She hesitated. Oh, to hell with Sam’s mother. “Yeah. You can wear what you want.”
He slumped against her, leaning into her body. “Will there be dancing? Like Strictly?”
“Definitely.”
Freddie kicked out his feet in his khaki Crocs. “And will I be allowed to have fun?”
Jenny was puzzled. “You’re always allowed to have fun.”
“I feel like I’m not allowed to have fun.”
“Who said that? Did Cecille say that?” She wasn’t sure about Cecille now. Not now that Cecille had something over her. And she would never forget that piercing look she gave her beside the chest of drawers. Yes, she should have gone for Magda, that pale, studious one with the specs.
“No.” He shrugged. “It’s just that I feel bad when I’m happy because Mummy is dead and that means I shouldn’t be happy.”
“Oh, Fred. You mustn’t feel bad for being happy. Mummy always wanted you to be happy, didn’t she?” She pulled him toward her tighter. “She’d be so proud of you being happy.”
Freddie was breathily noisily and Jenny could tell that he was trying not to cry.
Jenny pointed at the ground. “Hey, look, that beetle’s carrying a leaf now. Ninja beetle.”
They watched the beetle with its leafy burden scurry into a hole in the soil. “Daddy doesn’t like Sam,” he said matter-of-factly, not looking up.
“Sorry?” Jenny couldn’t quite believe what he’d said. The hairs on her arms prickled.
“Daddy doesn’t like Sam.”
“I’m sure he does, Freddie.”
“I know that he doesn’t.” He picked a large white flower and rolled the stem between his fingers.
She glanced up sharply at Ollie, a dark figure in his battered Barbour. Surely Freddie was wrong. But then why had he said it?
As if sensing her gaze, Ollie stood up and walked toward them, brushing flakes of green moss off his trousers. “Pizza?”
Freddie jumped up. “Pizza!”
They retraced their steps through the sun-dappled avenues of tombs in silence. A man in green overalls passed them with a wheelbarrow full of small chunks of broken stone. He stopped. “Ah, you mustn’t pick the flowers, lad,” he said, looking at the plucked flower in Freddie’s hand.
“Sorry.” Freddie looked down at his offending hand, bit his lip. He hated being told off by strangers.
“Eh, it’s alright.” The gardener looked at Jenny and winked. “You just make sure you give it to your pretty mum, eh?”
In her horror she stepped backward, the heel of her shoe catching on the crumbling stonework of Edward Ebenezer Stewart’s final resting place. Her ankle turned and she slipped and she dropped her handbag. The tableau froze. Her on the old grave. Tampax and phone and chewing gum rolling out of her handbag. A sharp pain in her ankle. She shut her eyes, wishing that the grave would open up and she could just sink into its dank depths until the awful moment passed. This not being an option, she scrambled back to the ground, noting with renewed mortification that Freddie had picked up the Tampax and was examining it carefully as if it were a rare albino beetle. She snatched it off him and shoved it back into her handbag.
“You alright, love?” asked the gardener, smirking.
“Fine!” She determinedly carried on walking, knees stinging. Freddie ran on ahead of them now. “God, I’m sorry,” she said stiffly, mortified, unable to look at Ollie.
Ollie stopped. “Jenny. You don’t need to apologize for anything.” He put his hands firmly on her shoulders, demanding that she look at him. She looked at him and saw that his lovely dark eyes were creased with repressed laughter. Clearly, he found the idea that she might get mistaken for his wife hilariously funny.
She was a joke.
Twenty-five
I’m getting restless. The house is swelling with the unseasonal heat. I can hear minute cracks spidering inside the bricks, Muswell Hill’s clay soil beneath the house’s foundations contracting, hardening, threatening number thirty-three with subsidence problems. Freddie is outdoors a lot now, stretching, strengthening those skinny, bendy limbs, jumping, naked but for his white pants, ya-ya-yahooing, throwing himself off that trampoline so that he’s a flying wild-haired angel cut out of north London’s paddling pool sky.
