5

Jen and Jason were spending Sunday afternoon as they spent five out of six Sunday afternoons – or six out of seven, if Jen could get away with it – at Jason’s family’s rambling childhood home in Twickenham.

Despite the fact that his parents, Charles and Amelia Masterson, now lived there alone, and that it was really far too big for them – something everyone was studiously avoiding pointing out, so afraid were they that one day Riverdale might have to be sold, and they wouldn’t just lose the bricks and mortar but also the fulcrum round which the whole family rotated – the house never seemed empty. Probably because it never got the chance to be. The Mastersons liked to congregate. And Riverdale was where they liked to do it best.

Most Sundays, along with Jen and Jason, Simone and Emily, there would be Poppy and Maisie, as well as Jessie and her husband, Martin. They didn’t restrict themselves to weekends either. Didn’t need a birthday or an anniversary as an excuse. The sun rising in the morning was enough of a reason for a Masterson get-together.

Admittedly, most women’s worst nightmare would be to marry a man whose idea of a good night out was dinner with his parents, or a drink with his sisters. For Jen it was the culmination of everything she had ever wished for.

Jen’s own family was called Elaine.

She was it. The sum total of Jen’s living relatives – well, with one exception, and he didn’t count. It was just her and Elaine, and it had been that way since her dad had walked out and left them when Jen was eight years old. She loved her mum, of course she did, she just sometimes wished she could multiply her.

When she was seven, Jen had wanted two things: for her parents to start talking again; and for some brothers and sisters to come along to keep her company while she sat on the landing and listened to the silence. It wasn’t that her mum and dad didn’t speak – it hadn’t got to the ‘Jenny, would you ask your father to pass the salt’ stage yet. They just didn’t speak unless they had to. There was no conversation. Nothing beyond the absolute essentials.

Most evenings, her dad would go out straight after tea and come home, three or four hours later, smelling like beer and kebabs from the nearby takeaway. Once, a local stray had followed him home, tail wagging, clearly convinced that Rory must have been concealing some tasty meat about his person because of his habit of stuffing a doner into his pocket to keep it warm, and the resulting aroma that clung stubbornly to his clothes.

By the time she was nine, those seemed like the halcyon days. Her father had gone, and he didn’t seem to be coming back. Her desire for siblings had never abated.

Without her dad there, home had felt oppressive, the long silences even more suffocating. Never mind that, in the last year or so, her father’s noise had mostly been the clatter he made when he fell down the stairs, or his party trick of burping the national anthem when he’d had a few. A skill that had always made her mother seethe. At least there had been evidence of life.

She assumed that her mum and dad must have loved each other once. In fact, she knew they had, had a vague but compelling memory of fun family days out before it all went wrong. Rory had been a joker, always kidding around, doing impressions, funny walks, pulling faces, anything to make her laugh. And she could remember Elaine joining in. With the laughing, that is, not the face pulling. She could remember a time when she didn’t have a knot of anxiety in her stomach, waiting for him to get home from work, for the heavy atmosphere to descend, when he would pick her up and twirl her round until she begged him to stop. Actually, maybe he had already started drinking then because, looking back, he had had scant regard for her safety, flinging her up in the air and barely catching her, Jen gasping with laughter and, probably, fear.

He was a man of big gestures, coming home on different occasions with a go-kart, a disgruntled-looking hamster in a cage, a Kenwood food mixer, and presenting them to Jen and Elaine with a flourish. She had wondered, later, whether he had won them off his mates in a card game. Whether other wives and children had woken up bemused by one of their possessions having inexplicably disappeared. Some other little girl crying because Hammy seemed to have escaped and taken his cage with him. No one had ever seemed to ask.

She had seen the photos of her parents with their arms round each other, smiling broadly for the camera. Their wedding, with Rory’s Zapata moustache and Elaine’s heavy fringe and honey-blonde bouffant locks. One and a half sets of grandparents still living, none of whom Jen could really remember ever meeting, dressed in their best. Everyone looking proud and happy and hopeful.

