by Lucy Dillon
Lauren looked unconvinced. He hadn’t even really got the hang of it by the end of the class, when everyone else was well away. It was deeply unsexy, him being such a malco. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t even know if he’s going to turn up to the class tomorrow. Kian wants him to join some five-a-side league.’ She fiddled with the can. ‘I bet that’s where he is now, down the pub with Kian. He never used to be like this, it’s just since he moved back in with him.’ She looked up. ‘Am I being a nag, Mum? I don’t want him to think I’m a nag, but it’s really annoying. Did you have to put your foot down with Dad?’
‘No,’ said Bridget. ‘Well, yes. Sort of. The trick is to do it so they don’t realise.’
Lauren opened her Diet Coke fiercely, as if she was snapping something off Chris.
That leech Kian, maybe.
‘Now, come on,’ said Bridget. ‘You know he sometimes has after-work customers at the garage. Of course Chris cares about the wedding – men just don’t get as into it as we do. Why don’t you give him one more ring, while I put some peas on?’
Lauren looked at her watch and tutted. ‘Mum, hang on with the peas a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to check my auction.’
‘Auction?’
‘For my Snow White cake topper,’ Lauren called over her shoulder, as she barged her way out of the kitchen. ‘In Wyoming . . .’ Her voice trailed away, drowned out by the sound of her feet clumping up the stairs.
Mittens slid into the kitchen, flicking his black tail crossly, then winding himself around Bridget’s legs, begging for attention and some supper. Lauren’s noisy return had thoroughly disrupted his semi-retired-cat life, and Bridget felt more than a little guilty for the loss of his peace and quiet.
‘Sorry,’ she said, chucking him on the white patch under his chin, and feeling the throaty purr start up at once. ‘It’s not for ever. She’ll be married soon enough.’
Bridget made herself a cup of coffee, and took one upstairs for Lauren, in her favourite mug. She found her hunched at her computer, making nervous clicking noises as she refreshed the page over and over again. Because of all the stuff crammed into her room, Lauren had had to set up her computer on her old desk, so her knees were practically round her ankles, but her eyes were gleaming with an excitement that suggested that she wasn’t really noticing any incipient cramp.
‘What’s this, then?’ asked Bridget, peering at the screen.
‘eBay,’ said Lauren. ‘Come on, come on . . . Yes! Yes!’ She clapped her hands together then punched the air. ‘Look! Mum! I’ve won!’
‘Well done!’ said Bridget, automatically. ‘What have you won?’
‘These cake decorations.’ Lauren scrolled down to the photographs of Snow White being gripped by a handsome sugarcraft prince. ‘You can’t get them in England. Aren’t they gorgeous?’
‘Mmm. Very . . . unusual. I thought you hadn’t decided about your theme yet?’
‘Oh, they’re so cheap, it doesn’t matter if I get Snow White and Lady and the Tramp,’ Lauren replied, cheerfully. ‘And Sleeping Beauty.’
‘Lady and the Tramp . . . ?’
‘I mean, I can always sell them on again, for at least what I paid for them.’ Lauren turned round awkwardly, knocking her notebook off the desk and on to her bed as she went. ‘That’s the thing, Mum. It’s so easy! What isn’t right, you can just put back on again and someone else will have it off you. I’ve got rid of a whole load of stuff we didn’t need from the flat . . . Look.’
With a series of clicks that Bridget didn’t entirely follow, Lauren brought up a busy page of transactions.
‘See? I bought the hand-dried rose petals . . .’
From New Jersey, in nine different colours, noted Bridget.
‘. . . and the glass candle holders in the shape of swans for the table centres, and blue garters for the bridesmaids, and the banners . . .’
‘It all looks very complicated,’ said Bridget, uncertainly.
‘Not really. Just takes a moment to work it out and you’re away. People are making fortunes selling tat, you know. All you need’s a digital camera and some fancy descriptions.’
An idea began to uncurl in Bridget’s mind. A way of offsetting some of the outgoings that seemed to be mounting up with every passing week.
‘Could you . . . could you show me how you’d go about buying something, then? Or selling something?’
