‘You should be thinking about your future. Your children will be heirs to the entire Crawford fortune. And you want them to be legitimate.’
Ben took a step back, reeling from this burst of insight as if it were a physical blow or a mighty explosion in his face. It had never occurred to him until this moment that, as Alan’s only surviving child, his children would be absolutely crucial to Alan’s dreams. He wasn’t running a business – he was building a dynasty. Without grandchildren, there was no future.
‘What if I don’t want kids?’ Ben blurted out.
‘Don’t be stupid. When you get to a certain age, everyone wants kids,’ he said in a voice that brooked no opposition. ‘And everyone wants grandchildren.’
I don’t, he wanted to scream. But he simply stared, struck momentarily mute by this awful understanding.
‘So, this Jennifer Murray,’ said Alan lightly, and he glanced slyly at Ben with those beady eyes that missed nothing. ‘What made you hire her?’
‘Jennifer?’ said Ben stupidly. What had Jennifer got to do with a discussion about grandchildren and heirs? ‘Because I think she can do a good job.’ Unintentionally, his inflexion rose at the end of the sentence, making it sound more like a question than a statement.
‘I see. So how did you find out about her?’
‘I hired her son, Matt, first and he introduced us. When I heard Calico were going under, I asked her if she was interested.’
‘Sounds like you did them both a big favour, Ben,’ he observed quietly, talking in the measured way he reserved for occasions when he was particularly irked by something. ‘I hope I’m wrong. I hope that your motives were purely professional.’
He opened his mouth to tell his father otherwise but Alan, with words as precise as the swift, ruthless cut of a chef’s knife, silenced him.
‘She’s a pretty woman, Ben, I’ll grant you that. And I can see the attraction,’ he said, as if piling Jennifer’s positive attributes, like recipe ingredients, on one side of a pair of old-fashioned scales. ‘But she has grown-up children, son.’ He fixed Ben with a hard stare, lowered his voice. And then he tipped the scales against Jennifer, in his mind anyway, with the heavy weight of the truth.
‘Her child-bearing years are over.’
Chapter 7
David drove Lucy back to Belfast on Sunday night despite her protestations that a bit of rain wouldn’t hurt. It was mid-September now and the weather had taken a sudden autumnal turn. The temperature had plummeted and the rain battered the car in wind-buffeted sheets.
‘So how did things go between you and your mother this weekend?’ asked Dad, both hands coiled lightly around the steering wheel as if taking his driving test for the first time.
‘Good,’ said Lucy, thinking guiltily of the bag in the boot full of laundered clothes (a peace offering from her mother) and further supplies of canned goods. The weekend had passed off peaceably, but it had left Lucy with a sour taste in her mouth. While she had succeeded in extracting money from her father, the victory had come at a price. Things between her and Mum were quietly strained, even more so than usual. Neither had mentioned the quarrel of the previous week, but Mum didn’t need to say a word for Lucy to know exactly what she thought. Her thin lips and toneless civility conveyed more disappointment than any words could. Once, when watching TV, she’d caught her mother staring at her so sadly, she had to get up and leave the room.
‘No more arguments over money then?’ said Dad, as he pulled into the outside lane, feeding the steering wheel through his hands like a rigid, circular rope. He glanced over and smiled conspiratorially. Lucy returned the complicit smile he expected, but she felt bad. She knew in her heart that winning didn’t make it right. At first, she’d been filled with rage by her mother’s refusal to give her more money. But later she’d thought, with grudging respect, that her mother had been right.
‘No, money wasn’t mentioned,’ she said, hiding her shame by staring out the window at the watery view of floodlit, low-rise industrial buildings backing onto the motorway. Some were clothed in bright graffiti, the talented handiwork of kids who should’ve gone to art college but never got the chance.
After the fallout with Mum the week before, Dad had been like putty in her hands. Through tears, with nothing left to lose, she’d confessed how much money she needed. And to her surprise, he’d pressed a big wad of crisp twenty pound notes into her palm. He did not ask a single question, so pleased was he to gain the upper moral hand, as he saw it, on Mum. As she’d closed her fingers over the money, the feeling of relief was so intense, she’d thrown her arms around his neck and sobbed once more.
‘Now you just let me know any time you’re short, love,’ said Dad, bringing her back to the present. ‘University should be the best time of your life. I don’t want you to be worrying about money. Or missing out.’
‘Thanks.’ Dad had always been greatly concerned that Lucy didn’t ‘miss out’. What he actually meant was ‘I will give you whatever it takes for you to fit in.’ He’d pushed her to do ballet and drama classes because that’s what the other, pretty girls in her class did. As a teenager, he made sure she had the trendiest fashions and the latest gadgets (You want to be cool, don’t you?). He’d nagged Mum into taking her to the best hairdressers in Belfast, in the failed hope that they could do something presentable with her thin, greasy hair. And he quizzed her about her social life, wanting to know where ‘all the kids hung out’ and who ‘her mates’ were. To please him, she’d talked about the popular girls at school as if they were her friends. Sometimes she was tolerated on the fringes of this ‘in crowd’; more often than not, told to get lost, or worse. It must’ve been clear to her father from a very early age that she was different. But, terrier-like, he persisted in his mission to transform her from ugly duckling into swan. He was a conformist.
The car accelerated away from the lights at York Street, joining the two-lane Westlink that skirted the city centre and connected eventually with the M1 on the south side of the city. ‘So how’s the studying going?’ said Dad.
‘Great,’ she lied.
‘You’re a bright girl, Lucy,’ Dad said confidently. He had never so much as brushed shoulders with self-doubt. ‘If you put in the work, you’ll be fine.’
Lucy gnawed the nail, already bitten down to the quick, on her right thumb. She’d lied about her first-year results. Mum and Dad were under the impression that she was on track for a two-one, maybe even a first. But the way things were going, she’d be lucky to graduate with a third, or worse. And there was always the awful possibility that she’d flunk altogether.
In choosing Applied Mathematics and Physics, she’d thought she was making a logical choice. In a world where popularity was decided on something as capricious as appearance (and a whole shed-load of other, shifting criteria, too subtle for Lucy to comprehend) maths was a solid bedrock of evolving logic and reasoning. She buried herself in numbers that appeared to deliver unequivocal answers.
But her judgement had proved flawed. Now in second year, she struggled to keep up, and the more she studied maths the more she came to realise that it didn’t have all the answers. It was no less fickle than the friendship of her peers. No amount of calculus or geometry could answer the questions that preoccupied her mind, nor ease the iron grip of isolation.
Driving
