‘I am.’
Katie turned back to the car full of children. Molly was starting to look a little teary, and Hannah was fidgeting in her seat. ‘Right, then! Who wants to go for a drive-through belated birthday doughnut?’
‘Yay!’ said Ross, making thumbs-up signs to the back seat.
‘Yay!’ replied Molly and Hannah at once, in an adoring echo.
Katie couldn’t tell whether the enthusiasm was for doughnuts or Ross. She suspected equal amounts of both.
‘Doughnuts?’ said Ross, as he reversed off the drive.
His tone was level but Katie knew what he really meant was: you don’t allow doughnuts, you’re clearly trying to curry favour, I know what you’re up to.
She thought of Greg’s hopelessly inappropriate presents, and thought fiercely, at least I know what my children like.
‘I need something sweet,’ she said, and turned up the theme tune to Balamory.
26
For Lauren and Chris’s mates – and for anyone under forty, and a few who pretended they still were – Saturday night in Longhampton traditionally started at the far end of the high street, at the Jolly Fox Inn, the dog-eared pub opposite the town hall, but tonight Lauren was feeling neither Jolly nor Foxy, unlike the heaving crowd of under-dressed, under-age drinkers around her.
‘Another orange and soda, Lauren?’ asked Kian, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the well-built redhead serving on at the bar, who was trying not to meet his eye.
Not even looking, thought Lauren, crossly. Leering.
They’d been wedged in a booth for over an hour, and so far all they’d done was drink and listen to Kian rate the various girls in there, one of whom Lauren had seen very recently in the surgery with a funny sprain she didn’t get playing netball. Lauren hadn’t even been drinking, what with Irene phoning her daily now to ‘encourage’ her about sticking to the detox plan. If she so much as looked at a Bacardi Breezer, she could hear Irene’s disappointed sighing in her ear.
What with one thing and another, she was beginning to wonder why she’d bothered coming out at all.
To see Chris, she reminded herself, shooting him a sidelong look. But then Chris was acting rather weird, trying to divide his behaviour between a night out with the lads and a romantic evening with his fiancée: drinking, encouraging Kian and occasionally asking her if she wanted a proper drink.
‘She is an eight point three, and she is feeling me,’ said Kian, still giving the barmaid the eye. ‘Go on, look up, look up, you know you want to . . . Yes!’
On cue, the barmaid peeked up from under her eyelashes at Kian, rewarding him with a cheeky grin, and what was either a wink or some kind of unfortunate squint – difficult to tell with all that mascara. Lauren could see that even from a distance of fifteen metres the legendary Matthews charm bait had worked again.
She turned to Chris to roll her eyes, but Chris just shrugged indulgently, then when he saw her glowering, said, ‘What?’ under his breath.
‘Who does he think he is, Calum Best?’ she hissed, but Kian was too engrossed in winking and flashing his watch.
‘Watch and learn, my man!’ gloated Kian. ‘Watch and learn – oh, sorry, Chris. I keep forgetting you don’t need to know this stuff any more.’
Lauren glared at him, but Chris was too busy giving Kian a bloke-ish shove.
‘Anyway, drink?’ said Kian, smoothing down his hair. ‘I’m going to the bar. And I may be some time.’
‘Pint for me, mate,’ said Chris, cheerily. He banged his empty glass down on the table where four empty glasses already jostled for space with the crisp packets, and leaned back in the velvet booth, his arm around Lauren, a happy man.
‘I’ll have a Smirnoff Ice,’ said Lauren, abandoning all attempts to stay off the booze, seeing Chris and Kian definitely weren’t. ‘And get someone to come and clean this table,’ she added, as Kian swaggered off towards the crowded bar.
As soon as he was gone, Chris took the opportunity to pull Lauren closer for a beery snog, but she wriggled out of his grasp, annoyed.
‘Not here! Not in front of the whole pub!’ she snapped.
‘What is up with you tonight?’ Chris demanded. ‘You’ve been acting up ever since we got here.’
