Goodness, Grace and Me

by Julie Houston

  ‘I would think a bike is the last mode of transport you’d choose, Amanda,’ I said rather cattily. It still rankled that I didn’t know what she’d been up to with Nick in Italy, and too much wine had loosened my tongue.

  ‘I’m sure you’re absolutely right, Harriet,’ she said sweetly, ‘but Seb’s bike is a Harley-Davidson. I have to say that travelling at high speed on the back of it is one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had.’

  Having been put well and truly in my place, I’d suddenly had enough and wanted to be home. I was beginning to feel hung-over and bad-tempered; I’d had too much to drink and it had been a long night.

  Rebecca, Sarah and I followed Clare up to the large underground car park a couple of streets away from Jimmy’s. It had been the only available place to leave her car and now, footsore and with drizzle seeping determinedly into our clothes, the walk uphill seemed interminable. Grace’s borrowed shoes were pinching my toes and Rebecca had abandoned her broken shoe in the overflowing bin outside Macdonald’s where it sat, demoralised, amongst the greasy remains of innumerable Friday night takeaways.

  ‘Who’d have thought Amanda would have produced such an amazing specimen as Sebastian,’ Rebecca panted, alternating hopping on her one remaining shoe and walking in her stocking foot along the pavement.

  ‘Why ever not?’ Clare asked, in some surprise. ‘Stunning women invariably produce stunning sons.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s so blond and blue-eyed. Sebastian is dark and brown-eyed.’

  ‘He has his father’s colouring,’ I said.

  ‘Oh? Have you met him?’ All three turned expectantly towards me.

  For some reason, I didn’t really want to get into a full explanation of our present relationship with the Hendersons, so I shrugged it off with, ‘Nick’s in the same line of business as David.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Sarah, obviously impressed. ‘My mum knows Amanda’s cleaning lady, and she says their house is to die for. Says they must be loaded. Does that mean you are too?’

  ‘If only,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t got myself into this conversation. The last thing I wanted was for it to get back to Amanda via Sarah’s cleaning lady friend, or anyone else for that matter, that I’d been telling everyone we were their new best friends.

  Luckily Rebecca, screaming a load of profanities as her stockinged foot stepped neatly into a puddle, diverted further attention from any possible relationship there might be between Nick and David Henderson.

  Ten minutes later, with Clare concentrating on exiting the warren-like car park, and both Sarah and Rebecca falling almost immediately into a drunken stupor, I relaxed into the car seat, mulling over the events of the evening and particularly Grace’s reaction on meeting Sebastian Henderson. I felt uneasy. Having Amanda and David Henderson, virtually uninvited, in my life was bad enough. Bringing the gorgeous Sebastian into the equation was, I feared, a potential recipe for disaster.

  Chapter 12

  ‘My very eccentric mother just shot Uncle Norman’s pig,’ I said, spilling scalding tea down the front of Nick’s pyjamas as I climbed back into bed. Nick, thank the Lord, wasn’t wearing them at the time – I was. I could never have married a man who wore pyjamas in bed, but I felt it totally acceptable to be wearing them myself. A present from his mother many Christmases ago, I regularly dug them out from the bottom of my wardrobe once the nights started getting chilly.

  ‘What?’ Nick muttered from the depths of his pillow, turning to look at his watch, which, as always, had been neatly laid on his bedside table the night before.

  ‘My very eccentric mother just shot Uncle Norman’s pig,’ I repeated, plumping up my own pillows and luxuriating in the fact that it was Saturday morning and half term stretched, like the Sahara desert, endlessly into the distance. I reached for Nick, so glad to have him home again after his week in Italy.

  ‘Jeeze,’ Nick muttered again, turning now to look at me with sleep-filled eyes. ‘I know you said she was going a bit, but you never said she was capable of this. Where the hell did she get the gun from?’ And then, after a pause, ‘which is your Uncle Norman? Is he the one that ran off with the barmaid from The Black Bull? The one that your mother doesn’t talk about?’

  ‘What? Oh don’t be ridiculous, Nick. I’ve been lying here for ages trying to remember the mnemonic for the names of the planets in our solar system. It suddenly came to me as I was waiting for the kettle to boil, downstairs. I was just trying it out so I’d remember it when I got back to school. We’re doing Planet Earth and the whole solar system when we go back next week.’

