Happy Ever After

by Kitty Wilson

  ‘Oh my God, oh my God, she can’t see me like this, it’ll be all around school. What am I going to do? Mum! What am I going…’

  Marion grabbed the phone, angling it away from Rafe so all that could be seen as she answered was her face and the shower behind her.

  ‘Oh, hello Mrs Marksharp. Is… um… is Rafe there?’ Sophie’s face popped up on the screen.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s very busy with important family business,’ Marion said sharply.

  ‘But we had agreed to…’

  ‘Yes, that was before the important family business and now he is too busy to come to the phone. I shall tell him you called.’ The matriarch of the family used a tone that brooked no disagreement.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Do I need to speak to your mother?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. Well, if you just tell him I ca—’

  Marion cut her off. ‘Yes, quite. You can see him in school tomorrow. Goodbye.’ She ended the call and Rafe looked at her, tears fully streaming down his face now.

  ‘Mum, why? Why would you do that? I can’t have my mum answering my phone, that’s so embarrassing.’

  Marion walked over to him and started to rub his back in a circular motion, as he had her earlier in the evening, trying to calm him. ‘Look, everyone knows I’m a nightmare. Your friends certainly do. So, let me take the blame on this one; no one is going to mock you just because I’m being difficult, and certainly not Sophie. If she does then she’s not worth it.’ Rafe didn’t look convinced. ‘You had three choices: you could have me being a difficult parent, you could just not answer and incur her wrath or you could let her see that your hand was superglued to your head. Which would be worse?’

  ‘Your mum is right, Rafe. I think she’s just saved your bacon.’ Alice finally spoke. ‘And if it’s superglue, we can get that out no problem, thanks to Google.’ She held her phone aloft to back up her point.

  ‘There, see. Now, Miss Pentire and I…’

  ‘Alice.’ Alice smiled warmly.

  ‘Alice and I are going to sort this out. Everything is going to be okay.’ Marion gave Rafe a steely glare full of promise of a future so brutal she would be amazed if he could sleep, then guided her eldest son downstairs to the kitchen where she and Alice set to work with a large bottle of nail varnish remover, an old comb and an awful lot of patience.

  It took almost two hours. Two hours of Rafe constantly shrieking ow and vacillating between self-pity and anger as they teased his hair away from his hand. But eventually they did it, finally managing to free him and sending him upstairs for a shower in the hope that when his hair was washed it wouldn’t look as if it had been mauled into tiny little patchy bits. Marion dreaded the fallout that was going to occur if he did come out of the shower with his hair all uneven.

  Alice looked at the bottle of wine, measuring its contents with a beady eye. There was probably about one glass left each – both had been sipping as they worked – and she poured out the remaining content into their glasses as they sat around the kitchen table looking at the debris, the comb and little bits of sticky stuff, solidified into round balls with small amounts of hair stuck to it.

  ‘You did really well. I can’t imagine what would have happened if my mum had been in charge of that,’ Alice sympathized.

  Marion bristled. ‘I did as any mother would do. It was most unusual. My boys are never normally badly behaved.’ Alice quirked a brow and Marion decided to change the subject. It was going to be hard arguing the my-boys-are-angels viewpoint after what Alice had just witnessed.

  ‘You really didn’t. I was an only child so didn’t have the whole siblings arguing thing but my mum banned superglue in our house, alongside anything else vaguely creative – painting, Play-Doh, sand. It just wasn’t allowed in case it caused any mess at all.’

  ‘Your mother is a very sensible woman. How is she? Still in Dubai?’ Marion was genuinely curious. Alice’s mother had the most perfect life, was remarkably well put together and as different to her daughter as could be.

