Hope put her head in her hands. ‘I don’t want to talk about this any more. We’re just going round in circles.’ She forced herself to look her mother in the eye, but bottled out at the last second. ‘You said we could thrash this out but, can’t you see, you’re just flogging a dead horse?’
Her mother flapped her hands dismissively. ‘Nonsense! Jack just needs a gentle nudge in the right direction.’
‘He needs to be reminded of where his priorities lie,’ Marge chimed in, and Hope steeled herself for a completely inappropriate pep talk about putting the spice back into their sex life, and if they started talking about buying some raunchy underwear and taking striptease lessons, she was going to run screaming out into the night. Or hitch a ride to the station, she really was.
‘… time to think about having a baby …’
Hope’s head shot up. ‘Say what?’
‘Obviously you’ll have to stay in London at that school to qualify for your maternity benefit, which is a shame, because the health service is much better here,’ Caroline Delafield said with a sniff. ‘Then once you’ve had the baby, you can both come home. You’ll want to have another child quite soon, nothing worse than an only child, then you can go back to work once they’re both at nursery. I can easily find you a teaching job. I do have rather a lot of sway with the local education authority. There might even be a position at my school. That would be nice, us working together, wouldn’t it?’
Hope was appalled. If this was their cunning plan, then she’d totally wasted the price of a return train ticket. She did want babies, of course she did, but years from now. And she didn’t want babies with a man who was in love with another woman. And Christ, she never wanted her mother as her boss. Just kill her now. ‘I’d take Jack back in a heartbeat, he knows that I would, but I’m not going to trick him into staying with me, by getting pregnant!’
‘Well, you want to get married to Jack, don’t you?’ her mother demanded. ‘Remember that barney you had when you thought he was going to propose in Spain? Well, having a baby is practically the same as getting married.’
‘It’s nothing like getting married, Mum!’
Marge patted Hope’s hand. ‘But Jack wants to be with you, he’s just confused right now, and I know it’s not very fashionable to say this, but biologically this is the best time for you to start a family.’
‘But there’s tons of stuff I want to do, and I’m only twenty-six, and Gurinder at work had her kids when she was in her late thirties.’
That stopped them in their baby-making tracks. All thoughts of Hope and Jack’s rapprochement were forgotten as they began to harangue her about all the birth defects that Hope’s hypothetical children would have if she left it too late. ‘Do you know what the medical term is for women who have babies after thirty-five?’ her mother shouted, her face red. ‘Geriatric mothers. Do you want to be a geriatric mother?’
‘You were forty-five when you had Jerry, so just stop it!’ Hope shouted back. ‘I mean it! When you said that we could find a solution to this fucking nightmare, I actually dared to hope that you meant it, but all you have is some bullshit scheme that’s not going to bring me and Jack back together. It’s just about you trying to micro-manage our bloody lives like you have done for the last twenty years! I don’t even know if I really did want to get married, or if it was because you banged on about it so much that I went along with it just to get you to shut up!’
‘Hope Louise Delafield! I won’t be spoken to like that!’ Caroline Delafield banged her fist on the table so hard that her wine glass bounced off the edge and shattered on the slate-tile floor. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’
‘Fine! I’m going!’
Hope got up, flounced out of the kitchen, flounced back to apologise to Marge, then stomped up the stairs to her room. Flinging herself on her lonely single bed seemed like the right thing to do – she really was channelling her not-so-inner teen.
Jack, as ever, had definitely got the better of the deal. The three of them had probably gone down the pub and were talking about football. Then in the five minutes before they left on Sunday morning, her dad or Roger would say, ‘We’re relying on you to do the right thing, son.’ Jack always got off easy.
Hope could remember lying on this bed when she was thirteen and thinking about Jack then too. But in those days it was hatching plan after plan to get him to stop seeing her as his friend who just happened to be a girl, and to start seeing her as a potential girlfriend. She’d stuffed her trainer bra with cottonwool balls, which had given her very fake, very lumpy boobs. And she’d stood shivering on the sidelines of a muddy, waterlogged field, cheering until her throat was hoarse, when Jack had played football for the local youth team. When that hadn’t worked, she’d doled out huge amounts of icy disdain in Jack’s direction in time-honoured ‘treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen’ tradition, which Lauren and Sugar magazine swore would work where everything else had failed.
