Louisa Young - Tree of Pearls

We have no streetlights up here, but by the light from the hall I could see, just visible where the sleeve of his ancient t-shirt ended, part of the curling tattooed wave that broke under the prow of the fully rigged HMS Victory on his left bicep, with the guiding compass-point star above it and the name in a furling banner beneath. Every eldest Makins son had had the Victory on his bicep since an early-eighteenth-century Harry Makins had served on board, as powder monkey or something, no one could quite remember what. Harry’s dad had wanted to break the tradition, and forbade all his sons from having any tattoos at all. Harry, with his historical loyalties and his rebellious nature, had celebrated his eighteenth birthday with Victory on his left arm and his twenty-first with the opening line of The Rights of Man like a bracelet round his right. For his twenty-eighth I had given him a tattoo of his choice. He had said he wanted a rose as he was getting soft, but he wouldn’t let me come with him to the parlour and he had come out with my name, damn him, in a curled tattooed banner wrapped around his arm beneath the bracelet of Thomas Paine.

I looked at him for a while as he slept. I used to kiss him, I thought. And shook my head violently, and went back to the child.

*

Lily, god bless her, took it entirely in her stride. As daddies are the men that live with children, so if Harry is her daddy of course he would be there for breakfast. Her logic is simple.

Mine isn’t. The reality of sitting round the breakfast table with them shook me about. Will she want him here for breakfast every day? My sole purpose in life is to look after her, to love her and save her from fear and shock, of which she had quite enough at her birth. She is innocence walking, and I am her minder. I make good. That’s my purpose. I make good for Lily. But for all the time Harry and I have had to wonder about how Harry As Dad, Us With Dad would be – before deciding to do the DNA test, since waiting for the results – for some things there is no possibility of preparation. We can’t know. We have no role models. No instructions. No guidance. Even less than people usually do. But this morning we have a masquerade of domesticity. (I put from my mind an image of a version of man woman child that was briefly here a few weeks before: Sa’id, Lily and I. Sitting about the breakfast table during the tiny moment when it seemed that anything could happen, and be all right.)

Now, here is Harry, having to go to work.

He had woken early and calling my name.

‘I’m here,’ I called, trying to call quietly not to wake her just as I realized she wasn’t in with me. I got up and went through to the kitchen.

Lily was there beside the sofa, blinking and smiling, with her curls all ruffled up and her eyes gleaming. She didn’t even look at me. ‘Dada,’ she said, in the sweetest little voice.

‘Oh god, hello,’ he said, with his hair all ruffled up too and confused amazement in his normally so steady green eyes. He looked back at me, and back at her, and shook his head as if in disbelief and said ‘oh god’ again. I thought Lily would make one of her clever comments about God, like why are you talking to God when you’ve only just met me, or something, but she didn’t. She just stood there in the puddle of her too-long pyjama legs and looked up at him with the sweetest little expression on her face. ‘Dada,’ she said again. Where the hell did she get ‘Dada’ from?

Harry wanted to hug her. He was embarrassed to because he was horizontal, in yesterday’s clothes, and half asleep. His limbs are so long and he didn’t know what to do with them. He is unaccustomed to hugging children. She reached over to him and patted his cheek. He looked at her, staring at her eyes. He sat up and leaned forward, his long back arching. He looked as if he might be going to howl with amazement and tenderness.

‘Hello, you little darling,’ he said. As he said it I realized how he had been holding himself back from her until now, now that his role is accredited.

She curled into herself. ‘Dada,’ she said. Coy as cherry pie. Inarticulate as a two-year-old. But getting her message across just fine.

He pushed back the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the sofa, squinting at his boots and shaking his head. He looked up at me. I had my face in my hand and was thinking about weeping. Or laughing. Something involuntary and physical, anyway.

‘Do you want some breakfast?’ he said to her.

‘First I go to the loo,’ said Lily, ‘and then I have breakfast.’ Ha ha! Letting him know how things are, how things work around here.

‘What do you have?’ he said, standing up, not knowing whether or not he was to go into the bathroom with her.

‘You can come in if you like,’ she said. In he went, and she started to explain about cereal, porridge, pancakes on highdays and holidays, melon that we had on holiday once and a naughty little horse came and tried to eat it.

I sat on the sofa. I had an image of a great big tiny girl’s little finger, with raggy nails and the remains of sparkly pink nail polish from a birthday party, and wrapped spiralled all around the length of it was long tall Harry. There could be worse ways for it to go, I knew. It was … all right. For them to be in love with each other.

The sofa was warm where he had been sleeping, but behind my neck there was a coldness. A sad little coldness, all the sadder for knowing it was absurd. But it was there. If you love each other then what about me? And they are blood. Blood closer than me. It’s Janie’s blood in there with them. Not mine.

I pulled the little feeling round from behind me and placed it square on my lap. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said to it, not harshly, but it looked me square in the eyes and I knew it had a point, and that I would have to bear it in mind. Sitting there with his warmth under me, thinking about love, I wondered whether, if I had said yes, sex would have crowned us and saved us and thrown us to the top of the mountain whence we would have surveyed our glorious new future, clear-eyed and confident like Soviet youngsters saluting a five-year plan. Maybe. Maybe.

I could hear Lily instructing Harry in how to get her dressed and make her breakfast, and I felt very, very odd.

*

Harry went to work. As men do. Rise, kiss children, and go to work. God but it felt weird. A little version of normality suddenly and weirdly come to sit on my head. There hasn’t been a boyfriend in my life – my domestic life – for years. The last one, actually, was Harry. Then the years of travelling and running wild, then the years of just me and Lily.

Except Sa’id. But I’m not thinking about Sa’id.

And now here is Harry going to work.

As soon as he left, Lily and I looked each other and said, ‘well?’ At least I did. She didn’t. It was as if she knew everything, and didn’t need to talk to me about it. Didn’t need gossip, or discussion, or analysis, or reassurance.

‘Well, sweetheart?’ I asked.

‘What?’ she said.

Part of me yelled out, ‘Jesus fuck, five years of love and devotion and total non-verbal understanding gone, just like that, just because love has gone multilateral …’ A silent part, of course.

‘About the daddy?’ I said. The daddy we’ve been talking about so long, the daddy I promised you, the daddy you longed for and I wasn’t sure I could provide and now I have – what about him?

‘Why are you calling him the daddy? He’s just Daddy. Not the daddy.’

He’s just Daddy. She spoke as if she’s known him all her life.

‘Are you … is he OK? Are you pleased?’

‘Doesn’t matter if he’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s my daddy so I love him.’