Not only was Jen an only child, but so were her parents. The only child of only children. Grandparents long gone by the time Jen was really aware they had ever existed. And once Rory had disappeared so completely from her life, Jen became the only child of an only parent. It should have been the two of them against the world. Instead, Jen had decided to blame all Rory’s faults and shortcomings on her mum, Elaine. It was irrational, she had realized once she grew up a bit, but since when did rationality ever get in the way of family resentments?

She had accepted every invitation that came her way, any excuse to get out of the house and away from her mother’s stubborn determination that everything was going to be absolutely fine with just the pair of them. She had sought out friends who lived in noisy, crowded households, sitting quietly in the background, observing rather than taking part. Always the shy girl on the outskirts. And, as soon as she was old enough, she’d applied to go to college as far away from home as she could and still be in the same country. Actually, she had tried to go to Scotland at first but, in the end, she had had to plump for her third choice, Newcastle, where she’d lived in twenty-four-hour-party halls and then a house shared with five others. The noise never bothered her. She had revelled in the chaos and the drama. Anything was preferable to silence.

The first time Jason had taken her to meet his own family, about six months after they had started dating – having met when Jen, fresh out of university, back living in a bed-sit down south and at a loss for what to do with her English degree, had volunteered to help organize a production at the local council-run theatre where Jason was the stressed-out would-be director attempting to pull the whole show together – Jen had stared in open-mouthed amazement at the anarchy, the warmth and the bickering that had filled their kitchen. Mostly the bickering. The Masterson girls could have won competitions in arguing. Synchronized squabbling. ‘55kg and under’ teasing. The contrast with her own teenage home couldn’t have been more extreme.

The house – a large but still somehow cosy-looking Arts and Crafts detached on a quiet residential road leading away from the centre of Twickenham – had smelled of fresh coffee and baking biscuits. Jen remembered thinking there were no hard edges; everything was drowning in soft furnishings. It had reminded her of a padded cell – only, one made by Laura Ashley and featured on the pages of Homes & Gardens. The family was clearly as artsy and craftsy as their house, because there were pictures tacked up all over the kitchen walls (some of which, she later discovered, dated back to when Jason was about three years old), and home-made-looking artefacts of varying degrees of ability everywhere she turned.

‘Jason made that in school,’ one of his sisters – Jen hadn’t worked out who was who yet – had said as she’d pointed to a misshapen pottery thing that Jen had assumed was meant to be a vase of some kind, but which now held pens in the middle of the kitchen table.

‘Good, huh?’ She had rolled her eyes as she said it, so luckily Jen had known she was meant to laugh. ‘Mum still has everything any of us has ever produced. It’s like the most pointless museum ever.’

Most of the family had been there. His mother, the two sisters, Poppy and Jessie. It had been Poppy, the middle of the three children, who had spoken to Jen she’d discovered when she was introduced. Jen had tried to hide in a corner, overwhelmed by the two confident girls, an amorphous ever-moving cloud of long hair, perfume and sarcastic remarks. She had found them terrifying. Not because they were mean, but because they were so self-assured. They had been handed the world without even trying, why wouldn’t they be confident in their own fabulousness? So she had given up making an effort to talk, and she’d sat in a large armchair that had almost swallowed her up, speaking only when spoken to.

‘What do you do?’ Jessie, the youngest at sixteen, had barked at her. Short, dark haired and ethereal-looking, she had draped her stick-thin frame in some kind of long wispy number. If Jen hadn’t known already, she would have guessed that Jessie was headed for drama school. Jason had told her his sister was a natural actress, blessed with a talent for making up stories, self-obsession and histrionics.

‘Um …’ Jen had said. ‘Nothing really, at the moment. I’m looking.’

‘What about your dad? What does he do?’ Jessie had carried on.

Jen had imagined this was what it must have felt like to be interrogated by the Gestapo – except they might have been more interested in her responses. Jessie was painting her toenails while she talked, and only giving Jen half her attention.

Jen had absolutely no idea of the answer to that question. Drank? She hadn’t seen Rory for years at that point so, for all she knew, he could have been the man who had come to fix her boiler the week before.

‘I don’t know, really,’ she had answered, and Jessie had looked at her as if she thought Jason might have brought home the village idiot.

‘Have you never asked?’

Jen had ignored the question. She’d guessed that Jason hadn’t filled them in on her family history.

