by Fiona Gibson
‘Great, well, just don’t let the fucker break your heart again, that’s all.’
I straighten up, unable to determine whether or not he’s joking. ‘It’s just a drink because he happens to be in London, Stu. It’s nothing.’
‘Yeah,’ he mumbles, ‘I just don’t want to see you being messed around, that’s all.’
My heart seems to soften, and I step towards him and hug him tightly. ‘You’re so lovely and caring, you know that? But I was sixteen then, and I’m forty-six now. No one’s going to mess me around.’
Chapter Eighteen
Despite a late night with Mo and the gang, Cam seems oddly keen to accompany me and his grandma on our day out. Not only to Little Cambersham village hall but firstly – and even more surprisingly – to the enormous out-of-town shopping mall that Mum favours.
‘Just fancy a day out,’ he says, climbing into the passenger seat of my car.
‘Are you sure, love? I mean, we’re choosing Mum’s dress first and I know how much you hate shopping …’
‘Aw, that won’t take too long, will it?’ His face pales. ‘Stu didn’t mention—’
I laugh. ‘Ah, so he suggested you should come, did he?’
Cam shakes his hair out of his eyes. ‘He just thought, y’know, that I could be a sort of …’
‘A buffer,’ I suggest.
He nods and grins. ‘Yeah. Or a referee, I guess.’
I pull away from the parking space and smile, grateful to my son, and to Stu, despite him being so prickly last night.
We pick up Mum, with Cam obligingly moving into the back seat, from which he gazes serenely at the sprawl of retail parks and car showrooms as we edge our way through the suburbs towards the mall. Mum loves a mall, or a ‘shopping arcade’, as she still calls them, viewing them as a vast, multi-stored version of Goldings back in Bradford: everything under one roof, no need to negotiate the outside at all.
On arrival, as predicted, she wants to make a beeline for Phase Eight while Cam ambles off to Starbucks. Eschewing the idea of a traditional wedding dress – thank heavens – Mum has decided to opt for the ‘classy frock’ option. However, Phase Eight fails to yield delights … as do Hobbs, Jaeger, LK Bennett, Monsoon and a whole host of other stores which I’d never heard of but seemed perfectly promising to me. I suggest John Lewis, with its many concessions – ‘I’m getting married, I need to see the full ranges!’ – and, with inspiration rapidly swilling away, Marks and Spencer. Mum snorts derisively. ‘Maybe if I was just after a pair of pants.’
Onwards we tramp, with Mum shunning the offerings at Laura Ashley, Jigsaw and Coast. To my alarm, she glances briefly into the window of Agent Provocateur but I manage to whisk her away. In Jacques Vert, she deigns to try on a pistachio shift in layered damask, but it’s deemed ‘too mother-of-the-bride’ and thrust back at the salesgirl after being tried on, with bronzer smudged around the neckline.
In a shop frequented mainly by teenagers – ‘No harm in looking,’ Mum trills – she admires a revealing ‘little number’, as she terms it, which might possibly have been tacked together from hankies. Although I hate to say it – and it’s appalling to even think this way – it probably wasn’t designed with a seventy-year-old woman in mind.
‘I know it’s quite young,’ she concedes, giving the flimsy fabric a lustful stroke.
‘It is a bit, Mum …’
She laughs. ‘You never dressed young, even when you were young!’
I gawp at her, remembering that right now I could be on the back of Stu’s bike, zooming down to the south coast. ‘What does that mean exactly?’
Mum chuckles as we leave the store. ‘Only joking, love. But, you know, I do think I have the figure to pull off something quite risqué, don’t you? Turn a few heads? Ha – that’d set the cat among the pigeons with Hamish’s buttoned-up family …’ I nod mutely. ‘I’m lucky,’ she adds as we march along the brightly lit concourse, ‘with my fast metabolism. You take more after your father …’
Well, thank you kindly. While we’re at it, shall we criticise me some more on my day off? We stroll past a garish stationery store, its window filled with aggressive-looking greetings cards covered in expletives. HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU GRUMPY OLD BASTARD … WE’LL MISS YOU, FUCKFACE. Who buys these things? Still, I am tempted to pop in to buy Mum a notebook in which she can list my many faults:
Had the audacity to work when her children were little.
