A Family Matter

by Claire Lynch

To all those who try their best. That is all you can ever do.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. FROM ADRIENNE RICH, “WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE,” 1995

Five and a half hours after he found out he was dying, Heron drove to his favorite supermarket. In the absence of an alternative, and because it was a Thursday, he decided to stick to his routine.

Still, she will do it, keep them all moving forward. Keep them all on track.

Dawn would pray that nobody at school would recognize her new favorite top as their own castoff. Dawn still liked the bus ride across town, and she still had a taste for fashion that didn’t match her budget. She came to the jumble sales on her own now, searching for treasure under the piles of discarded slacks, the outgrown school uniforms.

I agree, actually. There ought to be more to life than washing machines and emails and remembering to put out the recycling on the right day. But life is also this. It is all of this.

It was in August that Dawn realized it wasn’t Hazel’s haircut, or the things she talked about, that she liked. It was the way she changed the air as she moved through it.

“If you have time to worry about other people’s problems, you have few enough of your own.”

He has not done enough, that is the trouble. He has not lived in all the ways available.

She married him because it was what they were supposed to do, that is all. People do that all the time; it wasn’t wrong, she’ll say, but it’s hardly perfect, either. Both of them, she had always thought, felt gratitude more than anything else on their wedding day, a shared sense that their relationship was a shelter. Five years ago, the dress and the silk flowers had meant a license to blend in. A mortgage, a baby, all the things you needed to fill the days and years. But Dawn was a different person then, hardly a real person at all.

Something she had always known, as deep and bright as bone.

But the real cheating hasn’t happened in bed; Dawn knows that. The worst of it has happened in the few moments of real life they have made together. Hazel, washing up their coffee cups as Dawn slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. Walking in the park, holding hands when they were sure nobody was looking, playing at a life they would never have.

He wants to say, you will be so many people in your lifetime that you’ll look back one day and not even recognize some of the people you have been.

“Don’t worry. In cases like this,” the solicitor says, “the court almost always awards custody to the father.” The solicitor talks, and Heron finds it is reassuring to sit in front of this man in his striped tie, his name in brass on the door. A man who knows exactly what he should do. His mother was right, they needed a professional. It was all too much, she had said, for Heron to manage on his own. Too complicated.

“You normally only see this sort of thing in London. Anyway, the case for an unfit mother writes itself.” “Unfit?” Heron repeats it. “Judges are pretty clear.” The solicitor lists the reasons on thick fingers. “Risk to the child, psychological harm, influence of, well”—a clearing of the throat as he rearranges his mouth to say—“perversion.”

“Does she even want the child now? This”—the solicitor pauses in search of the word, swallows back “affair” and finds “situation”—“has clearly been going on for months. It’s my guess your wife is far from interested in family life anymore.” Then a pause, to make the point. “If you don’t sue for full custody of your daughter, social services will take care of the decision for you.”

The new threat hanging over him, that they would take Maggie away if he didn’t do as he was told. Heron is not unburdened by this meeting, these people have taken something else from him besides their fee. They have made it true.

“Is that it, then?” Maggie asks when they have finished. “No hidden premium bonds or treasure maps lurking anywhere?” Heron walks the few steps across the kitchen to the small corkboard beside the back door. He lifts up a menu for a Chinese takeaway, and from behind it, unpins a letter on hospital-headed paper. Maggie reads it, once, twice. Dear Mr. Barnes… Next appointment… Oncology. Maggie reads the letter and understands that her father will die. This is it then; this is the next thing. Not a shock exactly, but a confirmation.

A piece of deeply held knowledge she has been storing without meaning to. U2 song lyrics, the date of the Battle of Hastings, her father’s mortality. All of it information held by her body, whether her brain wants to keep it or not. Maggie hands back the letter and watches Heron pin it on the board. “I see,” she says, because she does. Afterward, they sit down again. The same people they have always been. Sitting at the same table. New information leaving a vapor trail across their conversation.

