Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [29]
She’d hugged her mother-in-law warmly at the door, but she’d refused to be conciliatory with her father-in-law. He could stew on it all week as far as she was concerned. She wasn’t in the least sorry she’d stormed out in the middle of their Christmas dinner. Maybe it would make him think twice the next time. The rest of the afternoon had had a sense of forced gaiety—they had all turned their attention to the children, while he had slumped in his armchair, dozing to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She’d played endless games of Uno and Pictionary. Once, looking up, she’d seen Stephen looking at her strangely, but when his eyes met hers, he looked away.
Kathleen had never said one word about finding Brian difficult to live with before, not in the whole time she’d known her. It made her think. Who else had a marriage full of secrets, and things unsaid, and things ignored until you could bear it no longer? Not just her.
Her mind went back to Mum’s journal. She’d read it and reread it, and even when she didn’t read it, she kept it by her bed, where she could see it, and it made Mum feel close by. Stephen had asked to look at it, but she had said no, that it was personal, and only meant for her and her sisters. He had shrugged and looked pained, as though her saying no was one more instance of her pushing him away as he tried to get closer. Which was, of course, exactly what it was.
The passage Mum had marked, the one she wanted her to read first, was one about Dad. And Jennifer knew why. She wanted Jen to know that she also knew how it felt to be in a marriage that wasn’t working. The journal entry was the conversation she knew Barbara had tried to start with her a dozen times. The one she had never let her start. Tonight, driving along the M40, with her husband asleep and snoring beside her, she missed her mum as much as she ever had.
He woke up as they pulled into the underground garage. At the door of their apartment, he put his hand on her arm.
“Take no notice of my dad. He’s a bugger. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry he’s a bugger? Or sorry you didn’t stand up for me in front of him?”
“I don’t want to argue.”
“Apparently not.”
“No one takes any notice of him, anyway.”
But she had gone into the living room and was switching on the television set and didn’t answer.
“Aren’t you coming to bed? It’s late.”
“I’ll be there in a while.”
But she fell asleep in front of the late film and was still there, stiff and chilly, when he brought her a conciliatory mug of tea the next morning.
Lisa
Lisa and Andy were a small child’s width apart on his sofa, watching Miracle on 34th Street—the remake, sadly, and not the original—with Cee Cee. Actually, they were pretending to watch. Andy had the Sunday Times on the seat beside him, and Lisa was pushing back her cuticles with an orange stick, occasionally pushing at her temples with her thumbs, trying to edge the headache out. They’d watched the same film twice already in the last month. It was a current favorite.
Cecilia Joan Armstrong—Cee Cee to everyone who knew her—was six years old, white blond, brown-eyed, and small for her age, with a lisp currently exacerbated by the absence of her two front teeth. She could read and add units, tens, and hundreds, and Google. She could not, apparently, flush a toilet or digest a meal without ketchup. She liked ballet and rabbits, and she still slept with a piece of her receiving blanket wound around her left arm and pushed into her ear. She did not like big dogs or radio programs where people were just talking to each other with no music. When she was sick, she liked to watch Maisie videos, lying on the sofa with her backside in the air, even though she was too old really