Failed to marry her children’s father – thus denying fascinator opportunities – and now, of course, it’s too late.
Not a very good cook.
Always dressed like a geriatric, even when sixteen.
Fat.
Onwards we plod while I picture my darling amenable son immersed in one of his mangled novels, sipping his cappuccino, still being of the age where he enjoys spooning the chocolatey powder off the top.
‘Are you going to the gym these days?’ Mum enquires as she swerves, without warning, into an otherwise deserted branch of Karen Millen.
‘Not at the moment, no. Not for about six years, actually.’
At first, I assume we’ve landed here by mistake. I have never quite ‘got’ Karen Millen, my impression being that everything is super-tight with alarming cut-away sections, requiring shoulders and back on display and throwing up all manner of bra conundrums. But perhaps that’s because – as Mum pointed out – I have never ‘dressed young’.
‘Have you ever thought of going back?’ she enquires, the hangers clanking as she peruses the rails.
‘Er, not really, Mum. I can’t imagine how I’d find the time, to be honest, and it’s so expensive.’ To distract her, I select a surprisingly simple dress in pale grey silk.
‘Too old,’ she remarks.
‘Oh, it’s not an age thing. I mean, I don’t feel too old for the gym. I just don’t enjoy being trapped in a sweaty room with all that terrible equipment—’
‘No, I mean that dowdy dress,’ she says briskly, scowling at it as I return it to the rail. ‘I’m going to be a bride, Lorrie. Every bride should feel youthful on her big day!’
The sales assistant, a fresh-faced redhead who looks only marginally older than Amy, glides over with a bright smile. ‘Hi, can I help you?’
‘Oh, we’re here for my mum, actually. She’s looking for something for her wedding …’
If the girl is taken aback, she is adept at hiding the fact. ‘How lovely. Shall I leave you to browse for a while?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Mum says grandly, as if the store has been closed to the riffraff in her honour, and now busying herself by scrunching delicate garments in her fist.
‘What are you doing?’ I hiss.
‘Checking if they crease,’ she replies. ‘That’s the sign of quality fabric. It doesn’t crease when you scrunch it.’
Now the assistant is frowning at Mum, but is clearly too scared to ask her to stop the scrunching.
‘How about this?’ Mum holds up a white body-con mini dress.
I shake my head. ‘It looks like a giant support bandage. You know, like runners wear for a bad knee.’
She eyes me coolly. ‘I think it’s lovely.’
‘Well, it is, and it’s obviously great quality, you’ve been crushing it up in your fist for about ten minutes and yet it’s completely uncreased.’ I inhale slowly, trying to quell the ball of agitation that’s building inside me. Is it normal, to become so riled after just ninety minutes spent with one’s mother? Pearl doesn’t feel that way – she goes out of her way to spend time with her parents – and nor does Stu, whose widowed mum still lives in Yorkshire and dotes on him. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit on the … tiny side, though?’ I venture.
‘You just said it was giant!’
I catch the eye of the salesgirl. ‘Giant for a support bandage. Tiny for a dress.’
‘You’re so uptight,’ Mum huffs. ‘I don’t know where you get it from, this perpetual worrying about what other people think. I mean, look at Cameron,
take a leaf out of his book—’
‘What does Cam have to do with this?’
‘Such a lovely boy. So calm, nothing seems to ruffle him …’ In a fit of rebellion, she marches to the back of the store with the white dress.
Well, of course it doesn’t, I muse, irritably flicking through a rail of teeny-tiny quilted skirts. He is seventeen years old. He does pretty well at school, earns enough money to fund his active social life, and will never be roped into the organisation of his mother’s wedding.
‘Shall I pick out some other dresses,’ I call after Mum, ‘in case that one’s not quite right?’ For instance, in case it makes you look like an Egyptian mummy?
‘If you like,’ she sing-songs back as she disappears into the changing room.
With jaw clenched I continue to browse the rails, half-heartedly looking for a dress for myself and wondering if everything needs to be body-con these days. I mean, I thought that was over years ago. But it seems to have reared up again, like a troublesome pimple, requiring a person to eat virtually nothing at all.
