by Jenny Colgan
‘Yes, well, it’s funny, I thought she’d be waiting on the doorstep in a flowery pinny holding out a tray of freshly baked scones,’ said Fleur.
Soon, however, there was a familiar high-heeled tread on their familiar creaking stairs with the peeling-away carpet - a death trap - and Jonquil was flinging the door wide.
As usual the contrast between the dusty house and Jonquil looking glamorous was a big one to take in. She really was lovely, reflected Posy, far prettier than she herself was, having inherited her father’s heavier jaw and smaller eyes. Fleur was much more like her - high cheekbones, a perfectly straight nose and a wide mouth. The effect couldn’t fail to be pleasing, even if she was fixing them with a gimlet eye.
‘Ah, there you are,’ said Jonquil. ‘I thought you were going to be late.’
‘Well, we’re exactly on time,’ said Posy, kissing her. ‘Like always. So you didn’t have to worry.’
‘Fine, fine.’
There was no smell of cooking in the narrow entry hall, which was piled up thickly with mail, brochures, invitations to gallery openings and leftover Christmas cards. Pictures - all originals, many valuable small oils by artists Jonquil had picked out early in their careers - were hung willy-nilly on every spare inch of wall space, their frames thick with dust. Posy breathed in the homely messiness of it. Whatever her reservations, this was still home.
She thought about her and Matt’s plans to move - he was taking on more clients all the time, he was extremely popular, and Mr Headingly had tipped him for big things, apparently. They had thought maybe they would move out of town a bit, get themselves a nice little house somewhere. Well, they had thought that. Before . . . before this temporary unpleasantness, Posy told herself firmly. They kept their apartment very tidy, though. Posy liked everything to be just so, and Matt was organised. See, she thought, we do have lots in common. Like folding things.
She sighed. He’d gone out without saying where. It was probably work. Probably. God, she missed his body at night.
‘What’s for supper?’ she asked.
‘Stir-fry,’ said their mother. Fleur and Posy exchanged glances. That didn’t sound promising.
‘I’ve brought my own,’ said Fleur gaily.
‘Oh, very good,’ said Jonquil, distractedly leading them into the kitchen. At least they couldn’t insult her about her cooking, she cared so little about it. And, as she was always pointing out, she was still the same size she’d always been and could have got into her wedding dress, had she not had it ritually burnt.
The kitchen dining room was a huge space at the back of the house, with windows looking over the immaculate garden. Jonquil loved gardening and took it very seriously. The garden was an exquisite haven from the tumble of the indoors, delicate and beautiful, with wildflowers and a herb rockery. It was as elegant and regular as the interior was messy and disorganised. Posy was sure there was some deep-seated reason for this, but wasn’t too sure she wanted to get to the bottom of it.
‘Roll on spring,’ their mother said. ‘I do hate all this mulching. Fleur, what are you wearing?’
Fleur was wearing a micro mini with a huge oversized jumper over the top. She looked sixteen, not twenty-eight.
‘Some couture, blah blah blah,’ said Fleur to curry favour. ‘Did you see it in Vogue?’
‘Oh!’ said their mother, pleased. ‘Very good.’
‘Who does the jumper belong to?’ whispered Posy.
‘I didn’t catch his name,’ said Fleur. ‘But I did catch his sweater!’
‘And his pubic lice?’
‘Shut up.’
Posy opened the bottle of wine and poured them all a large glass. ‘Thanks for having us to dinner, Mum.’
‘Ah, yes, supper,’ said their mother, looking around distractedly. ‘Are you really hungry?’
The girls looked at each other.
‘We could call for a take-away,’ said Posy. Their mother looked horrified. As far as she was concerned, take-away was simply Not Done. Posy often thought that if her mother could take all her meals in pill form, she would.
‘Well, quite, Posy,’ said their mother. ‘Then we can all put up our hoods and go out and do some cheerful-slapping.’
Fleur and Posy rolled their eyes.
‘I’ll start chopping,’ said Posy, pulling open a kitchen cabinet. Out fell a huge sheaf of unfiled bank statements. ‘Mum, do you think it’s right to keep bank statements in your kitchen cupboards?’ she complained.
