41
Jen had never really thought about how small her life was. How contained. How she truly had put all her eggs in one basket before she’d thrown it on the floor and stamped on it. Without her family her days were empty. The house resounded with silence. The weekends dragged on endlessly.
The Mastersons popped into her head at all hours of the day or night. Everything she did connected to one or other of them in some way. A walk through Soho Square would conjure up a snapshot of Poppy sitting on their bench waiting to meet her for lunch and a catch-up, an announcement about a new theatre production would have her calculating which dates she could tell Jessie she would be free to go, a flash of Lang Lang on the TV had her reaching for the phone to let Amelia know to turn over to Sky Arts. There was nothing that didn’t evoke them. It felt as if she was possessed.
She could get through the weekdays easily enough. She was busy at work and professional enough not to let the guests see that anything was wrong. Only once – when regular Mr Sommers asked her if she’d been ill since he saw her last, because she looked so thin – did she cry at work. Not so much cry, it was actually as if someone had opened up a fire hydrant. The tears seemed to be coming out horizontally and with such force that they were propelled violently across the reception desk. Mr Sommers, being a sweet man, had ignored his obvious desire to run away or to put up an umbrella, and had come round to her side, led her out to the back room and let her sob all over him. He’d had the sense not to ask her what was wrong, because he would have been there all day. As it was, she’d had to offer to pay for him to have his shirt laundered.
And then she’d had to force herself to think about other things on the bus and the Tube to and from the hotel, after she’d burst into tears one morning on the Northern Line and a man who had been sitting next to her got up and moved, muttering about her under his breath as he went. Funnily enough, no one on London Underground had put their arm round her and offered to let her deposit tears, mascara and snot all over their clothes.
This had always been her mum’s technique, when Jen was little. The forcing yourself to think about other things, that was.
‘Think about our holiday we had in Poole,’ she would say, when Jen couldn’t sleep. Or, ‘Remember how much fun you had when we went to Whipsnade? Think about that day from beginning to end. Everything, right from the moment we made the sandwiches to take with us, to when we got home and went to bed.’
It nearly always worked, and the young Jen had become very adept at focusing her memory to block out the bad stuff and keep her mind firmly rooted in a happy past event. Now, though, she had to try to find memories that didn’t contain Jason, because they would definitely set her off. And recalling a family holiday to Dorset when you were seven didn’t really cut it when you were forty-three.
She thought about calling her mum, telling her the whole story, saying she was sorry for the way she’d spoken to her last time she’d seen her, and asking her to come and help her get through this. So Elaine had made mistakes. Jen now knew only too well how easy that was. Knew that nothing was black or white, right or wrong. But she didn’t know where to start. How to break the silence.
She waited for Poppy to contact her. She had no doubt that Jason would have told his sisters everything. Even Jessie, who probably would have had to ramp up her hysteria to eleven so that people would realize she was actually serious, this time. She wondered if he would describe in detail the way she had thrown her discovery in Charles’s face, unaware of or not caring about the fallout she was causing. It wasn’t really his style to stir things up, but she could imagine that he might want them to know the worst about her, to make sure she was paraded in her true colours. And who could blame him?
It didn’t matter that Charles was the chief villain of the piece. What mattered was that she, Jen, had been the one to open the closet and let all the skeletons out. And once they were out and dancing about in plain sight, no one could ignore them any more.
If there was one lesson she had learned, though, it was no more secrets. If she had come home, that first day, and told Jason that she had seen his dad behaving oddly with a strange woman, things might have been tricky for a while, but they would have got through it together. So he would still have ended up estranged from his father. But, at least, their marriage might have remained intact. She had made the wrong choice, she knew that now – keeping her discovery to herself – but she tried to comfort herself with the knowledge that she had, at least, made it for the right reasons.
A couple of weeks after the world fell apart, she received a text from Cass.
WTF is going on? Dad says they all know. Are u ok?
She ignored it. Nothing good could come from going down that route again.
A while later, she received a note from Jessie. Overblown and accusatory: ‘I don’t know how you could have done this to us, after everything my family has done for you.’ She couldn’t finish it. Put it in a drawer until she felt strong enough to continue.
She had still heard nothing from Poppy, had picked up the phone on more than one occasion and begun to punch in her oh-so-familiar number and then lost her nerve at the last minute. On the fourth or fifth occasion, Poppy picked up. Jen was so surprised she almost dropped the phone. Poppy, as ever, started speaking as soon as she answered.
‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘Please, Pop –’
‘Stop calling me.’
And, just like that, the line went dead.
