Ralph’s Children (2 page)

‘Fuck’s sake, Kate, you’ll have them slitting their wrists before they’ve even uncorked the bloody sherry.’

Fireman’s opener.

He was a stocky man with a round, boyish face, receding downy fair hair, and granny glasses. His office was cluttered, but the area immediately around his computer screen and keyboard was
scrupulously tidy.

‘I hoped I’d been entertainingly wry about it,’ Kate had said.

‘Not especially wry, and definitely not entertaining,’ he’d said. ‘And no warmth, Kate, that’s the worst of it. Any fool can take the piss, but you’ve always
been able to make us feel you give a damn.’

‘I do,’ she’d said, with a sudden urge to cry.

He’d looked at her and recognized the signs. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Don’t,’ Kate had warned. ‘Just don’t.’

Fireman had shrugged and looked back at his screen. ‘Write it again.’

‘All of it?’ Indignation had replaced misery. ‘Some of it’s quite funny.’

‘Colonoscopies and funerals come to mind,’ he’d said.

‘Yours, preferably,’ Kate had said.

And from there it had nosedived all the way to the moment when Kate had pushed her way around to his side of the desk and tried to delete her column. And
no one
touched Fireman’s
computer, and she knew, when the mists had cleared, how lucky she was that her editor was tolerant
and
still quite liked her work, or else she’d probably have found herself seriously
unemployed with twenty-something lousy shopping days to go . . .

‘You’re your own worst enemy.’

Her mother’s contribution on the telephone soon after.

‘Not exactly what I need to hear, Mum,’ Kate had said.

‘The trouble with you,’ Bel had started to say, ‘is that—’

Kate had put down the phone.

Not
in the mood for Bel Oliver right now.

In her younger days, Bel had designed jazzy party clothes for a handful of private clients, but her craving for wine and vodka Martinis had taken its toll, since when too many
of Bel’s designs had been tailored to make Kate’s father, Michael Oliver, feel guilty and as miserable as she was.

When the marriage had at last broken down, most of their mutual friends had gravitated towards her husband, leaving Bel’s life horribly empty but for her friend Sandra West, a widow from
Goring she’d met at a depression self-help-group meeting; a mousy looking but pushy, frequently spiteful woman whom Kate greatly disliked.

Her mother considered Sandi West something of a saviour.

‘She believes in me,’ Bel had told Kate more than once. ‘In my talent.’

‘Why not?’ Kate had replied. ‘You are talented.’

Sandi also pronounced Michael a fool to have left Bel, and Kate cold not to have invited her mother to move in with her; and, according to Bel, despite chronic back pain and money problems,
Sandi always seemed to manage to make time for her.

‘A cross between a fan and a bully,’ Kate had described her once to Rob.

‘Your mum’s hardly the oppressed type,’ he’d pointed out.

Which was true enough, though Kate had wondered now and again about the timing of Mrs West’s arrival in Bel’s life such a brief while before the final crashing of the marriage. Had
wondered, too, if Sandi might not be in love with her mother, and frankly Kate didn’t think she’d mind if Bel swung herself around sexually, so long as she could finally become truly
happy.

Preferably with anyone
except
Sandi West.

More than a fair share of the blame for the break-up of Kate’s parents’ marriage lay at her father’s door, and Michael Oliver was the first to admit it.

‘I’m just not the man Bel signed up to marry,’ he said once.

Which was also true, Kate supposed. An attractive, long-legged man with friendly grey eyes, matched these days by greying hair, Michael had been a criminal lawyer who’d suddenly decided he
no longer wanted to practice law because the wrong people kept getting punished.

‘For God’s sake,’ Bel had said at the time, ‘you’ve always known that.’

‘But suddenly it seems to matter to me a great deal,’ Michael had explained.

‘Bollocks,’ Bel had said.

And with his wife’s failure to back him up at that pivotal moment seeming like one disillusionment too many, Michael had decided after a while that he didn’t really want to be her
husband any more either. In fact the only thing he really, passionately, wanted to continue being – of all the relationships and occupations that had shaped his identity till then – was
Kate’s father.

‘I couldn’t stand to think,’ he’d told her, ‘that you might never forgive me.’

‘It’s not me,’ Kate had replied, ‘who has to do the forgiving.’

‘But I know how tough it’s been on you,’ Michael had said.

