by Lucy Diamond
‘So, this is a lovely surprise,’ Julia drawled, sitting down at Frankie’s table and somehow managing to make her words sound as if she meant the complete opposite. She was wearing really dark burgundy lipstick and had swept her curly hair back into an impressively tight bun, with a long black pinafore, white short-sleeved stretchy top and a pair of gold trainers to complete the look. ‘Secret meetings, eh? Well, well, well. Interesting relationship dynamic you and my ex have got going on there, then. What else are you up to that he doesn’t know about?’
Frankie ignored the jibe. ‘I just wanted to see you, woman-to-woman,’ she began, trying to keep her cool. ‘And I guess what I want more than anything is to assure you that, growing up, Fergus has had nothing but love.’
‘My Fergus, you mean,’ Julia put in, wagging a finger. ‘My son.’
‘Your son,’ Frankie agreed. ‘He’s a really happy kid, his enthusiasm and love of life know no bounds. He’s growing up into such a lovely boy.’
‘Yep,’ Julia said irritably, as if Frankie was telling her something she already knew. She ripped open two sugar packets and stirred them into her coffee. ‘And?’
‘Craig’s been a great dad,’ Frankie went on, even though she could feel her nerve starting to falter. ‘And I’ve done my best too, to make every day a good one for Fergus, to teach him, to help him, to make him laugh.’
‘Right.’ Julia eyed her over the mug. ‘And you’re telling me this . . . why? To make me feel bad for not having been there? Or am I meant to be bowled over by gratitude?’
God, she didn’t half know which buttons to press, Frankie thought, feeling her skin prickling. Look at her sitting there, sneering so contemptuously, when Frankie was just trying to make things better, to open up a new, more civil communication channel. ‘I’m telling you because I absolutely love that boy,’ she replied steadily. ‘And because I just want what’s best for him.’
‘Right,’ said Julia again. Her nostrils flared as she breathed out crossly and her eyes were hard. ‘I get it. And now I’m guessing you’re going to say that what’s best for him is to stay right where he is, with dear, devoted Craig and kind, loving Frankie and—’
‘No,’ Frankie interrupted, trying to keep her voice even, despite the fact that Julia was clearly doing her damnedest to rile her. ‘I wasn’t going to say that. I think Fergus should see you. Of course he should. You’re his mum.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that, love,’ said Julia, but Frankie could tell she hadn’t been expecting the comment. ‘So what are you suggesting?’ she asked after a moment.
Now they were getting to it. ‘I guess I’m interested in what your ideal resolution to all of this is,’ Frankie replied slowly. ‘Genuine question. What would you like to happen? When you turned up at the flat that first time – what were you hoping for?’
Julia actually looked taken aback to be asked, but then, a split-second later, her eyes resumed their narrowing, as if she suspected Frankie of laying some kind of trap. ‘Well, to have Fergus back, of course,’ she replied warily. ‘To have my son.’
‘To have him full-time: that’s what you want, is it?’ Frankie asked, clarifying. ‘That’s what you’ve instructed your solicitor?’
Again, that mistrustful side-eye, that are-you-for-real? glance. ‘Sure,’ Julia said. ‘I mean, the way I see it, Craig’s had him for four years without me getting a look-in. Fair’s fair.’
She wasn’t thinking of Fergus as an actual person in his own right at this point, that was the crucial thing, Frankie realized. For Julia, he was still an object to be tussled over, a bargaining chip. ‘You know he’s got a place at Saint Helena’s primary,’ Frankie said carefully. ‘That’s just round the corner from us. He starts in September.’
‘Saint Helena’s? What’s that, some religious school?’ Julia shook her head. ‘No way. No kid of mine is being brought up religious.’
‘It’s not religious,’ Frankie said mildly. ‘It’s just an ordinary state primary school where all his friends are going. It seems really great, actually.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Julia said, and Frankie could tell – she knew – that Julia had not even considered the subject of schooling, or how that would happen. ‘I could sort something out.’
‘You’ve got a bedroom for him, have you?’ Frankie went on in the same mild tone, remembering Julia’s words earlier about dossing with a mate in their ‘shit-hole’ of a flat. ‘And you’ll be able to fit work in around looking after him, and taking him to hospital appointments, and all the rest of it? He still has to have check-ups, if you didn’t know, seeing as he was so poorly when he was little. Where is it you work, again?’