  ‘Yup. And no she wasn’t, isn’t, a sensible woman. Truth is, she was and is a very frightened woman who depends upon male approval for her raison d’être. She couldn’t cope with any suggestion that her house and child – and thus by extension, her – were anything less than perfect. Appearances are everything to her, but scratch the surface and it’s an empty, fearful existence. You were fab up there. You were calm, you didn’t make it about you and I suspect those boys are in for a hefty punishment.’ Alice didn’t seem fazed by giving such a candid answer, one that dived down straight past the surface level of small talk and into honesty. Marion suddenly felt comfortable; she knew about difficult mothers. Alice’s praise for her parenting was a rare jewel and made Marion feel far more at ease than she had been five minutes ago.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Marion nodded. ‘They most certainly are. I don’t mind making allowances for them in terms of sibling rough and tumble; I was an only child and desperately craved a brother or sister so I never wanted to punish them for creating the bonds that I missed out on. But there are limits.’

  ‘I think weeing in the shower gel is probably a very sensible limit,’ Alice responded.

  ‘Quite,’ replied Marion with a smile. ‘My mother had some similarities to yours. Not the house-proud bit; she was as slovenly as they came. I mean blow-her-nose-on-banana-peels-then-shove-them-down-the-back-of-the-radiator bad. Old cups of tea as ashtrays because she could never be arsed to get up. She didn’t have a washing basket; she would just chuck her knickers, all her dirty clothes, onto the kitchen floor once she had worn them, waiting for a time that laundry was done. A job that I can promise you wouldn’t have even happened if it hadn’t been for me. I’m not sure how we managed when I was a toddler and too small to reach the washing machine dials. This scar here…’ Marion lifted her fringe and leant forward so Alice could see it better. ‘That was when I went head first into the units because my foot got caught in a thong. I was six.’

  Marion silenced herself as she realized how frank she had just been; she had shared a detail she had never shared with anyone, not even Richard. But as she snuck a look at Alice through her eyelashes, she saw that the woman opposite her didn’t look revolted or even particularly surprised, just sympathetic and understanding. She had to admit that in all her dealings with Alice she had recognized that the woman seemed inhumanly free from judgement. Marion found herself continuing. It was like a valve that had been rusted shut for years was suddenly twisting open.

  ‘Until she had a new love interest; at that point she could drag herself away from watching game shows all day and do a bit of tidying up. She truly believed that one day she would be a contestant, win a fortune and it would make up for her never working. I think she viewed watching those shows as some sort of training for the life she believed she deserved yet had never quite happened for her. Anyway, when she did get a new love interest, well, you should have seen them. She liked the ones dripping in gold best, a sixty-a-day Embassy Number 1 habit and preferably with cars they would rev up and down the estate as if they were at Silverstone in a fully tricked-out Formula One racing car, rather than zooming around the Merryfield… talk about a misnomer’ – Marion barked out a sarcastic laugh – ‘around the Merryfield estate in a clapped-out Ford Capri with a pimped-up exhaust. Then she’d learn how to tidy. My God, did she whizz around with the Pledge then. Any toys I had would be hidden, any evidence of me expunged and her sexiest knickers would be dangled over the radiator as if they were drying, to show what a racy woman she was. I remember one set, it had a basque…’ Marion paused. What was she doing, telling someone who worked at the school all of this? What was she thinking sitting here chatting about maternal promiscuity and detailing her mother’s underwear to a woman who was dating the bloody vicar? Yet now she had started it was like a compulsion. She picked up her glass to have another sip and realized it was empty.

  Wordlessly, Alice got up and moved to the kettle, flicki
ng it on as if she were in her own house and for some reason Marion didn’t feel like taking umbrage. She did feel like talking, though; the floodgates had opened, so to speak. Alice hadn’t interrupted her yet and seeing as she had put the kettle on clearly was set to stay for a bit.

