Of course it didn’t matter too much to Freddie what my mother thought of him. He’d simply shrug and roll his eyes and try to charm her even more. His charms didn’t work on her. We used to escape back to his flat and he’d laugh about Mrs Cathcart’s old fashioned ideas and outlook on life.
After a year or so, when we’d been seeing each other fairly regularly, he invited me to go and live with him.
Of course I gladly accepted; I couldn’t wait to escape from my mother’s clutches, and it absolutely goaded her beyond belief because there was nothing at all she could do about it.
However, being a still fairly dutiful daughter, and loving my mother despite her infuriating ways, I continued to visit her every now and again, and made sure I rang her occasionally, as adult children do to please their parents, and because, despite everything, I cared for her. When we met up for tea or lunch out somewhere, we spoke about everything as long as it was trivial, general or work-related, but Freddie’s name was never mentioned. It used to upset me very much that she was so disappointed in me and my choice of partner. But all I wanted was to just be allowed to live my own life as I saw fit. As she did. As she had always done, ever since my father left her alone with two young children.
It wasn’t long after I’d left home to live with Freddie that she met Oliver Miller, another passenger on board a cruise ship when she went on holiday. He was a widower who’d lost his wife to a long illness more than six months earlier. My mother and this man continued to see one another afterwards, and it seemed to be serious in the months that followed. A year or so after they returned from the cruise he proposed marriage and my mother accepted.
I met Oliver a few times. He took the family out for dinner on our mother’s birthday. A very tall, elegant man, it turned out he’d been a surgeon, a consultant gynaecologist, before he retired from private medicine. There was something very likeable about the guy and we all got on extremely well. Oliver didn’t have a family of his own. He and his first wife, who’d been an invalid for practically all of their married life, had never had children. So I could well understand how happy he must have been to have suddenly had step-children thrust upon him, even though we were rather too old to dandle on his lap or play with toys. And it was evident he adored our mother. She in turn obviously adored him back, but despite deferring to him in most situations, when it came to Freddie, she was adamant.
He wasn’t going to be invited to their wedding. It was that cold, cruel obstinacy which brought things to a head between my mother and me. It left me feeling distraught. Even Jonti and Miranda had accepted him as my partner, apparently without any qualms.
The trouble with my mum was that she was wilful and stubborn. She’d always been strong willed, a woman used to getting her own way, and most people had given in because she was charming and quite unfairly beautiful.
But I could be as obstinate as her, so I didn’t go to her wedding to Oliver Miller, and thereafter cut off all contact with my mother and refused to take her calls and messages. I actually only kept up to date with what was happening through my stepfather, who regularly kept Jonti in the know.
And now here she sat, Lara Miller, as she was now, and she must be revelling in the situation, I thought sourly. Because she’d warned me time and again Freddie would do the dirty on me, and so he had.
And I was pretty sure my brother, the darling of my mother’s eye, would have brought her up to scratch on what had happened. He wouldn’t have been able to deny her anything.
The mountain spoke again, directing the comment to my appearance.
“Bailey, darling, what have you done to yourself?” my mother murmured, as playful as a girl.
Not expecting such a direct thrust, I blinked at her in confusion. Helpfully she pointed at my hair.I’d forgotten, and reached up to my head self-consciously.On Thursday night, after work and a few drinks, I’d made an impromptu appointment at my hairdresser and had had all my beautiful russet brown curls and ringlets lopped off and the remaining hair bleached a platinum blonde. I now sported a completely new look. A headful of short, spiky, silvery tufts.Before I had a chance to reply, my mother glanced across the table at my brother.
“Couldn’t you stop her?” she said.
Jonti grimaced. “You must be kidding, Mum, she’s a black belt in karate.”
I grinned in appreciation, but our mama wasn’t so amused.
“Don’t be so ridiculous, Jonti,” she snapped. “What on earth possessed her to chop off all those beautiful curls, do you think?”
He sighed, and raised his hands to stop the flow. “What did you expect me to do, forbid her from every going to a hairdresser? Follow her around everywhere? Bind her hands and tape up her mouth? She’s a grown woman, mother. She did it of her own free will and being of partially sound mind.”
Our mother looked uncomprehendingly at me, then back again to Jonti.
“But what was she trying to prove?” she asked him in bewilderment.
Now who was talking as if I didn’t exist?
“Oh for goodness sake, I’m not trying to prove anything,” I snapped. “I was simply trying to change, to improve my looks.”
“But darling girl, you looked gorgeous as you were. If you had wanted a change...”
“Please. It’s not like I went and got a dragon tattooed across my back,” I said irritably.
Miranda came over just then and placed a steaming tall glass of coffee in front of me, then stepped back and looked thoughtful before putting in her two pence worth.
“You know, Mother Lara, I wasn’t sure at first, when I first saw it, but now I really quite like it,” she said, surprising me. “It makes Baily look... sort of... I don’t know... edgy.”
Mother Lara’s eyes crinkled. “Edgy?” she breathed.
