“Is that what you think?” said Ed in a small voice. “What you really think?”
Jenny shrugged, continuing with the food preparations. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she replied over her shoulder. She wanted this conversation to stop. And stop now.
Jenny jumped as Ed shoved his chair back noisily and bent to pick up his daughter who was by now sobbing. All the time he kept his eyes on his wife, watching her half-heartedly reach for a carrot and the vegetable peeler and begin scraping it directly onto the counter-top. He jigged Bee up and down, pushing her head gently into his shoulder where her wails became muffled, but no less intense.
“I can’t believe you,” he said softly.
Jenny continued to work the vegetable peeler furiously.
“I am so fucking jealous of you, Jen,” he hissed. “You have talent dripping out of your pores – you always have done. But you’re either too lazy or too scared to do anything with it. Since we met – we should never have met in fact. You should have been at bloody Cambridge but you wasted your place. A place I would have killed for!”
“I couldn’t go to Cambridge,” she snapped in response. “My dad –”
“Ballsto your dad!” shouted Ed ferociously.
Bee jumped and resumed the crying which had almost stopped. Ed rolled his eyes at what he had just done, and shushed her again.
Jenny stopped with the vegetable peeler suddenly, her shoulders heaving as she took a deep breath and stared ahead of herself at the cream butcher-shop-style tiles on the wall.
Ed knew what her face would be like, her chin jutting outward, her eyes like steel. It didn’t stop him however. “Your dad is a grown man and I think you going to Cambridge would have done him more good than every bloody Sunday dinner put together that you’ve cooked for him in your life. It might have made him appreciate you for one thing, and made him stand on his own two feet for another.”
Jenny remained silent.
“And don’t you think it would have made him proud to see you in a cap and gown, graduating? From Cambridge?”
Jenny tried to bite back the tears but couldn’t. “No,” she whispered. “He needed me here, with him. Not flouncing around a fancy college just for the sake of it. My degree from Darvill’s is as good as anything I could have had from Cambridge.”
Ed sighed again, exasperated. “Jenny, I’m not even going to continue to argue about Cambridge because you know that the whole Darvill’s experience wasn’t a patch on what you could have had – that they don’t even belong in the same sentence. And as for your degree? Art History? How does that qualify you to make sure that there’s enough bloody copies of Goldeneye on the shelves on Beech Road, and that the returns policy in the High Street branch is being adhered to?”
Jenny turned sharply. “Please, Ed, I’m good at my job – do we have to do this again?”
Ed stroked the back of Bee’s head and lowered his voice as she nestled into his shoulder, sleep imminent. “Yes, we do, Jen. What about your wedding dress? It was beautiful – that woman walked up to us on the street outside the registry office and told you that she wanted one just like it. Why didn’t you tell her you could make one for her, just like you’d made that one?”
“It was my bloody wedding day, Ed,” retorted Jenny. “I was hardly going to offer my sewing services while my wedding photos were being taken, now was I?”
Ed shrugged as much as he could with the dozing child in his arms. “It was hardly Westminster Abbey, Jen, was it?” he said.
Her face grew red again but he continued.
“I’ve seen those little sketches you do,” he blurted.
The redness in Jenny’s face rushed to her cheeks. She’d thought she kept her notebooks secret.
“I don’t know much about dresses but they’re not shoddy from what I can make out. Why don’t you ever follow up on them?”
Jenny puffed, her argument revived by being able to cast the notion aside. “They’re just doodles – just something to pass the time.”
“Right. Just doodles,” he agreed sarcastically. “You can sew though – ever think of trying any of them out?”
“I’m too bloody busy with Bee and my job and this house to even think about stuff like that, Ed,” she replied. She rolled her eyes to heaven.
“Precisely – this house! Look at what you’ve done here. What about interior design? You could do a course –”
“Oh Ed, just shut up. I’ve got a headache and my dad’s here in an hour and nothing’s ready,” she whined, her hand again clapped to her forehead. “Just leave me be. Stop bloody bullying me to be what you want when I’m perfectly happy with what I am.”