  ‘They weren’t all bad. Some of them were kind to me, would bring me little treats but that wasn’t the point. The point I guess was that my mother wasn’t. She never showed a millimetre, a fraction of a millimetre of pride in me and my achievements. And by God did I achieve, thinking I guess that one day I would do something so great that she would have to praise me. Do you know I won the awards for the most hard-working child in school every sodding year, and not once, not once did my mother turn up to the celebration assembly? Not once. I don’t think school knew what she looked like; secondary school certainly didn’t. By that point I’d stopped striving for her approval, I just wanted an escape and figured that being the exact opposite of my mother was the best chance I had of getting the life I wanted. I got myself into Oxford, you know. That’s where I met Richard, and the last words she said to me as I packed up my stuff and got ready to make my own way to university was that I was a lazy bitch who hadn’t taken the bins out.’ Marion took a sip of the tea that Alice had set down wordlessly next to her. ‘I was so conditioned to it, I went back and did them before I shut the door for the last time.’ She heard a little hmm noise escape her lips as she finished speaking. A reflective hmm that fully captured the essence of how foolish doing the bins made her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Marion, that’s dreadful. What did she say when you graduated?’

  ‘I didn’t tell her. What was the point?’

  ‘And now, how are the two of you now?’

  ‘I never went back. Once I was out, I was out. I haven’t gone back to Merryfield since. No, that’s not strictly true. I went back for the first time this month. When I found out that Richard was cheating on me and for all my hard work, for all my choices, I had ended up choosing a husband as unreliable as the many lovers of my mother. The only difference being that he never turned up with a kebab or called me sunshine.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not the only difference.’ Alice leant over and placed her hand upon Marion’s. Marion allowed it to stay. Alice had never said a word about the ridiculous scenario in the run-up to last Christmas where Marion and Serena had a full-on old-fashioned cat fight, well worthy of her Merryfield heritage, and Alice had doused each of them with a basin of water to break them apart. Marion had a feeling she could rely on Alice not to say a word about what had happened here tonight. Trust was not something Marion had really applied to women before but this woman, the one with the thick reddish brown hair that could do with a brushing and a frame that could do with losing a few pounds, this woman Marion trusted, and before she knew what she was doing, a tirade about Richard, his betrayal and her love gushed forth from her lips – I miss him, I love him, I’d do anything to have him back but once a cheat… It was as if she were a dam that had just been destroyed, her past and her emotions a raging torrent unleashed.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Marion was back in Penmenna School the next morning. She pushed open the big old Victorian front door and entered the building, reaching the office where Sheila, the school secretary, was based.

  Chatting with Alice last night had had an impact upon her. Alice hadn’t left until gone eleven and Marion had found that not only did she not mind, but she had quite enjoyed herself. Marion had talked for hours about how much she missed Richard but could never forgive him. She’d found herself going on and on about how she loved his outdated sayings, how he could sing beautifully but only after a couple of drinks, how he knew what she needed before she did. She talked about how his freckles made her smile, the scent of him used to make her feel safe.

  She had gone on a bit.

  She also learnt that having someone who sat, listened and made encouraging noises was soothing. Alice hadn’t jumped in to try to problem-solve, try to offer solutions so that Marion would shut up and move on to the next subject; she had just listened.

  It had made Marion wonder when she woke up this morning, fully rested for the first night in ages, if perhaps listening was an undervalued skill that people needed to utilize more. If being listened to was responsible for making her sleep well and wake up this invigorated then maybe it was something she should give more credence to. It was certainly a skill she was prepared to utilize in her nascent business. She had sent a text or two to make sure people were aware that she was a Very Good Listener these days. And now she was going to practise on Sheila.

  The last thing she expected to see was Richard in the office, comfortable as comfortable could be sitting behind Sheila’s desk, his glasses slipped partly down his nose as he looked at Sheila’s laptop screen. The woman was known for many things; her wizardry at IT was not one of them.

  For goodness’ sake! She knew she couldn’t get too mad; he was chair of the governors so was entitled to be in the school from time to time. She would have just preferred it not to have been today, the day she had woken up perky and positive rather than exhausted and wrung out. And now his very presence was liable to make her mood plummet. It didn’t help that Sheila was leaning over him, cooing about how clever he was, whilst wafting a plate full of biscuits, complete with doily, under his nose. Who had doilies these days? Marion was fairly sure none had been sold since 1972 and certainly knew she had never been on the receiving end of one in all her years in the school.

  ‘Ooh, hello, Mrs Marksharp. Aren’t you lucky to be married to such a clever man?’

