My head refuses to clear, despite Chloe’s exhortation, and Will materializes and fills my brain.
He’d appeared in our lives in the eighties. Well, “appeared” doesn’t really describe it. He stormed our castle and swept Jude off her feet. It was a huge event in our lives. She didn’t normally have boyfriends when I was growing up. She used to say she’d taken a vow of celibacy and was living like a nun. And laugh. I remember looking up “celibacy” when I was about twelve and being quite shocked. I thought Jude was talking about religion but she was talking about sex. Of course, her friends howled with laughter and started calling her Sister Jude. I wasn’t included in the joke. I was still just the kid. But I knew Jude wasn’t happy being celibate. For a nun, she spent a lot of time talking about men. But it was talking, not doing. My best friend Harry said Jude needed a bloke, but I didn’t pass this on. Unwanted advice, Jude would’ve said.
I knew something had changed, though, when I heard her singing in the bath one night. Singing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” at the top of her voice with all the harmonies and “yeah, yeahs.” She sounded so unlike Jude that I knocked on the door and shouted through: “You sound happy!”
“I am. Come in,” she shouted back.
I didn’t really like seeing Jude naked—it didn’t feel right, but she said I was being a ridiculous prude and how did a child of hers grow up to be embarrassed by the human body.
I remember sitting on the loo seat so that I didn’t have to look straight at her while she told me that a man from her past, a man she really liked when she was younger, had reappeared. I felt all hot because I thought she must mean my dad. The man we were not allowed to talk about.
I didn’t know who he was, my dad, and I used to think that she didn’t either. When I was little, and there were dads in the books she read to me, I’d ask. I’d point at the pictures and say, “Is that my daddy?” and she’d laugh and say, “No. That’s the daddy in the book.”
“Where’s my daddy?”
“You haven’t got one, Emma. It’s just us.”
I think she weeded out books with fathers in them after a while because we never seemed to read about them again.
Of course, when I got a bit older, I realized that everyone had a dad, but I understood from Jude’s silence on the matter that I shouldn’t ask. So I daydreamed one. He was tall and good-looking and fun and clever and, some days, he played the guitar and, on others, he wrote books and took me on holiday to faraway places. Hilarious really because no one I knew had a dad like that. Harry’s dad was old and wore cardigans.
But, as I got better at eavesdropping, I began picking up bits and pieces about my real father. I listened in when Jude told a neighbor over a bottle of wine about her struggle to bring up a child alone, earn a living, and pass her law exams. “No time for men for ages,” Jude complained.
“Emma’s dad is long gone—he couldn’t wait to leave,” she’d said. “Charlie was much younger—well, he was still a baby himself.”
I stashed away the information—I now had a name and a baby face to feed my imagination.
Anyway, Jude sat in her bath and told me the man she’d met again was coming to the house. She said she’d spotted him on the telly news—he’d been speaking at an anti-nuclear demonstration—and had recognized him immediately.
“After all these years, I’ve never forgotten him,” she said. She chattered on about how they knew each other at college—Jude went to Cambridge and did history. Jude was and is super clever. She’s retired now, obviously, but she used to be a lawyer specializing in human rights cases. She always used the word “lawyer”—“Solicitors are middle-aged men with tummies, doing conveyancing,” she told me. Anyway, the law wasn’t her first choice. When she left university, she joined a publishing house and was rushing round London, lunching with the beautiful people. She always sounded as though she was using italics when she said it.
But I happened, and we had to live with Granny and Grandpa for a while. When we left, she said she needed to do something more solid, more nine-to-five instead. She got a job in an office while she studied. I remember she spent hours with her head in her books and court papers. Her bedroom had that sharp, inky, papery smell. She had to concentrate, she would tell me if I tried to ask a question about my homework or tell her about how mean Mr. Lawson was in assembly. She had to concentrate or she might miss the tiny detail that could get her client out of prison. So I went back to David Bowie in my room and talked to his poster on the wall.
So, I liked this new Jude, singing in the bath. She wanted to tell me about things and she sounded young and excited. I stayed in the steamy bathroom, listening and giggling with her until my clothes felt damp and my mother was ready to emerge from the water.
I didn’t say the “dad” word. I knew it would kill the mood and I decided to wait and see.
When the love object came to the house, I smiled my welcome as instructed earlier by Jude.
She’d been jumpy and nervous the whole morning, changing her clothes at least three times.
“You look really nice,” I’d said each time she appeared in a new outfit, but she kept disappearing back upstairs to change. And I was so pleased that she was wearing the pretty turquoise earrings I’d bought for her birthday out of my pocket money.
When “Professor Will,” as she insisted on calling him, finally knocked on the door, I thought Jude would pass out with the excitement.
“You go, chick,” she said, taking one last look in the mirror. “And smile!”
I loved it when she used to call me “chick,” my pet name from when I was a little girl. She’d all but abandoned it as I got older, but it still had the power to make me feel warm inside.
Anyway, I’d only just got the door open to let him in when she wafted past me and took over.
“Hello, Will. How lovely to see you. Will, meet Emma. My baby. Darling, this is Professor Will. My old friend from uni.”
Will flashed me a sympathetic smile and held out his hand.
“Hardly a baby, Jude. She’s a young woman.”
It’s funny the things you remember. His hand felt dry and warm, and a gold ring on his thumb brushed my knuckles.
I risked a closer look at him to check if there was any family resemblance. There wasn’t. He was all corners. Sharp nose, sharp cheekbones. Nothing like me and my pudding face. Jude used to tell me I was pretty sometimes, when we were on our own. But I wasn’t—I’m not. Pretty was shiny hair and long eyelashes and pink cheeks—like Jude. I had brown curly hair that wouldn’t lie flat and a pudding face. I hated my face. I used to stand in front of the mirror, pulling at my flesh like it was made of Plasticine until my cheeks stung. Jude said all teenage girls went through this.
Will must’ve caught me staring at him and smiled. Jude didn’t see, she was too busy closing the front door, so it was a smile just between us and it made me feel a bit tingly. He might be my friend, too. Or my dad.
“Tea?” Jude said as she led him into the sitting room.
“Lovely,” he said. “What a great house.”
In the kitchen, filling the kettle and searching for two matching mugs, I remember wondering what sort of man wears a ring on his thumb.
He must be nearly forty, I thought, spooning the tea into the pot. It’s like your granddad wearing platforms.
I laughed to myself at the idea and carried the tray through.
The professor had kicked off his sandals to sit cross-legged on the sofa and his feet looked soft and white like bread against the cushions.
“I can’t quite believe you’re here,” my mother gushed.
Very unlike her. Very un-lawyer-like, I thought, crossly crashing the tray down, spilling the milk into the saucer of sugar.
“Sorry,” I said, not meaning it. Jude looked furious, but Will swooped forwards, nearly toppling from his guru pose, to help steady the table.
“No damage done,” he said. “Just ready mixed.” And he and Jude laughed.
I felt left out of the joke, but when Jude was mopping up, he winked at me.