‘Aha,’ said their mum. ‘Well, do you think it’s right to go haring off out on your fiancé and going to look up your ex-boyfriends on the World Web World? Haven’t you ever heard of letting sleeping dogs lie? After that speech Fleur told me all about it.’
Posy straightened up. ‘Subtle, Mum. Very subtle. Nice timing, nice gentle introduction.’
Fleur was crouched on the ground trying to look innocent and coax a mouse out of its hole by offering it some squash.
‘Fleur, for God’s sake. What’s the first rule of Sisters’ Club?’
‘Never talk about Sisters’ Club?’ Fleur mumbled into her sleeve.
‘YES.’
‘That’s very passive-aggressive behaviour, you know,’ said Jonquil.
‘So?’
Fleur poked up her head. ‘Actually she was asking loads of nosy questions about me, and it was a good diversion to talk about you instead.’
‘That is why you dobbed me in it? Cowardice?’
‘Hey, I’m not the one stalking my exes online.’
‘That’s because your hard drive isn’t big enough for all six million names.’
‘Girls, girls.’ Her mother handed them each a wine glass. ‘Let’s sit down.’
‘In front of our delicious supper,’ said Posy. Jonquil ignored her and walked over to the dinner table, which was piled high with files.
‘After what Fleur told me—’ she said.
‘You mean Judas,’ said Posy.
‘I know I’ve told you this before, but . . . you don’t have to get married if you don’t want to.’
Posy sat down with a sigh and started nibbling on the edge of a raw carrot. ‘Mum. Listen. I do want to get married, OK?’
‘Just not right now?’
‘Yes, actually, now.’
‘But not to him.’
‘Mum, stop it, OK? It’s not really your business.’
‘No, I’m only your mother who watched you two run out of your own engagement party.’
‘It was nothing. Just a storm in a teacup. Honestly, what’s the big deal? I mean, I think I’m trying to take a rational balanced look at my life right now and everyone else keeps treating me as if I’m a dangerous loon.’
‘What does that tell you?’ said Fleur from the floor.
‘Are you talking to me or your best friend the mouse?’ said Posy crossly.
‘Did you really go all the way to the Hebrides to see Chris?’ asked her mother.
‘No.’
‘Oh, thank God.’
‘It was the Shetlands.’
Jonquil rose. ‘I think I’ll just make a sandwich. Would anyone like a sandwich?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Fleur, smugly opening her lunch box. Posy decided to give in gracefully, stay seated and keep quiet. The silence in the kitchen, as Jonquil pulled out white bread, tomatoes, cheese and mayonnaise - her default attempts at motherly feeding - seemed endless. And she wanted to kick Fleur under the table.
‘I just want to say,’ said Jonquil, ‘that if you’re worried about married life beforehand, it . . . it definitely doesn’t get any better afterwards. That’s all. I see it day after day. Marriage is just too difficult for long-living contemporary society, it just is.’ She looked down at her knife, suddenly mumbling in a way that was most unlike her. ‘I just don’t want you to get hurt again, Posy. Not like that. I am still your mother.’
Outside, imperceptibly, the freezing cold had done the trick and, gently in the lamplight, snow had begun to fall, l
anding on the birdfeeder and gradually obscuring the path.
Posy found herself thinking about her dad.
She often wished she’d paid more attention to him when he was at home. Run to greet him at the door, rather than continuing to watch Press Gang. Clung on to him on the rare occasions they’d gone on family outings and walks. Sat on his lap, even when she was too big for it.
But he was just her dad. A familiar-smelling presence that left at eight and came home at six and had a glass of wine and wasn’t, as far as she knew, the least bit different from all the other dads at school and perhaps in the whole world.
She supposed in retrospect that he and her mother didn’t speak very much, but she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. All her mother seemed to do, she reckoned, was get at her, so she wasn’t surprised her dad wanted to stay out of her way, too. And Jonquil’s presence was so very there, with her ‘How did that teacher make you feel?’ and ‘But you have to understand that Clemency may have been saying that she didn’t want to be your friend any more while hitting you over the head with her milk bottle, but she didn’t necessarily mean it.’ It seemed entirely balanced for her dad to be more of a background figure, who only liked to give her the occasional tickle and say, ‘Everything OK down there, Posy girl?’