‘Acting up? Well, maybe it’s because I didn’t expect Kian to come along this evening! I thought it was just going to be you and me. To celebrate the house! A drink – one drink – then something to eat somewhere, and then some time on our own. At your flat. Without Kian hanging around like a bad smell.’ Lauren heard how crabby she sounded, and tried to pull on a more seductive face. ‘Actually, if he’s going to hang around here chatting up barmaids, maybe we should take advantage of the empty flat right now?’
Chris fiddled with a beermat. ‘Ah, well, Kian’s already told me he’s got plans for himself tonight . . . back home. So that might not be the best idea.’
‘What?’ wailed Lauren. ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘Lauren, it’s his flat! I can hardly hang a sock on the door, can I?’
Lauren struggled to keep her frustration under control. ‘So if you knew that, why didn’t we just stay in this evening, then? Or we could go back now?’
I can’t believe I’m suggesting that, she thought. I’m scheduling sex like some kind of teenager and I’m twenty-two and engaged!
She stroked Chris’s thigh under the table. Chris had great thighs: long and lean and really hard from years of rugby training. ‘The only thing getting me through the last hour has been the thought of getting you, on your own, at home, out of those sexy jeans,’ she murmured. ‘Come on, Chris, let’s go. Now. Kian’s happy enough here, and I haven’t . . .’ Lauren jiggled her eyebrows meaningfully. ‘. . . been alone with you for days . . .’
Some hot and steamy sex, she reckoned, might just blow away the niggles at the back of her mind. That’s probably what was up, not enough tenderness and intimacy and appreciation of Chris’s gorgeous thighs.
But he didn’t move. Instead his square jaw jutted even more.
‘What if I wanted to go out, with my mate, and my girlfriend, into town? Where I might see my other mates?’
‘Other mates?’
‘Yeah, well, Kian phoned Mark and Rich, and they’re on their way . . .’
‘Chris!’ protested Lauren. ‘Saturday night was meant to be for us!’ How obvious did she have to make it?
Chris looked properly pissed off. ‘For God’s sake, Lauren, I’ve given up Wednesday nights to make a dick of myself at ballroom-dancing lessons with you, and I was out with you and your parents and my mother last night at that social whatever. I’ve had her on the phone already today, giving me earache about my bloody waltzing! Can’t I have one night out with my mates?’
Lauren turned so she was facing him in the booth. ‘It’s not just one night, though, is it?’ she heard herself say. ‘You never used to spend so much time out drinking when we were living together. I don’t know where you are half the time. I hope it’s not going to be like this when we’ve got our own house.’
‘What are you saying?’
They both knew exactly what she was saying, but neither wanted to put it into words. Words that would lead to a really big bust-up. Instead, they glared at each other mutinously.
Chris cracked first. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to . . . go home with you, but . . . I want some time out with the lads. They’re already saying I’m under the thumb cos I’m engaged, and what’s it going to look like if you’re dragging me off halfway through the night?’
‘Like, you’re the only one with a girlfriend?’
‘It’s not about that, it’s about male bonding,’ whined Chris, and that was the final straw for Lauren, because right up until they’d moved out of their houseshare, Chris and the lads had had maybe three big nights out a month, and that was as much bonding as they’d been able to deal with. Even then, he’d have binned it for one flash of her hold-ups. He didn’t need his ‘boys’ time’ that much.
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‘Oh, well, fine,’ she said, grabbing her bag. ‘If spending time with me is making you feel under the thumb, then go ahead. You know where you can stick your thumb.’
‘Lauren!’
She got to her feet clumsily, jolting the table so Kian’s last pint glass tipped over and spilled beer dregs on the table. ‘Don’t bother.’
‘If you’re asking me to choose between my mates and you . . .’ began Chris, but Lauren wasn’t having any of that.
She pointed a finger at him. ‘I didn’t say that. You did. And you were meant to be spending tonight with me.’
Before he could protest any more, she turned and marched out of the bar, her heels stomping on the wooden floorboards as her blonde hair swung well above the general mass of heads. On her way out, she nearly knocked over Kian coming back from the bar with two pint glasses and a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.
