by Gil McNeil
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For Joe
CHAPTER ONE
In the Bleak Midwinter
October
Alba Roses
An ancient variety which dates back to Greek and Roman times, these are the toughest of all the Old Roses. With elegant grey-green foliage, the flowers have a delicate tissue-paper quality in a range of soft pinks and whites, and a purity and clarity of fragrance, often with hints of citrus. Notable examples include Maiden’s Blush, a gentle marshmallow-pink rose with a refined sweet scent; Belle Amour, a strong coral pink with a rich myrrh fragrance; and the creamy white Jacobite Rose, with a lingering sweet-citrus scent, which was also known as the White Rose of York during the Wars of the Roses.
It’s Thursday morning and I’m trying to make packed lunches for the boys as quietly as possible so nobody wakes up before I’ve had my second cup of tea. Both Ben and Alfie are still young enough to surface early, but there could be a brass band going at full pelt in the living room and Dan would stay asleep. At thirteen he’s definitely doing the teening thing now, and he’d be completely nocturnal if left to his own devices. It’s absolutely bloody typical of the wonderful world of motherhood—you spend the first ten years trying to get the little sods to sleep, and the next ten trying to wake them up. The only guaranteed way to rouse him nowadays is flicking water on him—although only when his brothers aren’t watching, since I go for light droplets from the toothbrush mug in the bathroom, whereas Ben would opt for the shower on full jet, if he could work out a way to get it to reach that far. I caught him trying to bring the hosepipe in from the garden last week, and Alfie thinks his plastic pirate chest would be the perfect water carrier, and it’s huge. Mind you, there might come a morning when a giant pirate chest full of cold water is exactly what I need, so I’m not ruling it out.
I’m enjoying picturing the total immersion of my firstborn, when the phone rings. Great. Bang goes my attempt at a quiet half hour.
“Oh good, you’re up.”
“Morning Mum.”
“Are you about to set off?”
“Not yet. I’ve got to get the boys to school first.”
“Yes, but you know how upset your father gets.”
Bloody hell, she’s ringing me at seven a.m. to remind me that Dad likes people to be punctual.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can Mum.”
“Don’t forget to bring something smart for the funeral will you?”
“I’ve got my black trouser suit.”
“You used to have some lovely black skirts when you worked at the hotel.”
“That was nearly twenty years ago Mum, when I was a student. And Dad hated them because they were too short.”
“I know, but—”
“I know he’s on a one-man mission against trouser suits Mum but I’m a big girl now, I can wear what I like.”
She sighs, and I feel guilty, like I always do. She’ll be sitting in her dressing gown in the kitchen, looking tired. Family gatherings always reduce her to a nervous wreck long before anyone arrives.
“The only suit I’ve got with a skirt is navy blue Mum, and that doesn’t seem right for a funeral. And I can’t afford to buy something new just because Dad thinks I can’t wear trousers for formal occasions. And by the way, if he goes into a trouser tirade later on, you could always remind him they’re good enough for Princess Anne. She was on the news last night, on an official visit somewhere, with no horses in sight, and she was still wearing trousers, so that’s got to count as a formal occasion, what with her being royalty and everything, don’t you think?”
Dad has always had a soft spot for Princess Anne and her I-may-be-a-Royal-but-I-can-still-swear-at-photographers approach to regal life. Actually, if I could channel my inner Princess Anne, I’m sure my life would be vastly improved—and I could get my horse to kick people if they were being annoying, so it would be win-win all the way. But the last time I was on a horse, I fell off, so maybe not.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine Mum.”
“Well, I just hope you’re warm enough. It’s been bitter here the last few days. Georgina bought a lovely new suit with a matching coat, and it’s got a sort of quilted lining. She says she can lend you something if you like. Wasn’t that kind?”
Charming. Lend your rejects to the newly divorced sister-in-law. Particularly ones with quilted linings. How selfless.