  ‘Well, you’ll soon have to change your little mnemonic,’ Nick said, reaching over for my tea. ‘Pluto is about to be made defunct.’

  ‘You’re joking. How inconsiderate is that?’ I fumed.

  ‘Don’t panic. You just have your very eccentric mother shooting Uncle Norman himself rather than his pig.’

  ‘Suppose,’ I said, suddenly bored with the whole damned thing. I don’t know why I was even thinking about school when I was free from it for a week and I had my husband to myself for once.

  ‘So what time did you get in last night?’ Nick asked. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Late and Different,’ I replied, answering both questions in one sentence. ‘Got a bit of a hangover. In fact, I don’t think I feel very well at all.’ I didn’t, I now realised.

  ‘You’re getting to be a little pisshead lately,’ Nick said, with the superiority of one who hadn’t had anything to drink the previous evening. ‘I blame Grace. She was fairly much on the straight and narrow until Daniel went off with his Australian bit. Now she’s got you jumping out on unsuspecting men while dressed as a nun, and having you out until all hours at the seediest places in town.’

  ‘Mandy stayed the course,’ I said, glancing at Nick for any reaction her name might evoke.

  There didn’t appear to be any apart from a simple, ‘Oh?’

  ‘Her son turned up out of the blue,’ I continued. ‘Back from somewhere. I can’t remember where.’

  ‘New Zealand,’ said Nick. ‘David’s brother lives out there and Sebastian’s been working with him.’

  ‘For someone who never normally notices or remembers any detail about anyone,’ I said scathingly, ‘you certainly seem to know enough about Young Sebastian.’

  ‘Probably because Mandy talked non-stop about him all the time we were in Italy. From what I gather, he is the main reason she and David are still together.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked sharply. ‘Did she tell you that?’

  Nick shrugged. ‘I get the impression from what she said that she and David would probably not still be together if it wasn’t for Sebastian. She says David is away from home a lot, and feels maybe they’ve drifted apart somewhat, but didn’t want Sebastian being the victim of a broken home.’

  I snorted. ‘Sounds to me she was telling you this for a reason.’

  ‘What sort of reason?’

  ‘Oh don’t be so naïve,’ I said. ‘She fancies you. She was just letting you know that “her husband doesn’t understand her” so that if you were up for a bit, it would be fine by her.’ Fired up, I reckoned now would be as good a time as any to tell Nick about John still having contact with Amanda. More than just contact if John was to be believed. I’d hardly seen Nick since he’d come home and hadn’t yet told him about my brother’s apparent on-going affair with Amanda.

  Before Nick could defend either himself or Amanda, or I had the chance to break the news about John, the telephone on his side of the bed began to ring.

  ‘Who? Oh hello, Kenneth, you’re ringing early. Is everything alright?’ Nick shouted into the receiver aware, as always, of my dad’s deafness. There was a long silence as Nick tried to work out exactly what Dad was ringing up about at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. I looked out across the garden and down to the fields beyond. It was only just coming light, a heavy mist wrapping itself, like a smug grey cat, around the still, silent trees.
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  ‘Hang on, Kenneth, I’ll just put Harriet on,’ Nick shouted, handing the phone to me while indicating, by a shrug of his shoulders, that he couldn’t quite make out what Dad wanted.

  ‘Are you ok, Dad?’ I found myself shouting.

  ‘Your mum’s acting a bit queer, love.’ Dad sounded tired and distressed. ‘She’s talking to your Granny Morgan, arguing with her, like.’

  ‘Dad, Granny Morgan’s been dead for the last four years.’

  ‘I know that, love and you know that. Problem is, your mother appears to have forgotten.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Who?’

  Blimey, I could see this was going to be hard work. ‘Mum,’ I shouted. ‘Where’s Mum at the moment?’

  ‘In the kitchen. She’s cleaning out the cupboard under the sink and talking to her mother.’

  ‘How do you know it’s Granny Morgan she’s supposed to be talking to?’ I asked. ‘Maybe it’s the postman or the milkman?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, love. She doesn’t call the milkman or the postman “mother.”’

