Chapter XX Cosima #4
He pronounces father as ‘fatter’, which makes her smile. She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand.
‘I could,’ Cosima says. ‘He’s at home, awaiting trial. It’ll be months. But I haven’t. Called him, I mean. He emails but I don’t reply.’
‘Why not?’
She doesn’t have an answer. Not one that would make any sense.
How to explain the revenge she had taken, the scores she had believed she wanted to settle?
How to explain that she’d convinced herself she was defending her aunt – her poor, dead aunt whom she was never really that close to – rather than just being clouded by rage, by the need to bring her father down, to attack all that he represented, but also by her desperation to make him love her again?
How to explain to Rudy, with his blond hair and his innocence and his nosebleeds and his uncool sunglasses (attached to his neck by a purple plastic chain) that she had formed an alliance with her father’s nemesis Martin Gilmour?
And how to explain that she actually liked Martin?
That he had become, if you really thought about it, her best friend?
She couldn’t even begin. She’d messed everything up and now her father was probably going to prison. Because of her.
‘You should just call them,’ Rudy says and at that moment, Holly and Heinrich appear with three different soft drinks cans.
‘We weren’t sure which one you’d prefer,’ Holly says. ‘We’ve got Fanta, Coke and …’ She checks the label of the final can. ‘Some Balinese thing.’
‘Coke, please,’ Cosima says. The can is cool in her hand. She flips open the ring pull and drinks. The sugary liquid revives her. With Rudy’s help, she is able to stand. His hand is large and strong. She keeps hold of it longer than necessary before letting it drop.
‘Thanks, guys,’ Cosima says. ‘I’m sorry about that. The heat got to me, that’s all.’
‘I’m—’ Holly starts.
‘It wasn’t anything you said, Holly, don’t worry.’
Holly’s shoulders sag with relief.
Cosima chucks the empty Coke can into her rubbish sack and they continue to wend their way along the beach, cleaning as they go.
That evening, when she’s back in her apartment, freshly showered and clean, she takes a beer from the fridge and sits outside on the small wooden balcony that overlooks the yard at the back of a busy beauty salon.
The manicurists often come out to smoke and gossip on their breaks.
Two of them are there now, drinking cups of tea, and Cosima waves at them before taking out her laptop.
She clicks on her inbox. She sees his name immediately. Ben Fitzmaurice. Regular as clockwork, her father has sent her an email. She clicks on it.
‘Dearest Cozzie,’ he has written. ‘I want to start by saying how sorry I am.’
She holds her breath. This isn’t the usual email containing news of home and her siblings.
‘I’m sure you know by now that I was arrested and have been charged for offences I committed. Having had time to reflect, I now regret my actions wholeheartedly but, if you’ll let me explain, I’d value a chance to tell you why I acted in the way I did.
‘As a student, I made a terrible error of judgement and got behind the wheel of a car when I was drunk. I killed my girlfriend at the time. Her name was Vicky. She was kind and fun and clever. I have never forgiven myself.
‘My parents were terrified I would lose everything. My friend Martin, who was sober, agreed to take the blame. My parents paid him handsomely for this act of generosity and the police dropped their investigations. My family and I genuinely thought this was the best thing to do.
‘Years later, for reasons I don’t need to go into here, Martin exposed us.
My father and I spoke to the police and persuaded them there was nothing to be gained by pursuing the issue.
Martin and I fell out, I’m afraid, which was very painful but I understand a bit more now about why he felt the need to do what he did. I know you two have become close.
‘More recently, as you’re aware, your aunt Fliss struggled with addiction issues.
She claimed Jarvis, a man whom I – we – considered to be a close friend, took advantage of her in the most wretched way.
I don’t want to go into the distressing detail of that here but perhaps, one day, if you give me another chance, then we can talk about it.
‘I confronted Jarvis but he insisted what happened between him and Fliss had been consensual and that she had “thrown herself” at him. The thing is, Cozzie, Fliss had a reputation for doing things like that. She caused difficulties with quite a few of my friends over the years, even the married ones, and she had lied to us before. Many, many times. I’m afraid it didn’t take much for me to think she was lying to us again.
I didn’t believe her. If I’m being totally frank, I didn’t want to believe her because of what it would mean about Jarvis.
And then I was convinced by Jarvis that the best course of action for all of us, including Fliss, was to lean on the police to make the files go away.
I told myself it would have been awful for Fliss to be dragged through the courts and I wasn’t sure she would survive it.
And I also knew that, without Jarvis and his financial backing, my campaign to become PM never stood a chance.
‘Looking back, I’m disgusted I allowed my ambition to cloud my judgement.
I’ve learned, over the last few months, that my ambition can be a curse.
It killed my beloved sister. It has cost me my relationship with you.
It almost lost me your mother. It has blinded me to the hurt I caused.
But the person I was back then saw no other way.
I felt I had to go along with what was being suggested.
I truly thought I was doing the best thing for my sister, and for my family.
