Tyrone had turned his car around by now and waved as he drove past. Lara waved back, smiling brightly, but her face sagged as soon as he’d gone. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said, reaching out a hand for Eliza’s arm. ‘We can talk more about this on the way.’
The girl jerked back to avoid being touched. ‘I’m not going home,’ she said. ‘You go if you want. Don’t let me stop you.’
‘What do you mean, you’re not going home? Of course we’re—’
‘No.’ Eliza’s voice was low but carried real threat. The girl in the princess swimming costume had, in fact, a core of steel. ‘I’m going to Cambridge. And if you don’t want to come, that’s fine, I’ll get a coach. Or hitch a lift, if I have to.’
‘Lize, this is—’ Lara stopped herself microseconds before saying ‘ridiculous’. No one liked being called ridiculous, especially not a teenager in full righteous flow.
‘I’m eighteen years old and I want to meet my dad. I’m going and you can’t stop me.’
Lara stared down at her feet and drew a breath – and as she did so, remembered a conversation they’d had three or four years ago. She’d gone to the doctor because one of her legs had become swollen, only to be told it was a blood clot that, at any given moment, could break loose and drift aimlessly up to her lungs, possibly killing her. Treatment had swiftly followed and she was absolutely fine now, but it had shaken her, imagining that she might have suffered a stroke, or even died, due to the random travels of this rogue clot. She’d drawn up a will the same week, and forced herself to discuss with Eliza who would look after her, should the worst happen. Grandma and Heidi would be there for her, Lara had assured her, but Eliza had shaken her head. ‘I’d go and find Dad,’ she’d said loftily. ‘Force him to do some parenting for a change.’
That should have been a red flag in itself, a warning to Lara that the idea of tracking down her father was bubbling away in the back of Eliza’s mind. But instead of confronting the issue, she’d plunged her head further into the sand. And now look where they were.
A powder-blue Mini sped by just then, loud music blasting from the open windows, and the sound set her teeth on edge. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I hear you. But let’s get in the car at least and talk it through.’
Eliza didn’t move. ‘I’m not getting in the car until you say that we’re going to Cambridge. Today,’ she replied, folding her arms.
Lara felt thoroughly beaten. Driving down to Cambridge today, in pursuit of the elusive Ben McManus, was really the very last thing she wanted to do. She’d been quite happy for the past to stay firmly in the past, to seal up the part of her heart which had been broken, and forget the whole thing for evermore. But Eliza left her with no option. If this trip had to be made now, as her daughter was insisting, then Lara couldn’t let her go alone.
‘Fine,’ she muttered, unable to come up with a better idea. ‘You win. Get in the car. Let’s go.’
‘So what was he like, then? My mysterious dad?’ said Eliza. ‘Am I allowed to ask that yet or are you going to carry on being secretive? Because it’s probably in your interest to give me your side of the story before I ask him his. Don’t you reckon?’
They had been driving for about twenty minutes in a bad-tempered silence, and so far Eliza had eaten almost all of the cheesy biscuits and two of the sandwiches Lara had bought as a picnic lunch from a garage shop they’d passed. If Lara had hoped that some sustenance might take the edge off her daughter’s combative mood, she’d been straight-up kidding herself.
Here goes, then. No more secrecy. Might as well get it over with, she figured. ‘Well,’ she began, glad that she was obliged to keep her gaze on the road, rather than cope with intense eye contact on top of everything else, ‘I have to say, the night I met your dad, I thought he was pretty much the best person ever.’ She attempted a neutral voice but couldn’t avoid a sigh creeping in. ‘I thought he was really something.’
The words might sound corny but they were true. One of the reasons she tried not to think about Ben McManus for any length of time was because of how devastated she had felt when the relationship – if you could even call it that – didn’t go anywhere. She had played and replayed their conversations, their connection, their passion, trying to find errors, hairline cracks, moments when she should have noticed that he wasn’t into it in the way she was. But either he was an astonishingly good actor, or she was astonishingly stupid, because she had never been able to detect a single glance, a single reaction that belied the bond she’d felt. So what had gone wrong? The answer had eluded her this whole time; his memory a painful, not-to-be-prodded bruise.
But she was getting ahead of herself already. ‘So, like I said, we met in New York,’ she went on, keeping her voice steady as she indicated to overtake a trundling lorry. ‘I was doing an internship there on a magazine, a four-month placement.’
‘Whoa,’ Eliza said. ‘Seriously? You never told me about that! I assumed you were there on holiday.’
Lara was silent for a moment. It was hard for her – and for Eliza too, apparently – to equate the daring, independent young woman from those days with the boring old mum she felt herself to be now. ‘Yeah,’ she said quietly, flashing back to the thrill of being in the city and feeling as if she were constantly on a film set; the heady impression that a filter on her life had been dialled up to a brighter, more vivid configuration. ‘It was pretty exciting. I loved it.’
‘Wow,’ said Eliza, still digesting. ‘So what about Ben? My dad?’ She sounded self-conscious, as if she were trying the phrase on for size. ‘Was he working there too?’
‘He was travelling with some mates,’ Lara replied, trying not to sigh again. ‘He was between jobs; a career break, he called it, so—’
‘What, from running a map shop?’
‘No.’ Lara flicked on the wipers as it started to drizzle. ‘He was a full-time graphic designer then, I think, but was taking some time to work out what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.’
‘Right,’ said Eliza, impatiently. ‘So what happened?’
Chapter Seven
Easy to say in hindsight, but on that golden summer’s day when she first met Ben, Lara kept getting the feeling that the world was being particularly good to her. That everything was clicking into place, the cogs of her life turning especially smoothly, that all signs pointed towards her luck being in. Purely by chance, she’d got a seat on the packed subway train to work when usually she had to stand, crammed in with her fellow passengers, her face often ending up squished into someone’s hot armpit. Then, approaching her office building, she noticed a twenty-dollar bill blowing around on the sidewalk and even though she glanced around conscientiously to see if anyone had obviously just dropped it, there was no sign of this and so she pocketed it herself. That wasn’t all. At work, the temperamental coffee machine behaved itself perfectly. The printer didn’t jam for once. Lara was asked to write a piece on beachwear and the editor praised her ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Sun’ title. And then, when she took herself off for an al fresco lunch in Madison Square Park (yes, obviously she bought herself a pastrami sandwich like a proper New Yorker), a pretty blue butterfly appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, and landed randomly on her hand for a delightful, breath-holding moment. The hot June sun shone down and she turned her face to it like a flower, feeling as if she too might be blooming. As if everything was coming together for her, right here, right now.