‘I only said –’
‘Well don’t, OK?’
‘You’re a very good mother.’
‘Don’t start.’
‘You are. How can you even think such nonsense? You’re –’
‘Mother, I said don’t start.’
‘All right.’
‘All right.’
‘Shall I put the kettle on, dear?’
That had been that, and Hope had been for her run, and she had calmed down a little, and yes, OK, they would all go to the party. What was the point of not going? She was too tired, too bored to have a family scene. Order restored, her mother had since been flitting around the kitchen, in that flitty way that set Hope’s teeth on edge at the best of times, but which she would try, strenuously, to ignore today.
Hope’s mother flitted particularly irritatingly whenever a social engagement with Paul and Suze loomed, even without revelations like today’s. And later she’d become manic, to boot, laughing too loudly at things that weren’t funny and washing up like a woman with a wet-crockery fetish. Hope really didn’t mind that her mother was her brother and sister-in-law’s doormat – that was entirely her business. But she was sick and tired, frankly, of being expected to be likewise. To worship at the temple of Suze. This had been a small victory. Yes, she’d caved in and would go to the party, but at least she wouldn’t be taking a bloody casserole home.
Hope’s mother, who had at last stopped flitting and come to help Hope with the food, executed an impressive radish rose and lobbed it into the bowl in the sink.
‘He seems like a nice man,’ she observed in her sly way. ‘Very chatty. Not at all like you described.’
Though she had been adamant that it would not happen, Hope had been forced to relent in the matter of Simon driving over to take her to the park for their runs. This was the second time now, and the complicating factor of her mother being in the house (and like a whippet whenever the doorbell rang) meant that he’d now stepped over the threshold. She should have stuck to her guns, she knew she should have. But Simon had a crafty way of creeping up on her absolutes. It was madness, he’d said, for him not to collect her. He’d be driving almost past her house on his way there, and was really more than happy to drop her back as well. There were only so many times you could politely say ‘it’s too much bother for you’ and no occasion whatsoever when you could less politely change tack and say ‘I just don’t want you to – OK?’ in its place.
‘He is a nice man, Mum, and I never described him differently.’
Her mother sniffed. ‘Yes you did, dear. You made him sound very dull. Oh, yes. And talking about men friends –’
‘We were?’
‘We were. I remember what it was I was going to tell you now.’ She reached across Hope and picked up a cherry tomato. Why was it ever necessary to do anything with a cherry tomato? ‘You’ll never guess who Biddie saw in the Pot au whatsit the other day.’
Hope glanced across at her mother.
‘Biddie?
‘You know – Biddie Hepplewhite from the flower club. She goes there with her daughter.’
‘Lucky her,’ observed Hope, trowelling away at a mushroom and scowling.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. She says the food is a Shakespearean tragedy. Anyway, the point is, she saw your Jack Valentine in there.’
Hope put the distressed mushroom in the dish with the others and picked up another. Then thought better of it, put the mushroom down and picked up her glass of wine. Hell, her mother was driving, wasn’t she? She swallowed a mouthful. ‘Mum, he is not my Jack Valentine.‘
‘No, I know, dear. More’s the pity.’ She shook her head. Hope had told her nothing beyond the black eye at the football match. ‘But you know what I mean,’ her mother chided. ‘Anyway, he was there with that woman who used to be in Emmerdale. What was her name? Biddie did tell me. You know. The one who played the veterinary receptionist and ran off with the communicable diseases inspector they sent in to sort out the pigs.’
Hope swallowed another mouthful of wine. A bigger one. ‘Allegra Staunton.’
‘That’s it! Well done! Allegra Staunton.Yes, her.’
It didn’t mean anything. They could have been having a meeting. Quite easily, in fact. These broadcasting types kept funny hours, didn’t they?
And, bloody hell, what was it to her, anyway? OK, she had still been toying with the idea of calling him. But that was all. Every reservation in the entire book of reservations had so far stayed her hand on the receiver, and, well, this unexpected piece of intelligence was truly a gift. Her unspoken questions had been answered now, hadn’t they? Just as she’d predicted. Just as she’d feared. Forget the self-pity. The satisfaction of having been proved right so conclusively almost made her feel jaunty. Paul and Suze’s pot luck party notwithstanding.
‘Isn’t that lovely!’ trilled Suze when, some ninety minutes later, they arrived at the house.
Hope pushed the tray of crudités towards her and reminded Tom and Chloe crisply about removing their footwear, even as they were doing so. Why did she do that? Why the need for automatic pre-emptive strikes? She must stop doing it.
There were already enough trainers outside the front door to stock a small shoe shop, into which heap Chloe cheerfully lobbed hers, while Tom, scowling pointedly, because his were new and very precious, stepped inside in his socks and placed his own ones at the foot of the stairs.
‘And how are you two?’ enquired Suze now, flicking her pony tail and turning to march off down the hallway. It was expected, and invariably achieved, that they’d follow. A curious ritual. It always put Hope in mind of mother goose.
‘We lost one of our stick insects today,’ said Chloe, who had not yet told Hope this. ‘I’ve had to leave privet leaves all round the house.’
