Girl Unknown(14)

The rain had stopped, water pooling in dips in the paving.

I could see Susannah striding down the street and shouted for her to stop, but she didn’t slow and I had to run to catch up with her.

‘Please come back,’ I said, when I finally reached her.

She kept on walking, holding her coat closed with one hand, her handbag clenched in the other. There was something terrible in her balled-up anger, her refusal to speak until she reached the corner where our avenue meets the main road. ‘I’m so sorry, Caro,’ she said. ‘We’ve ruined your evening, haven’t we?’

Her eyes flicked past me to a taxi slowing as it neared and she stepped out on to the road with her hand held aloft.

‘Please don’t do this,’ I said, but her mind was made up.

I watched the taxi drive away, saw the sharp silhouette of her haircut through the rear window, and knew that what had happened between them could not be undone.

Peter and Anna were at the front door when I returned, already in their coats, full of smiles and words of thanks for a lovely evening, then hastily departing. There was no sign of David. I watched them hurry away into the night, before closing the door on the darkness and returning to the kitchen. Chris had his head in his hands, David pouring him another whiskey.

‘Chris is staying with us tonight,’ he told me.

Normally, I am the one to offer comfort, to know the right words to say. ‘I’ll go and make up his room,’ I said.

As I closed the door, I saw them clink glasses, solemnity in the gesture rather than any measure of cheer. At the same time, I felt my jaw tighten.

An idea had got its claws into me: that David might be having an affair. A dalliance with a colleague or some post-doctoral student. Some silly girl looking for excitement with an older man, the thoughtless facilitator of his midlife crisis.

We might have been able to weather the storm of such a crisis, but what was to come – the slow erosion caused by her destructive presence – proved far worse, a dark cavity that would open up and suck each one of us in.





6. David


‘Who is Zo??’

I turned and saw Caroline staring at me.

I had been rinsing the wine glasses from the night before, dog-tired and hung-over. Chris had just left. Her words startled me out of a daydream – a memory of Linda wearing a shirt of mine, her feet bare on the hard tiles of that kitchen floor in our Donegal cottage all those years before. Those same feet, the night before, had pressed into the small of my back, the soft curve of her heels. We’d had so little time left. I’d traced a finger over her temple, along the sloping curve of her cheek, and told her it was all going to be okay. I drew her close enough to feel her body against mine, caught in the green haze of her stare. I kissed her, the tenderness of her lips against mine. A sense of certainty had come over me – the sure knowledge that we were safe, that no harm could come to us. I had been twenty-four, my whole life ahead of me.

‘David?’ Caroline said. In her hand was a piece of paper, and she held it up to me. ‘I found this in your wallet.’

It was the note Zo? had slipped beneath my office door, the one asking me to meet her in Madigans.

‘Why were you looking in my wallet?’

‘It fell out. I was doing the laundry.’

I put the tea-towel, which had been slung across my shoulder, on to the draining-board and took a deep breath. ‘Close the door,’ I said. ‘We need to talk.’

Caroline looked both confused and upset. She shut the door, and the chatter from the television in the next room became an indistinct hum. I gazed out into the garden where everything, for a moment, appeared to be moving in slow motion – the russet leaves falling from the trees, and above them a dense body of clouds rippling by in waves. In the distance, there was the dull sound of a car starting.

‘Do you remember me telling you about Linda Barry?’

Caroline seemed to steel herself. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Zo? is her daughter.’

‘Her daughter?’ she repeated.

I pulled at my earlobe. ‘She’s also one of my students. She came to see me because she thinks I’m her father.’

Caroline put the note on the table, but she kept her eyes on me. ‘She said that?’

‘She said she was pretty sure because her mother had told her who I was, and she had her birth certificate with her.’

Caroline pulled out a chair and sat at the table. ‘A birth certificate?’ she said.

Her resolute calm and steady nerve disarmed me. It would not have been unreasonable for her to raise her voice, to display some outrage. Instead there was a steely, implacable propriety. I should not have been surprised. Caroline had always demonstrated a degree of strength and inner resolve.

‘It didn’t actually name me as father …’

‘Then how can you be sure she’s your daughter?’

‘I can’t, not categorically. But there was a resemblance to Linda, I suppose, and the dates match up. She had some photographs …’

‘Photographs?’

‘Of myself and Linda.’

Caroline looked about her as if to reassure herself, to check that she was where she thought she was – that the kitchen, with its stereo on the counter, the glass fruit bowl, the children’s assorted books and computer games, the black-and-white framed pictures of us as a family on the far wall, were all there. I thought for a moment she might reach out and touch something – the need in her appeared so real.