I was lying on the settee, enjoying a particularly intense staring contest with the cat when I heard a knock at the door. Almost anyone who might be at my door in the first place had their own key and even those who didn’t would let themselves in, so I stayed put for a second knock before displacing Daniel Craig and traipsing down to see who it might be.
‘Mum?’
‘Clearly,’ my mother replied, shaking off her umbrella in the doorway and waiting for me to step aside and let her in. ‘I do hope Cassie gets better weather tomorrow, it’s been very up and down of late. The forecast is for sun but who knows what we’ll get?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, following her quick step up the stairs and holding out my arms for her discarded mac. ‘I didn’t know you were coming over.’
‘Clearly.’ She cast a disapproving eye over the flat as she stepped inside. I’d started cleaning up, really I had, but after a busy Saturday morning at the surgery, sitting down with a cup of tea and the last chapter of Wish It. Want It. Do It. had proven far too tempting. ‘Your father said the flat was a disgrace.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ I argued, draping her jacket over an epic ironing pile and Daniel Craig slunk underneath, out of sight.
‘For you, no,’ she agreed, busying herself in the kitchen. ‘But then he didn’t spend a lot of time in your room as a teenager.’
‘Let me make the tea,’ I offered as she rifled through half-empty boxes of teabags, looking for something that met her approval. ‘You sit down.’
‘Your dad is concerned about the surgery.’
Apparently she didn’t want to sit down.
‘And I’m concerned about you.’
‘No need to be concerned,’ I assured her. She turned her grey-blue eyes in my direction and I could see I wasn’t going to get off that easily. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Tell me the truth,’ she said, fully aware I was incapable of lying to her once she had insisted on ‘the truth’. It was as though she’d had a wicked fairy cast a spell on me at birth, I was powerless against that command. ‘It’s not like you to behave like this.’
‘Like what?’ I asked, fighting the compulsion to tell her everything and genuinely curious as to how she thought I was behaving.
Mum carried on making the tea, warming the pot with freshly boiled water, resetting the kettle and emptying the teapot into the sink before adding two teabags and pouring in the water.
‘You’re not yourself,’ she replied, one hand on the teapot, the other on her denim-clad hip. I looked down at my own ripped knee skinnies and then back at her sensible high-waisted, straight leg jeans. Thinking about it, hers were probably more on trend than mine. ‘I should have known when you turned up at your dad’s birthday in that dress.’
‘It was a very nice dress.’ I crossed my arms over my feeble bosom. ‘Possibly not entirely appropriate, I will give you that, but still, very nice.’
‘Not the word I would have used.’ She sat my one and only tray on the coffee table between us, two clean mugs with exactly half an inch of milk in the bottom of each and a steaming pot of tea in the middle. ‘First you run out on the party, then your dad says you’re giving him grief about the new vet.’
I made a grumbling sound that couldn’t quite be considered words and reached out to pour my tea.
‘Leave it,’ Mum said briskly. ‘It needs two more minutes. Olivia, what’s the matter?’
Until I met Adam’s family, I’d always felt like me and my parents were close but it turned out geographically that ‘nearby’ and ‘close’ weren’t exactly the same thing. Compared to Abi’s family, we were the Waltons. Not once had my mother slapped my father in the middle of parents’ evening and neither of them had ever declared the other a whoring witch in the nearest big Tesco, but at the same time we didn’t merrily spend time together the way the Floyds did. Adam actually chose to hang out with his parents; there was no such thing as a dutiful Sunday lunch around his house, it was all unlocked doors, ‘just popped in to say hello’ and Tuesday night fajitas. They had been on holiday together, as adults, more than once.
I loved my parents, but even though I worked with Dad, we didn’t spend an awful lot of time together. If we were both in the surgery, it was because we were both busy and conversation outside of work stayed strictly superficial – who in the village had what illness, the price of eggs these days, whether or not someone had been cheating on Bake Off. And so Mum’s surprise visit was alarming enough without her wanting to have an actual conversation about actual real life.
‘Is it Adam?’ she pressed.
‘No, well, yes – but not just Adam.’ I couldn’t stand another second of this without the galvanizing power of tea. I grabbed the teapot, turned it twice, and poured it as my mother’s thin lips disappeared into her face. ‘I’ve got a lot going on. But I’m not giving Dad grief, I’m just not sure I agree with the way he wants to do things.’
