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He glances at his reflection in the kettle, and hastily wipes the sticky red imprint from his cheek. There’s more lipstick on his mouth, but I don’t tell him that.
I rinse my mug in the sink and put it in the dishwasher. Tom snakes one arm around my shoulders, his other hand sliding between my legs. His erection presses into the small of my back. ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’ he murmurs.
‘Of course not.’
I look up and see our reflection in the window, Tom’s arm looped loosely across my neck. And I’m suddenly, unexpectedly, assailed by a memory of my mother at the kitchen sink, my father behind her just as Tom is now.
But my father’s embrace isn’t affectionate.
I don’t know how old I was: in my memory, my eyes are level with the top of the kitchen island, so perhaps four or five. Five, I must have been five: my mother was pregnant with my sister, Gracie.
My father’s hands are around my mother’s throat.
He’s forcing her head down into the sink, which is full of greasy water. She’s coughing and gasping, fighting for air. Her arms flail impotently, unable to reach him. She’s drowning.
I despised my mother, even at the age of five. I despised her for her weakness: not her physical inability to stand up to him – she was only five foot two and a hundred pounds lighter than he, and pregnancy made her even more vulnerable – but for willingly ceding him her power in return for the ring on her finger. She was a beautiful woman, asmartwoman. As young as I was, I could see she had other weapons in her arsenal. She could have made him love her. She could have made him loveme.
I wasn’t weak like my mother.
So I picked up the paring knife she’d been using to prepare dinner, and plunged it into the back of my father’s bare leg.
I couldn’t have known where to cut to cause maximum damage, of course. I wasfive. And yet instinctively I avoided the big muscles of the thigh or calf: he’d brush off the slender paring knife like he was swatting a mosquito. Instead, I went for the vulnerable point between the joints of his knee. I sliced straight through the posterior cruciate ligament and severed the popliteal artery, though of course it’d be years before I learned what they were called. Had my mother not called an ambulance, my father would have bled out on the kitchen floor.
She never thanked me. On the contrary: she blamed me for making his vicious temper worse because of his chronic knee pain.
Perhaps she was right. Violence is never the answer, of course.
Until it’s the only option.
chapter 16
millie
Stacey’s yellow Mini convertible pulls up opposite the gates of the Hurlingham Club. The top is down, and she waves at me over the sun visor.
‘Oh, God, I’msosorry I’m late,’ she calls, as I cross the road to meet her. ‘I got caught up at work. Have you been waiting long?’
‘Two minutes,’ I say.
She flings open the passenger door. ‘Get in. I’ll drive us to the clubhouse.’
The porter comes out of the lodge and raises the security barrier as Stacey pulls into the driveway.
‘Hi, Fredo,’ Stacey says. ‘You look like you’ve caught the sun.’
‘Welcome back, Mrs Porter. Nice day to be on the courts.’
‘It’s yoga this morning,’ Stacey says. ‘But we might stay and have some lunch afterwards, as it’s such a lovely day. This is Millie Downton, a friend of mine.’
‘Nice to meet you, Ms Downton. I’ll phone ahead for you, Mrs Porter, and reserve a table.’
I’ve never had a female friend before. I didn’t want one: Tom was always enough for me. I’ve never really understood the mysterious and strange nature of female friendship: the emotional intimacy and need to share the innermost details of each other’s lives which from the outside seem to make the relationships as fraught as they are gratifying. It’s a common trope that men are more competitive than women, but in my experience women are simply competitive in a way that’s less obvious – they’re competitive aboutconnection.
The girls I knew at college, the women I worked with at the hospital: what appeared to matter to them most was the degree to which they were privy to each other’s secrets. And I was always too ashamed to share mine.
Stacey noses her car around a group of women in tennis whites walking three abreast and follows the gentle sweep of the drive towards the Georgian clubhouse. Sitting beside the Thames in Fulham in forty-two rural acres surrounded by the stressful clamour of central London, the Hurlingham Club is an anachronistic survivor of a different age. It lost its polo grounds after the Second World War when the London County Council nabbed them by compulsory purchase for council housing, but it’s somehow managed to hold off all-comers since then. The goalposts of the so-called class war may have shifted, but the Hurlingham is still an unapologetic oasis of privilege.
‘How long have you been a member here?’ I ask as she parks behind the clubhouse.
