‘Maybe,’ I say cautiously.
What do I know? Maybe Daddy is up there, sitting on a cloud.
‘But what if he falls off?’ queries Anna anxiously. ‘Mummy, what if Grandpa falls off?’
‘He will hold on tight,’ says Tessa. ‘Won’t he, Mummy?’ And now both of them are looking expectantly up at me, with absolute trust that I know the answer. Because I’m Mummy, who knows everything in the world.
My eyes are suddenly hot. I wish I was what they think I am. I wish I had all the answers for them. How old will they be before they realize I don’t? That no one does? As I survey their questioning little faces, I can’t bear the idea that one day my girls will know about all the shit that the world really involves, and they’ll have to deal with it, and I won’t be able to fix it for them.
‘All right, Sylvie?’ says Dan as he and Mummy come out of the drawing room. He glances swiftly at the picture of Daddy, and I know he’s realized my train of thought. Photos of Daddy do tend to catch me out.
Well, to be honest, anything can catch me out.
‘Fine!’ I force a bright tone. ‘So, girls, what are you going to put on your pancakes?’
Distraction is crucial, because the last thing I need is Tessa talking about Grandpa sitting on a cloud in front of Mummy.
‘Maple syrup!’
‘Chocolate sauce!’
Anna and Tessa dash into the kitchen, all thoughts of Grandpa forgotten. As I follow them I glance at Dan, still walking right by Mummy’s side, and the sight suddenly cheers me up. Will Project Surprise Me have an unexpected side benefit? Will it bring Dan and Mummy closer together? Seeing them just now, huddled in the drawing room, they had a kind of directness and openness with each other that I’ve never seen before.
I mean, they do get on, as a rule. They do. Kind of. It’s just …
Well. As I’ve mentioned, Dan can be a bit prickly about Daddy. And money and … lots of stuff. But maybe he’s over that, I think optimistically. Maybe things have changed.
Or maybe not. By the time we’ve all finished eating, Dan seems more prickly than ever, especially when Mummy finds out about the snake and teases him about it. I can tell he’s struggling to stay polite, and I don’t blame him. Mummy has a habit of picking one joke and making it too many times. I almost find myself coming to the wretched snake’s defence. (Almost.)
‘I always wanted a pet when I was little,’ I say to the girls, trying to broaden the conversation. ‘But I didn’t want a snake, I wanted a kitten.’
‘A kitten,’ breathes Tessa.
‘Your snake would probably eat the kitten!’ says Mummy merrily. ‘Isn’t that what you feed snakes, Dan, live kittens?’
‘No,’ says Dan evenly. ‘It is not.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mummy,’ I say, frowning at her before she freaks out the girls. ‘Granny’s joking, girls. Snakes don’t eat kittens! So anyway,’ I press on. ‘I wasn’t allowed a pet and I didn’t have any brothers or sisters either … so guess what? I made up an imaginary friend. Her name was Lynn.’
I’ve never told the girls about my imaginary friend before. I’m not sure why.
No, of course I know why. It’s because my parents made me feel so ashamed about it. It’s actually taking me some courage to mention her in front of Mummy.
In hindsight – especially now I have children of my own – I can see that my parents didn’t handle the whole imaginary friend thing well. They were great parents, really they were, but that one issue, they got wrong.
I mean, I get it. Things were different then. People were less open-minded. Plus Mummy and Daddy were super-conventional. They probably worried that hearing voices in my head meant I was going mad or something. But imaginary friends are perfectly normal and healthy for children. I’ve googled it. (Lots of times, actually.) They shouldn’t have been so disapproving. Every time I mentioned Lynn, Mummy would freeze in that awful way she had, and Daddy would look at Mummy with a kind of disapproving anger, like it was her fault, and the whole atmosphere would become toxic. It was horrible.
So of course, after a while, I kept Lynn secret. But it didn’t mean I abandoned her. The very fact that my parents had such an extreme reaction to her made me cling on to her. Embellish her. Sometimes I felt guilty when I talked to her in my head – and sometimes I felt defiant – but I always had a horrible feeling of shame. I’m thirty-two years old, but even now, saying ‘Lynn’ out loud gives me a queasy frisson.
I even woke up dreaming about her the other day. Or remembering, maybe? I could hear her laughing that happy gurgle of a laugh. Then she was singing the song that I used to love, ‘Kumbaya’.
‘Did you talk to her in real life?’ says Tessa, puzzled.
‘No, just in my head.’ I smile at her. ‘I made her up because I felt a bit lonely. It’s perfectly normal. Lots of children have imaginary friends,’ I add pointedly, ‘and they grow out of them naturally.’
