“It already feels like a million years.” He heard her light another cigarette. “I smoked myself to death,” she said. “What else was I going to do?”
“You did make it worse for yourself, though,” he said. “You made mistakes.”
“Mistakes? What mistakes?”
“Afterwards, I mean. You said things you shouldn’t have. To journalists.”
He thought she might bridle at that, but she kept quiet.
“And that picture they took of you when you got your degree,” he said, “the one that appeared in the papers.”
“What about it?”
“You shouldn’t have smiled.”
“So now I’m not allowed to smile…” She sounded crestfallen, even defeated, but when she spoke again, a few moments later, her voice had all its old bluntness. “And you,” she said, “are you so innocent?”
36
Billy went over to the stainless-steel sink in the corner and brought handfuls of cold water up to his face. He had been honest with her, brutally so, and she had put up very little resistance, though she had hit back towards the end, when he was least expecting it, but now that she had gone, he was left with an uneasy feeling. He’d talked too much. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t paid attention and, as a result, he felt there was something he had failed to understand. He turned off the tap, then tore off a couple of paper towels and dried his face and hands. Failure, he thought. Firstly, she had failed to realise what she was getting into. Then she had failed to object, to disassociate herself. Something was lacking in her, and it had made her lethal. But what about me? he thought as he dropped the sodden paper towels in the bin. Am I so innocent?
Almost twenty years had passed, but he could still see Venetia sitting across from him in that prim, drab hotel dining-room in the North Pennines.
“If I tell you—” Venetia said, then stopped.
“What?” he said.
“It might change everything…”
“You decide.”
She took a breath and then began. When she was a little girl, she said, she hardly saw her father. He was always off somewhere — at work, or out with clients, or travelling. She would long to spend time with him, fantasising endlessly about all the things they might do together. Grimacing, she tipped more wine into her glass. George McGarry was his name, she went on, and he was the chief executive of a shipping company — a man of great energy and charm, by all accounts. In his forties he married a lively but delicate woman from Bombay. They had two daughters. Margaret was four years older than Venetia, taller, and more reserved.
“I always felt she should have said something,” and now Venetia looked away, into the room. “But I suppose it was asking too much. Besides, I probably wouldn’t have believed her. I wouldn’t have wanted to believe her.”
Billy felt as if the contents of his stomach were beginning to go sour, and he reached for some water.
“I didn’t really see my father until I was eight or nine,” Venetia went on, “and then suddenly, from one day to the next, he seemed to realise that I existed. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. This was my dream, and I’d almost given up on it. He started calling me V. V, darling. V, my sweet. He would pick me up after school and we would go to the cinema, or if it was summer we would drive out into the country. He had a beautiful car. A Daimler, I think it was — all soft leather and polished wood. It was like his work, the secret, glamorous side of him — the part of him I’d never been allowed to see.”
She looked across the table at Billy, and the expression on her face was one he didn’t recognise. She seemed to be pleading with him, but he wasn’t sure what she wanted. To change the past, perhaps. Impossible, then. The look had a nearness about it too, a confidentiality, and for the first time, possibly the only time, he felt properly included in her life, and it hurt him in a way that was almost physical, both because of the unexpected beauty of the moment, and because he was certain that it wouldn’t last.
“It keeps coming out wrong,” she said. “Do you want me to go on?”
Staring down at the tablecloth, he nodded.
“Promise me something,” she said.
“What?”
“Promise you won’t feel sorry for me.”
“If I feel anything,” he said, “it won’t be that.”
Her face was drawn to the dark window. “The first time it happened, we were in his car. We had been to a museum, I think, but he took a different route home, and we ended up on a quiet road that ran through woods…”
One of her hands lay on its side on the table, the fingers curled. Her head, angled away from him, was absolutely still, as if the story she was telling was an animal that could be frightened off by even the slightest of movements.
“He parked the car, then turned and looked at me,” she said, “and I thought he was going to talk about school, how I hadn’t been doing very well, and I had all my excuses ready, but then I noticed that there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t remember seeing before, something strange and glittery, and his breathing was noisier than usual. I could hear each breath, and when he spoke, his voice was husky.”
She gazed down into her drink. Billy wanted to reach out, put his hand against her cheek or stroke her hair, but he knew it would be wrong to touch her.
“It was husky, almost as if he had a cold, or he was going to cry. ‘You know I love you, don’t you, V?’ he said, and suddenly I didn’t want him to call me V any more. ‘Venetia,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You’re too grown-up for nicknames, aren’t you?’ He looked through the windscreen for a while, then he turned to me again. ‘I love you so much,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Of course I do,’ I said. I wanted to come out with a joke and make him laugh, but his eyes still had that weird glitter, and the air in the car had gone all thick. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he said. ‘Of course,’ I said. And that was when he reached down and undid his flies…”
Her face was still lowered.
“It went on for six years,” she said.
“Venetia,” Billy said.
He couldn’t say anything else. He felt, oddly, as if he was implicated in her father’s behaviour, as if he was also guilty. Because he was a man, perhaps.
Fathers, though, he would think a few years later: they were like the poppies that appeared in the summer, so vivid against the new ripe yellow of the corn, so handsome, but if you pressed their petals between finger and thumb the red went black and wet.
Back upstairs, he lay next to Venetia on the bed and watched TV. He fell asleep without meaning to. When he woke, it was two thirty in the morning and Venetia had gone, but there was a strip of light under the bathroom door, and he could hear a tap running.
“Are you all right?” he called out.
She didn’t answer.
Leave her, he thought. Let her be. Throwing off his clothes, he climbed beneath the covers and was asleep again before she reappeared.
On Sunday, as they drove back to Liverpool, he asked her whether she ever saw her father. Sometimes, she said. On special occasions. Though he was quite ill now, with angina. He’d been put on a strict diet and wasn’t allowed any excitement. Two months ago, on his seventy-first birthday, she had bought him the richest cake she could find. She thought that if he ate enough of it he might die. She cut him slice after slice, and because he loved her so much he kept on eating.
“It didn’t work, though,” she said. “He’s still around.”
Billy took his eyes off the road and looked at her. She wasn’t joking.