A reissue of the evocative first novel by the author of Perfect Lives Quite unlike her fair stepsisters, Lizzie is dark and secretive, "just like your father," says her mother. But what was her father like? Photos of him are hidden away, and snatches of overheard conversation between her mother and her stepfather deepen the mystery. Only her best friend Savannahalso abandoned by her father when she was a babyknows what it feels like to wonder, to try and piece together an earlier story. When events propel Lizzie to go alone to London she stops wondering and starts searching. Beautifully evoking the ache of childhood loss, the scrappy joys of chaotic families, and the hurt and relief of understanding, this novel reveals Polly Samson's talent for laying bare the uncomfortable truths that lie just under the skin, in every family, in every secret.
Release date:
April 1, 2012
Publisher:
Virago UK
Print pages:
256
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Lizzie is being driven mad by a man in a car that’s worth more than her flat. ‘Shall we stop off for a walk in the park?’ he
says, smoothing her dress against her leg, just one hand on the wheel. I’m not a dog, thinks Lizzie, after-dinner walks are
not what I need, but she doesn’t tell Tony that. Instead she points out that it’s a bit late for the park. ‘It’ll only be
full of drunks again.’
‘Right,’ he says, ‘I’ll take you straight home then,’ and he continues doodling on her thigh while he weaves a swerving, lurching
tarantella through the enraged London traffic. They are beyond Marble Arch now, where the gallows used to be, he says. They
could hang twenty-four men at a time there, but Lizzie hardly hears him.
‘Beautiful evening,’ he’s oblivious to her mood, turning up the J.J. Cale and deafening himself to her telling him how much
she’s been looking forward to seeing where he lives.
‘Just drop me at my flat,’ she says, and she tries not to sound too sulky, too desperate, too like a spaniel, though ‘flat’
is putting it a bit grandly, she has to admit. Lizzie rents a room at the top of a red brick Victorian house not far from Paddington
Station. It’s without embellishments, this room: not a fireplace, not a single plaster curlicue on the ceiling. It’s a no-trust-fund,
no-favours, hard-luck sort of a place, with its kitchen galleyed off along one wall by a chipped Formica-topped counter and
the bathless bathroom, not much bigger than a cupboard, that houses a temperamental lavatory and a plastic shower, hooked
up in the corner, without a cubicle. Lizzie has found crouching over the lavatory the only practical way of having a shower.
‘Your place it is then,’ Tony says, his fingers sliding against the thin silk of her dress while his foot stomps between the
pedals. Lizzie leans her head against the door and shuts her eyes.
She’s thinking about his house, or rather how she imagines it to be. It’s the usual scene, with her in his bath, up to her
neck in pine-scented bubbles, alone on this occasion, though quite often she pictures him in the bath with her, or sometimes,
even better, he’s just in the room, talking to her and soaping her back.
He’s thinking what a novelty it is to be with a young brunette when blondes have always been his thing. Each time his hand
moves towards the inside of her thigh, he can feel her muscles twitch, minutely as when a fly lands on a horse. Her flimsy
skirt does little to cover her nerves. Lizzie always wears soft clothes in soft colours. Perhaps it’s her way of telling the
world that she needs to be loved.
The stale shabbiness of her room, or more precisely what Tony, her new boyfriend, will make of it, is troubling her as he
pulls into the right-hand lane, preparing for the Queensway turn-off. And there she is, at it again, thinking of him as her
boyfriend. Well, that’s quite a joke, and a bit of a worry too; but man friend doesn’t sound right and, given their circumstances,
boss is inappropriate, and he’s not her partner, lover, fiancé or husband. Not yet, anyway, and maybe never.
