‘I didn’t have a migraine today,’ Eliza announced. ‘I had a little day trip out instead, all by myself. Want to guess where I went?’
Lara put the garlic down and stared blankly at her. She had no idea where this was heading. ‘Why don’t you just tell me?’ she suggested.
‘I went to Whitby,’ the girl said, pacing across the floor, ponytail swinging behind her, fists clenched. ‘I saw Dad. Or should I say Steve?’
Okay, so this was unexpected. And alarming too. Why was Eliza calling him Steve? Did this mean . . . ? ‘What—?’ she began but her daughter was already speaking over her.
‘Because he’s not my dad, is he? He told me, so you can drop the act now.’ Eliza’s voice shook with emotion, her wide grey eyes full of accusation. ‘Have you any idea how embarrassing that was, by the way? That he had to tell me, in the middle of the street, that he wasn’t really my dad? Can you even imagine how I felt at that moment?’
Lara had to put both hands down on the worktop because here was her own personal sinkhole, weakening the ground beneath her, threatening to drag her down. The secret she had buried for so long, and so carefully, now exposed to the open air for the first time in years. Her breath seemed to seize in her lungs. ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to say. ‘That must have been horrible.’
‘Oh, you think?’ Eliza’s sarcasm was belied by the fact that her face was turning red, just as it always had when she was a small girl and trying not to cry. It pained Lara to register this. ‘Correct! It was horrible. It was fucking awful, Mum!’
Lara gulped. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said again, aware of how weak the words sounded, how woefully inadequate.
‘Well, guess what, that’s not good enough,’ Eliza retaliated. She was Lara’s height, five foot six, and stood opposite her, bristling with such ferocity that Lara took a step back. ‘You can’t apologise your way out of this one. You let me think Steve was my dad – and that he didn’t care enough to have anything to do with me. You let me think that, even though it’s not true. That’s really shitty, Mum. That is just . . . wrong.’
Lara closed her eyes briefly, wishing there was something she could say to turn the situation round, an explanation she could produce that might make this better. But there was nothing. Because it was shitty. It was wrong. She’d always had to live with that knowledge. ‘I—’
‘Don’t say you’re sorry again because I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested in you being sorry.’ Hatred was practically radiating out from Eliza’s pores and it pierced Lara to her very marrow. ‘I’m just so . . . hurt. You know? So fucking hurt that you have been lying to me all this time. I thought you were better than that!’
The words stung like a slapped face. Lara’s hands trembled so violently she had to clutch them together. She didn’t know what to say other than sorry, but if she dared bleat that out for a third time, her daughter’s anger might become incandescent. But how could she explain? ‘It didn’t start as a lie,’ she mumbled, her face flooding with heat.
Eliza stared at her, allowing the words to hang between them. ‘It didn’t start as a lie?’ she repeated. ‘What the hell does that even mean?’
Lara dropped her gaze to the scuffed lino floor. It meant that, all those years ago, when she’d told Steve she was pregnant and he’d assumed the baby was his, she had kept silent when a more honest person would have corrected him with a ‘might be’. She had agonised over the omission, truly grappling with the ethics of the dilemma, but at the time she’d had very few choices. Steve had effectively been offering to rescue her from a difficult situation; he was a decent, steady bloke, trying to be responsible. Sure, had things been different, he’d have remained merely a drunken, consoling encounter during a bad patch and nothing more; she never would have bothered seeing him again. This was not how the dice fell though – and so she’d made a go of it with him, for better or worse. In retrospect, for worse.
‘It means that I thought you were his,’ Lara replied, low-voiced. The old shame surged through her, forcing her to add the muttered caveat, ‘Well, probably anyway. I hoped you were.’
This was greeted by a long, sarcastic whistle. ‘Probably, she says. Probably. Jesus Christ, Mum, do you know how you sound? This is . . . I can’t believe it. Poor Steve! I’ve spent all these years despising the man and now I actually feel sorry for him. I can’t believe—’
Whatever it was Eliza couldn’t believe remained unspoken; she let out a noise that was somewhere between a scream and a growl, and threw her hands in the air. ‘So who is he, then? My real dad, who you’ve kept hidden from me my whole life? Were you ever going to tell me? Or was it more convenient for you to go on letting me think my dad hated me and wanted nothing to do with me?’ She was crying by now, tears rolling down her round freckled face. ‘Does everyone else know, by the way? Does Grandma know, and Uncle Richie? Is this some big family secret that you’ve all been keeping from clueless little Eliza?’
‘No!’ Lara protested, even though yes, her mum did know – having moved down from Cumbria in the aftermath of Steve’s departure in an act of solidarity. And yes, okay, so Richie knew too, but that was because he was kind and wise, and a good person to talk to in a crisis. It wasn’t as if she’d gone round broadcasting her secrets to the world at large though. ‘Well – all right, they do know,’ she conceded in the next moment, wretched at the thought of another layer of untruths, ‘but it’s not like we’ve all been talking about it behind your back. It’s more that—’
She couldn’t find the words to explain – were there any words good enough to explain? – but it didn’t matter because Eliza was yelling now, fists clenched by her sides. ‘How could you do this to me, Mum? I hate you for doing this!’
At that precise moment, Lara hated herself too. If someone else had caused that blanching anguish on her girl’s face, the shocked tremor in her voice, she’d be going after them with a rolling pin, but she was the one to blame this time; she’d done that to her, the person she loved the most. She mentally turned the rolling pin on herself, beating herself up with her usual comparisons: that if she was any kind of proper mother, like the apron-clad Mrs Watson, this would never have happened. ‘Darling, I’m so sorry,’ she said again, but Eliza rounded on her before she could continue.
‘Stop bloody saying that! If you were really sorry, we’d have had this conversation years ago. You wouldn’t have lied to me from the day I was born!’ She scrubbed at her face with a tissue, inadvertently smearing mascara around her eyes. ‘You still haven’t told me who he is, anyway. Or how I can find him.’
Lara’s throat felt as if it were closing up and she had to force herself to swallow back the rearing tide of panic. Of course Eliza wanted to find him, to know about him. But she in turn felt so unprepared for the telling of this story, she had no idea how to begin. She steeled herself. ‘Listen, you’re upset, maybe this is not the time—’