claiming benefit?”
“You would hardly want me to live on you. Look, it’s temporary, Dad. It won’t put you out. Karen can move into Claire’s room, and I’ll have my own room back. I need some privacy. As soon as we make our arrangements, I’ll be off.”
“Who? You and your man-friend?”
“Could you just draw the curtain a bit, Dad? The sun’s in my eyes.”
“Suzanne, do you have any evidence that this man you are involved with wants to set up house with you? When you tell him you’re expecting his child, he may be horrified.”
“I don’t see why he should be. It’s a perfectly natural thing.”
“But has he told you, in words of one syllable, that he means to leave his wife?”
Suzanne closed her eyes again. “Oh, he means to.”
“Do you think you could make the effort to keep awake? Your whole future is in the balance here.”
“I don’t know why I’m so sleepy. It must be my condition.”
“Did you want to get pregnant? Are you one of those women who have to prove they can?”
“Everyone has to prove they can. All my friends have been pregnant.”
They infuriated him, the little nest-making pats she gave to the cushion, settling it against the side of her head. “Haven’t you any ambition?”
“What sort of ambition?”
“A career.”
“There are no careers. There aren’t even any jobs. Didn’t you know there are three million people out of work?”
“You don’t have to be one of them. Not if you graduate.”
“It only postpones it. What do people do with degrees in geography? There aren’t any cosy teaching jobs to take up the second-rate people, not these days.”
“Cosy?” Colin thought of his probationary year; a time of his life when he had seriously considered hanging himself. “Why did you bother to go to university, if you thought like this?”
“I can just see your face if I’d told you I wanted to be a hairdresser.”
Colin was aghast. “Did you?”
“Not a hairdresser especially. There are times when you’re just as thick as Mum.”
“Literal-minded,” Colin said. “Not really thick.”
He was touched, when he thought about it, by the way she still called them “Mum” and “Dad.” Not that he expected her, like Alistair, to hail them as “Old Cow” or “Paunchy” rather that in the somnambulistic self-sufficiency she had acquired, he expected her to label them Occupants of Parental Home; to find them some grey unemotive category that she could use on official forms. She was still such a child, after all, with her flat chest and her bitten nails.
“Suzanne, sit up like a good girl and listen to me. I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that.” She stifled another yawn. “When people tell you that sort of thing, they usually regret it. And then they hold it against you.”
“That may be so, but I feel bound to, because I so much don’t want you to make a mess of your life.”
“And when people say that, they mean they’re about to plunge in and muck up all your plans. Look, I know what I’m doing. I’m an adult.”
“I don’t think those two things follow.”
“Go on then. Tell me your story. ‘When I was about your age…’” She uncurled herself and rubbed her calves. “I’m getting cramp. I ought to go and lie on the bed.”
“You can go up on the roof and perch on the ridge tiles,” Colin said, “but for God’s sake listen to what I’m going to tell you. About ten years ago—”
“What’s the use to me of something that happened then?”
“The whole world doesn’t centre around you, Suzanne. As it happened, mine didn’t in those days. I was very much in love with a young woman whom I’d met at an evening class. I was contemplating leaving your mother in order to live with her.” Colin rose from his chair and walked over to the fireplace; which had recently been rebuilt, and gas-logs installed. It had cost him an effort to speak; he could not turn his face to his daughter and show her that his mouth was trembling, and that his eyes had filled with tears. It would shake her faith in him, in his rectitude and solidity; if indeed she had any, after his confession. Simply to speak of it brought the pain back to him; how clogged and salty the throat, how heavy the weight behind the ribs. He had felt like this for months after his break-up with Isabel. It was the time of his life that, in modern terminology, he recognised as the nuclear winter; the many months of cold and dark.
“At an evening class?” Suzanne said. Her smooth sleepy voice was derisive. “What in?”
“It was called Writing for Pleasure and Profit,” he replied. He could not imagine why it was only this aspect of the business that engaged her.
“So which did you get? Pleasure, or Profit, or some of both?”
“Neither really. We soon left. It wasn’t for us.”