And he is driving her mad, though she suspects she’s in love. What’s the matter with the man? Lizzie can’t see why he doesn’t invite
her home; after all, that’s what people do, isn’t it? It seems the obvious next move after three weeks of dinners and walkies
in the park. It reminds her of a couple of summers ago, with Sam, when they were both sixteen. He kept refusing to take her
to his house too. He said that he didn’t want her to meet his mother, despite the fact that he’d been to her house and had
loads of meals with her parents and even stayed the night. In the spare room, of course. Well, she’d nagged and nagged and
eventually he did take her home. And she stood there, his mother, all electric-shock grey curls and puddle-coloured eyes,
stirring a jug of custard. The Devil Child, she said, glaring. Why have you brought the Devil Child into my kitchen? Sam had
looked at Lizzie across the room, so embarrassed. They left then and he said, see, I told you it was a bad idea.
The Devil Child, the unwanted, the abandoned. These are all labels to which Lizzie has grown accustomed. Sometimes she looks
at the small birthmark on her left hipbone and sees there, in abstract melanin, the horns of Satan himself. A lucky mark,
declared her mother, a beauty spot. The Devil Child, said Sam’s mother, and Lizzie glossed over the rejection, and took perverse
pride in being the sort of girl that boys didn’t take home: the siren who makes mothers fear for their sons’ tender young
hearts.
But as Lizzie knows, Tony doesn’t live with his mother. What a bizarre thought. His mother must be at least two hundred years
old, a right old granny. But there is something. Long after he drops her off after their evenings of pasta and tiramisu and
snatched kisses on a park bench in Kensington Gardens, she lies awake listening to the beehive hum of the traffic and wonders about his secret life: about the domestic arrangements that
he’s keeping from her. And, to be honest, she has had quite enough mystery in her life already.
‘Tony,’ she says, gathering her nerve, ‘do you live with someone that you don’t want me to meet?’ His hand is still on her
leg; she feels entitled to ask.
Tony looks at her and laughs. What he sees is a small pale face with furrowed brow above round chocolate eyes: like a puppy,
so serious. He thinks that she looks adorable biting her lip like that, and about twelve years old.
‘Like a girlfriend,’ she says, pushing his hand away. ‘Stop teasing, you know exactly what I’m asking.’
And he just laughs some more. Nervously? Perhaps, she thinks. ‘Sweet thing,’ he says, and she is lost to the merry crinkles
around his eyes. ‘If I wasn’t available, I’d tell you.’
Of course, Lizzie knows a little more about Tony than she’s letting on. How could she not; everyone talks about him at the
office. ‘Not bad for a man in his forties,’ they all agree. ‘Quite a catch,’ says Lucy, whose job it is to initiate Lizzie
into the workings of Tony’s photographic agency, or more precisely the intricacies of the filing system, before she leaves
for her new job. She pulls out file drawers with the munificent air and enamelled nails of an old beauty queen handing over
her tiara.
‘Yeah, but still misses his wife,’ says the more homely Paula, who gave Lizzie a potted baby spider plant plucked from its
parent at her own desk, and would quite clearly like a young girl to take under her wing. Occasionally, Lizzie catches Paula
and Lucy gazing, broodily, towards the closed door of Tony’s unoccupied office, a room almost twice the size of the outer
office where the four of them have their grey metal desks jammed up, one against the other, nursery classroom style, though
instead of an alphabet frieze it’s the pouts and poignant pipe-cleaner limbs of some of Tony’s own most celebrated fashion pictures that
they try to ignore.
‘Correction. It’s not his wife he misses,’ says Lucy. ‘It’s Sophie. He hardly gets to see her.’
‘How sad,’ says Lizzie, before Paula silences them, with an overemphatic ‘Sshh,’ and spike-heeled Katrina appears waving a
misfiled print like a weapon. Lizzie’s already been warned about Katrina. Touchy, apparently, and rules the office with steely
determination.
Katrina flings the picture onto Lizzie’s desk then strides to the door of Tony’s office. Sometimes she escapes there to work.