Cecille is watching Freddie, enjoying him, laughing, her river of brown hair flicky and sheeny in the sunlight. She is wearing a denim miniskirt that shows off her slim brown legs. It did not travel over from France with her and it bears the Topshop label, like so many of her new purchases. The French square’s pressed navy sweater hasn’t made an appearance for a while, I realize. She slings her weight lazily to one hip, a new feline sexuality about her I’ve never noticed before. She yawns, tired because she and Ollie were up last night until one in the morning drinking beers in the garden, beneath the warm black sky and the stars sharp as cookie cutters. Yeah, I’m jealous.
So I catch a thermal down the hill, buffeting over the cool air that hangs above the black, still spots of Hampstead ponds, through the nitrate fug of Camden to check in on Jenny. Well, Sam actually. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this Dominique business that’s been rumbling for weeks. Who the hell is she? And what’s she got to do with Tash, of all bloody people? Jenny’s wedding date is rushing toward us all now. I need to find out.
Jenny needs to find out, even if she doesn’t know it yet.
I enter through the open balcony window of Sam and Jenny’s apartment. Bingo! Jenny isn’t at home. Sam is. But who is this powdering her nose in the marble bathroom? Oh, damn, his mother, Penelope, the battle-axe from Sussex with the overactive salivary glands. She spits when she talks and little strings of saliva link her upper and lower teeth like a brace when she smiles. She creates a dust bowl of perfume wherever she goes too. The perfume is so strong and pervasive, as if it’s made of those nanoparticles that are so small they can pierce the epidermis. She should only be allowed in well-ventilated areas.
“Her phone’s still on answer?” Penelope says tersely, applying a layer of powder to her face thick as pollen. “Surely she knows I’m here to discuss the floral arrangements.”
Sam pushes up his shirtsleeve and glances at his Rolex. “Give her a minute, Mum. She’s probably just caught in traffic.”
“I’m not even going to ask where she is, Sam,” Penelope sniffs. Which is her way of asking.
“She’s not in Muswell Hill, actually. She’s having her roots done.”
“Thank goodness.” She laughs shrilly. “Not like her.”
What a cow! I think we can safely declare Penelope to be the mother-in-law from hell.
“We’re going to a party tonight.”
Penelope sits down at the kitchen table, spreading her hands on the surface so that the veins pop out like pipes. She examines her manicure in loaded silence. “That’s nice.”
“What?” says Sam.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Mum. I know that face.”
“I’m concerned about Jenny. Very concerned, Sammy.” She spits a fine coat of drizzle on her son’s hand. “She’s not playing ball on the wedding. Everyone’s waiting for her to get back to them. It’s not like she’s not had many offers of help. Did I tell you that Clarissa Ridgemont’s daughter has offered to give her a free makeup session? She’s waiting for a yea or a nay too.” She shakes her head. “It just looks like bad manners, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Sam says wearily.
Penelope gives him one of those scrutinizing looks that only mothers give. “Is everything okay between you, darling?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He is a man who could lie to anyone, including his mother.
“It’s just…” Penelope looks down at her hands.
“What?” He slams down his coffee cup. “What, Mum?” He turns the tables nimbly, so that his disloyalty is now hers.
“I feel you should both be more excited, that’s all,” she says, picking her words carefully, like the f
lowers in her front garden. “I remember when your father and I got married, gosh, I was hopelessly beside myself, I really was!” She swivels her gold wedding band around her fat pink finger. She’s going to get buried with that ring. “And your sister. Pip was like one of those gypsy brides, wasn’t she? You know, the ones on telly.”
“Jenny’s best friend has just died, Mum.”
“It was some time ago now.”
“Try telling her that.”
They sit in silence for a few moments. The traffic hoots outside. There is the rhythmic drum of a police chopper, flying above the houses. “I thought the point of having the wedding this summer was to start a new chapter.” She won’t let this go.
“It is.” He looks down at the table, like he can’t look his mother in the eye either.
“The funny thing is, Sam, Jenny doesn’t look like a woman about to get married. She looks…” Penelope hesitates. “I don’t know, fevered.”
Sam throws his shaven head back and laughs. “Fevered?” He drops his head in his hands and lets out a mock groan. “Mum, please. This is not a period drama.”
