Kind of Cruel (25 page)

I’ve often wondered if Sabina truly likes Jo, deep down – though not as often as I’ve wondered if Neil likes Jo.

The posh tea is delicious. ‘Mm. Why don’t I have heavenly things like this in my house?’ I say.

‘Count yourself lucky. You don’t have Quentin in your house,’ Jo whispers, grinning.

‘I do, believe me.’

‘You
do
have Quentin living in your house? Funny, I could have sworn he lives here.’

I laugh for longer than the joke deserves, falling easily into what Sharon used to call my ‘SONS’ routine: being the source of narcissistic supply that Jo needs me to be. In her spare time, inspired by having Marianne as a mother, Sharon read every book about dysfunctional parenting that she could get her hands on. Her house was full of chunky volumes with titles like
Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
, which she refused to hide when Marianne visited.

Sharon and Jo never met, though for years Jo kept saying Sharon sounded like ‘a hoot’ and she’d love to meet her, and Sharon got to hear plenty about Jo’s antics from me, so they probably knew each other about as well as two people who had never met could.

I couldn’t introduce them. It’s my own fault that I couldn’t, and it makes me feel sick when I think about it. One moment of recklessness . . . This is the dark core of everything I hold against Jo and against myself: that I was stupid enough to give her the power to destroy me and Luke, to destroy me and Sharon . . .

‘I’m making the simplest, loveliest supper in the world.’ Jo’s voice brings me back to the present. ‘Even a non-cook like you could manage it: linguine with basil, tomatoes, mozzarella and olive oil stirred in – that’s it, all there is to it!’

‘So basically Insalata Tricolore with pasta?’

‘Yup. With a sliver or two of red chilli, black pepper and Parmesan. Why didn’t I think of it years ago? Quentin won’t eat it – leaves in it, no meat, not hot enough, yada yada. I made him a shepherd’s pie this morning.’

‘You’re a saint,’ I tell her.

She turns to face me. ‘I meant what I said before. You should count yourself lucky. Sabina helps a lot, but . . . sometimes I still fantasise about putting a pillow over his face.’ She claps her hand over her mouth. ‘Sorry, that’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s wholly understandable. It’d only be terrible if you did it.’

Dinah comes tearing into the room. ‘Amber, William’s been teaching us the difference between transitive and intransitive relationships. Can I tell you?’

‘Not that again!’ says Jo. ‘The child’s obsessed.’

William has a tendency to develop strange fixations. He seems older, more serious, more pedantic every time I meet him. Barney, in contrast, is regressing: a few weeks ago he ditched his normal voice and started to speak like a lisping toddler. He’s kept it up ever since. Jo thinks it’s cute, but it drives me mad.

‘You don’t know the difference, do you?’ Dinah gloats.

I don’t. My education was sadly lacking, evidently.

William, Nonie and Barney appear in the doorway.

‘William learned it at school, along with a gazillion other things, but for some reason, this is the one that stuck,’ says Jo.

‘A transitive relationship is like “is younger than”,’ Dinah explains. ‘If I’m younger than William, and Nonie’s younger than me, then Nonie’s also younger than William. An
in
transitive relationship is like “is cross with”. If I’m cross with you and you’re cross with Luke, that doesn’t mean I’m cross with Luke, does it? I might not be.’

‘Very clever,’ I say. Why did no one ever teach me that?

‘Let’s go and put more things on our lists!’ says Nonie.

‘We’re making lists of transitive and intransitive verbs,’ William tells me. His tone implies I’m a dullard who cannot hope to keep up. I wonder if he has any friends at school.

‘Whap aboup, “Wikes pizza”?’ Barney suggests, in his new baby patois.

‘No, that’s—’

‘That’s almost perfectly right, Barney. You just need to add a bit more.’ Jo flashes a warning look at William. ‘You could have “Likes pizza
more than
”. Well done, Barn! Clever you!’

Dinah shoots a disbelieving look in my direction. I think about Nonie’s Maths homework and feel compromised.

Once the children have withdrawn, Jo says, ‘William’s teacher’s a genius. Seriously. A
proper
genius who spent years refusing to get a job because he was unwilling to do anything but read and think. His life story’s fascinating. He lives on a boat.’

Of course he does
. In the abstract, people who live on boats annoy me, though I liked the only boat-dweller I’ve ever met, a man I used to work with at the council.

‘Jo, about Quentin . . . I know I said you’re a saint, and you are, but . . . you know you don’t have to be one, don’t you? If it gets too unbearable having him here . . .’

Jo stops chopping basil. She lays down her knife and stands with her back to me, stiff and still. ‘What are you saying?’

I feel something harsh and hostile creeping towards me; its invisibility renders it all the more menacing. How have I cocked this up? I’m sticking up for Jo, a tactic that can normally be relied on to go down well.

Whatever you say now will be wrong. And you won’t know why. And you’ll feel victimised and relieved at the same time, relieved to be able to say to yourself, ‘
This
is it,
this
is what happens, and it
does
happen. Look, it’s happening now.’

‘What point are you making, exactly?’ Jo asks again, in the voice I find hard to believe I haven’t exaggerated in my mind when I’m not listening to it.

Second-guessing isn’t going to work. My best chance is honesty. ‘Ignore me,’ I say. ‘I know you’re way too good a daughter-in-law to turf him out. It’s my guilt talking. Luke and I ought to take him off your hands now and then, but we don’t because the thought of having him to stay . . .’ I shudder. ‘I suppose I self-servingly thought I’d help instead by suggesting you send him packing. The more I see you suffering with him, the worse it makes me feel. And let’s face it, there’s nothing wrong with him apart from . . . everything that’s wrong with him. Why can’t he live on his own, or try and meet a boring widow who’d be willing to take him in?’