When she needs to concentrate, she says. Lizzie, too, has enjoyed the odd half-hour swivelling in the nubbly grey tweed chair
at Tony’s desk; whiling away lunchtime with her sandwich, toying with the row of little suspended silver balls that clack
so soothingly into each other. And snooping. She knows that he keeps the middle drawer of his desk locked and that there is
a peppermint breath spray pushed to the back of the top one on the right. She has sat there, as he does, facing the silver-framed
photograph: an informal David Bailey of Tony with his daughter, a little pink-faced girl in a black leotard. He reminds Lizzie
of a lion with his springy hair glinting in the sun and his broad, tanned face, his arms strong, a pair of protective paws,
hugging the little girl to his chest. The backdrop is pink roses and Sophie is laughing.
It was on her third day that Lizzie first met the lion in person. Tony breezed in, late for his meeting, but gracious as an
ageing matinée idol arriving at a film première. Suddenly everyone was smiling and she cursed herself for having put off the
dripping shower for an overdue hairwash the night before and for not wearing something more appealing than her old school
skirt to the office. When she went to the loo to brush her hair, Katrina was already in there and Lizzie could smell perfume. That
same afternoon he sat on her desk, asking for paperclips (a ruse; Lizzie already knew, how could she not, that he had paperclips
and plenty of them in the third drawer down on the left-hand side of his desk).
Was she happy working at the agency? he asked, and were the others being helpful? And she said that yes, they were, but there
were one or two aspects that she still found confusing and Tony looked at his watch and said, tell you what, why don’t we
pop out in half an hour, after we’ve finished here, have a drink, and I’ll see if I can help you.
At the Queensway traffic lights Tony takes his hand from her thigh and gestures at the trees. It’s still light over the park,
even though they have eaten dinner. Better than a saveloy and chips, Lizzie reckons, that’s what she would have had if Tony
hadn’t taken her to L’Escargot after work. That’s what she eats on her way from the tube to her flat, has done most evenings
since she left home and moved to the city. ‘Ever heard of Capability Brown?’ he asks.
‘A bit,’ says Lizzie, who doesn’t have the faintest clue what he’s talking about and hopes he’s not about to test her. Animal,
vegetable or mineral? Soldier, sailor, fisherman, spy? This capability brown could be anything.
‘Capability Brown planted all these trees,’ he says.
Lizzie’s mood lightens, she likes it when Tony tells her interesting things. She’s keen to learn. She likes it that he knows
more than her. She wriggles deeper into her seat as he tells her about Capability Brown in his felted hat sitting with binoculars
while men put poles into the places where the trees would grow: where the saplings of oak, beech and horse chestnut would
spread their branches for future generations, long after this Lancelot’s own death.
‘Good men plant trees,’ he announces from his pulpit behind the steering wheel and Lizzie doesn’t want to argue. She won’t
tell him that when she was a baby her real father planted a whole orchard of trees for her, but he didn’t stick around to
see them grow. Or her either, come to that.
Instead she studies Tony while he speaks. Perhaps it’s the wine, but watching him like this makes her almost fizzy inside,
like laughing gas or mischief, and she marvels at her own cheerfulness so soon after everything that happened back home. What’s
it been? Not even a month yet and already she’s almost forgotten that her world has been turned upside down – punched and
scoured and ripped to ribbons – though she still misses her mother. Tony’s eyes look turquoise today, chameleon eyes that
shift from bracken to aquamarine, and Lizzie tries to work out if it’s the colour of his shirt or the sky, or simply his mood.
There are a number of things that Lizzie likes about him. She likes that he knows more than her, of course, and that his arms
are big and strong and he calls her ‘sweet thing’ and ‘sweetheart’. She likes it when he tells her stories from his youth;
of Oxford University and Bob Dylan concerts. Mostly he plays the blues in his car these days, but sometimes it’s opera and
she likes that too. One day, he says, he will take her to Covent Garden, to the Royal Opera House. She likes the fact that
he has a round tin of travel sweets in the glove compartment. She twists open the top and chooses a lime green square of boiled
sugar, dusty from its bed of white icing. She doesn’t have to ask, she can help herself to his sweets. That’s another thing
she likes about him.
