The Bad Mother

by Isabelle Grey

  ‘He’s always told lies. Pointless lies. Except they’re not, once you start to see the pattern. Some of it’s mind games – putting the other person at a disadvantage, clever him getting one up on you. Gives him a thrill. And the rest is about how it’s never his fault. Big bad sister who dumped him. Alcoholic mother who abused him. He always was a …’ Shirley rose abruptly to her feet. ‘Forgive me, but I’m going to stop here. This isn’t easy.’

  Mitch rose too. He could see how angry and upset she was, and hoped she didn’t blame him. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you,’ he said humbly. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘No, you were right to come.’ She held out her hand with a warm smile. ‘I hope we can stay in touch. I don’t have kids, and my mother died last year, so I’d like to have some family around me, to get to know you. If you want a great-aunt, you know where I am.’ Shirley laughed, her tone light and natural for the first time, and Mitch was glad that she seemed to like him.

  He was already back out on the street when Shirley called to him. ‘Mitch? Tell your mother – warn her – if he’s fixed his attention on her, then he won’t let go. Tell her to take care.’ She slipped back inside, closing the big wooden door, leaving Mitch to find his way back to the station alone.

  On the return journey, he was too exhausted to think about the visit in any detail. Apart from Tamsin, he wasn’t sure who else he ought to tell. Not his sister, for sure: although Lauren promised not to tell her friends at school, Mitch didn’t think she’d manage to keep quiet very long. Nor did he want to admit to Sam why he’d not sought his advice and had acted alone (and fibbed about it), which made it difficult now to confide in Hugo without being disloyal to his dad. Given how reluctant Tessa had been to raise the subject again once Lauren had been told, it wasn’t going to be easy to tell her where he’d been today. Except he ought to deliver Shirley’s warning, explain about Roy’s pointless lies and discover in what other ways the evil bastard was getting a kick out of outsmarting his own daughter.

  As the train neared Felixham and passed through more familiar places, Mitch tried instead to focus on imagining a future in which he had a great-aunt with a successful design business in Shoreditch, a future in which he might be at home among the girls in their art-student clothes beside hipsters in narrow jeans and plaid shirts, and remembered the awareness he’d had in Cambridge, exploring those narrow, high-walled streets all by himself, that he could be whoever he wanted to be. But as quickly as he invented alternative futures for himself, those visions were tainted by the superimposition of Roy Weaver’s uncannily familiar face, by his crimes, his mind games; it made him angry, and his anger made him feel unsafe.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  When Tessa opened her front door, even though this time she was expecting to find Erin waiting on the step, she recalled the morning three months earlier when she’d turned up unannounced. This morning, looking agitated in pale slacks and a tailored blue-and-white striped shirt, Erin’s brightness seemed false and contrived. She’d rung the previous day to suggest they have ‘a good chat’, and although it was difficult for Tessa to spare the time with the B&B fully booked throughout the summer season, she could hardly refuse. At least the kids were still busy with the final few days of term and she didn’t have them to think about too.

  ‘Can we sit in here?’ Erin asked at the door to the unoccupied guests’ sitting room. ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  As Erin sat down and rummaged in her big handbag Tessa inspected the room, which had been freshly cleaned and aired this morning, the curtains nicely draped, the cushions plumped. She hadn’t actually sat in here since her evening with Declan: the memory was pleasant. He’d called her a couple of times since, and though he’d kept things light, his attention gave her confidence. She smiled to herself, aware that she had every intention of indulging herself again on his next visit.

  Erin drew out what looked like an old biscuit tin and leaned across to press it into Tessa’s hands. ‘Pamela gave me this.’

  Tessa settled herself on the couch and prised open the tin: nestled in tissue paper she found three little dolls she had never seen before.

  ‘Pamela wants me to put them back.’ Erin nodded towards the doll’s house. ‘She said my mother took them out when I went away.’

  Tessa looked more closely at the faded little figures, but their significance burdened her so she put them aside. ‘Maybe we should get rid of that thing? Forget the past. Start from where we are now.’

  Erin opened her mouth to respond, but then looked down, inspecting her immaculately varnished nails for a few moments. ‘I hear you’ve been meeting up with Roy Weaver,’ she said. Tessa could imagine her opening a business meeting with that same upbeat tone.

