The Mother-in-Law

by Sally Hepworth

  I’m not sure what I expected for Nettie—perhaps someone small, sharp, eager to please, like her. At six foot three inches, I thought Ollie was tall, but Patrick is positively mountain-like—six foot seven at least. Apart from his height, he reminds me a little of Tom, in his plaid shirt and chinos, his round face and eager smile. He has a knitted jumper around his shoulders, preppy style.

  With all greetings out of the way, Ollie, Tom and Patrick sink into the large couch and Diana and Nettie wander off toward a drinks table. I hesitate a moment, then follow them.

  ‘You sit down, Lucy,’ Diana directs me.

  ‘Oh no, I’m happy to help.’

  But Diana raises her hand like a stop sign. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Just sit.’

  Diana is obviously trying to be polite, but I can’t help feeling a little rejected. She isn’t to know, of course, that I’ve fantasised about bumping elbows with her in the kitchen, perhaps even facing a little salad crisis together that I could overcome by whipping up a makeshift dressing (a salad crisis is about all my culinary capabilities can stretch to). She isn’t to know that I’ve imagined nestling up to her as she takes me through photo albums, family trees and long-winded stories that Ollie would groan about. She doesn’t know I’ve planned to spend the entire evening by her side, so by the time we go home she’ll be as enamoured with me as I’ll be with her.

  I sit.

  ‘So, you and Ollie work together at the IT company?’ Tom asks me as I plant myself next to Ollie on the sofa. He pronounces IT ‘it’, God bless him. Ollie has explained that technology isn’t his father’s strong suit.

  ‘We do,’ I say. ‘Have done for three years.’

  ‘Three years?’ Tom feigns shock. ‘Took your time, didn’t you, mate?’

  ‘It was a slow burn,’ Ollie says. ‘For her.’

  Ollie was the classic solid guy from work. The guy always available to listen to my most terrible dating stories and offer a sympathetic shoulder. Ollie, unlike the powerful, take-charge assholes that I tended to date, was cheerful, unassuming and consistently a good guy. Most importantly, he adores me, and there is something about being adored. It is much nicer, I realise, than being messed around by charismatic bastards.

  ‘He isn’t your boss, is he?’ Tom twinkles. It’s horrendously sexist, but it’s hard to be annoyed with Tom.

  ‘Tom!’ Diana chides, but it’s clear she finds it hard to be annoyed with him too. She’s back now with drinks, and she purses her lips in the manner of a mother trying to discipline her very cute disobedient toddler. She hands me a glass of red wine and sits on the other side of Ollie.

  ‘We’re peers,’ I tell Tom. ‘I recruit for the IT positions, Ollie recruits support staff. We work closely together.’

  It began, oddly enough, with a dream. A bizarre, meandering dream that started at my Great-Aunt Gwen’s 90th birthday party and ended at the house where my best friend from primary school lived, but she wasn’t a little girl any more, she was an old lady. But somewhere in the middle, Ollie was there. And in the dream, he was different. Sexier. The next day at work, I sent him an email saying he’d been in my dream the night before. The expected ‘what was I doing?’ banter followed, with an undercurrent. Ollie’s office is right next door to mine, but we’ve always sent each other emails—witty commentary about our boss’s Donald Trump hair, suspicious behaviour at the office Christmas party, requests for sushi orders for lunch. But that day it was different. My heart skipped a beat every time his name appeared in my inbox.

  For a while I kept my head about it. It was a rendezvous, a tryst . . . not a relationship and certainly not the relationship. But when I noticed him giving money to the drunk at the train station every morning (even after the drunk abused him and accused him of stealing his booze); when he spotted a lost little boy at the shopping centre and immediately lifted him up over his head and asked if he could see his mum anywhere; when he began to occupy more and more of my thoughts, a realisation struck: this was it. He’s the one.

  I tell Ollie’s family the story (minus the dream), my arms spinning around me as I talk quickly and without pause, as I tend to do when I am nervous. Tom is enraptured at the storytelling, patting his son on the back at intervals as I talk.

  ‘So tell me about . . . all of you,’ I say when I’ve run out of steam.

  ‘Nettie is a marketing executive at MartinHoldsworth,’ Tom says, proud as punch. ‘Runs a whole department.’

  ‘And what about you, Patrick?’ I ask.