Maggie and Heron work through the next box of papers in silence, scrapping far more than they save. They work and she sees not what it will be like to be without him, but what it will be like to wait. Maggie will live with this now, the anticipation of grief, for all the months and years it will take. The time before has already gone. The time when everything was simply fine.

This is a day she has been waiting for all her life. Her chance to repay him. The one who loved her. The one who stayed.

She cannot say, you cannot die, not now, because I will sometimes want to call you, to tell you a joke I read in the paper, or that I saw a famous person on the platform at London Bridge. You cannot die, because you will be missing from the photographs of all the days that haven’t happened yet—the children grown up, graduations, weddings, their babies. Maggie knows you cannot tell someone they are not permitted to die, no matter how reasonable the request.

There is space to think in an empty classroom, the right kind of air. Hazel really did think it might be fine this time, or saw, at least, a flash of possibility. She knew someone who knew someone who had made it work, or maybe that was just a rumor. She thought things had changed, just enough. In truth, she thought their plan to tell him was sort of beautiful, romantic even, until it wasn’t. Now it looked like something else, something reckless and naive. Hazel thinks; she tries to work out how to fix this. There were other options, surely. Bigger towns, where nobody would know them.

On afternoons like this, when she is alone, Hazel tries to fall out of love with Dawn. She makes a list of all her bad habits, the way she leaves the lid off the butter dish, the way she sticks the old bits of soap together rather than starting a new bar. She thinks of all Dawn’s imperfections, the strange bit on her left ear that’s like an elf’s, or a small rash she had once on her elbow, and she tries to be disgusted instead of charmed by them. Hazel tells herself lies. It’s the only thing she can think to do. She tells herself she isn’t hopelessly in love with Dawn.

She tells herself she wouldn’t do anything to have her. To save her from what is to come.

When the women in the group read aloud from their judgments, Dawn holds her breath as if warding off their bad luck. These judges who take it all so personally, standing as the last line of defense between innocent mothers and dangerous women who might seduce them in the supermarket. Nothing about being with Hazel feels like a bad influence to Dawn. It feels like electricity.

Maggie reads the first page in one glance, whole, like swallowing food, too hot and too fast. The lump of new knowledge sticks in her throat. Burns her from the inside. She reads it again, slowly. It’s a strange document, stern and official. A report about her, about all of them, but the family she reads about is not a family she recognizes. He has lied to her. She feels the weight of this settle, heavy and unfamiliar. He is still lying to her now.

She would like to have more concrete details to remember. She would, if she was really honest, like to know if they have anything in common. If there is something in the way she tucks her hair behind her ear when concentrating. If they both have the feeling of being at home when walking into a library. Her mother was, she thinks, a short woman. Can that be right? Surely she was too young to really remember anything?

Dawn looks at Heron and does not know him. It seems laughable that they have ended up here. Impossible, that they would face each other in court, humiliate each other in front of strangers like this.

It would be boring, all the procedure of it, the standing up and down, if it weren’t for the fear collecting at the back of her throat, making her feel full up, too liquid. As if she might laugh, as if she might vomit.

Dawn knows she will remember this man’s shoes for the rest of her life, his dainty little loafers, the type with the slight puckering around the front edge, a gold bar across the front. Whatever happens, she thinks, I will be haunted by this man and his delicate slip-on shoes.

“You mean to say you think Mrs. Barnes will harm her own daughter?” “Not physically, perhaps,” the social worker says. “But morally. This is a moral question.”

They’ve all been perfectly clear with him, the social worker, the lawyers. It is his duty, they’ve told him, to protect her, to save her from the strangeness of that life and what it might do to her. It’s up to him to keep her safe from playground bullies. Worse things. From the risk of it all. Heron nods his head, he stays frozen to the bench, and he says yes. “Yes, okay. Do what you need to do.”