  ‘Well, what’s she saying to her?’

  ‘She’s really cross with her,’ Dad said. ‘She gave me t’ fright of me life when she started. She’s shouting and carrying on. Having a real go at her.’

  ‘Dad,’ I said gently, but loud enough for him to hear me, ‘how can Mum be having a go at her when Granny Morgan’s not there?’

  Nick was shaking his head in disbelief. I think, in truth, he’d always thought my family a strange lot, with their northern working-class way of doing things. The fact that my mother was now on her hands and knees, cleaning out cupboards and talking to my long-dead grandmother all before eight o’clock on a Saturday morning simply confirmed his suspicions.

  ‘Ay, I don’t know, lass,’ Dad was saying now. ‘She obviously thinks she’s still alive.’

  ‘Look, Dad, don’t you worry. I’m going to call Diana and we’ll both come round as soon as we can.’ I put the phone down. There was something obviously very wrong with poor Mum and we needed to sort it out.

  ‘Nick, you’re going to have to do some shopping for India’s birthday party tomorrow. I don’t know how long I’m going to be over at Mum and Dad’s and I haven’t even thought about a cake or games or party bags.’

  ‘You know that Kit has also invited a load of people over tomorrow, don’t you?’ Nick asked, not quite meeting my eyes as he did so.

  ‘You are joking? Who gave him permission to do that? Oh great, Nick, thanks very much indeed. You do realise the last thing that Kit and his mates want is potted-meat sandwiches and Blind Man’s Buff?’

  Born exactly eight years and one day apart, this time of year had always been hectic as we celebrated both Kit and India’s birthdays. Although I’d warned Kit that we really wouldn’t be celebrating his birthday with a party, I was dreading to think what he had in mind this year now that he was officially a moody grunter.

  ‘I have to tell you, Hat, I think potted meat and Blind Man’s Buff isn’t exactly on India’s wish list either. She was talking about a pink limo, and having her party at “Little Miss Cute” when I was putting her to bed last night.’

  ‘She can dream on,’ I said grimly. ‘I can’t bear the sight of little girls dressed up as if they were off to one of those dreadful American pageants.’ ‘Little Miss Cute’ specialised in parties where ‘tweenies’ had their hair styled and nails manicured until they were grotesque parodies of their mothers.

  Nick put up his hands in protest. ‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m only telling you what she told me last night. I’m sure whatever you’re laying on for her will be fine.’

  This was, unfortunately, the problem. Apart from supervising the sending out of invitations, which India had insisted on doing herself, laboriously writing each one while her tongue hung out with the effort of concentrating, I’d not done a thing towards it. Gone were the days when I’d spend hours planning party themes and creating novelty cakes that kept me up into the early hours. They always took a lot longer than I’d anticipated, and there was invariably a twiddly bit that broke and needed remaking.

  For Kit’s sixth birthday I’d transformed what was now Sylvia’s flat into a veritable rain forest. Snakes hung drunkenly from verdant branches brought in from the garden, and huge, showy butterflies flapped their florid paper wings as they hung, circling giddily, from a makeshift mobile. Kit’s cake was the pièce de resistance that year. I’d spent days creating double-sided sugar-paste animals that marched and trumpeted purposefully around the edge of the cake in their pairs. On the actual morning of the party I’d got a bit caught up in the excitement of it all and went out to hire a costume, suggesting Grace, as Godmother and all-round party good egg, might like to do the same. I ended up looking very much like a dumpy cartoon character in a moth-eaten lion’s outfit that smelled as if the previous owner had actually died in it. Grace, of course, arrived sleek and beautiful in a black panther costume that had all the dads hot under the collar and more than happy to accept a second glass of wine rather than dumping their offspring and beetling off for a couple of hours’ respite with Saturday afternoon football, as was the norm.

  Since I’d been back working full time the kids were lucky if I had time to actually bake a cake, let alone decorate the damned thing. If they were really lucky, it was a ready-decorated birthday cake from Sainsbury’s, which, according to Liberty, was what they’d really been after all along.

