If I Never Met You: A Novel

Dad

Hello princess. How’s my beautiful clever daughter? Well guess what, me & Nic tied the knot!!! Just because of tax reasons, visas, all that jazz. Did it out here in Beefa with a couple of witnesses but we’re going to have a proper tear-up in Manchester in a month or so. I’ll give you the details when I have them. Going to spend a few quid on it, need somewhere fancy, no fleapits. Get yourself a nice dress and send me the bill, you’re one of the bridesmaids, as it were. Love you loads, my darling. Austin xxx

Laurie blinked at the WhatsApp through the fug of receding sleep on Sunday morning: you could dissect this in a lab as a perfect study of her relationship with her father. All of him was in there, like a nucleus containing the DNA information.

1. Lavish praise, blandishments.
2. Surprise news, the sort that makes it clear his life is, in fact, nothing much to do with her.
3. Material spoiling, bribes.
4. More protestations of how important she is to him. A bridesmaid “as it were.” (I want you to feel you’re important without going to the trouble of actually treating you that way.)
5. Not, despite the performative paternalism, referring to himself as “Dad.” On the rare occasions she’d seen him when she was little, she’d loved the novelty of having someone to call dad, but he always used to correct her: “You’re making me sound old.” She was baffled: thirty was old, and he was her dad?

And not forgetting 6. The worst possible timing, as always.

Laurie

Hi, congratulations to you and Nic! Will come to the celebration, just let me know. I have less fun news, Dan and I have separated. I’m keeping the house on and he’s moving out. His decision, no third parties involved. Ah well. Maybe I’ll meet someone at your tear-up. ☺ xx

Two blue ticks, immediately. So he’d read it. No reply. More Classic Austin Watkinson.

And to round it all off—and this part she couldn’t blame her dad for, although it felt as if she should be able to—he’d now unwittingly made her phone call to her mum, to break the news about her and Dan, even more onerous. Her parents didn’t speak, so it was down to Laurie if Mum was going to be informed, and she should be, really. Laurie knew if she put it off, she’d end up avoiding it altogether; she wouldn’t keep secrets for her dad. Still, her mum wouldn’t thank her for it, and it’d feel like it was Laurie’s fault.

Laurie and Dan had spent all day Saturday slowly and painfully going through it all again, and now Dan was out on a run and Laurie was actually relieved not to have to face him for a few hours, endlessly wondering if she could have said or done something different to change this outcome.

Having told one person, it had started to become real. She could call her mum and practice doing it vocally—and now, in a Dan-less house, was better than later. She sat on the third step of the stairs, heaving the plastic rotary-dial red and blue phone onto her lap. When she bought it a year ago from a website that did “vintage things with a modern twist,” Dan had said, “More bourgeois knickknacks. Behold our thirty-something pile of affluent middle-class tat!”

Did he hate all this stuff? In this home they’d made? Could she not even look at a sodding retro hipster landline in the same way? His belongings were piled into tragic bin bags in the dining room. She’d heard him, before she got up, quietly calling a local restaurant to cancel their reservation. This afternoon, they had been meant to be eating Sunday lunch at a pretentious new place nearby full of squirrel-cage light bulbs and “Nordic inspired small plates.”

“Look at this,” Dan had said barely a week ago, in another space-time dimension, waving his phone with the website open: “This place isn’t a restaurant, it’s a dining space prioritizing a thoughtful eating menu with an emphasis on provenance and a curated repertoire of low intervention wines. Fucks saaake.”

“You wanted to try it!” Laurie had said, and Dan eye-rolled, shrugged. Back when Dan’s “rejection of things he’d nevertheless willingly chosen” was confined to where they had meals out.

In the cold light of morning, Laurie couldn’t believe he was keeping on with this charade, that he wasn’t going to be standing in some unloved, unfurnished two bed that smelled of plug-in air fresheners with a greasy estate agent and think: “What the hell am I doing?”

Not that love or happiness was stuff, but Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t. She felt so foolish: the whole time he’d been growing colder, quietly horrified, hemmed in and alienated by it. It was such a shallow thing, but Laurie felt so damn uncool for being satisfied by a life that Dan wasn’t.

She listened to the ringing on the other end, replaced the receiver, and tried again. Her mum would be in the garden and thought the first phone call was merely to alert you to the fact someone was trying to call you. She rarely answered until they’d made a second or even third attempt. It was a quirk that used to drive Laurie mad in her teenage years; they had flaming rows about Laurie always having to answer.

