My Secret Lover

movement.
    ‘Where are the boys?’
    ‘Vlad’s taken them on a field trip to
Italy. They’re doing the Romans at school. Do you know what they wanted to
know?’
    ‘Was there a McDonald’s in Rome.’
    ‘How did you know?’
    ‘It’s what they always ask.’
    ‘I should spend more time with them,
I really should.’
    ‘Yes, you should.’
    Serves her right for cottage style.
    ‘God, you’re lucky to have a little
place of your own,’ says Joanna.
    ‘Lucky? Me?’
    ‘Oh don’t start, Lydia.’
    I hate my sister.
    ‘You’re the one who started it. And
you’re the lucky one.’
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘Looks for start.’
    ‘Looks aren’t everything.’
    ‘That’s what good-looking people
always say. When you’re pretty, people take you seriously.’
    ‘Not true.’
    ‘Who’d put my bed in the Tate
Modern?’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘Anyway, I’ve only got instant,’ I
tell her grumpily. ‘Instant will be perfect.’
    I don’t know why she has to do all
this darling, lovely, perfect stuff for me. Does she even know she’s doing it
any more?
    ‘I thought about Dad the other day,’
I say, putting a mug of coffee down on the floor near her elegantly dangling
hand.
    ‘Really. Why?’
    ‘I was at a kind of Tupperware party.
And I thought, Mum actually replaced him with Tupperware... She even stored her
picnic sets in his wardrobe. Why did she do that?’
    ‘I think it’s all about putting
things in boxes,’ says Joanna. ‘Makes them easier to deal with.’
    Which makes us laugh again, because
she sounds just like one of Mum’s demonstrations and she didn’t mean it like
that.
    I love my sister.
    ‘I couldn’t remember his voice
properly,’ I tell her. ‘But can you remember my voice when I’m not here?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What’s your strongest memory of
him?’ Joanna asks. ‘Showing me places in an atlas.’
    ‘Mine is making fires,’ says Joanna.
‘He really loved making a proper fire. I think it was his one little act of
rebellion...’
    ‘Of course, she got a living flame in
before he was even cold. Why do you think Dad married Mum?’ I ask. ‘Because she
was pretty. And pregnant.’
    ‘No!’ I can’t imagine my mother being
pregnant, but I suppose she must have been.
    ‘Haven’t you ever worked out the
dates?’
    ‘No.’
    It’s not something you do if you’re
not the oldest, is it?
    ‘But it was the Swinging Sixties.’
    ‘I don’t think that reached as far as
Kenton.’
    ‘They wanted such different things.
Dad would have been happy to buy an old camper van and take off round the
world. Mum had her sights set on a semidetached in Pinner.’
    ‘Who do you think you’re most like?’
asks Joanna. ‘Dad, of course. What?’
    ‘Tupperware, marriage, a nice little
house in the suburbs...’ says Joanna.
    ‘It wasn’t actually Tupperware, it
was aromatherapy. Anyway, you’re married.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ she admits. ‘The
trouble is, if you pretend you’re happy with ordinary for long enough, you have
a heart attack when you realize that you got it wrong, and now there’s endless
ordinariness stretching in front of you,’ says Joanna.
    ‘Is that what happened to Dad?’
    My father had a coronary arrest on
Platform 5 the week after he retired. He was on his way to the British Library.
Nobody noticed until the rush hour was over. And by then it was too late. I’ve
often stood in the place where he died and wondered what he was thinking about
the moment before. The stationmaster told Mum that he had a smile on his face
which she took to mean that he hadn’t been in pain. But it might just as easily
have been that the next train on the board was a Fast Aldgate, first stop Finchley Road.
    ‘What do you think?’ Joanna asks.
    ‘I was in hospital at the time,’ I
remind her.
    That was the worst moment. My mother
and sister coming to my bedside with terrible stricken looks on their faces.
    ‘Am I going to die?’ I asked.
    ‘No. You’re going to be fine,’ Joanna
said.
    ‘Dad’s downstairs,’ Mum added. ‘He is
dead though.’
    I actually smiled because I was still
in the relief-that-I-wasn’t-going-to-die bit. And when I registered her words,
I thought it must be her way of saying something else, like tired, buying a
newspaper or some fruit. Something like that.
    I may even have laughed.
    Funny, us overlapping in the
hospital.
    He was alive when they brought him
in, but he died a few minutes
later. I thought afterwards