“You better had,” Janine agreed.
As Tiffany rose from her chair, Natalie put a hand on her wrist and she sat back down.
“Is this really what you want, Janine?” Natalie asked.
Janine looked at her. “I don’t see how it is any business of yours,” she said.
“It’s not, except that I can’t imagine this is really how you want it to be with your little girl. Why are you punishing her for doing nothing more than thousands of other girls her age do every year, and not half so many deal with so well? You’ve brought her up to be this amazingly strong and resourceful girl; she must have learned her mothering skills from you and she’s a damn good mother. You look like an intelligent woman, and I know because Tiffany’s told me that you two were very close. Do you really want to destroy your relationship with your daughter and granddaughter over a nonexistent problem? Is it really worth it?”
Tiffany gasped and stared at her mother as Natalie braced herself for a barrage of angry abuse. But Janine didn’t move. A few seconds ticked by on the clock, the only sound to break the otherwise total silence.
“I miss her too,” Janine said, speaking about her daughter in the third person. “I wonder how she’s doing, how the little one is. I know that boy is taking good care of her, people tell me. But it’s her dad. He won’t have it.” She shook her head, hopelessly. “He’s stuck in his ways and stubborn. I said to him, maybe we could try to get to know the boy, get along with him, maybe meet his family. But like I said, he won’t have it. He’s an ignorant old fool.” She looked down at Jordan in her buggy for the first time, and was rewarded with a gap-toothed smile.
“She’s beautiful,” she said, acknowledging Tiffany at last. “You’re doing well. A first baby is hard to manage.”
“You could still see us,” Tiffany said, her tone so hopeful Natalie felt her eyes prick with tears. “Dad doesn’t have to come. You could come and see us…you wouldn’t have to tell him.”
Janine looked at her daughter and shook her head. “I can’t go behind his back,” she said, with finality. “You know I can’t. We’ve been married twenty-eight years. We trust each other. He’s not a bad man, just a stupid one.” Her smile was bitter was she looked down into her teacup. “You know, I think it was the shock that did it—when you told us you were pregnant. I just don’t think that he ever, we ever, expected it would be our little girl. Always so good, always worked hard at school, never out later than you were supposed to be. He still saw you as the little girl who used to sit on his lap and read with him not so long ago. He was shocked and hurt, Tiffany. He latched on to the first thing he could think of to try to break you and Anthony up and to keep you as his little girl, pregnant or not. But you didn’t choose him, you chose Anthony. And that hurt him.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Tiffany said. “But how could I choose? I love Dad, but I love Anthony too and he loves me, Mom, he really does.”
Janine nodded slowly. “Yes, it does look that way, that’s for sure,” she said thoughtfully. “I think if things had happened differently, maybe when you were a bit older, he would have been fine with Anthony. But he’s said what he’s said now. He’s made his stand and he hates to admit he’s in the wrong, you know that, Tiff. Once his mind is made up, it’s impossible to change it.”
“But I miss you, Mom—I need you,” Tiffany pleaded, her voice breaking.
Janine looked at Tiffany, her eyes brimming with tears, but she did not make a move to touch her.
“Dad’ll be back soon,” she repeated, her voice trembling. “You’d better go, love, hey?”
Tiffany scraped her chair back and hurried out of the house as fast as she could with Jordan in the buggy, as Natalie strapped Freddie into his. Janine sat perfectly still, her elbows resting on the kitchen table as she held on to the teacup she had yet to drink from.
“He’s the most precious thing in my life,” Natalie said to her, nodding at her son. “I’d never let anything stand in the way of being his mom. I can see how much you love her, Janine, don’t lose her forever.”
When she got outside, she found Tiffany sitting on the front wall furiously wiping away her tears with the sleeves of her sweater.
“I told you it was too late,” she said, when Natalie stopped beside her.
Natalie shook her head. “I don’t think it is, I think you really got through to your mom there, and anyway, whatever happens you tried, and that’s important. It really is. I’m proud of you.”
