Tree of Pearls. Louisa Young

or something, but she didn’t. She just stood there in the puddle of her too-long pyjama legs and looked up at him with the sweetest little expression on her face. ‘Dada,’ she said again. Where the hell did she get ‘Dada’ from?

      Harry wanted to hug her. He was embarrassed to because he was horizontal, in yesterday’s clothes, and half asleep. His limbs are so long and he didn’t know what to do with them. He is unaccustomed to hugging children. She reached over to him and patted his cheek. He looked at her, staring at her eyes. He sat up and leaned forward, his long back arching. He looked as if he might be going to howl with amazement and tenderness.

      ‘Hello, you little darling,’ he said. As he said it I realized how he had been holding himself back from her until now, now that his role is accredited.

      She curled into herself. ‘Dada,’ she said. Coy as cherry pie. Inarticulate as a two-year-old. But getting her message across just fine.

      He pushed back the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the sofa, squinting at his boots and shaking his head. He looked up at me. I had my face in my hand and was thinking about weeping. Or laughing. Something involuntary and physical, anyway.

      ‘Do you want some breakfast?’ he said to her.

      ‘First I go to the loo,’ said Lily, ‘and then I have breakfast.’ Ha ha! Letting him know how things are, how things work around here.

      ‘What do you have?’ he said, standing up, not knowing whether or not he was to go into the bathroom with her.

      ‘You can come in if you like,’ she said. In he went, and she started to explain about cereal, porridge, pancakes on highdays and holidays, melon that we had on holiday once and a naughty little horse came and tried to eat it.

      I sat on the sofa. I had an image of a great big tiny girl’s little finger, with raggy nails and the remains of sparkly pink nail polish from a birthday party, and wrapped spiralled all around the length of it was long tall Harry. There could be worse ways for it to go, I knew. It was … all right. For them to be in love with each other.

      The sofa was warm where he had been sleeping, but behind my neck there was a coldness. A sad little coldness, all the sadder for knowing it was absurd. But it was there. If you love each other then what about me? And they are blood. Blood closer than me. It’s Janie’s blood in there with them. Not mine.

      I pulled the little feeling round from behind me and placed it square on my lap. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said to it, not harshly, but it looked me square in the eyes and I knew it had a point, and that I would have to bear it in mind. Sitting there with his warmth under me, thinking about love, I wondered whether, if I had said yes, sex would have crowned us and saved us and thrown us to the top of the mountain whence we would have surveyed our glorious new future, clear-eyed and confident like Soviet youngsters saluting a five-year plan. Maybe. Maybe.

      I could hear Lily instructing Harry in how to get her dressed and make her breakfast, and I felt very, very odd.

      *

      Harry went to work. As men do. Rise, kiss children, and go to work. God but it felt weird. A little version of normality suddenly and weirdly come to sit on my head. There hasn’t been a boyfriend in my life – my domestic life – for years. The last one, actually, was Harry. Then the years of travelling and running wild, then the years of just me and Lily.

      Except Sa’id. But I’m not thinking about Sa’id.

      And now here is Harry going to work.

      As soon as he left, Lily and I looked each other and said, ‘well?’ At least I did. She didn’t. It was as if she knew everything, and didn’t need to talk to me about it. Didn’t need gossip, or discussion, or analysis, or reassurance.

      ‘Well, sweetheart?’ I asked.

      ‘What?’ she said.

      Part of me yelled out, ‘Jesus fuck, five years of love and devotion and total non-verbal understanding gone, just like that, just because love has gone multilateral …’ A silent part, of course.

      ‘About the daddy?’ I said. The daddy we’ve been talking about so long, the daddy I promised you, the daddy you longed for and I wasn’t sure I could provide and now I have – what about him?

      ‘Why are you calling him the daddy? He’s just Daddy. Not the daddy.’

      He’s just Daddy. She spoke as if she’s known him all her life.

      ‘Are you … is he OK? Are you pleased?’

      ‘Doesn’t matter if he’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s my daddy so I love him.’

      ‘Oh,’ I said. How very easy this seems to be for her. How very misleading that impression might be.

      ‘You know, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Because it was his little sperm so he’s part of me and so we love each other.’

      I don’t feel left out and I am not jealous. I’m really not. I can accept that I might feel these things briefly but they’re not … how I really feel. I really feel really happy that she is being so uncannily together about this. And I’m not sure I believe it. But she is looking at me, so straight and clear and young, and I find myself thinking, my god, maybe it is possible that she just is this well-balanced, maybe between her own natural self and my long devotion to her security she is capable of happily and harmoniously swanning into having a father after all.

      But swans paddle furiously under the water.

      No, go with it girl. Don’t look for grief. If there’s to be any you’ll notice soon enough.

      ‘Of course,’ I said.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re still my mummy even if it wasn’t your little egg.’

      I was ridiculously pleased to hear it, and we walked to school as if nothing had happened, as if it was still just us, and then I came home and got in the bath.

      *

      Dressed again after my bath, I was staring out of my study window, looking out over the grey and yellow mouldy plum December skies and the chilling, battening-down rows of west London winter roofs, not applying myself to some negligible piece of work, wondering about Harry. It had been a few weeks since he had produced the official certificate of his right and duty to be around. He leaves nothing here. No detritus for me to clear away, nothing to suggest he’s coming back. Physically, he might as well never have been here. But he does come back. He’s been coming back for a while.

      So now we arrange a semi-detached homelife for Lily, from scratch. I was hugely alert to what we could slip into. We needed to talk, and yet when we did there was so little to say. Perhaps we just needed to do. Perhaps I should, as Fontella Bass recommends, ‘Leave it in the Hands of Love’.

      The phone rang. I stared at it a bit dopily, then answered. A stranger’s voice, a man, asking for me by my full name. Something put my hackles up. I am a most defensive and protective person. But I was prepared to admit that I was me.

      ‘This is Simon Preston Oliver,’ he said.

      I was none the wiser, and implied it. And then remembered his name from the message.

      ‘Scotland Yard,’ he said.

      Immediately I had a flood of the feeling I get when the school rings: they know parents and their first words are always ‘don’t worry, nothing’s happened to Lily’. I wanted this man to say these words of Harry. Why would Scotland Yard ring me, if not …?

      ‘Why?’ I said, not very intelligently.

      ‘I need to talk to you, Ms Gower, and …’

      ‘Is Harry all right?’ I interrupted.

      There was a pause. ‘DI Makins is fine,’ he said.

      ‘Of course,’ I said. Still hurtling up the wrong track. ‘Isn’t that …’

      ‘I’m