Lauren looked up at her with an indulgent smile. ‘Ah ha! It’s those Scottish genes coming out! Are you bargain hunting, Mum?’
‘Oh, you know . . .’ Bridget tried not to look too interested. She didn’t want Lauren thinking they couldn’t afford her big day. Lauren worried about things like that; it would spoil it for her. Besides, the house was stuffed with tat, just taking up space. It would be good to declutter.
‘You’ve got to be careful – people can get addicted to this, you know. You read about them in magazines . . .’ As Lauren spoke, she was already searching for ‘wedding favours Disney’. ‘Still, I reckon you’re pretty safe, aren’t you? The world’s most sensible budgeteer. The woman with just the one credit card, always paid off in time.’
‘Yes, well, clever clogs, you’d be surprised how much we primary-school teachers need to know about computers these days. It’s good for my morale to be one step ahead of the children,’ said Bridget. ‘Shift up, and let me look.’ She squeezed onto the edge of the bed, so she could see the screen.
Lauren hesitated for a moment, surprised that her mum was so interested in a shopping experience that involved the scary world of the internet too, then decided she was probably doing it to make ‘mother–daughter time’ – without the danger of Irene dropping in.
The wedding magazines were very big on mother–daughter time. Bridget was very big on non-Irene time.
Plus, it didn’t look like Chris was going to call, not now. She’d texted him four times, and that was enough.
He knew where he was meant to be. She wasn’t going to go chasing after him. She suspected Kian was already brainwashing him about the evils of being under the thumb, and that, thought Lauren, wasn’t something she was going to give ammunition to with shrieky phone calls. It could wait.
‘OK, then,’ she said, flexing her fingers. ‘How about we sell . . .’ She cast her eyes around the jumbled boxes of stuff piled up against the walls. ‘Those satin court shoes I bought last week that don’t quite fit properly.’
Before long, Lauren and Bridget had listed the shoes, along with a ‘spare’ veil and – just to prove you could sell absolutely anything – a knitted bride loo-roll cover Lauren’s Auntie Carol had sent her. It was so much easier than Bridget had realised. And the amazing variety of wedding-related things you could buy! They had just slapped each other’s hands to celebrate the successful purchase of ‘One Hundred Glass Cinderella Slipper Wedding Favors’ from a private seller in Toronto when a plaintive voice came wailing up the stairs, along with an acrid smell of burned pan.
‘Bridget! Bridget!’ yelled Frank, sounding panicked. ‘What’s going on with this pie? Something’s burning!’
‘And that,’ sighed Bridget, ‘is the wow factor of married life they don’t tell you about in the dress shops.’
‘No problem, Mum,’ said Lauren, already typing. ‘Non . . . stick . . . pans . . . New in box.’ And she hit return.
Not such an unproductive evening after all, she thought.
12
Angelica sat surrounded by papers in her parents’ front room, on the same scratchy brown sofa that had been re-upholstered every five years, but never replaced, and slowly turned the pages of a family photograph album. It had been at the bottom of a box marked ‘Angela’, right at the back of the attic under a box of Cyril’s crystal radios, which, she supposed, said it all.
The album had no photos of Pauline and Cyril’s life before she arrived. Angelica found it difficult to imagine what they’d been like as a young couple – she had no mental prompts to picture them picnicking in the Lakes, or l
aughing uproariously at a party. There were several awkward photographs of them in their ballroom-dancing finery, but only the pencilled dates on the back told her whether Cyril was 20 or 40 at the time. Pauline’s comfy bosom had been there from the start, and only the size of her hair and eyeliner hinted at the fashions changing outside Longhampton.
The album began when she was a few months old, lying crossly in a Moses basket: Angela Marie, 4 months at home, Pauline had written carefully in chinagraph pencil. It was the first of many very similar photographs.
Is that really me, thought Angelica, who hadn’t seen the photographs for years. She was a sallow little scrap of baby in a crocheted bonnet, never quite as sweet-looking as the lovingly hand-made clothes she was swaddled in. Pauline had knitted everything except the actual baby it seemed: matinee jackets, hats, all-in-ones, bootees, fancy frilled dresses.
