The Half Sister(14)

‘I’m in here,’ says Rose, sticking her head around the kitchen door. Lauren gently puts the car seat down, with a sleeping Jude inside, and carries Emmy, who’s kicking her little legs with excitement, down the hallway towards her Nana.

‘Hello, my precious girl,’ says Rose as she discards her oven glove and takes Emmy in her arms. Lauren looks at her quizzically, noting that nothing about her mother is any different. She looks just the same as she looked yesterday, before a girl arrived claiming to be her dead husband’s lovechild.

‘You okay?’ she asks hesitantly.

‘Absolutely,’ says Rose, and Lauren hears that lilt in her voice that gives the game away. She’s far from okay.

‘Listen, I just wanted to talk about Jess and what happened,’ says Lauren. ‘I can’t imagine how you must be feeling about it all.’

‘I’m fine, absolutely fine,’ Rose insists. ‘Now, what does this baby girl want for breakfast?’ She tickles Emmy and the little girl squirms delightedly in her arms.

Lauren could leave it. She almost feels compelled to, so that they can go back to pretending that they’re just like every other family. But this isn’t about them. This is about Jess, and Lauren knows that she has set something in motion that she can’t stop.

‘We need to talk,’ says Lauren, more assertively.

‘Honestly darling, there’s really no need. I’m absolutely fine.’

Lauren swallows and picks an imaginary piece of fluff off her trouser leg. ‘But it’s not just about you or us,’ she says, without looking up. ‘This is about a woman who thinks . . .’

Rose goes to her daughter and cups her face. Emmy giggles and reaches out with her own hand to touch her mother’s other cheek. The two women can’t help but smile. ‘Your father was a good man,’ says Rose earnestly. ‘Don’t let a stranger destroy your faith in him.’

‘But she’s not a stranger,’ says Lauren, pulling away. ‘And whilst I can understand you not wanting to have anything to do with her, I want the chance to get to know her. I want the children to get to know her.’

Rose retracts her hand as if she’s been burnt. ‘You can’t possibly be serious,’ she says, looking at her daughter as if she’s mad. ‘You don’t know the first thing about this woman. She turns up here, out of nowhere, professing to be my late husband’s child, and you’re honestly going to believe what she’s saying? You’re going to allow her to denounce the memory of your father? She could be absolutely anybody. But I tell you one person she’s not . . .’

Lauren waits with raised eyebrows.

‘Your sister.’

‘But Mum, I—’ starts Lauren, before Rose holds her hand up.

‘Enough.’

It’s what her mother has always done when she doesn’t want to hear something she doesn’t like. Maybe that’s why we’re in this predicament, thinks Lauren.

‘You can’t just shut me down like that,’ she says, sounding more confident than she feels. She may be thirty-eight years old, but she’ll always be her mother’s daughter – she only needs to get a certain look from Rose to make her feel five again.

Rose purses her lips tightly together and takes Emmy to the oven to see the rising sponge cake. ‘Yum,’ she says, as Emmy giggles and blows raspberries.

Lauren’s chest tightens and she stands up straighter, in the hope that it will give the impression that she’s feeling far more forthright than she actually is. ‘A woman came to our house one time . . .’

Rose shoots her that look and Lauren’s stomach rolls over, but she refuses to back down.

‘Do you remember?’ she pushes on, a gentler tone to her voice.

Rose shrugs her shoulders.

‘She was demanding to see Dad,’ says Lauren, trying to jog her mother’s memory, but feeling wretched for trawling up something she may have spent years burying. ‘She said that she’d been calling him, but he’d been avoiding her.’

‘He avoided a lot of women,’ says Rose. ‘Because they all felt that they held the monopoly on his time. That’s just the way he made his clients feel. That’s why he was so good at what he did, but it was also his downfall.’

‘She didn’t look like a client.’

Rose laughs. ‘None of them ever did! I remember this one time, when we were at a charity function at one of the big London hotels, and this woman sashayed up to him as we were eating our meal. She looked straight at me as she whispered something that made your father choke on his chicken. He was going all red and I didn’t know whether to give him the Heimlich manoeuvre or throw a bucket of cold water over him.’

Lauren can’t help but smile. ‘Did you ever find out what she’d said?’

‘Your father couldn’t bring himself to repeat it, but suffice to say, the woman was a recently divorced client who had perhaps misread the signals. You have to understand that a lot of the women he worked for were lonely and would do anything to feel loved and wanted again.’

‘Including going to bed with their married divorce lawyer?’

‘If your father had been that way inclined, yes,’ says Rose. ‘But he wasn’t, so . . .’

‘But—’