Page 89 of We All Live Here
Bill is completely rigid. “I absolutely do need the details.”
Gene pulls a face. He sighs. “I think she said she was…just a bit…bored.”
“Bored?”
“Hey, I’m sorry. It was just that old…connection, you know? We couldn’t help ourselves. We go back a long way, like I said. These things are hard to resist.”
Bill is breathing hard. He sits very still, staring at the floor. He looks like someone who has been punched, hard, in the stomach and isworking out which of his internal organs is no longer operative. Then he swallows, and makes his way quietly and abruptly toward the loft hatch. As Gene and Lila protest, he climbs through the hatch and starts making his way down the metal steps.
“Bill!” Lila tries to go after him but he holds up a hand. “Bill, where are you going?”
“I need some space,” Bill says, his voice quiet and choked. She can just see the top of his head now that he has made it to the landing. “I’m going home.”
Lila watches as he walks carefully down the stairs, one hand on the banister. A few moments later she hears the front door close.
The house is silent. Lila’s head is spinning. She looks up at Gene. He holds his hands up. “Well, I didn’t know she was going to write a damn letter about it.”
“Of all the people in all the world you could have slept with you had to sleep with Mum? You had to wreck the one thing Bill had left of her?” Her voice is shaking. Suddenly Lila erupts. It is as if thirty-five years of pain and frustration and loss have burst through. She wants to throw the box of letters at him. She wants to push him out of the loft hatch. “You wreck everything! My God! You just crash through people’s lives with no thought for how it impacts on them!”
“Sweetie, I—”
“You could have left her alone! Hadn’t you caused us all enough damage already? She loved Bill! And you couldn’t bear it, could you? The one chance you got and you wrecked that too. You’re a monster!”
“Lila honey—”
“Get out!” she yells. “I should have known you’d destroy this too. It’s all you do, isn’t it? Come blundering in, seduce, get bored, and destroy everyone’s happiness. You’re like—you’re like some terrible disease. Just go. Go! I never want to see you again.” Lila scrambles down the stairs, and runs, sobbing, into herbathroom.
Chapter Twenty-nine
For the next few days, Lila cannot clear her mind of the image of Bill’s ashen face, the way he seemed suddenly hollowed out, as if the one foundational thing that had been holding him up had collapsed, taking him with it. She feels his grief and shock as if it is her own. And it is her own because she keeps circling to the image of her mother, blithely flying off secretly to have sex with the one man she had sworn she would never see again. Francesca, who had seemingly held the world’s wisdom in her cheerful gray-ringleted head, had made the worst decision Lila could possibly imagine and she feels as if her own moral compass has disappeared with Bill’s.
Gene left. She had heard some movement in the house, heavy feet on stairs, a murmuring to the dog, but she had been crying too hard to pay much attention. She had emerged after an hour to find her study space cleared, the bed folded back into a sofa, a pile of sheets and pillows neatly folded at its side. She had gazed at the space where her father had been and felt absolutely nothing, except perhaps a nagging regret thatshe had ever been stupid enough to let him in again. When she had spied the Post-it note withI’m sorryon it, she had screwed it up in her fist and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.
•••
Bill had declinedto pick up her calls, sending a short text after the fourth:Darling girl, I know you mean well but I really just need to be alone right now.
But the following day—after a night of fitful, intermittent sleep—she had driven round there. The curtains of the bungalow were drawn and it had taken Bill ten minutes to answer the door. When he opened it, Lila had been shocked at his appearance: he had looked worse than he had when Francesca had died, grayer and more frail. The bungalow had held a chill atmosphere of emptiness, as if his presence were not enough to make it feel like a home again.
“Please come home,” she had said, placing her hand on his as they drank tea. “He’s gone now.”
“I can’t, darling. I need to sit and digest this by myself for a bit. I’ll come and get my things when I’m ready.”
Instead Penelope had come the following day for his medications. She had been glassy-eyed with sadness, as if it were she whose memories had been destroyed. “He’s so sad,” she said simply, clutching the bag of pills from his medicine cabinet. “I feel…helpless.” She had clutched Lila’s wrist with her thin hand, gazing at her mutely before she left.
Two days later he had arrived with an empty suitcase, and removed some of his clothes and personal items. He had rung on the doorbell, as if he were a visitor, and was scrupulously polite. Lila had thought he felt she was also to blame, even as she assured him that Gene was gone, that Bill’s place was here, that they needed him. “Mum really loved you, you know,” she had told him, as she sat on the bed while he packed carefully,folding each shirt with military precision. “Whatever stupid decision she made, you must know that.”
Bill had let out a long sigh and sat on the bed beside her. “That’s what makes it all so incomprehensible. She knew he was ridiculous. She knew he had been repeatedly unfaithful when they were together. The number of times we talked about him, how unreliable he was, how angry he made her…It just makes no sense to me that she would be sucked in by him again.”
He had grown silent. Then, “I had a feeling something was off. I’ve been remembering it, once I checked the dates. There was a period when she was a little distant. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought if I left her alone it would just…die down. She said she was going to stay with Dorothy in Nottingham for a few days. I didn’t think for a minute…” He tails off.
“So you just left her alone.”
“I—I’m not very good with emotional situations. I thought it was something she just needed to get out of her system. I didn’t realize it was…him.” His voice strains as he refers to Gene. He cannot say his name.
“I’m so sorry, Bill. But we still love you. We would love you to come home.”
“I think my home is back there,” he says quietly. And the words go through her like a knife.