‘Aye aye,’ he said to Chris, who was staring helplessly after her retreating back.
Bollocks, he thought. Bollocks. Lauren didn’t lose her temper often, because she hated upsetting people, but when she did, God, did he know about it. Besides, Chris knew, deep down, that this time she had the right to be mad.
But sometimes you had to say things, didn’t you?
‘She’ll be back, mate,’ said Kian, dumping the drinks on the table. ‘Probably just the wrong time of the month. Simple as that.’
Chris took a thoughtful draw on his pint, and Kian made a happy clicking noise with his tongue, meaning a new phone number had just been entered on his phone.
The trouble was, thought Chris, his life wasn’t as simple as Kian’s, because his life wasn’t just his any more. It was Lauren’s too. For twenty-five years, like the mortgage said. And the rest after that.
Bridget slipped into the spare room, and shut the door carefully behind her. Frank was dozing in his chair downstairs, and Lauren was having a night out with Chris, staying over at his afterwards. That gave Bridget at least an hour uninterrupted to sort things out, longer if Frank decided to make his own cup of tea when he woke up.
She blinked hard. If things could be sorted out in an hour.
No, she told herself, briskly, just as she told the children at school, when something’s wrong, you’ve got to face up to it. There’s no point ignoring what isn’t going to go away.
And before she could chicken out again, she opened the plastic folder with all the red bills and bank statements in, and spread them across the bed.
Bridget swallowed as the reality of her situation sank in.
Four credit cards, thousands of pounds of overdraft, one wedding, half of which was still to pay for. And no secret stash of cash to save her bacon.
Bridget and Frank had never used credit cards much during their marriage – ‘If we can’t pay for it straight off, we can’t afford it’, had been Frank’s motto, inherited from his own dad who’d only stopped keeping money under his mattress in 1985, when he’d gone into hospital and the nurses had refused to be responsible for it. Frank wouldn’t have understood the smartness of playing one card off against another. But he did like the novelty of having things now, instead of waiting.
So she hadn’t told him that the new lawnmower she’d treated him to had gone on her Capital One card, or that she’d also popped their Easter holiday on the card too, so she could use the cash in her account to pay for the hand-engraved ‘Save the Day’ cards Lauren had ordered without telling her, as well as putting a deposit on the band.
Bridget bit her lip as she surveyed the statements, each innocuous purchase looming up at her. None of them seemed so expensive on their own, but together . . .
She’d managed to fit everything into her budget perfectly to begin with. But then Frank’s pension had turned out to be nearly a third less a month than he’d been expecting, and they’d had to spend fifteen hundred pounds putting the car right after the clutch went; that had gone on the overdraft. Then there were the household bills, so much higher than usual with Lauren back, on the phone and on the internet and in the fridge all the time, and Frank ‘enjoying his retirement’ with M&S luxury ready-meals, and buying her that eternity ring. Bridget didn’t want to alert Frank to the amount of money owing on the cards by writing massive monthly cheques to clear them, so she’d only been paying off the minimum balance, but the amounts splashed out at Bridal Path and Wedding Belles seemed to be double what she remembered spending.
And now she had no idea where she was going to find fifteen thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three pounds, seventeen pence – not counting the rest of the money the wedding was going to cost.
Bridget sat back and stared at the statements, and felt sick.
She knew she should come clean and tell Frank. She should have said something before now, before he even gave Lauren the money, but how could she now, seeing Lauren so sparkly eyed with excitement and love, hugging her dad and telling her what a lifesaver he was and how she had the best parents in the world? And him, all thrilled to be helping her. She’d have had to have a heart of stone.
She rested her elbows on the table and tried to think. They could try to get a second mortgage on the house, although where were they going to find an extra three or four hundred a month? They could cut back. (But on what?) She’d have to tell Frank.
Even as she thought it, something in her recoiled in shame. For their entire marriage, Frank had boasted to their friends about how his Bridget was so pennywise that they’d never had a moment’s worry over money in their lives. He was so proud of her for her common sense, and he trusted her to keep them right, financially. And now she’d let him down over something so stupid.