‘My Lord, how grisly!’ came back the laughing response. ‘Now you two, let’s see – they had now reached the kitchen – a quick glass of Ribena before you go and join the fray?’
Tom, third in the crocodile, glanced back at Hope with his eyebrows aloft. She shook her head minutely, knowing what was coming. He raised his eyebrows further. He was now six inches taller than both of them, and eyed the Ikea plastic cups that stood in a rainbow row on the table with enough pained derision to fell a rhino.
‘Actually, Auntie Suze, I don’t like Ribena. Er… any chance I could have a beer?’
Had Paul not stepped into the kitchen at this point, Hope would doubtless have inserted a reedy ‘certainly not!’ into the conversation – Suze’s face was already gearing itself up to express rigorous disapproval, and she was anxious to forestall it – but he had, and now clapped his nephew on the back.
‘Course you can, mate,’ he said, ignoring his wife’s look of horror. ‘Howdy, sis,’ he added, clapping Hope on the back as well. ‘How’s your love life?’
Paul had asked this question with tedious regularity from the day after her divorce had come through. She wondered quite how he’d respond if she told him. In detail. In millilitres of body fluids exchanged, if he bloody liked. He went across to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of something European and duty-free and held it out to Tom.
‘Marvellous,’ she answered, smiling sweetly at Suze. ‘I’ll have one of those too, if I may. How’s yours?’
Chapter 21
‘Marvellous,’ Jack said. ‘That’s really good news, mate.’
It had been touch and go, and a trifle overcrowded in the bathroom, but good sense had prevailed and the lovely Julie had relented by the Thursday. Not, she’d been at pains to point out, because she’d completely forgiven Danny his misdemeanours, but simply because christening slots were hard to come by and it wouldn’t sit well with the vicar if she had to cancel at such short notice.
Danny had been uncharacteristically quiet and thoughtful about it.
‘You think?’ he answered, while packing his few things into his holdall. ‘I’m not so sure, mate. I can still see me here.’
Jac
k, just home from work and swigging on a Becks, and still in thoughtful mode about his excuse for a life, scanned the shabby room and raised his eyebrows.
‘You can?’
‘I was thinking about something you said to me once. Way back. When Lydia first said she wanted to divorce you. You said something about feeling you’d lived half your life feeling not quite up to scratch. Like something she’d just had to tolerate, like eczema. It’s a bit of word, isn’t it?’
‘What, eczema?’
‘No. Tolerate.’
Jack shrugged. ‘I guess.’
‘I mean, that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it? With men and women. That women just ‘tolerate’ men these days. Don’t much need them. Don’t particularly want them. Just tolerate them because they have to.’
‘But that’s it. They don’t have to any more. Not if they don’t want to. Lydia didn’t, did she?’
He looked searchingly at Jack. ‘Yes, but doesn’t that bother you?’
Jack shrugged. He was way past analysing all the reasons why his marriage had ended. And wearier still of attributing so much of it to his deficiencies as a husband. He’d had more than enough of that before it had ended, despite Lydia prefacing every lecture she gave him with the words ‘Jack this isn’t about you, you know. It’s about me. You must understand that.’ Blah blah blah. She had a special face for that one and it wasn’t dissimilar to the one a priest might adopt for speaking to a condemned felon. Besides, the football would be coming on soon.
And at least Danny had a wife to go home to. She was probably whipping up a moussaka even now. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not unduly. It’s not all women. It’s just some women.’
‘Yeah, like Jules. I mean, you know what she said? That she could just about tolerate my ‘wandering eye’, but that she really couldn’t tolerate any more of that computer stuff. Well, I’m not sure I want to be tolerated. I feel like I’m on bloody probation. Is that right? Is it?’
Jack passed him a pair of balled socks that had rolled away across the carpet.
‘She loves you, mate. You know she does. She’s just, I don’t know, a bit twitchy about sex. She’ll come round. What time’s she expecting you?’
On the Friday, a whole week since the Allegra debacle, Jack still felt he hadn’t moved on. What he needed, he decided, was to get himself out of the rut he was slipping into. He needed to find a new place in the world. More pressingly, he needed to find himself a new place in which to live. To which end he’d popped into an estate agent’s on his way home from work. The girl in there, a pleasant twenty-something with a dip-dyed scarlet ponytail, had been friendly, effusive even, when he’d told her his name. She’d printed off several colour copies of property details for him and told him her mother listened to his show every day and thought he was really, really lovely.
Jack, for whom this particular endorsement was beginning to feel more than ever like a hail of Sanatogen bottles raining on his unprotected head, was reminded (via trying hard to remind himself that he was not old and worn out but young and fit and virile) of Allegra. She hadn’t called him, and he wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing, a bad thing, or something to which he should ascribe no particular importance. (There was no reason to hear about the TV show yet – they’d already written to tell him they’d be getting in touch again next week.) And he wasn’t sure whether to call her. If he did he’d feel obliged to have a big grown-up talk with her, either attempting a further assignation, which was pointless, or explaining that while he found her immensely attractive, that he wasn’t ready for – well, that – right now. While this option had the benefit of being honest and less scary, it might not augur well for his TV career. A woman scorned and all that. What to do?