‘Jason says he met you at the theatre.’ Jessie pronounced each syllable separately, relishing them all: thee-ate-er.

‘Yes,’ Jen had said, looking to Jason to help her out, but he was playing with the family’s cat, and seemed oblivious to her plight.

She’d tried to conjure up some interesting anecdote or other, but everything she could think of seemed to have some kind of ‘R’ rated element: unsuitable for public consumption. ‘The first time we had sex was on the stage, actually, after everyone had gone home,’ or, ‘Did he tell you about when we caught the leading man giving the boy who played his brother a blow job in the props cupboard?’ So she had just said nothing.

‘What were you doing?’

‘I was helping out.’ Oh, the sparkling wit. Move over, Oscar Wilde.

‘For God’s sake, Jess, leave the poor girl alone.’ This from Poppy, the other one, the middle sister, whose grungy get-up and unwashed hair couldn’t hide the fact that she had a face that probably made grown men weep. Sloping hazel eyes had gazed at Jen sympathetically from under a spiky fringe. ‘It’s just that you’re the first girl Jason has ever brought home, so we’re naturally curious.’

Jason had looked up from his position on the carpet. ‘You are such a liar.’

Poppy had given Jen a big smile. ‘We were beginning to get worried … you know.’

Jason had thrown a cushion at his sister. It had actually missed Poppy completely and hit Jen in the eye, but she’d tried to ignore the fact she thought she might be going blind and she’d laughed along. It had seemed like the right thing to do. And, if she hadn’t, she’d been afraid she might cry.

Jason’s mother, Amelia, had made tea. Home-baked scones, salmon-paste sandwiches and a Victoria sponge. The stuff of Enid Blyton families, not something Jen’s mum would ever have had the time – or even the inclination – to do. It had struck Jen when Jason had first introduced her that if you ever had to explain to an alien what a mother was, you could just show them a picture of Amelia. She was so soft, so warm, so maternal-looking, covered in flour from baking treats for her children. Either that, or her cocaine habit was out of control. Jen had nearly asked if she could sit on her lap.

Elaine was all angles. Elbows and knees sharp like compasses. Skin scratchy like sandpaper. On the rare occasions Jen condescended to give her a hug, she couldn’t help feeling there was a danger she might snap her in half.

‘Do you take sugar, Jennifer?’

‘It’s Jen, Mum,’ Jason had cut in. He had heard Jen say the same thing many times, although she hadn’t been intending to insist on her preferred name here so soon.

‘My fault, Jason did tell me.’ Amelia had smiled, and the room had practically lit up. Jen had actually looked round to see if someone had turned a light on.

Jen hadn’t wanted to seem greedy by saying, ‘Yes, three please,’ so she had muttered a word that had come out a cross between ‘one’ and ‘two’, meaning Amelia had had to ask the same question again.

Jen had known that she wasn’t making a great impression. She wouldn’t have warmed to herself as a potential daughter-stroke-sister-in-law, in all honesty. She’d wished, and not for the first time in her life, that she was more polished, more … accomplished. Or, at least, more socialized. She’d felt like one of those children found living in the woods who has been brought up by a wolf pack and has never had human contact before. All she could do was grunt. They were lucky she didn’t sit on the floor, lift her leg and start grooming her bits noisily.

‘Come up to my room,’ Poppy had said, out of nowhere. ‘I’m going to a party tonight and I have literally no idea what to wear. I’ve been home too long; you’re the first person I’ve seen in weeks with any sense of style, so you can help me pick something out.’

Jen had almost kissed her with gratitude, nearly falling over the now sleeping cat in her hurry to get out and away from the questioning.

And then Jason’s father, Charles, had walked in. The sun had come out, birds sang, flowers bloomed.

‘You must be Jen.’ He had smiled his big, expansive smile. ‘Welcome to the madhouse. Are they torturing you yet?’

Jen had smiled nervously. ‘No … of course not.’

‘I bet they are. Take it as a compliment. If they didn’t like the look of you, they wouldn’t bother. They’re all bark.’

