by Lucy Diamond
‘Alison? Is that you?’
Alison, her hand on her car door, turned at the voice. She’d popped over to see Robyn after work, and had ended up staying for dinner because Robyn had just broken the news about John to the children and emotions were running high. Sam had been silent and unhappy, while Daisy had spouted anguished tears of sorrow. It had been a wrench to leave, frankly, despite Robyn’s assurances that she could cope.
‘Jeanie!’ she said now, blinking in surprise as she saw Robyn’s mother-in-law approaching along the pavement from where she’d parked, a duty-free bag in hand. Jeanie looked very brown, she noticed, although what had she done to her hair? Someone had given her a very bad cut that didn’t suit her in the slightest. ‘Hello, it’s been ages,’ she added politely, feeling a complete hypocrite, seeing as this was entirely down to her. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine, but . . .’ Jeanie grimaced. ‘Goodness, I’m very sad about what’s happened with John and Robyn, as I’m sure you are. I couldn’t believe it.’ She shook her head. ‘Words fail me.’
‘I know,’ said Alison tightly. Talk about awkward, she thought, as Jeanie came to a standstill beside her. Because Robyn was her daughter, who’d been very badly let down by Jeanie’s son, and there was no getting away from that. If Jeanie dared started trying to defend John in any way, or twist things around so that she blamed Robyn at all, then . . .
‘Poor Robyn, how is she?’ Jeanie asked, cutting into Alison’s thoughts. ‘Honestly, I could wring John’s neck, I really could. I’ve never been so disappointed in one of my own children. I feel absolutely dreadful about the whole thing – and me being out of the country as well, while it happened.’
To be fair, she did look pretty wretched about it. Not least because of the terrible haircut. ‘Robyn’s bearing up,’ Alison replied guardedly, wondering if Jeanie was here to report back to John. ‘Doing the best she can. She broke the news to Sam and Daisy tonight, which sounded pretty upsetting.’
‘Oh dear.’ Was that actually a tear in Jeanie’s eye? ‘The poor little loves. I brought them some presents from my holiday, but it’s going to take more than that, isn’t it? Bless them.’
‘I’m sure they’ll be glad of a distraction – they’ll be really pleased to see you,’ Alison said, softening slightly towards the other woman. Anyone who was kind to her grandchildren was okay by her, after all, and she knew how fond Robyn was of Jeanie, too. She was relieved that the Mortimers seemed to be sticking by Robyn, moreover, despite her daughter’s initial fears. ‘How was your holiday, by the way?’ she added, noticing a plane flying above their heads. ‘Did you have a lovely time?’
‘Well . . .’ To Alison’s surprise, Jeanie looked uncharacteristically bashful. Embarrassed, even. ‘Yes, but it’s probably a good thing that I’m back home,’ she said rather cryptically, lowering her voice, as one of Robyn’s neighbours cycled past them. ‘Back home, and acting my age again, too.’
Alison wasn’t sure what to say for a moment. Gosh, was that Jeanie Mortimer being vulnerable? She couldn’t remember ever seeing her unsure of herself like this before. ‘Age is just a number,’ she reminded her kindly. This was what she told all her clients who came to her, doubtful and lacking in confidence. ‘Who wants to act their age, anyway? Not me.’
Jeanie gave her a rueful smile and then her face cleared, an idea seemingly occurring to her. ‘Oh – Alison. I’ve just thought. You’re a hairdresser, aren’t you? I don’t suppose you could do me a huge favour and sort this mess out for me sometime, could you?’ She tugged at a strand of her hair. ‘This is what I mean about acting my age . . . I went and booked myself in for a makeover at the hotel, thinking I was a spring chicken, when . . .’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Turns out I’m mutton after all.’
‘You’re not mutton!’ Alison told her, tutting. She hated that word and the way it made women feel. ‘And of course I can change the style for you. Let me find my diary and see when I’m free.’
‘Thank you,’ Jeanie said, as Alison pulled out her appointment notebook and began rifling through. ‘I’m too embarrassed to go to my usual stylist, because I know they’ll tell me off for it. Deluded fool that I am.’
