Their decision to marry in the autumn was a continuation of the absurd, drugged-up fantasy that should have remained a misjudged holiday romance. He was thirty and she was twenty. Later, she wondered if it was a longing to connect with Greece after the trauma of losing her mother. There was an undeniable pleasure in lying in bed with someone and speaking Greek, as she had done as a child with Ellie. It was so hard to make sense of the murky motives of youth. Constantine had the physical daring and shapely limbs of the bull-leapers on the Minoan frescoes at Knossos. Danger, beauty and youth, backed up by a family whose wealth was intimidatingly vast and assumed by them to be a solution to everything.
If moving to Greece had initially felt like embracing her mother’s country, it wasn’t long before she’d lost it. And lost a baby. She blamed herself for that. A summer of such concentrated partying that she forgot to take the pill – up all night at clubs, taking whatever looked good, staying awake with coke, sleeping all day. She didn’t notice she was pregnant for ages, by which time it was probably already doomed. The implausible marriage had already disintegrated. She returned like a soldier traumatised by war to her father’s England. Except that Ed had gone by then – moved to France. If she bought The Times, she was able to read his numerous book reviews, but she hardly ever saw him. Theo was already doing something in nanotechnology, and earning fabulous money in Boston. So there was no family left. During that terrible time, Daphne felt orphaned, emptied, robbed.
Skimming through her teenage diaries in search of ideas for Putney, she was shocked by how unhappy she’d been, especially when Ralph went to America for a year. She had regularly got drunk on her parents’ brandy and bottles of wine, convinced that all meaning had been snatched away from her life. Of course, she dissembled about why she was in such a bad way. Her parents may have been thinking about other things, but they loved her and noticed her misery. Once, they’d been playing a record of Ralph’s music on the kitchen gramophone as the family gathered for supper. This was not unusual. Indeed, his music had been a sort of soundtrack to her life – cropping up by chance on the radio or at friends’ houses, actively sought out in occasional concerts, and sometimes chosen by her to listen to at home. But this time, hearing Into the Woods, the woodwind piece he said represented their first kisses in the green glade, it was too much to bear. She fled from the room and refused to come down to eat. Later, Ellie brought her a plate of spaghetti bolognese and sat on her bed, stroking her, telling her it was never easy being a teenager, that she could always talk to her about anything. Daphne longed to confide in her mother, to be held and comforted, but it was impossible. The pact of secrecy between Ralph and her was their foundation stone. She knew that if she confessed, she would never see him again.
It was all very well, she thought, Ellie acting the part from time to time. She never doubted that her mother was devoted to her. But it was the veering from one extreme to another that was so hard to deal with as a daughter, so that she never knew whether Ellie would be too engrossed with a project to speak to her children or whether she’d come to Daphne’s bed and lie there with her for hours singing Greek songs and making up mad stories.
This ‘blowing hot and cold’, as Ed called it, characterised her mother’s approach to many things, including religion. Ostensibly espousing a dogged, left-wing atheism, Ellie periodically dragged her children off to the Orthodox church in Moscow Road. She and Ed had married there in 1958 and they’d baptised both babies there as well. Daphne remembered various occasions standing under the gilded dome, yawning her way through Easter midnight Mass, standing for an eternity and clutching her decorated candle in a sea of small flames. One year, Ralph had been there with Nina and a baby or two. In the chaos that ensued after midnight struck, when everyone was kissing and greeting friends (‘Christ is risen’, ‘Truly he is risen’), they’d escaped into some sort of vestry and snogged. Outside, firecrackers exploded like warfare.
By the time she picked up Libby and Paige from the party, Daphne felt overheated with anger. It was like an allergic reaction that spiked when she thought of Ralph, of the casual carelessness of her parents and of her own gullible stupidity. The girls stumbled along the pavement, collapsed into the back seat of the car and hardly greeted Daphne. They were evidently drunk.
‘Yeah, fine,’ answered Libby to her mother’s question of how it went. There was a love bite on Paige’s neck. Daphne felt helpless and furious. What could she do? What do mothers do? There was certainly no role model.
‘You sound as though you’ve had a drink or two.’ It came out sullen and stupid. Should she roar and rant? She couldn’t do that to Libby, especially in front of her new friend. She had done far worse at their age.
Back home, her body was rigid with unabated fury and, above all, fear.
‘You need to drink lots of water now or you’ll be ill.’ She made the girls down two large glasses each and, when Paige went to the bathroom, she spoke to Libby. ‘I’m not happy about this. You must be careful, my lovely.’ She hoped to draw her daughter in close, impart some motherly words of wisdom, show her there was no need to hurry with these new experiences. There was so much time ahead.
‘Yeah, Mum. I’ll be careful.’ It sounded patronising. ‘Night, then.’ Libby turned to leave, wiping her face and smearing a streak of black mascara across a pale cheek.
After the girls were in bed, Daphne returned to her sewing. She held a small figure of Ralph, wondering how he fitted into the scene this time around. She no longer thought of him as a romantic, floating character in the sky, and she began to wonder about the real, living Ralph. How did he see their story now? Did he harbour any doubts at all or was he as sure as he’d been in 1976, when he’d committed adultery and child abuse simultaneously? She had never formulated that thought before and it had a satisfying cut to it, like a knife. Had it ever crossed his mind? Perhaps she should ask him.
Locating some black rubbery material – scraps of fetish clothing – she snipped out a tiny mask, attaching it so it covered much of the Ralph doll’s face. A bit voodoo, she thought with satisfaction.
9
JANE
‘Jane! Jane? Aren’t you coming?’ Michael’s voice had a mix of concern and annoyance as he returned to the kitchen. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I’ve been calling you for ages. We ought to go now if we’re going to miss the traffic.’ Having finished the washing-up, she was standing at the sink, staring out of the window at the weak sun that had just broken through the morning mist.
‘Sorry, my love. I was a million miles away.’ Probably more like two thousand, if she was honest – somewhere in Greece, where Daphne had been, supposedly working, for the last few weeks. This gap in proceedings had been difficult. It had the blank, empty summer feel she had hated as a girl, when she waited in Wimbledon for her friend to return from the Mediterranean.
This summer, it was waiting in Wandsworth, with brief flurries of commotion each time Toby returned from a festival where his university troupe was performing. The previous week, he had arrived home happily exhausted and unwashed, his head shaved and a sparse auburn beard sprouting from his youthful chin. He had four actor friends with him and the two girls took over Josh’s old room, while the boys spread out rolls and sleeping bags on Toby’s floor. They spent most of the days asleep, emerging in the late afternoon, and Jane had enjoyed coming home from work and cooking suppers for the students, before they went out for the night. Crowding round the kitchen table they put away platefuls of food and quoted lines from their comedy show that had them laughing so much the girls said they would pee themselves and the boys lay cackling on the floor. She was pleased to see Toby happy and doing something he enjoyed, but she had to admit that even having her youngest son home didn’t prevent her thoughts being dominated by Daphne and Ralph.