The Child(20)

When “Professor Will,” as she insisted on calling him, finally knocked on the door, I thought Jude would pass out with the excitement.

“You go, chick,” she said, taking one last look in the mirror. “And smile!”

I loved it when she used to call me “chick,” my pet name from when I was a little girl. She’d all but abandoned it as I got older, but it still had the power to make me feel warm inside.

Anyway, I’d only just got the door open to let him in when she wafted past me and took over.

“Hello, Will. How lovely to see you. Will, meet Emma. My baby. Darling, this is Professor Will. My old friend from uni.”

Will flashed me a sympathetic smile and held out his hand.

“Hardly a baby, Jude. She’s a young woman.”

It’s funny the things you remember. His hand felt dry and warm, and a gold ring on his thumb brushed my knuckles.

I risked a closer look at him to check if there was any family resemblance. There wasn’t. He was all corners. Sharp nose, sharp cheekbones. Nothing like me and my pudding face. Jude used to tell me I was pretty sometimes, when we were on our own. But I wasn’t—I’m not. Pretty was shiny hair and long eyelashes and pink cheeks—like Jude. I had brown curly hair that wouldn’t lie flat and a pudding face. I hated my face. I used to stand in front of the mirror, pulling at my flesh like it was made of Plasticine until my cheeks stung. Jude said all teenage girls went through this.

Will must’ve caught me staring at him and smiled. Jude didn’t see, she was too busy closing the front door, so it was a smile just between us and it made me feel a bit tingly. He might be my friend, too. Or my dad.

“Tea?” Jude said as she led him into the sitting room.

“Lovely,” he said. “What a great house.”

In the kitchen, filling the kettle and searching for two matching mugs, I remember wondering what sort of man wears a ring on his thumb.

He must be nearly forty, I thought, spooning the tea into the pot. It’s like your granddad wearing platforms.

I laughed to myself at the idea and carried the tray through.

The professor had kicked off his sandals to sit cross-legged on the sofa and his feet looked soft and white like bread against the cushions.

“I can’t quite believe you’re here,” my mother gushed.

Very unlike her. Very un-lawyer-like, I thought, crossly crashing the tray down, spilling the milk into the saucer of sugar.

“Sorry,” I said, not meaning it. Jude looked furious, but Will swooped forwards, nearly toppling from his guru pose, to help steady the table.

“No damage done,” he said. “Just ready mixed.” And he and Jude laughed.

I felt left out of the joke, but when Jude was mopping up, he winked at me.





FIFTEEN


    Jude


MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2012

There was still a trace of lentils on the plate she picked up off the draining board for her toast and she plonked it straight into the sink.

Her daughter had hardly touched the meal yesterday. It used to be her favorite meal, back in the day. When Emma was eight or nine and they first moved into their rented Victorian villa in Howard Street. The late seventies had been tough for Jude, trying to forge a new career with a child to look after, but the rent was cheap because of the area. And it didn’t seem to matter to Emma where she lived. She was always caught up in her own little world, anyway.

If she closed her eyes, Jude could almost smell the house at Howard Street, a pervading mixture of damp plaster and her favorite perfumes. It hadn’t been a palace but it had character. The house had a hall paved with cracked black-and-white tiles—“they’re antique, not old,” Jude had told her mother when she turned her nose up.

Will had liked it straightaway.

“Oh, Emma!” Jude said out loud now as she banged about in the cupboard, looking for another plate. “Why can’t you let things go? It was you who brought Will up.”

Jude had never intended to tell her daughter all the details of the telephone call that had come out of the blue, how she’d known straightaway it was Will’s voice even though it’d been nearly ten years since she’d last heard it. He’d slammed out of the house with his bag in 1992, calling over his shoulder that he’d be in touch when she’d calmed down. But she knew he wouldn’t be. There’d been a row too far.

His attention had begun to wander again. She’d hit her fifties by then and he’d lost interest in her, preferring to flirt openly with waitresses during supposedly romantic dinners.

“Oh, Jude,” he’d laughed when she finally decided to confront him. “I just appreciate a pretty face—I’m only looking.”

But he wasn’t. He was doing as well as looking. Jude knew. She smelled it on him and lay awake worrying that he would leave her. She’d tried to keep cool, telling herself it was a midlife crisis and he’d grow out of it. But when she caught him groping one of her friends at a party, there had been a flaming row and he’d packed his bags.

There had been complete silence after that, even when she made the first move. His phone went straight to voicemail and he didn’t ring back. Or reply to her e-mails. Or her letters. And gradually, she stopped trying.

But he’d rung when he read her father’s obituary in 2001, in a Cambridge University newsletter. She had recognized the voice but not the tone. He was quietly polite as he offered his condolences but there had been no small talk. Good of him to bother, she’d thought, but it had been horribly awkward and hadn’t led to any more contact.