  ‘I run a bookkeeping business,’ Patrick says. ‘It’s small now, but we’ll expand with time.’

  ‘So tell me about your parents, Lucy,’ Diana jumps in. ‘What do they do?’

  ‘My dad was a professor of Modern European History. He’s retired now. And my mother died of breast cancer.’

  It’s been seventeen years, so talking about it is uncomfortable rather than upsetting. Mostly the discomfort is for other people, who, upon hearing this news, have to figure out something to say.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Tom says, his booming voice bringing a palpable steadiness to the room.

  ‘I lost my own mother a few years back,’ Patrick says. ‘You never get over it.’

  ‘You never do,’ I agree, feeling a sudden kinship with Patrick. ‘But to answer your question, Diana, my mum was a stay-at-home mother. And before that, a primary school teacher.’

  I always feel proud to tell people she was a teacher. Since her death, countless people have told me what a wonderful teacher she was, how she would have done anything for her students. It seems a waste that she never went back to it, even after I started school myself.

  ‘Why bother having a child if you’re not going to stick around to enjoy her?’ she used to say, which is kind of funny since she wasn’t able to stick around and enjoy me anyway, dying when I was thirteen.

  ‘Her name was . . .’ I start at the same time as Diana stands. We all stop talking and follow her with our eyes. For the first time I understand the term ‘matriarch’, and the power of being one.

  ‘Right then,’ she says. ‘I think dinner will be ready, if everyone would like to move to the table.’

  And with that, the conversation about my mother seems to be over.

  We have roast lamb for dinner. Diana prepares and serves it herself. Given the size of their house I almost expect caterers to show up, but this part of the evening, at least, is comfortable and familiar.

  ‘I was so impressed to hear about your charity,’ I say once Diana is finally sitting rather than serving. ‘Ollie is so proud of you, he talks about it to anyone who’ll listen.’

  Diana smiles vaguely in my direction, reaching for the cauliflower cheese. ‘Does he?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. I’d love to hear more about it.’

  Diana spoons some more cauliflower onto her plate, focusing intently on the transaction as if she were performing surgery. ‘Oh? What would you like to hear?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’ I feel under the spotlight suddenly, like I’m prying rather than making conversation. ‘I guess . . . what gave you the idea to start it? How did it get off the ground?’

  ‘I just saw the need,’ she says. ‘It’s not rocket science, collecting baby goods.’

  ‘She’s humble.’ Tom pushes more lamb onto his fork, still chewing what’s in his mouth. ‘It’s her Catholic upbringing.’

  ‘How did you two meet?’ I ask, deciding to move to a different topic after my lack of success with Diana’s charity.

  ‘They met at the movies,’ Nettie says. ‘Dad saw Mum across the foyer and sparks flew.’

  Tom and Diana exchange a glance. There is affection in their gaze but something else too, something I can’t quite place.

  ‘What can I say?’ Tom says. ‘I knew right away that she was the one. Diana wasn’t like anyone else that I knew. She was . . . smarter. More interesting. Out of my league, I thought.’

  ‘Mum came from a well-to-do family,’ Nettie explain
s. ‘Middle-class Catholic. Dad was a country boy, no connections, no money.’

  I take a moment to chide myself for the assumption I made the moment I walked into the house—that Diana had married Tom for his money. It’s a sexist assumption but, in my defence, perhaps understandable, given the disparity in their looks—Diana being statuesque and striking, and Tom, well . . . neither statuesque nor striking. The fact that she married him for love raises Diana a few notches in my opinion.

  ‘And how about you, Diana,’ I ask. ‘Did you just know?’

  ‘Course she did!’ Tom says, framing his face with his hands. ‘How could you not, seeing this face?’

  ‘Actually I’ve been trying to tell him I’m not interested for nearly forty years but he just keeps speaking over the top of me,’ Diana says wryly, and Tom lets out a hearty guffaw.

  After her earlier formality, it’s nice to see this side of her. I allow myself to hope that once we’ve spent some more time together, we’ll laugh about this first meeting when she wouldn’t allow me to help with dinner (probably as we potter around in the kitchen together). Maybe one day I’ll even start helping her with her charity. Yes, it will all be fine. Diana might not be the easiest nut to crack, but I’ll get there. Before long, we’re sure to be the best of friends.

