The Other Mothers' Club
Page 16
“Would you like some wine?” she asked, knowing that, like Lou, Hannah was always hankering to be allowed a glass. “As it’s a special occasion.”
“No,” Hannah said. “Thanks,” she added as an afterthought for her father’s benefit. And Eve caught Ian looking from her to his daughter, something like panic creeping into his eyes.
“Diet Coke then?” Eve kept her voice bright.
Hannah shook her head.
“Juice?” Eve persisted. “Mineral water?” She could hear the desperation in her own voice. The neediness. Where had that come from? She hated needy, regarded needy women as agents of their own downfall.
“Tap water,” Hannah said.
Getting up, Eve took a tumbler from the drainer, filled it and came back. If not for the whirr of the fan oven and some generic dinner-party sound track from Ian’s iPod in the corner, the room would have been silent.
“And what’s your doll called?” Clare asked Sophie too brightly.
It was the same with pizza, pasta and garlic bread. Hannah was not hungry, not interested, and hated garlic, which was an entirely new one to Eve.
Everyone else ate. Everyone else had firsts, seconds and forced down thirds, even Lou, who could be as difficult about food as Hannah if the mood took her. Eve felt so pathetically grateful she wanted to hug her.
Pushing a scrap of lasagna around her plate, Eve tried to regroup. She’d had stupidly high hopes, based entirely on fantasy and wishful thinking, and ended up with this. Clare was obviously mortified. Eve could tell from her bright, snappy conversation: the teacher-tone had slid in. Lou was playing with Alfie and eating for England, but that didn’t hide the fact that every few minutes her eyes slid to the kitchen clock and disappointment tightened her face when she realized only five minutes had passed.
Let it go, Ian’s glance said when her eyes sought his across the table.
“More white, anyone?” he asked, waving a newly opened bottle in the general direction of the table.
“Me, please.” Lou held out her glass.
Not even Clare tried to stop her.
“And me,” said Eve. She saw a flicker of doubt cross Ian’s face.
He was right on two counts: (1) she’d probably drunk enough already, and (2) she should simply ignore Hannah. Let Ian deal with it when Clare and her daughter left. But somehow, Eve couldn’t. Clare and Lou were her friends; closer even than her family. It wasn’t much to ask Hannah to be polite for a couple of hours, surely? She was the one who was meant to be well brought-up. The one from a good family, who went to an expensive school. The one with all the privileges. Where the hell were her manners?
“Ice cream?” Eve suggested, fixing a smile onto her face as she pushed the tub toward Hannah. “Low-fat,” she preempted. “Frozen yogurt, really.”
“No, thank you,” Hannah said quietly. “I don’t eat ice cream.”
Eve should have taken a deep breath, held it and counted to ten…but she didn’t.
“What would you like?” Eve asked, exasperation, desperation and a touch too much Chablis meeting in four seemingly innocuous words.
It hadn’t come out how she’d meant it.
What Eve had meant was, What do you want if you don’t want pizza or pasta or garlic bread or salad or wine or Coke or juice or ice cream, or anything else I offer you? Tell me, and I’ll get it for you.
But that wasn’t how the words had come out. They’d come out more loaded. Translation: There’s no pleasing you.
“I would like,” Hannah said, her voice cold but glinting with triumph, “to leave the table.”
There were so many worse things she could have said that Eve’s body almost sagged with relief.
“Go on, then,” Ian said, breaking the silence that had fallen when Eve had spoken. “Right,” he added, his voice so brittle that Eve couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “What would everyone else like for dessert?”
“I can’t believe Eve thought I’d like her,” Lou said, banging her Dr. Martens against the seat opposite. The rhythmic thud was working Clare’s nerves. “She’s a spoiled princess. I wouldn’t be friends with her even if there was no one else in school.”
“I think Auntie Eve just hoped,” Clare said. “And Hannah’s not a spoiled princess. She’s had a hard time. Her mom died of cancer when she was ten. You have to cut her some slack.”
