by K. L. Slater
I drank my tea and stared at the wedding picture, then took a screenshot of it in case Bridget applied a higher security setting to her account. I’d already scrolled down her profile page, but there was nothing new on there.
She looked good in the photograph, even though it pained me to admit it. You could tell she was older than him, but you’d have said there was a lot less than twenty years between them.
Bridget had always been skilled at making the best of herself, but ten years ago I remembered she’d looked drawn. Crow’s feet around her eyes and tiny lines radiating out from the corners of her mouth. She’d come over to the house in the months after Tom had received his sentencing and gone to prison. It was an episode I’d rather forget. She had been desperate, seemed almost on the edge of madness, and I’d sent her away. Closed the front door in her face. Although I’d felt she deserved it, it hadn’t been my finest hour, but then I’d also been suffering. When I looked in the mirror, I knew that I’d aged because I’d been grieving the loss of my son, too.
Now, Bridget looked like she’d been through a time tunnel. She appeared much younger. There was a telltale frozen quality around her eyes, and her strangely puffed-up cheeks were probably due to a syringe full of filler. With freshly highlighted hair and understated make-up, her dress style was classy but contemporary.
This was a woman who’d done a lot of work on herself both mentally and physically. I’d felt about a hundred years old next to her, frumpy and definitely past my best.
Mansfield was a big town, and living in different areas as we did, there was never any danger we’d bump into each other. In all these years I hadn’t seen her out once, though that was probably on account of me barely going into the main shopping area. I shopped online or at local stores in Berry Hill.
The front door opened and I heard Audrey’s voice call out, ‘Only me!’
‘I’m in the kitchen,’ I called back. Robert often wore headphones as he worked, listening to music, but it was typical of him to pretend he hadn’t heard the door.
‘Here you are, love.’ Audrey walked over and handed me a bunch of glorious orange chrysanthemums, their stems wrapped in a floral paper bag. ‘From my garden, with love.’
‘They’re beautiful.’ I sniffed at the flowers. ‘Just what I need to cheer me up. Thank you, Audrey. Look at this.’ I pushed my phone screen towards her. ‘She’s crowing about it already.’
I thought Audrey would gasp in horror, but she didn’t seem fazed. She wrinkled her nose at the wedding photograph, then slipped off her jacket, draping it over a bar stool, and reached for my empty mug. ‘Right, first things first, let’s get you a fresh cup of tea and then you can tell me all about it.’
My heart sank as I placed the flowers down beside me. Even though my head was full of it all and I’d turned to Audrey for a sympathetic ear, it was a different thing altogether to repeat it word for word. It was traumatic.
Audrey bustled around the kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards.
‘So the gist of it is that Tom and Bridget have got married in prison and now he’s gone to live with her, yes?’
I gave a half-hearted laugh. ‘You make it sound so simple.’
She brought the drinks over on a tray with a plate of shortbread fingers I’d had in the cupboard since Christmas.
‘Are these still in date?’ I picked one up.
She rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve got a family crisis on your hands and you’re still trying to control every meaningless detail. For heaven’s sake, relax!’
‘Yes, Mother.’ I took a bite of the biscuit.
‘What’s Robert think about it all?’
I shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem to give a toss, he’s back in his office at usual.’
‘Maybe he’s got other stuff on his mind,’ Audrey remarked, looking at the biscuits but not taking one.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. You’re the one who said he’d been quiet lately!’ She sighed. ‘Look, I know this is the last news you wanted or expected from Tom, but trust me, the best thing you can do now is to accept it’s happened.’
So easy for Audrey to say. She didn’t even seem surprised about what Tom had done! Though we were the same age, she had got no children. She’d had a couple of long-term relationships over the years, but she’d never married. When her elderly mother died, she’d left Audrey a bit of money so she was, in anyone’s book, in a comfortable position.
‘He’s my son, Audrey. I can’t pretend this isn’t happening.’
‘That’s not what I said.’ She took a sip of her tea and leaned towards me. ‘You’ve got to realise that Tom is not the same boy who went into prison. He’s a man now and he’s entitled to make important life decisions.’ She tipped her head and regarded me. ‘Don’t for a moment think I’m agreeing with what he’s done. Frankly, I think it’s appalling. But maybe give him a little space. He’ll soon get fed up of life with a woman old enough to be his mother.’
I reached for my tea.
When Tom had been around five or six, we’d made edible gingerbread decorations for the Christmas tree. We had different-coloured icing, tiny silver balls, glacé cherries in red and green, and even striped ribbon to hang them on the tree. I remembered hovering over his red and green mess, the frayed ribbon, and as I reached out to help him, he’d turned to me and said, ‘No, I can do it, Mummy. I want to do it on my own.’ So I had let him make a mess, and somehow the gingerbread men had still looked cute and festive and everything was perfectly OK.
Now Audrey was suggesting I should do the same thing again. Leave Tom alone to get on with his life, make his own mistakes. But there was something bigger at stake here than broken ginger biscuits. There was a real danger Bridget was playing a much darker game and he wouldn’t realise it until it was too late.
Audrey studied my expression. ‘What is it?’
