Mum would have known how to get Francesca onside, even in the face of the disappearing keepsake saga. She always had the right word for everyone. Even the hard-nut hoodies on the estate stepped back to let her pass, elbowed each other out of the way and curbed the worst of their language when Mum went striding by with her cheery ‘Hello, my lovelies’ as though they were all dolled up in Scout uniform, offering to pick up litter and wash cars.
But as her only daughter, the single receptacle of all her modest dreams and ambitions, I couldn’t make myself utter the words, ‘This marriage lark is not all it’s cracked up to be.’ I didn’t even want to admit to myself that Francesca hated me so much she’d deliberately ruined something really precious to me.
I finished making the coffee, watching her resist the temptation to look at the bottom of the mug to see what make it was. I smiled. ‘Have you had a car boot sale lately?’
Mum clapped her hands. ‘You know that funny little stool that was in the corner of the lounge with the plant on it? Some old boy bought it for fifteen quid last Saturday. Gave half of it to Sam towards a new pair of goalie gloves.’
‘You didn’t need to do that. You should be treating yourself.’
Mum looked at me over her coffee cup. ‘I want to treat him. He’s still my grandson, you know.’
I’d never known Mum prickly like this. ‘Mum, no one’s saying otherwise. Have I done something to upset you?’
With that, her face, which even when she was miserable still had an air of waiting to catch a thread of fun, crumpled into tears. I hadn’t seem Mum cry since our snappy old Jack Russell was put down about ten years earlier. I hated to think Sam and I were the cause of it. She fumbled in her sleeve for a tissue, which I recognised as one of her haul of the serviettes she snaffled every time she took Sam to McDonald’s.
‘Sorry, sorry, Mags. I don’t want to come here and blub. I’m happy for you, really I am. I suppose I miss you and Sam. I’m a bit lonely without you.’ I’d expected her to be pleased to have her flat back, with room to move again. But now, an image of Mum sitting on her couch with no one to discuss the disastrous meringues on the Great British Bake Off came into my head. Guilt at my selfishness, dancing off to my new home with barely a backward glance, made me want to cry myself.
Mum rubbed the little patches of dry skin on her knuckles, as if weighing up whether our relationship could withstand what was coming next. She sniffed. ‘I think you’re ashamed of me now you’ve married into the Farinellis and “bettered” yourself. That’s why you don’t want me to come round.’
‘I’ve never stopped you coming round!’ I braced myself for Mum’s next comment, wondering what other bloody thing I’d done wrong, what other flaming shortcoming I had, what other little gap I’d failed to fill.
‘So when was the last time you phoned me and invited me for anything?’
‘You’re family. I don’t need to invite you. You can come any time.’
There was a pattern developing here. Last time I’d gone out with the girls for a drink, they’d teased me about whether I’d deleted their numbers from my mobile. And I’d felt a bit offended though I knew I didn’t go out as much as I used to. But wasn’t that the same for everyone who got married? Otherwise I might as well have stayed single.
My stomach knotted as Mum shook her head. We did rub each other up the wrong way sometimes, but we never really fell out properly. And I didn’t want to start now that life was supposed to be getting better.
‘You might say I’m always welcome, but if I do pop in, you’re always like, just hang your coat up, just put your mug on a coaster, just wash your hands before you help me with dinner, just be careful not to knock over that glass, like I’m a five-year-old who can’t be trusted to have a drink without spilling it everywhere.’
I sighed, feeling my annoyance subside. Where to start? How could I even begin to explain the burden I felt of looking after everything that belonged to Caitlin, so Francesca could never say, ‘I loved that table/glass/bowl/tea bloody spoon but Maggie’s family ruined it’? How could I tell her that I dreaded Anna coming in, taking in the avalanche of Sam’s shoes and boots, the carrier bags I didn’t quite finish emptying of groceries, the pens without lids scattered on the kitchen table, the shabby, slovenly second wife? That I spent my whole life sweeping up after myself and Sam, but never quite managed to tidy us away enough to feel that we weren’t somehow a tickling hair of irritation caught in the collar of the Farinelli glamour?
It wasn’t that Mum didn’t belong.
It was that I didn’t.
I took her hand. ‘I’m sorry that I’ve made you feel like that. It’s a bit of an adjustment period for all of us, isn’t it? We’d been a little unit of three for so long that I feel a bit caught in the middle, trying to please everyone.’
A more accurate description would have been stretched like a frayed elastic bungee cord that was about to snap and hook someone’s eye out.
Mum’s face relaxed. ‘You know Daphne that I’m looking after? Her son is taking her on holiday for the first two weeks of August, so I can have some time off. I’ve been saving up my car boot money. I’ve got enough for a caravan in Cornwall. Do you think Nico would let you and Sam come away?’
‘Of course he will. He’ll be pleased for us to spend time with you. It’s not really a case of him “letting” us anyway… we’re a bit more equal than that.’
Even Mum had fallen into the trap of thinking that I needed to throw myself on the floor, grateful for a husband. I wondered if anyone thought Nico was lucky to have me. But Mum was so thrilled about our Cornwall adventure she didn’t notice my sharp words.
‘We can go to the Eden project – I think I can swap my Tesco vouchers for tickets – and I saw on telly that there’s surfing down there, perhaps Sam can try it, there are some lovely beaches, with a bit of sun, it’ll be as good as going abroad.’
The word ‘abroad’ woke me up. God. Tuscany. First two weeks of August.
Mum was still extolling the virtues of Cornish cream teas and planning to hire a windbreak if it was a bit blowy. I couldn’t tell her we couldn’t go. Not now. Not when she was already feeling as though we were looking down our noses at her.
But I couldn’t allow her make plans then let her down at a later date. I sat there, my face, my heart burning. I needed to get the words out.
‘Actually, Mum, I’m really sorry but I’ve just realised Sam and I are flying to Tuscany then.’
She looked at me as though I’d said we were off to America on a private jet. ‘Tuscany?’
I nodded, hoping today wouldn’t be the day that I would have to articulate the words, ‘We’re staying in a castle’.
Something shifted on her face, as though Sam and I were drifting further and further out of her reach. I wanted to row back towards her and scoop her into the boat with us, not leave her stranded, an unwilling spectator of a life she couldn’t share.
Which is probably why the next sentence flew out of my mouth, a crazy idea formulated by an unbalanced mind, a suggestion with ‘disaster’ written all over it, flashing about the kitchen in strobe lighting.
‘Why don’t you come to Italy with us?’
21
LARA