Jo turns to face me. ‘I don’t expect you to share him,’ she says, moving back in the direction of normal temperature speech. ‘You’ve got your hands full with Dinah and Nonie. But I can’t evict him, Amber. How can I? He’d be lost on his own, utterly lost.’

She folds her hands, watching me carefully. Why? Why isn’t she getting on with chopping stuff up? ‘Wouldn’t he?’ she says, when I say nothing. ‘Admit it.’

Honesty worked for me once; it’s worth trying again. ‘Yes, he’d be lost, initially, but . . . that’s his problem, Jo. He’s in possession of his faculties and able to get himself a life if he wants to, even at his age. I freely admit I might be a selfish cow, but for me the right to enjoy one’s own life – own and
only
– trumps duty to others every time. I took Dinah and Nonie in because I wanted to. I love having them; they enhance my life. I’d never in a million years allow Quentin to move in.’

‘Yes, you would. If Luke was an only child, if it was a choice between having Quentin live with you or—’

‘Jo, seriously. Under no circumstances whatsoever would I agree to live under the same roof as Quentin Utting.’

‘Well . . .’ She considers what I’ve said. ‘Luke certainly doesn’t feel that way. And if you do, you deserve to die miserable and alone, with no one to love and look after you.’ She turns away, cuts open another packet of mozzarella. The cheese rolls out onto the work-top like a squashed wet golf ball.

You deserve to die miserable. And alone. With no one to love and look after you.

Damn. No one heard it but me.
Damn, damn, damn
.

‘I don’t think that is what I deserve,’ I say matter-of-factly, trying to ignore the sensation that I have poison inside me. ‘If I’m unbearable to be around when I’m old, then, okay, fair enough, but if I make the people close to me feel good rather than like hanging themselves from the nearest coat peg, then I think I’ll deserve
not
to die miserable and alone.’ I do this only with Jo: speak as if I’m representing myself at the Old Bailey.

‘Shall we drop it?’ she says tightly, her eyes fixed on her pile of basil.

Luke certainly doesn’t feel that way.

Yes, he does. Luke would hate to have Quentin living with us as much as I would. More. Luke has never spoken to Jo about his feelings. She’s a liar, and I want to tell her that I know it. Dropping it is the opposite of what I want to do.

‘I don’t think believing that no one should sacrifice their own wellbeing for the sake of someone else should automatically dis-qualify me from—’

‘You can’t let anything go, can you, ever?’ Jo snaps, smacking her chopping board with the packet of linguine she’s holding in her hand. ‘You can’t just . . . move on. You have to keep goading me . . .’

I hear a moan from behind me: Kirsty with damp hair, in pyjamas and a dressing gown, and Hilary in jeans and a shirt that’s covered in wet patches. I’m pathetically pleased to see them, and have to bite back the urge to say to Hilary, ‘How much of that did you hear?’

‘Hi, guys,’ I say instead. ‘You okay? Nice bath, Kirsty?’ Jo once asked me if it had ever occurred to me that I never asked her younger sister any questions about herself, so now I always do.
So what if she can’t answer? It’s not for your sake, it’s for hers. How would you feel if no one ever asked you how you were or what you’d been up to?

Hilary and Kirsty often stay the night at Jo’s; the lounge has two sofa-beds which Jo bought in order to encourage this to happen, at around the same time that she turned an under-stairs cupboard and part of her and Neil’s previously decent-sized bedroom into two minuscule shower rooms in order to have enough bathrooms for all comers.

‘I think Kirsty and I are going to head off, love,’ Hilary tells Jo. ‘I can’t get her to settle, and . . .’

And our own large house containing our comfortable beds is only three minutes’ drive from here?

‘Oh, what a shame!’ says Jo. ‘What’s up, Kirsty? Are you tired?’

‘We’ll see you tomorrow,’ says Hilary. ‘I think she is tired, yes. We spent a lot of last night wandering around the house, didn’t we, Kirsty?’

Did Jo object to my views about Quentin on Hilary’s behalf, because Hilary has sacrificed most of her life for Kirsty? But that wasn’t what I meant. Hilary adores Kirsty; she doesn’t regard it as a sacrifice, doesn’t resent it. Like Jo, Hilary is a looker-after, and Kirsty is her beloved daughter and genuinely helpless. Kirsty doesn’t bang on about Harold Sargent and septic tanks. It’s totally different.

I’m doing it again: defending myself even though no one’s listening.

‘Right,’ says Jo, once Hilary and Kirsty have gone. ‘I think it’s time to crack open a bottle of wine. What d’you reckon?’ She smiles at me.

I don’t know what craziness has got into me, but I hear myself say, ‘Year Zero again, is it? I was hoping you’d stay angry for a bit longer, so that I can say something else you’re not going to like. I’ve become involved, bizarrely, in a police investigation.’ Even as I say it, my connection with violent death doesn’t strike me as the most remarkable thing: what’s more shocking is that, for the first time ever, I have openly mentioned the officially cancelled past in Jo’s presence. I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing. Is she aware of her history-erasing streak? Maybe it’s all in my mind.

I tell her as little about Katharine Allen’s murder as I can get away with, and finish with a cheap trick: I add that of course she’ll be able to understand why I have to tell the police that she attended my DriveTech course on my behalf, pretending to be me.

She is aghast – scared more than angry. ‘You can’t tell them! Amber, how can you . . .’ She shakes her head. ‘I did you a favour, one I should never have agreed to. The whole thing was wrong. I seem to remember making that point at the time. You should have gone on that course yourself.’