Julia scowled as if she realized where Frankie was going. ‘Look, if you’re trying to make out that I’m some kind of unfit mother, just because I don’t have a job or a house right now—’
‘I’m not,’ said Frankie quickly, ‘I’m honestly not. But the court will look at your circumstances and—’
‘Well, they can sod off and all, then, because he’s still my son, and nothing can top a mother’s love. Nothing.’ Julia was getting angry and, if Frankie wasn’t careful, she’d be flouncing off out of the café and this conversation would be over, her chance blown. ‘And I’m not the one writing about every detail of Fergus’s life in a national newspaper for the world to see, either. I’m not the one who’s taking away his privacy every bloody week!’
Touché, thought Frankie, lowering her eyes. ‘I know he’s your son. I’d never deny you that,’ she said after a moment, trying to calm things down. ‘I swear, I’m not trying to get at you. It’s just . . . there’s a lot to think about. Fergus is such a brilliant kid, and of course you should be part of his life, of course you two should have a relationship, but it’s a big deal. The court would look at what’s best for him – and how settled and happy he is right now – and—’
‘I can’t be bothered with this,’ Julia said, pushing her chair back with a squawk and getting to her feet. ‘I cannot be bothered.’
Frankie was losing her, she thought in dismay. ‘He still has massive tantrums sometimes, you know,’ she found herself blurting out. ‘His shoes cost a bloody fortune. He wets the bed if he has a nightmare.’
‘Right, so you’re trying to put me off my own kid. That’s nice. That’s charming. Whatever.’ Julia began walking away, her back stiff and haughty, and the encounter seemed to be slipping through Frankie’s fingers.
‘I just want you to know, that’s all,’ Frankie yelled out across the café, and several people in there stopped what they were doing to stare. ‘It’s not that easy! Sometimes it’s the best thing ever, but sometimes it’s really hard work!’
Julia wheeled round, eyes like gimlets. ‘Fuck you. He’s my child.’
Now everyone was staring at them. The guy in dungarees behind the counter even bookmarked his Brecht in order to pay full attention, just as Julia stormed out, letting the door crash shut behind her. Frankie put her hot, red face in her hands and wished she could rewind the entire morning so that none of this had happened.
Shit. She had blown it. She had made the situation a million times worse, not only for her, but for Craig and Fergus, too. And now Julia might step things up and fight harder than ever for Fergus, and Frankie wouldn’t be a mum any more. The thought made her nauseous. Her pulse throbbed where adrenalin was pinballing around her system, and dismay crashed through her. How could she have been so stupid, so impulsive? How could she have staked everything she held dearest on this one foolhardy throw of the dice?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘Victoria? It’s Robyn Mortimer. How are you?’ Today was officially Bite-the-Bullet day, Robyn had decided. Following the cheerleading we-can-do-this conversation with her mum, she had dug out a contact number for her old boss, the inimitable Professor Victoria Tomlinson, former Sydneysider-turned-Yorkshirewoman. Now, seizing a quiet moment in her lunch-break at school, she had apprehensively punched the number into her phone.
‘Oh! You’re on holiday? I’m so sorry – this can totally wait until you get back then,’ Robyn gabbled, not wanting to irk the one person whose good books she needed to access. She’d walked to the top of the school playing field so as to get some privacy, and made an oh-no-you-don’t gesture at a couple of Year Ten girls who were sloping that way, cigarette packs in hand. It would be the end of term on Friday and she felt as if the entire school, staff and kids alike, was easing towards the finish line, rules and regulations gladly discarded in their collective wake.
‘Rubbish! I’m only lying here turning walnut – in terms of colour and wrinkles, I should add, ha!’ said Victoria. She sounded as if she might have had one or two Aperol Spritzes too, Robyn thought, although perhaps that was just her holiday mood seeping down the line. ‘So how are things? Life treating you well?’