She must have done something right because then there’d been that night Jack was walking her home from the once-a-month Youth Club disco, which he always did because her mum had asked him to and he did live next door, when he’d suddenly coughed nervously and asked if he could kiss her.
Hope could still remember every single detail of that first close-mouthed, bumped-nose kiss. It had been unexpected and utterly thrilling but also scary to have Jack’s lips on hers, and she hadn’t known what to do with her mouth or how to breathe or if she’d freak out if he used tongue. No other kiss ever could compete with that first kiss and all the months and months of desperate yearning that had preceded it.
But then there was that other kiss. A kiss that she never expected, because she’d imagined that the only man who’d ever kiss her for the rest of her life was Jack. Jack’s first kiss had filled Hope full of longing but when Wilson had kissed her exactly one week ago, it had triggered a deep, dark lust that Hope hadn’t known she was capable of feeling. Kisses could change your life, or at least change the direction that your life was going.
But Wilson was just … just the sexual equivalent of a couple of ibuprofen, and she had to stop transferring or displacing, or whatever the hell it was that she was doing. Hope hung off the edge of the bed so she could yank open one of the divan drawers and pull out a pink shoebox covered in Take That and Hello Kitty stickers.
Hope dumped the contents on her duvet and sifted through photos of teenage parties, daytrips to Blackpool, nights out at the indie disco in Oldham. She could still conjure up the smell of Elnett and singed hair as she got ready at Lauren’s house, swigging from Diet-Coke bottles filled up with Malibu and pineapple juice. They’d meet up with the rest of their little gang to get the bus into town, and she’d sit on the back seat with Jack, snogging. Once Jack had left for university, there were the weekends in London. Hope would swear blind to her mother that she’d have her own room in Jack’s shared house when in reality they’d spend the whole time shagging, in between the shopping and drinking. She’d been so happy back then, really happy in a way that you could only be when you were a teenager and you were in love, and in every photo that anyone took of you, his arms were around you and you were both gazing at the camera with goofy grins and red pupils.
They hadn’t been that kind of happy for a long, long time, but maybe that stopped when you had a mortgage and credit cards and full-time jobs. It was the kind of happiness that came from being young and completely free from any kind of responsibility. They could still be happy, Hope was sure of that, but it was more of a quiet contentedness than that wild exuberant rush that had always made Hope shiver with anticipation when she’d been on the London-bound train.
But how could you have quiet contentment with someone when every time that he said he was working late, you immediately suspected that he was with another woman? Or you had to stop yourself from poring over his Facebook account to see if he was getting wall messages from women that he’d sworn he would never have any contact with? Or if every time h
e bought you flowers or a tub of ice-cream, you assumed it was to assuage his guilty conscience because he’d been doing something with someone who wasn’t you?
Once the trust was gone, you weren’t left with much to base a relationship on, Hope thought as she stuffed the photos back in the box and shoved it out of sight. And if your other half didn’t want to be your other half, then you didn’t even have a relationship.
When her mother gently tapped on the door and opened it, Hope was in bed, squeezed into a pair of old pyjamas, listening to a Britpop mix CD Jack had made her on her battered old Discman.
Hope immediately tensed up and prayed that her mother would go against type, just this once, and not comment on how crying had left her eyes puffy and red. She unhooked her headphones as her mother came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Oh Hopey,’ she said, her voice a lot gentler than Hope had expected. ‘I know you think I’m too hard on you, but I just want you to be happy.’
‘I know,’ Hope said, as she let her mother stroke the lump that was her thigh. ‘But we never seem to agree on what would make me happy.’
Caroline Delafield sighed. ‘It’s just that I can’t wait for you to give me a grandchild. A little granddaughter with Jack’s hair and your eyes.’
