it for Barbara on honeymoon in Glasgow and the shimmer of blue – more eastern Med than western Scotland – was instantly recognisable. She found the straps and held it up, letting the layers of satin and chiffon swing free. There were details she hadn’t noticed before, or didn’t remember: the old-fashioned label, sewn in by hand, the slight discolouration under the arms. Was there a breath of Barbara’s perfume, or was that just Helen’s imagination?
‘Alys!’ she shouted, after a moment or two. ‘Come and try on this princess dress.’
She knew Barbara wouldn’t mind a bit. After all, Helen herself had spent a good year around the age of six tripping around the house in its gauzy layers, the spaghetti straps nicely set off against her utilitarian white M&S vests. She’d called it her cocktail dress. As a child, Helen had liked to imagine Barbara’s youth had been spent swishing around sophisticated parties. She had a vague fantasy that Barbara had come down in the world when she married Neil and renounced a life of leisure and glamour and quite possibly even cigarette holders for love, a red-brick semi and her baby girl. She didn’t actually have any evidence for this exotic former life, but, in the absence of evidence of anything more prosaic, it was an attractive fantasy.
Alys duly trotted upstairs, but when Helen held up the dress she looked sceptical.
‘Which princess?’ she asked.
‘Not a Disney Princess. Another Princess. Princess Alys.’
‘Daddy buy me Belle dress.’
‘Did he?’ Helen was genuinely puzzled. Alys adored Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Helen couldn’t imagine she could have received such a prize and not been full of it for days.
The girl looked sad and a little confused. ‘I get it next time, he say, next time, but …’ She faltered, and her big eyes welled with tears.
At home, Helen had had to tell her over and over that Daddy didn’t live with them any more. Each time, it cut her up inside and the tears that she managed to hold in when she was with her children spilled out with interest after bedtime. Eventually, Alys seemed to have understood, on some level at least, but the visit up here could only have confused her.
‘Blue is for boys, Mummy.’ As ever, the three-year-old’s train of thought chugged on at pace.
Helen racked her mind for some Disney Princess assistance. ‘Cinderella wears blue,’ she said, encouragingly.
‘Not that blue, Mummy – that’s boys’ blue.’
Helen looked down at the dress, as if noticing its colour for the first time. ‘Oh! You mean I should give it to Barney to wear?’
She loved her daughter’s laughter, which bubbled thick and sticky in her throat like liquid fudge. Alys liked the joke of her brother wearing the dress and her chortles brought Neil to the door.
‘Good morning, ladies,’ Neil said, making Alys giggle even more.
‘Alys thinks Barney should dress up in Nana’s honeymoon dress. What do you reckon, Granddad?’
She expected Neil to laugh along. Instead, he reached out, groping like a blind man. His fingers touched the fabric, but then it slipped out of his grasp and the dress slithered to the floor. He sat down heavily on the bed. Helen cursed inwardly. Of course, she should have realised the dress might upset him. But a moment later he was smiling again and had pulled a toffee out of his pocket for Alys.
He turned to Helen. ‘I came to tell you there’s a phone call for you, love.’
‘Darren?’ she mouthed it silently over Alys’s head, and he nodded.
‘Now, young Alys.’ His grasp on the dress was firm this time, and the wet sheen on his eyes had been blinked away. ‘The thing you have to know about this dress is that it belonged to a mermaid once. That’s why you can see all the colours of the deep blue ocean in it – in fact, I’m sure I once saw a tiny golden fish flickering through just about here …’
The phone handset sat like a grenade on a chest of drawers on the landing.
‘Hello?’ She kept her voice low, going into the spare room.
‘Hi, Hels. How’s your mum doing?’ said the voice on the line.
‘She’s okay. We went to the hospital on Friday. They’re going to operate next week. We’ll know more then.’
‘I was gutted to hear it, really I was.’ She could picture him shaking his head, sorrowfully, rubbing the back of his hand against his designer stubble in that way he had. ‘Give her my best, yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ she agreed, knowing she’d say nothing.
‘I’ve been trying your mobile.’
‘I know you have. It’s not the easiest time, Darren.’
‘Yeah, I understand that. But the kids’ll be missing me.’ As he spoke, she tried to push away the image of Alys’s perplexed face, talking about the stupid Disney costume. ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t have taken them up there, and we both wanted to deal with access informally, but …’
Bastard. Always trying to come across as Mr More-Than-Reasonable. He should be here with his family now, rather than having fucked off with his glossy, giggling area manager. That’s what Helen wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. She’d had explosive, raging, endless rows with Darren each day since he’d left, but only in the privacy of her own mind. When it came to real life, the words would never come.
She realised he was still talking. He was still going on in his calm let’s be adult about this voice that she’d so quickly come to despise.
‘… So I’ll come up at the weekend and stay with my mum. Just me, not Lauren – I don’t want to make things harder. But I want to see the kids properly, not just an hour over lunch or something. Okay? And I want to speak to them. Are they there just now?’
Helen pressed the handset closer to her ear. Alys’s laughter was louder now, but not so loud that he’d be able to hear it down the phone line.
‘Mum’s taken them both to the park,’ she lied. ‘You only caught Dad and I because we were finishing the dishes. We’re just going to meet them.’
‘Right.’
‘Yes.’
He sighed. ‘Look, call me later – just let me say goodnight to them at least.’ His voice might have cracked, or it might have been static on the line. She was learning, to her surprise, that Darren could be a good actor. It was bizarre, thinking back to how she’d always been able to read him like a book. Perhaps he’d never had the will to deceive her before, or perhaps it was the distance that had opened up between them making it harder for her to really see him the way she always had before. She ached even more for the man she had married.
‘I don’t want them to get upset,’ she said.
‘For God’s sake, don’t make me beg to speak to my own kids, Helen.’
He didn’t sound to her like a man who was begging. She felt the familiar lump swell in the back of her throat. This was