“Hmph,” Lou grunted.
Thud, thud, thud.
“Yeah,” Lou added. “When-she-was-ten. That’s three years ago. She’s still hamming it up. Anyone can see that. Anyway, I don’t have a dad and I don’t see you cutting me any slack for that.”
Fair point, Clare thought, although she didn’t say it. She didn’t have the energy to go there. And even if she did, Will was not someone she wanted to think about right now, let alone discuss with her daughter.
Thud, thud, thud.
“Lou, for God’s sake, stop that, will you. It’s giving me a headache.”
“No, it’s not,” Lou said. But she let her feet swing slowly to a halt. “Lunch gave you a headache.”
Annoyingly, that was true too. Lunch and too much wine. Clare rarely drank at lunchtime, even on the weekend, and not just because she couldn’t afford to. Wine went straight to her head, in more ways than one. The lights playing at the edge of her vision were a reminder of that.
Even without the ice cream incident and its aftermath—Hannah flouncing from the kitchen, Eve trying to look as if she didn’t want to cry, Ian glowering over cheesecake and chocolate mousse and cheese and cookies that no one but Alfie had the stomach for—lunch would have given her a headache.
Everything about it had felt wrong. From the photos on the stairs (Museum? Lou said. Mausoleum more like), to Ian’s rigid body language and Eve radiating tension the moment they’d stepped through the door. Normally the least likely person to go bang, Clare had watched helplessly as Eve had let that spoiled brat wind her up and ruin her day. Clare, who, given her experiences with her own stepmonster, had automatically expected to sympathize with Hannah, was surprised to find herself one hundred percent on Eve’s side. And Lou was right. She was a little princess. Not that Clare could admit that. Eve had been so desperate for the people she loved to like each other that she hadn’t stood a chance.
“Just FYI,” Lou added as the Northern Line train pulled into their station, “I love Auntie Eve—and she did give me twenty quid before we left—but I’m not going there again. I’ve got better things to do with my Saturdays.”
Clare hadn’t spotted the cash handover. If she had, she would have tried to prevent it, but she let that go unmentioned. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said.
Her migraine was encroaching rapidly now. She made a mental note to buy some Nurofen at the Tesco Express on the way home. It was a bit stable door shut/horse bolted, but it was better than nothing.
“Why not?” Lou asked.
“I very much doubt we’ll be invited.”
Sixteen
Silence. Finally.
Eve had been longing for the day to end, but now that it had, the darkness didn’t bring the relief she’d hoped for. It was suffocating.
It shouldn’t have been; the heating had long since gone off and the bedroom window was slightly open. Outside, the air had the chill of autumn, but still the room was stuffy, stale with tension and unspoken resentments.
Eve wanted to kick off the duvet, as she would have done at home, because her apartment still felt like home, and right now she’d give anything to be there. She’d been tempted to leave when Clare and Louisa had…to have gone back to Kentish Town and her apartment, and be her old self, just for a few hours. To regroup and remind herself what life was like Before Stepchildren. Or, more precisely, Before Hannah.
But Eve didn’t move, not even an inch. Just lay there, straight as a board, her body parallel to Ian’s, their hands nowhere even near touching.
She didn’t want to wake Ian. Not that he was really asleep, from the pitch
of his breathing.
Eve didn’t want to break the pretense of his sleep or hers. Instead they both lay in silence so each could pretend to believe the other was sleeping. If she kicked back the cover, the lie would be revealed, and they’d have to talk. Eve had a good idea she knew what Ian was thinking. Right now she didn’t feel up to hearing it.
It’s just a row, she thought. A row without the words. People do that all the time. Couples, friends, lovers, husbands, wives. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not the end of the world. People argue and then make up. Hell, some people argue just for the sake of making up. Any half-decent relationship can survive a fight.
So why did this feel so much more than that?
Why was she so reluctant—afraid, even—to say and hear what had to be said? She knew she was in the wrong, that she shouldn’t have taken the bait, that she was the grown-up…but why? Why did his having children mean she had to leave her rights at the front door?
