There was a long unruffled silence down the line. ‘Listen, Abby. I know it’s a pain. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’
‘You’ve spent the last fortnight haranguing me over this. How could you?’
‘It’s work. I don’t have a choice. It’s not as if I wanted to pull out. Daddy’s gone to a lot of effort, booked a really nice restaurant. I was looking forward to it.’
‘Great. So how about you go to dinner with Daddy and I’ll fly out to New York and eat canapés and hobnob with a bunch of idiots and close whatever stupid fucking deal it is you have to close?’
My voice was getting increasingly shrill. I was very aware of this, but I couldn’t do a thing about it. Francesca, in contrast, had started using her telephone voice – which was so enunciated you’d have thought she’d been taught it in finishing school. In actual fact, I think she’d been taught it on some moronic assertiveness course at work. It was the voice she slipped into whenever things got heated, and it always made me feel like I was eleven and she was fifteen again, and there was this unbreachable gulf that existed in our relative levels of maturity.
The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that this four-year age gap had defined all the major differences between us. It had definitely defined our different attitudes to our father. Francesca had been eighteen when he left us; by that time she had gone up to Cambridge. She had more important things to worry about than the final death rattles of our family. I had been fourteen, and was left wondering, Why now? The answer, I could only assume, was that my sister had been the mysterious glue that kept my parents together. And her relationship with our father had emerged from the divorce pretty much unscathed. Twelve years later, she still called him ‘Daddy’ like she was a girl from Beverly Hills asking for a lift to the Prom. When I called him ‘Daddy’, I was being Sylvia Plath.
‘Abby, you’re being very unreasonable about this,’ my sister continued.
‘I’m being unreasonable? I’m not the one who’s spent the past two weeks going on about how important these horrendous family get-togethers are. I’m not the one who drops every other commitment the second work calls.’
‘Oh, come on. That’s hardly fair. Our jobs are very different. Yours is much more . . .’
‘More what? More frivolous? More dispensable? More of a hobby, really?’
‘It’s more flexible. You don’t have things like this dropped on your plate at the last minute. You get to work to your own schedule. You should count yourself lucky.’
‘Jesus! Do you know how patronizing you sound?’ The weary sigh down the phone suggested she didn’t. ‘That’s it – I’m not going either!’
‘Don’t be silly. You have to go. Daddy’s already called the restaurant to change the booking. They were really good about it. And you must know how difficult it is to get a table there. They’re always booked up months in advance.’
‘Oh, yes. I’m sure it was nearly impossible for them to change a table for six to a table for five.’
‘Four.’
‘What?’
‘A table for four.’
‘Fucking hell! Adam’s not coming either?’
‘No, of course not. Why would he go without me? That would be weird. You wouldn’t make Beck go to a family dinner if you had to pull out.’
‘Yes I bloody would! I’d make him go and take notes and report back on the whole sorry affair.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘I’m not joking.’
I heard another deep breath down the line. ‘Listen. When did you last see Daddy?’
‘Don’t guilt-trip me. You have no right.’
‘When was it?’
‘It was recent enough.’
‘When?’
‘Around Christmas.’
‘That’s not recent.’
‘I didn’t say recent. I said recent enough.’
‘He’s worried about you. He asks how you’re getting on all the time, whenever we speak.’
I didn’t say anything. It probably wasn’t true. But there was a part of me that wanted it to be true. And I hated that part of me very deeply.
I felt hollow in the pit of my stomach, like I was going to cry.
I didn’t cry. Instead, I told my sister that she wasn’t getting a birthday present this year. ‘You don’t deserve one and I can’t afford one.’
Then I hung up.
I was lying, of course. I wouldn’t have made Beck go to the meal without me. I couldn’t have, not at the moment. He still hadn’t forgiven me for the second article.
So far as I could tell, his main grievances were as follows: 1) I was dramatizing my life – our life – no matter how I chose to dress it up. 2) I’d written about private conversations and given too much personal information. 3) I’d made a couple of passing references to our sex life – even though I hadn’t said anything bad about our sex life. (Admittedly, this could have been included under the previous point, but I knew from his tone that it should stand as a complaint all by itself.) 4) I was being deliberately provocative. 5) Neither of us came off well.
But, really, it seemed to me that this was all just one mammoth, repetitive, mostly unreasonable grievance. Every point could be subsumed under the single theme that it was wrong for me to write about my life in a national newspaper.
‘Who are you trying to be?’ Beck asked me. ‘Katie fucking Price?’
This was extremely unfair.
I wasn’t trying to be anyone. I was just being myself, writing something open and honest. It wasn’t as if I were standing on a table flashing my tits.
‘That’s exactly what you’re doing,’ Beck told me.
I was flashing my literary tits.
Six days after the article had been published, as we took a taxi through the narrow streets of Soho, we had argued ourselves to a frosty impasse. Tacitly, I think we’d agreed to stop talking about it for the time being. We’d stopped talking in general. It was getting us nowhere.
We had to take a taxi to the restaurant because walking, even to a bus or Tube station, was completely out of the question. I was wearing five-inch heels, which would go some way to narrowing the height difference between Marie Martin and me (assuming that she wasn’t also wearing five-inch heels; I didn’t think she would be because that would make her three inches taller than my father, and he was far too vain to feel comfortable with this arrangement). I’d spent at least a couple of hours getting ready for this ridiculous meal, and I knew most of my preparation was for her benefit.
This did not make me feel good about myself. And I felt myself sinking even lower as we pulled up outside the restaurant. I could tell straight away that I hated it. The façade was mostly glass. It was trendy. There was minimalist furniture and abstract art everywhere. One glance at the table of diners nearest the entrance confirmed that there wasn’t a round plate to be seen. The crockery was all quadrilaterals – squares and rectangles mostly, but I could have sworn I also glimpsed a rhombus at one point.
My father and Marie Martin were waiting for us in the bar area. She looked incredible, needless to say. She was in a black halter neck that clung to the narrow curve of her hips like a second skin. Her make-up looked like it had been done by a professional and her hair was swept over one shoulder in a cascade of elaborate ringlets. She looked immaculate, airbrushed, as if she’d stepped straight out of one of her adverts. The only consolation I could find was that her breasts were no larger than mine; they were possibly a little smaller, depending on how much padding she was wearing. Definitely no more than a B-cup, though.
I don’t know why this mattered to me, but it did.
My father and I hugged with the stiff, awkward hug we’d been perfecting over the past twelve years – the kind of hug you could imagine Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi exchanging for the benefit of the assembled cameras before heading backstage to discuss fiscal austerity. Except I was nothing like Angela Merkel.