She turned over to scenes of Pauline, already middle-aged in her twinsets, holding baby Angela at her christening, on the garden wall, playing with a bucket in the garden. Usually on her own, and well away from thorns or puddles, scowling from under a mop of dark hair, until suddenly, at a year old, Pauline had recorded, ‘Her first smile for the camera!’ and from then on, little Angela’s eyes searched for the camera like a flower reaching up towards the sun. Pauline didn’t really smile much, possibly because Cyril was usually behind the camera in shots of the two of them, barking instructions.
The album stopped when she was about five, when her mother started sending her to Miss Trellys’s, and the dancing albums started instead. That was the end of Angela the daughter, and the beginning of Angela the fulfiller of Pauline’s ballroom dreams.
She turned the pages, hoping irrationally that she’d find some unseen candid shots of Cyril toasting Pauline on their anniversary, or the two of them enjoying a sweet sherry at a Friday night social. There was nothing more, apart from one or two loose pictures slipped in under the tracing-paper pages: Angela in her school uniform, toes turned out neatly in ballet position, with long black plaits; Pauline and Angela on a rare day out in Birmingham.
Then, strangely, Angelica’s wedding photograph: she and Jerry holding hands, wreathed in smiles underneath a frothing American bower of flowers. The bright colours and Florida sunshine zinged out of the picture after the monochrome flatness of her black and white childhood.
It gave Angelica a start to see herself suddenly grown up, the dancing years skipped over and her life fast-forwarded to the semi-retired nearly-forty-something she’d been when she met Jerry on the cruise. He was a widower looking for shipboard romance; she was filling in some time as half of the professional couple, with that bitchy old queen, Nigel Taylor, a friend from way back. Easy money, she’d thought, and easy dancing, to heal her battle-scars after the wearing competition years with Tony. She hadn’t been expecting to meet an old-fashioned gentleman like Jerry, and while the roses that turned up nightly at her cabin were charming, his relaxed, generous lead on the floor was what won her heart. He didn’t want to show off; he just wanted to enjoy her company. When he proposed as they docked in New York, she said yes.
The wedding had taken place in the garden of his enormous Florida home, six months later, and they’d gone on an anniversary cruise for the next seven Julys. Each time, they stopped the dancefloor when they started to quickstep, and he always smiled into her eyes as they spun, and in its own way, that meant more to Angelica than the nerve-racking tension of competing with Tony. Or at least, she told herself it did.
Angelica felt a sharp sting of hurt that Pauline had just stuffed her wedding photo into this album. She’d sent it in a special box, along with a slice of cake, and some of the lovely silk flowers that had decorated the tables. All right, so she hadn’t been living in the UK at the time, and there was no chance of her popping round to Sydney Street and not seeing it on the mantelpiece, but surely the wedding of their only child warranted a photograph frame at least?
Pauline and Cyril were invited to the wedding of course, with first-class tickets, but they hadn’t come, and Angelica hadn’t really expected them to. She had to pretend to be disappointed, because Jerry and his family were so sad for her, but she knew Cyril wouldn’t fly all the way over to Florida, and had to invent a heart murmur for him, to explain.
Angelica touched the photograph, remembering the feel of the suit against her skin. It was a real Joan Collins number: white crepe with padded shoulders and a peplum that showed off her still small waist. She’d wanted red, what with it being an outdoors blessing rather than a church ceremony, and both she and Jerry being well past that virgin bride moment, but he’d insisted on white, old romantic that he was. Men who could dance as well as he did tended to be romantics, or ladykillers. Jerry was a bit of both.
It was a lovely photograph. Jerry looked so distinguished in his tux. If she was channelling Joan Collins in her power suit, he definitely had a look of Blake Carrington with his perfectly coiffed grey hair and deep tan. Cyril should have been proud, she thought, that finally she’d achieved some sort of respectability and married a millionaire.