What to tell Simone and Emily had been the one thing she and Jason had agreed on. The truth about everything, with one small omission – the way Jen had behaved on fight night. Both girls were heading home for the big anniversary party, fired up and excited by the thought of a Masterson get-together. Unaware it had been unceremoniously cancelled.
‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ Jen had said tearfully, when Jason had suggested he come over and they break the news together – to try to at least show their daughters they were still capable of having a functioning relationship.
‘It’s not about you, it’s about them. You have to try.’
Jen had driven to Euston to collect them, Simone and Emily having coordinated their movements so they would both end up arriving on the same train.
Simone had been full of her plans to travel to America in the summer holidays. Her college had organized some kind of exchange programme, and she was going to work in a legal centre in Boston for a month or so. Jen had been thrilled for her when she had been accepted, but now she was struggling to act enthusiastic about anything except sitting in a darkened room and sobbing.
She had bitten her lip to try to stop herself from crying in front of the girls. She hated it that her daughters’ happiness was about to be trashed.
‘Mum, is something wrong?’ Simone had asked. ‘You look … I don’t know … you don’t look well.’
‘What?’ Emily had demanded, having failed to pick up on the atmosphere herself. ‘What’s wrong?’
Jen had reached a hand out and squeezed her knee. ‘I’m OK. A bit stressed. But I’m not ill, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘What about Dad?’
‘Dad’s fine. Neither of us is ill.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
By the time they had got home, Jason was lurking in the hall, looking like a man who didn’t know how to relax in his own home. Like a guest who hasn’t yet been offered tea and made to feel comfortable. As soon as they had all hugged their hellos, he’d asked them to come and sit at the kitchen table. He wanted to get it over with, Jen could see. Get it over with and get out of there.
‘There is something wrong,’ Simone had said, looking at her mother accusingly.
‘What’s going on?’ Emily had been amusing herself, piling her hair on top of her head into two buns and securing them with pencils. She looked like a little girl.
‘Everything’s OK, girls,’ Jason had said, looking at the table and allowing his body language to give away that it definitely wasn’t. ‘It’s just … Mum and I have decided to live apart for a while.’
He’d paused to let what he was saying sink in. Emily’s eyes were brimming over with tears in a second. Simone sat stony-faced.
‘Why?’ Emily had wailed. ‘What do you mean, live apart?’
Jen had put a hand over hers. ‘Dad has got a new place and I’m going to stay here.’
‘Have you met someone else?’ Simone had said, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Neither of us has,’ Jen had added hastily. ‘That’s not what this is about.’
‘Then what is it about? What’s going on?’
In their discussion of what best to tell their daughters, she and Jason had decided to cite irreconcilable differences. Tell them that they had grown apart. It seemed like the easiest, kindest way to go.
‘We just feel like we need some time on our own, that’s all.’
She had looked at Jason for some support, and he had picked up on it. Their communications system hadn’t yet completely broken down, then.
‘We’re still talking, look. We don’t hate each other. Far from it.’
That did it. Jen had stifled a sob. Simone squeezed her hand.
‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ Jen had managed to say. ‘No one is to blame.’
‘This is … awful,’ Emily had said. ‘I mean, how could you do this to me?’
‘Oh, shut the fuck up, Em,’ Simone had said. ‘This isn’t about you.’
Emily had ignored her. ‘And what about Granny and Grandpa? They must be devastated.’
Jen had taken a deep breath. ‘That’s another thing …’
When she’d finished, Emily had looked disgusted. ‘Grandpa has another daughter? Gross.’
‘Poor Granny,’ Simone had said quietly.
‘Yes,’ Jason had said. ‘Poor Granny. I need the two of you to keep an eye on her when you’re home.’
Neither Jen nor Jason had mentioned that she and Amelia had had no contact since that night, or that Jason had no intention of ever being in the same room as his father again. They had thrown enough disturbing information their girls’ way for one day. The rest could wait.
‘I don’t have to tell you how important it is that no one outside the family gets to hear about Granny and Grandpa’s problems,’ Jason had said, still protecting his father despite everything.
Simone and Emily had nodded earnestly in a way that had made Jen want to cry all over again.
When Jason said he had to leave, Emily had clung on to him like she used to do when she was tiny and he would leave for work. Jen nearly joined her, gripping on to him like one of those tiny koalas she used to put on her pencil when she was at school.
That night, both Simone and Emily had stayed in with her and they’d all cooked together, like they used to do before the girls left home, and then they’d squashed up on the sofa, alternately comforting and needing to be comforted.
She knew Jason was angry, knew that it was too much, all at once, for them to be able to try to carry on as if everything was normal. But it still both shocked and hurt her how definite he was, how quickly he had decided that there was no possible future for them.