Lizzie sits back in her seat, sucking the edges off the sweet, and closes her eyes while Tony slips his hand beneath her skirt, skilful as a shoplifter: not so high that it tickles, but
quite high enough to make his intentions clear. And he’s not even drunk, she thinks, though she is. Matters between them are
hurtling to their conclusion. She feels like she does when an aeroplane takes off: the what-goes-up-must-come-down stomach
rush that accompanies the boiled barley sugars that the air hostesses hand out. She has only flown a few times but she’s had
more than her fair share of bumpy landings. Flying scares her now.
His hand is still there. She concentrates on what happened earlier. He had finished his veal escalope (milk-fed, according
to the menu, he always seemed to order the thing that Lizzie felt the most sorry for), and he reached across to take her hands
in his and hinted that one day soon he might take her away for the weekend. The way he looked at her set her stomach off so
badly that for the first time in her life she hadn’t managed pudding. Then he told her about his cottage. The one in Hampshire
that he bought with a nest egg, twenty years ago, before he was even married. He told her about the watercress beds and the
stream and how little Sophie had learned to swim there in water so cool and clean that you could count the fish.
‘But I suppose you go home to your parents most weekends,’ he said, waving the waiter away, dismissing the pudding menus with
a flick of his wrist. ‘Where is it they live? Did you say Somerset?’
‘I don’t think I did,’ said Lizzie, imagining his cottage and herself gliding through the cool stream. ‘But it’s Devon, not
Somerset.’
‘Ah, Devon,’ he said, and she nodded.
‘So that’s where you disappear at the weekends.’
‘No,’ she said, looking away. ‘I don’t.’
In fact weekends were a desert for Lizzie. Weekends were when she longed to disappear, quite literally. Just switch life off for a couple of days, like a little hibernation. She wished
she did have a family that she could go back to. A father to cosset her after her grimy week in London, a mother to worry
that she was looking thin and feed her roast potatoes. Weekends were when she felt most sad about everything that had happened.
During the week, work – or more precisely the uncertain excitement of whether Tony would come into the office or not – sustained
her. But from Friday night to Monday morning she barely left her room. Last Saturday, for instance, the Australian girls on
the first floor had a party. It was obviously a party because Lizzie could hear whooping voices and laughter even above the
music – the B52s and UB40 – and people kept ringing her bell when they couldn’t get an answer below because of the noise.
She spent the evening sitting hopefully on the landing at the top of the stairs, where the smell of the garlic bread and chilli
con carne was strong enough to make her eyes sting, and she watched the chattering people arrive clutching bottles, but no
one saw her there at all.
‘Yeah, it was brilliant,’ she told Paula back at work. Well, she was always so full of the dinner parties and trips to the
theatre that punctuated her weekends.
‘Meet anyone nice?’
‘Nice? Maybe he was. God, I was drunk though.’ And Lizzie had lowered her eyes as though ashamed of her wayward behaviour.
It’s only a matter of time, she told herself, things will soon start looking up. All she ever did, in fact, was read. A lot.
Well-thumbed, brick-thick novels fished from cardboard boxes outside the second-hand shop. Sometimes she painted. Just water-colours
that she hid under her bed, like a teenage boy’s pornography, but concealed only from herself, because no one else was ever there to find them. Sometimes she hit the Benylin, swigging half a bottle of sweet red syrup to help her sleep:
that woozy dreamless floaty sleep, the best kind. Always paid for in the morning by a pneumatic drill of a headache.
‘No,’ she said again to Tony, deliberately keeping her voice light, ‘I don’t disappear at weekends to Devon or anywhere else,
come to that.’ She squeezed his hands over the table and waited for the invitation.
Tony released her fingers and looked at her almost sternly. Lizzie swigged Chablis from her glass. She needed to swallow.
‘Is it the train fare?’
Lizzie snorted and to her horror a gobbet of wine shot from her nose. ‘No, I just don’t want to see my family any more, that’s
all.’
Tony regarded her even more severely then, as a headmaster might a truant.