In the garden, next door’s cat was torturing some small creature; the friendly neighborhood fox was screeching in frustration as a dustbin rocked on its wheels but refused to fall. And in the far, far distance, trucks rumbled down the A4, giving the night a low-level hum she’d never noticed before. But not the cat, the fox or the trucks hid the creak of a bedroom door, the pad of sock-clad feet on the stairs, and the click of the kitchen door being opened and shut.
Be reasonable, Eve told herself, the kid’s gotta be hungry. She hasn’t eaten all day.
But the knot in Eve’s stomach grew tighter.
Whose fault was it if Hannah was hungry?
All the loathsome parental clichés she’d promised never to think, let alone say, tumbled inside her head: Eat what you’re given; Children are starving in Africa; You’re not getting down until you’ve cleared your plate…. If she was honest, Eve wanted to follow Hannah downstairs and slap her.
More than that, she wanted Ian to. More than anything, Eve wanted Ian to stand up for her, to show whose side he was on. His silence and the gradual leveling of his breathing told her that right now it wasn’t hers.
If anything, the tension had ratcheted up a notch with Clare and Lou’s departure, releasing those who had bothered to be on it from their best behavior, Eve and Ian included. Alfie had grizzled, Sophie had whined and Hannah had shut herself in her bedroom. Then, even more alarmingly, Sophie had joined her. Even Ian had not been able to pretend that was a good sign.
Eve had slammed plates into the dishwasher and knocked back another glass of wine. Ian had coaxed the children through the rest of that afternoon, but on the rare occasions she’d been left alone with him, an uncomfortable silence had settled, and one of them had found a pressing need to be in another room. For Eve, this usually consisted of finding something else that needed washing up.
It was ironic really. Ever since Eve had moved in, Alfie had clung to her like a limpet. This evening she’d been the one who’d gone in search of him.
Bedtime, when it had finally come, had been a living hell. It was past ten p.m. before Sophie and Alfie had gone down. Alfie, normally so sunny, so unaffected by anything other than his tummy, had been cranky and grizzly, demanding story after story until Eve had been exhausted from “doing the voices” while Caroline’s photo had gazed unflinchingly at her from Alfie’s bedside table. That cool stare had been the last thing she’d needed. It had taken what little reserves Eve had had left not to turn the picture face-down.
And now—now—Hannah was hungry. Eve wanted to wring her neck.
“Go to sleep.” The sound of Ian’s voice coming out of the darkness made her jump. It wasn’t friendly or conciliatory. Just sick, and tired.
“I was.”
“No, you weren’t. I could hear you thinking.”
“You could hear me thinking?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, forgive me if I think too loud.” She hated herself even as she said it. This wasn’t her. She sounded as if she’d been twelve. She sounded like the kind of woman she hated.
A sigh.
“Just go to sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Great, she thought. That’s something to look forward to. But what she said was, “Night.”
“Night.”
She hoped they wouldn’t talk about it in the morning. How could they? If they couldn’t talk about it in private, the two of them cocooned in darkness, unable to see what the other was really thinking, they were hardly going to do it in broad daylight with three children for an audience.
An hour later Hannah was back upstairs and Eve was still wide awake. She needed to talk to someone. She was tempted to call Clare, but it had been a long time since her friend had welcomed 2:00 a.m. distress calls.
She knew that Clare had intended that to be the purpose of the club. That she had Clare and Lily and Melanie and, now, sort of, Mandy, to get it all off her chest. But how many of Eve’s problems could they really put up with, given they had problems of their own? It was a support group—friendship and coffee and a bit of light relief—not the Priory. For a second Eve found herself wishing she still kept a diary, something she hadn’t done since that second year at university. But what would she write if she did?
Dear Diary, my thirteen-year-old stepdaughter was nasty to me today…. It sounded pathetic even to her.