They’d been looking forward to retiring for years, knowing they hadn’t a fortune, but they had ‘enough to see us out’, as he liked to say. It was the time of their lives for relaxing. Enjoying themselves. Not scrimping and panicking about mortgage rates. Bridget’s heart ached as she thought about the times they’d slumped in front of the telly, after long days at work, and joked wanly about how it’d all be worth it once they were retired. ‘I can’t wait to do nothing with you, Mrs Armstrong,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll have enough for chocolate digestives then, eh?’
Frank’s blood pressure was only just coming down now after years of strain, and if he found out she was going to have to work longer to pay off a credit-card debt . . .
A sudden, sharp image flashed in front of her eyes, of the two of them dancing at the social night, smooching round the crowded dancefloor, held tightly in each other’s arms despite their height difference, moving with the practice of thousands of songs and hundreds of nights. Frank had leaned down to whisper in her ear. ‘I don’t think I’ve been this happy since we first met,’ he’d said with that gentle smile that had been for her alone since she was seventeen years old.
No, thought Bridget, struggling to keep calm. I’m just going to have to work out a way of dealing with it. Frank needn’t know. Lauren definitely mustn’t know; if her special day was going to cost this much, there was absolutely no way she was going to allow it to be spoiled by worry.
Special day, thought Bridget. They’ve got you at last.
She picked up a sheet of paper, with her neat figures running down the right-hand side. So far, she’d managed to drum up nearly four hundred pounds eBaying bits and pieces from around the house, without touching the two or three items that would raise the most money, but had far more sentimental value – her charm bracelet, a painting her mother had given her. Frank hadn’t noticed a few china dolls vanishing from the sideboard, but he’d notice if she suddenly wasn’t wearing her eternity ring.
The letter from the newest credit-card company sat unopened in the file, and she had to force herself to open it.
When she did, an involuntary gasp escaped from Bridget’s throat. There was a note about how much the calculated interest would be next month, when the 0% period expired, if she didn’t pay it off in full. When Bridget had been banking on making her smart transfer, that sum had
seemed fairly outrageous. Now, along with the minimum payment that she didn’t have, it seemed terrifying.
She scrumpled up the letter in fear, then made herself unscrumple it, smoothing it out with shaking fingers.
Bridget sat on the bed, surrounded by the overspill of stuff from Lauren’s room – her boxes of wedding shoes, and Save the Day cards, and stacks of glossy magazines full of ideas for spending money on white things – and for the first time in her entire life, she felt scared.
The lights were on when Lauren pulled up outside her parents’ house and she sat in the car for a few minutes, to calm herself down. She took two or three deep breaths through her nose, like a horse, rehearsing how much she’d tell her mum, so she’d get the whingeing off her chest, but without making her worry that the wedding was off.
But bloody hell, it wasn’t on, all that ‘don’t make me choose between my mates and you!’ business. Who said there had to be a choice? That sounded to Lauren like a previous conversation someone else had had with Chris. That someone being a friend who had a vested interest in keeping him available for pub-crawling.
Lauren ran a hand through her hair, smoothing down her blonde fringe as she’d done since she was little. She felt like storming round to that building site and telling them to get a move on with her house, because the sooner Chris was away from Kian Matthews, the better.
She tried to ignore the voice at the back of her head reminding her that Kian wasn’t exactly handcuffing Chris to the bar stools, and that he was a big enough boy to say no if he really wanted to.
It was starting to drizzle again, and Lauren hopped from foot to foot on the step as she let herself in. She spotted Dad of the Year asleep in front of the television, a book about ballroom dancing rising and falling on his chest. He looked old, Lauren thought with surprise. When he was asleep, the bags under his eyes seemed pouchier, and his skin slacker, yet when he was awake and bantering away, he looked the same as he’d done all her childhood.
But then her parents were old – in their sixties. Her mum was filing credit-card statements with the coffee, and her dad actually wanted slippers for Christmas. Would Chris look like that, snoring in front of the fire with her in forty years’ time?