‘You must worry them sick, you silly girl. What do you mean, you don’t want to see them?’ He was leaning back in his chair,
putting a distance between them, his eyes sharp, like flints.
Lizzie could feel the threat of tears. She didn’t want them to spill down her face. Her mascara wasn’t waterproof for one
thing. She gulped some more wine and Tony refilled her glass from the bottle.
‘Look,’ she said, wiping her nose against the back of her hand, ‘I can’t talk about it, okay?’ Tony hadn’t moved any closer,
his mouth was still a hard line. She took a deep breath, and plunged in, speaking quickly to get it over with: ‘My dad did
something bad and I don’t want to see him. And my mum doesn’t know and I don’t want to have to tell her. And quite honestly,
after what happened, it’s better that way.’
Her words were the catalysts she intended, at last he was inflamed. ‘Oh, you poor lamb,’ he said, and she saw his eyes sparking, his hands reaching for her again across the table. ‘You can talk to me about it, you know, it might help.’
And just for one shameful moment Lizzie almost felt glad that her dad had done what he did but now the tears were about to
spill and ruin everything so she excused herself and went to the ladies’ to blow her nose and wipe the soot from the corners
of her eyes. When she returned she told him a bit about her parents, but not about what had happened to make her run away.
And she told him that, in any case, her dad wasn’t her real father; that her real father was someone who hadn’t seen her since
she was a baby.
His eyes didn’t leave her for a moment while she talked. ‘What is it?’ she said, but he was intent, as though seeing her for
the first time. ‘Why do you keep looking at me like that?’
Tony was smiling. He formed a square with his fingers and thumbs and peered at her through it. ‘You’ve got something about
you,’ he said. ‘It’s in your eyes, there’s something unknowable. Something I’d like to try and capture in a picture.’ Lizzie
could feel herself blush; again he refilled her glass. ‘And skin like honey.’
‘Tony, stop it, I haven’t!’
‘You’d be surprised. Why don’t you let me take a few snaps one of these days?’
After that she did quite a bit of talking, and he was rapt. She told him about her three little half-sisters, Anna and Briony
and Lou, how they all looked like little photocopies of their father and not a bit like her mother and herself at all. And
she told him how noisy they always were and about how she once tried to soundproof her bedroom with bubble wrap and when that
hadn’t worked she had moved all her things up to the attic and set bags of flour as traps over the door in an effort to keep
them out.
After a bit of pressing, Tony allowed her to drop the subject of her parents and she felt like the most interesting girl in
the world, a raconteur, a wit. And even if it was nothing more than him wanting to take her picture … well, never mind. Tony
had done some good work, Harper’s, that sort of thing. She’d seen some of his pictures in her mother’s magazines, knew his name years before she met him, and
now here he was, listening and laughing, and his eyes with something in them that she took to be burgeoning affection, or
even love. An attentive face was still a novelty to Lizzie. As was the large dark green cup of cappuccino that the waiter
brought her (she’d just stopped herself from asking for frothy coffee, thank goodness). Tony had a smaller green cup of espresso
that made him shudder slightly with each sip, like medicine. ‘Bitter,’ he said. He stirred in two sugars, still listening
to what she was telling him about a magician she had met in the street on her way to work that morning.
‘I swear to you, it’s true,’ she said. ‘He took a lit cigarette from his mouth and crushed it in his fist and then it was
gone, not even a puff of smoke. I can’t work it out at all, can you?’
Tony shook his head. No, he said, magic wasn’t his thing, and then, quite suddenly, he leant over and took her wrist. He pulled
her close, guiding her hand beneath the table and pressing it into his lap. ‘See the magic you do to me,’ he whispered. And
of course, Lizzie, who was not yet nineteen, felt flattered.
Lizzie remembers eating sausages with her fingers from a grease-smeared enamel plate, balanced on her lap. She is sitting cross-legged
on the prickly grass by the small campfire that her parents lit on summer’s ev. . .
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