‘Ah . . .’ Victoria had never been a person you could bullshit, whether it was about lab results, student grades or matters of the heart. ‘Actually, no,’ Robyn replied frankly, leaning against the wire fencing and pretending to be scanning the horizon for rule-breaking teenagers. ‘Let’s just say things have been better. John and I . . . well, you might have heard, actually. He’s run away to Scotland with a former student. Which is . . .’ She tried to find a polite way of ending the sentence, until she remembered who she was talking to, ‘well, it’s completely shit, basically.’
‘Oh, mate. I did hear a little bird squawking about some terrible goings-on. What a prick, eh? What a bastard.’
‘Yes,’ said Robyn, ‘but I wasn’t ringing to talk about him, I was ringing to—’
‘Do you remember I went through it myself? Shitty ball-ache of a husband doing the dirty on me, the most horrendous dragged-out divorce in the history of all-time marriage disasters?’ Victoria gave a snort down the phone.
Robyn did have a vague memory, now that Victoria mentioned it, of when she’d first started work in the department, and hearing a story about Victoria going down to one of the labs and smashing up loads of equipment. She’d written it off as a college myth at the time, but maybe the two were connected. ‘Grim times,’ she replied with feeling.
‘I’ll say. But hey, please tell me you’ve taken some revenge on the bastard. You have, haven’t you? It’s the only satisfying, fun thing about the whole rotten, stinking business.’
‘Um . . . well . . .’ said Robyn, not wanting to sound like the weedy sort of person who would just catatonically accept a husband’s atrocious behaviour as their lot, even though that was pretty much how she’d gone about it so far. ‘Not exactly.’
‘I sent my ex-husband an envelope of scrambled egg through the post every day for a whole month, because I knew the smell of egg made him vomit,’ Victoria went on, hooting at the memory. ‘He went mad, of course – oh, he was livid about it, but did that stop me? Bollocks, did it. Anyway, enough about that. He’s lost most of his hair since then – ha! – and I’m now married to the most divine woman on the planet, so we’re all square.’
Robyn could hear laughter in the background, and intuited that the most divine woman on the planet might well be on the next sun-lounger to Victoria. ‘Good!’ she said. ‘Sounds like a happy ending to me. Anyway, I was just ringing – and honestly, this can wait until you’re back – but—’
‘You were ringing to see if there was any work that might be going for you at the uni?’ Victoria guessed. ‘Oh, mate, I would love to have you back on the team! Let me think . . . Well, Alfonso has just taken a sabbatical at the moment, so there’s potentially some kind of vacancy there. We’ve got a maternity leave coming up as well, so . . . Exciting! Let me see what strings I can pull when I’m back in Blighty.’
‘Oh!’ Robyn felt excited, too. She had hardly dared get her hopes up, but it really did sound as if there might be a way back for her. ‘Thank you, that would be amazing. I can update my CV and send it over or—’
‘You don’t need to update your CV, I know how talented and fabulous you are,’ Victoria told her. ‘Look, I’m back in August, why don’t we hook up then and talk through what we’d both like from the arrangement? I’m sure we can make it work between us, all right? Cool. Good to have you back. Hey, and listen: don’t forget the scrambled eggs. That will be a key part of your interview, by the way – you telling me how you wreaked your terrible revenge on the ass-wipe. Got it?’
Robyn laughed again. Victoria was definitely a bit worse for wear. She hoped her old boss would actually remember the work part of this conversation when she sobered up. ‘Sadly, I don’t have the address of his new love-nest, so the scrambled-egg option is out of the question,’ she replied, deadpan, pointing a warning finger at a Year Nine and miming to her that she needed to unroll the top of her school skirt, which she had gathered up so that it was more like a school belt. ‘But I’ll do my best,’ she added, not wanting Victoria to think she’d gone soft.
‘You’d better. And you have a great summer, now. Ciao!’
‘Bye,’ said Robyn, hanging up. Then she marvelled for a few glorious seconds that there might still be this small pocket of the universe where she belonged, where she was respected, where she was told she was fabulous. A place where she didn’t have to police smoking and snogging students, where she didn’t have to nag on about skirt lengths and too much flicky eye make-up. But in the meantime . . . ‘Sasha Higginbotham, will you pull that skirt down to its proper length, please,’ she bellowed, striding back down towards the school building as the bell rang for afternoon lessons.
