Skeletons (27 page)

‘It’s half past eight.’

‘I don’t care. You can read for a while, if you want.’

Jen couldn’t help it. She laughed. ‘Since when were you the kind of mum who made hot chocolate?’

Elaine looked hurt for a moment. ‘I used to, actually, when you were little. I’m worried about you, Jenny. I want to do something to help.’

‘To make yourself feel better, you mean?’

‘Yes, maybe. If that’s how you want to look at it, then fine. But let me look after you.’

‘Fine,’ Jen said, huffily, unable to get up the energy to argue.

By nine o’clock, Jen was in bed with a warm drink. Elaine actually tucked her in.

‘It’s like I’m in a straitjacket. I can’t breathe.’

‘Things’ll get better.’ Elaine leaned down and pecked the top of her head.

Jen lay there, trussed up like a mummy. Stared at the ceiling.

She’d dropped off almost as soon as Elaine had left the room, and hadn’t woken again until about thirteen hours later. Her congealed once-hot chocolate still sat on the bedside table. She took her time and came downstairs, having
showered and dressed, so that Elaine would have nothing to lecture her about.

The agenda for the day in Richmond was clearly ‘Take
Jenny’s mind off it!’ because Elaine went into overdrive, talking about the river and the ducks and the little shops, and should
they have lunch in a pub or Zizzi. Jen had never heard her mother talk so much. She nodded along, feigning interest, occasionally interjecting something anodyne enough that her mother might think she was following what she was talking about. She appreciated what Elaine was doing, she really
did. She just wasn’t sure she wanted her mind taken off it.

By the time they got home, Jen had been beaten into submission. Rendered as obedient and pliable as a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome.

Bath. Home-cooked meal. Clean pyjamas. They watched
Antiques Roadshow
on TV, and it was quite therapeutic – until Jen remembered how Poppy used to like to rewind and freeze at the point some posh old biddy was told her priceless vase was
actually worth about fifty quid. She would try to find the exact frame where the news hit her and her face gave away how devastated she was, before she plastered a smile on and said it was fine, she would never want to sell her heirloom, anyway.

Thinking about that made Jen cry. She tried to hide her tears from her mum, who seemed to be engrossed, but before she knew it Elaine was next to her on the sofa, clamping Jen to her side and telling her to ‘let it all out’. She may
well have regretted saying that, because Jen did. She couldn’t stop herself. To her credit, Elaine just sat there with her arm around her daughter, patting her like she needed burping. She didn’t ask any questions, didn’t make Jen talk, for which Jen would have been
grateful if she’d been capable of rational thinking.

By the time Jen had cried herself out, she felt much better, if somewhat foolish. Elaine’s response, once Jen had steadied her breathing and blown her nose noisily on a tissue her mum had produced
from somewhere, was to make them both a cup of tea.

‘
Downton Abbey
?’ she said, once she was back from the kitchen with a full tray – pot, milk jug, plate of biscuits, everything. (Jen hadn’t even known she had a milk jug. Couldn’t imagine what would ever have
possessed her to buy one.) She nodded and her mother settled in beside her, and they watched in silence. Jen found her presence strangely comforting.

‘What are you going to do while I’m at work tomorrow?’ she asked, when they said goodnight. ‘I’m on an early, so I won’t even see you in the morning.’

‘I’m sure I can find plenty to amuse myself,’ Elaine said, and kissed Jen on the forehead. ‘Sleep well.’

She knew something was up the minute she put her key in the door when she got home from work the following afternoon, because Elaine was practically standing to attention in the hall.

‘OK, what’s going on?’ Jen demanded as she headed into the living room and saw that the piles of detritus she had accumulated in the past few weeks had been replaced by open spaces and shiny woodwork.

‘Oh, you’ve tidied up. Thanks. You didn’t have to.’

‘I had lots of time,’ Elaine said. ‘Not that I mean you shouldn’t have left me on my own all day,’ she added hastily, scared of being seen to criticize.

‘It’s OK, Mum. I’m going to get changed,’ Jen said.