  ‘Yes.’ Tessa had struggled with what she’d been forced to admit was jealousy at the thought of Erin seeing Roy again, yet supposed it was inevitable that the two of them would wish to meet. She was weary of endlessly having to negotiate, explain, mitigate her own relationship with Roy, while she always seemed to remain an invisible part of the equation. Sometimes, she thought fiercely, it was as if Roy were the only person who actually saw her. ‘I haven’t told him yet that you were coming. I wasn’t sure how you’d want to play it.’

  ‘Pamela said he’d sent me a message?’

  ‘Yes, that he remembered you fondly.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘He said you’d failed a music exam or something.’

  Erin nodded. ‘That’s why I said yes when he asked me to go off for a walk with him. Averil was cross with me, said I hadn’t done enough practice, so I wanted to get back at her.’ She paused, her expression unreadable. ‘He must have a pretty good memory to hang on to a detail like that!’

  Tessa picked up on the bitterness in Erin’s laugh, and wondered if maybe she still carried a torch for her first lover, still suffered from the old hurt that he’d left Felixham without a thought for her. ‘He liked the photographs I showed him of you when you were young,’ she offered, trying both to be generous and to bring the conversation back to the present. ‘He wrote that he’d been half in love with you.’

  Erin seemed to wince, but refreshed her smile so fast that Tessa could not be sure.

  ‘What do you make of him?’ Erin stared at her daughter. ‘Do you like him?’

  Caught off guard, Tessa laughed. ‘Yes.’ She could feel herself blushing. ‘Of course.’

  Erin nodded and began to twist one of her big fashion rings around her finger. ‘I liked him too. Thought he could charm the birds out of the trees.’

  ‘Do you want to come to the prison, to meet him again?’

  ‘No.’

  Tessa was taken aback by Erin’s vehemence, and it seemed as if her question had resolved something for Erin, for she stopped playing with her ring and raised her chin.

  ‘There’s something I never told anyone except my mother,’ she began. ‘I’m not sure how much of it Pamela ever really knew or overheard. In any case, it doesn’t matter – Averil never believed me. And maybe she was right not to.’ She paused again, her determination appearing to ebb away.

  Tessa was gripped. Erin was the only other person who’d met Roy, who had her own intimate connection with him. ‘Will you tell me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Erin drew in a deep breath. ‘It’s why I came back. It’s funny that you’re the only one I can talk to about him. Roy didn’t want to meet my friends, or Pamela, so I had no one else’s opinion to go by. And now I’m not sure any more what I’ve remembered or imagined or made up.’

  ‘Pamela must know?’

  Erin shook her head. ‘I’m not going to discuss this with her. It’s best we keep this between you and me.’

  Tessa was appeased: during Erin’s earlier visit she had felt marginalised by the intensity of the sisters’ reunion, but now she was to be central to whatever this mystery was about. She watched Erin glance around the room as if taking herself back in
time, repositioning herself as the teenager she’d once been. Tessa reminded herself that she – a mere seed in the womb – had also been present: it had been the simple fact of her existence that set such vast upheavals and displacements in motion.

  ‘It was Roy’s last day in Felixham,’ Erin began. ‘He was here for a week, and we kept bumping into each other. I was learning how to flirt. He was older, but didn’t look it somehow, he wasn’t tall or big, so I didn’t question why he was interested in a schoolgirl. All the same, I’d been told not to go off with boys I didn’t know. If Averil hadn’t been so cross with me for failing that exam …’ Erin fanned her hands out across her pale slacks, examining her scarlet nails. ‘He took me out along the edge of the marsh, where the ground rises, where there are sheltered places in among the gorse. He didn’t threaten or hit me, he just didn’t let me say no.’

  Tessa was too shocked to speak.

  ‘Averil said it must have been my fault, because if I was telling the truth then my clothes would’ve been torn, I’d’ve had cuts and bruises.’

  ‘You’re not saying …’ Tessa didn’t dare utter the word in case saying it made it true.