Her mum was “out of the normal,” as a plumber once said, surveying the kitsch art collage of Elvis on their pink bathroom wall in the 1990s.

Her mother had very strict, controlling, and conventional parents herself, and was determined to do things differently. Laurie admired this, while sometimes feeling she’d overcorrected to the other extreme.

If you’d wanted a mother who was chill with you being out until all hours and your friends accidentally dropping the F-word, Mrs. Peggy Watkinson of Cannock Road was the one. Plus, she looked and dressed like Supremes-era Diana Ross. Both Conventional and Unconventional Dads of the neighborhood were fans. And she wasn’t Mrs. Watkinson either, because she’d never been wed to Laurie’s dad. Laurie chose it as her surname because at the time, her mum was using her stage moniker, Peggy Sunshine. And Laurie was no way going to have a wacky surname on top of being the only black girl in her year.

When Laurie’s mum was addressed as Mrs. Watkinson by a teenager, she smiled and did her characteristic hand wave. “In a past life, maybe.” And mentioned there was wine open in the kitchen.

Your mum is the best, her friends said, as they trudged up the stairs, glasses in hand, promises extracted—by Laurie—not to tell their mums.

There were times when Laurie craved mums like everyone else had, who replaced lost PE kits, made chicken nuggets with beans and chips for tea instead of eggplant and pineapple curry, and didn’t have Egyptian birthing stools on display in reception rooms.

She tried ringing her mum again, but was unsuccessful. She’d give it a last try and then give up.

Whenever anything awful happened, no one ever considered the difficulty of the admin, Laurie thought. Someone had to broadcast it, manage the fallout. How come there were so many services in modern society and not this one? “Relationship Over? Let Us Round-Robin!”

“Working out how to tell everyone” was a part of her and Dan’s separation that was going to be almost as grueling a prospect as being left in the first place. It felt so unnecessarily cruel that you didn’t just have to go through the thing, you had to have a dozen conversations with people of varying closeness about the fact you were going through the thing.

Dan did this, Dan should deal with all of it. But he couldn’t, even if she wanted him to.

Some hip friends, a few years back, had posted up a witty archive photo on social media of themselves and made an official announcement to everyone they were divorcing.

Laurie considered it, lying in bed last night, but it only really worked as a “ripping the bandage off in one go” technique if you said it was fine, you were both OK, no hard feelings, no bombshell story to uncover here, move along. Essentially, hinted it was a joint decision. Those euphemisms that publicists deployed when famous people parted: “leading different lives,” “grown apart,” and Laurie’s favorite, “conflicting schedules.”

Dan once said that “mutual” only ever meant “one person has given up, and the other person concedes they can’t persuade them not to,” and now that felt astute. Turns out, he was plot foreshadowing their own end. Where did he go, that Dan?

The phone finally connected, third time lucky, haha.

“Hi, Mum . . . Yeah, I thought you’d be in the garden. OK to talk? I’ve got some bits of news . . . No, not that.” It really did put the tin hat on this that everyone would think she was about to announce the baby. She took a breath to gird her loins.

“Dan and I have split up. It’s his decision.”

She couldn’t bear to say “left me,” with all its sense of passive victimhood, but she had to make it clear she wasn’t going to have answers. She recounted Dan’s reasons for going.

“Oh dear, my darling. Sorry to hear this.” Her mum had kept the strong Caribbean inflection from the island of her own childhood. “I know you will be very hurt, but sometimes paths diverge. He obviously has to do this next part of his journey on his own. Which is very painful for you, but it must be what his heart is telling him.”

Laurie gritted her teeth. Maddening calm was one of her mother’s attributes that could also feel like a weapon.

She knew her mum, who lived outside society’s conventions in Upper Calder Valley with a fabulous kitchen garden and incense burners, wasn’t going to do the “what a bastard” response, and in many ways, Laurie liked that her mum was an independent thinker.

But right now she didn’t want this stuff about how nothing was good or bad, it was just a different choice. Hippieishness could feel heartless. She wanted her distress to be recognized.

Laurie remembered her mum saying of her cousin Ray, who was in a serious motorbike smash, “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and Laurie asking how someone held together with metal pins and subsequently living in an adapted bungalow was stronger. “Mentally stronger,” came the answer. Tenuous, at best. It was uncomfortably close to telling Ray to see the upside. Here was her version of that. Laurie was often struck by how the arc of history was long, but bent toward nothing really changing.