  Jumping out of bed for the second time that morning, I realised I really was quite hungover. I felt sick and the room was beginning to spin a little. I glanced longingly back to the bed where Nick appeared to think he could stay a little longer. Sod that for a game of soldiers. If I was up, after working every second God had sent this last week, then I didn’t see why he should stay in bed after a week messing around in Italy with Little Miss Goodness.

  Pulling off all the bedclothes and shouting, ‘Get up, there’s a party to be organised,’ I fled into the shower in the hope that the hot water might bring me round.

  It didn’t. And neither did the mug of strong of coffee that I attempted to get down my neck twenty minutes later. Leaving Nick with full instructions to sort out the kids as well as India’s birthday party, I rubbed on some foundation and bright pink lipstick in a vain attempt to hide my death-like pallor, and drove over to Mum and Dad’s.

  Diana’s car was already parked on the road outside their house and so, God forbid, was Christine’s.

  ‘Bloody hell, you look rough,’ Diana said as I walked into the kitchen where she was making tea.

  ‘I feel it,’ I groaned. ‘I really am going to have to stop drinking. I used to be able to drink whatever I wanted without feeling like I’d died and ended up in hell the next morning.’

  ‘It’s your age,’ Diana said cheerfully. ‘I should stick to cocoa from now on if I were you.’

  ‘What’s Caring Christine doing here?’ I asked, nodding towards the living room where I could hear my sister-in-law’s voice, no doubt talking to Mum as if she were a child.

  ‘Dad rang her, apparently, and she was round here like a shot.’

  Christine closed the kitchen door carefully behind her as she joined us in the kitchen shaking her head, a concerned smile etched onto her face. As per usual she was loving the drama of it all and I wanted to slap her face and muss up her perfectly highlighted blonde bob. Always a huge monarchist, Christine had been devastated when Princess Diana had died in that car crash and seemed to think it her mission in life to carry on where Diana had left off. With her blue-striped shirt collar set at a jaunty angle against her squeakily clean neck, and the vertical crease of her immaculate chinos a perfect perpendicular to her cream tasselled brogues, she certainly seemed to be succeeding.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re both here now. Dad rang me in a bit of a panic and I came straight over.’

  ‘So did we,’ said Diana brusquely, making a point of not offering Christine any tea.
/>   ‘Yes, well, the thing is I do feel this has gone on long enough. Poor old Dad is at his wits’ end.’

  ‘What, exactly, has gone on long enough, Christine?’ I asked, still feeling a bit dizzy and wishing I could sit down, but refusing to be put at a disadvantage .You had to look Christine in the eye – a bit like you might a cat with a superiority complex – or she’d have the upper hand.

  ‘Harriet, you know what’s been going on with Mother,’ Christine tinkled, a condescending little smile hovering around her lips. ‘She keeps wandering off, and now she thinks her mother has returned from the dead. She needs help, maybe a rest somewhere.’

  ‘By rest I assume you mean some sort of hospital?’ I said angrily.

  ‘Or even a home,’ she added smoothly, glancing towards Diana for confirmation. Diana gave none, but stood quietly at the kitchen table, drinking her tea.

  ‘I mean, it might only be for a little while,’ Christine went on hurriedly, little pinpricks of colour now highlighting her perfectly Max Factored complexion. ‘There are some really caring places where Mother would be with people like herself. There are lots of activities that she could get involved in. She’d be able to watch TV and play cards and I believe there are things like bingo and even line dancing for the more able.’ She trailed off as she saw Diana’s face.

  ‘You are a very silly woman, Christine,’ Diana now said, evenly. ‘You were a very silly girl when, despite all the sex education and contraceptives freely available, you still managed to get yourself up the duff at the age of eighteen. You’ve continued to be a very silly woman throughout your marriage to my poor, silly brother who, I might add, should be here, himself, this morning. Now, will you please keep your very clean, but particularly silly nose out of my, not your, mother’s business, and fuck off.’

  ‘Where’s Patricia gone?’ Mum asked as the back door slammed behind Christine, and Diana and I took in tea and biscuits to our parents who were sitting side by side on the pink Dralon sofa. Dad was stroking Mum’s hand, a look of utter bafflement on his increasingly lined face.