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The first time Ashley asks who her father is, she's five years old. It has at last dawned on her that other children have fathers, at least some of them do, and it's not that she feels the lack of one, but just that she's curious. After all, her mother has been at pains to make clear to her that families come in all shapes and sizes. Theirs is just very small.
Helen's answer is long prepared. "He died before you were born. I'm sure he would be very proud of you."
For now that's enough.
The second time she's thirteen, and she won't be put off that easily. "But what was he like?" she says, sitting crosslegged on her bed, pink fluffy coverlet at odds with her karate gear and the general disaster that is Ashley's room. Ashley is broad shouldered and math is a struggle for her, unlike Helen. She likes Language Arts better and she's killer at field hockey. "Was he a doctor like you?"
"He was a barrister," Helen says. "They call that a lawyer here. And he also taught at a boys' school part time. He wasn't a scientist by profession, though he certainly could have been if he'd wanted." All of that was true. John Druitt had read law. He had taught literature, once upon a time. "He liked words better than numbers."
Ashley nods gravely, as if it's what she wanted to find something of herself in him, some key to who she is. She's at the age where all her differences from her mother look vast. "Where did he go to school?"
"New College at Oxford," Helen says, and she can't help but smile a little. "He was a very good student. He liked Milton and Tennyson, and he loved the cavalier poets. Herrick and Lovelace and that lot." Ashley doesn't know the cavalier poets yet. They don't do that in school anymore by the eighth grade. Probably they don't do cavaliers at all. She dredges her memory for the words and finds them locked in a forgotten cabinet somewhere, a summer day sitting on the grass under shading trees. "Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, that from the nunnery of thy chaste breast and quiet mind to war and arms I fly."
Ashley is blinking, a confused sort of expression on her face. "You were a nun?"
"It's a metaphor," Helen says. "And it's a poem about a man leaving for war. 'True, a new mistress now I chase, the first foe in the field. And with a stronger faith embrace a sword, a horse, a shield.'"
Ashley's face clears. "Oh," she says. "He liked to fight."
"Yes, my dear. He did." She comes and sits by Ashley on the bed, puts her arm around her. "He was a keen sportsman and a great cricket player. Football too. British football, I mean. Soccer. He was very good." Those things are true. And for a moment she can believe that they are the only things that are. There was a young man named John Druitt who played football and cricket, studied law and read poetry to his fiancée under green trees, and he died a very long time ago.
The third time Ashley asks is the night before her high school graduation. There's been a dinner for the graduates and their families, a power point presentation with music with pictures of all the seniors back to childhood, growing up before their eyes. In Ashley's photos it's just Ashley and her mother. It always has been.
Helen is checking email in the office when Ashley comes in and sits on the edge of the desk. She's wearing a blue sundress that isn't at all her style, but it's what girls are supposed to wear for these things.
"Do you have a picture?" she asks, and Helen doesn't need to guess who she means.
"Not anymore," Helen says. There was one. More than one. They were in the drawer in her father's big desk in the front room in the house in London, the house that had been lost in the Blitz. She hadn't taken them out for years then, but she knew they were there. They were always there, like a blemish usually covered by clothes.
Ashley nods. Probably she thinks Helen threw them away, relics of a lover long forgotten. "What did he look like?"
"He was tall," Helen says. "And very handsome. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Keen features." And now she sounds like she's giving a police description. Which is not inappropriate. She's certainly given one before.
"I'm kind of short," Ashley says.
"You're built like my father. It's my mother who was tall."
She fiddles with the pens, twitching at them. "Why don't you talk about him?"
And there the truthful answer is best. "Because it hurts too much."
There, Ashley lets it lie.
The fourth time is two years later. It's Christmas, and Ashley and Henry are having a Star Wars marathon in the upstairs lounge, pizza crusts on greasy paper plates all over the rug. They're laughing and teasing each other like brother and sister, drinking Dr. Pepper straight out of a 2 liter bottle, arguing about movies and ammunition in the same breath.
"Dude, you are so full of it," Ashley says, and Henry grins.
"Yeah? Don't you think I could build a lightsaber?"
On the screen, Luke Skywalker is testing out his lightsaber for the first time, blued blade humming as he looks at it in wonder. He kills the field, turns to his mentor. "How did my father die?"
Ashley shakes her head at the screen. "Oh man, you are so screwed! Now watch him lie like a rug! Come on, Obi-Wan! Let's hear the BS!"
"…a young Jedi named Darth Vader…. He betrayed and murdered your father."
Henry looks up and sees Helen, startled into picking up his slice of pepperoni pizza off the upholstered couch arm. "Sorry," he says.
Ashley turns around, and Helen doesn't know what she sees in her expression. But Ashley is always direct. "How did my father die?"
"I'd rather not talk about it," Helen says, and walks out. At least she can give her that much truth.
Ashley doesn't follow.
The last time is in Rome.
"You made all that stuff up," Ashley says, and her eyeliner is smudged from God knows what. "All that stuff that I thought was all the truth I knew. You lied about it all. You said my dad was a lawyer who liked soccer, not a serial killer."
"I told you nothing that was untrue," Helen says.
"You just left out the really important parts!" Ashley is spitting mad, and she has the right to be. "The homicidal maniac parts!"
"I did," Helen says. "All of the important parts." She has left out what it is like to discover you are pregnant by a man who likes to carve up women's genitals for sport. She has left out what it is like to be that alone, in a world that will revile you for your promiscuity, that you slept with your fiancé, thinking he was a young barrister who loved words and cricket and you. She has left out how very nearly Ashley never existed at all. That's a story for many years from now, if at all, when Ashley has faced those hard choices herself.
But Ashley isn't asking that. She's watching her, clear eyed, and there is something in her face that is just like John. It's always been there. "He said you were daring and innocent and unsure of yourself. That it hurt you when people didn't like you and that you were mad because people didn't think you were as good as a man. That you loved flowers and boating." Ashley shakes her head. "We've never been on a boat in my whole life. Like, a little one on a river or something. I thought maybe he was lying and didn't know you very well, but why would he make up stuff that was so weird and that anybody would know wasn't you?"
Helen swallows. "Maybe it was, once." She sat in the stern of the little boat on the river under a parasol while he rowed, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, and they talked about Darwin. They ate watercress sandwiches on a blanket on the riverbank and argued about the effects of electricity on living tissue and the legend of the minotaur. She read aloud to him while he rowed back. "My vegetable love should grow, vaster than empires and more slow. A hundred years should go to praise, thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast, and thirty thousand to the rest. For lady, you deserve this state, nor would I love at lower rate, but at my back I always hear, time's winged chariot hurrying near."
Ashley looks away, out over Rome draped in the pale pink light of sunset. "I don't know what's true now."
"Maybe you should ask him," Helen says, and it's the only answer she's got. She doesn't know the answer herself. She never has.