then she goes back home,’ Amanda sailed right on, thinking, somehow, that this was encouragement, ‘and we’re supposed to be happy that she’s returned to her old, small, black-and-white horizons? That dreams are all well and good, but don’t forget that you’re actually trapped on the farm forever? Same reason I hate the Chronicles of fucking Narnia. Oh, God, and don’t get me started on him.’ The Cowardly Lion minced onscreen. ‘The stuff of nightmares.’
Karen looked incredulous. Or rather, more incredulous. ‘The Cowardly Lion?’
‘Oh, come on. Look at him and tell me you don’t see every paedophile you’d warn your daughter away from. I always think he’s about to whip it out and lay down on top of Dorothy.’ She put on a frankly hideous version of the Cowardly Lion’s voice. ‘Come on, little Dorothy, sit on your Uncle Lion’s lap and he’ll show you why he’s king of the jungle, uh-huh, uh-huh. And then he pushes her to the ground and pulls her panties right on down to those ruby–’
Amanda stopped because the look on Karen’s face was, at last, unmistakeable. Panadol never made anyone look that way.
‘Well, don’t cry about it,’ Amanda said, but it was too late.
Karen, it turned out, had been ‘fiddled with’ – Karen’s own horrible, multiply-repeated phrase – by her grandfather from ages five to fourteen. It only stopped when he’d died. Not only that, when she’d told her parents, they’d thrown her briefly out of the house, allowing her back to do A-levels only when she’d completely recanted.
‘You don’t know,’ she’d sobbed into Amanda’s arms in the long, long hours that followed. ‘You just don’t know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Amanda said, awkwardly patting Karen’s head. ‘No, I don’t.’
It might have brought them closer together. It probably should have, but instead, Karen started bringing friends over with whom she’d abruptly stop talking whenever Amanda entered the room. And that, once more, was that.
The baffling thing was that she had no idea why. Her childhood had been perfectly normal, from what she could tell. She was still close to both George and Clare, despite the divorce, and there’d never been any undue worry about money or security. It just felt like she’d been born with a small flaw, right at the centre of herself, a flaw somehow too shameful to be shown to anyone else, so she’d spent her life building a carapace around it to keep it hidden. Inevitably, the carapace became her true self, a fact she could never quite see, a fact that might have offered relief. Because all she knew was the truth deep inside of her, the little something wrong no one else could ever, ever know. And if that wasn’t the real her, then what was? At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing.
‘Are you having a good time, sweetheart?’ her father would ask in his every-other-day call.
‘Yes, Dad, Jesus,’ she would say to keep from crying.
‘Because everyone says your college years are your best years, but I have to confess, I found them sort of awkward and . . . Well, awkward actually about covers it.’
‘You find everything awkward, George,’ she’d said, bending at the waist to stop the sob rising in her throat.
He’d laughed. ‘I suppose so.’ Which was so upsetting somehow – his kindness, the pointlessness of it – that when he’d asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t need any more money?’, she’d had to hang up on him.
Rachel and Mei sat down, taking up five-sixths of the picnic blanket between them. It wasn’t quite warm enough for a picnic, really, but Rachel liked these sorts of gruelling challenges, wanting to see, Amanda thought, how much she could get her friends to put up with. If you complained, you lost.
‘So who’s looking after JP?’ Rachel asked, not taking off her coat.
‘My dad,’ Amanda said, looking through the basket and failing to find anything she liked to eat. She settled on a plastic tub of salad. ‘Is there dressing?’
Another pause, then another quiet, shared laugh between Mei and Rachel. Amanda ignored it and found, at least, a small, very expensive-looking bottle of olive oil. She poured it sparingly over the greens and the other greens and the various other greens besides those. She screwed the cap on too vigorously and felt it snap under her fingers. It now spun fruitlessly and refused to stay on. She carefully put it back into the picnic basket, setting the cap on it in a way that at least made it look closed, checking to be sure that neither Rachel nor Mei had seen.
‘My dad would never babysit,’ Rachel said, pouring a mug of coffee from an outrageously sleek thermos. ‘Never changed a nappy in his life? Didn’t bother learning our names until we were five?’
‘Oh, please,’ Mei said, surprising both Amanda and, it seemed, herself, before quickly re-shaping her face into one of cheerful acquiescence. Amanda didn’t dare hope for solidarity here; it was probably just how much Rachel liked to play up the Australian-ness of her father until he was practically roping cattle with his teeth while surfing and drinking a beer. Does he have that weird Australian pug nose? Amanda had never asked. Or the omnipresent layer of Australian male baby-fat? she’d never queried. Or a ponytail out of an inbred ’70s jug-band? she’d never wondered aloud. She checked herself internally. She was being grossly unfair. But wasn’t grossly unfair sometimes thrilling?
‘Dad’s great with JP,’ she said. ‘He’s very kind, is my father. Gentle.’
‘Mmm,’ Rachel didn’t quite say, looking across the field they’d chosen to some youths also taking advantage of the weather to kick around a football. ‘Jake Gyllenhaal’s younger brother, three o’clock.’
Mei blinked. ‘You know, I never know what you mean by that. You say “three o’clock” like it’s a direction.’
‘It is a direction?’ Rachel said, pointing. ‘Twelve, one, two, three o’clock? Not that difficult?’
They turned and looked at Mr Three O’Clock who, Amanda would never admit out loud, was indeed handsome, if a bit too young even for her, though possibly not for the six-years-older Rachel. His hair was as thick and luscious as a milkshake, and there was no way he didn’t know it. Even at this distance, he gave off self-regard like the Queen gave off forbearance.
‘He looks like he cries when he comes,’ Amanda said, not realising she’d said it out loud until she heard Mei snort with laughter. She turned, but Mei was already retreating again under Rachel’s glare. Mei quickly picked up her phone to keep tracking her daughter. ‘Still in Nando’s,’ she said.
‘Well, at least Marco takes an interest?’ Rachel said. ‘At least he’s not off with some hot new girlfriend in another country? Forgetting every bit of his duty?’
Amanda’s fork stopped halfway between the last bite of the salad and her mouth, momentarily so stung that swift tears filled her eyes. Blunt willpower alone kept them from spreading down her cheeks.
Because it wasn’t like that. Well, it was, but it also wasn’t. Henri was back in France and living with Claudine now but Amanda had basically forced him to go, booting him out of her and JP’s life with a force and constancy that had surprised even her. He called JP every week, though, even if JP’s four-year-old phone skills were barely rudimentary. Henri said he just