‘Hey, we all do foolish things,’ Alison said. Goodness me, so the woman was fallible after all, she thought, startled. Whenever Alison had seen Jeanie previously, she’d always been organizing a buffet or in charge of the teapot, the hostess with the mostest, running the show. And as such, Alison had held her up as – well, not the enemy exactly, but certainly somebody better than her, somebody with a richer, fuller life than herself. A person to be envied.
In actual fact, she was just a woman who loved her grandchildren to bits, who was fretting about her son’s bad behaviour and happened to be sporting an unfortunate haircut into the bargain. Your average human being, in other words. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you about my dreadful blind dates when I’m doing your hair – that’ll cheer you up,’ she added, rolling her eyes. ‘Then we’ll see who’s the deluded one. Now, how about Thursday morning? I could fit you in then.’
‘Thursday morning would be perfect,’ Jeanie said thankfully ‘Blind dates, eh? How exciting! A hairdo rescue and some good stories. I might not be going back to my salon at this rate.’
Alison smiled at her, thinking that she really had got this woman all wrong. Completely wrong. ‘Even better news,’ she found herself saying. ‘There’s a big fat family discount for you.’
Family, she repeated to herself, as Jeanie smiled back and they agreed on a time. It felt as if a door had opened and Alison had just walked on through.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Frankie had barely got inside the flat, following her disastrous encounter with Julia, when Craig appeared in the hall, asking in a strange, tight voice where she’d been. And then she could tell immediately that she’d been rumbled, that he knew exactly where she’d been.
Thank goodness Fergus was there, charging down to greet her in his usual manner, by hurling himself at her legs while he shouted ‘Mumma!’ in the most flatteringly joyful way. Because of this, she was able to bend over to make a fuss of him for a brief few moments, her heart pounding as she cast about for how best to reply to Craig without sending him into a towering rage. It seemed, in fact, as if she’d been tiptoeing around him for days now – weeks – trying to keep him from exploding on her. Was this what it had been like for Julia? she wondered, taking her shoes off and allowing her hair to swing down and hide her face while she wrangled with her thoughts. She wanted the old Craig back, she thought to herself. The relaxed, easy-going Craig who’d made her feel happy rather than on edge.
‘Hi,’ she said coolly, straightening up, Fergus still clutching at her hand and trying to tell her about a pigeon he’d seen out of the window. She met Craig’s gaze squarely, noticing how clenched his jaw was. Oh God. Julia had told him, she realized, her heart sinking. Just look at the wounded betrayal in his eyes. ‘Everything all right here?’
‘I asked you where you’d been,’ he repeated, ‘because I had a very strange text while you were out.’ He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and read aloud: ‘Sending your girlfriend to meet me because you’re too scared? Lame!’ Then he looked across at Frankie; no need to say anything more.
‘I . . .’ Frankie felt lost for words at the intensity of his gaze. (Damn Julia, she thought crossly. Why did she insist on making herself so hard to like? When Frankie had only been trying to help matters, too.) ‘I thought it was a good idea,’ she replied weakly after a moment.
‘You thought,’ he repeated, ‘that it was a good idea.’ He folded his arms across his chest, his expression cold, and Frankie’s self-defence mechanism kicked right on in.
‘Yes, I did,’ she replied hotly. ‘Because by refusing to speak to her or go through mediation, you’ve completely driven her to this position. You’ve put her totally on the offensive – and no wonder. It should have been you going to talk to her like an adult, face-to-face, not me. And you should
have done it right from the start!’
Fergus pressed himself against her leg, burrowing into her. ‘Mumma,’ he said plaintively.
‘You don’t know her,’ Craig snapped.
‘So you keep telling me! Which is why I wanted to see her, because she has a right to be heard. Because at the end of the day, she is—’ She suddenly became aware of Fergus right there, hot against her thigh, saying, ‘Mumma, Mumma’ at her, and she stopped to scoop him up. ‘This isn’t the right moment,’ she said, holding him in her arms. ‘Yes, lovely, it’s all right,’ she told him quietly.