Ed stared at her. Slowly, he shook his head, sighed, and turned on his heel and left the room. He couldn’t talk to her any more. Just couldn’t do this again.
And instead of calling after him, Jenny stayed with her eyes clasped shut, wishing that the conversation had never happened. Wishing that he would leave her alone. Since they met, they’d been having this altercation in various different ways. Him nagging at her to design clothes, to study interior design. Her batting him away at every opportunity.
With a sigh, Jenny Mycroft wiped away the tear that leaked from her eye. The tear that signified how unhappy she was that they were arguing when everything was so perfect for them. Except it wasn’t, was it? Jenny sniffed, and turned back to what she was doing for a Sunday lunch she no longer cared about. And she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand again because she was, deep down, so very unhappy because Ed was absolutely right.
Chapter 13
1999
Jenny
I never let on to Ed, of course. Too stubborn to let him know he was right. But it was all in my head. I had it all in theory all right – in spades. My imagination would leap ahead, taking an Olympic-style long jump over planning, hard work and straight to success. Incredible success. Something like being Princess Diana’s favourite designer, or the woman behind an Oscar dress that the whole world was talking about.
1996. Bee was barely a year old and I knew that I should take Ed’s advice. To just bloody well listen to him – but I didn’t, did I?
I bought a sewing machine. Bought a sketchbook too. And started to draw even more than I had before. Proper designs. Dresses. Mainly dresses. Beautiful, floating garments in colours like teal and sapphire, corals and baby pinks, buttery creams and asparagus greens. In silks and cottons – fitted at the waist, skimming the hips, fabric cut to flare deliciously when the wearer would turn or twirl. There wasn’t much call for them back then, of course. Everyone clumped around in combats and parkas and cropped tops, piercing their bellybuttons, trying to look like All Saints.
I didn’t do a single thing with them, however. Instead, I made it all about Bee. I immersed myself in her. Her every movement from the time she woke, through each feed, each nap, each game. I cooked for her, I washed for her, I made her my universe. And now, watching her as I am, as usual, from the rocking chair in her room, I am so glad that I didn’t waste a second I could have had with her, even though all of that precious time was spent as a buffer against actually facing up to doing something with my life. I don’t regret a second of it now, that her life was mine, her every breath one that I shared.
From downstairs, I hear Ed moving about, opening drawers, rustling paper. In an instant, I am there, in the living room. With Ed who has so far managed to hold it together tonight. He’s been watching TV – some David Attenborough thing.
I watch him for a moment. He’s sitting on his armchair, his habitual seat in the dark room. I stand behind him, wondering if he can feel me in any way – if he even has the slightest inkling that he is not alone. If he does, he doesn’t let on.
He’s sketching. As he often has, trying to come up with new ideas. I glance over his shoulder to see what he’s been up to. It’s a new character. A little dinosaur, wearing dungarees and with red hair. Underneath it, he’s scribbled the word ‘Jen-o-saurus’.
&nbs
p; It’s for me.
The pang of longing to be able to touch him hits me again. I watch as he flops the sketchpad onto the table and his pencil with it, which rolls on landing, making a quiet ‘tick, tick, tick’ sound as it rotates as far as the edge of the table and then disappears silently over it onto the rug beneath. Ed seems not to notice as he pushes himself out of the chair, taking a moment on standing to gently stretch, straining his neck away from his shoulders and rubbing the base of his back absent-mindedly. That done, he takes a step toward the far right-hand corner of the room. No sooner has he hit ‘play’ on the CD player but I am suddenly and completely transported back to the time that I had been contemplating only moments before. To 1996, when Bee wasn’t yet a year old. When I kept house and played mum and wore trainers and sketched in secret lest Ed should find out and nag me even more than he did. When I deliberately hid the sketches because I was too afraid to do anything with them.