“Thanks Mum, but tell her I don’t need to borrow anything, would you, or she’ll try to give me stuff I don’t want, like last time.”
“You’ll see her yourself, at supper tonight.”
“Okay.”
Bugger. I’d forgotten Roger and Georgina would be around this evening. So not only do I have to sit through supper with my annoying brother and his stupid wife, but I have to thank her for offering to lend me items from her wardrobe which I wouldn’t be seen dead in, not least because they’re bound to be at least three sizes too small. What a huge treat.
“I thought I’d make a shepherd’s pie, and Georgina’s making a pudding.”
“Great.”
So that’ll be two raspberries each and a teaspoonful of sorbet. Georgina’s always on a diet, since her only real passion in life is buying clothes in smaller and smaller sizes. She’s got more outfits than anyone else I know apart from Lola. But Lola’s my best friend, and she buys the kind of things you instantly covet, whereas Georgina prefers fussy little suits with shiny buttons and hideous sparkly evening wear. She keeps all her shoes in special boxes with photos on the front so she never has to search for a cerise satin sandal or a navy court shoe. It’s like an alternate universe: Barbie meets Imelda Marcos, but with a posh accent. Most mornings I’m lucky if I can find two shoes that match. I did the school run last week wearing one black loafer and one navy. I had to stay in the car and then belt home to change, so nobody would think I was having some kind of post-divorce breakdown. And Georgina always has immaculate makeup, even at breakfast. She’s like one of those women who squirt unsolicited perfume at you in department stores—always a shade too orange—with slightly manic smiles plastered on their faces. Sometimes I wonder if she’s secretly signed up to a postmodern version of The Stepford Wives. She’ll probably be getting a hostess trolley next.
Mum is running me through the list of ingredients for her shepherd’s pie, as if I’m the kind of nutter who really wants to debate whether King Edwards or Maris Pipers are the perfect potatoes for mash at ten past seven in the bloody morning.
“Are they bringing Henry and Alicia with them tomorrow?”
Georgina isn’t a hands-on mother, and Roger’s hopeless too, so it’s quite hard to warm to their kids. They’ve both been packed off to the local prep school practically since they could walk, so they’re that lethal combination of snooty and spoilt and not very bright, which private schools seem to specialise in. Good table manners, but such a strong sense of entitlement, you almost want to slap them just to see the look on their faces.
“No, they’ll be at school, and Roger says their education has to come first. I do worry about Roger you know—he works so hard.”
He bloody doesn’t, he spends most of his tim
e playing golf in between annoying all the staff at the hotel, who get on far better when he’s not around. The hotel’s been in the family for three generations now, and was a much happier place when Granddad was in charge, by all accounts. Even Dad was less useless and bossy than Roger, who likes to patrol round in the evenings, steadily getting drunker and drunker and playing the genial host, and then falling asleep in the office behind Reception. In fact he passes out so regularly that the staff have taken to calling him “Roger and Out.”
“Is he still finding time to play lots of golf?”
“Yes, but don’t forget he’s on the committee this year, so he has to be there as much as he can, and your father thinks he’s got a good chance of becoming captain next year.”
God, he’ll be even more unbearable if he becomes captain. I bet he’ll get a special jacket, and wear it all the time. He’ll probably get a second one to sleep in. Dad will be thrilled though—he’s been trying to get Roger to the dizzy heights of captaincy for years.
“That’s great Mum. Look, I better go so I’m ready to leave on time.”
“Well drive safely love, and we’ll expect you around lunchtime shall we?”
“Teatime Mum. I told you yesterday, there’s no way I can get from South London to Devon in three hours, not unless I hire a helicopter, and we know what happened last time—he ended up covered in mud.”
“That wasn’t Roger’s fault Molly, you know that.”
“I’ll see you later Mum.”
