Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
That night, Felicity ordered the second biggest dinner she had ever eaten. She was ravenous. Stale Battenburg at the Bissons’ was the only thing she’d consumed since Saturday morning’s breakfast, and she felt as though she’d lived an entire lifetime since then.
She sat in the opulent dining room in her hotel and tucked into a massive veggie burger with a mound of chips, followed by two helpings of decadent chocolate mousse just like she remembered from that wonderful holiday. She declined the gin tonight, though. It wasn’t called Mother’s Ruin for nothing.
As she ate, she hid her tear-ravaged face behind her trusty copy of Ulysses and pretended to read while she thought about everything she had learned, trying to avoid conversation with her fellow guests. And the hot barman, for that matter, although she had definitely felt his eyes on her as she walked past him earlier. She wondered idly if he’d still look at her that way if he could see what she’d just put away. And then she decided she didn’t care. She was officially ‘Felicity Two-Puddings’ now but, today of all days, she deserved it.
What an afternoon.
Felicity had ended up curled in a ball on Bertie and Cherie’s comfortable old floral sofa, sobbing her heart out, with Cherie patting her arm at intervals and the stinky old dog (‘Moses, thirteen years old, likes ice cream and orange Fanta’) nuzzling her hand. It had felt good in a strange way. The questions she’d had for so long, the gap, the reason for her father’s bizarre behaviour, all were becoming clearer.
She couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit vindicated. If her mother… if Jocelyn had been cheating on her father just as Bertie said, then he at least had a reason for doing what he did, rather than being a completely unfeeling monster which, Felicity thought with a twinge of guilt, is kind of how she had him pegged. Even better, it meant she wouldn’t necessarily have inherited the unfeeling monster genes after all. It wasn’t necessarily in her genes or her make up or her nature or any of that nonsense. It felt something like freedom.
Of course, cheating on people might still be in her genes. If that was the sort of thing that could be coded into them. Felicity wasn’t sure and made a mental note to do some googling later. Because she suddenly knew, and with frightening clarity, that Bertie hadn’t been the only man to visit the house. Her father was often away, travelling to the mainland for his work as a surveyor, and her mother had never let her social life suffer as a result. As children they had assumed these mysterious ‘visitors’ were just friends, had pictured them sitting around in the ‘smart dining room’ with their mother, elegantly dressed, playing cards or embroidering cushions or some other Austen-like activity.
Oh God.
Felicity felt uncomfortably hot and uneasy at the thought that those innocent soirees might have been something Other… but she had to admit there were a lot of men. A lot. A whole lot of single men. Visiting late. Leaving early. She could see some of their faces if she concentrated hard enough. Not that she wanted to.
Even in Derbyshire, there had been visitors. She remembered them coming now, knocking on the door for a late ‘supper’ with their mother. They were sent to bed early on those evenings, but it was such a small place they could always hear the murmurings from downstairs. And other sounds too, laughter, sometimes crying, the sound of glasses chinking and strange, animalistic noises coming from their mother’s bedroom on the other side of the rickety stairs. Funny, thought Felicity, how she had managed to block this all out until now. The metaphorical equivalent of sticking her fingers in her ears.
She had always found it a strange dance, the mystery of other people’s sex lives. How on earth did anyone ever know who was sharing a bed with whom? Or who had an ‘understanding’, as it were? And how did it come about? It was like a card game she had never learned the rules for. These nightly goings on always seemed so separate from the mundane day to day of living; ethereal, somehow, and yet so base at the same time. Was that a British thing? Perhaps. It seemed inconceivable, in particular, to think that Felicity’s incredibly beautiful and poised mother had ever been naked in the presence of a man. Blimey, no. Let alone multiple men. No wonder Felicity had blocked it out. She wondered if Tristan knew and had kept it from her all these years.
That night, her sleep was filled with lurid images of her mother in the arms of a succession of naked strangers, and even an elderly Bertie, complete with carpet slippers and a pipe. It was not a pretty picture. She woke up in the early hours in a cold sweat, her heart racing, and wrapped her arms around herself. Jocelyn, what a hot mess you were .
After a while, her heart slowed but she couldn’t sleep. Instead, she lay in the dark, cocooned in luxurious sheets and the complete darkness and silence of the hotel. Of the island, for that matter. And as she lay there, she wondered exactly how many other latent traumatic memories she had buried deep inside her. It was time, she thought, to get some help.
But Felicity still had two more days on Guernsey. And despite everything, she was determined to make it feel like a holiday.
It wasn’t that hard. The place was just so beautiful. On Monday morning she got up early and walked and walked and walked and, as she did so, she rolled all this new information around in her mind like savouring a new flavour of ice cream. And as she wandered, she found fields that would soon be drifting with rare orchids, watched birds of prey wheeling overhead and got deliciously lost exploring the ‘green lanes’, cliffs and footpaths that were supposed to be reminiscent of Devon and Cornwall. There were stunning coves and beaches and ancient architecture all over the island, it seemed, and all with a delightful French flavour, a little like the Bissons, in fact.
In the afternoon she finally managed to catch a boat to the nearby island of Herm. Her face nearly froze off during the short and deserted boat ride over, but she found peace and solitude on the tiny island rumoured to be a favourite of Cliff Richard, of all people, and she walked the entire circumference from high cliffs to low beaches in a couple of hours. Halfway round, she thought she saw a seal bobbing and disappearing amongst the waves. Puffins and dolphins could be seen here too, at the right time of year, and in the spring and summer it was awash with wildflowers. Perhaps old Cliff wasn’t so bad after all.