Charles had swept Amelia up into a floury hug, seemingly oblivious to the white powdery mess that transferred itself to his suit. Jen had actually been surprised that he was dressed so formally given the bohemian get-up favoured by the others. Even Amelia was wearing a floaty scarf with her pinny. She knew, though, that he had his own business, something in property, so he probably had to make a good impression. Later, she’d learned that Charles was always well turned out. Even on days when he didn’t visit the office, he was never less than impeccably attired. No lounging around in his PJs, or old gardening trousers, for him. He was up, showered, shaved and dressed to impress by breakfast time.

Amelia had laughed and pushed him off, waving her pastry-sticky fingers at him as a threat. Jen had tried to imagine Elaine doing the same to Rory, but the only image she could come up with was her mum hitting her dad with a newspaper when he had tried to help himself to the cooking sherry once. Neither of them had been laughing.

Up in Poppy’s old room – a treasure trove of her childhood things, Rothko and Pollock posters, and a heaped-up clothes mountain sitting in the centre like an altar – Poppy had sat on the bed cross-legged and indicated for Jen to sit next to her.

‘Ignore Jess,’ she had said, conspiratorially. ‘She has a tendency to say inappropriate things. It comes from thinking you’re God’s gift and everyone will be fascinated by whatever you utter.’

Jen had laughed. ‘Honestly, she was fine.’

‘It’s all to do with being the youngest. You get away with more. Myself, I’m the overlooked middle child.’ She’d leaned across and dragged over a floral dress from the pile on the floor. ‘How about this? Too Lady Di?’

‘A bit. Maybe if you wore it with engineer boots?’

‘Don’t have any.’ She scrabbled around under the bed. ‘Converse?’

‘Perfect.’

‘If I can find them. So how about you? Youngest? Eldest?’

‘Both. I’m the only one.’

Poppy had stopped in her rummaging and looked at her as if that was the strangest concept she had ever heard. ‘God. Grim.’

Jen, who was used to people telling her she was lucky to have all of her mother’s attention, or not to have to wear hand-me-down clothes or share a bedroom, had screwed up her face in response. ‘It is a bit.’

‘Hey, do you want to come to this party?’

‘Oh, I don’t –’ Jen had started to say, but Poppy had continued, ‘Shit, no, Jason won’t go. He hates all my friends. Come without him.’

Jen had laughed. ‘Better not.’

‘Well, next time.’

‘Great.’

‘Or we could meet up in London. I mean, if you’re going to be part of the family we really should get to know each other properly.’

‘Bit early for that, I think. I wouldn’t buy a hat yet –’

‘Oh no, he’s got to settle down with you. He’s got no choice. I’ve always been terrified he’d marry some girl I didn’t like. Can you imagine what that’d …? Well, no, I don’t suppose you can. And that lot all love you too, I can tell,’ she’d said, indicating the downstairs.

And, just like that, Jen had acquired a best friend.

At some point, when they were sitting around the table after lunch, Poppy had produced a tin full of old photos and proceeded to show Jen every embarrassing haircut Jason had ever had – along with pictures of him in fancy dress, or school plays, or dressed as a page boy for a cousin’s wedding. To Jen he had looked adorable in every different incarnation, but what had captivated her more, what she could hardly bear to tear her eyes away from, was what was around him. The crowded messy life of a family – happy, smiling, pouting, sulking, it didn’t matter. They were an entity, a team, a gang.

And all the while Amelia had beamed, as if all she had ever desired was right there in that room, and Charles had sat at the head of the table smiling, making jokes, making his children laugh, making Jen feel at home. A patriarch completely happy with his lot.

By the time she and Jason had left to go home, a few days later, she was in love with them all in different ways. Even Jessie. She had nearly refused to leave, climbed up on the roof and claimed squatter’s rights. She’d wanted to stay in that overstuffed, noisy, alive house for ever and be a part of their lives. They were everything she had always imagined the perfect family would be. She’d known that, more than anything, she wanted to join this clan. She had wanted to turn the clock back to her lonely childhood so they could adopt her.

About a week later, Jason had asked her to move in with him and she hadn’t even hesitated before saying yes. Over the years, they had all become such important allies in her life that on the (very) rare occasions she and Jason had a fight that lasted into the evening, what kept her awake wasn’t worrying about who would get the house, it was how she would be able to win custody of her in-laws.