‘I don’t care, I don’t bloody care. She doesn’t need your family’s presents.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nic …’
‘Don’t use that language with me.’
‘Oh, what, fucking what?’
A caught-back sob from Nicola, could have been a laugh or a cry of despair.
And then from Mark simply, ‘Nic …’
And then, ‘Don’t you touch me.’
At my elbow Nicola’s little sister Eloise said, ‘Uncle James, I think Daisy’s done a poo in her knickers.’
Eloise, who had reached the stage of braces and awkwardness, was holding Daisy at arm’s length towards me. From the smell of her, Eloise was right. Daisy’s face was screwed up, her body trying to wriggle away.
‘Dowwwwwwn,’ she wailed, ‘want go dowwwwn.’
When we rounded the end of the hedge, Mark and Nicola were gone.
*
And then again, later, in the conservatory. Dark clouds lowering at the horizon, wind whipping up although the day was still bright in our little square of green. Daisy reached out her chubby little arm to her birthday cake and said, ‘Cick! Cick!’ so Mark cut her another slice and placed it in her reverently open hands. She looked at it with rapt attention — her mother had fed her some earlier with a spoon — then, decisively, buried her face in the cake, came up smothered in chocolate and wiped her hands down her dress.
I was just beginning to laugh when Nicola turned round, looked at her daughter and said, ‘For God’s sake, Mark, why the hell did you do that? Look at her! Just look at her!’
And it was too sharp, too angry, too loud. It was disproportionate, so that for a moment we were all staring at Nicola. And she felt it too, the heat of inappropriate rage.
‘Come here, Daisy,’ she said, and pulled the child to her a little too roughly, crouched down and began to scrub at her face with a napkin a little too forcefully.
Daisy, feeling the pressure of so many eyes on her, burst into noisy tears. Nicola sat back on her haunches with a sigh, releasing Daisy’s arm, and the little girl ran stumbling to her father, burying her face in his cream trouser leg, covering it in chocolate.
Mark lifted her up, cuddled her to his chest, more chocolate everywhere.
‘Shhh,’ he said, ‘it’s all right, Mummy didn’t mean to upset you, did you, Mummy?’
And Nicola looked up from her crouch at the circle of her family around her, and at Mark holding Daisy, and at Daisy’s smiling complacent face, now that she had attained her father’s arms. Nicola made a low noise at the back of her throat, got to her feet and reached for Daisy, but Daisy snuggled closer to her father. Nicola’s mouth turned down, her arms still outstretched for her daughter. Her brow darkened, she took a breath to speak but instead turned on her heel and marched back into the house and upstairs.
There was a moment of silence.
Nicola’s father said, ‘Well then.’
Rebecca said, ‘More cake for anyone?’
But soon many of us had to leave.
Nicola did not come down to see us off. We stood in the outer atrium with Mark, next to the piles of presents which had been sent by Simon, who could not come, and Emmanuella, who could not come, and Franny, who also, for some reason, could not come. Daisy was climbing over Mark, as if he were a tree, biting at his neck and ear, pulling on his shirt, popping off buttons as she clambered and dangled.
‘I’m sorry about Nic,’ he said. ‘She’s got a headache.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Jess. ‘Tell her we send our love. We’ll see her next time we’re down.’
I leaned in to hug Mark goodbye, and as I did so Daisy detached herself from him and, for a moment, put her arms around my neck. With her softness, she planted a wet kiss on my cheek, unbidden. I have remembered this so often that the memory is worn through and now I wonder if I imagined it entirely.
Mark waved us off as we drove away. I looked back, and saw Daisy still clambering and exploring the contours of her father. And when I think of Daisy now, that is how I remember her still. Slung in Mark’s arms like a monkey swinging in a tree. Climbing over him like he was the most solid thing she knew.
About six weeks after that, Mark called me.
He said, ‘James?’ in a broken voice. ‘I’m in London, because Nicola,’ but he could not finish the sentence. The tears overran him and he gulped to a wheezing halt.
‘Are you at the flat?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to come over?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’
It surprised me, considering the matter as I drove to Mark’s flat, that he was so devastated. Perhaps it surprised me that Nicola had managed to accomplish this thing; to pierce the armour and wound him. I have never been able to hurt him myself. I might say I have never wanted to hurt him, but it’s not true. I wish he cared enough about me that I could hurt him. I wish I thought that my leaving would cause him pain. I wish I felt I had ever meant more to him than someone convenient to pass a pleasant afternoon or weekend with. I wish that I could break him by telling him I have ceased to love him, but I can’t. He will never cry those tears for me. Sometimes contemplating this makes me so angry that I find I want to hurt him. But, of course, that is the one thing I can’t do.
When I arrived at the flat, Mark was crumpled in a brown leather sofa by the window. His eyes were bloodshot; the tip of his nose was red. He was wearing a ragged jumper and a pair of old, paint-stained jeans. I let myself in, and he opened his arms wide, like a toddler looking for comfort. I hugged him, his head on my shoulder and the wet of his weeping trickling on to my shirt. After a while, he dis entangled himself from me and I poured us both whiskies.
Mark said, ‘This is it. She wants a divorce.’
I nodded.
‘She thinks I’m seeing someone else. I tried to tell her she was being silly but she’s so … she’s very final, you know?’
I knew.
‘And anyway, look. You’re not someone else, are you?’
Suddenly I was afraid, with a fear louder than my concern for Mark’s marriage.
‘Did you tell her it was me?’
He shook his head. ‘I mean, it’s not just …’ He chewed at his thumbnail. ‘You knew that, didn’t you, James? You knew that it wasn’t just you, didn’t you?’
I nodded creakily. I supposed I had known, in a way. He began to sniff again.
‘But … can’t you tell her you’ll stop?’
‘She won’t listen.’
‘Do you want her back?’ I said. ‘Do you still —’ I stopped, reflecting on how little I wanted to know the answer to this question — ‘love her?’
Mark curled his lip at his empty tumbler. He refilled it.
‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Maybe I do. Maybe.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘So it’s not …’
‘It’s not that. It’s Daisy.’ Mark looked past me at the bookshelves behind my head. ‘Don’t you see? She could take Daisy away from me.’
Ah, I thought. Melodrama. This was the Mark I knew. I spoke gently.
‘She can’t do that, Mark. It’s not legal.’ I thought of the thin veneer of gold covering Mark’s body, of his touching lack of comprehension of what it could purchase. Children could not simply be taken away from a man with money.
‘You’ll get good lawyers, Mark. You can afford it and she can’t stop you from —’
He turned his head to stare out of the window. He was calm now.
‘She can though,’ he said, ‘and she will. I might have the money, but there’s enough dirt to be dredged up, and she knows most of it already. The drugs and the boys and the cottaging — there’re police records of that. You should know.’ He placed the flat of his palm against his forehead and rubbed in a circular motion two or three times, as if trying to ease some sudden pain. ‘No judge in the world would choose me over her.’