‘You shouldn’t have gone,’ Craig rebuked her, not seeming to hear. ‘I’m handling this, I know what I’m doing. And I don’t need—’
‘But, Craig, your way of “handling this” seems to mean goading and antagonizing her,’ she retaliated, the words bursting out of her. ‘Not to mention sidelining me at every opportunity, refusing to discuss anything, making me feel like my opinion and input are completely worthless and irrelevant.’ She glared at him. ‘And I’m fed up with it!’
Fergus promptly dissolved into noisy sobs – of shock, probably, because she never usually raised her voice – and she stroked his hair and patted him soothingly. ‘It’s okay, poppet. Nobody’s cross with you. Come on, let’s go in the living room and get the building blocks out,’ she said, before Craig could come back at her and make things any worse.
He followed her in there a few minutes later, when she’d upended the box of wooden bricks and she and Fergus were sorting through them on the rug, calm restored. ‘For what it’s worth,’ Frankie went on, putting green bricks in a pile for Fergus, ‘I don’t think Julia’s remotely prepared for what motherhood entails, or has properly thought it through. But I do think she’s got a right to be taken seriously, and a right to start again with . . .’ She indicated Fergus with her eyebrows, not wanting to alert him to the fact that he was under discussion. ‘And he has that right, too. What we need to do is make that as good a relationship as possible, for his sake. If, in years to come, he finds out you’ve denied him that, he might never forgive you.’
It was quite the longest speech she’d made to Craig on the matter, but Fergus seemed unimpressed by all of this talking, and even less so by the fact that his father was standing there doing nothing, when he could be helping with something important. ‘I am looking,’ he said grandly, ‘for red bricks, Daddy.’
Craig knelt down beside them and began obediently picking out all the red ones. ‘Sorry,’ he said in a gruff voice after a few moments.
‘You made Mumma sad,’ Fergus said accusingly, before Frankie could reply. He leaned against her possessively, patting her knee with a plump hand while giving Craig an extremely disapproving look. ‘And then I was sad.’
Frankie felt her heart quiver with love for her loyal, sensitive boy, whose face was most definitely saying Team Mumma all the way. She was so choked up that she couldn’t actually speak for a moment.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Craig, contrite and shovelling a pile of red bricks over to him by way of apology. ‘No one’s going to do any more shouting.’
‘Well, good!’ said Fergus in such a grown-up-sounding way that Frankie had to struggle not to laugh. Then he frowned in concentration as he started stacking red bricks on top of each other. ‘Now blue ones,’ he ordered, and they both fell to his command like grovelling minions.
‘Blue ones coming right up,’ Frankie assured him.
A fragile truce was maintained for the rest of the day. She and Craig were polite to one another in the presence of Fergus, but Frankie could feel a tension between them, the air still ringing with words unsaid. She had never really stood up to Craig like that before, had never called him out so bluntly on his behaviour. Partly, of course, because their relationship had always been so accordant in the past that she hadn’t needed to stand her ground and argue in such a way. They’d only really ever disagreed on small things – which film to watch on Netflix, whose turn it was to load the dishwasher – issues that nobody could get too heated about. By sticking her head above the parapet this time, by making it clear her feelings were at odds with his, Frankie couldn’t help wondering how the dynamic between them would be affected. One thing she knew for sure, though, was that there would be no turning back. The bottle had been well and truly unstoppered, the genie long since escaped.
Craig seemed thoughtful and preoccupied. He left his laptop off for the rest of the afternoon and took Fergus out to the high street, returning with a bag of picture books from the library, as well as an expensive-looking bottle of Merlot and some nice food for dinner. Frankie, meanwhile, took the chance to catch up on some work admin, but found it difficult to concentrate. It was as if they were both acting out parts that they’d usually be able to play without any effort, and yet today seemed unnatural and forced.
Later on, after they’d eaten and once Fergus had settled down to sleep, Craig turned to Frankie and asked, ‘Glass of wine?’ in a way that could only be the precursor to A Serious Chat. The Chat of Doom, she thought with a flutter of nerves.
