Joe stiffened and I smiled blankly. ‘You’ve been in that flat so long!’ said Daisy gaily. I wasn’t fooled. ‘When are you going to make an honest woman out of her, Joe?’
‘Oh, god,’ said Joe.
‘It’s just a question.’
‘It’s a shit question!’ Joe said. ‘What if I’m happy with the way things are?’
Daisy snorted. ‘Mummy’s a pig!’ said Lucia, and I couldn’t help laughing.
‘Don’t you two believe in marriage, then?’ said Daisy. ‘It’s fine if you don’t!’
‘Oh my god. Thank you, Daisy. I was so worried for a moment there about your thoughts on the matter,’ said Joe. Yet, regardless of Daisy’s invasive tactlessness, I was disturbed by how furious he was. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her to shut up. She always does this. It’s ridiculous.’
‘But don’t you want the security, Rose?’ said Daisy.
I looked at her. What, if anything, did she really know about her brother’s life? Could she not see that aside from the flat with its four walls and roof, Joe brought me no security whatsoever? That these days, his emotional offerings were hazy, sketchy things, underlined by his own preoccupations? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was well hidden to those who did not care to look. I laughed, not knowing what else to say or do.
‘Rose, why are you always laughing at me?’ said Daisy.
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
Daisy looked at me with dislike. Dorothy intervened. ‘Daisy, for Christ’s sake, put that wine down. You’re tired. She’s so tired,’ she said to me directly, as if I had provoked this garbled projection of insecurity and bile from her adult child. ‘Young children are exhausting.’
‘She wouldn’t know,’ said Daisy.
‘Daisy,’ said Dorothy sharply. ‘Go and sit in the front room.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Joe.
Ben remained silent. Daisy got up and walked out of the dining room with the air of a hurt duchess. I knew from my friends that young children were exhausting, but none of them acted like this when they were tired. I wondered if Daisy was depressed.
‘They’re having problems,’ Dorothy said quietly.
‘Dot,’ said her husband, finally speaking up with a warning in his voice, his eyes in the direction of Lucia.
‘Oh well,’ said Dorothy, sighing. ‘Everyone has their ups and downs.’
There was something of the prairie matriarch in her voice, and it irritated me. Daisy should not have been let off the hook for what she said to me, but she was – she always was.
‘Dad, shall we go and look at the van?’ said Joe.
Dorothy, Wilf, Lucia and I were left behind, sitting in the aftermath of another Sunday lunch. ‘Luce, poppet, go to the playroom and find a puzzle for us to do,’ said Dorothy.
‘I hate puzzles, Granny.’
‘Don’t we all, darling. But go and do as Granny asks.’
Robotically, Lucia laid down her pencil and slunk out of her chair like she was pouring herself onto the floor.
Dorothy sighed again. ‘How’s your father, Rose?’ She always said it like that – never, ‘How’s Matt?’
‘He’s well, thank you. He’s in Brittany.’
Dorothy ran her finger round and round an embroidered peony on the tablecloth. ‘I expect he misses you.’
‘He’s got Claire.’
‘Will you go there for Christmas?’
I felt alarm. Dorothy liked to plan Christmas early. Did she want me to go to France for Christmas? Was this some sort of attempt to get me away from her son? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay with Joe. Wherever Joe is.’
Dorothy looked up at me. Her expression! It was so strange. I felt bereft as I looked into it, as if a halo of defeat was framing her head. It seemed to be slipping over her eyes and drawing them shut. ‘Christmas,’ she whispered.
My eyes flicked to her wine glass. Was she drunk? Christmas – the way she said the word, I saw that season roll round again, as we headed towards the last quarter of the year. All the same dynamics that Dorothy had witnessed for over thirty years would play out once again – the same arguments, the same carols, the same turkey. I felt it in her voice. I wanted to reach out and take her hand, and tell her she didn’t have to do it all – let Joe cook, let Daisy sort it! – but I didn’t. She didn’t invite that kind of intimacy. Even after all these years I was a guest; I never felt like family.
‘Are you all right, Dorothy?’ I said. ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’
‘No, no, thank you.’ Dorothy looked up at me, and I saw her mentally rearrange herself. ‘Oh, Rose,’ she said. ‘I do hope they haven’t found any more rust on the van.’
8
Zoë came good on The Locust Plague, and I devoured it. All women deserve the privilege of failure, but very few get it, Constance wrote. It is a privilege to get something catastrophically wrong, and be given another chance as if nothing really happened. Men do it all the time, and afterwards, are castigated as individuals. Politicians spring to mind. Businessmen. Killers. The white devils who ruin our world. Women are devils too, of course. But when a woman screws it up, it’s usually on behalf of all women, as if we move inside one breast. And yet we should be allowed to screw it up! Self-consciousness in a woman’s life is a plague of locusts!
I liked the boldness with the exclamation marks. I loved the entire thing. But Constance was being universally political here. I wanted the personal. Women are devils too, of course. I wanted to know what mistakes of hers she was talking about – what had she done in her own life that was so catastrophically wrong, and how might it be connected to my mother? I thought about what my dad had told me, about Elise being in her thrall.
I had also been doing some deeper digging on the Internet. Constance Holden was ex-directory: her address had been removed from the public domain, so I couldn’t just turn up at her house. Her books had a presence on the web, however. According to one essay, Green Rabbit showed ‘a woman in the prime of her writing self: fluid, alarming, switching effortlessly between raw pain and aching diffidence’. It had won several prizes in its year of publication, and since then had sold well over a million copies. In both books, Holden seemed preoccupied with mothers and daughters, love, the nature and conditions of emotional punishments, and missed opportunity. Wax Heart had been turned into a perennially popular film called Heartlands. It had won an Oscar for its lead actress – the legendary Barbara Lowden. Neither book was ever out of print, but Constance hadn’t written another novel since Green Rabbit. Some of the press-cuttings posited not that she had suffered writer’s block, but that she had simply opted for a percentage of the box-office takings for Heartlands and decided to retire. This didn’t seem likely to me, but then again: there were no other novels.
I discovered that there had been an attempt, in 1997, to interview Constance. A journalist for the Observer had tried to do the same as me – to understand why someone would want to vanish at the peak of her powers. Her agent, a woman called Deborah Clarke, had refused to cooperate – at Holden’s request, apparently. The journalist described how Holden had always been ‘cagey’ about her upbringing, often questioning the point of peeling back her layers when the books existed as sufficient codes for a life lived. According to the journalist’s profile, in a previous interview given when Wax Heart was published, but not available online, Constance had mentioned a father who had been in the army, a peripatetic life moving to wherever he was stationed, not staying there long enough to plant roots in the soil. ‘But roots are conservative, anyway,’ the journalist quoted her from the earlier piece: ‘The concept of them is to put us, and keep us, in our places.’ As far as the journalist could tell, Connie was unmarried, and there was never a mention of a partner or children. All the journalist could find out was that for a period of time, Holden went to live in America, then perhaps Greece, then a mooted cottage somewhere in the south-England countryside. He couldn’t find friends, he couldn’t find family. The local shopkeeper in the village where Connie was allegedly living was ‘blunt’ and ‘protective’, which convinced the journalist she was somewhere near. And then the trail went cold. No one would help him. The journalist made a virtue out of this and turned his piece into one of those literary mysteries. But he offered no solutions.