When she was sure Ian was asleep, Eve slid out of bed, slipped into her dressing gown and crept out of the room. A plate in the sink told Eve that Hannah had eaten several slices of cold pizza that had been left in the fridge intended for tomorrow’s lunch. The microwave was switched on at the wall, so she’d obviously heated them up first. Eve fought back tears of frustration. Would it have killed Hannah to eat one slice at lunchtime? What was she trying to do? Eve was sure she already knew the answer to that. Hannah was trying to break her and Ian up. And Eve had just ensured that phase one of her campaign had succeeded.
While Eve waited for the kettle to boil, she slid her laptop from her work bag, turned it on and idly chewed a pizza crust she didn’t really want as her machine connected to the internet.
Pot of coffee, packet of Alfie’s favorite chocolate Hobnobs, laptop…Eve tried to make herself comfortable at the oak table that only hours earlier had been the scene of her humiliation. Kitchens at night had always been a sanctuary to Eve. It was one of the things she shared in common with Clare. Maybe it had even started when they had shared a house together as students.
As recently as a month ago, she’d huddled over her tiny table in the kitchen of her apartment, catching up on copy, reading, just mulling over her day. In the past she’d switched off the light as she’d listened to the radio and looked out across the sleeping gardens at the windows of the apartments that had backed onto hers, blank and dark, as if the houses had been asleep too.
She could learn to love this kitchen too. She just had to set her mind against the fact that the kitchen, like every other room in Ian’s house, was haunted by Caroline.
Looking around, she hunted for some small way to make her mark, but one that wouldn’t look like petulance. So that ruled out black-bagging the rain boots. Eve smiled in spite of herself. It would almost be worth it. Although, of course, it wouldn’t.
Instead, she went to the utility room and opened the cupboard where Ian had stashed her boxes. She didn’t know what she was looking for until she found it: a large white bowl with a blue fish swimming across the base. She’d bought it in Chinatown several years ago, one lazy Sunday afternoon of wandering and window-shopping. It was close enough in style to Ian’s own things not to look like point scoring, but knowing it was there, in the cupboard, would at least make her feel she was putting down markers.
Eve settled herself back at the table, but still the sense of being an interloper remained. It didn’t help that Eve could remember sitting at her own table with a pile of unread newspapers, reading columns written by Ian’s late wife as her illness had progressed. Written, Eve imagined, precisely where she sat now.
That was one reason she’d been so excited when Beau had secured its exclusive interview with Ian to publicize the book of her columns.
But that was then. That was before she’d found herself tucking Caroline’s son into bed, cooking her youngest two beans on toast, and reading them bedtime stories. Before she’d realized the only unbeatable rival was a dead one. Although the dead one’s elder daughter was running a close second.
Eve half expected to glance up and see Caroline leaning against the worktop in her waffle dressing gown, coffee in hand, watching her. On her face that cool, knowing smile she wore in all her pictures.
As a distraction, Eve typed the word stepmother into Google. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she knew the second she pressed Enter that millions of other women were looking for it too. A manual that didn’t appear to exist. Maybe there’s a planet full of us, she thought, sitting alone at our kitchen tables in the late and early hours, wondering how the hell we’re going to cope and scouring the web for an answer.
In the early hours in London; bracing herself for the school run in Sydney; grabbing a few minutes’ peace after bedtime in Chicago. A cup of tea/mug of coffee/glass of wine in one hand, and maybe the answer to someone else’s problem in the other. Two and a half million hits and counting. Link after link scrolled before her eyes.
My Stepmother is an Alien
The Evil Stepmother
The Ambitious Stepmother
I hate my stepmother with a passion.
The URLs that sprang up told her instantly what she suspected. Stepmothers were A. Bad. Thing. Vilified, loathed, hated. Site after site compared horror stories, swapped jokes, or offered anaemic analysis of this most wicked of fairy-tale baddies. Eve was shocked by how many of those there were. She clicked on a site that claimed to offer practical help and was assaulted with a litany of teen complaints.