We All Live Here

Chapter Seven

Lila

Lila Kennedy had been seven years old when Bill McKenzie came into her life. She had arrived back from a play-date with Jennifer Barratt one afternoon and her mother had been sitting on the sofa in the living room beside a strange man with a crew-cut and a tweedy wool pullover, a tray of empty coffee cups on the low table. When she had walked in the two of them had moved apart a couple of inches in a way that made Lila stop in the doorway.

“Hello, darling,” Mum had said brightly. “Come and say hello to Bill. He’s just put up the most gorgeous bookshelves in the study.”

Lila could not imagine how something as boring as a bookshelf could possibly be described as “gorgeous,” but her mum was always making dramatic exclamations about things so she assumed it was just part of the same pattern. Francesca Kennedy was, Bill had told her some time later, “one of life’s enthusiasts.” A sky was never blue, it was “the most perfect azure, like something one would see from a Greek island.” The neighbor’s cat was “just the most heavenly grump. I adore him.” Lila would physically shrink into herself when her mother ate, especially soft cheese, because she would close her eyes and smile and say things like “Oh, God the creaminess ! That is actually orgasmic ,” and let out little gasps of pleasure .

After several weeks of Bill’s repeated appearances at the house, when he repaired cabinets, rehung doors, and fixed the tap in the loo that never stopped dripping, Francesca announced that Bill was “the kindest, loveliest man. I actually feel like the world tilts more correctly on its axis when he is here.” Lila realized that the slightly stiff, well-spoken woodworker would probably be hanging around for a while.

She didn’t really mind. By then Lila could barely remember her father, who had gone back to America to work when she was four years old and never come home. She could recall a few brief impossibly cheery phone calls, always interrupted by “Oh, honey, the first AD is calling me. Gotta go. Love you!” He burst back into her life on short visits every six months or so, bringing extravagant toys from America and marshmallows and Hershey’s Kisses. Lila would sit with him in the front room while her mother stood in the doorway, watching them with a strange expression or “leaving them to it” while she went to the shops. But the visits grew further and further apart, the last one punctuated by a hissed and tearful argument in the downstairs hallway. By the time Bill appeared, her father had stopped coming altogether, only occasionally marking her birthday with a week-late card or an age-inappropriate toy.

Still, Lila was not sure at first how she felt about the tight little unit of her and Mum being interrupted by that man, with his starched collars and his classical music (she and Mum had previously liked to dance in the kitchen to the Beatles or Marianne Faithfull), and his exercise routines and morning runs, from which he would return drenched with sweat and quietly euphoric. He brought muesli, which looked like the bottom of the school parrot’s cage, and foreign ingredients, like tahini and curry leaf, and was always making meals that made Mum pull that embarrassing face, and announce that he was “an actual culinary genius. You clever, clever man.” Bill’s ears would go pink with pleasure and he would look at her like he might actually melt. It was a little awkward to watch.

But even Lila had to admit that life was probably a bit better once Bill moved in. Things that went wrong in the house were put right straight away, and her mum never cried anymore, and he was careful with Lila: he asked her opinion on things and never interfered or tried to act like he was actually her dad. On her eighth birthday, when Lila’s dad had yet again failed to send even a card (she had told herself she didn’t care), she had come home from school to find Bill had made her a whole doll’s house with working electric lights and windows on little sashes that slid up and down. It sat in the corner of her bedroom, like a portal into another world. Lila had been transfixed by it. She had dropped her schoolbag and knelt in front of it and started gently adjusting the furniture and folding back the tiny quilted bedcovers and seeing which bits actually moved like a real house. (A miniature mirrored bathroom cabinet with a little wooden tube of toothpaste! A tiny stepladder into an attic!) She had barely changed position for ten minutes, the rest of the world falling away. And when she finally turned back to look at the two people in her doorway, waiting for Mum to announce that it was “absolutely exquisite! Dreamy!” Bill had his arm around her, his face a question mark, and Mum was dabbing at her eyes a little sadly and saying, “I know, I know, I’m being stupid. It’s just that this is what I always wanted for her.”

It was a nice thing, what Mum was saying. But until that point, Lila realized afterward, she hadn’t known anything was missing.

···

Gene doesn’t end up sleeping on the sofa. Lila doesn’t think she can bear the prospect of him snoring away in the heart of their household, while Bill huffs and puffs his way through the morning.

She pulls out the old sofa-bed in her study at the top of the house, shoving her desk, with effort, to one side so that it can extend fully, and locates the spare duvet in one of the removals boxes that hasn’t yet been unpacked. She makes up the bed while Gene stands in the doorway, exclaiming that it is so great to be here, so kind of her to put him up, that he really is just so grateful. Even the sound of his voice irritates her. She thinks, as the low fizz of anger vibrates in the back of her head, drowning out conversation, that she could almost forgive him his absences, his failure to contact her after the births of her children, his complete inadequacy as a grandfather. His failure to turn up after Francesca’s death had lodged like a radioactive bullet inside her, obliterating any sense of generosity or kindness. Francesca, who had never done him any wrong, who had brought up his child so that he could leave and lead whatever crappy hedonistic life he had chosen in Los Angeles. Francesca, who had struggled alone on her teaching assistant’s salary for three long years until her parents died and left her enough money to buy a small house. Lila had stood at her grave, flanked by her girls, as her mother had been lowered gently into the earth, one solitary blushing peony on top of the wicker coffin. She had watched the broken figure of Bill opposite as he tried to stay upright under the weight of his grief, and she had known that whatever remaining feelings she had for her biological father had turned to ice.

“What time are you heading off tomorrow?” she says, trying to keep her voice from betraying any of this. He has sat down heavily on the sofa-bed, and is peeling his way out of his battered leather jacket.

“Oh, sometime in the morning.”

“The girls get up at seven thirty. They may wake you as the only working bathroom is on this floor.”

“Not me, sweetheart. You’re all good. I’m dead to the world until eleven.”

“Of course you are,” she says shortly. After a pause she adds: “So are you in rehearsals?”

“Yeah, but they don’t start till, like, midday or something. So you guys just pretend I’m not here and I’ll take care of myself.”

Lila hands him two towels, holding her hands outstretched as if she is unwilling to take a single step closer. “There’s a spare toothbrush in the cabinet if you need it.” She gazes at him as he takes them, noting the slack skin around his jaw, the network of crow’s feet around his eyes, even if the Nirvana T-shirt suggests he doesn’t want to admit to them.

He looks back at her, his eyes suddenly softening. “It really is good to see the girls.”

“Yes,” she says, folding her arms. “They’re great.”

“A credit to you. And I’m truly sorry about your marriage.”

She swallows. “Yes,” she says, her voice cool. “Me too.”

His face is searching hers, as if he’s hoping for some chink into which he can make it through her armor. But she’s damned if he’s earned it.

“I really appreciate this, Lila.” He pauses. “I mean, I know I haven’t exactly—”

She brushes her hands together. “I have to go to bed. Early start and all that.”

“Oh. Sure.”

She fights a vague reflexive guilt as she sees the old man’s face, the awkwardness and faint melancholy flickering across it. It is only when she closes the door behind her that she realizes he has walked the whole way up four flights of stairs without once favoring his injured leg.