The two women sat together on the bench at the bottom of the gently fading garden, where the roses were brown now and only held their shape until the wind blew them into little fluttery petal bombs, flamboyant reminders of the seasons passing. The air had a sharpness to it, as if warning them that there wasn’t much of summer left, but the sun felt warm enough on their faces, and at least sitting side by side Juliette didn’t have to look her friend in the eye. They chatted for a while about James and the kids, and it was clear to Juliette that Camilla’s married life was so simple, based on real love and mutual respect, accepting each other’s differences, giving to each other rather than transacting like a business arrangement – and she realised how most of her friends’ marriages weren’t like that at all. Camilla moved on to her favourite subject now, filling time, telling Juliette about a super recipe she’d found for making instant ice cream (‘It’s so easy, Juliette, you should try it’), and Juliette told Camilla how the kids were doing in school (not great), how little Jack in particular had been unsettled since his father had moved out, how Flo seemed to be struggling with all the after-school activities and extra tuition and pressure she was under to get into secondary school, and how Noah just ran wild, immune to discipline, so Juliette simply didn’t know what to do with him. Finally the conversation had faded out to nothing and they had both just sat there for a while, in silence.
It was Camilla who spoke first.
‘So what are you going to do, Juliette?’
‘About what?’
‘You know.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘About getting better.’
‘I guess I just have to try to carry on, look after the kids, try to be a better mother, what else can I do?’
‘You need to get your head straight, that’s what. You owe it to the children, especially now you and Stephen have split up.’
Juliette sighed. ‘I’ve tried all that. I’ve read every therapy book under the sun over the years. I’ve even tried writing it down – that’s why I first went to Alistair, I never meant …’ She looked sheepish, and Camilla knew it was Natasha she regretted betraying, not Stephen now. ‘Nothing’s worked,’ Juliette continued. ‘I’m officially a nutcase. I yelled at Noah again this morning, just for slopping his drink. I just seem to have so much rage in me … He hates me, and I can’t say I blame him.’
Juliette’s eyes started to fill, and although Camilla had told her that of course he didn’t hate her, Juliette had hunched into herself and shaken her head and said, ‘Yes, he does, he does,’ and she’d confessed to what a hopeless mother she was, and how desperately she loved her children and didn’t want to be fucking up their little lives but just didn’t seem to know how not to, and she started crying really hard then, and Camilla hugged her until the weeping had stopped and then suggested, ever so gently, that maybe Juliette could get some help with her anger issues, and Juliette nodded, acknowledging it at last.
‘You do know why you’re so angry, don’t you?’ said Camilla. ‘It’s not just about the kids – or Stephen – or even Alistair.’ Juliette coloured again. ‘It’s not even about what happened to poor Siobhan, although of course that’s dreadful. It’s all that business with your mother.’
‘No it’s not,’ replied Juliette.
‘Yes it is, Juliette. I told Renée at the time not to rush you. We were all so worried about it, once you told us what you were doing. I mean, one minute you didn’t seem remotely interested in your birth mother, and the next you and Renée were dashing off to find her. It’s a huge deal doing something like that, especially before you’re ready. You just never had time to come to terms with it.’
‘No, it wasn’t even that.’ Juliette hesitated. She’d never told any of them the real story: what she’d found out twenty-five years ago, who Elisabeth Potts really was. It was humiliating somehow, the rejection (by a young married couple, not a desperate teenager) even worse than she’d imagined. She’d felt ashamed that no-one, not Cynthia, not her grandmother, had told her the truth. She found over time she didn’t blame them though, she’d known how hard they’d tried to get it right. No, she only blamed Elisabeth. The revelation of what Elisabeth had done, explained to her by her devastated adoptive parents in their sunny kitchen so long ago, had felt too painful, too overwhelming to take in, and so it had seemed easier to leave it all alone at first. It had been another few months before she’d tracked down and confronted Elisabeth, met her for the first time, and as Juliette thought back to that day, not long before the end of her first year at Bristol, she realised that it hadn’t helped at all. In fact it had made it all worse.
Her old friend looked at her in the watery sunshine.
‘Tell me what happened, Juliette, you need to talk about it.’
And so, for the first time ever, maybe because she’d hit rock bottom and had no-one else to turn to, Juliette did.