This last is a little dig at Mummy, but she pretends not to notice, which is typical.
I’ve promised myself that one day I’m going to have it out with Mummy. I’m going to say, ‘Do you realize how ashamed you made me feel?’ and ‘What was the problem? Did you think I was going mad or something?’ I have all my lines ready – I’ve just never quite had the guts to say them. As I say, I’m not brilliant at confrontation, and especially not since Daddy died. The family boat’s been unsteady enough without me rocking it more.
Sure enough, Mummy has blanked this entire conversation and now changes the subject.
‘Look what I found the other day,’ she says, zapping at the wall-mounted TV, and after a few seconds, a family video appears on screen. It’s from my sixteenth birthday, the part when Daddy stood up to give a speech about me.
‘I haven’t seen this one for ages,’ I breathe, and we all fall silent to watch. Daddy’s addressing the ballroom at the Hurlingham Club, where my party was. He’s in black tie, and Mummy’s all shimmery in silver and I’m in a red minidress, which Mummy spent Saturday after Saturday helping me look for.
(Now I look back, it really doesn’t suit me. But I was sixteen. What did I know?)
‘My daughter has the wit of Lizzy Bennet …’ Daddy is saying in that commanding way of his. ‘The strength of Pippi Longstocking … the boldness of Jo March … and the style of Scarlett O’Hara.’ On screen the guests break into applause and Daddy twinkles at me and I gaze back up, speechless.
I remember that moment. It blew me away. Daddy had secretly gone through all the books in my bedroom, looking for my heroines and writing a speech around them. I glance over at Mummy now, my eyes a little hot, and she gives me a tremulous smile back. My mother can drive me mad – but there are times when no one gets it like she does.
‘Good speech,’ says Dan after a few moments, and I shoot him a grateful smile.
But as we’re watching, the screen starts to go blurry, and suddenly the voices are distorting, and the video becomes unwatchable.
‘What happened?’ demands Tessa.
‘Oh dear!’ Mummy jabs at the remote, but can’t improve the picture. ‘This copy must be damaged. Never mind. If everyone’s finished, let’s go into the drawing room and we can watch something else.’
‘The wedding!’ says Anna.
‘The wedding!’ shrieks Tessa.
‘Really?’ says Dan incredulously. ‘Haven’t we done family DVDs?’
‘What’s wrong with watching the wedding?’ I say. And if I sound a little defensive … it’s because I am.
So, yet another key fact about my family: we watch our wedding DVD a lot. A lot. Probably every other visit to Mummy’s place, we all sit down to watch it. The girls love it and Mummy loves it and I have to admit I do, too.
But Dan says it’s weird to keep replaying one day of our life. In fact, Dan hates our wedding DVD – probably for the same reason that Mummy loves it. Because while most wedding videos are about the happy couple, ours is basically all about Daddy.
I never even noticed to begin with. I thought it was just a lovely, well-produced DVD. It wasn’t until about a year after our wedding that Dan suddenly flipped out on the way home from some gathering and said, ‘Can’t you see, Sylvie? It’s not our DVD, it’s his!’
And the next time I watched it, of course, it was obvious. It’s the Daddy show. The first shot of the whole DVD is of Daddy, looking gorgeous in his morning suit, standing by the Rolls-Royce we used to get to the church. Then there are shots of him leading me out in my wedding dress … shots of him in the car … the pair of us walking up the aisle …
The most moving moment of the whole DVD isn’t our vows. It’s when the priest says, ‘Who gives this woman to be married?’ and Daddy says, ‘I do,’ his resonant voice all choked up. Then all the way through our vows, the camera keeps panning over to Daddy, who is watching with the most poignant expression of pride and wistfulness.
Dan thinks Daddy went into the editing suite and made sure that he featured prominently. After all, he was paying – he was the one who insisted on hiring an expensive video team, in fact – so he could have it just the way he wanted.
I was incredibly upset when Dan first suggested this. Then I accepted that it was possible. Daddy was … not conceited, exactly, but he had healthy self-esteem. He liked to be the centre of attention, always. For example, he was desperate to be knighted. Friends would mention it and he’d brush them off with a lighthearted joke – but we all knew he wanted it. And why not, after all the good he did? (Mummy’s really sensitive about the fact that he missed out. I’ve seen her blinking while reading the Honours List in the newspaper. Let’s face it, if he had been knighted she’d be ‘Lady Lowe’ now, which does sound pretty good.)
Even so, I have a different theory about our DVD. I think the video team were just naturally drawn to Daddy, because he dazzled like a movie star. He was so handsome and witty, he whirled Mummy around the dance floor with such aplomb, no wonder the cameraman, or editor, or whoever it was, focused on him.