I sat back on the sofa, got more wine into me and tried to rearrange my head to make room for this information. It shouldn’t have stunned the bejasus out of me, at least not to this extent. Olivia has always been a vast mystery to me, at every moment of our relationship and especially in the moments when I thought I understood her best.
When we met, she was a lawyer in the Office of Public Prosecutions. She wanted to prosecute a D-list smack dealer called Pippy who had been picked up in a Drug Squad sweep, while I wanted to let him skip along his merry way, on the grounds that I had spent the last six weeks becoming Pippy’s new BFF and I didn’t feel we had exhausted his many interesting possibilities. I called round to Olivia’s office, to convince her in person. We argued for an hour, I sat on her desk and wasted her time and made her laugh, and then when it got late I took her to dinner so we could keep arguing in comfort. Pippy got a few extra months of freedom, and I got a second date.
She was something else: sleek suits and subtle eye shadow and impeccable manners, a mind like a razor, legs that just kept on keeping on, a backbone like steel and an aura of up-and-coming that you could almost taste. Marriage and babies were the last things on her mind, which as far as I was concerned was one of the fundamentals of any good relationship. I was just disentangling myself from another one—the seventh or maybe the eighth, I don’t know—that had started cheerfully and then descended into stagnation and bitchery after about a year, when my lack of intentions became clear to both of us. If the pill were infallible, Liv and I would have gone the same way. Instead we got a church wedding with all the trimmings, a reception in a country-house hotel, a house in Dalkey, and Holly.
“I’ve never regretted it for a second,” I said. “Have you?”
It took her a moment, either to decide what I meant or to decide on the answer. Then she said, “No. Neither have I.”
I put out a hand and covered hers, where it lay on her lap. The cashmere jumper was soft and worn and I still knew the shape of her hand like I knew my own. After a while I went back into the sitting room, got a throw off the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Olivia said, without looking at me, “She wanted to know about them so badly. And they’re her family, Frank. Family matters. She had a right.”
“And I had a right to have a say about it. I’m still her father.”
“I know. I should have told you. Or respected what you wanted. But . . .” She shook her head, against the back of the sofa; her eyes were closed, and the semidarkness rubbed shadows like great bruises underneath them. “I knew if I brought it up it would turn into an enormous argument. And I didn’t have the energy. So . . .”
“My family is terminally fucked up, Liv,” I said. “In far too many ways to go into. I don’t want Holly to turn out like them.”
“Holly’s a happy, well-adjusted, healthy little girl. You know she is. It wasn’t doing her any harm; she loved seeing them. This is . . . Nobody could have predicted this.”
I wondered, wearily, if that was even true. Personally, I would in fact have bet on at least one member of my family coming to a sticky and complicated end, although my money wouldn’t have been on Kevin. I said, “I keep thinking about all those times I asked what she’d been up to, and she went on about going Rollerblading with Sarah or making a volcano in science class. Chirpy as a little chickadee, not a bother on her. I never once suspected she was hiding anything. It kills me, Liv. It just kills me.”
Olivia’s head turned towards me. “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, Frank. Truly. She didn’t think of it as lying to you. I told her that we might have to wait a while before we talked to you about it, because you’d had a big argument with your family, and she said, ‘Like that time I had that fight with Chloe, and all week I didn’t even want to think about her or I cried.’ She understands more than you think.”
“I don’t want her protecting me. Ever. I want it to be the other way round.”
Something moved across Olivia’s face, something a little wry and a little sad. She said, “She’s growing up, you know. In a few years she’ll be a teenager. Things change.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” I thought about Holly sprawled in her bed upstairs, tearstained and dreaming, and about the night we made her: the low triumphant laugh in Liv’s throat, her hair wrapped round my fingers, the taste of clean summer sweat on her shoulder.
After a few minutes Olivia said, “She’ll need to talk about all this, in the morning. It would help her if we were both there. If you want to stay in the spare room . . .”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”
She stood up, shook out the throw and folded it over her arm. “The bed’s made up.”
I tilted my glass. “I’ll finish this first. Thanks for the drink.”
“Several drinks.” Her voice had the sad ghost of a smile in it.
“Those too.”
Behind the sofa she stopped and her fingertips came down, so tentatively I barely felt them, on my shoulder. She said, “I’m so sorry about Kevin.”
I said, and I heard the rough edge on my voice, “That was my baby brother. It doesn’t matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.”
Liv caught her breath like she was about to say something urgent, but after a moment she let it out in a sigh. She said very softly, maybe to herself, “Oh, Frank.” Her fingers slipped off my shoulder, leaving small cold spots where they had been warm, and I heard the door click quietly behind her.