It bloody well was his fault. He was determined we needed a helicopter landing spot at the hotel, to attract a better class of clientele. Even though the hotel’s managed to survive perfectly well without guests arriving by air, apart from the RAF pilot who parachuted onto the roof of the kitchen during the War—we’ve still got his photograph up behind the bar. Granddad invited his squadron to dinner and there’s a picture of them all raising a glass. Apparently they drank the bar dry that night, and one of the waitresses went missing for three days. But when Dad took over he went for a bit less of the jolly host approach than Granddad. And now Roger’s in charge, he’s determined to go upmarket, or what he thinks is upmarket, which seems to mean hiking up the pricings, painting everything taupe, and serving amuse-bouche before dinner. Nobody ever arrives by helicopter, apart from wedding parties with more money than sense. Last autumn a groom opted for the airborne option, and Roger insisted on giving himself a central Air Command role, putting on the orange jacket ready to supervise the landing, but then he stood in the wrong place, and nearly got blown off the cliffs by the downdraft. He ended up facedown in the rough grass by the tennis courts, covered in mud and leaves. The staff were so pleased they practically put the Jubilee bunting back up in Reception.
I finish making sandwiches and try not to think about how much I’m dreading today. Apart from driving all the way to Devon and listening to Roger bang on about becoming captain while I try to resist the temptation to stab him with my fork, it’s the funeral tomorrow. Helena’s funeral. And Helena and Bertie are the only two people in my whole family I actually like, apart from Mum, and she’s definitely getting worse. She’s spent so long pandering to Dad, she’s a nervous wreck. She practically quivers when he goes into one of his rants now. You’re longing for her to show some glimmer of disapproval, but she never does—unlike Helena, who never stood for any nonsense. Bertie can be pretty stalwart too, and since he’s Mum’s older brother, Dad’s usually a bit muted when he’s around. But Helena was the one who was in charge of everything, she used to take Mum out for a tour round the garden if Dad was in one of his moods. She even walked out of a family lunch once, when he was banging on about something—I can’t remember what. She simply stood up and said he was giving her a headache and she’d rather be out in the garden than listen to him being so boorish. He went bright red, and nobody spoke on the drive home. It was brilliant.
I so wanted to be like Helena when I grew up I even practised doing my hair in a bun, like she did. She was so wonderful, and now I’m going to her funeral. The perfect end to a perfect year, and it’ll be Christmas next and I haven’t got a single present yet. I only just managed to pull off Ben’s birthday last week after a frantic last-minute present-buying frenzy, where I spent far too much money. But eleven is a tricky age for birthdays—young enough to still want balloons and cake, but old enough to want something more grown-up than party games. We had a cinema-and-pizza party in the end: fifteen eleven-year-olds in the dark, with popcorn and ice cream. God knows what I was thinking, but I pity the poor people who got our seats for the next screening. And now we’ve bypassed the mellow fruitfulness of autumn and gone straight into freezing October fog and belting rain. All the shops are full of tinsel, and if I don’t sort something out in the next few weeks when the sale of this house goes through, Mary and Joseph won’t be the only ones looking at stables as a possible venue for Christmas lunch. And to top it all I’ve got the funeral of the person I liked most in my entire family. And I’m not allowed to wear trousers. Dear God.
“Mum?”
Bugger. Alfie’s up.
“Yes love?”
“Can I have bacon?”
“No, it’s a school morning Alfie. It’s cereal today.”
“I need bacon, I really do.”
He’s still half-asleep, with his hair sticking up in tufts and his pyjamas on inside out.
“What happened to your PJs love?”
“They were itchy, so I turned them round. That was very clever, wasn’t it Mum?”
“Yes love. Do you want apple juice or milk?”
Please let him not start wearing all his clothes inside out. School mornings are tricky enough already.
“Orange.”
“Orange what?”
He grins.
“Juice.”
“Alfie.”
“Please. Orange juice, please.”
“That’s better. I might make toast and honey?”
He claps, which makes me smile. It’s always nice to get a round of applause first thing in the morning.