“Skittish, not happy, not sad, not bereaved even! Not like I was when poor Mark got tongue cancer! I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I lost sixteen pounds. That was the only upside,” she reflects, sipping tea.
“Mum, will you please just leave it?” There’s a growl to his voice now that shakes the air particles in the room like a maraca. He gets up, walks to the window and looks down the street. His eyes flicker and focus in recognition of someone or something.
I swoop over to the curtain rail.
Ah, Jenny’s back! Getting out of the car, glancing around. Up the street. Down the street, like she’s seeking someone. Looking, yes, fevered! Oh, dear. I want to sound out a warning. Mother-in-law’s here! Stop the divving around. Approach with caution. But all I can do is madly wave my nonatomic arms in frustration. I am the world’s most useless guardian angel.
What the hell is the point of me?
Twenty-six
Jenny glanced behind her one last time. No, no sign of Sophie’s hubcabbed celestial chariot, or whatever it was. Was she imagining stuff? Had she lost it, like Sam said? The thing was she’d come out of the hairdresser, jittery on coffee and Hello! magazine ingestion, and was walking down the street to her car, sharply aware of the pins in her ill-advised wedding rehearsal Sarah Palin updo—the overbearing stylist had insisted—pulling at her scalp, when something caught her eye. She’d turned. It was a woman walking quickly away, her beige trench coat flapping open in the wind like a tent, a mass of glossy brown hair piled up on her hair, tendrils loose around her neck. A gash of red scarf. She got into her car—and yes, it was a white Fiat—slammed the door and revved off, starving Jenny of proper scrutiny of her face. But she was pretty damn sure it was the same woman. The same woman who’d turned up at her apartment all that time ago, the one who looked like Sophie. How could she forget her?
More important, how the hell could she forget that Penelope was coming over? And now she was late, for once. Standing on the doorstep of her apartment, she checked her iPhone, which had turned itself on to silent as it so often did in her handbag, and saw she’d had four missed calls from Sam. Anxiety bubbled in her tummy like gas. She knew she was in for another earful from Sam. And some silences that could kill from Penelope.
She would fail as a potential daughter-in-law before she even opened her mouth. What with her bad Sarah Palin hair. Her pimply chin. The insomnia and bad dreams bagging around her eyes, the bad dreams that had bugged her ever since visiting the grave on Sophie’s birthday. The same ones over and over, like an endlessly repeated miniseries. The most popular was the one when she spilled red wine on her bridal dress then on closer inspection realized that it wasn’t wine but blood and that she’d got her period early and Sophie had to run off to find Tampax but couldn’t because all the shops were shut because they were in the country and shops were never open in the country and so the vicar had to ask the congregation, “Is there a Tampax in the house?” And the day and the dress were ruined. After that dream the following day would always pass in a blur. Like she was wearing a pair of glasses that weren’t the right prescription.
The wedding was beginning to feel like a reptile bought from a pet shop that had grown bigger and fiercer than its owners could cope with, and unmanageably hungry. She’d said that she’d prefer a simple, small ceremony but kept getting shouted down by Sam’s family, who had forked out a small fortune. Now her own parents, who could ill afford it but didn’t like to feel they weren’t stepping up to the high-water mark set by Penelope, had felt compelled to donate seven thousand pounds of their savings. It left her feeling guilty and beholden and anxious. And, no, she still hadn’t bought the dress.
Penelope would be bound to ask about the dress today. It would be top of her bullet point list. And to prove to Penelope that she had actually tried to find a dress and wasn’t a complete timewaster, she’d have to relive the shopping trip with her mother the week before, which had ended with a tense coffee and a stale Eccles cake in John Lewis’s fourth-floor café and her mother saying she was “the world’s fussiest bride.”
Everyone said when you saw the right dress you knew it was the One. But she didn’t know. They all just looked like shockingly overpriced bits of fabric to her. She had yet to find the dress. And the dress had yet to find her.
As she fumbled for her keys it started to rain lightly. She stopped for a moment, resting her hands on her knees, thankful that she wasn’t being watched and that she could snatch this one moment to realign herself, catch her breath before Penelope, before the party.