She looked in on the kitchen as she passed through the hall. It sparkled like something out of a Flash commercial, light bouncing off the faux marble worktops and hitting her square in the eyes.
Upstairs, her bedroom (which, this morning, although Jason had long since vacated it, still bore his imprint like a crime scene, exactly half of the wardrobe empty while her clothes spilled out on to the floor, two drawers of the tall boy barren while the other two overflowed, half of the
dressing table bearing the chalk-outline dust imprints of his deodorant and aftershave) looked like a ten-man makeover team had spent a week smartening it up. Her clothes seemed to be arranged by type. Trousers, skirts, dresses, tops all segregated. Apparel apartheid. Toiletries were lined
up in order of height. Shoes stood side by side in neat pairs. So that’s how Elaine had spent her day. Either that, or the mice had decided they finally needed to start earning their keep.

Jen felt tears well up, yet again, and forced them back down. While she wasn’t sure that erasing every trace of Jason from her life was what she wanted, she couldn’t fault her mother’s kindness. She changed out of her uniform –
putting it on a hanger, for once, instead of draping it over a chair – practised a smile in the mirror and headed back downstairs, determined to seem grateful.

‘Let’s talk, Mum,’ Jen said. ‘I mean a proper talk. Not skirting around the issue, not shouting at each other. Or me shouting at you, I suppose I should say.’

Elaine looked trapped in the headlights, a rabbit scared out of its skin. ‘I don’t want to get into a fight, Jenny.’

‘Neither do I. And could you call me Jen? Just once in your life?’

She took a deep breath, realizing that this wasn’t a great start for a rational discussion.

‘Thank you for everything you’ve done today. I really appreciate it.’

‘I don’t know how else to help you.’

Jen poured herself a glass of wine. ‘Want one?’

‘A tiny one, maybe.’

‘Really?’ She couldn’t remember ever having seen her mother have a drink.

‘Really small. Dutch courage,’ Elaine said, with a nervous laugh. She sat down at the kitchen table, fiddled nervously with the cuff of her blouse.

‘I understand why you hated Dad. I really do. I can’t imagine what it must have been like, being married to someone who treated you like that.’

‘If I thought we could have kept it together for your sake …’

‘I get it, I truly do. I wouldn’t have wanted Simone and Em to grow up watching their father come in after being out all night, God knows where. Of course you were right to kick him out.
It’s the rest of it. After …’

Elaine sighed. Took a minuscule sip of her wine. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. I thought I was doing the right thing. It seems I wasn’t. I can’t change it, however much I want to.’

‘I just … I don’t understand how you could think it would be better for me to believe my dad had forgotten all about me. It makes no sense.’

‘I know now, I accept that I was partly motivated by anger. After everything he’d done to me, I didn’t want him to be able to pop up twice a year with a present and have you thinking he was father of the year.’

‘I don’t think that was likely.’

‘We all make mistakes. It’s just that some are bigger than others, that’s all.’

Jen couldn’t argue with that. She had lost count of how many she had made herself in the past few months.

‘Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is. And I didn’t have anyone to ask for advice. It was a terribly lonely existence, to be honest.’

Jen felt suddenly overwhelmed. ‘For me too.’

‘I realize that now. I think … I thought you were so young, the best thing I could do was to protect you. Maybe I should have talked to you more.’

‘Mum …’ Jen said, and then she stopped.

She hadn’t told anyone the full story of everything that had happened to her over the past couple of months.
Nobody had the whole picture, from her seeing Charles and Cass in the street to the
night she blew Jason’s family apart, via her indiscretion with Sean. She felt so weighed down by the need to get it all off her chest, to confess. To paint as bad a picture of her behaviour as she could, and then see what the fallout was.

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘Of course you can,’ Elaine said, but she looked worried, as if she wasn’t going to like what she heard.

Jen started at the beginning, told the entire tale, leaving nothing out. She saw Elaine’s eyes grow wide when she got to the part about going back to Sean’s hotel room with him.

‘You poor love,’ was all her mother said, when she’d finished.

‘It’s all my fault, though. Everything.’