  ‘I don’t know. It hurt, but then it was my first time. Maybe he just took advantage. What man wouldn’t? I probably led him on – that’s what Averil said. But I don’t remember wanting him to.’

  ‘You were fifteen.’

  ‘She said I should never have gone off with him like that.’

  ‘What happened afterwards?’

  ‘He walked me home. You see?’ Erin looked hopefully at Tessa. ‘He’d never have walked me home if … So maybe I was just ignorant and silly and he did nothing wrong? It’s all so long ago now, I can’t be sure of anything.’

  Tessa found she was clasping her gold bracelet, and let it go as if it were red-hot.

  ‘But you’ve met him,’ Erin went on. ‘You know him. You know what’s he’s done, why he’s in prison. What do you think?’

  ‘No, no, I can’t believe he’d ever do anything like that.’ But deep in Tessa’s mind reverberated the impact of a metal locker door being slammed and a woman’s aggressive voice: Fuck him! Roy Weaver playing his nasty little mind games. She had a moment’s panic: what if she were wrong?

  ‘The woman he killed,’ asked Erin, ‘it wasn’t … like that?’

  ‘No,’ Tessa confirmed, relieved to scramble back to surer ground. ‘She was his girlfriend. They’d been together a long time. He loved her. It was virtually self-defence.’

  Erin sighed and sagged back a little against the soft cushions. ‘I’m so glad. I wasn’t sure whether or not I should tell you,’ she said, ‘but when Pamela rang to say you were visiting him, that he might get out and come here … I thought it’d be so wrong not to let you decide for yourself. I had to come and put you in the picture.’

  ‘Thank you, but I promise, he’s …’ Tessa strove to put into words the scrupulousness of Roy’s behaviour. ‘He’s very proper, exact, almost old-fashioned. Courteous. I can’t imagine him threatening anyone like that. I really can’t.’

  ‘And it’s so long ago. People change. I’ve changed!’ Erin got to her feet and held out her hands to her daughter. ‘I didn’t mean to cause yet more trouble, spilling out all this ancient history. I’m so glad you think it’s all right.’

  ‘He’s my father,’ Tessa assured her. ‘He wants to be my father. He cares about me.’

  ‘That’s good to hear.’ Erin gathered up her handbag, not looking at Tessa. ‘I just couldn’t forget the poor woman he killed, kept worrying that maybe if I’d spoken up …’ She shook herself and forced a smile. ‘I spend too many hours in hotel rooms with nothing better to occupy me!’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Tessa. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘I shan’t say anything to Pamela,’ said Erin, leaning in to kiss Tessa’s cheek. ‘Let’s never mention this again, what do you reckon?’

  Tessa nodded, inhaling the smell of her mother’s face powder. She was exhausted now and wanted her to leave. In the doorway, Erin turned. ‘I never meant to lie. Averil said it must’ve been my fault and I’m sure it was. And then there was you! The future to consider. I was simply too young to understand what he’d done. That’s what you think, isn’t it? You do believe me?’

  Tessa tried to think how she would react if Lauren came to her with some overheated tale of seduction by an attractive summer visitor, and couldn’t help but acknowledge an ambiguous sympathy for Averil.

  ‘I do believe you,’ she assured her mother. ‘Roy’s a good man.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Even though Blanco was pleased to see him, skittering and sliding around the wide solid oak planks of the kitchen floor, Mitch was hesitant about entering Charlie Crawford’s house. But Tamsin assured him that her dad was too busy with the arrangements for a big party he was throwing the following weekend to care about something that had happened weeks ago at her school. And sure enough, as she led Mitch into the kitchen, Charlie merely glanced up and said ‘Hi’ before returning his attention to his iPad. Mitch was almost disappointed – he liked the idea of defying Charlie for Tamsin’s sake. But after lunch Charlie’s indifference allowed Tamsin to take his hand, lead him up to her bedroom and draw him down beside her under her cool white sheets.

  Heading home along the seafront later that afternoon, Mitch felt as if he were walking on air: it seemed certain now that Tamsin would probably remain in Felixham for the entire summer holidays, which meant that they could be together for a whole six weeks. Plus, when he’d remarked on how cordial she seemed to be towards Quinn, she’d said she hoped maybe the affair was already blowing over. He was happy that she wouldn’t be made miserable, or be anxious about how much to say to her mum. It meant, too, that he could tell her about Tessa and that Declan guy. He still hadn’t made up his mind how much he minded, and Tamsin didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, but it was good not to carry the secret any more.