  For God’s sake, he was hardly Einstein. It would also seem that the news hadn’t made it back to Sheila quite yet; that was a relief, albeit an unexpected one.

  Sheila suddenly gasped. ‘Oops, sorry. Awkward…’ She giggled to mask her embarrassment. Okay, the gossip had reached her, as had her granddaughter’s language skills. Sheila tried to cover up her blunder by more talking. ‘I just couldn’t get the laptop to work after the latest update but Mr Marksharp is being terribly kind and sorting out the whole thing for me.’

  Marion felt herself suck in air and without meaning to she could feel her lips begin to purse. Great. Here was Richard Marksharp, laptop saviour, and Mrs Marksharp, sour old lemon. She could practically hear the whole village thinking it’s no wonder their marriage failed. She tried really hard not to growl and instead stalked through into Rosy’s office, the door of which was open, and which she very firmly closed so she wouldn’t have to hear any more cooing.

  She wondered how Sheila would feel if she knew the terribly clever Mr Marksharp had been caught cheating with a colleague. One would hope she wouldn’t see him as a towering genius then. Although knowing Sheila’s ability to gloss over anything she didn’t feel was particularly pleasant, she would probably start rattling off some nonsense about boys being boys. Marion flinched a little as her scathing inner monologue reminded her that it was one of her default phrases for her sons’ misdemeanours. She wouldn’t be using that again. In fact, she had a feeling she may be tightening up on that score immediately. She had been lucky that Rafe’s hair recovered remarkably quickly and had been fine this morning, but the pendulum of her liberal parenting had obviously swung too far. She would have those boys back on schedules before they knew what had hit them.

  It took less than ten minutes for Rosy to agree on colours and designs for the bridesmaids’ dresses, to okay stationery, schedule the cake tasting and adamantly refuse to consider writing vows – she and Matt wanted it to be as pressure-free as possible and no, having their wedding planner write the vows for them was definitely not an option. Marion smiled as she left the room. She could see she was going to get good at listening.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve done it. You really are a marvel, Richard, so lovely to have you back in the village. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the working day without my Candy Crush running; it breaks the time up so nicely. And then we had
this silly update on the network system…’

  ‘It was an absolute pleasure, Sheila. Everyone needs a little bit of downtime through the day. If you’ll excuse me a minute – Marion! Marion…’

  Marion had already opened the door and was heading down the granite steps at speed. It had been tough having him around last night at supper; it cut a little too close to the bone. She really wasn’t keen on him turning up at school as well. For a man who had spent the last few years rushed off his feet he seemed to be finding a remarkable amount of leisure time.

  ‘Marion!’ He wasn’t giving up easily.

  ‘Yes?’ she snapped, turning and facing him.

  ‘I was hoping you might be coming to the PTA meeting in a bit?’

  ‘I hardly have the time, Richard, not these days.’

  ‘I thought I would go.’ His chin dipped into his chest. He had always been rubbish at hiding his emotions but Marion wasn’t going to take the blame for his disappointment.

  ‘Jolly good, see what you think and feed back to me later.’ It would do no harm to have eyes and ears there when she wasn’t. She wanted to get to St Michael’s Mount today and have a talk with the family there. She was sure they could easily monetize such a fabulous setting much more efficiently than they were.

  ‘Later?’ Richard’s face perked up. ‘Yes, I could do that, shall I pop home… um, to yours,’ he corrected, and Marion knew how that would cost him, ‘afterwards? I could take you to lunch?’

  ‘I said no to lunch yesterday, Richard. I meant feed back by text; there’s no need to give the boys false hope by turning up every day. I think perhaps if you limit your visits to the weekend and when I need you, that would be best. Now if you’ll excuse me, I really do have to be getting on.’ Marion wished she had a fan she could clasp shut firmly or a velvet cloak she could sweep around her in a movement of dismissal but alas, she would have to rely on what was at her disposal, and that was bucketloads of sass. She turned pointedly on her heel, huffed down the school steps and stalked back to the car park, aware of his eyes watching her every move as she left.