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He would tell her thirteen days before their wedding, and she would feel his words lodge like a shard of bone between her ribs.
Fathers, in Piglet’s experience, seemed to feel at a permanent liberty to express their opinions as if they were facts. Both her father and Richard had no embarrassment in voicing their beliefs without self-consciousness, while her mother and Cecelia were expert at ignoring their husband’s venting and any offence it caused.
She did not know how to drink this coffee: how to fight and accept care, how to hate and how to love.
It would not be the first time she had felt the creep of belligerence as her friend’s life morphed into a shape different to her own.
There were some things that you could not tell your friends. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to strip her of the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared.
There were some things that you could not tell your family. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to return her to them.
She was proud, in a way, that she could still smile as the delicious life she had been savouring turned maggoty in her mouth.
When she asked herself what was worse—what he had done, or what it would be like for people to know what he had done—she was reassured by her inability to answer.
She was going to waste, she feared, she knew, the life she had made spoiling around her, turning to rot.
Beneath the meshed lace, her skin was puckered, hair follicles swollen by cold and by the realisation that she was married, that she had made a mistake. Because shouldn’t she be full now? Shouldn’t she be satisfied? Despite everything, she was hollow. She was hungry.
Piglet was running, speeding, from one life to another. She was in the margins of her decisions, inhabiting the space in between. It felt oddly lonely, she noticed—or spacious, maybe—when there was enough room to spread out. As she drove towards Margot’s, she felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes, and she did not know if it was relief or grief that made them fall.
now. She had failed to become the person she had craved to be.
How to say that she had built a life that relied on the mirrors of others? How to tell Margot that she had carefully crafted her personhood on a lie—and not Kit’s, even, but the fallacy of their bliss, the superficiality and shallowness of it all. She pressed her lips together. These were the things she knew: she had married Kit; she had told her father; her family were not the people she wanted them to be; she was not the daughter that her in-laws desired. Images from the day flashed through her mind: the croquembouche collapsing this morning; the dress; her father leaving; the church; the
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What did she want, she wondered afresh, and did it matter, as long as she could choose?
For a moment she was shocked, scared at the sight of her creation destroyed, desecrated on the lawn, before she remembered that she had chosen this ruin over the one she had been living. It would take her a while, she knew, for this choice to settle into her brain as fact, her decision like the death of a loved one: easy to forget, terrible to realize over again.