“Dan will be on his own on his ‘journey’ for a while, and then he’ll be with someone else. I think that’s how this works? He’s not going to become a nomadic shaman monk, Mum. He’s on a good salary at a provincial law firm.”

Unless you bought Dan’s blather about jacking it all in, which Laurie didn’t. Maybe her scathing cynicism was adding fuel to Dan’s theory they were no longer aligned, but still, file it under Believe It When I See It. She’d heard him kvetching about the state of Ryanair’s delays enough times, she couldn’t see him floating in tranquility down the Mekong Delta.

“Well. So are you.” That’s all right then. Jeez.

Peggy sort of tutted in a “there, there” way, and Laurie sucked air into her painful rib cage. She’d not eaten more than a few pieces of toast with peanut butter for days. She didn’t expect her mum to be upset on her own behalf, and she had feared her mum would insist this was an opportunity in disguise. Not least because Peggy thought Laurie had settled down too young, and her feelings toward Dan had always been polite rather than enthusiastic. Laurie got the feeling that Dan had presented to her as a stereotypical Nice Young Man, but her mum had found him a little dull. Peggy liked characters, eccentrics, and oddballs. Speaking of which . . . her dad’s news.

“Is there anything I can do?” her mum said, after listening to the practical arrangements of the dissolution of Dan and Laurie Inc.

“No. Thanks though,” Laurie said, refusing to bite at such a lackluster offer. “Oh, also.” Deep breath. “Dad’s got married to Nicola. In Ibiza, but they’re going to have a do back here in Manchester too.”

Her mum was silent for a second. “Nicola? Is that the one from before?”

“The Scouser, yeah.”

Laurie had only met Nicola a few times before but she liked her: a garrulous, handsome woman with her own jewelry business, who wore a lot of animal print and liked a party as much as her dad, which was saying something.

“He always said marriage was a rotten institution, a place people went to die!”

“Yeah. Well this is his journey, I guess. What his heart is telling him.”

Laurie was being sarcastic, but it evidently didn’t register. She could hear her mum fidgeting on the other end of the phone, and pictured the frown that usually accompanied mentions of her father.

“I shouldn’t be surprised at your father being a shit by now, and yet somehow I always am.”

“He says they did it for tax breaks.”

“Ever the romantic,” she sniffed.

Of course, had Laurie said he’d done it for love, her mum would’ve scorned that too.

“Please warn me when he’s having his reception because I do not want any chance of running into him and this woman. Wanda and I were going to come over for an exhibition at the Whitworth.”

“Mum, I don’t mean to sound mean-spirited . . .” Laurie knew she was about to start a fight, even while she intellectually, rationally wanted a fight with her mum like she wanted a hole in the head. Yet emotionally, it was somehow an inevitability. “I tell you my boyfriend of eighteen years dumped me and it was, Oh well, Dan must have his reasons to follow his lodestar and I’ve told you Dad’s got married, and he left you thirty-seven years ago, and you’re now pissed off and angry. Why can’t I be pissed off and angry at Dan?”

“You can! When did I say you couldn’t be?”

“The whole ‘he must be doing the next part on his own and listening to his heart’ stuff wasn’t exactly saying I had a right to be upset.”

“Of course you do, but he’s not cheating on you, he’s not lied to you. What do you want me to say, Laurie? Do you want me to criticize him?”

“No!” She didn’t. Infuriatingly, she still felt defensive of him. “It’d just be nice if . . .” She trailed off, as what came next was harsh.

“What?”

“. . . As if you sounded like you cared about my breakup anything like as much as you care about Dad’s rubbish.”

“That’s a dreadful thing to say. I care much more about you than I do about him!”

Hmmm, yeah, not what Laurie was saying, but how did Laurie think it would go, pointing out her mum’s hypocrisy in the sting of her dad’s news?

Her mother and father were opposite poles, Laurie realized: her dad said the right things and didn’t mean them, and her mum might feel them, but she never said so.

They finished the call with terse politeness so they could go away and boil resentfully on the things the other had said.

As Laurie replaced the receiver she thought: Well, that was ironic—wasn’t that the ultimate moment to be bonding over similar experiences? You wouldn’t get this on the bloody Gilmore Girls.

Her mum was still heavily marked by what her dad did almost four decades ago; Laurie felt the tremor his name caused. Was that going to be Laurie’s fate where Dan was concerned too?