I gazed at Miranda, almost hardly daring to breath, waiting in suspense to hear how she’d reply and wondering how it was she wasn’t intimidated at all by my mother’s narrowing lids and glacial expression. Or maybe she was simply ignorant
“Yes,” replied Miranda cheerfully. “She reminds me a bit of that character Geena Davis played, you know, in that film with Samuel L Jackson, the American black actor. The one when the girl’s got amnesia, and then remembers she’s a secret agent, or spy, or whatever it is she was, and she reverts to her original look, which was really sexy and, well, edgy. She also went from being brown to platinum blonde. Same colour as Bailey’s now.”
She smiled at me, and I smiled back, but my mother grimaced.
“What rubbish, Miranda. Just because some actress once played a gangster in a film, doesn’t mean my daughter had to copy her.”
I rolled my eyes. But she wasn’t finished with me.
“What about your colleagues at the office?” she asked, turning back to me and knitting her brows, always perfect arcs above her carefully made-up Cleopatra eyes. “I take it your bosses have seen your new hairstyle? They must have been somewhat confused in the bank by this edgy looking creature turning up the next morning looking as if she’s the sort of person who could easily knife someone in the back.”
I was secretly rather pleased at that description, but I kept my voice even, so as not to rouse my mother’s ire any more than it had been already aroused.
“Actually,” I said, “most of the people at work said I looked cool. In fact one guy I’d never spoken to before noticed me and said he had a room to rent in his house if I needed it.”
My mother gave the same sort of harrumphing noise in the back of her throat, which Jonti seemed to have inherited and which I’d missed out on.
“Toast,” said Miranda, rather unexpectedly.
I raised an eyebrow. “This is hardly the occasion,” I demurred.
“No, your toast’s ready,” replied my sister in law, placing a stack of it on the table before me. She placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Another espresso, Mother Lara?” she asked sweetly. “Another croissant, perhaps?”
As my mother raised her cup to be re
-filled and gave her daughter-in-law a thin smile, it occurred to me that Mrs Miranda Cathcart might be rather pleased that my mother had arrived so fortuitously. Perhaps she’d even secretly arranged it with my mother, hoping I’d be hauled out of there, leaving her and Jonti in peace once more.
But if she thinks I’m going back to live with my mother and step father, at my time of life, I thought, as I viciously attacked the toast with the only knife to hand, which happened to be the butter knife, she’s got another thing coming!
Chapter 4
Breakfast was over and couldn’t be dragged out any longer. Mum had said she wanted to talk to me, to which I’d replied I was perfectly agreeable to hearing her out, so Jonti had made himself scarce as soon as he was able to. Miranda, after having made it crystal that she trusted I would absent myself that evening from the flat, had also taken herself off to buy whatever it is she needed for her guests’ dinner. I decided there and then that it really was time to make a move and let these good people have their lounge back.
Curling myself on the armchair, I was aware that for all my outward signs of ease, I felt slightly on edge, which is not at all the same as saying one was edgy. I felt as if my mother had once again managed to compromise me into a situation with which I wasn’t truly comfortable. But she was my mother, after all, and had to be respected. But, before she seated herself, something on the couch caught her attention, and she bent and her long red fingernails scraped the crusty fabric on which she was seated.
“I see that Miranda’s still been unable to remove this liqueur from the settee,” she said faintly as she spread her silk skirt and arranged herself gracefully on the cushions. “Baileys, wasn’t it?”
I gave an appreciative nod at the pun. “Only you could call your daughter after a shipping region and still manage to make a joke of her name,” I said.
She took a deep breath. “Well, all jokes aside, I’m here to offer you my help.”
I cupped my chin in my hand and regarded her thoughtfully. “What makes you think I need any help, Mother?”
She only had to raise her eyebrows at me and I was already on the defensive. Thirty three, going on thirteen. I leaned back in the chair and gave a small shrug.
“Actually, I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet,” I said, somewhat untruthfully.
She gave me a quizzical look. “You’re not thinking of going back to that man, are you?”
“That man made me pretty happy while I was with him.”
“I never trusted him.”
“Yes, I know. You told me so enough times over the years. Apart from when you initially thought he might be a member of the razor family, before you found out he wasn’t related to them, you quite liked him. Only afterwards did you decide he was unsuitable for your only daughter. So I guess you must be very pleased at having been proved right about him.”
She bristled. “You really think I’m that shallow?”
I didn’t answer.
She stared out of the window. “I know you still blame me for divorcing your father.”
“I don’t say it was your fault…I don’t even know whose fault it was…”
She raised her hand to cut me off. “That’s at the heart of everything… I know it. Our marriage and the break up. You think I don’t understand that’s why you and I have such a …a difficult relationship now? But you and Jonti were both so young at the time, how could you possibly understand?”
I looked at her. “I’m not so young now, Mother,” I said, but she still wasn’t looking at me. It was as if she was talking to herself.
“No marriage is perfect, Bailey,” she said softly. “We all make mistakes, some of us more than others.”
Now she turned to me, and there was a plea in her voice.
“I don’t pretend to know or do what’s right always,” she said. “But whatever you think about me, whatever you believe, believe me when I tell you that I’ve only got your best interests at heart. And to ask you to please not shut me out of your life. I just want to see you happily married.”
