must know that that was who he truly was,’ says Kate.
‘Maybe the man I saw was the real him,’ says Lauren bluntly, looking straight at Kate. ‘And the version you saw was the fake, because for a good few years after that, I only remember a controlling man who always got his own way.’
Kate can’t believe what she’s hearing; it’s so far removed from the man she knew.
‘He’d stop me from going out,’ Lauren goes on. ‘Dictate who I was allowed to be friends with, forced me to go to sixth form when I really didn’t want to . . .’
‘But . . .’ starts Kate, thinking it all sounds like a dad who cared, rather than one who didn’t.
Lauren’s lips thin as she empties the bottle into her glass. ‘He even put me in an institution for two weeks.’
Kate’s addled brain stops dead in its tracks. ‘He did what?’
‘Yep, he took it upon himself to admit me to residential care.’
‘What for?’
Lauren shifts in her chair. ‘He thought I had an eating disorder.’
Kate recalls a period when she was fourteen or fifteen and Lauren going away for a while. She thought she’d gone on holiday with friends – in fact, she’s sure that’s what their mother had told her. ‘And did you?’ she asks.
‘I had an unhealthy relationship with food for a bit, but I didn’t need to go into hospital – it could have been dealt with at home.’
Kate is beginning to see a pattern emerging of a scared, confused and unwell young woman, and a father who was doing his best to protect her. Though she can understand how their father’s duty of care could have been portrayed by Lauren as Machiavellian.
‘Did you ever wonder . . .?’ she starts, knowing she has to tread lightly if she’s to get her point across before Lauren shuts her down, ‘. . . if Mum might have been the driving force?’
Lauren pulls herself up, Kate notices, and looks at her, suddenly alert.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, for as many reasons as you didn’t always get along with Dad, I’ve never felt as close to Mum.’
‘Perhaps it was just naturally geared up that way,’ offers Lauren.
‘Perhaps,’ moots Kate. ‘But I’m wondering if she had more control than we thought – now I know what I know.’
Lauren leans in. ‘Go on,’ she presses.
Kate remembers back to the argument she witnessed when she was younger; the context of which is only becoming clear to her now. ‘We were in the New Forest . . .’
Lauren furrows her brow.
‘It must have been when it was all kicking off about the baby.’
Lauren nods and looks at the tattered tissue in her hands.
Kate leans her elbows on the table and holds her fingers at her temples, desperately trying to delve into the deepest corners of her mind to recall what happened next. The outline is there, she just needs to fill in the detail. ‘We were in the house and you stormed out.’
‘That’s when Justin and I had decided to keep it,’ says Lauren.
Hearing the boy’s name takes Kate back. ‘Mum and Dad rowed after you’d left,’ she says. ‘She accused him of not doing enough.’
‘Enough what?’ asks Lauren.
‘I don’t know,’ says Kate. ‘I thought she’d meant he’d not done enough to stop you from leaving. She said something like, “if you don’t put a stop to this, I will not be held accountable for my actions.”’
Lauren screws her face up. ‘She must have been telling him to stop treating me like a child, to stop trying to control me.’
She could have been, but now it doesn’t ring quite true to Kate. ‘I wonder if she was talking about you and Justin – that Dad hadn’t done enough to discourage you from seeing him, or . . .’ She trails off, not wanting to state what appears to be blatantly obvious.
Lauren fixes her with a hard stare. ‘Or . . .?’
‘Or maybe she thought he hadn’t done enough to stop you going ahead with the pregnancy.’
‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ says Lauren. ‘She told me that she was sorry but there was nothing she could do. She said that Dad had made his mind up and that was the end of it.’
Kate’s brain feels like it’s banging against the inside off her skull. ‘But after she’d gone to find you, I found Dad crying. He was in the study; you remember that room at the end of the corridor with the big open fire.’