‘Sure,’ she replied, trying to keep her cool. Here we go, she thought, hearing him in the kitchen. Any minute now she was going to get his full, unfiltered reaction to her earlier criticism, and this time she wouldn’t have Fergus to act as a buffer. She had the horrible feeling it would be another case of Craig digging in his heels and refusing to see any angle other than his own.
He came and sat down next to her on the sofa, setting their drinks on the table in front of them. Just by the way he was sitting – slightly forward, hands clasped loosely between his legs – she could tell that he was tense. And then he looked at her sidelong and launched his opening salvo. ‘I think I might give up the column.’
‘Wow,’ she said, taken aback. Kill the golden goose? She had not been expecting that. ‘Seriously?’
He nodded. ‘With Fergus starting school in a couple of months, maybe it’s a good time.’ He swilled his wine gently in the glass, the overhead light catching in the dark-red ripples. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while,’ he admitted. ‘You’ve raised the subject before, obviously, and our friend Julia has brought things to a head more recently.’ He sighed heavily, staring down into his glass. ‘I hate to say it, but yeah, it’s probably the right thing.’ Another sideways glance her way. ‘How would you feel about it, though? I mean, it’s income for you too, and I know you’ve got other bits and pieces of work, but . . .’
He didn’t need to spell out the ‘but’. But . . . it’s your biggest earner. But . . . it’s guaranteed money every week. But . . . it’s been our joint project for years now and will mean the end of an era. Still, at least he was asking her opinion on the matter, she realized.
‘I think now might be a good time, yes,’ Frankie replied, choosing her words carefully. ‘I would hate Ferg ever to feel weird about it, if teachers or parents at the school recognize the name and put two and two together. And we’ve got to draw the line somewhere.’ She hesitated, remembering Julia’s barb about the column, how the other woman had condemned the weekly piece as a cynical money-making exercise at Fergus’s expense. Frankie hoped Craig’s change of heart would seem like a gracious climb-down on that front at least, an admission that yes, she was being listened to. ‘Anyway, I’m going to sort out my dragon pitch any day now, and you’ve got all these other feature ideas,’ she went on, bracingly. ‘We can manage. We’re more than just one-trick ponies, right?’
He nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed.
They both sipped their wine, rather self-consciously – which was a shame, because it was really fruity and delicious, the sort you could enjoy quaffing in big gulps – and then Craig went on. ‘Look, what you were saying earlier, about being sidelined and me not listening . . . I’m sorry. I can see why you’d feel that way, when I’ve gone bulldozing ahead each time.’ He hung his head. ‘I’ve not handled this terribly well, have I? Panic and smash things, that seems to have been my strategy,
in hindsight.’
She managed a small smile. ‘I wouldn’t say you’ve been your most diplomatic, no,’ she replied, then took a deep breath. ‘I get where you’re coming from though. I don’t want to lose Fergus, either. Because, selfishly, then I won’t be a mum any more. And I love being his mum. I couldn’t bear it if that was taken away from me.’ Her voice wobbled dangerously and she did her best to swallow down her emotion. ‘You’re always going to be Fergus’s dad, but for me . . . For me, the stakes are high in a different way.’ She closed her mouth abruptly, not wanting to risk getting into a whole other conversation about babies now, when they’d never explicitly discussed this before. If that was ever to be an option – as she hoped one day it would be – then it had to come from love, not merely as a knee-jerk reaction to Craig’s nightmare ex.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, turning the stem of the wine glass between her fingers and trying to compose herself, ‘I know you feel strongly about Julia, and I can tell there’s a whole stew of resentment and anger simmering inside you. Fair enough. I’d probably react the same way, in your position. But we can’t just close her out and hope she’ll go away. Because she means business.’
He gave a rueful nod. ‘I didn’t want to break the spell, that was the thing,’ he admitted after a moment. ‘I didn’t want Fergus to know the facts because I thought it would be too hard on him, too confusing. But you’re right – we can’t keep it from him forever. We can be straightforward about the whole biological situation, without it changing how he feels about you.’
