Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon
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old suppers, stargazer lilies, home.
When she stepped into the sitting room, both her parents turned to look at her. Her mother was dressed, incongruously, in a ritzy black cocktail number with a swishy little fringe of bugle beads around the hem. Her usual five-inch heels had been kicked off; standing in her bare feet on the thick carpet, Roz looked very small indeed. The corn on her middle right toe shone in the lamplight.
‘Your father’s leaving us. He can’t wait to get away, apparently. He’s been sick of us for years, apparently.’
Bertrand took a step towards his wife, one hand raised. ‘Roz, that’s not fair, that’s not what I said—’
‘But luckily for you, he’s deigned to stick around till now. So as not to disrupt your home environment. Now, isn’t that nice of him, Tamsin? Aren’t you going to say thank you to your father?’
‘Roz, this is between you and me. I won’t have you using Tam like this—’
‘He says there’s no one else, but I almost wish there was. I almost wish there was.’ Roz fought down a knot of hysteria. ‘I think I could understand that better than this, this dismissal—’
‘Valerie Fischer.’ Tamsin kept her voice as clear and steady as she could. Even in her anger, she was aware of the need to enjoy this longed-for consummation. ‘It’s Valerie Fischer, isn’t it, Dad?’
Father and daughter held one another’s gaze like lovers for three, four, five seconds before they remembered Roz.
She was motionless, a visionary staring through them to a strange new past.
* * *
From then on, everything was different. Roz was unable even to choose between red and green pesto without consulting her daughter. There was no longer any question of Tamsin leaving home; Roz needed her too much. She attended the Royal College of Music as planned, but stayed in her old childhood bedroom at home in Holland Park. After years of friction, mother and daughter were now inseparable. Tamsin acted as spokesperson, supplying all the fury and indignation and disgust that Roz herself couldn’t seem to muster.
‘Tamsin’s my sellotape,’ Roz would tell her friends. ‘She’s the only thing holding me together.’ She gave her mirthless laugh.
Tamsin’s friends were wary of her, unnerved by the thought of her long silence. She was newly inscrutable. She even looked different: gone were the Nirvana T-shirts and the belly-button rings. At first, her new role – as her mother’s counsellor, comforter, guard dog – felt like dressing up. Then she became it, and it grew harder and harder to remember a time when she and Roz hadn’t been bound to each other in this way. The scar above her belly button faded, from aubergine through lavender to a little raised sickle-shape the colour of clotted cream.
It was around this time that Roz retired from singing, after twenty-four years as a soprano soloist. When she and Bertrand first met, Roz had been a rising star in the opera world, already well known for her unexpectedly powerful vibrato. Her size was her USP: it seemed extraordinary that such a small person could make such a big noise with apparently so little effort. It also helped that she was beautiful. ‘Aha. Roz Andersen, the siren with the siren,’ Bertrand had quipped when they were introduced. Two weeks before their wedding, The Sunday Times ran a picture of Roz on the cover of the colour supplement, playing Desdemona in a big-budget ROH production of Verdi’s Otello. Then Bertrand’s career really took off, and together they became moderately famous. They were the golden-haired golden couple of music, rarely absent from Tatler.
Cigarettes had always been an occasional pleasure for Roz, a guilty secret kept carefully hidden from the agency that insured her voice. After the break-up, though, she took up smoking in earnest. A pack a day, then two packs. Everyone was worried. Roz lost count of the times she was warned about ruining her voice. Her response was unvarying: ‘I know. I don’t care.’ She took grim solace in this deliberate self-sabotage, which seemed to her to correspond with the magnitude of Bertrand’s crime.
(In fact, Roz’s voice was going anyway. Killing it off with a nicotine addiction induced by the trauma of separation was marginally preferable to watching her reputation fall into a slow, age-related decline.)
It was Tamsin, with her own unlimited supply of anger, who finally persuaded her mother to convert grief into rage. After three months of crying and smoking, Roz put on her sequinned Louboutins and climbed up onto the roof of Bertrand’s precious Merc, with a steely Tamsin and two fearful, admiring neighbours (both women) looking on. The next day, she distributed his wine cellar amongst her friends.
During the divorce process the Daily Mail got in touch, hoping for photographs. Together, Roz and Tamsin sifted through two decades’ worth of holiday snaps to find the perfect pose: Bertrand on the beach, off-duty, paunch relaxed, clutching a can of Boddingtons. The amphitheatre of his gut. In a second photograph he and his moobs reclined on a deckchair. A third showed him sad-arsed under a beach shower, muffin-tops slopping over the waistband of his designer trunks. The Mail ran all three. The headline was ‘Conductor in the Odium’.
When Roz moved out, Tamsin moved with her. Bertrand offered to pay the rent on a separate flat, closer to the Royal College; but this, like all his attempts at rapprochement, was met by the cool, almost professional hatred that had come to define Tamsin’s relations with him.
There were no boyfriends during the Royal College years. On her one, brief visit to Roz’s therapist, in the immediate aftermath of the divorce, Tamsin had been diagnosed with ‘trust issues’. ‘That’s unoriginal,’ Tamsin had told the shrink, feeling herself equally unoriginal even as she said it: the privileged rich kid from a broken home, wisecracking back to her jaded psych. Since then, several of her friends had suggested the same thing – that her father’s behaviour made it hard for her to have any faith in men. Tamsin had another explanation: the Royal College boys simply weren’t to her taste. They were too precious, too aware of their own talent. She slept with a couple of them, but more out of a sense of obligation to a hedonistic student lifestyle than any real desire. Mostly, though, she was at home with Roz, or working at her piano.
Occasionally she still thought about the boy on the train. The faint aversion was gone. She remembered only that he had been good looking, and that there had been wine, and candlelight, and an exhilarating sense of adventure. Most of all she remembered herself, with the disconcerting feeling she was remembering someone else.
Then she graduated from the College, fell in love with a history teacher several years her senior, and forgot about Chris completely.
* * *
When Tamsin was nineteen, her shoulders lost their angles; her arms and legs filled out; her nose and jaw took on a solidity that was unmistakably Bertrand’s. Her hair darkened to his exact shade of dirty gold, and even her newly swollen breasts appeared to belong more to her father’s side of the family than her mother’s.
Alarmed by the weight gain, Tamsin went to see her GP. She certainly wasn’t fat, but she was a lot bigger than she had been six months ago. Was it the Pill? Dr Lott didn’t think so. She scrolled briskly back up through her notes, rows of Listerine-green data on a convex black screen giving their laconic account of Tamsin’s life. Menstruation had started late, hadn’t it? This was probably just the tail-end of a mildly delayed puberty. ‘It happens sometimes. Nothing to be worried about. You’re a healthier weight for your height now, actually. It’s really not a problem.’
But it was. The mirror gave her back her father’s face, leonine, handsome, hated.
The history teacher was called Callum Dempster. He and Tamsin met in the canteen of St Timothy’s, the East London comprehensive where Callum was deputy head of humanities. Newly graduated from the Royal College, Tamsin was playing keyboard in an Arts Council-funded workshop designed to introduce children from disadvantaged backgrounds to