  I was thirteen when my mother, Joy, died. Mum was aptly named—always having fun, never taking herself too seriously. She wore headscarves and dangly clip-on earrings; she called people ‘dear’ and sang loudly in the car when the radio played a song she liked. At my birthday parties she wore fancy dress, even though none of the other adults did, and she had a pair of tap shoes that she liked to wear, even though she’d never learned how to tap.

  That was the kind of person my mother was.

  The only times I saw Mum dress in black—without so much as a headband or hair piece or adornment—was when she attended a conference or dinner with Dad. Dad is the polar opposite of Mum—conservative, serious, gentle. The only time Mum reined in her personality, in fact, was for Dad. ‘Dad’s job is to look after us, our job is to look after him.’

  Dad never recovered after she died. Apparently statistics indicate that most men remarry within three years of a previous relationship ending, but almost twenty years on, Dad is still happily single. ‘Your mother was my life partner,’ he always says, ‘and a life partner is for life.’

  Dad hired a housekeeper after Mum died, to cook and clean and shop for us. Maria was probably fifty, but with her black hair flecked with grey and rolled into a coil, she may as well have been a hundred. She wore skirts and pantyhose and low-heeled court shoes, and floral aprons she sewed herself. Her own children were grown and the grandchildren hadn’t shown up yet. She came from noon until 6 pm every day. She was always there when I got home from school and it seemed like it was the best part of her day. It was the best part of my day too. She’d empty my bag and rinse out my lunchboxes and chop up fruit and cheese on a plate for my afternoon tea—things Mum wouldn’t have done in a blind fit. With hindsight, some teenagers may have felt smothered by Maria. But I just felt mothered.

  Once, when I had the flu, Maria came for the whole day. She pottered around, checking on me periodically, bringing me water or tea or a cool cloth for my forehead. A couple of times, when I was dozing and heard her enter the room, I let out a little moan just to hear Maria fussing. She’d kiss my forehead and bring me water. She even fed me soup with a spoon.

  It was, hand on heart, one of the best days of my life.

  Maria left when I turned eighteen. She had her first grandchild by then, as well as an aging dog with glaucoma, and besides, I was nearly grown so there wasn’t much for her to do any more. After that, Dad got a cleaner and started doing his grocery shopping on his way home from work. Maria kept in touch with birthday gifts and Christmas cards, but eventually her life got filled up with her own family. And that’s when I realised I needed my own family. A husband, some children, an old blind dog. Most importantly, I needed a Maria. Someone to share recipes, to give wisdom, and to drown me in waves of maternal love. Someone who wouldn’t leave and go back to her own family because I was her family. I didn’t have a mother any more. But one day, perhaps, I’d have a mother-in-law.

  After dinner, Tom tells us to go hang out in the ‘den’, which is a room with soaring cathedral ceilings and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and masses of leather. It reminds me of a gentlemen’s club. It has an enormous TV that rises up out of a cabinet, as well as an actual bar loaded with spirits. Ollie has been called into the kitchen to help with coffee and dessert (which I assume means they want to debrief about me), so I am kicking back in the gentlemen’s club with Nettie and Patrick.

  ‘So,’ Patrick says from the bar. He is making us some sort of cocktail, which I don’t need because I’ve already had two glasses of wine, but he seems so happy messing about with all the spirits that I don’t have the heart to tell him. ‘What do you think of Diana?’

  ‘Patrick,’ Nettie warns.

  ‘What?’ A smile curls at the corners of his mouth. ‘It isn’t a trick question.’

  I scramble pathetically for something to say, but honestly, there isn’t much. Diana spent most of dinner intermittently asking if anyone wanted more vegetables. She deflected any questions I asked her, and apart from her little chuckle about her first meeting with Tom, she remained frustratingly distant all evening. If it hadn’t been for Tom and Nettie and Patrick, it wouldn’t have felt like a social function at all. All I know is that Diana is nothing like I was hoping.

  ‘Well . . . I think she . . . is . . .’ I roll several words around in my mouth—nice, interesting, kind—but none feel right and I don’t want to be insincere. I am, after all, not just here to impress the parents. If things work out between Ollie and I, I’ll be spending alternate Christmases with Nettie and Patrick for the rest of my life, so it is important to be real. Problem is, it’s too early to be really real. Meeting the family, I realise, requires you to be a politician. You need to know where to throw your support at the time that yields maximum results. I decide to do as my mother always told me and find something true to say.