Angelica sighed. She knew in her head what married life in Florida had been like – she could remember the songs she’d taught those fiancés to dance to, and what sort of mineral water Jerry liked to keep poolside – but she couldn’t feel it any more. It hadn’t left an imprint on her, in the way she could still taste the fear beating in her throat while she put on her competition make-up. She’d passed through those warm, easy Florida years, and then, when they came to an end, she’d put her possessions into storage along with her tango dresses, and now it could almost have happened to someone else.
Maybe, she thought, it was because she didn’t carry any bitterness in her soul about it. When she’d found out about the other woman – another dancer, not much younger than her, from their bridge club – she’d accepted it with an acquiescence that surprised the lawyer Jerry insisted she hire. Partners weren’t for ever, she knew that from her career. Jerry was a good man, they’d had some good times, but Angelica was too much her own woman to be second best to anyone. She’d had enough of that with Tony, and she wasn’t going to start now.
So she agreed to his generous divorce settlement, refusing to haggle over the price of her freedom, and even kept in touch, after his new baby was born. Angelica said nothing, but privately reckoned Jerry paid a high enough price for his last gasp of youth: sleepless nights and milky vomit at a time when he should have been sipping mojitos on his porch and listening to Dean Martin. Still, that was his choice.
Pauline was careful never to mention the baby, for fear of hurting Angelica, but it wasn’t really the child that she was jealous of: it was the sense of belonging that the three of them would have. In the photograph Jerry sent of himself with Melissa and baby Jerrissa, they were all squashed up together in the frame, three parts of one whole. Frankly, it looked wrong to Angelica, but they were undeniably a family, and that was something she only realised she’d longed for, as her mother was dying.
You always rubbish the thing you want most, she thought sadly, looking at herself and Jerry posing expertly under the arch of gardenias. In the Tony days, it had been easier to dismiss families as a sentimental nonsense than it was to risk having that conversation that could wreck their ever-precarious balance of business and pleasure. She was never sure what was more important to Tony, Angelica the partner, or Angelica the lover, and the thought of finding out terrified her into a proud silence.
She propped the wedding photograph up on the mantelpiece and was about to put the album back into the box when on impulse she flipped through the remaining pages, just in case there was anything else there.
Right at the back, tucked into the folded spine of the album, was an envelope.
It was addressed to her in Pauline’s handwriting: Angela – to be opened in the event of my death, written in confident, sloping ink, which dated it to well before her mother’s arthritis had set in, leaving her handwriting like a child’s att
empt to copy her old neat style. Pauline hadn’t been as confident in person as she was in her handwriting, preferring to leave most of her opinions to Cyril until he died.
That had been one of the nicer things about having her mother living in Islington, thought Angelica, as she slit open the envelope. Free of Cyril’s domineering views on everything from immigrants to white bread, and encouraged by Angelica’s own disregard for anyone else’s approval, Pauline had slowly started to display a healthy disapproval of cyclists who rode on the pavements, and moved on to milk cartons and folk who played their car radios so loud she could hear them in the front room.
It had been one of the little ways they’d grown closer towards the end, that shared outrage with other people’s thoughtlessness. One of them would start with a cross observation over breakfast, and then they’d let their irritation spiral to furious fulmination, until one of them would crack and giggle.
I’m so glad I brought Mum down to London, thought Angelica suddenly. I couldn’t bear to think of her alone here now, with just these albums for company. She unfolded the letter and was surprised to see that it ran to four closely written sides. What could her mother want to write about that she couldn’t just tell her? Was it legal stuff?
It can’t be that important, thought Angelica, though her thumping heart suspected otherwise. Why would it be right at the back of an album I might never have found? Surely if Mum meant to tell me anything important she’d have left it in the bank, or put it in her jewellery box or something?
Dear Angelica, Pauline wrote. I hope you will forgive me for what I am about to tell you, and understand that it is much easier for me to write this down than to explain in person. I have always been so proud of you, and what you have done with your life. You have brought me and your father so much happiness, and although perhaps it has not always seemed so, we have taken a great joy in you as our daughter.
Angelica felt tears prick in her eyes as she heard Pauline’s voice in her head. She had known how much pride her mum had taken in her; it was her dad who’d never shown any sort of interest in what she’d done.