‘But you already have five grandchildren,’ Hope pointed out. ‘Two of which are granddaughters.’
‘Yes, but it’s different when it’s your daughter, rather than your daughter-in-law,’ her mother said, and it was odd to be having a conversation together with no back-biting, no raised voices, even if the subject matter was making Hope die a little. ‘You know what they say.’
‘No, what do they say?’
‘That you have a daughter for life. You have a son until he gets married.’ Her mother was obviously on her way to bed as she’d taken off her make-up and her hair was tied back in a scrunchie. She looked older and a lot more tired than she usually did, and Hope felt moved to lean forward and give her a quick hug, even brush her lips against her mother’s cheek.
‘I’m sorry about this, Mum,’ she murmured. ‘And if there is a way out of this situation that doesn’t involve us breaking up or me getting up the duff …’
‘Hopey! That’s a revolting expression!’
‘Getting pregnant, then,’ Hope amended hastily, nudging her mother with her foot and teasing a brief smile from her. ‘I’m just saying, I’m willing to put the effort in if Jack will too but … it’s just … It’s like he’s changed so much and I can’t trust a single word he says any more.’
Her mother shot off the bed like she’d suddenly remembered an urgent load of laundry that she just had to do. ‘I’m sure that’s not the case. He’s always been very reliable in the past.’
‘Mum, he’s changed, and I don’t feel like I know the new Jack or, well, if I even like him that much.’
The conversation had taken a sharp turn into territory where her mother didn’t want to go because she was scurrying for the safety of the landing. ‘It’s late and you’ve had a lot to drink and we’ll talk about this tomorrow,’ she said, as she flicked off the main light, without even asking Hope if she was ready to turn in for the night.
CAROLINE DELAFIELD STAYED ABSOLUTELY true to her word and she did talk about it the next morning. She talked about Jack and Hope and her plans for their future at lunch too, and came with Hope to the hairdresser’s so she could carp on about property prices and the standard of living in the Greater Manchester area, which were much lower and much higher respectively than they were in London.
She only paused before the Great Comb-Out began, when Hope mooted the possibility of cutting a good ten inches off so she’d end up with a jawline bob that wouldn’t need combing out.
‘But you’ve got such lovely, long hair,’ her mother exclaimed. ‘Or it would be if you ran a brush through it occasionally, and really you don’t have the bone structure to go that short.’
Then the tugging and pulling commenced and all Hope could do was say, ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Christ!’ and ‘Can you stop for a second?’ She wasn’t sure if she was talking to Mandy and her wide-toothed comb, or to her mother who was still talking babies, but this time about the future progeny of Prince William and the former Kate Middleton and how she hoped they wouldn’t inherit their looks from the Windsor side of the family.
It was no wonder that Hope ended Saturday afternoon with a killer headache and zero possibility of being left alone to sleep it off when her mother had plans for them to reorganise the linen cupboard together. Hope knew she couldn’t take much more.
As soon as Jeremy came back from his friend’s house, she persuaded him to come with her to Oldham to see a film. Persuade was perhaps not the right word. Hope pleaded, begged, cajoled, threatened and reminded him at five-minute intervals that he was responsible for her current predicament by opening his fat mouth and landing her in it.
‘God, did you take nagging lessons from Mum?’ he spat in disgust before he capitulated, and Hope was so mad at him for even daring to suggest such a heinous thing, that she forced him to see a rom-com and pay for his own popcorn.
On Sunday morning, Hope stayed in bed for as long as she dared, which was hard when her mother was pointedly vacuuming right outside her bedroom door for a good twenty minutes until Hope gave in to the inevitable and got out of bed to face the second performance of the music.
At least Jeremy was there to diffuse the tension with his endless demands for help with his coursework and more toast. Then her dad phoned, which necessitated her mother shutting herself in the conservatory with the phone and refusing to tell Hope how the London arm of the peace talks was going.