‘You know as well as I do that’s not true.’

‘It feels like it is.’

‘Charles Masterson made his choices. They had nothing to do with you. And you won’t get anywhere by spending your time wishing you’d behaved differently, because there’s nothing you can do about it. I should know. You just
have to move on.’

Jen gave a half-laugh. ‘Well, that’s easier said than done.’

Elaine put her bony hand over her daughter’s, patted it. ‘I didn’t say it was easy. Just that it’s the right thing to do.’

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Jen said. She meant it.

By the time Elaine left, on the Tuesday morning – Jen had arranged to go into work late, after having taken her to Marylebone and made sure she got on the right train – Jen
felt as if she’d
turned a corner. Jason was gone, but she had to try to get on with her life.

‘Bye, Jenny … Jen … sorry,’ Elaine said as she kissed her daughter goodbye.

She said ‘Jen’ like it was an alien word, like she had picked it up phonetically and had no idea what it meant. But at least she said it.

‘I will get used to it, it might just take a while.’

Jen gave her a hug. Almost asked her to stay. ‘I’ll come down soon. I promise.’

Her relationships gradually started to drift back to the way they had been before. People stopped asking her how she was feeling every five minutes and started having normal conversations again – about what their kids were up to, or the weather,
or the price of petrol. It was a relief, if she was honest.

She started visiting Rory regularly, taking him cakes and cans of lager – even though she knew he shouldn’t really have either. He seemed pleased to see her. Even, she suspected the second time, had tidied up in anticipation of her visit.
The cobwebs were still there, but they looked as if they had been shifted about a bit. She thought he must have flapped a duster in their direction, at least. She didn’t even try to fill him in on what had happened to her life. He had only just learned to remember Jason’s name –
it would be too confusing to ask him to forget it again.

They kept their conversation to the present. Jen had realized it was pointless expecting Rory to account for the past. It was what it was, and there was nothing she could do to change it. And after a while, she stopped wanting to
punish him, stopped looking for explanations and apologies. She started to enjoy hearing about the mundanities of his day. His on-off relationship with Jean, his feuds with the Meals on Wheels volunteers, his one-man campaign against the noise of his upstairs
neighbour. If she didn’t so much feel she had gained a father, then she had at least gained an old man who she was starting to care about. It was almost like having another child to worry about. A crabby, wrinkly child with hair growing out of his nostrils, brown teeth and a tendency
to pick fights with everyone around him. But she liked having someone else to care about.

She wondered what had happened to Cass, whether she had managed to maintain a relationship with her father, given what had happened. She actually hoped that she had, hoped that some good might have come out of this mess. In the end, she
didn’t have to wait long to find out.

It was the headline that screamed out at her. ‘I am TV star’s love child’, it declared. ‘See pages
6
and
7
’. Next to it was a picture of
Charles – not one she recognized, but recent. Looking dapper, looking pleased with himself, unaware that his house of cards was about to come tumbling down.

And beside that was a photo of Cass. Glamorous, dressed up, made up to the nines and posing for the camera.

Jen could hardly get the money out of her purse to pay for the paper, her hands were shaking so much. Once she had it, she didn’t even move away from the newsstand. She just opened the pages up, right there and then. She needed to see the
worst.

On page six was another picture of Cass, looking hurt and hard done by, but also, it seemed to Jen, a little coquettish as well. The piece went on to describe how poor old Cass Richards had been forced to live in the shadows for the past
twenty-five years while her bigamist, in all but name, father presented himself as some kind of pillar of the community and forged a career as an outspoken upholder of all things right and illiberal.

There was a snap of Cass’s mother too – Barbara, Jen finally discovered her name was. She could see that Barbara bore a strong resemblance to Cass, an older but more
glamorous version. She looked
younger than Jen had imagined – fifty-five, the article declared – still a vibrant, attractive woman. The button nose and slight overbite were there, along with a mane of glossy ash-blonde hair and amber-coloured, possibly lifted, eyes. She must, Jen thought, have been stunning when Charles
had first met her. She wasn’t far off now.

