Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [98]
Mark didn’t recognize her. The venom poured from her so liberally that he wanted to move physically away from her to escape its molten stream.
And she wasn’t finished.
“Only she wasn’t perfect, was she? She was a liar. A cheat. She lied to you. She lied to her own daughter. To all of us. And she was a coward.”
Mark shook his head.
“So forgive me if I’ve had enough of the Barbara Forbes for sainthood movement. If I’ve stopped trying to live up to something that never actually existed in the first place. If I’ve stopped mourning her.”
“Stop it.” He put his hands on her shoulders, held her hard, and spoke through gritted teeth. “I won’t have you talk about your mother like that in my house, in her house.”
“I’m sorry, Mark.” Instant contrition.
“Go to bed, Jennifer.” Mark didn’t want to hear it.
His voice was cold, and quiet, and full of fury. He walked off quickly, anxious to be as far away from her as his house allowed. If she wasn’t drunk, he’d have thrown her out.
He went into the garden, without turning around, and gulped at the cold air that assaulted him.
He was beyond angry with Jennifer. How dare she come to him and behave that way? No amount of unhappiness, or red wine, could excuse her. He felt panic—how could things ever be normal again? His brain, still under the influence of the wine he’d drunk himself, tried hard to sort the new information it had received tonight. He pulled his sweater around him and sat down on a teak chair, glad that the cold night air was doing its job on him.
He thought about Barbara. Amanda had been eight when they met. She’d been gorgeous, too. Just like her mum. With pigtails and an overbite. A ballerina, at that point, always twirling and leaping. She’d had so much energy. Their closeness had been apparent; in the same room together, Amanda would always sit on her mother’s lap, one hand behind her mother’s neck, smoothing Barbara’s hair between her fingers. When she was tired, Amanda would suck her thumb and rest her head against Barbara’s chest, instantly relaxed. Her breathing would slow, the sucking calming and soothing her, although Barbara told her she was getting too old to do it. Mark had found Barbara the most beautiful when she sat this way, Amanda on her lap. She looked like some modern-day Madonna.
He hadn’t lied to Jennifer—he and Barbara had agreed, early on, not to get bogged down in the details of their pasts. That had been her idea, he now realized. She said that the only thing he needed to know about the girls was that they were hers, and that they were the great loves of her life. He needed to understand that. She no longer loved their father, so that part of her heart, the part not occupied by them, was free. For him.
He’d had a girlfriend. He’d been seeing someone for a couple of years. He was still with her, when he went into the gift shop and got hit by the thunderbolt. They were both thirty, and their friends were starting to get married, and he had known that she wanted him to ask her, but he hadn’t, some part of him always sensing that whatever he felt for her, it wasn’t enough. He’d broken it off with her, straightaway. But Barbara hadn’t wanted to know about that girl, either. She said it wouldn’t help.
They both had pasts, and it didn’t belong in this present, or their future. He could hear her saying it. Remember her saying it, sitting across from him.
Was that why? Was that why she hadn’t wanted to talk about it? Because she had something to hide? Because she was afraid he’d think less of her if he knew?
And would he have?
Mark thought about the thing he had never told her. When he’d been seventeen years old, finishing his A levels, hoping to get good enough grades to take up a place in the architecture and civil engineering department at the University of Bath, he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. They’d been together for a year or so. They’d met at sixth form. It had been the first serious