My hand flew up to my face and clamped over my mouth. I pressed hard and suppressed the wail that had risen suddenly in my throat. ‘It’s not the marriage, it’s not because I want to control him, it’s that I think she’s out to ruin him,’ I said in one long sentence before drawing breath.
Saying the words out loud didn’t bring relief, it only seemed to emphasise my fears, make them appear more real than ever.
‘Ruin him how, love?’ Audrey looked at me pityingly. ‘Remember they’re both adults. She can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to.’
‘She hated him, Audrey. For years she hated Tom, and me too. When they left the house earlier, she turned and looked at me from the door. She didn’t say a word, just smiled in a loaded sort of way, if you know what I mean. It was a smile filled with triumph, with accomplishment. All of which seemed invisible to my husband and my son.’
‘Hmm. I think it’s easy to read things into non-verbal signals. Sometimes things that aren’t really there,’ Audrey said gently. ‘But one thing is for sure. If you want to maintain a relationship with Tom, you’re going to have to accept that they’re together.’
I knew then that my worst fears were already realised. Bridget Wilson had pulled off a masterstroke, probably years in the making. She had successfully manipulated events to put herself in control of my son, and nobody realised it but me. Nobody suspected it but me.
Worse still, I could do precisely nothing about it if I wanted to keep the lines of communication open between us.
Fifteen
Audrey
Later, Audrey fed Soames, her ten-year-old Burmese, then settled down to watch an episode of Virgin River on Netflix. She turned on the gas log burner, which looked just like the real thing without any of the mess or the invasive toxic fumes she kept reading about, and settled back with her glass of white wine.
She looked around the small living room. It was nothing special, this house. Semi-detached, two bedrooms, with a small, narrow garden that she’d had fully decked for convenience three years ago. But it was paid for and it belonged to her and her alone.
On reflection, her
life hadn’t turned out quite how she’d expected, but then as far back as college when her friends – including Jill – would chatter on about getting married and having kids, Audrey never joined in. She’d never imagined herself as a sort of mother hen figure, organising her husband and kids and perhaps a family dog.
And now here she was, at almost fifty. Never married and forever hearing how women of her age were unable to find partners because the men all wanted younger women. Well good luck to them! What would she want a grunting, moaning old bloke in her life for, anyway?
She pointed the remote control at the television and watched the beautiful scenery roll by in the show’s opening credits. The series was supposed to be set in California but Audrey had read that they’d done all the filming in Vancouver.
Interesting that, when you believed one thing and then found out another. Quite different but sort of the same was the position she’d found herself in. She’d had to make some uncomfortable decisions but, if push came to shove, she’d stand by them.
The truth would not go down well with her old friend. Audrey had done her best to wake Jill up to reality but she was blind to anything other than what she wanted to believe.
Currently, Jill was as infuriated by the age difference between Tom and his new wife almost as much as she was worried about Bridget’s possibly sinister intentions. Audrey had heard whispers of gossip already around town. People who’d sent her a message or text, asking her if it was true that this middle-aged woman had married Jill’s son, a man who’d not yet turned thirty.
The glossy magazines Audrey had a weakness for were always full of photographs and shallow articles about young women and their much older partners. George Clooney was seventeen years older than his wife, Leonardo DiCaprio was twenty-three years older than his current beau, and nobody seemed to care a jot about it. The vicious comments and wave of negative responses had been saved for Brigitte Macron, twenty-four years older than her husband, the French president.
It annoyed Audrey that Jill subscribed to the same annoying double standards. Of course, she understood her friend’s worries and her resentment of the situation. Bridget and Jill were once good friends and the fact Tom had gone to prison for the manslaughter of Bridget’s son would traumatise anyone.
Still, as an older woman herself, Jill should have known better, been able to separate the age issue from the family issue. Jill had married Robert in her early twenties, and her beloved full-time career in the library service had instantly taken a back seat when she’d had Tom but she’d picked it up again later, taken part-time hours.
Books had been everything to Jill when she’d been younger, and now she barely mentioned them. When he’d been booted out of the architect’s firm and retrained as a student counsellor, Robert had packed Jill’s collection of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen away in boxes and relocated them ‘temporarily’ to the garage to give him space to work. He’d converted the room into his own office and it had been that way for years now.
‘It’s not right that everything you care about is constantly pushed back,’ Audrey had fumed when Jill told her about the books she’d been in the middle of restoring. She’d tried her best to rekindle a bit of inner fire in her old friend, but it had fallen on deaf ears. Like everything else did.
‘I don’t mind,’ Jill had said placidly. ‘I haven’t the heart for reading or repairing them any more.’
Audrey had been forced to accept that Jill had chosen a gentler path in life, conducive to what Robert’s idea of a good wife was. When Tom had gone to prison, Jill had rapidly faded to a shadow of her former self. She’d quit her job and had begun to rely more and more on their friendship, looking to Audrey for guidance and advice although never wanting to take heed of any of it when it came to Robert.
Jill had been too soft for years, allowing Robert – who Audrey had always felt disapproved of their friendship – and Tom to dictate her every move.
