young age. Oh, and a quite disfiguring scar across his left cheek from an accident with clashing swords.”
“Swords!”
“When he was directing a remake ofThe Three Musketeers. He got in between the actors during a particularly nasty parry.”
Soon they were both laughing, and Alice realised her dark mood along with her hangover had almost completely lifted. She just had to erase last night from her mind. Inventing a father seemed to be doing the trick quite nicely.
As they strolled back home, arm in arm, Polly said, “Okay. Don’t call Aaron, or text him for several days. Let him stew.”
Alice felt her neck tensing up again at the return to the subject of Aaron. “He won’t call me. Not after the way we left each other. It was like the Cold War.”
“That was simply a mutual failure on both your parts to process the enormity of the situation. Let things brew for a while. If you want I’ll hide your phone so you can’t keep checking it.”
“That will not be necessary.” Alice stuck her nose in the air. “I am bigger than that. I am the daughter of a Scottish laird who directs Oscar-winning movies despite living with horrendous pain from his injuries on a daily basis.”
“Cool,” said Polly. “Piece of cake, then.”
* * *