Something caught her eye. She looked up through the bead curtain of rain. Oh! There was someone at the window of her apartment, waving. It was Sophie! Clear as day. Sophie standing there in the frame of her sitting room window, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, waving manically! She stumbled backward, wobbly with joy. But then, slowly, heartbreakingly, the arm disappeared and all she could see was Penelope’s stern, frowning face looking over the mountain range of her bosom. Get a grip, she told herself. Dead people do not wave from windows. Nor do they drive Fiats. Get a grip.
Twenty-seven
Forget knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door, I would just like to know if I am on the waiting list, thanks all the same. I can pinpoint the moment when it all began—collision between big bus and big pants—but I have no idea when it will end. And don’t all things end, eventually? Blair. Bootleg jeans. Teething. Youth. Isn’t that the lesson we don’t want to learn?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no hurry to leave. Not when Freddie and Ollie are still here. It’s just that it’s exhausting and frustrating not being able to make my presence known to anyone but terrified household pets. Ah, the restless ghost of Sophie Brady. Wooo!
It’s so frustrating not being able to alter the course of events, only to see them. Like Jenny’s wedding. She’s about to marry a toad and I can do damn all to stop it. I can’t even sleuth down Sam’s secrets. I can’t do anything.
People have existential crises about the point of life. (Is this it? Well, no, actually, it ain’t.) But I guess I’m in crisis about the point of being dead. It’s not like I’ve got wiser and more spiritual. In fact, worryingly, the opposite appears to be happening. I’m getting pettier, more irritable. Yes, more like a live human in fact! Let me list the ways.
• Cecille rolls Ollie’s socks into balls and lines them all up in his drawer like a plot of small cabbages, or rather, petit choux. I used to just put them in a pile on the dresser. This really irritates me.
• Cecille irons his underpants. Not even I ironed the grunderpants. Beyond call of duty. More than pisses me off, obviously. She has even ironed him underpants for Suze’s party. Does she think he’s going to pole dance or something? Widower-gram! Yay.
• Worse—could there be worse? Yes, there can!—Cecille also irons her own knickers. No woman of twenty iron
s her knickers. And it’s not career appropriate to iron your frilly smalls—not for Cecille, M&S multipacks—while your boss and his son are sitting a few feet away on the sofa watching the footie on telly.
• The new butterfly tattoo on Cecille’s left buttock. Couldn’t help but be rather pleased when it got infected. See how lacking in Buddha-like compassion I am?
• The way she pretends to “adore” Ollie’s favorite nettle ale—come on, you’re French, fooling no one, love—and sits on the back step sipping it, sunlight threaded in her hair, gazing at Ollie through those long lashes.
• The question of my secret letter stash is eating away at me. I still have no idea where they are, which is very worrying. Cecille, mistress of the drawers, is chief suspect. If she does have them, does she have any idea that she is custodian of a bomb that threatens to shatter lives like windows?
Twenty-eight
Jenny maneuvered her Sarah Palin updo out of the orbit of a particularly unflattering downlighter and surveyed Suze’s party, still disbelieving that she’d actually dragged Sam up here, despite the showdown with his mother earlier that day. There were twenty, thirty people in the living room, she guessed, clutching large wineglasses or small bottles of beer, laughing, shouting over each other, their tongues working within their cheeks to extricate bits of Suze’s sticky cocktail sausages from between their teeth. They seemed to meld into a certain type that she’d become familiar with on her visits to the neighborhood: women in their thirties and forties, nicely dressed, media-ish, tired looking, a few pregnant; fortysomething men with superfluous body hair. Yes, she definitely recognized some of the individual faces. The man in the suit and the trilby, the self-conscious twiddle of mustache. The lady with the white-blonde Gaga do. It took a moment for her to realize that she recognized them from Sophie’s funeral all those months ago.
Snatches of conversation slid about the room. “How is your new nanny working out?” “No, honestly, thanks, I’m on the wagon. Total torture.” “I know I shouldn’t say this but she looks fabulous on the chemo. She’s lost a ton of weight, hasn’t she?” “She only gives you the time of day if she thinks you might be able to offer her eldest a work placement; I wouldn’t worry about it.” “I hear you’ve got gay guinea pigs too! Let’s throw a gay guinea pig disco!”
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