He’d grown up in a family of three boys and been sent to boarding school very young, she knew, and her mother complained endlessly in later years of his emotional unreachability and closed-off nature, but Posy wondered sometimes if that wasn’t something they had in common after all; they weren’t entirely easy people to get to the bottom of. Fleur and Jonquil bore their hearts on their sleeves - if they had a disaster, the world got to share it; if they were happy, then ditto.
Happiness was more complicated to Posy, she thought. She seemed to have an in-built, questioning self-consciousness that stopped her ability to just ‘be’ in the moment. Here she was, with a nice boyfriend - fiancé - ex-fiancé. Oh god! - lovely boss, everything in life lining up, and she was running off on wild goose chases around the country.
The morning her dad had gone she hadn’t even noticed. He’d left the house as normal at eight a.m. Jonquil had evidently had clients all morning and, in the clutter, hadn’t even discovered the note until after the girls had come back from school. Posy could still see herself, as she sat there remembering: her mouth full of Jammie Dodgers, trying to watch Danger Mouse on a tiny telly (Jonquil thought the concept of telly was common), as her mother gripped at the kitchen table and gasped. It was the first time Posy realised that a pain inside could hurt just as badly as one on the outside. Her mother had crumpled as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Fleur had been doing an interpretive dance and hadn’t noticed. Posy had leapt up, alarmed.
‘What is it, Mummy?’
‘Call me Jonquil,’ her mother had gasped. Her father had never gone along with the name thing. Posy still had to double-take when she thought of his real name. Raymond.
‘What is it, Jonquil?’ Posy had obediently repeated, feeling as if she didn’t want to know.
Her mother had straightened up painfully slowly, like their grandma getting out of her bath chair in the home for retired genteel ladies they religiously visited once a month to allow themselves to be pinched and preened for i nspection.
‘It’s . . . it’s nothing, darling.’ Jonquil sat down, clutching the letter in her hand.
‘Is that from school?’ said Posy, who suffered from a persistent belief that her year’s form teacher, Mrs Fitzgerald, didn’t like her.
‘No . . . no,’ said Jonquil. ‘No, it’s not the school.’
In fact, the letter - although Posy had never seen it, due to her mother suddenly taking up smoking again and burning it compulsively in her ashtray - said simply that Ray couldn’t take it any more; that he couldn’t bear to live his life ignored, and that he was going to take a bit of time to himself to work out what he wanted to do.
What, it turned out, he wanted to do was start dating a rather brassy woman about ten years younger than their mother, after what even Posy realised at her age was a completely inappropriate period of time. Marian may have been nice and she may have been horrible, but it would never matter to the girls, who immediately decided to stick together like glue and hate her en masse, for ever, which was a terrible shame, because when Marian and Ray got married, just a year later, and moved to Essex and had a baby boy called Jason, Posy and Fleur never really got the chance to know their new baby brother, and Posy, at least, would have liked to very much.
Access visits had started off as awkward affairs - Posy often read, ruefully, in adult life, agony columns in which separating couples were advised to go speak nicely about each other in front of the children so as to minimise confusion and bitterness. In their home, all-out war was declared. Jonquil would sit through dinner and point out, using a variety of psychoanalytic methods, every small point of failure in Ray as a husband, father, and, indeed, lover.
‘You need to know the truth about the world,’ she would say, waving a cigarette wildly over their Dairylea sandwiches. ‘And about men.’
‘But Fleur is six,’ Posy would add, quietly.
‘I am not really six,’ Fleur would add. ‘It is only my disguise for being a pirate queen, for now, until I am ready to take on my true bydentity.’
‘Identity,’ Jonquil would add blankly. ‘And that’s another thing. The man had no sense of identity.’
There hadn’t been a formal decision to break off contact. And Posy knew, and was grateful, that Ray had continued funding her education until she’d left college. She just wished that he’d fought a tiny bit harder for his daughters, that was all.