‘Never mind that,’ her mother said briskly, as she shut the Sunday supplement that Hope was trying to read. ‘No time for that either. Go and get washed and dressed, so we can go over to Matthew and Kathy’s for lunch. She’ll need help with the prep – apparently she’s still got post-natal depression,’ she added sceptically. ‘We never had that in my day.’
It was the next phase of her mother’s evil masterplan. Her oldest brother and his wife had recently had their third child, her brother Luke and his wife, Lisa, were turning up with their two children, and the only reason her brother Adrian and Hope’s favourite sister-in-law, Tanya, weren’t coming was because they didn’t have any children so had the time, money and energy to jet off on a last-minute mini-break to Brussels.
As soon as they walked through the door, three-month-old Gretchen was dumped in Hope’s arms and actually she didn’t mind at all. Gretchen was warm, smiley and felt wonderfully solid and comforting as Hope obediently sniffed the top of her head, which smelt of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. What she did mind was her mother watching her like a hawk, eyes narrowed, as if she could see right through to Hope’s uterus, which should have been clenched in longing. It wasn’t, and when Hope followed Kathy into the kitchen to help with making lunch, her sister-in-law wasn’t exactly the poster girl for procreation either.
‘Gretchen’s so adorable. Don’t you just want to cuddle her all day long?’ Hope remarked as she peeled potatoes, because she could totally appreciate other people’s babies, even though she didn’t want one of her own in nine months’ time, and she could never really think of what to say to Kathy, because she collected little china cats and had a framed photo of Michael Bublé on the hall wall.
‘It never sleeps,’ Kathy said through gritted teeth, pushing back her lank hair, which hadn’t been highlighted in months, so Hope could see her red-rimmed bloodshot eyes. ‘It just never bloody sleeps so, no, I don’t want to cuddle her all bloody day long, I just want to get an hour’s uninterrupted sleep.’
‘Oh dear,’ Hope said helplessly, glancing through the serving hatch into the lounge where her eighteen-month-old niece, Kirsten, and three-year-old nephew, Alex, were pummelling her brother Matthew as he tried to programme the SKY box. ‘Still, it’s nice that the three of them are so close in age.’
‘Are you fucking joking? Thr
ee children under the age of four? It’s like I’m stuck in a nightmare that I can’t wake up from because I never get to bloody sleep.’ Kathy sounded too manic to even cry, and Hope was beyond relieved when Lisa, Luke’s wife, came into the kitchen with her two sons clinging to her skirt. They demanded to know if Hope had bought them a present, and when she pulled out the Ben 10 toys she’d bought them, it turned out they already had them and she ‘was a stupidhead’ and ‘smelt of wee-wee’. Being an aunt was different to being a teacher, and Hope didn’t really feel as if she was in a position to put them on a time-out or deprive them of stickers. Not that Lisa paid them any attention. She and Kathy were having a horrific conversation about episiotomy scars and mastitis and how it was ‘a load of bloody bollocks that putting a cabbage leaf in your bra helps’.
By the time lunch was finally served, Hope was contemplating having her tubes tied the moment she got back to London. She was also seriously considering upping the limit on her overdraft, so she could fly off somewhere sunny instead of coming home for Christmas, because all five of her nieces and nephews had perfected a piercing squeal when confronted with anything they didn’t like, such as broccoli or her mother telling them to use their indoor voices, and the lingering headache from yesterday’s comb-out was threatening to upgrade to a migraine.
Then Jack walked into the room just as Kathy had refused to serve her any pudding because ‘your Mum says you’re trying to lose weight’. Hope had to rub her eyes because she was obviously hallucinating. It couldn’t be Jack, because Jack was in London with her dad and Roger. She shook her pounding head and yes, it was Jack, smiling nervously around the assembled guests as he tried to fend off the attentions of Alex, Hope’s youngest nephew, who was intent on punching him in the testicles.
‘What are you doing here?’ Hope gasped, standing up so she could hustle Jack out of the room, away from beady eyes. The beadiest eyes of all belonged to her mother, who looked as if she might just explode from sheer, smug satisfaction.