‘I knew you weren’t close,’ she says, ‘but I never asked why. You don’t, do you? People’s lives are complicated.’
‘It’s me,’ Tony says. ‘I’m her stepdad, and she’s never accepted me. Or my daughter, Lou.’
I remember Kirsty saying she had a sister.
Patricia grimaces. ‘It just doesn’t sound like her, to turn her back on her family like that. It doesn’t sound like the Kirsty we know, does it, Mabel?’
A thought crowds in: how well do we know her, really?
‘I thought maybe there’d been a falling out over Ben,’ I say. ‘That you and him didn’t get on, or something like that.’
‘We’ve never met him,’ Sandy says. ‘We’ve never been to their house. Didn’t even know there was a baby.’
She collapses in tears and I watch as Patricia reaches a hand out and covers Sandy’s hand with her own. She’s so good like that, offering comfort to anyone and everyone. Is it an American thing? I’m not sure I could.
Then the second thing happens. Julie’s in the kitchen doorway, giving us all a bit of a funny look, no doubt wondering who Sandy and Tony are and why we’ve all left the party.
‘There are some people here for you, Patty,’ she says.
Patricia looks at me as if she’s asking whether I know anything about this. I don’t know whether she thinks I can just conjure people up out of thin air. But there’s a smile playing at the corner of Julie’s lips, so I’m guessing it’s someone Patricia will be pleased to see.
She goes out into the hallway, and then I hear a shriek and the thud of bodies slamming into one another. I get up to follow her, and see that she has a small girl attached to each leg, and a middle-aged woman in her arms. Ah, I think. Sarah.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t call,’ Sarah’s saying, ‘I didn’t realise you’d be so… busy. I’ve left him, Mum. Can we come back?’
24
I’m standing on Kirsty’s doorstep with Olly at my side, hoping she’ll be glad to see him even if I’m still in her bad books. When she comes to the door, I see that she looks tired. It’s no wonder, of course, with a young baby, but I’ve never noticed it before. And that’s when I realise she’s not wearing makeup, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her like this, and she looks just as beautiful, but vulnerable, too.
‘What do you want, Mabel?’ she asks.
I notice her look down at Olly and then force herself to look back up at me. She doesn’t want to soften.
‘I’ve come to say I’m sorry.’
Arthur used to say I was the worst person when it came to apologising. In the early years of our marriage, it caused a few arguments, but once he’d accepted that’s just how I was, he used to be able to laugh it off. He had his shortcomings, too, after all. Once, I accidentally put his best white shirt in a dark wash and it came out looking grey. Money was tight, then, so we couldn’t afford to just replace it. We stood at either side of the kitchen, him clutching it tight, me thinking it would be a pig to iron when he’d finished screwing it up with his fists.
‘Why can’t you just admit you did something wrong and say sorry?’ he asked.
‘It was a mistake! Anyone can make a mistake!’
‘Yes, but if I made a mistake and it affected you, I would apologise.’
I never did. Why was I so stubborn, then? My instinct with this was to wait for it all to blow over, but Julie made it pretty clear she thought I owed Kirsty an apology, and when I really thought about it, the idea wasn’t quite so abhorrent as it used to be.
‘Why did you do it?’ Kirsty asks.
She hasn’t asked me to go in and I’m cold on the doorstep, the wind bitter.
‘I thought I knew best. I thought that whatever was keeping you apart was probably trivial and that you just needed a push in the right direction.’
She shakes her head. ‘I was doing okay,’ she says. ‘I was doing all right without them.’
There’s pain in her eyes, the kind I’m more used to seeing in Julie’s. What would Julie do? She wouldn’t shy away from the difficult stuff. She’d talk it through, until it was sorted, or closer to being sorted.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I ask.
She sighs, and I know she wants to tell me to sod off but she can’t quite bring herself to do it.
‘Come in,’ she says.
‘Olly too?’
‘Yes, Olly too.’
We go in and I slip my shoes off. She has this bright, airy hallway that you could fit my front room in. There’s framed art on the walls, which look like they’ve been freshly painted this morning. There’s just a hint of grey to them, and it makes me think again of Arthur’s shirt. If it happened now, I’d probably be doing him a favour. Everything’s grey these days.
‘Dotty’s having a nap,’ she says. ‘Come through.’ I follow her into an enormous room that’s part kitchen, part dining room and part living room. There’s a sofa at one end, and that’s where she leads me.
It’s funny, years ago people would boast about how many rooms their house had and now it seems people like to have as few walls and doors as possible. How do you ever heat a space like this?
‘Does it get cold in here?’ I ask.
‘No. Underfloor heating.’
Well, I never. I sit down and Olly settles at my feet and when Kirsty sits beside me, she leans across and gives him a bit of a fuss, and that’s when I know she’s not going to hold a grudge.
‘I thought I’d bring him to you,’ I say. ‘If you’re ready to take him.’
‘Oh, thank you.’ Her eyes fill with tears.
She really loves him. I do, too, I suppose, but he’ll be better off here. A child to play with and two adults to take him on walks. And it’s not as if I won’t see him.
‘I’ll come and visit him now and again, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course it’s all right.’
I could go, leave it on a positive note like that. But if I did, we’d have to go back to this business with her family another time. It’s not just going to go away.
‘Do you want to talk about what happened with your family?’ I ask.
She thinks about that.
‘Families are so complicated, don’t you think?’ she asks.
Mine wasn’t, not really. Not when all four of us were alive. After Bill died, things were never the same, never right, but up until then, it was plain sailing. Or is that just how I remember it now, all these years later?
‘They can be, I suppose.’
She shifts around a bit, like she’s getting herself settled.
‘I adored my dad,’ she says. ‘Like, totally idolised him. He was always chasing me around the house on all fours or helping me climb trees or something. Very physical. And then suddenly he didn’t do any of that any more, and he often spent the morning in bed. Stopped working. And nobody told me he was ill, and I know they were trying to protect me but it just meant I thought he didn’t want to spend time with me any more. And when he died, it came as such a shock to me. It was months before I fully understood that he wasn’t coming back. When Mum met Tony, it just felt way too soon, to me. It was less than a year after he died. I wasn’t ready, and she kept asking if I’d like to call him Dad and it felt like the worst kind of betrayal.’