Chapter 12
TWELVE
‘Do you realise, if I marry Aiden, I’m going to have a really beautiful name?’ Harriet stands underneath an enormous wooden dining table art installation at The Broad and gazes up at the roof it forms over her head.
Marry Aiden. I just want to cover my head in a blanket and hide until the day I die.
‘Harriet Lewis.’ She sighs, dreamily. ‘It’s got a great ring to it I think.’
It suddenly seems fitting how dwarfed she is by this unsettling monument to domesticity. ‘Do you remember us once having a conversation about how egregious and anti-feminist you thought it was for a woman to change her name when she marries?’ I ask.
‘It’s not anti-feminist if it’s your decision. Then it’s empowering.’
I watch her meander around giant chair legs, closing her eyes, like she’s dancing a Regency reel to a tune playing in her head. Then she stops interlacing her arms with imaginary dance partners and looks at me. ‘So, Mum, you know how I said that after my term ends here in March, I might want to go travelling a bit in North America before I go back to England and take up my summer position at Heatherwick in July?’
I wait for her to go on, conscious that my windpipe is constricting to the size of a runner bean.
‘Well, I’ve had some new thoughts on the matter.’
Oh, please no. Please NO.
‘As you know, I’ve only got three weeks left of my term. And given I don’t have to go back to uni in England until September, I thought I might stick around here in LA until June, when Aiden’s term ends, and then we might both go to Europe and…’
She comes to an abrupt halt.
‘And what?’ I prompt.
‘Well, you know… just travel for two or three weeks…’
Part of me thinks, well, that doesn’t sound too horrendous, then she says, ‘We’ve also been talking about what happens after the summer. If we go travelling to Europe, and then I do my placement at Heatherwick… Instead of going back to uni in England, I, er, I might return here and finish my degree at UCLA.’
She drip-feeds it so matter-of-factly that I consider I might have misheard.
‘Harriet…’ I do a sharp about-turn and take off towards another room, this one full of giant, mirror-polished stainless-steel structures that look like colourful balloons twisted into animal shapes. I come face-to-leg with a menacing silver rabbit and catch a reflection of my own horrified expression staring back at me.
‘Mum?’ She has followed and is standing beside me so that we are both staring at our freakishly distorted images reflected in the artwork.
I cover my ears with my hands, stride away from her and pretend to read the exhibit description. Suddenly the artist’s desire to memorialise the icons that remind us of kids’ parties, festive holidays – and the birth of babies – makes me want to slap him over the head.
‘What’s wrong with my studying here for my last two years?’ she asks. ‘I can stay on the same student visa, I think. Obviously, I have to confirm that. But if I can’t, and we did get married…’
Married. Married. Married. Married.
Marrrrrrrried! I inwardly scream.
‘Harriet.’ I try to tread carefully even though I am so tired of being on eggshells with her. ‘You don’t marry someone to enable you to stay in a country.’ Imagine if Frank gets wind of this plan! All his suspicions confirmed. ‘Anyway, I don’t understand what’s motivating all this urgency. This is not like you. It’s not like any nineteen-year-old!’
Is it truly the logistics of long-distance love? Or is there something else lurking at the bottom of this that she’s not sharing with me?
‘What about how much you loved uni, and your course, and all your friends? Your dream of working for a big architecture firm in London after you graduate?’ I pivot on one foot then come face-to-shin with an electric-blue balloon dog that must be twenty feet tall. I’m in art gallery hell complete with demons.
She hurries after me as I trot towards what I’m hoping is the exit. I can tell we’re bracing for the showdown neither of us wants to have. ‘I still have my dreams! There are top architecture firms here, in LA. Maybe even more job opportunities than in London. This is not about me changing who I am as a person. It’s about me trying to find a way to have two very important things that I want – two things that I love.’ She’s imploring me to understand, but I can tell something in her confidence is flagging. ‘There’s no law that says I have to finish my studies in England. I can transfer to UCLA. Then Aiden and I don’t have to be apart for all that time. Otherwise, what happens with our relationship?’
‘And who pays for expensive college education in America? Have you thought of that? Your grant was one term, Harriet. One term. Not two years. You have to think practically here.’
A violent flush appears across her chest. ‘I know that, and I don’t know who pays,’ she says, less bullishly. ‘We haven’t thought through every last detail. But don’t worry, it won’t be you and Dad. I’ll take out a loan or… I’ll get a job. Maybe just study part time.’ Her neck almost elongates with indignation. ‘I’ll come up with a solution that doesn’t involve you, I promise.’
I cannot believe this is the same Harriet. It makes no sense to me. No sense at all. ‘You’re doing all this rearranging of your life? You’d consider working full-time while you study – do you know how hard that would be? All so that you can be someone’s wife? Harriet, think, please…’ I implore her to see reason. ‘If it’s meant to be with Aiden, it will survive two years of you finishing your education in England.’ I think of Frank saying that thing about test everything; hold tight to that which is good. ‘The best thing you and Aiden could give each other under the circumstances of all this is time.’ I scan her fried little face. ‘Time, Harriet. Not wedding bands.’
Her face falls. I need air. I spot the door and hurtle towards it. Her feet clack after me.
‘You could choose to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,’ she snips.
I step outside. Breathe.
‘I didn’t have to tell you all this,’ she continues, her voice evaporating in the din of downtown traffic. ‘And maybe if you’re so dead set against us, we’ll just elope to Santorini or somewhere. Maybe we’ll do it, like, now, at March break . And then we can stop having this ridiculous conversation! You’d just have to live with it and get on with it, wouldn’t you?’
I open my mouth to say… what? I’m not even sure; I don’t want to keep railing at her, throwing out practical realities that make me sound so at odds with her.