They are afraid of her, of some power she has no idea how to wield. There is nothing Dawn can say or do or cry about to change anyone’s mind. It had seemed so obvious when she left the house that morning. She loved her daughter; that was the main thing. People would be reasonable. They would be fair. Now the barrister reads her private letters, and Dawn sits and thinks of all the ways she could have, should have, made these words disappear. Bleach. Fire. Scissors.

The oddness of being in love with people who become less and less known to you each year.

Maggie rings the doorbell and Heron understands what that means. She has moved toward him, but only one square. This is not a reconciliation, not yet. She is ready for him, full of words and fury and questions. When he opens the door she will roar, let it all fly at him. But the words that come out of him are, “Will you come in?” And the words that come out of her are, “Not today.” Which is close enough.

But these few weeks apart have changed him. This short exile from her life has washed the color from Heron’s face, weakened the way he stands in the doorway even. Maggie doesn’t know how to make him hear it, feel it, without him crumbling to dust on the doorstep. Instead, they stand. Maggie outside, Heron in. The narrow porch between them, like the set of a strange play.

She thinks of all the energy wasted, the years of hating her mother and mourning her. She wonders if she even has it in her now, the time and strength it will take to reimagine a person she is so used to being without. When Heron appears again at the front door, he hands her a cardboard box full of folders and brown envelopes. Full of her life before. The unopened birthday cards are the hardest.

Maggie has come this far; she has looked at the tiny cottage. It is charming, she thinks; that is the word. The flint walls, the front door painted red, a little too small even to convince her that a full-sized person lived inside. She could get back in her car and drive home, or she could knock.

Inside, the flint cottage is all neatness and faux driftwood signs. The theme is beach clichés, light blue paint, anchor motifs, rope.

Still, there is something lovely about it, everything carefully chosen and in its place. The vertical radiators and tidy gray sofas. Every corner of the little house the opposite of her father’s, which hadn’t been decorated for as long as Maggie could remember, or now she thought of it, since her mother left.

Maggie had always found it vaguely funny, the way her father let the house fade and fall out of fashion. She made fun of it, obviously, and then indulged him as if he were some sort of aesthete, rising above a change in wallpaper on moral grounds. Perhaps she had missed the point entirely. Did he want it that way, a daily reminder of a previous life? A sort of penance? Sadness and disinterest can often look alike, Maggie thinks.

“Shall we walk?” the woman who is her mother asks. “Down to the sea?” They agree some air is a good idea after the long drive.

It is stupidly late. They have talked for hours; they will talk again. They will piece it back together, try to name what this life has done to them. Maggie knows she is only just beginning to sense the scale of it, the waste.

Although they are both exhausted, neither wants the night to end, so they take it in turns to find ways to say, this is just the start of things. Dawn, who has learned that it is easier to plan than to remember, dares to say, “You could bring the children, when the weather warms up? Are they too big for building sandcastles? I’m not good with children’s ages.” “You’re never too big for sandcastles,” Maggie says, quite certain that Tom would say he absolutely is, and only half sure about where Olivia would stand on the matter.

“There’s a woman—two women, I mean—here in the village,” Dawn says. “They have a baby. I see them walking together, pushing the pram. Nobody says a word. People smile at them.” It had been the work of a lifetime, learning to live with what she had lost. Watching what other people had gained.

The fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, all that might gift you or cost you.

In the 1980s in the United Kingdom, around 90 percent of lesbian mothers involved in divorce cases like Dawn and Heron’s lost legal custody of their children. Exact numbers are almost impossible to trace since most, knowing the likely outcome, chose not to go to court.

One of the hardest aspects of writing this book was the thought that this rift could be imposed on the family when Maggie is so young. When the court case takes place, Maggie is just about to turn four, the age of my youngest daughter when I was writing the novel. While the general legal precedent in custody cases between heterosexual parents was that children under six should be placed with their mother, the same rules did not apply to mothers like Dawn.

“The sooner the change is made the better,” the judge declared, describing the four-year-old as “a resilient and adaptable child.”