‘Isn’t that why she’s got Una?’
‘Well, yes, but Una needs a day off.’ She bites back her irritation. ‘We’ve been through this.’
He mutters something under his breath but she doesn’t catch it. ‘We need to go.’ He hurls his rucksack onto his back. ‘I’m gonna be late for school.’
‘What about the bus?’ He always takes the bus. He says he likes it because it gives him the chance to catch up with his mates, not that they look like they’re catching up when Kathryn sees them. They’re usually glued to their phones or their ears are plugged into them.
‘I missed it.’
Again. Last week he didn’t turn up at school. He’d taken the bus that day and she’d assumed he’d arrived okay – she has Find My Friends on her phone to keep track of him after his behaviour last year – but his phone was turned off. And he usually got the bus with Harry. Then she’d received a call from the headmaster to say he hadn’t turned up for registration. She’d rushed out of the gallery and driven around until she’d found him, walking on the Downs, in the cold, his breath clouding in front of him. When she’d asked him where he’d been, he told her he’d missed the bus and decided to walk and had then got lost in the fog. She hadn’t believed a word of it, of course. He’d been living in Bristol all his life and his school was a forty-minute walk at the most. Yes, it would have made him late but there’s no way he would have got lost going from Stokes Bishop to his posh school near the centre of town.
‘Well, lucky I’m here, then,’ she says, trying to keep her tone light so as not to antagonize her once placid son.
It was when he turned fourteen that he changed, practically overnight, from a chilled-out kid to an angsty, defensive bag of hormones. She’d heard it could happen from friends with older kids but she’d never thought it would apply to her boys. She’d brought them up well – being a good mother was just as important to her as being a good wife and daughter. Her own disastrous childhood, before she’d come to live with Elspeth, had made her determined to be the best mum she could be to her kids. And she’d thought she’d succeeded. Until last year.
Not that she could admit any of it to Elspeth. Elspeth wouldn’t understand. She knows her mother prefers girls. She remembers only too well how her mother had sent back little Tommy, a boy she was going to adopt before Kathryn because he’d been ‘too naughty’.
‘Did Grandma ask after us?’ Jacob asks from the front passenger seat.
‘Of course. Always,’ she lies. The sad truth is, Elspeth doesn’t give a shit about her grandsons. Kathryn worked that out years ago. She remembers visiting her mother with a newborn Jacob, a beautiful chubby baby with big brown eyes and apple cheeks. Elspeth had looked faintly disgusted when Kathryn handed him to her, as though he was some mangy animal that smelt. She’d swiftly returned him to her with a rictus smile, and Kathryn had been so hurt she’d gone home and cried. Throughout Kathryn’s second pregnancy she could see how hopeful her mother was that she’d have a little girl. Every time Kathryn saw her Elspeth had announced that she was carrying this baby differently. Comments like ‘Your bump is all around the side and you’re looking swollen. I think it’s a girl,’ or ‘You’ve not been nearly as sick this time. Have you noticed?’ And when she gave birth to Harry her feelings had oscillated wildly. On one hand she knew that if she’d given her mother that much-wanted granddaughter she’d lose all control and Elspeth would take over, but on the other a granddaughter might have made her mother love Kathryn more.
‘I haven’t seen her in months.’ Jacob’s voice brings her back to the present.
Kathryn tries to hide her surprise. ‘Do you want to see her?’
He grunts. ‘Not particularly. She never asks me questions. Not like Nanny Mols.’ Nanny Mols – Molly – is Ed’s mum, a lovely, plump-cheeked, smiley lady who dotes on Ed, as well as her only grandchildren.
‘I think Grandma has a lot on her mind. And she’s older than Nanny Mols, remember. I wouldn’t take it personally. Grandma is like that with everyone.’
‘I’m not taking it personally,’ he snaps, and Kathryn wants to kick herself for saying the wrong thing. Again.
She wants to scream at him. To tell him to be thankful for the home he has, for the life he’s got. You could have had a childhood like mine, she’s tempted to say. A mother overdosing in front of you. Being pushed from pillar to post. And then finally finding a family only to discover they have their own demons and dark secrets. But she doesn’t say any of this, of course. She bites her lip and they drive the rest of the way in silence.
20
The Cuckoo, October 1983
It was 31 October. Viola’s thirteenth birthday.
Katy thought it was apt that Viola should have her birthday on Halloween. In the three months she’d been living under the same roof as her sister, she had come to realize that something very dark lurked behind Viola’s beautiful veneer.
She had done everything in her power to make friends with Viola, not least because she knew that was what Elspeth expected, and she had vowed to do whatever her new mother wanted to avoid being sent back to the home, like Tommy. She’d hated it there. Nothing in the home had belonged to her – everything was shared: the TV, the tatty second-hand toys in the playroom. Worse than that, there was no love. She even let Elspeth call her by her full name, Kathryn, when nobody else did. ‘I don’t like to shorten names, darling girl,’ she’d said, wrinkling her nose.