“Will you stop being proud of me,” Tiffany said with a loud sniff as she stood up and defiantly shook her hair off her shoulders. “It’s getting to be embarrassing.”
“Come on.” Natalie smiled. “How about you come back to my place, I’ll cook us lunch, we’ll eat a load of cake and watch my Dirty Dancing DVD. It never fails to cheer me up.”
“What’s Dirty Dancing?” Tiff asked.
“For both your sake and mine,” Natalie said, slinging an arm around Tiffany’s shoulder, “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
The children were filthy, so when they got back from the park Meg and Robert gave them one big midday bath, a fun-filled hour that saw the bathroom covered in mud and Meg and Robert wet through. Once Alex, Hazel, and James were dried and dressed and packed off to watch a video before lunch, Meg found herself alone again with her husband.
“Just being with you and the kids has been great,” Robert told her, drawing her body against his in an embrace so tight that she could hear his heart beating. He kissed the top of her head. “I feel like I’ve been away for a long time and now I’ve finally come home.”
Meg looked up at him and perhaps the searching expression in her eyes surprised him because he dropped his arms from around her and took half a step back.
“Have you?” she asked him intently. “Have you really come home?”
“Of course I have.” Robert smiled. “Back where I belong.”
Sixteen
Natalie found a Post-it note stuck to the telephone in the hallway when she and Freddie got back with Tiffany and Jordan.
Jack called at 12, it read, in her mother’s characteristically undisciplined scrawl. Natalie looked at it thoughtfully. It was highly unexpected. If she had expected him to call her at all, she had not imagined it would be today. And apart from anything else it meant that he did still have her phone number. After more than a year he still had the phone number he had never attempted to call after they had first met.
What did that mean? Natalie wondered. Did it mean anything at all? After all, she kept numbers on her cell phone forever, names of people she could barely remember anymore and hadn’t spoken to in months. But even if the fact that he had held on to her number was of no significance, he had still called her back unexpectedly quickly.
That had to mean something, but Natalie had no idea what. She looked at the entirely inadequate Post-it note.
“Typical,” she said out loud.
“What is?” Tiffany asked her, unwinding the long pink scarf from around her neck.
“Typical of my mother to not acquire details,” Natalie said, waving the Day-Glo orange paper at Tiffany. “For example—am I supposed to call him back or is he calling me back? And what tone of voice did he have when he called? Short? Disappointed? Confused? Now I’ll never know. Like I said—typical.”
“Really?” Tiffany said wearily as she hefted Jordan out of her buggy. “That’s a very atypical thing to typically get wrong. I don’t know anyone who writes on a phone message how the person sounded—and anyway, who is this Jack guy?”
“Oh, no one,” Natalie said, tucking the Post-it note into her pocket and wondering if her mother was in the house. It was quiet, there were no telltale signs of her paraphernalia scattered around the hallway; the stupidly high-heeled tan boots were gone, her white coat with the imitation leopard-skin collar was not hanging on the end of the banister, and her gold fake Gucci handbag had disappeared from beside the phone. It looked like she’
d gone out.
It occurred to Natalie that she probably should have asked Sandy what she was doing today, maybe even have had lunch with her. After all, so far she had spent the minimum amount of time with her mother. But if she’d gone out it showed that she wasn’t exactly sitting around pining away, waiting for her only daughter and grandchild to return. Typical, Natalie thought sullenly to herself, aware of yet unable to repress the irrational thought.
“If this guy is no one, then why do you care whether or not he’s confused?” Tiffany asked her reasonably.
Natalie looked up at Tiffany. “Because I am a naturally caring, empathetic person, of course,” she said, loading Freddie onto one hip and picking up her shopping bags with her free hand.
“You do that a lot,” Tiffany observed.
Natalie swung round and looked at her. “Do what?” she asked.
“Say something that is obviously completely crazy but with such authority that people don’t tend to question it. I’ve noticed, that’s all,” Tiffany said with a shrug. “It’s quite cool.”
Natalie examined Tiffany’s face and wondered just what else the young woman had guessed about her.