‘I say all of this not as an excuse, Cozzie. I freely admit that the things I have done are not only wrong but harmful and quite possibly unforgivable. I say it because, after hiding so much of myself from you, I want you to know the truth. You deserve that. You have always sought truth out with a bravery I admire. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to recognise that.
‘If you can find it in your heart to do so, please forgive me. I love you so much, Cozzie.’
‘Daddy.’
She closes the laptop, finishes the beer, gets another from the fridge.
She lets his words settle around her. She doesn’t forgive him but maybe she is a fraction closer to understanding him.
And he doesn’t suspect her. He has no idea of the part Cosima has had to play in this unravelling and for this, she finds she is grateful.
So she does what Rudy told her to do. She calls her parents.
Her mother answers. Serena’s face fills the video screen. Her mother’s eyes are wet. Her hand is covering her mouth, as if she doesn’t trust herself to speak.
‘Oh my God, Cozzie,’ she says. ‘Cosima, my darling, oh my God. You called. It’s you.’
Serena is sitting at the kitchen table at Tipworth.
Cosima recognises it immediately: the worn oak, pitted with indentations and tea stains and buttery fingerprints.
The place where Hector carved his initials with a pen-knife.
The corner Cosima hit her head against as a toddler.
It’s all there, memories hewn into the wood.
‘It’s me,’ Cosima says.
For so long, she has imagined her mother being angry and cold with her. But Serena is neither.
‘I’m sorry,’ Serena says. ‘So, so sorry. For everything. We love you so much. We’ve been so worried about you and—’
In the background, a familiar voice saying, ‘Who’s that?’ And then Serena turns the phone screen around and Cosima sees her father walking through the kitchen door.
‘Cosima,’ her father says. ‘My girl.’
His face is older, more careworn. He is wearing a quarter-zip fleece, stray fluff around the collar, and his hair is whiter than it was when she last saw him, the grey fanning out beyond his temples into the upper reaches of his scalp. He looks smaller, more fragile.
‘Did you get my last email?’
She nods.
‘Thank you for reading it,’ he says.
Cosima watches as her mother puts her arm around his shoulders. The accordion of time stretches and contracts. She wants, suddenly, to be with them, in the yellow warmth of that kitchen, smelling the familiar smells of home – country air and hot toast and beeswax candles.
‘How are you, Dad?’ she says, her voice hoarse.
He tells her he’s ‘bearing up’. He’s waiting for a court date. His barrister says it could take a while. The average time to get to trial is over a year. After that, it might be a jail sentence but his lawyers are confident it won’t be too long and they’ll be able to get him out after a few months.
‘I could just get away with community service,’ Ben says, then catches himself.
‘Sorry. I don’t mean “get away with”. I know what I did was wrong, but …
’ Through the phone screen she can see the light leaving his eyes.
‘Stupidly, I thought it was right at the time. I feel terrible that I’ve let you all down. ’
‘You haven’t,’ Serena murmurs, but he ignores her.
‘You especially, Cozzie.’
He looks at her with a great, penetrating sadness and she wants to believe he means it. The exposure of her father’s vulnerability is disconcerting. She has never seen it before.
‘It’s OK,’ Cosima says, moving the conversation on. ‘Thanks for the donation, by the way. To the environmental charity.’
Her father shrugs.
‘You’ve made me think, you know. I should have done more when I could. Otherwise what’s the point of it all?’ Then he grins, some of his old bombast returning. ‘Still, I wish you hadn’t sprayed orange paint all over that nice sculpture.’
She smiles, relieved to catch glimpses of his old self showing through.
‘I let you down too,’ Cosima says and she thinks of River in the hospital bed and the police files and grabbing Martin’s wrist in the same kitchen her parents now sit in. ‘I’m sorry as well.’
‘You did nothing wrong,’ he insists. ‘I won’t have you thinking that.’
Cosima will never tell them what she did. She makes a pact with herself: in order to keep her own crimes secret, she has to forgive her father his.
‘We failed you,’ her dad continues, looking at Serena. ‘We understand that now, don’t we?’
Serena nods.
‘Don’t laugh, Cozzie,’ her mother says, ‘but we’ve been having spiritual coaching.’
‘What?!’
‘Can you believe it?’ Ben asks, shaking his head. ‘She’s got me seeing her bloody shaman.’
Cosima laughs then. She can’t help it. Soon they’re all laughing.
‘That’s mad,’ she says. ‘Mad.’
There is something to be salvaged in this moment. It feels nice, talking and laughing with her parents across the time zones, a cool beer by her side, the beauty therapists’ gentle chatter rising from the yard below, the rhythmic crashing of waves in the background.
Cosima doesn’t know yet what the future holds or what forgiveness might look like. But for now, she is tired of fighting. For now, she will concentrate only on this phone call, on picking each word with care, as if collecting ring pulls and bottle caps from the sand to make it clean again.
Cosima watches the screen dim as the English afternoon clouds over. Then her mother gets up to switch on the Tipworth kitchen lights. The room brightens.
‘That’s better,’ her father says. ‘Now I can see you properly.’