And now it was Saturday and he was about to become a godfather. Almost eleven. He’d better get a move on. Better think himself into the role.
Jack had been to only one christening in his life – Ollie’s – and wasn’t sure what to expect. He’d spent some time in town the preceding week, trying, and largely failing, to decide what sort of gift would be appropriate for him to give this new charge. His gut instinct was for a seriously good football – Danny would appreciate that – but logic told him this would not go down half so well with Julie, so, in the end, with the help of a kindly lady in the jewellers, he’d plumped for a little silver musical money box, which tinkled Finlandia when you wound it up, and had an assortment of silver forest animals gathered around a tree stump on the top. No chipmunks. He so wished he could stop thinking about Hope. It was doing him no good at all.
The local church – less than a mile from his flat – was a Norman affair, with towering cedars in a rank around the graveyard and a daffodil-filled garden at the side. A big banner affixed to the low wall outside exhorted him to come and find out what life was really all about, but as this involved telephoning someone called Peggy for a friendly chat and/or joining their informal group for tea and discussion on a Tuesday (or so the permanent marker squiggles written below told him) he felt he probably wouldn’t find useful answers there.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, anyway. He had been doing too much thinking lately as it was. Jack wasn’t given to bouts of despondency and depression. But, right now, in this little cache of existence in which he had found himself, he felt he could, should he allow himself to try one on for size, very easily find himself doing so.
There was a small knot of people in suits and pastel clothing gathered at the entrance. Dan and Julie’s relatives, he supposed. He knew none of them, which made him feel like an impostor, turning up here all on his own. A shady character who had shuffled up in the hopes of a free cup of tea and a little light redemption.
‘Jack!’ said one of them now – a woman about his own age. She waved and approached him. He smiled automatically, even though he didn’t have a clue who she was.
‘Caryl Phelps,’ she told him obligingly. ‘Julie’s sister? We met at their Christmas party a couple of years back. How are you? I’m so sorry to hear your news. It’s always a shock when these things happen.’
Shock for who, precisely? It certainly hadn’t been a shock for him. Indisputably hadn’t been one for Lydia – she’d written the script. For Caryl then. For everyone who hadn’t broached the veneer of their marriage. Jack tried, and failed, to place her. The only thing he could recall about Dan and Julie’s Christmas party a couple of years back was that, in keeping with just about every social event in the last two or three years of their marriage, Lydia had spent most of the evening sitting on other men’s laps and/or shimmying around the kitchen clutching wine bottles with her shoes off and an expression of studied abandon on her face. And that he had been far from sober and rather sad.
‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, that’s life.’
‘Yes.’ She shrugged too. ‘Well. These things are usually for the best, aren’t they? Nice to see you again, anyway.’ She smiled at him sympathetically, having presumably run out of polite conversation and/or interest in attempting more. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’d better go and round up my brood, I suppose. Looks like rain.’
Yes, thought Jack. Heavy storms expected. Lydia was approaching from behind.
She was wearing a particularly unattractive outfit. A stiff turquoise skirt suit that he didn’t recognise. It pleased him. For several months after the separation he had found himself gripped with a frustrating sense of bitterness nearly every time he saw her. She looked so damn thrilled to be no longer with him. So groomed. So confident. So altogether like a woman who had blossomed. Jack tried hard not to read anything relating to the subject of divorce, but even he knew – it was so generally well documented – that post-divorce women so often found happiness, while post-divorce men often lost their way, like old limb-challenged lions in the veldt. And killed themselves sometimes.
He knew he was only feeling sorry for himself, but he couldn’t help it. She’d put on a little weight which, he had to concede, suited her. And emanated self-ass
urance. Like a diamond might emanate sparkle, perhaps. Or an overfilled burger bun might emanate ketchup, this metaphor pleased him more.
Lydia also looked at him sympathetically. Which was what she always did these days. Always had done, perhaps. As if he’d been an orphan puppy she’d taken in once but in whose future she no longer had any faith.
‘You’re looking well,’ she said. Which, likewise, was what she always said. ‘How’s Dad?’
He wished she wouldn’t call him Dad. She shouldn’t be allowed to. Not any more. There should be legislation, thought Jack, to stop it. He knew he was being childish, but, right now, a child was what he very much wished he could be.
‘Ollie and I popped in to see him last week. Did he tell you?’ she was saying. ‘He’s not looking too good, is he?’
Jack shook his head. ‘He’s much the same.’
‘The nurse was saying they didn’t think it would be too long before they’d have to see about getting him a hospice place. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Seems like only yesterday that he was fit as a flea and chasing Ollie round the garden. Such a shame. Poor Dad.’
Jack stood and studied his newly polished shoes. He really, really, didn’t want to talk to Lydia about his father. He felt her hand on his arm before seeing its approach.
‘If there’s anything… if you want to… well, you know you only have to ask, don’t you?’
Or have her pat him either. She was looking sympathetic again. What the hell did she think she could do for him? Effect a cure? Invent immortality? Mop his fucking brow when it all got too much? He looked at her pointedly and she took her arm back.
He really, really, wished she wouldn’t call him Dad.
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