“Yes, well,” she said. “Come downstairs and help me peel potatoes. How’s that for authority?”
Once in the kitchen, Tiffany installed Jordan and Freddie on the rug by the window where they ignored each other happily, Jordan lost in her mission to chew through her rubber teething ring and Freddie striving to move just one single millimeter closer to Blue Dog, who was tantalizingly out of his reach.
“Actually, now I come to think of it, you are very mysterious,” Tiffany said, after a few minutes of companionable peeling.
Natalie blinked. “Who, me?” she said. “Mysterious? I am not.”
“You are,” Tiffany said, arching a finely plucked eyebrow. “I think I know why, too.”
Natalie looked up sharply at the teen.
“What? What is why? What?” She had had more coherent moments.
“You can tell me, you know, if you want to.” Tiffany brandished the peeler at Natalie as she spoke. “You’ve been really kind to me and I am good at listening if you want to talk. I wouldn’t judge you.”
Natalie put down the potatoes she was midway through peeling and wiped her damp starchy hands on a tea towel.
“What do you think I have to tell you?” she asked Tiffany cautiously.
Tiffany’s smile was full of sympathy. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Natalie. If things aren’t as good between you and your husband as you are always saying they are and if you’re splitting up, is it because of that guy Jack who left a message? Have you been having an affair and now he wants you to leave your Gary and marry him, and is that why you want to know whether or not he’s confused?”
Natalie spluttered all over the pre-prepared baby sweet corn.
“I hope you’re not planning to take an exam in revealing denouements,” she said, scandalized. “That is most certainly not what is going on.”
“I reckon it is,” Tiff went on confidently, “otherwise how do you explain that you have no photos of your so-called husband anywhere and that you don’t wear a wedding ring?”
Natalie stared in horror at Tiffany. “Next you’ll be telling me it was Professor Plum in the library!” She snorted in what she hoped was a suitably derisory fashion. Tiffany had just picked a few very large holes in her story, which so far nobody else, including herself, had noticed.
“Look, Tiff, you’ve got it all wrong,” Natalie assured her.
“What, then?” Tiffany asked her steadily. “What’s the mystery?”
Natalie looked at Freddie inching his way along the mat on his tummy. She thought about her son and Jack, and she thought about what was about to hit a very large high-speed fan at any moment anyway, and that soon all of her new friends would inevitably know the shocking truth about her. Actually, it wasn’t the truth that was shocking; the truth would have been quite mundane. It was the unadorned silly web of lies that she had got herself tangled up in that was shocking; the kind of complicated nonsense that normal people would probably put down to borderline personality disorder. Sometimes Natalie wondered if she was a bit mad, chasing her tail over a fib that now was only to save the dignity she had never had too much of in the first place. The sane thing would be to simply tell Tiffany the truth right now.
And so she said, “Don’t be such a plank, honestly. The photos of my Gary are in my bedroom, my wedding ring is at the jewelers being buffed, and Jack is just a friend I had a bit of a falling-out with, that’s all. Now shut up, Miss Marple, and peel.”
Some habits, it seemed, were hard to break.
“Natalie,” Tiffany persisted, perhaps sensing Natalie’s split-second wrestle with the truth. “The way you act, I sometimes wonder if you’ve got a husband at all or if you made it all up!”
Natalie looked up sharply from the chopping board.
“But how did you…?” She stopped herself when she realized from the expression on Tiffany’s face that she hadn’t known, she had only been teasing.
“What, you mean…?” Tiffany spluttered. “You mean you haven’t got a husband. You mean you actually did make one up?”
“No!” Natalie protested. Tiffany raised a highly skeptical eyebrow. “Well, yes, okay then, except when you put it like that all blunt and matter-of-fact, it makes me sound mad and totally un-hinged and I’m not.” She paused, struggling to rationalize the irrational. “I didn’t mean it to get so out of hand. It sort of slipped out when Gary was banging on at me to get the quotes checked by my husband and it grew from there. I know I was stupid, but I didn’t know any of the group that well then and I wanted to fit in. Besides, I wasn’t exactly ready to tell you the truth about me and Freddie, I wasn’t sure if any of you were ready to hear it without running a mile.”
