Rosie Thomas - A Simple Life

Dinah toasted the muffins and spread jelly on them. She made rosehip tea and gave Milly a mug, and Milly wrapped her black-varnished fingers greedily around the warmth. Dinah noticed for the first time a clumsy tattooed flower in the vee between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Did you go to friends?’ she asked at length, when Milly had drunk two mugs of tea and eaten the muffins.

‘What?’

‘You said you were going to see some friends. Last night, before you went out.’

‘I haven’t got any friends here.’

She said it coolly without inviting sympathy but Dinah’s heart still twisted for her.

‘So where did you go?’

‘I walked around a bit. Then I remembered some people Sandra and Ed know, across the other side of Main Street, they’ve got, like, this big barn thing at the side of their house. They keep all the garden furniture and stuff in it. The door, wasn’t locked so I just went in and slept on a kind of padded seat thing. It was fine. I can look after myself.’

‘Yes, I suppose you can.’

Milly was studying her tattoo.

‘I’m sorry about last night, right?’

‘I’m sorry I slapped you. I shouldn’t have done.’

Milly laughed. It was the first time Dinah had heard her laugh and it was as attractive as her smile.

‘Actually that was kind of funny. It felt like we were two kids fighting. Let’s have a look.’

Dinah realised that she meant the bite on her hand. Obligingly she held it out to show the red weal. Milly sighed.

‘Maybe you should get a tetanus shot. You know, I asked Sandra if she could fix it for me to come here this weekend. After that time I met you I thought you were kind of okay, and I liked you. Only when I like someone I can’t believe they could like me or anything because I’m so shitty, and then I have to be like, really as bad as I can be so they won’t like me and then everything’s sort of proved for me so that I don’t have to speculate .’

It was the speculate that touched Dinah. With an effort to find the right neutral voice she said, ‘I think I understand. But why were you so determined not to go to LA with your parents?’

‘Because that’s what they always do . Or what he does and she lets him do. He just announces that we’re going somewhere, to suit him, and up and off we go. Franklin, Zermatt, London, back to bloody Franklin. For his writing. As if it’s some kind of art, instead of crap paperbacks with swastikas on the front.’

Milly paused, trying to arrange her words. ‘And it’s like, that’s how she needs it to be. She wants him to act that way so she can, I don’t know, accommodate him. It’s like a deal between them.’

Yes, Dinah thought. That’s what it’s like. We all have our different deals.

‘Anyway, I didn’t want to be taken like some parcel and left to sit in a hotel. I thought of asking to come here. Like I said, I do like you.’

And showing her liking, however grudgingly, was an added way of attacking Sandra. Milly was no fool.

‘Thank you,’ Dinah said. She would not make the mistake of offering clumsy reciprocal assurances just yet. The conversation was about what Milly thought and felt.

‘Is there any more tea?’

‘I can make some.’

While her back was turned Milly said, in a rush of words, as if she wanted to get it out while no one was looking at her, ‘I’m adopted, you know. They couldn’t have any kids of their own so they got me.’

Dinah moved carefully, not letting her surprise show. She put down the refilled teapot and took her place again opposite Milly at the table.

‘I didn’t know that.’

Sandra might have told her, she realised, that day in the café bar. But somehow the as-yet unmade friendship had developed a flaw, like a pattern going awry. They had become suspicious instead of intimate.

She thought of Ed and Sandra and their castle in the woods, but a different perspective made them seem smaller, farther off, while new questions and associations hung between Milly and herself, pricking her, hooking into her skin.

‘Yeah. They told me all that shit when I was a kid, they talked about it all the time in churchy voices, about how I’m special. They got me from the adoption services in London. Specially chosen, they wanted me so much, you know? I never believed a word of it. I don’t think they do nowadays, either. How could they, seeing what they ended up with was me?’

The small pale face with the angry make-up mostly rubbed away by the night in a barn. The lower lip pushed out, simultaneously aggressive and tremulous. Eyes fixed on Dinah’s face, greedy for attention and affection and reassurance, as well as routinely defiant. Another woman’s child, her history compacted within her. God forgive me, Dinah thought.

‘I had a daughter too.’

Milly gaped at her, silenced for once.

‘She’s fourteen, the same as you. Only I haven’t seen her since she was a little baby. I gave her up for adoption.’

There was a long pause. Milly picked reflectively at the smaller of her nose rings, turning it in its reddened puncture. Dinah could almost follow her thoughts down through their faltering spirals. Finally she breathed the question, ‘Are you saying, like, I could be your daughter?’

‘No. I know you couldn’t be.’

‘How do you? Why did you have her adopted? Was she, kind of, somebody’s she shouldn’t have been?’

‘No. She was Matthew’s baby too.’

It had been a long time, such a very long time since Dinah had allowed herself the luxury of words to vent the pressure. Silence had contained everything like a cold crust over molten liquid. She felt the pressure increasing, cracking the crust and pushing words into her mouth. They were ready to spill out of her mouth now. It was wrong that it should be Milly to hear them, Milly with her own pressing needs. Wrong, but right also.

‘Why, then?’

Dinah turned her head. Through the window she saw the Berkmanns driving off to their Sunday morning tennis game. Kendrick Street, Franklin, Massachusetts, coming alive once more.

‘I’ll tell you, if you like.’

‘Yeah. I’d like. Make a change from going on about me.’

Awkwardly at first, then fast, Dinah began to talk.

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