Ed skips through the tracks on the album he’s picked until he gets there. To ‘Wonderwall’, of course. The song that meant something to everyone back then.
To us it was pacing the floors with Bee through a period she had where she refused to go to sleep alone. Ed played the CD in the room as he paced, I sang along to it as I nursed her. I long to feel again her head grow heavy on my shoulder as she eventually – and inevitably – succumbed to sleep as I crooned in her ear.
And at that moment, in the present, Ed closes his eyes and throws his head back, inhaling deeply, as if cleansing himself with a breath. I wish I knew what was in his head. Wish I could stand beside him and rest my head on his shoulder in turn.
And I wish, beyond wishes, that I hadn’t been so scared. That I had fought off that all-consuming, crippling fear. The fear that kept the sketches hidden away from the world, the fear that had kept me out of Cambridge, the fear that made me turn inwards. The fear of getting it wrong, of being embarrassed, of feeling again like Penny Jenny – the poor kid with the second-hand uniform in school.
Because if I hadn’t been so afraid then I might still be here with him. Just him.
And not anyone else.
Chapter 14
MAY 1997
Jenny
For all that he was her husband’s best friend, drinking partner, sporting competitor, best man and almost-brother, Jenny Mycroft knew very little about Guillaume Melesi.
What she did know was that she didn’t really register on his radar. That he was very much Ed’s friend, not hers, that if she vanished off the face of the earth, in fact, he would barely notice. When Guillaume was around, everything had to be about Guillaume – his interests, his experiences, his views, his opinions. There was certainly no room for anything that a drippy little pen-pusher like her could say to interest him.
Deep down, it suited her that since the autumn of the previous year he had been absent on one of his adventures. So when he finally arrived home and accepted Ed’s invitation to a dinner party, dressed in traditional African costume, with his booming voice tinged anew with an affected accent, she groaned inwardly.
He was the first to arrive – Ed had asked him to come along a full hour before the rest of the guests and Jenny had answered the front door at his loud knock. He had completely ignored her as he’d entered, of course. Strutted past her, dressed head to toe in a peacock-coloured smock over matching trousers, a blue kufi hat on his tightly cut hair, dominating everything around him as he entered. On seeing Ed, his smile grew warm and the men embraced like long-lost brothers.
Ed’s joy at seeing his friend after so long was palpable, and Jenny stood to one side, watching them slap each other on the back and share greetings as if she didn’t exist. Guillaume’s enquiries were addressed only to Ed, his tone haughty, reminding Jenny of how much she actually disliked Ed’s best friend.
Guillaume wanted to talk at length about his travels. Two months in Paris “in the château of my grandparents” as he called it, followed by just shy of six more in Botswana and South Africa.
“I needed to reach my soul, mate,” he told Ed as they opened a beer on the patio, the doors of the sunroom wide open where Jenny could overhear them as she prepared dinner in the kitchen.
“Needed to feel the voice of my people inside me.”
Jenny sighed.
It was a scorching hot Friday evening, the start of the bank holiday. Jenny watched as the men became completely absorbed in conversation and, with a glance at the kitchen clock, decided to nip upstairs to freshen up.
Despite Guillaume’s presence, Jenny felt the excitement of a summer evening as she headed back downstairs to prepare for the arrival of the rest of the guests. She knew she looked pretty and fresh, dressed in a sleeveless lilac sundress that just skimmed her knees. Her hair, still wet from the shower she had taken earlier, was held in a messy bunch by a clasp above the nape of her neck and she had applied only light foundation and a swipe of lip gloss. Bee was at Betty’s for the night and Jenny felt prepared for the evening, relaxed and ready . . . and then, once tonight was finished, three days of freedom ahead and a scorching weather forecast. She loved bank holiday weekends.