‘That I don’t understand,’ she replied, pushing her wispy blonde fringe out of her eyes. ‘Your dad has been running that place since before you were born; why would you not want his help?’
‘I do want his help,’ I said, pulling on a loose thread left by a missing button on my shirt. ‘But I don’t want him telling me what I have to do with the rest of my life.’
I knew how I sounded, the look on her face just confirmed it.
‘I’m not being difficult.’ I read her mind to save her some time. ‘But I don’t agree that getting a new vet in and taking me away from the animals to sit in an office doing paperwork is the best way to run the business. If he wants me to run the business he needs to let me do it my way. Mum, I’m thirty.’
Mum held my gaze, her eyes calm and steady, while I fidgeted in my seat. This was the part where she waited for me to confess, apologize and promise never to do it again. Only I hadn’t done anything wrong and there was no apology coming.
‘You could start acting like it,’ she suggested, ignoring my shocked gasp. ‘What’s going on with you and Adam?’
Ooh, distract me with an insult then throw in the real question. Sneaky diversion from Addison the Elder.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ I told her, noting her tactics for future use. ‘We’re on a break.’
She looked at me before she spoke and I flushed uncomfortably under the weight of her blue eyes. It wasn’t the usual ‘look at the state of you’ glance, she was really paying attention.
‘There are a lot of things I might have done differently with my life, if I’d had the chance,’ she began. ‘If I were your age, believe me Olivia, I’d be out there doing it all. But the one thing I have never doubted was the fact your father was the right man for me. I want the same thing for you.’
‘How do you know, though?’ I wasn’t convinced. As far as I was aware, and as far as I ever wanted to be aware, my dad was the only boyfriend she’d ever had. ‘There are what, seven billion people in the world and I’m supposed to know some bloke I met in the local supermarket is the one, just because? I haven’t even met all my Facebook friends in real life, let alone every eligible man on the planet.’
‘The world was a much smaller place for me and your dad,’ Mum replied, smiling for the first time since she’d walked through my door. ‘But it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been an international jetsetter, he would still have been the one for me. There’s a lot to be said for someone who understands who you are and where you’re from – don’t underestimate how much those things matter. It’s a lot more important to find someone who appreciates the things that made you who you are today than someone with a nice bum and a Ferrari.’
‘Why, do you know someone with a nice bum and a Ferrari?’
My mum, the relationship guru, blushed into her cup of tea and I reluctantly let myself wonder if she was right. I had never had to explain myself to Adam; I’d never had to be someone I wasn’t. Out of the seven billion people on earth, how many would have taken the day off to hold my hand through my wisdom tooth surgery and told me I looked beautiful when I actually looked like a deranged gerbil? How many would have flown me all the way to Budapest to introduce me to a wombat on my thirtieth birthday? And how many would still stroke the edge of my ear until I fell asleep every night, even after three years? None of them, because none of them were Adam.
‘Your generation has made the world a very big place, Olivia,’ she explained. ‘And I don’t know if that’s always a good thing. I was very relieved when you came back home after university – I was worried you’d run off travelling around the world or something, because you always had that mad streak in you and between you and Abigail I wouldn’t have put any sort of escapades past the two of you.’
‘I didn’t move home,’ I reminded her, pulling myself upright. ‘I never moved back into the house, and I started work as soon as I graduated, you know that.’
‘I meant came back to the village,’ she replied, pulling the loose thread out of my shirt altogether. ‘All I ever wanted for you was to see you settled and happy. That might not sound very exciting, but in this day and age, it’s not a given.’
‘I am happy,’ I said, realizing as soon as I spoke that it wasn’t entirely true. ‘Or I thought I was. Now I don’t know what to think.’
‘Hmm.’ Mum tucked the loose thread into her jeans pocket.
Hmm? That was the best she could do?
‘What would you have done differently?’ I asked, struggling to imagine my mum as anything other than my mum, reliable, predictable Lesley Addison, baker of cakes, mender of socks and village authority on the best time of year to plant your daffodils. ‘If you had the chance?’
She took a deep breath in through her nose and looked up at the crack in my ceiling. ‘All kinds of things,’ she said, her soft smile turning wistful. ‘I would have liked to have travelled more but hopefully there’s still time for that. I think I would have liked to have had a job – I feel quite odd to have reached my age without having done something.’
‘I thought you were happy not working,’ I said, thinking of Cass and Chris and Gus. ‘I didn’t realize.’
