Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [50]
Dad hadn’t asked her about it. She supposed he could have snuck into her room, while she was at school or something, and read it, but that wasn’t really his style. She guessed he thought it was private, between Mum and them. Anyway, she was going to give the original to Lisa, when she came down next—she’d hogged it long enough. She liked the folder. It was just a cheap one, from WHSmith, but Mum had chosen the most colorful one, of course. It was turquoise and hot pink, with a pattern of palm trees and flamingos on the front. The pages inside were all different. Some of it was written on hotel notepaper, some on lined pages that looked like they were from one of her A4 pads. Some on white Basildon Bond. Mum’s handwriting was consistent, although she occasionally used a pencil. They had a pot that they kept by the telephone, and it was supposed to be full of pens, but, however often she filled it up with cheap Bic biros, it was emptied—people took them to write something and then wandered off with them, tucked them behind their ears or into their back pockets, and they were never returned to the pot. Hannah could hear Mum huffing and puffing to herself, complaining about the absence of a pen, before resorting to a pencil.
Mum screamed out of all of it, she supposed, and that was why it was so precious.
She stood up, and switched off her stereo. This part she was bringing downstairs now was written on lined paper. She wanted her dad to read it. She wanted him to remember how much Mum had loved him.
MARK SAT ON THE DECK, BUNDLED UP IN A COAT AND HAT, watching the sun set, with a glass of red wine in his hand. When Hannah touched his shoulder, and he turned to her, she saw that there were tears in his eyes, but she said nothing. He had the right to sit on the deck and shed a private tear for his wife, didn’t he? Talking about it wouldn’t help. She’d grown used to tiptoeing around his grief. These moments were getting rarer. Last summer, and in the autumn, it had happened all the time—she would come in from school, or down from the shower, and find her dad in tears. Sometimes he pretended he hadn’t been doing it, but she knew the signs. Sometimes he didn’t even try to cover it up. Now he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sniffed hard.
“Hiya, gorgeous. What you got there?”
“Part of the journal. It’s about you. I thought you might like to read it.”
He put his wineglass down and took the paper from her.
“Thanks, Hannah.”
BARBARA’S JOURNAL
How I Met Mark
So, picture the scene. I’m divorced. I’ve been on my own with my daughters for almost eight years. Things ended pretty badly with Donald, so his involvement has been sketchy. He pays. He pays every month. But he doesn’t come around at all, and there is certainly no every other weekend or two weeks in the summer holidays arrangement going on. (That’s another story, not for today….) So I’m doing it all by herself. The house, you girls, the job…Lisa, the oldest, she’s nearly twenty-two now. Which makes me feel incredibly old—she’s practically the age I was when I had her. She doesn’t live at home, of course—she shares a flat with some girlfriends. But she comes home at the weekends, loaded with laundry and hungry for home cooking. Jennifer—she’s at university. She just left. I try not to mind that she chose St. Andrews, in Scotland. Of course, it was the best course. But it’s so far away. It feels like rejection. Amanda is the only one who still lives at home permanently. She was eight a couple of months ago. Sometimes I worry that she’s lonely without a sister or a brother around. But she’s great company. She has that adult way about her that only children—which is what she virtually is, given her position in the family—sometimes have.
I love being a mother. Always did. I’m bloody good at it, too, I think, and I’d defy anyone to tell me the girls lacked anything in their lives. I made sure they had plenty of adult male, rolemodel-type company. And I worked hard to