  ‘I think she is a wonderful cook.’

  Patrick laughs a little too heartily and Nettie looks daggers at him.

  ‘Oh come on, Nets.’ Patrick gives her a poke in the ribs. ‘Listen, it could be worse. At least we have Tom, right?’

  I smile, but it’s cold comfort. I’ve had such a clear picture of what I wanted in a potential mother-in-law—no father-in-law, not even Tom, could take its place. Patrick, on the other hand, seems to have accepted his frosty mother-in-law without too much concern, despite the fact that she clearly isn’t his cup of tea either.

  ‘Well,’ I say after a few minutes, when Ollie has still not shown his face and I get the feeling Nettie wants a moment alone with Patrick. ‘I might see how dessert is coming along.’

  I walk through double doors into the great room that feeds into a wide kitchen, centred around a huge granite island bench. Ollie and Diana are at the island with their backs to me and appear to be arranging items onto a cheese board.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ Diana is saying.

  ‘It matters to me,’ Ollie says.

  ‘Well it shouldn’t.’ Diana enunciates her words like a librarian or piano teacher, crisply and properly, not in the least uncertain. I pause in the doorway.

  ‘Are you saying you don’t like her?’

  Diana pauses for far too long. ‘I’m saying it doesn’t matter what I think.’

  I pull back, out of sight, tucking myself around the corner. I feel as though I’ve been sucker-punched. Of all the reactions I’ve had so far—that she isn’t the mother-in-law I wanted, that she hasn’t measured up to my expectations—I haven’t, narcissistically as it turns out, even considered that she wouldn’t like me.

  ‘Seriously, Mum? You’re not going to tell me what you think of Lucy?’

  ‘Oh, Ollie!’ I picture her shaking
her hand like she’s swatting a fly. ‘I think she’s fine.’

  Fine. I take a moment to digest that. I’m fine.

  I search for an upside to fine, but I can’t seem to find one. Being called fine is like being told your outfit doesn’t make you look fat. Being called fine is like being the day-old sandwich that doesn’t give you food poisoning. Being called fine is like being the daughter-in-law that you didn’t want but who could have, on balance, been worse.

  ‘There you are, Lucy!’

  I whirl around. Tom is at the mouth of the hallway, beaming. ‘Come and help me choose some dessert wine. I never know which one to go for.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t really know much about w—’

  But Tom is already dragging me down to a cellar with an astonishing array of wines. I fake my way through a dessert wine tasting session, grateful for the dark to hide the tears that I blink back.

  To me, fine is as good as dead.

  3

  LUCY

  The present . . .

  The police are in my kitchen. The male cop, Simon, has found mugs and tea bags and milk without having to ask where they are, and now he’s making me a cup of tea. The female cop, Stella, is beside him, loading up the dishwasher and tipping the remnants of burger buns and tomato sauce into the rubbish.

  Ollie is in the hallway, on the phone with Nettie. I can hear him explaining that he’s not sure . . . that he’s told her everything he knows . . . that he said he doesn’t know! . . . that she should just come over and talk to the police herself.

  He is talking about Diana, I remind myself. Diana is dead. The fact that we never got along seems to vanish in the face of this, or at least soften a little, and I find myself gripped by a profound sadness. It’s as though Diana’s death makes our past issues seem trivial, even petty. After all, no one gets along with their mother-in-law do they? My friend Emily’s mother-in-law refuses to believe that Poppy is lactose intolerant (‘What a load of nonsense, they didn’t have all these “intolerances” in our day.’). Jane’s mother-in-law can’t fathom how she can use disposal nappies, especially after she’d gone to the trouble of purchasing Henry a box of cloth ones. Sasha’s mother-in-law talks incessantly about the inheritance she is apparently going to receive, making sure to remind her how lucky she should feel. Danielle’s mother-in-law is a gratuitous advice giver, Kena’s is an interferer. Sara is the only one who adores her mother-in-law, and that’s because Marg looks after Sara’s children two days a week, while also doing the family’s laundry, ironing and preparing home-made meals for the freezer. (Marg is what we call a ‘mother-in-law unicorn’.)