‘I was happy taking care of you,’ she said with a quick touch of my knee. ‘But once you started school things got very boring, very quickly. I did consider a few things but it’s hard to get started when you’re in your thirties and you’ve no experience at anything other than raising a child. All the qualifications I got in college were out of date by the time you went up to secondary school and your dad was a bit funny about me doing anything in the village.’
Curiouser and curiouser.
‘Funny how?’
‘He didn’t want me to work in the old supermarket when it opened.’ She arched an eyebrow at the memory. ‘I don’t think it’ll be news to you that your dad can be a bit of a snob.’
It didn’t feel like the right time to point out that more than a few of his snobbish tendencies had rubbed off.
‘And we had always planned to have more children but we couldn’t, so that was that.’
She brushed nonexistent crumbs from her lap as though she hadn’t just dropped a massive truth bomb in the middle of my living room.
‘You couldn’t have more kids?’ I asked quietly. ‘Why?’
‘Because we couldn’t,’ she said quickly. ‘We don’t really know why. Your dad didn’t want to do the tests and I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of doing it the doctor way anyway, so that was that. But yes, I do wish I’d found something worthwhile to do with my time. Although I don’t feel too badly about it when I look at how well you’ve turned out.’
‘Really?’ I allowed myself to be distracted by the rare, seemingly genuine compliment even while I processed her confession. This was all a lot at once. ‘You could still get a job now, Mum. You could do a lot of things.’
‘All I want to do now is get your father out of that white coat and into his swimmers.’ She took a deep drink of tea and rattled her neatly filed nails against the mug. ‘He’s worked very hard his whole life. It’s time he did something for himself, for both of us actually. It’ll be nice to turn the light out and know he’s not got to rush out and take care of someone’s silly rabbit in the middle of the night.’
‘I’ve got so much to look forward to,’ I said, my expression grim. Rabbit call outs were the worst. There was hardly ever anything you could do for a rabbit.
‘If you and Adam have as happy a life as me and your father, you’ll have done bloody well for yourself,’ she replied, flushing at her own uncharacteristic light swear. She would have died if she’d heard the way I talked to David and Abi. ‘And whatever is the matter between the two of you, sort it out. From what I can tell, it’s terribly easy to walk away from things these days with your Tinders and Grindrs and the like but nothing worth having was ever easy and that is a fact.’
‘Mum!’ I was truly shocked. ‘Do you even know what Grindr is?’
‘I’m fifty-five, I’m not dead,’ she said, draining the dregs of her tea. ‘You see all sorts on Loose Women, Olivia. All these couples breaking up at the first sign of trouble because they think there’s something easier around the corner – but easier does not endure. Easier is not worth the time of day.’
‘What if he doesn’t want to sort it out?’ I asked, keeping my voice light, my eyes on my bare toes.
‘Then he’s a bloody fool.’ She stood up and kissed me on the top of my head before reaching for her coat. My ironing pile tumbled to the floor and Daniel Craig raced out from under the mess, a pair of knickers looped around his neck. Mum tightened her mouth again and shook her head. ‘I’m saying nothing.’
‘Thanks.’ I gathered everything up in my arms and dumped it on the settee. I would totally do it before the christening.
‘Talk to your dad about the surgery,’ Mum said, glancing out the window at the weather before belting her mac. It was still raining. ‘Talk to Adam about whatever is going on and get that button sewn back on your shirt, if you even know where it is.’
‘Life’s too short to worry about missing buttons,’ I said, throwing my arms in the air. I had no idea where it was. ‘Isn’t that what this whole chat was about?’
‘This chat was about listening to your parents from time to time,’ she corrected. ‘Every so often, we might have something useful to tell you.’
‘God forbid,’ I replied as she saw herself out, shaking out her umbrella and closing the door behind her.
Resuming my position on the settee I looked at her lipstick-stained mug and wondered. What would I regret when I was sixty? The photo of me and Adam and my beloved birthday wombat stared down at me from the wall. What stories did I want to share with my daughter? Daniel Craig pranced indignantly out of my bedroom, still wearing my pink thong around his neck. I reached out to pull it away but got nothing but a swipe of his paw and a high-pitched yowl for my troubles.
‘Keep them then,’ I said, settling back down and closing my eyes. ‘You weirdo.’
Because I didn’t have enough to worry about without a three-legged cross-dressing cat called Daniel Craig giving me grief.