  For once he enjoyed being a part of the summer throng. He’d never understood before why anyone other than small kids armed with buckets and spades and makeshift cricket bats on the beach would want to spend a holiday here, but now he realised that, for the adults, it was about sex. If what Felixham offered adult holidaymakers was an opportunity for the same kind of blissful island of time he’d just relished in Tamsin’s bed, then the place was an absolute fairy kingdom.

  But it wasn’t only about going to bed with Tamsin. He’d also been able to share his concerns about Roy Weaver. He’d already told her on the phone about his visit to Shirley, about how he’d instinctively liked and trusted her, that she seemed really smart and clever and not at all like a woman with a grudge against her brother. Now he’d been able to confide in Tamsin how he still hadn’t found the right moment to communicate Shirley’s warning to his mother. Tessa still wore the gold bracelet she said Roy had given her, which must mean she wanted to feel close to him, close to a man Shirley had described as self-centred and manipulative, a liar and a killer. At this point Mitch had shown Tamsin the print-out Shirley had given him of the photograph with his own face looking out from Roy Weaver’s graduation gown and hood. Tamsin had hugged him: he was nothing like Roy Weaver, and certainly wasn’t going to start turning into a werewolf at full moon! It was good to be teased and be able to laugh about something that had made him so uneasy, though he didn’t think he could explain even to Tamsin how contaminated he felt, knowing he carried the genetic imprint of a violent man who’d harassed and maybe molested women. Maybe if he’d been allowed to meet the guy it would be different, but meanwhile the idea of his mum cosying up to this criminal was disgusting.

  As he neared the B&B he noticed Sam’s car parked outside with the hatchback door open. Sam was leaning inside, arranging carrier bags and a cardboard box that seemed to be full of shoes. His father straightened up when he saw him. ‘Lauren’s coming to stay with us for a while,’ he explained. ‘I think your mum needs a bit of space.’

  ‘Ok.’
/>   ‘Tell Lauren I’ll wait out here.’ Sam shrugged awkwardly. ‘Probably best.’

  Mitch let himself in and stood for a second, listening to the sounds of the house. He could hear sobbing and shouting upstairs, and felt a sneaking disloyalty that he was glad Lauren was going; the rows with Tessa seemed endless and she’d be much happier with Sam and Nula, who’d find jobs for her in the brasserie that would let her feel grown-up and important. Not wanting to burst his own bubble of contentment, he decided he’d try to deliver Sam’s message, slip up to his room to grab a sweater, then escape. Tessa would expect him to side with her, and right now he wasn’t sure he could.

  But what he found was worse than he expected. On the first-floor landing he found Lauren, tear-stained and wild-eyed, an overstuffed carrier bag in each hand.

  ‘It’s not my fault!’ she cried as soon as she spied him. ‘I didn’t mean to, I just forgot, and I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Mitch followed Lauren’s terrified nod towards the door to the nearest guest bedroom through which he could see a curtain of water cascading down across the open doorway to the bathroom beyond. Inside Tessa was on her hands and knees trying to haul a pile of sopping white towelling off the floor and into the bath. The tiled floor was covered with water.

  ‘What did you do?’ Mitch turned to Lauren.

  ‘I was rinsing off my swimming things in the sink upstairs, then Evie rang and we were talking and I forgot to turn off the tap.’

  ‘Jesus, Lauren!’

  ‘I said I was sorry! She won’t listen.’

  ‘Mitch? Is that you?’ Tessa called from the bathroom.

  ‘Dad’s waiting for you by the car. Go,’ he told Lauren firmly. ‘I’ll call you later.’ She obeyed gratefully, and Mitch went in to face Tessa.

  ‘Look at my brand new bathrobes!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘They’ll wash, won’t they?’ said Mitch.

  ‘How could she be so stupid! The water must’ve been running for half an hour at least. She’s caused hundreds of pounds-worth of damage.’