It was time for Audrey to even up the playing field a bit. She knew a lot more about the people in her friend’s life than Jill thought she did. More than Jill herself, in fact. The Billinghurst family weren’t quite the wonderful, innocent bunch Jill would lead her to believe, and they had trodden on other people they considered beneath them for long enough.
The last thing Audrey wanted to do was to hurt Jill needlessly. But that was an impossibility now because things had gone too far. One day soon she’d explain to Jill exactly what she’d done and hope she’d somehow understand.
Audrey turned up the volume and settled back into her cushions, cradling her wine while Soames purred on her lap.
She had the distinct feeling that life was about to get very interesting indeed.
Sixteen
1995
Jill had made a Mediterranean vegetable tortilla and a tomato salad for tea. Bridget and Jesse were coming over for their regular Wednesday-afternoon visit to the house.
Jill looked forward to their company. She liked to make a bit of an event of it, set the table properly. Pretty paper napkins, nice cutlery, new water glasses she’d bought in the House of Fraser sale last week. She always asked the cleaner to work an extra hour on Tuesdays, and the woman had done an excellent job. The heated ceramic tiles in the kitchen sparkled and looked clean enough to eat lunch off, but Jill thought she spied a smear and took a cloth to it before her friend arrived.
Bridget Wilson wasn’t like most of the other women around here, and she wasn’t like Jill herself, either. She didn’t appear to expect or want anything fancy and elaborate. But then Jill setting the table and cleaning the floor wasn’t really about Bridget. It was about trying to satisfy the almost constant niggle inside herself, wanting everything to be perfect. Which it invariably never was.
She suspected it came from having parents who fostered high expectations. Then she’d left home and married Robert, who had similar aspirations of striving for perfection in all things. But she’d lived enough life by now to know that almost nothing was perfect, no matter how hard you tried.
She stood at the kitchen island and watched Tom running around the garden excitedly in his little padded coat and mittens, waiting for Jesse to arrive. It was early March, but it had been a bleak winter and there had been snow on and off for what seemed like months.
After meeting at playgroup a year ago, the women had become firm friends. Bridget had had the opportunity to take up an evening cleaning job twice a week but had nobody to look after Jesse. Jill invited him to stay at their house. As Bridget didn’t have a car and didn’t finish work until eight, it made sense for Jesse to stop over on Wednesdays and Fridays.
‘She’s certainly fallen on her feet,’ Robert had grumbled. ‘You providing free overnight childcare.’
But Jill didn’t mind at all, and Tom loved it. She’d swapped his single bed for bunk beds painted to look like Thomas the Tank Engine, which both boys adored. They played so well together, hardly a cross word between the two of them.
Bridget repaid the favour and regularly took the boys to the park, and Tom would sometimes stay over at hers at the weekend. Jill worried about the area, about crime, but she’d learned to push that out of her mind. She trusted Bridget to look after Tom and that was what mattered.
In any case, with the extra income, Bridget was soon able to move and rent something nicer just a twenty-minute walk from Jill’s house. Unbeknown to Robert, Jill paid for the removals service as a housewarming present. She had a contact at the school and, although Bridget’s address didn’t fall into their catchment area, she put Bridget and her friend in touch and Jesse was able to get a place from the waiting list. Now, the two women saw even more of each other, meeting up for coffee, and Jill often popped over to Bridget’s for a chat.
Tom was changing from being a shy, clingy boy when other people were around to seeming completely comfortable when he was with Jesse. And more than that, Jill really liked Bridget. She liked her transparent manner, the way she never tried to impress anyone. She didn’t t
ry to convey an image different to her reality. She seemed to be saying, ‘This is me, and if you don’t like it then that’s your lookout.’ Surrounded by neighbours who seemed obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses, Jill appreciated that.
She didn’t feel judged by Bridget like she did with a lot of the other women in the area, acquaintances she met at playgroup and coffee mornings. There was an expectation to look a certain way, do the right things – like volunteer for mind-numbing community events and the school fete, for instance, or host people you didn’t overly know for dinner because you wanted to show off your new kitchen, as neighbours down the street had done only last week. Jill had never been as concerned with the latest fashions and status symbols as most of the women around here were, and it set her apart.
Bridget was the first one to admit she was poor and living a life she hated. Yet Jill found it endearing she would often speak, with astonishing conviction, of her plans and ambitions for the future for both herself and Jesse.
She was a free spirit all right, and Jesse had that in him too, even at this young age. Jill saw it in his sense of adventure. Where Tom held back in new situations, Jesse would charge in head-first without a thought. More often than not, after a few moments of caution, Tom would follow his lead and end up enjoying himself.
Jill wondered if Tom liked the fact that Jesse seemed a little wild. Last time they were here, she had run out alarmed when she spotted Jesse chasing a terrified Tom around the garden armed with a big stick – a tree branch, it turned out to be. But when she got out there, Tom was laughing so hard he was unable to catch his breath, and before Jill reached the end of the garden, they’d swapped and he was doing the chasing.
Jesse was a little boisterous at times, for sure. But Jill felt sure he’d grow out of that in time. They always did.
Seventeen