But then she says, ‘I’m happy, Mum. And I’m trying to make the best decisions for myself.’ The tip of her nose is as red as her chest. She reaches for my arm. ‘Instead of fighting me, can’t you just support me?’
No! I hear my inner voice scream. I didn’t accompany her to America to have her never come home! She can’t marry someone whose father thought she was a green card grabber from day one. At the first sign of an argument, he’ll be telling his son to leave.
I get a flash of us going at it on that chaise and I have to stop walking.
Frank, the man I had ill-advised, casual sex with, can’t become family.
The sun is beating on the top of my head. I suddenly miss Rupert. I miss having an ally in the pursuit of common sense. Every drama we’ve ever had with Harriet has been something we have shared. We were parents who were thoroughly on the same page with parenting. All our hopes and dreams for her were the same ones. I massively miss having him to go to right now, having him on side to chew this over. Then I hate that he took what we had and threw it away.
‘What about your dad in all this?’ I say. ‘If you’re even vaguely serious about staying here for the next couple of years he’s got to be a part of the conversation. Despite you saying you can self-support, there would be financial implications for us.’
‘No way!’ she says. ‘He has no right to know a thing about what I’m doing. And if we did get married, well, he’s not invited.’
I sigh. ‘Harriet, no matter what you feel about him, you can’t move to America and not tell him. You can’t have a wedding and not invite him.’ I can’t believe I’ve just said wedding like it’s now an event on our social calendar.
She goes to speak but upturns her hands instead. We stare at one another, like we are poles apart and will never come together again. ‘Would you want him here?’ she asks. ‘Say we did marry… What if he brings Dag the Slag? Do you really want to come face to face with the woman who stole your husband?’
I regret ever giving her that name. It was cathartic for two minutes, then it just somehow reinforced the victim status I was determined not to ascribe to myself.
‘She didn’t steal him, Harriet. He’s not a pack of turkey mince on a supermarket shelf. And he’s not with her. It was just a flirtation.’ I say that for her benefit rather than my own, though it annoys me that Nat’s assessment of the situation is still lurking in the back of my mind.
‘Because he texts you a million times a day begging you to come home? You automatically conclude it’s not still going on?’ she says. Now she’s looking at me like she can’t believe who I am any more.
I start to walk towards the Walt Disney Concert Hall where I’ve a vague memory of parking my car. Hard to imagine that little over an hour ago we had stood here and marvelled at the originality of the building, and she’d been telling me all about Frank Gehry’s vision when he designed it, and she was talking like a sensible, career-driven young woman again. Not like we’re in a time warp and have travelled back to the 1950s.
‘You still need to tell him if you’re truly thinking of abandoning your studies in England to marry a boy on the other side of the world,’ I say.
‘Ugh!’ she grunts but doesn’t add anything. We walk a while without speaking. ‘You know, Mum,’ she says, levelly, when the tension has come down a bit. ‘I always listen to you. You’re always the voice of reason, and I love that, and I value and respect it… But it’s my life. And I could have just as great a life here in America, as in England. I mean, anyone would think I wanted to move to Uzbekistan.’ She sounds a little breathless with the intensity of all this. ‘And I don’t want to have to get dad’s permission. I don’t think he’s qualified to know what’s best for me. Or you, for that matter.’
Just when I was so certain I knew where I parked, I now realise I have no idea. The street is an assault of traffic, sirens, bad smells. ‘Look, Harriet…’ I try to keep the angst out of my voice. ‘I understand your feelings, more than you might think. And all I care about is your happiness and well-being. But I also think you need to remember your dad still loves you. Nothing he did was about you. It possibly wasn’t even about me.’
Nat said people often cheat due to opportunity rather than dissatisfaction. Sometimes it’s for self-exploration; to try on a new ‘them’ or to reconnect with their former single selves. Most of the time it’s not because they’re unhappy with their partner. Woop. Woop. Makes all the difference.
‘That’s so pathetic!’ she says. ‘Now you’re just making excuses for him! I mean, how can you say it wasn’t about us? It was absolutely about us. We’re his family. We’re a unit. If he had valued that, he wouldn’t have risked losing it.’
I don’t know how to respond to this because she’s wrong and she’s right. If he cheated, then he didn’t value us. But I haven’t the heart to tell her that we’re actually not a unit, that she might just feel that way because she was an only child; the lines that make up the sets and subsets of us got blurred. I can’t have her believe that Rupert cheated on both of us; that would make her suffering equal to my own, her self-worth as eroded as mine. And I can’t bear that. I can’t bear that he could have damaged her as much as he’s damaged me.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you’ve got to promise me that he can’t know. You won’t tell him anything about me or Aiden.’ She clutches my arm. ‘You’ve got to respect my wishes, Mum. If you don’t, I swear I’ll never forgive you.’
I search her face, those blue eyes that are so much like Rupert’s. Before I can speak, her hand falls away from my arm. ‘Wow. You’re going to, aren’t you? Despite everything I’ve said. Despite what he’s done to you…’
‘No, I…’
She throws up her hands. ‘It wasn’t just a flirtation. I mean, he did it, for God’s sake. How blind are you trying to be?’
She strides off. I watch her red and white Converses retreat down the pavement.
‘I won’t tell him,’ I call after her. Right now, I will do anything to turn this around. At first, I’m not even sure she’s heard. Then she stops.
‘You know,’ she turns and looks at me. From this distance she suddenly seems so remote, like we are separated by way more than just half a city block in the middle of downtown LA. ‘I wish I felt I could believe you.’
This is a gut punch. It almost makes me fold. When have I ever given her cause to doubt my word? This is the most devastating thing I could ever imagine coming out of her mouth.
It lives there – her crashing disappointment in me. Then she says, ‘I’ll find my own way back.’