Later on, having finished work, Robyn was walking to pick up Sam and Daisy from school, bracing herself for part two of Bite the Bullet day: telling them the truth about where John really was. While negotiating with Victoria – if she could even use the word ‘negotiating’ – had been gratifyingly straightforward, she suspected that this next challenge was going to be a whole lot harder. The thought of her children’s bewildered, sad little faces turned up questioningly to hers as they tried to fathom why – why? – their dad had done such a thing was enough to break her heart clean in two. What were you even supposed to say in this situation? Were there any words in the lexicon that could make this remotely okay to an eleven-year-old and a nine-year-old? She suspected not.
Her phone started ringing as she walked through the primary-school gates and she gave a little start as John’s office number came up on her screen. Oh my goodness. What was he doing, back at work? How long had he been in town? Turning hot and cold all over, she jabbed the button to pick up. ‘Hello?’
‘Robyn? It’s Gabby here. From the engineering faculty.’
‘Oh,’ said Robyn, deflating all over again. Of course it wasn’t John. He was living the life of Riley up in Edinburgh and probably hadn’t even thought about her – or work – since he’d left. ‘Hello. Is everything all right?’ she remembered to say in the next moment. It was probably something tedious concerning John’s dismissal, she thought glumly, wandering through to the juniors’ playground.
‘Yes,’ replied Gabby. ‘We had a message from John the other day with his new postal address, for any mail to be sent on to him,’ she went on, ‘and I’ve just had a call from a Professor – Tomlinson? – asking me to urgently pass the address on to you. Something about . . .’ Her voice was becoming more doubtful by the second. ‘Ah, I might have got this wrong, but . . . scrambled egg?’
Robyn let out a snort of laughter as she pieced all of this together. What was Victoria like? ‘Thank you,’ she managed to say. ‘Don’t worry, that makes perfect sense. If you could just email me those details, that would be very helpful. You’ve got my email address, haven’t you? Great. Thanks very much.’
She gave another snigger of amusement as she reached the edge of the playground, imagining John’s face if she really did send him an envelope full of scrambled egg. It was actually kind of tempting.<
br />
‘Hi, how are you?’ She hadn’t noticed Beth Broadwood walking up next to her. ‘You look – dare I say it? – more like your usual self. How’s it going?’
Robyn was still smirking. ‘I know this might sound childish,’ she said, ‘but I’ve just been given John’s new address. And I was wondering . . . if you were a gorgeous young twenty-two-year-old shacked up with a much older man, what would you be most horrified to see arriving in the post for him?’
Beth didn’t reply immediately and for a moment Robyn thought she hadn’t picked up on her meaning. But then Beth raised a mischievous eyebrow. ‘Adult nappies?’ she suggested. ‘Haemorrhoid cream?’
‘Hair-loss treatment?’ Robyn added, lips twitching.
‘Oh, you could have a bit of fun with this,’ Beth said, giggling. ‘You could really go to town. Wouldn’t it be awful if somebody signed him up to all these junk-mailing lists for – I don’t know – pensioner holidays or hearing aids . . .’
Robyn heard herself making a gurgling sound. ‘Or gave his details to the local Jehovah’s Witnesses, saying he wanted to be saved . . .’
‘Yes, and needed an urgent baptism,’ said Beth. ‘That would be a real shame.’
The two of them collapsed into giggles, leaning against each other. ‘The possibilities are endless,’ said Robyn, feeling more cheerful than she had for a long time.
‘Decisions, decisions,’ agreed Beth with a grin. ‘Well, keep me posted,’ she added as the children started pouring out of the school. ‘Hey, let’s go out for a drink sometime in the holidays – you can tell me all about it then.’
‘I’d love that,’ said Robyn, feeling a small glow of pleasure. With every conversation that she’d had with Beth, she’d come to like the woman more each time. Was it cheesy to say that she felt as if she might just have made a new friend?
Here came Sam and Daisy now anyway, both smiling as they ran towards her, and she felt a churn of anxiety inside, that she was about to really shake their happy worlds with what she had to say back at home. But she wouldn’t let them down, she thought, crouching a little so that she could hug them both, one on each side. She had all these great women around her who were going to help her survive this ordeal – her mum and Paula, Victoria and Beth – and she would make damn sure that her children came through it with her as best she could manage, too.
