She disentangled herself abruptly. ‘You too. Thanks for the inspiration!’ Then she held up the Iced Plum, hoping that this gesture said, Our entire exchange has been about paint. Nothing more. ‘Good luck with your kitchen.’
‘And you.’ His smile was wide and charming, his blue eyes crinkling at the edges, a dimple in his left cheek. Then he saluted. ‘Paint rebels of the world, unite!’
With that, he was gone, whistling as he went to pay. Kirsten let out her breath in a gust of relief. There, she told herself. The end. As soon as he vanished around the end of the aisle, her mind scrambled to reframe the whole sequence merely as a funny story that had happened to her. Maybe something she could confess over dinner tonight even, laugh about, then file away. And you actually bought the paint? she imagined Charlotte hooting. Oh, Kirsten!
She hesitated though, because then she was thinking about how grating she always found it, the way her sisters-in-law liked to ‘Oh, Kirsten’ her in that ever so slightly patronising way. Not least because Sophie was seven years younger than her, Annie couldn’t do a thing for herself, and Charlotte was the dictionary definition of a flake. Oh, Kirsten! As if she would never quite understand the McManus family ways; their glance-exchanging refrain othering her, keeping her apart from the tribe. The three sisters with their shared history and shared jokes, all mothers who seemed to love endlessly discussing their adored children in front of her, knowing that she had no such stories of her own to contribute. Oh, Kirsten! You’ll never be one of us! Perhaps this imagined response was why, despite her strong impulse to quietly replace the Iced Plum on its shelf and return shamefacedly to the beige selection for something more suitable, she didn’t do any such thing.
Yes, Charlotte. I actually bought the sodding paint. What of it?
‘Can anyone squeeze in dessert?’ Charlotte asked at that moment. ‘There’s the most amazing-looking birthday cake out there, thanks to Kirsten.’ She twinkled her eyes across the table at her, and there were a couple of smiling ‘Oooh!’s from the others. Kirsten suddenly felt mean for all her bitchy thoughts that evening, because on the rare occasions when the sisters extended their collective warmth to include her, she always experienced such a wave of corresponding pleasure, as if she was part of their family after all. Despite everything, she still longed to be included. Was that the curse of being an only child? Or a sign that she was tragically insecure?
The main course over, there was a bustle of activity: plates cleared, drinks poured, Charlotte shouting unintelligibly from the kitchen about cream and ice cream. Kirsten seized the chance for a moment to herself and escaped to the downstairs loo, grabbing her phone from her handbag on the way. How was it possible that you could be in a room full of loud, jolly people and yet feel so alone?
Once locked away, she exhaled, rolling her eyes at her flush-faced reflection, already thinking yearningly of her quiet, dark bedroom, of how her weary body would sink into the mattress later. Not long now, she reassured herself.
Then, for some reason, she found herself typing Landscape Legends into the notes app on her phone and saving it. Just in case she ever needed it in future.
Chapter Four
Eliza’s quest had begun in an A-level biology lesson on genetics a month earlier, when the teacher, Dr Khan, had started speaking about genetic conditions and disorders that were passed down through families. Sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, kidney and heart disease . . . as the list increased on Dr Khan’s whiteboard, Eliza had felt a new panic grip her insides. Because who could say what genes her dad had passed on to her? What nasties might be lurking in her body’s cells waiting to surprise her in the future? Who even was she?
The relentless drumbeat of Who am I? had propelled her as far as Whitby, determined to get some answers, and the same Who am I? still looped around her head as she sat now in the Partridges’ too warm living room for an evening’s babysitting. Admittedly, there were worse places to be undergoing a traumatic crisis of self than this room, with its chintzy curtains, massive telly and fake-coals gas fire, plus the sofa that practically swallowed you up with its cushion mountain. (Mrs Partridge worked in a soft-furnishings shop in town and you could tell.) But even with such creature comforts, Eliza’s head still jangled from the shocking revelations that had emerged earlier. She was even further from knowing her own self because she wasn’t the daughter of Steve the Abandoner after all, but of Ben the Enigma. Ben McManus, a blip in her mum’s life, a man she hardly knew, who, like it or not, had helped bring about Eliza’s entire existence. (How was that even allowed, anyway? What kind of design fault of the human body was it when people could create a whole other person from a random sexual encounter, conducted hours after meeting? Without planning, consideration, applying for a procreation licence . . . without so much as knowing each other’s star sign, in the case of her parents!)
It had been too surreal almost for words, typing her father’s name into her phone to be presented with a series of pictures of different men. Might that be him with the shock of white hair and laughing smile? Him, in the black and white shot, with an artfully posed side profile, hand to his chin? God, she hoped not. He looked a right arsehole. Please let her real dad not be an arsehole, she prayed fervently. Not on top of everything else.
‘Well?’ she’d demanded, as her mum scrolled through the images with infuriating slowness. There was a Ben McManus who was a chef in North Carolina. An Irish firefighter who’d raised thousands of pounds running marathons for a prostate cancer charity. A young student, a football player in a minor league. And then . . .
Her mum made a gasping noise as she zoomed in on the photo of a friendly-faced man, forty-something, standing behind a shop counter with his sleeves rolled up. Was that him? His expression was one of faint awkwardness, perhaps from having his photo taken, but beyond that, Eliza could see he had grey eyes like her and a beaky sort of nose that she’d inherited too (thanks for nothing, Dad). She thought of Steve’s pudgy face and scruffy appearance, then stared back at the man on her phone. ‘Is that him?’ The caption beneath the picture read Ben McManus, owner of All Mapped Out, Cambridge. ‘Mum?’ she prompted, unable to bear the silence any longer.
Lara nodded weakly. ‘Yes,’ she said in a strange voice. ‘I’m pretty sure that’s him.’
Eliza gazed anew into the eyes of the Cambridge Ben McManus, her tummy twisting a peculiar spiral inside her. You are my dad. Hi there. This is weird, isn’t it? Are we at all alike, I wonder? Presumably he had absolutely no idea she even existed, no clue that he had an eighteen-year-old daughter who was fifty percent him walking the planet. Just as she’d had no idea he existed either, until five minutes ago.
She glanced up at Lara, desperate to know more. ‘He looks nice,’ she said, her mind whirling with questions. ‘Was he?’
Lara paused for a moment then nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was. Until . . .’ Then, exasperatingly, she had clammed up. ‘Look, I need to get on with dinner,’ she’d muttered to the floor, no longer looking at Eliza.