‘Obviously,’ Kate had told him. ‘Because I love you both.’

‘Love,’ her father said wryly. ‘Blessing or curse.’

‘Bit of both, I suppose,’ Kate had said, and had promptly gone away to use that as the opening gambit of that week’s column.

However much she did love both her parents and – for better or worse – Rob, Kate often spun into monthly denial of that with her dark plunge into PMS, blowing their
smallest shortcomings out of all proportion, carping, bitching and generally doing her best to drive loved ones away. Ending up despising herself most of all.

‘I’m such a lucky cow,’ she remembered saying once to Rob, ‘that you put up with me. With
this
.’

Only a year since she’d said that, while they’d still been happy.

She
had
felt so lucky then, knew just how sweet life had been to her, how comfortable her upbringing in Henley-upon-Thames, how easy her years in Sheffield studying journalism, how
convenient her return after landing a trainee job at the
Sunday News –
and lucky too that Richard Fireman had warmed to her chatty style and eclectic palette of topics, and that
she’d found a studio flat off Church Street in Reading just around the corner to the newspaper’s offices in Prospect Street.

‘Why not London?’ Abby Wells, a friend from university, had asked when Kate had accepted the job.

‘Not sure,’ Kate had said. ‘Lack of confidence, I think.’

‘You?’ Abby was surprised. ‘You can write, you know how to make people listen to you, how to make them
let
you write.’

‘Only at uni,’ Kate said. ‘And maybe in Reading, too, if I’m lucky.’

The old theory about fewer tiny fish in small ponds.

All her blessings had culminated in the preparation of a feature on Reading Park School, where she had been allocated, as her guide, their modern foreign languages teacher. Rob Turner had seen
the young woman with russet hair and earnest eyes and fallen for her instantly, and Kate had crashed in much the same way. Rob was tall, chestnut-haired and blue-eyed, with a warm smile and quick
mind. In less than twenty-four hours Kate had learned that he loved children and horse riding, and that his heart had been pretty much smashed to shrapnel when his ex-wife Penny had walked out four
years earlier, taking with her to Manchester their nine-month-old daughter.

‘How could she do that?’ Kate had been appalled. ‘
Why
did she do it?’ She felt a need to know, to find out the worst before she lost her heart entirely.

Rob took a moment. ‘Penny says she only married me to have a child. Not that there was anything so special about me – she just wanted to have a child by someone comparatively
“normal”.’ His grin was self-deprecating. ‘Her word, not mine.’

Kate had said nothing, let him go on.

‘Apparently she always planned on leaving when the time was right, because as it turns out she doesn’t particularly like men and was never keen on living with one.’

‘When did you find this out?’

‘The day she told me they were leaving.’

‘God,’ Kate said.

‘She was painfully honest about it that day,’ Rob had said wryly. ‘But I suppose if she’d been that frank at the outset, we wouldn’t have had Emily, and I’d
rather have my daughter in my life on my ex-wife’s screwed-up terms than not have her at all.’

‘She sounds like a monster,’ Kate had said.

‘She’s a good mother,’ Rob said.

‘Depriving Emily of her father,’ Kate had said.

‘I do my best to make sure Emmie knows I’m here for her.’

‘But that’s not enough, is it?’

‘Of course not.’

Kate had put her arms around him then, and Rob had said that if she wanted to, she could speak to Penny, who’d promised to confirm the truth to any woman who became important to him.

‘Like a job reference,’ Kate had said.

‘In a way,’ Rob had said.

‘I don’t need to ask her,’ Kate said.

She had really believed they were solid.

For keeps.

They were so good together. Sharing their home – a pretty gabled cottage between the south Oxfordshire villages of Sonning Common and Kidmore End – confident that they were enriching
each other’s lives. For several days each month, Rob sympathized with her darkness and put up with her bitching, and Kate sometimes wished he had some semi-awful habit to match, but there was
no
side
to Rob.

Life with him was simply good.

And then it was over.

L
aurie Moon surveyed her best work of the month.

The most important work, at least. Her gift for Sam. A portrait in vivid acrylic paint of mother and son at the funfair, complete with candyfloss, cuddly bear prize and plastic bag with pitiful
goldfish. Happy memories of the ‘best day out ever’. Sam had told her it was the best, so it must have been.