Yes, they’d taken him for granted, but weren’t you supposed to take your parents for granted? Assume everything would always be OK and that they would never let you down? And the older she got, the less she understood. Jason was twenty-two now, still living at home in Welwyn Garden City, playing a lot of Playstation and showing an incipient weight problem. He was nice enough, looked a lot like Marian. They didn’t see much of him, or Ray, but whenever they did have stilted, awkward get-togethers - normally about twice a year, when Ray would have a ‘family barbecue’ and Jonquil would sniff about how déclassé it was and refuse to ask them any details about it when they got back, even though Posy could tell she desperately wanted to know everything and, depending on how her and her mother were getting on that month, would tell her or not - Ray wouldn’t cuddle her, exactly, more like give her an apologetic squeeze. She and Marian would politely ignore each other. And they would never, ever talk, not properly, and sometimes it was agony.
‘I won’t get hurt,’ said Posy now, decisively. ‘Look, it’s snowing!’
‘So, why the wild goose chases up and down the country?’ Jonquil asked.
‘I just wanted to see how Chris was doing, that’s all.’
‘Weighing up your options,’ said Fleur. This time Posy did kick her.
‘I always liked him,’ mused Jonquil.
‘You did not! You called him a woodworking bear!’
‘Did I? Affectionately, of course.’
‘Well, it wasn’t a goose chase, just a . . . I was just interested, that’s all.’
‘If you were really into this whole wedding thing, you wouldn’t be interested,’ said Fleur sagely. ‘You’d be too busy doing flower arrangements and blah blah blah things, and ooh I must have lavender serviettes and ooh all my bridesmaids must be the same height:weight ratio.’
‘I would not be like that!’ exclaimed Posy.
‘You would, everybody is. If you loved him, that is.’
‘Can’t you go outside and make a snow angel or something? ’ said Posy crossly.
‘Anyone would think you didn’t want me here helping and giving advice.’
‘Fleur, I don’t want you here, “helping” and giving advice.’
Fleur pouted. ‘Well, just as long as you don’t go and get mixed up with Adam all over again, that�
�s all.’
‘You’re not going to see Adam,’ said Jonquil. Posy reflected that Leah’s parents hadn’t asked about her boyfriend status for three years. This made Leah worry that they thought she was a lesbian. ‘He’s a bounder.’
Posy rolled her eyes, but didn’t deny it.
‘He was, Pose,’ said Fleur. ‘A real nob-end. You totally wasted your time there.’
‘That’s rich,’ said Posy. ‘What about you and that Cossack?’
‘Dmitri was from a wild gypsy race,’ said Fleur. ‘He couldn’t be tamed.’
‘He couldn’t be taught to pee in the toilet,’ said Posy.
‘Anyway, this isn’t about me and Dmitri, who had a wild inner passion you could never understand.’
‘For British visas,’ said Posy.
She hadn’t really been planning to see Adam - well, he’d crossed her mind, but she had enough problems here as it was - but the onslaught was making her petulant and contrary. She was hardly going to cosy up to Adam.
‘Really, darling,’ said Jonquil. ‘Adam is the most dreadful wide-boy. It’s a ridiculous idea. Don’t put yourself through this. If Matt isn’t making you as happy as he ought to, focus on that, not looking around to see what else is out there.’
Posy bit her lip. Being ganged up on was only going to make her more stubborn.
‘I know,’ she said eventually. ‘I know that staying in love with someone for a lifetime is really difficult. I’m interested in how people manage it, and how it would have been. I don’t think it’s weird to have a look at different lifestyles, before I embrace my own.’
Jonquil and Fleur exchanged glances.
‘Well, dear, you’re the psychotherapist . . . Oh no, that’s me,’ said Jonquil.
‘Can we go and get some dinner somewhere?’ complained Fleur as they trudged back to the tube in the snow. ‘That Ethiopian place will still be open.’
To her surprise, Posy was furious. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been talking about me to Mum,’ she said, trying to control her fury. ‘I can’t believe you two sat in there and ganged up on me about my perfectly reasonable personal business.’