‘You’ll be a hero. You survived a kidnap,’ Simone says softly, sadly.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy replies. She lifts her chin. ‘I don’t know why, but I feel sure I will attend RADA. One day.’
‘You never know. Instinct counts for a lot.’
‘You can eat Caribbean rum cake in the Bahamas. Don’t you like that?’ And it’s this grasping, juvenile kindness that makes Simone cry.
‘I do. Hard to find with no alcohol,’ she says, covering up her tears.
‘Can you make me something?’ Lucy says, smiling slightly, her hand to her chin, elbow sliding along the table. It’s a childlike pose, something from the deep past.
‘Anything,’ Simone says.
‘Meringue.’
‘An excellent choice.’ Simone rises to her feet, finds the eggs. She separates them deftly, fat round button yolks into a pot to save for omelettes – despite the last time she made them, she still can’t resist them – whites slinked into a bowl, beaten by hand the old-fashioned way. Good cooking should be painful on the muscles. She gets them quickly to fluffy, as cotton-like as the clouds outside, puts the oven on super low.
‘Why didn’t you want to live out at drama school?’ Simone asks. ‘Can you tell me?’ They have less to lose now. Moody’s text has sealed their bleak future, and Simone feels able to ask.
Lucy looks directly at Simone, and, for just a fleeting second, she sees Damien. Something about the open expression. ‘Honestly …?’ she says, just the slightest lilt of a question in her voice.
‘Yes, honestly! Of course, honestly.’
‘Because …’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you remember my high-school leavers’?’
‘Yes?’ Simone answers, confused. They’d opened Dishes up to everyone, Lucy’s friends, their friends.
‘I keep thinking about something.’
‘What’s that?’ Simone asks, and she knows, somehow, that Lucy is going to say something that will nudge the foundations of their relationship.
‘You were at the little back corridor in Dishes with Dad. Sitting on the step you like. And you – you had a drink.’
‘Yes,’ Simone answers. Her only drink in twenty years. Those two sips with Damien, and they’d thrown the rest away.
‘You had adrink. On my final day of school.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Simone says.
‘I was – God. OK.’ Lucy takes a breath. ‘I was worried that, you know how you always say I’m your … what’s that thing?’
‘Raison d’être,’ Simone says with a smile.
‘Right. And then you’re sitting there drinking on the final day of – of something.’
‘Oh,’ Simone says in a small voice. How strange the parent–child relationship is. That Simone can view something so simply, with her daughter witnessing it, unseen, taking something so complex from it. ‘No, no, no. I was trying it for a recipe. And a little toast to you. It was nothing. Hated it. I had two mouthfuls!’
‘Oh.’ Lucy pauses, gazing into the middle distance. ‘But.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t want to leave you, OK?’ Lucy tells her. ‘I didn’t want to … leave us, I suppose.’
‘Why not?’