What Sam said
went.
What Sam asked for, Laurie did her damnedest to give him. And he asked for so little. Love, mostly. Cuddles. And more time with his mum.

The one thing she couldn’t give him.

When it came to her painting, Sam was so easily pleased, her greatest fan. Not so impressed, Laurie was painfully aware, when it came to her role as his mother. There she came about fifth or
sixth best, depending on whether, prior to her arrival, his carers and teachers had made him eat sprouts or cabbage or carrots or look at maps. Sam hated green and orange vegetables, but maps
really alarmed him. If Laurie arrived on a map or bad veggie day, Sam’s greeting was more fervent than usual, though when she looked into his warm, slightly slanted eyes on those occasions,
she saw a touch of desperation that spoke more of relief than love.

Not that Sam needed saving from anyone at Rudolf Mann House, where he lived and was educated. His care was magnificent, his schooling as fine as it could be. Bought and paid for by his
grandparents, Peter and Michele Moon. Pete and Shelly to their friends, who thought them salt of the earth people. And even if Pete’s money had come from a chain of Essex garages, the Moons
had moved up in the world long enough ago for few people to hark back to when they had not lived in their handsome red brick house off the Henley–Wallingford road between Nuffield and
Nettlebed and run their excellent riding stables less than a mile away.

They were philanthropic, too, Pete and Shelly, always happy to stick their hands in their pockets or work for charity. Good neighbours with a love for their animals and respect for the beautiful
part of the country they lived in.

‘We know how lucky we’ve been, simple as that,’ Pete had said many times.

Everyone agreed. They were a lucky, good-looking couple with a clever son, Andrew, married to Sara, a local girl and qualified accountant, living with their kids over in Moulsford; Andrew in the
horse business, too, having brought in a few promising racers as well as Sara, who did the books for the Moons these days. And then there was Laurie, their pretty fair-haired daughter still living
at home, and working at the stables too now – though she’d studied art and wasn’t too bad at it according to the locals whose homes she’d painted.

Laurie had left home for a while some years ago, had gone to stay with relatives in France, painting and – according to Pete and Shelly – doing ‘her own thing’, though
there had been a bit of gossip at the time. People had thought she might have got herself pregnant or maybe just involved with a chap the Moons couldn’t approve of – and if
they
didn’t approve, there had to have been a good reason, because you couldn’t find more tolerant people or better parents.

‘You have to know when you’re beaten, sweetheart,’ Peter Moon had said to Laurie at the time.

Over the breakfast table on a Sunday, both her parents looking uncomfortable but determined, her mother’s bobbed hair shiny as ever, but tension in her eyes and around her mouth, her
father’s rimless spectacles part-way down his nose as his brown eyes fixed on Laurie.

‘Some things are just too much to cope with,’ Michele Moon had agreed.

She usually agreed with her husband, not because she was a doormat, but because he was a clever, good man who’d steered their path skilfully through life.

‘And that’s why we’re doing this,’ Pete went on, ‘because we love you so much and want the best for you.’

‘That’s all we’ve ever wanted for you, baby,’ said Shelly. ‘You know that.’

‘
Baby
.’

Laurie must have heard her mother use that throwaway endearment a thousand times, but hearing it from her lips at that moment had made her feel as if ground glass was churning deep inside
her.

Throwaway.

Baby.

She had fought them, raged and pleaded until her throat felt like sandpaper and her insides like taut-stretched rusting wire, and she’d walked out because she had nothing left to fight
with. And then she’d regrouped, sure that if she steadied herself she’d find a way to make them understand and be her kind, loving parents again rather than these new, alien
parent-forms that she hardly seemed to recognize. But it had all been to no avail, because she was too young and inexperienced.

No excuse.

Too weak.

More like it.

Too pathetic.

A pathetic excuse for a woman.

A mother-to-be.

Of a baby. Her own baby. Precious to her from the first shock of pregnancy. She’d hardly been able to believe that release of incredible warmth, of that never-till-then experienced
love.
The kind her own mum had described to her in the past, the kind Laurie knew, therefore, that Shelly would comprehend in time. And her dad, too. Once he’d got over the
understandable disappointment in his no longer perfect little girl, Pete Moon, her adoring daddy, would see how amazing and beautiful it was that she was going to be a mum and make him a
granddad.