At some point, you have to give up wishing for your parents to be who you wanted them to be and accept them as they are, Dan once said.

Easy for him to say, with his kind, dependable mum and dad who thought he was a prince among men and would drop anything and do anything for him.

As Laurie sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and nursing her bruised emotions, there was muttered cursing in the distance as someone tripped over a step, the scrape of a key in the lock, and Dan came in the door.

“Hi,” he said. He was pink from running, and wore the look of apprehensive guilt he always did around Laurie now.

“Hi. I told my mum.”

“Ah.” Dan was obviously at a loss over what to say. “I’ve not told mine yet.”

Laurie had guessed that from the lack of a call from Dan’s mum, Barbara. They got on very well and Barbara had always, in a benign way, treated Laurie as Dan’s PA and hotline to his psyche, as well as his calendar. Yeah, good luck with that from now on.

“I’ve found a flat,” he said. “Quite central. I can move in next week.” He gulped and rushed on. “I know this sounds really soon and that I’d had it lined up, but I honestly didn’t. I was on Rightmove yesterday afternoon and it just came up, and when I called the agent they said I could pop ’round this morning. It’s not great but it’ll do for now.” He trailed off, his cheeks flushed with the exercise and—hopefully—mortification at being so evidently eager to see the back of her.

“Oh. Good?” Laurie said. She didn’t know what note to strike in the teeth of total rejection. She’d always had this knack with Dan—she could joke him out of any temper, persuade him when no one else could. “He’s proper silly for you,” a friend of his once said.

Now she felt as if anything she said would be either pathetic or annoying; she could hear it become one or the other to him as soon as it left her mouth. All the usual doors, her ways in, had been bricked up.

“I’m going to keep paying the mortgage here for the time being. Give you a grace period so you can decide . . . what you want to do.”

“Thanks,” Laurie said flatly, because no way was she going to be more fulsome than that. Dan’s larger salary came with a ton of stress at times, but had its uses. She’d have to remortgage herself up to her eyeballs and eBay everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. Losing Dan and her home felt insurmountable.

“I’m going to get fish and chips for dinner tonight, want some?” Dan added, and Laurie shook her head. The rest of the bottle of red in the kitchen would be more effective on an empty stomach. She noticed Dan’s appetite was fine.

“When do we tell everyone at work?” she said. They’d mutually avoided this pressing question yesterday, but Laurie knew her office mate, Bharat, would sniff it out in days.

They’d be a week-long scandal, with the news cycle moving into a different phase day by day. “Have you heard?” on Monday; “Was he playing away?” on Tuesday; “Was she playing away?” on Wednesday; “I saw them arguing outside the Arndale mall last Christmas, the writing was on the wall” fib dropped in as a lump of red meat to keep it going on Thursday. “When is it OK to ask either one on a date?” nailed on by Friday, because Salter & Rowson was an absolute sin bin. There was a lot of adrenaline involved in their work at times, which was dampened by after-hours booze. Add a steady influx of people aged twenty to forty joining or interning, and you had a recipe for a lot of flirting and more.

It was a shame this had happened now, just when the Jamie-Eve gossip could have been a useful distraction. But there was no way a furtive shag, even a specifically verboten one, was going to trump the breakup of the firm’s most prominent couple. And Laurie wouldn’t have snitched on Jamie either. She wasn’t ruthless.

Dan leaned on the wall and sighed. “Shall we not? For the time being? I can’t face all the bullshit. I can’t see how they’d find out otherwise. It’s not like I’m going to put it on Facebook and you’re hardly ever on there.”

“Yeah. OK,” Laurie said. They both wanted to wait for a time it’d matter less, though right now Laurie couldn’t imagine when that might be.

“And my dad’s got married.”

“No way!” Dan’s eyes lit up. He officially disapproved of Laurie’s dad in order to stay on the right side of history—and of Laurie and her mum—but she’d always sensed Dan had a soft spot. “To, what was her name, Nicola?”

“Yeah. Some party happening here. I’m a bridesmaid.”

Barely true, but she wanted Dan to picture her in a dress, in a spotlight, in a glamorous context with scallywag dad, whom he sneakingly admired.

“Ah. Nice.” Dan looked briefly sad and ashamed as obviously, he’d not be there. “Never thought your dad would settle down.”

“People surprise you.” Laurie shrugged, and Dan looked awkward and then blank at this, muttering he needed a shower.