She hoped desperately that Amelia hadn’t seen the article, although she knew the chances were that some kind soul would draw her attention to it. Schadenfreude had a way of bringing out the worst in people. She couldn’t even begin to
imagine the agonies her mother-in-law would go through once she knew her life was being held up for scrutiny and ridicule. Charles, she knew, would be mortified. His whole grim past had raced up to knock him down. It was unlikely
Newsnight
would be picking up the phone to have him
air his views on the Big Society now.

Another small picture showed Charles and Amelia on the beach with a mini Jason, Poppy and Jessie. Jen felt sick. She had no idea how the paper had got hold of that particular photo. Cass must have had it squirrelled away somewhere from years ago.
Used it as a voodoo doll, most likely.

She took out her phone to call Jason. She wanted to make sure she broke it to him gently, before it hit him in the face. Wanted an excuse to speak to him, as much as anything.

‘I’ve seen it,’ he said, when she told him why she was calling.

The way he said it made her feel like it was all her fault all over again.

‘Poor Amelia.’

‘Jen, I’m busy, actually. I’ll talk to you another time, OK?’

He had put the phone down before she could say anything else. She knew he still wanted to punish her.

It was unbelievable how many people come out of the woodwork as tabloid readers when something like this happened. They were positively queuing up to tell Jen about it. Some (Neil, Judy) had her best interests at heart, she knew, wanting to
cushion the blow, as she had tried to do for Jason. For others (Margaret from housekeeping, a neighbour Jen had argued with once when their car alarm kept going off, Graham the doorman), it was their best ever day and they would have walked barefoot over the Himalayas to be the one to break
the news and see the expression on Jen’s face when she heard it for the first time.

The papers made a meal of it for a few days. Jen kept her head down, didn’t answer her front door in case they had sent a reporter to ask for her side of the story. The whole thing felt like it was happening to someone else’s family.
Which, in a way, it was. Jason’s. Jen was thankful, at least, that the girls were enough of a step removed for no one to think of contacting them to ask for their opinion.

‘Maybe,’ Elaine said, when Jen spoke to her on the phone, as she did most days now, ‘a part of Charles is relieved it’s all out in the open.’

Jen knew better. Charles had stayed with Amelia all these years for a reason. He would never have wanted his son and (acknowledged) daughters to know exactly what kind of a person he really was; he prized his status, his
social standing and his burgeoning TV career too much. And, for all she knew, he had really loved his wife. He’d just had a funny way of showing it.

She picked up the phone to call Cass, without even stopping to think.

‘Hey,’ the familiar voice said. ‘I guess you’ve seen the paper.’

‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ Jen said. ‘Have you got any idea how hurtful this is? What it’ll do to Amelia?’

‘I wasn’t the one who spilled the beans in the first place,’ Cass said defiantly. ‘I wasn’t the one who pulled the rug out from under Amelia’s life.’

‘But …’ Jen could hardly speak. ‘In the papers? For the whole world to see? That’s so … vindictive …’

‘That’s not why I did it. Nothing was going to change, don’t you see? They were sticking together in that stupid house like nothing had happened.’

‘Grow up, Cass,’ Jen said. ‘Stop acting like it’s all about you.’

‘I suppose you know what it’s like now, being on the outside? Once they lock those doors, there’s no getting in. Trust me, I tried.’

Jen did something she had never done before. She put the phone down without saying goodbye.

She couldn’t help thinking about what was happening in Twickenham. Who was there? Did Amelia have all her children around her to soften the blow? Had she finally thrown Charles out, now that all their dirty laundry had been aired so
publicly? Were they talking about Jen, or was her name never mentioned? Written out of their collective history.

She felt an ache in her stomach when she pictured them all sitting around the table, the places where she and Charles used to sit probably both empty now. She would try to push the thoughts to the back
of her mind. Even though Amelia and Charles were still the girls’ grandparents, they were no longer her family. She had to forget about them.

She waited for the media attention to die down. She resolved to go out more, stop brooding, stop looking at the internet, and take back control of her life.

If only she knew how.