The Golden Fury

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

The phone rings again five minutes later, and for a split second I consider not picking up. But I must. She’ll only keep ringing until she gets me.

“Why don’t you come over?” Jude says, as if there has been no break in the conversation. “You’ve never seen my flat and it’s been months since we saw each other.”

I react immediately. Guilt and shame—the Catholic twins and my Pavlovian response to my mother’s passive-aggressive parry.

“It’s a bit difficult. I’m trying to finish this book by my deadline.”

“Well, if you’re too busy. You must prioritize, I suppose.”

“That’s not fair,” I say. “Of course my work is important to me, but so are you.”

“Right,” she says. “But not enough to spend some time with me.

Never mind. There’s a new Sunday serial starting on the radio. I won’t be bored on my own.”

“I’ll come, I’ll come,” I say, back to being the sulky teenager.

“Lovely,” Jude says. “I’ll cook a birthday lunch tomorrow, then. Will Raul be coming? He’s always welcome, of course, but it might be nice to just be the two of us.”

I’m silently furious on Raul’s behalf, but he wouldn’t want to be there, anyway. He has tried his best to like Jude, but he struggles.

“I admire your mother’s intellect,” he’d said after meeting her for the first time at a particularly sticky Sunday lunch in Covent Garden. “But she is determined to be the cleverest person in the room, isn’t she?”

His tiny revenge is to call her Judith, a name she detests.

“Actually, Raul’s busy with an open day at college, so it will only be me, anyway,” I say.

“See you at twelve, then. Don’t be late,” she says. “Lots to talk about.”

She’d put the food on to cook far too early in her eager anticipation of Bria’s arrival and she could smell it beginning to catch.

The fug of simmering lentils had fogged up the window when Jude went into the kitchen. She whipped the saucepan off the electric ring and put it on the draining board, ready to reheat once Bria arrived.

She went to look out of the sitting room window again. Hovering.

Restless. She hadn’t realized how muchshe’d been looking forward to seeing her spiky only child. It had been at least six months since the last time—maybe nine. She didn’t know why she bothered. Bria clearly didn’t.

From the moment she’d brought Bria home, she’d been determined to have a completely different bond with her daughter from the tense relationship she had had with her own mother. She played the big sister card, treating Bria as an adult instead of as a child, but it had exploded in her face.

The terrible teens. Jude leaned her forehead on the cool windowpane as her mind filled with the vision of Bria screaming and slamming doors. And the silence as she’d trudged away from her, up Howard Street, two bulging carrier bags pulling her shoulders down. Her own shoulders drooped and she closed her eyes. She could still taste the dry, sour fear she’d felt as she watched her child disappear.

She’d had to throw her out. Well, hadn’t she? “The monster in our midst,” her boyfriend Will had said.

But, that was then, she told herself firmly as the doubts threatened to overwhelm her again . Bria’s an adult now. We have both moved on.

She focused on the lovely time they were going to have and put on a Leonard Cohen CD to give herself something to do, singing along with the well-worn lyrics and pushing books and papers into more pleasing piles.

But five minutes later, she was back at the window to watch the street for her child.

“I wish she’d just get here,” Jude suddenly said out loud . She was talking to herself more and more lately. An unattractive habit, she felt. It made her sound a bit mad and old, but the words just spilled out of her before she could stop them.

Funny how things change, she thought.

There’d been a time when she would have paid money to get rid of Bria for an afternoon. She was a little chatterbox, going on and on about things until Jude’s head hurt.

And she never stopped talking about her father. Her bastard father.

Ironic how absence makes the heart grow fonder, Jude thought. The unknowing heart.

She remembered how Bria used to invent stories about him. He was always the hero, of course. Brave, kind to animals, handsome, and once, at the age of eight, in a piece of homework titled “My Family,”

even a member of royalty.

Jude had been called in by the teacher to be told her daughter had an impressive imagination, but they needed to be careful this imagination didn’t spill over into telling lies. The teacher had called her Mrs.

Massingham even though she knew Jude was unmarried.

Her face darkened at the memory of how she’d slunk away, admonished. She’d wanted to tear the teacher’s head off, but she didn’t want to draw more attention to herself. Or to Bria. But she remembered very clearly her anger when she got home. Bria was down the street at Mrs. Speering’s, doing her homework.

She’d snapped at her childabout calling her father a prince and Mrs.

Speering had laughed, thinking it was a joke, but she’d shut up when she realized it was serious.

Bria had looked up—cool as a cucumber, Jude recalled—and said:

“I heard you say he was called Charlie. That’s the name of a prince.”

Jude had wanted to shake her. Instead she’d told Bria her father wasn’t a prince. He was nothing.

Her child had looked devastated and Jude always suspected that it was at that moment that her daughter became determined to find out the truth.

As far as Jude was concerned, the Truth was greatly overrated. It could be so many things to different people.

But she’d ended up fueling her daughter’s mission. Her obsession.

Jude hadn’t wanted her to even think about her father. He had done nothing for her, literally nothing. He’d left as soon as he could.

But, as Bria got older, she’d latched onto any male figure in their lives—the man at the corner shop, one of her teachers at school, her best friend Harry’s dad. And Jude’s boyfriends. She invented stories about them, fantasizing about them being her father, and Jude had had to stamp on that and later silly lies.

• • •

The fierce buzz of the doorbell made the cat run under the sofa. Jude pushed the button to release the front door for Bria and felt a clutch of nerves as she waited for her to appear. “Hello, Jude,” Bria said loudly, trying to be heard above Leonard Cohen’s mournful growl, and kissed her cheek.

“Sorry, I’ll turn it down,” Jude said. “I was listening to it while I waited. You took your time.”

“It’s only ten past twelve,” Bria said quietly.

“Oh right, I thought it was later,” Jude said.

She could hear the irritation in her voice and tried to stop herself.