As Dan passed her on the stairs and his bathroom-puttering noises started, Laurie leaned her head against the bannisters, too spent to imagine moving for the moment. When they passed thirty, as far as their peer group were concerned, Dan and Laurie tying the knot was a done deal. If they weren’t thinking about it themselves, they weren’t allowed to forget it.

From acquaintances who’d drunkenly exhort, “You next! You next!” at one of the scores of weddings they attended a year, to the open pleas from Dan’s mum to give her an excuse to go to Cardiff for a day of outfit shopping (the best reason for lifetime commitment: a mint lace designer shift dress and pheasant feather fascinator), to friends who told them, once they’d finished bottles of wine over dinner, that Dan and Laurie would have the best wedding ever, come on, come ON, do it, you selfish sods.

Laurie always deflected with a joke about her not being keen what with being a lawyer, and seeing a lot of divorce paperwork, but eventually that dodge wore thin. Dan referred to Laurie as “the missus” and “the wife,” leading newer friends to think they were married.

It had always seemed a case of when, not if. Laurie had vaguely expected a ring box to appear, but it never did. Should she have been pushing the issue?

The where’s the wedding??!!! noise hit a peak around thirty-three. Having skirted around it, after news of another friend’s engagement, they discussed it directly over hangover-cure fried egg sandwiches of a Saturday morning.

“Do you not think it’s much more romantic to not be married?” Dan said. “If you’re together when there’s no practical ties, it’s really real.” He was indistinct through a mouthful of bread. “Realer than when you’ve locked yourself into a governmental contract. We of all people know that legal stuff means nothing in terms of how much you love each other.”

Laurie made a skeptical face.

“We have no ‘ties’ . . . except the joint mortgage, every stick of the furniture, and the car?”

“I’m saying, married people stay when it’s rough because they made this solemn promise in front of everyone they know, and they don’t want to feel stupid, and divorce is a big deal. A big, expensive, arduous deal. As you say, you end up having the wagon wheel coffee table arguments over stuff for the sake of it, like in When Harry Met Sally. There’s the social shame and failure factor. People like us stay together when it’s rough out of pure love. Our commitment doesn’t need no vicar, baby.”

With his scruffy hair, sweet expression, and expensive striped T-shirt, Dan looked the very advertiser’s image of the twenty-first-century Guy You Settle Down With. Laurie grinned back.

“So . . . what you’re saying is, there will be no weddings for you, Dan Price? Or, by extension, me? The Price-Watkinsons will never be. The Pratkinsons.”

He wiped his mouth with a piece of paper towel. “Ugh we’d never double barrel no matter what, right?”

Laurie mock wailed. “No huge dress for me!”

“I dunno. Never say never? But not a priority right now?”

Laurie thought on it. She sensed it was there for her if she demanded it. She was neither wedding wild nor wedding averse. They’d been together since they were eighteen; they’d never needed a rush in them. Plus, it’d be nice not to have to find fifteen grand down the back of the sofa, there was plenty needing doing in the house. She smiled, shrugged, nodded.

“Yeah, see how it goes.”

Emily always told Dan he was lucky to have such an easygoing, un-nagging girlfriend and Dan would roll his eyes and say: “You should see her in Ikea,” but at that moment Laurie felt Emily’s praise was justified and she thought, looking at his warm that’s my girl smile, so did Dan.

And it was only now, listening to the shower thundering upstairs, that Laurie realized that she’d missed the giant glaring warning sign in what Dan had said.

Yes, staying together out of love, not paperwork, was romantic. But if you flipped it around, he was also saying marrying made it too difficult to leave.

Three days later, Laurie got a packet of seedlings for colorful hollyhocks in a card with a Renoir painting, and her mum’s unusual sloping script inside read: “To new beginnings. Love, Mum.” Laurie cried: this meant her mum had fretted on their conversation, it was her way of making amends. Maybe her mum hadn’t trashed Dan, had been upbeat on purpose—to make it clear this wasn’t history repeating, that Dan wasn’t her father and Laurie wouldn’t go through what she did.

Laurie had no faith anymore. As a lifelong believer in The One, in monogamous fidelity to the person who your heart told you was right for you, she was suddenly an atheist. If Dan wasn’t to be trusted, who could be?

In the years ahead, she knew plenty of people would tell her to be open to commitment again, to true love: that fresh starts were possible and it would be different this time. She knew she would smile and nod, and not agree with a word of it.