“So soon?” Emily asked, all fake-disappointed. “Well it was good of you to come. I’m sure Father would have appreciated it.”
I could feel myself beginning to tear up, which was natural enough at a funeral, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing it. “You must have loved him very much.”
Of everything I’d said to her that day, that was the thing that silenced her. She looked at me, blinking like I’d said something strange or impossible. “He was a good father.”
Before anybody could say anything else, she’d turned away, seeing or pretending to see somebody across the crowd who was much richer or more important than we were. When she was gone,me and Bobby rounded up the kids and went to ask Tom if he’d be okay to take us back. Which he was, because Tom was a love.
So we piled into the car, and I held Susan on my lap while Robert and Maggie sat next to me. And when I started crying for real, because I was always going to, Maggie reached out and put her hand on my arm and said, “It’s all right, Mummy. He was probably very old.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Because even though walking away from Emily that day had half broke my heart, I knew it’d broke before, and I was pretty sure it’d break again. But right there and then I knew it didn’t matter. That it had been right to love her and right to leave her and right to get back in the car and go home for the last time.
I won’t say I never thought of her again, because I did. But as the years went by it got less and less until—well—until you come along and started asking questions, no offence. But maybe now’s the time it was right to talk and all, because I think—I don’t know, maybe I’m just an old lady who likes to ramble, but I reckon it was a story worth telling, for all it don’t really have a proper ending.
Friday
After Doris had gone, Audrey stayed sitting by the river for a while. The evening was a balmy one, so it was easy enough for her to linger with her thoughts as the light waned and the first pale stars started glinting through the still blue sky. Every so often she’d pick up a stone, weigh it in her hand, and then set it down again. There were no frogs to throw them at, and anyway, Audrey—like Doris—wasn’t a throwing-rocks-at-frogs sort of person. Maybe she was just—like Doris—drawn to throwing-rocks-at-frogs people. Maybe, in fact, all relationships consisted of the one who threw rocks at frogs and the one who didn’t.
Except no. Even as the thought assembled in her mind, she dismissed it. It was cerebral clickbait: superficially insightful but utterly meaningless. Jennifer Hallet was arrogant, high-handed, and performatively offensive, but it was hard to imagine her indulging in casual cruelty. If only because it was hard to imagine her indulging in casual anything.Why the fuck, Audrey could imagine her saying,would I want to throw a rock at a frog? Who’s got the fucking time?
And as for Natalie… While Audrey didn’t condone throwing rocks at frogs, it had a kind of cheerful nihilism to it, and Natalie was neither. Even so, it had been far too easy for six-weeks-ago-Audrey to convince herself, at the time unconsciously, that Natalie was basically her Emily Branningham—a woman she’d spend her life reaching out to hoping in vain that she’d reach back. Now, though, all of that felt abstract and disconnected. Something that belonged in the past.
Which might have been where Emily belonged as well. And, if it was, then this story that Audrey had so desperately been trying to find an ending for was never meant to have one. It was just two women hurting each other over decades and then eventually maybe one or both of them partly getting over their otherwise doomed relationship. Until Audrey stumbled in with her actually fairly small feet and stomped all over everything.
“Lane?”
She’d been so absorbed in her thoughts that she hadn’t heard anybody approaching, but she tried not to look too startled as she twisted around to face Jennifer Hallet, who had appeared from out of the dark like a sexy banshee in a shabby leather jacket.
“You’ve been a really fucking long time.”
“Sorry.” Not wanting to keep craning her neck, Audrey swivelled and found herself kneeling on the riverbank staring up at a woman who seemed to naturally default to being stared up at. “I was just having a think.”
To Audrey’s very mild surprise, Jennifer lowered herself to the ground and sat opposite her, one leg tucked underneath her, one knee up. “Thinking about what?”
“All of it.”
“Oh, nice,” replied Jennifer with reassuring sarcasm. “Very specific. Whatbitsof all of it?”
Audrey wasn’t sure where to look. Jennifer was sitting closer than she usually did, at least in nonsexual contexts, but she still wasn’t a stare-soulfully-into-my-eyes type of person. Which was awkward because Audrey was in the mood to stare soulfully into something. She cast her gaze slightly downwards, which had the unfortunate consequence of leaving her staring soulfully into Jennifer’s breasts.
“The bit where I’m still not sure I’m doing the right thing, but where I know I want to do it anyway even if it isn’t, and where I’m worried that makes me a terrible person, and—”
Jennifer laid a finger over Audrey’s lips. “Calm down. This is a shitty fucking world full of shitty fucking people who spend more than half their time making other people’s lives shittier. But you won’t make it a better place by beating yourself up about questions you can’t answer.”
“I might,” replied Audrey, a lightly laid finger proving little to no impediment to speech.
Jennifer looked unimpressed. “Doris chose to talk to you. She chose to let you look for Emily. If you find her, they’ll both get to choose if they want to meet again. There really does come a point where it’s fucking hubristic to pretend you’re the one calling the shots.”
It was comforting logic. Sufficiently comforting that Audrey was inclined to mistrust it on principle. “Okay, but—”
“No buts. All thiswhat ifpap is helping nobody. Now, how’s the search going?”
For a moment, Audrey didn’t know how to answer. Not because she didn’thavean answer but because she still wasn’t quite used to Jennifer being on her side. It was a weird sense of power and danger, like having a pet tiger.
“Badly?” she said. “Or possibly fine? The problem with this kind of thing is that you don’t really know. I’ve got some leads I’m following up, but they could all turn out to be dead ends. Or, y’know, I could have Emily’s home address and phone number by this time tomorrow.”
Jennifer gave a sly smile. “You’re enjoying the chase though, aren’t you?”
That was another place Audrey had been trying not to let her mind go. While there was a lot about her old, higher-stakes, higher-stress career she didn’t miss at all, shehadmissed that. “A bit,” she admitted.