Mum’s gym-related enquiries churn around my brain as I gather together a selection of alternative dresses for her to try on. I joined the gym a year or so after David had died. Although it was more than I could afford, I’d read that exercise ‘released endorphins’ and figured that grappling with the terrible fixed weights might make me feel marginally less insane. I only went once. Even grief failed to make me thin. However little I ate, my body clung onto its pillowy reserves, as if they were a duvet – or a quilted skirt – that someone might try to snatch away at any minute.
‘Lorrie? Lorrie! Come here!’
Shit. Mum’s strangulating herself with the support bandage. I hurtle towards the changing room – look, Mum, I’m exercising! – and find her having emerged from her cubicle, encased in the white sheath.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Er, I think …’ I bite my lip.
Mum twists and turns, angling her hips and tilting her bottom hither and thither as if to prove she can at least move whilst wearing it. It’s not that she doesn’t have the body for it. Her figure is enviably trim, the result of a lifelong dedication to Ryvita and cottage cheese – with the addition of pineapple whenever caution was thrown to the wind – plus the appetite-quashing effects of Spring Vegetable Cup-a-Soup (‘Only fifty calories a serving, Lorrie. Shame you don’t like it!’). However, it’s such a young style – and so organ-squeezingly tight – that I can’t help wincing. Mum is a striking-looking woman. She’d just look so much lovelier in something more elegant.
‘Well?’ she prompts me.
‘I think there’s a bit of a bra issue,’ I say, diplomatically.
She glances down at her breasts which, I have to say, are impressively perky for any age. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’s spoiling the line. I’ll take it off.’ Back in she goes, grunting behind the closed cubicle door and reappears, still wearing the bandage dress but with nipples visible. ‘Better?’
‘Erm …’ I grip the alternative dresses and grimace. ‘It’s a bit …’ Nipply? No, that won’t do. ‘I’m just not sure about the white, Mum.’
‘Well, I am a bride,’ she exclaims, and something inside me shifts uneasily. I picture my son, probably starting to wonder where we are by now, and experience a powerful urge to be with him.
‘Yes, I know, but I think you could choose something … much prettier, don’t you?’
‘Oh.’ Her face softens.
‘And less … stark? Here, look – I picked out a few for you …’ I hand her the dresses and, grudgingly, she disappears back into the cubicle.
For what feels like weeks, I peruse the shop with its lime sandals and cream leather handbags adorned with buckles and gilt chains. In a few hours’ time I’ll be meeting Antoine, and I haven’t given a thought as to what I might wear for that. I thought I’d have ages to plan my outfit but the day is rapidly slipping away, and we still have to drive out to Hertfordshire to check on the hall.
‘Well?’ Mum has reappeared, now wearing a fitted cobalt blue dress with delicate gold embroidery detailing around the neckline. It’s incredibly pretty and sweet.
My heart shifts a little. ‘You look lovely, Mum,’ I say truthfully.
She bites her lip. ‘Oh, I’m not sure …’
No, really – you do. And your grandson is probably on his third coffee by now, and I have a date tonight with a man I haven’t seen since ‘A View to a Kill’ topped the charts … ‘Honestly, I don’t think you’ll find anything better.’
She sighs, turns sideways and frowns. ‘It’s not very … weddingy, is it?’
‘That doesn’t matter. The colour is wonderful on you.’
She smiles coquettishly and steps out into the main shop – ‘I need to see it in better lighting’ – where the assistant enthuses that the dress could have been designed with her in mind.
‘Oh, go on then,’ she says, beaming. ‘I’ll take it.’
A clutch of deeply tanned twenty-somethings wander in, all long, highlighted hair and muscular calves. They probably don’t even notice us but, if they do, I like to think they would agree that Mum looks sensational. Minutes later, she is linking her arm with mine, shimmering with pleasure, as we leave the store.
In the next shop, she shuffles and sighs impatiently as I try on a fitted dusky pink dress with a cream lace collar – just one single garment, requiring five minutes’ waiting time – which happens to fit perfectly and does wonderfully flattering things to my waistline. My phone bleeps as I’m getting dressed, and I snatch it from my bag, expecting Cam to be enquiring as to our whereabouts. Just landed at Heathrow, Antoine has texted. Very much looking forward to seeing you tonight.
