After You

She stared at me. ‘I thought you’d help me.’

‘I will help you, Lily. But this isn’t the way to –’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘I – I have no idea what to –’

‘You don’t want to help. You don’t want to do anything. What have you actually told me about my dad? Nothing. How have you actually helped? You haven’t. Thanks.’

‘Hold on! That’s not fair – we’ve only just –’

But the girl flicked her cigarette butt out of the window and turned to walk past me out of the room.

‘What? Where are you going?’

‘Oh, what do you care?’ she said, and before I could say anything more, the front door had slammed and she was gone.

I sat very still on my sofa, trying to digest what had just happened for the best part of an hour, Lily’s voice ringing in my ears. Had I heard her correctly? I went over and over what she had told me, trying to recall it through the buzz in my ears.

My father was Will Traynor.

Lily’s mother had apparently told her Will had not wanted anything to do with her. But surely he would have mentioned something to me. We had no secrets from each other. Weren’t we the two people who had managed to talk about everything? For a moment I wobbled: had Will not been as honest with me as I’d believed? Had he actually possessed the ability simply to airbrush an entire daughter out of his conscience?

My thoughts were chasing each other in circles. I grabbed my laptop, sat cross-legged on the sofa and typed ‘Lily Hawton Miller’ into a search engine, and when that came up with no results, I tried again with various spellings, settling on ‘Lily Houghton-Miller’, which brought up a number of hockey-fixture results posted by a school called Upton Tilton in Shropshire. I called up some of the images, and as I zoomed in, there she was, an unsmiling girl in a row of smiling hockey players. Lily Houghton-Miller played a brave, if unsuccessful defence. It was dated two years ago. Boarding-school. She’d said she was meant to be at boarding-school. But it still didn’t mean she was any relation of Will or, indeed, that her mother had been telling the truth about her parentage.

I altered the search to just the words ‘Houghton-Miller’, which brought up a short diary item about Francis and Tanya Houghton-Miller attending a banking dinner at the Savoy, and a planning application from the previous year for a wine cellar under a house in St John’s Wood.

I sat back, thinking, then did a search on ‘Tanya Miller’ and ‘William Traynor’. It turned up nothing. I tried again, using ‘Will Traynor’, and suddenly I was on a Facebook thread for alumni of Durham University, on which several women, all of whose names seemed to end in ‘-ella’ – Estella, Fenella, Arabella – were discussing Will’s death.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard it on the news. Him of all people! RIP Will.

Nobody gets through life unscathed. You know Rory Appleton died in the Turks and Caicos, in a speed-boating accident?

Didn’t he do geography? Red hair?

No, PPE.

I’m sure I snogged Rory at the Freshers’ Ball. Enormous tongue.

I’m not being funny, Fenella, but that’s rather bad taste. The poor man is dead.

Wasn’t Will Traynor the one who went out with Tanya Miller for the whole of the third year?

I don’t see how it’s in poor taste to mention that I may have kissed someone just because they then went on to pass away.

I’m not saying you have to rewrite history. It’s just his wife might be reading this and she might not want to know that her beloved stuck his tongue in the face of some girl on Facebook.

I’m sure she knows his tongue was enormous. I mean, she married him.

Rory Appleton got married?

Tanya married some banker. Here’s a link. I always thought she and Will would get married when we were at uni. They were so gorgeous.

I clicked on the link, which showed a picture of a reed-thin blonde woman with an artfully tousled chignon smiling as she stood on the steps of a register office with an older, dark-haired man. A short distance away, at the edge of the picture, a young girl in a white tulle dress was scowling. She bore a definite resemblance to the Lily Houghton-Miller I had met. But the image was seven years old, and in truth it could have portrayed any grumpy young bridesmaid with long mid-brown hair.

I reread the thread, and closed my laptop. What should I do? If she really was Will’s daughter, should I call the school? I was pretty sure there were rules about strangers who tried to contact teenage girls.

And what if this really was some elaborate scam? Will had died a wealthy man. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that somebody could think up an intricate scheme by which to leach money from his family. When Dad’s mate Chalky died of a heart attack, seventeen people had turned up at the wake telling his wife he owed them betting money.

I would steer clear, I decided. There was too much potential for pain and disruption if I got this wrong.

But when I went to bed it was Lily’s voice I heard, echoing into the silent flat.

Will Traynor was my father.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Sorry. My alarm didn’t go off.’ I rushed past Richard and hung my coat on the peg, pulling my synthetic skirt down over my thighs.

‘Three-quarters of an hour late. This is not acceptable.’

It was eight thirty a.m. We were, I noted, the only two people in the bar.

Carly had left: she hadn’t even bothered telling Richard to his face. She simply sent a text message telling him she would drop the sodding uniform in at the end of the week, and that as she was owed two weeks’ sodding holiday pay she was taking her sodding notice in lieu. If she had bothered to read the employment handbook, he had fumed, she would have known that taking notice in lieu of holiday was completely unacceptable. It was there in Section Three, as clear as day, if she had cared to look. And the sodding language was simply unnecessary.

He was now going through the due processes to find a replacement. Which meant that until due processes were completed it was just me. And Richard.

‘I’m sorry. Something … came up at home.’

I had woken with a start at seven thirty, unable for several minutes to recall what country I was in or what my name was, and had lain on my bed, unable to move, while I mulled over the previous evening’s events.