“Like you are now?”
She turned to look at me, and her voice was rock steady. “As I am now. As I always wanted to be and as every woman deserves to be with the right husband beside her.” She leaned forward, all urgency and earnestness. “What’s wrong with a mother wanting to see her children happily married, with children of their own? It’s what life’s all about, having children. Carrying on the line.”
“Mother, please!” I was uncomfortable; I wasn’t enjoying this conversation one bit, it was so unlike her to open up in this way. Normally she was so restrained and reserved. “Stop going on about marriage and children, will you? Marriage is just a piece of paper,” I said. “It means nothing.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t believe in anything or anyone anymore,” I replied, and felt my heart tug in my chest as I spoke. “Besides, having kids isn’t a guarantee that that marriage will last, is it?” I added coolly. “If it were, Dad would still be part of our family and living with us, wouldn’t he, instead of living apart from us, in Jersey, with his second wife and her family.”
“I really don’t care to hear you talk like this, Bailey,” she said crossly, ignoring the mention of my father. “If I didn’t believe in the holy state of matrimony, would I have got married again?” she added, her tone a reprimand.
I ran an exasperated hand through what remained of my hair. “You left it long enough,” I said. “It’s been over twenty years since Dad walked out of the house. Nobody’s blaming you now for trying to find a companion during the last years of your life!”
There was a long pause, and then my mother leaned forward and placed her hand over mine.
“Please let’s not argue, Bailey.”
I just shrugged and moved my hand away. There, she was back to her old self. Not wishing to discuss my father with me. As if he was a taboo subject.
“We’ve gone off at a tangent,” she said at length. “All I really wanted to was to discuss your plans.”
I remained silent.
“Okay. Then I’ll say it out straight.” She straightened her back and pressed her knees together primly. “I want you to come home with me,” she said. “Right now. Just come back, no questions asked, and no demands made, I promise. The house is big enough for all of us, you can live comfortably, and we won’t intrude on your life in any way. If you want, we’ll turn the upstairs into a flatlet for you, or maybe even build an extension on the side, if you prefer. You’ll have total independence. Your own keys. Your own front door. What do you say?”
“I say I’m almost thirty three and it’s time to cut the umbilical cord.”
Her lips pursed. “Is it because of Oliver that you won’t come and live with us?” she asked. “That you somehow think you’ll be in the way? Because if you think your stepfather isn’t in agreement with me over this, you’re wrong. We’ve discussed it. He’s in total agreement. He very much wants you to come and live with us and make our home yours. You can ask him yourself if you don’t believe me, Bailey.”
I listened to the entreaty in her voice and I looked at her, suddenly curious.
“Why should he care so much?” I wondered. “I’m nothing to him. He hardly knows me.”
She blinked, looked away. “Well, it’s only natural, isn’t it? I mean, he wants whatever I want, whatever makes me happy.”
I shrugged, turned away. “Lucky you. You waited long enough to find a guy who can make you happy, I’ll grant you that.”
She leaned back, crossing her long, slim legs. “You do blame me for divorcing your father, don’t you?”
“I guess I blame you both. For not trying harder to make the marriage work,” I said simply.
Her nails tapped on the chair rest.
“Your father and I, we were very much in love at the beginning,” she said, staring into distant space, as if remembering those far off years.
“Then one or the other fell
out of love, right?”
“Something like that, yes.”
God, she made me so mad sometimes. “You see?” I said sharply. “Even now, you won’t tell me what happened.”
I saw her take a deep breath before she answered. “I’m sorry, Bailey, but it was a long time ago, and I swore to myself I would never discuss that part of my life with my children.”
“But I’m no longer a child.” I waited, but when she didn’t speak I shook my head at her in frustration. “Who are you protecting by remaining silent? What does it matter who did what to whom?”
She raised her chin, and there was that old defiant look back again. “I don’t know or care if you’re still in touch with your father, Bailey, but if you are, and he should ever choose to discuss it with you, then that’s his prerogative. But don’t look to me to talk to you on the subject, because I shan’t, so please stop trying to wheedle things out of me.”
I gave a short, contemptuous little laugh. “And you wonder why I choose not to come and live with you,” I said.
There was a long silence, which eventually my mother broke. But when she did speak, it was as if all we’d said just then had never been mentioned, for her tone was so light and teasing.
“You do realise that you’ve outstayed your welcome around here, don’t you?”
I decided to imitate her tone of voice, and made myself smile. “Don’t I know it,” I said. “If Miranda gets much brighter around me she’ll explode.”
I received a quick smile in response, but some of the awkwardness between us still survived, making me jumpy. So, standing up, I jammed my hands into my pockets and went over to the windows, looking out at the street. It was late June and at last the sky was a shining blue and people were outside, enjoying the spell of fine weather, not knowing how long it may last.
I spoke over my shoulder. “So, you might as well know, I’ve decided I’m going to take a long break, take some time off work. I’m due a sabbatical. Or they can tell me where to go if they don’t like it. I don’t really care.”
Deception Page 4