Lawrence laughed. Eloise had stolen away from the table while we were talking and I watched his eyes tracking her around the room. She was carrying two bowls of something down to the far end of the table.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘She’s giving them bloody pasta.’
He got out of his chair and went to follow her, grasping her elbow and saying something in her ear.
‘Why doesn’t he just let her do it?’ the leopard-print woman said to me. ‘They’re her kids.’
I turned to look at her. She had a narrow head and small very round eyes that she widened frequently, as though in private amazement at the things people said and did. Her dark hair was tightly drawn back from her bony face by a leopard-print band. She wore earrings like dangling gold ingots that matched her collar-like necklace. She was sitting back in her chair with her wine glass in her hand, her food uneaten on its plate. She had mashed the balls of choux pastry into a pulpy mess and hidden the foie gras under it.
‘Gaby,’ Birgid said severely, ‘he’s trying to establish boundaries.’
Gaby twirled her fork in the mess on her plate.
‘Have you got kids?’ she said, to me. ‘I wouldn’t want someone telling me how to bring mine up.’ She pursed her darkly lipsticked mouth, flipping over her fork and mashing the food with the back of it. ‘You’re the writer, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Lawrence has talked about you. I think I’ve read one of your books. I can’t remember what it was about though.’
She read so many books, she said, that they tended to blur together in her mind. Often she would drop the kids off at school and then go back to bed and spend the whole day there, reading, only getting up when it was time to collect them again. She could get through six or seven books a week. Sometimes she would be halfway through a book and suddenly remember that she had read it before. It was bound to happen, given how many of the things she read, but all the same it was a bit disturbing how long it could take her to realise it. She would start to get this surreal feeling, as if she was looking back on something while it was actually occurring, but for some reason she never blamed it on the book: she always thought the sense of déjà vu was to do with her own life. Also, at other times, she remembered things as if they’d happened to her personally when in fact they were only things she’d read. She could swear on her life that this or that scene existed in her own memory, and actually it was nothing to do with her at all.
‘Does that ever happen to you?’ she said.
The worst thing was the arguments it caused between her and her husband. She would be absolutely certain that they had been somewhere or done something, and he would simply deny it point blank. Sometimes she realised after the argument that the trip to Cornwall had in fact taken place in a book rather than in reality, but at other times her certainty about something remained, to the point where his refusal to recognise it nearly drove her mad. Recently, for instance, she had mentioned a spaniel they once owned called Taffy. Her husband claimed to have absolutely no memory of Taffy at all. More than that, he had accused her of making Taffy up: they had never owned such a dog, he said. They had ended up screaming and shouting at each other, until she realised that there had to be some proof and had turned the whole house upside down searching for the evidence that Taffy had existed. It had taken her all night – she had turned out every single box and drawer and cupboard – while he sat on the sofa drinking Scotch and listening to his contemporary jazz collection, which she hated, at full volume, and mocking and jeering at her whenever she happened to pass through the room. In the end they had both collapsed with anger and exhaustion: the children got up in the morning to find their parents fully dressed and asleep on the sitting-room floor, with the house looking like it had been ransacked by burglars.
She put her wine glass to her dark fleshy lips and drained it in one swallow.
‘But did you find anything?’ Birgid said. ‘Did you ever solve the mystery?’
‘I found a photograph,’ Gaby said. ‘In the last box there was a photograph of an adorable little brown spaniel. I can’t tell you what a relief it was. I’d thought I was actually finally going mad.’
‘And what did he say?’ Birgid said.
Gaby gave a mirthless little laugh.
‘He said, oh, you meant Tiffy. If I’d known you were talking about Tiffy, he said, obviously that would have been completely different. But there was never any Taffy, he said. The thing is,’ she said, ‘I know the dog was called Taffy. I just know it.’
The girl in the red dress – Henrietta – spoke for the first time.
‘How can you be sure?’ she said.
‘I am sure,’ Gaby said. ‘I know it.’
‘But he says it was called Tiffy,’ Henrietta said.
Her face was as smooth and round and white as a china doll’s. She must have been fifteen or sixteen years old, but despite her tight dress and high heels she acted with a childlike simplicity. She stared at her mother with wide, unblinking eyes. Her expression, which never seemed to change, was one of alarm.
‘He’s wrong,’ Gaby said.
‘Are you saying he’s lying?’ Henrietta said.
‘I’m just saying that he’s wrong,’ Gaby said. ‘I’d never call him a liar. I’d never call your daddy a liar.’
Eloise came and sat back down in her place opposite me and looked brightly from one to the other of us, trying to get abreast of the conversation.
‘He’s not my daddy,’ Henrietta said. She sat very still and erect and her round, doll-like eyes didn’t blink.
‘What’s that?’ Gaby said.
‘He’s not my daddy,’ she repeated.
Gaby turned to Eloise and me with open irritation, and proceeded to explain the details of Henrietta’s conception as though Henrietta were not sitting there listening. The girl was the product of a previous relationship – or not even a relationship, a one-night stand she’d had with someone in her early twenties. She’d met Jamie – her husband, and the father of her other two children – when Henrietta was only a few weeks old.
‘So he is her daddy really,’ she said.
Lawrence served the main course, one tiny bird with trussed-up legs each.
‘What is it?’ Angelica asked, as hers was set before her.
‘Baby chicken,’ Lawrence said.
Angelica screamed. Lawrence stiffened, plate in hand.
‘Leave the table, please,’ he said.
‘Darling,’ Eloise said, ‘darling, that’s a little bit harsh.’
‘Please leave the table,’ Lawrence said.
Tears began to roll down Angelica’s cheeks. She got to her feet.
‘Do you know where he is?’ Eloise said, turning away.
‘Where who is?’ Gaby said.
‘The father,’ Eloise said in a low voice. ‘The man you had a one-night stand with.’
‘He lives in Bath,’ Gaby said. ‘He’s an antiques dealer.’
‘Bath’s only just down the road,’ Eloise exclaimed. ‘What’s he called?’
‘Sam McDonald,’ Gaby said.
Eloise’s face brightened.