Tiffany seemed frozen to the spot by her words.
“Well, say something!” Natalie begged her. “Shout at me, tell me what an idiot I am. Stomp off and tell the others if you like, but please don’t remain rooted to my kitchen floor until the end of time looking so horrified!”
Tiffany thought for a moment and slowly shook her head.
“You muppet,” she said.
Natalie shrugged—she couldn’t deny it.
“I know,” she said. “I know I am. Look, I’m planning to sort it out, I really am.” She spread out her hands in a pleading gesture. “Will you just keep it to yourself until I can tell the others myself, please? I will as soon as I get the chance.”
“’Course I will,” Tiffany said, pouting a little. “Just because I think you’re nuts doesn’t mean that I’m a snitch. And anyway you’re my friend, weirdly even my best friend right now—so of course I won’t tell.”
Natalie smiled with relief.
The phone must have started ringing again just as Sandy was coming in through the door because she picked it up before Natalie could get to the extension in the kitchen and brought it downstairs with her.
“Jack, again,” she said, leaning toward Natalie so that she could take the handset from where it was wedged between her left ear and shoulder. “He seems keen!”
Natalie took the phone, noticing that her mother was laden down with shopping bags from Argos to Zara; she must have been into the West End.
“Hello, dear, I’m Nana Sandy—oh, what a lovely little girl,” Sandy said to Tiffany, who was sitting on the rug playing with the babies after lunch. “I must show you what I’ve bought…”
“Jack,” Natalie said, as she left the kitchen, pulling the door to behind her. She sat on the stairs up to the hallway. “I didn’t expect you to call…so soon, I mean.”
“Well,” Jack said. “You left in such a hurry. I just wanted to see if everything was okay. Your house hadn’t burned down or anything?”
“Oh no,” Natalie said with a half-baked chuckle. “No…no.”
It seemed that despite Jack’s speed to call her, the awkwardness they had mana
ged to shrug off last night had returned with a vengeance.
“Natalie, last night was really…nice…” Natalie thought she could hear a “but” waiting to be tagged onto the end of the sentence. “Look, can I see you again—no real reason, no agenda,” Jack said. “Just because…we never got a chance to finish our conversation, did we?”
“No, we didn’t and we really do have to, Jack,” Natalie agreed, determined to put an end to this situation.
“Can you come over tonight?” Jack asked. “To the flat where I’m staying?”
Natalie paused, but he couldn’t have known it was because she wondering if she could get away with asking her mother to babysit again when she hadn’t even asked her to have lunch with her.
“Or if you want I’ll come over to you, I still have your address.”
“No, no,” Natalie said hastily. “I’ll come to you. Eight?”
“I look forward to seeing you then,” Jack said.
“Wouldn’t bet on it,” Natalie said as she hung up.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Natalie asked Sandy as she sat expressing milk at the kitchen table. It was an odd sort of progress, when it came to the mother-daughter relationship, but Natalie had never imagined that she’d be able to sit, milk-heavy breast in hand, squirting it into a contraption that most resembled a medieval torture device while her mom cooked herself pasta. “I know it’s a day and two nights in a row, and I know I haven’t exactly seen you very much since you got here, but this is important.”
“This Jack fellow,” Sandy said, testing her tomato sauce.
“Yes,” Natalie said, screwing the top on one bottle of milk and transferring it to the fridge. She then began on the other breast. The last thing she wanted was for any breast milk leakage to occur before she had told Jack about Freddie. “He’s an Italian buyer; we’re hoping to distribute Mystery Is Power through him on the Continent.”
“He didn’t sound Italian,” Sandy observed.
“He speaks very good English,” Natalie told her, slipping off her nursing bra under the sleeves of her top and exchanging it with some difficulty for an underwired black number that was now slightly too small for her.
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