Mum smiles quizzically as I emerge from the changing room. ‘Oh, you didn’t let me see. How was it?’
‘Lovely. I’m going to buy it.’
‘You do look pleased with yourself,’ she teases. ‘See, it’s not so bad coming out shopping with me, is it, darling? We should do it more often.’
Chapter Nineteen
We find Cam immersed in a novel at a cafe table littered with muffin crumbs, and make our way to the car park.
‘Got my dress, Cameron,’ Mum announces.
‘Great,’ he says, mustering enthusiasm.
‘Do you have your outfit picked out?’
He smiles as we arrive at our car. ‘Er, no, but I’ll find something, Grandma.’
‘It’ll be much easier,’ I add, ‘now there’s no theme.’
‘Yes, well,’ she says, only slightly grudgingly, ‘I suppose it might turn out for the best now that Hamish’s parents won’t be involved. You know they’ve hardly welcomed me …’
‘Oh, Mum, I’m sure they’ll come round eventually.’
She wrinkles her nose as she buckles herself into the passenger seat. ‘They think I’m not of their class.’
I glance at her. ‘Well, does it matter what they think? Hamish loves you. Anyone can see that.’
‘Yeah, it’s Hamish you’re marrying,’ Cam offers gamely, ‘not his mum and dad.’ This seems to appease her and as we pull out of the car park, I send silent thanks to Cam for being here today.
I have yet to meet Hamish’s mum and dad – does he even call them that, or is it Mummy and Daddy in those circles? – and I’m intrigued to do so. Clearly, they are of the landed gentry type, and whenever I picture their home it’s cluttered with muddy wellies, bouncy spaniels and fishing rods. My own in-laws – naturally I regarded them that way, despite David and I not being married – were a no-nonsense but kindly couple from London’s East End, Lionel a tailor and Patricia a doctor’s receptionist. They adored Cam and Amy, their only grandchildren, but passed away – Lionel first, followed by Patricia a mere three months later – the year following David’s death. The previously buoyant couple seemed to be suddenly beset with a raft of chronic health concerns; it was as if they couldn’t bear to carry on living after losing their only child. So, with Da
d in Australia and Mum being too distracted to fully engage with my kids, grandparental attention has been fairly thin on the ground. Perhaps that’s why Cameron is so incredibly kind to his grandma – at least, for a seventeen-year-old.
Aided by Google maps on his phone, he guides us through the leafy lanes of Hertfordshire. We pass through villages of red-brick terraces and Tudoresque cottages. Whilst I’ve never had the urge to leave London, I can see the appeal of softly rolling hills punctuated by the occasional church spire. We pass the gated entrance to Hamish’s family seat, its north turret just visible through the woodland. Although Mum has visited Lovington Hall several times in the year she’s known Hamish, she doesn’t drive and therefore has no concept of where anything is, and seems quite surprised when I point it out.
‘I assume Hamish is meeting us at the village hall,’ I remark.
‘Well, I told him to be there at three,’ Mum says, ‘like you said. But there’s no need, you know. He’ll just say it’s fine …’
How dare he be so easily pleased! ‘Yes, because all he really cares about is you and him getting married. Can’t you see that’s all that matters?’
She glances at me and frowns. ‘Well, yes, I suppose you’re right.’
I touch her hand. ‘Can’t you just relax, then, and appreciate that?’
She rubs at her eyes. ‘Of course I can,’ she murmurs, causing my heart to squeeze a little. It’s no wonder she finds it difficult being so adored; she’s simply not used to it. After Dad, none of Mum’s subsequent men were terribly nice to her. Following credit-card-thieving Brian, she hooked up with John, a borderline alcoholic with a roving eye, then Larry who had the audacity to suggest she might have a boob job ‘for me’. For him! As if it were as simple a procedure as trotting out to buy some fancy knickers. Then along came Hamish, who’s been so unswervingly sweet and devoted in his old-fashioned way, suggesting that Mum move into his own modest cottage a few miles north of Lovington Hall only after they’re married. I hope to God she doesn’t screw things up.