“Can I have cartoons?”
“Yes, but only for half an hour, and very quietly.”
He skips off into the living room. It really doesn’t take much to make your morning perfect when you’re six. Despite all sorts of dramas going on around you, if there’s still toast and honey, and clandestine cartoons, everything is right with the world. Perhaps I should try to channel my inner six-year-old rather than my Princess Anne—I’ve got a much better chance of pulling that off, although I’m not sure kids do that well with Peter Pan parents busy trying to pretend they’re not grown-ups. It’s hard enough to navigate adolescence without your parents sharing your tastes in music and wearing the same clothes, and they’ve got enough to cope with after the divorce.
After the initial shock and humiliation of discovering Pete had been having an affair, it’s the only thing I really mind about: how the boys will feel about it all. So far it’s been fine—more than fine, if I’m honest. It feels like there’s much more room for everyone without Pete sitting at the head of the table dominating everything, giving us all lectures about the importance of good table manners, while our food went cold. Making everything about Him, and banging on about the proper way to behave. Things are so much calmer now, we’ve recalibrated our family life over the past year, and it’s definitely an improvement, a real improvement. Which does beg the question what on earth was I doing treading water in a marriage that hadn’t been working for ages, when everyone seems so much happier now that the divorce is over and our new family life is starting to emerge.
So that’s one more thing to feel guilty about. If I’d been devastated or heartbroken, it would have been more in keeping somehow. I’d be the ubiquitous Good Wife dealt a cruel blow. But instead there was a quiet kind of relief about it all. And spending so many years just ticking along is definitely not what I was hoping for when I was twenty-three and getting married and the future seemed so shiny and
full of promise. I can’t work out when I turned into the maternal version of a tugboat, chugging along towing my flotilla of boys, carefully navigating around any potential tricky bits. But it does dent your confidence, realising you’ve chugged yourself right into dry dock. I was so busy keeping everything calm and quiet I hadn’t spotted the captain was about to jump ship. I can’t help thinking that with such a lack of skill at forecasting when something is about to go totally tits-up, I shouldn’t really be left in charge of the average domestic appliance, let alone three growing boys. Someone with a clipboard will probably press the doorbell one morning soon and say “Seriously? Don’t you think we should start you off with something a bit simpler, like a rabbit, and see how you get on?” So I’d better make sure I salvage something positive from the wreckage. A whole new family life, with more fun and less chugging along. Although possibly not today, what with the funeral and everything.
I take Alfie his toast, and receive another round of applause. I’m really going to miss this house, even though while I was using all my free time to redecorate, Pete was using his to have an affair with his school secretary. I’d just finished the dining room when he announced he wanted a divorce so he could marry Janice, with her high heels and little angora cardigans. Perky and petite. She collects glass animals—and other people’s husbands, apparently. Still, she who laughs last laughs the longest.
Looking back, I can’t quite pinpoint when Pete changed from the young radical who wanted to change the world into Peter, the headmaster of the kind of private school where the parents pay a small fortune in fees precisely to ensure that the world doesn’t change at all, thank you very much. When I dropped the boys off in the park for their Sunday afternoon paternal moment last week, he was wearing a new jogging outfit, with Janice in a matching one, with a tiny pink vest. For a moment I hardly recognised him, he looked so different. I can’t imagine any circumstances where we’d have gone jogging together. And not only because I often run into kids from my school when I’m out, and if they saw one of their teachers in a special jogging outfit, they’d just run along behind you, making comments. It gave me quite a jolt, realising just how much he’d changed. Jogging along, with a special new watch to measure his pulse, busy fretting about what canapés to serve to the parents at Musical Evenings, while I’m teaching at the local secondary school and trying to find new ways to engage the interest of fourteen-year-olds who couldn’t really give a fuck about the causes of the First World War, although they can get you a new laptop at a bargain price whenever you want one. Still, it’s not all bad; at least I don’t have to take up jogging.