What she wasn’t prepared for, however, was the figure that stared up at her from the bottom of the stairs. Vicky Mycroft – dressed in the shortest of short black skirts, revealing deeply fake-tanned legs, with a sharp, glossy new haircut – glanced up at Jenny as she descended, stretching her burgundy lips into an insincere smile. To anyone who didn’t know her, Jenny mused, she looked at first glance not dissimilar to Victoria Beckham. It was really only when she opened her mouth and started to speak that the impression of anything posh was well and truly banished.
“Vicky,” said Jenny, finally reaching the bottom step and extending her hand to her sister-in-law, who was being helped from a black velvet bolero jacket by Ed.
“All right, Jenny,” she replied, unsmiling and cocking her head slightly to one side as if it were a confrontation rather than a simple conversation. She made no effort to take the proffered hand. Instead, she glanced down at it as if to question what Jenny thought she was doing with it.
Jenny withdrew her hand and instead clenched her fists by her side, digging her fingernails into her palms as she saw Vicky’s mouth twist into her trademark smirk that indicated a tiny victory. One up for Vicky.
Jenny took a deep breath as Ed brushed past her absent-mindedly and opened the door to the understairs closet where he hung the jacket.
“I didn’t realise you were coming along this evening,” continued Jenny. A statement rather than a question.
“Vicky rang when you were upstairs,” said Ed, as if it sufficed as an explanation.
Jenny’s expression remained stony, her eyes fixed on her sister-in-law, unsure of her next move.
“So just now, then?” she managed.
“Ain’t a problem, is it?” Vicky cut in suddenly. “Ain’t I welcome to come round my big brother’s for a bit of nosh of a Friday night? Ain’t no ’arm in that, is there?”
Jenny’s mouth twitched.
“No. It ain’t,” she replied, unable to resist the sarcastic emphasis on ‘ain’t’. She had no idea where Vicky’s accent came from. She had grown up in the same household as Ed, after all, yet persisted in speaking like a latter-day Eliza Doolittle.
Ed stepped back out of the understairs cupboard and closed the door, stopping to look from his sister to his wife, his face plastered with an unwitting grin. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them.
“Right then,” he smiled. “Shall we go through? The sun is lovely on the patio.”
Jenny sighed. He’d opened his first beer the instant he’d come in from work and was an absolute lightweight when it came to booze. Now, he was babbling. An indication that he had drunk enough to feel that all was well with the world and, most dangerously, that he liked his family. Jenny knew there was no point in pulling him aside at this point to castigate him for inviting Vicky.
Instead, she politely stood back a little and indic
ated that Vicky should follow her brother down to the kitchen and beyond into the garden.
Jenny allowed Ed and Vicky to walk ahead of her, observing Vicky’s unsteady path as she negotiated the steps down to the kitchen with caution. Ed wasn’t the only one who’d started early, she observed to herself and suddenly collided with Vicky’s bare back as she made a sudden stop at the bottom step and turned with a glare, trying her best to maintain her balance.
“Here!” she barked, thrusting the bottle of Faustino which she held in Jenny’s direction. “Make yourself useful. Open this, would ya?” And, with that, she turned again and proceeded to follow Ed unsteadily through the kitchen and out through the patio doors.
Jenny glared after her and rolled her eyes as Vicky reached the threshold between the house and garden and came face to face with their other guest, who had helped himself to another beer from the bucket filled with ice while Ed had answered the door.
“I don’t think you’ve seen this man in a while,” Ed said, indicating Guillaume who stood and extended his hand to Vicky. She grabbed it, as much for support as in greeting.
And then Jenny heard her voice change, from the hissing harpy who had ordered her to “make herself useful”, to something that could pass for smooth.
“Guillaume, innit?” she responded breathlessly. “Ain’t seen you round in a long time – been on holidays?”
Three hours later, Jenny was exhausted. The guests had arrived in a sudden burst and instead of the sedate evening that Jenny had planned, they all seemed in full bank-holiday party mode. The food had been consumed merely as soakage and, as dusk fell, Jenny glared at Ed as he reappeared through the kitchen doors with a tray of tequila shots.
Sing me to Sleep Page 7