‘Wait. Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Andy asks. He waits a beat, and then grins. ‘I’m sure we can find you some pearls somewhere—’
I thwack him with a cushion. ‘Don’t laugh. This is all your fault.’
He fends off the pillow, and catches my hand. ‘Don’t let Celia get to you,’ he says, suddenly serious. He pulls me onto his lap, and tightens his arms around my waist. ‘Wear what you want to wear, Caz. You don’t have to dress for her or anyone else.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘Since when did you give a shit what anyone thinks?’
He’s right. Celia Roberts and the self-righteous Mummy Mafia are never going to like me. Why keep pushing the boulder uphill?
I run back upstairs and change into the skinny jeans and halter top and a pair of skyscraper heels. Andy’s eyes light up when I come back downstairs. ‘That’s more like it,’ he says.
‘Come along then, trophy husband,’ I say, picking up my bag.
The car park at Bella’s school is surprisingly full when we arrive. Louise wasn’t kidding, I think, as Andy circles the lot looking for a space. It’s not even six-thirty, and it already looks like it’ll be standing room only inside.
But as we open the door to the auditorium, we’re blocked by a sudden flow of people leaving. I catch Andy’s eye, puzzled. Perhaps there was a matinee, too. I wish I’d known; I’d much rather have gone to an earlier show so Kit didn’t have to eat so late.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, stopping a woman in a flowery dress who looks vaguely familiar. ‘Was there an early show?’
‘Well, it was at four, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Oh. I didn’t realise there were two performances.’
She looks at me as if I’m mad. ‘There aren’t.’
‘But it doesn’t start till seven—’
‘It started at four,’ she says tersely, turning on her heel to rejoin the throng of chattering parents exiting the auditorium.
I swing round to Andy, not knowing what to say.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Andy exclaims. ‘We missed it?’
‘Louise told me it started at seven!’
‘You must have made a mistake. Jesus, Caz. Didn’t you write it down?’
‘I did not make a mistake! She told me the wrong time on purpose!’
Kit tugs my hand. ‘Is it finished? Can we go to dinner now?’
‘Of course she didn’t tell you the wrong time on purpose,’ Andy snaps. ‘She’s not a bloody bunny boiler. You obviously got it wrong.’
He sounds like he’s giving me the benefit of the doubt, but I can tell from his expression he doesn’t believe I made an honest mistake. He thinks I deliberately sabotaged Bella’s evening.
Just as Louise intended.
Chapter 9
Louise
‘They’re cutting it a bit fine,’ I mutter, craning my neck to look behind me. ‘It’s almost four. The play will be starting in a minute.’
‘Andrew will be here,’ my mother says confidently.
‘Well, they’ll be standing at the back, then. The place is packed.’
Mum puts her hand on Tolly’s shoulder as he kneels up on his chair between us. ‘Stop fidgeting, Tolly. We should have saved them some seats, Louise. There were three right next to us.’
Min leans around me to address my mother. ‘No, Celia, we absolutely should not have saved them seats. It’s bad enough Lou’s going to have to sit with that woman at dinner. I’m so sorry we can’t come,’ she adds to me, leaning back again. ‘I don’t mind leaving Dom and Jack to babysit their brothers for a couple of hours now they’re fifteen, but not for the whole evening. They’ll kill each other or burn the place down.’
‘It’s fine,’ I whisper.
‘It’s not fine,’ Min hisses back. ‘Honestly, Lou, you can’t keep letting her do this to you.’
I wish Min had known my mother before Nicky’s death. It wasn’t just that Mum was happy, although of course she was, in the way you don’t appreciate until it’s in the rear-view mirror. When your children are healthy and safe, when your marriage is good and you have a roof over your head and food on the table, it allows you to be unhappy about a set of holiday photos that come back from Boots all blurry, or the chip in your brand-new kitchen counter. Mum worried about Nicky and Luke and me, of course, in the way every mother fears for their children; she warned us to wear our bicycle helmets and never to accept sweets from strangers, and insisted we call her if we were going to be late home. But her style of parenting was one of benign neglect, the same way she’d been raised. She let us have the freedom to make our own mistakes, to climb trees and break wrists, to refuse sunscreen and get burned.
Nicky’s death changed who she was. She didn’t wrap us in cotton wool, although that would’ve been a perfectly natural response. Instead she gathered us close, closer; she inserted herself into every aspect of our lives in a way she never had before, as protective and fiercely territorial as a tigress.
When Luke was turned down for a place studying physics at Imperial College, his first choice, without even being given an interview, Mum drove to London the next day and barged into the admissions office with his school reports in her hand, haranguing them until they agreed to see him. He was horribly embarrassed, but Mum didn’t care. Embarrassment was no longer part of her vocabulary, or her experience. She cared only about getting us what she felt we deserved, advocating for us when we couldn’t or wouldn’t advocate for ourselves.
It’s why she refuses, even now, to accept Andrew is a lost cause. She’ll fight our battles for us, whether we want her to or not. She’s seen too much, been through too much; all that’s left for her is to make things right for her family. I can’t take that away from her.
Dad grieved differently. Before Nicky’s death, he and Mum parented us jointly, but afterwards, he ceded everything to Mum. I glance across at him as he fiddles with his old-fashioned camera. He still uses the same one he did for our school plays, and I wince as he tests the flash, which leaves a Hiroshima-like glow imprinted on the retinas of anyone within a ten-foot radius. On the other side of him, Luke holds up his new iPhone and hits record, checking for light levels. Peas in a pod, give or take a bit of technology. They survived Nicky’s loss as I did, by fading into the background, and leaving Mum alone in the spotlight of her grief.
The lights dim, and there’s a sudden hush, the rustle of programmes, and a few self-conscious coughs. The headmistress, Mrs St George, comes on stage and makes the usual remarks about how hard everyone has worked and what troupers the PTA have been, but I’m not really concentrating. Bella will be devastated if her father doesn’t come. As the headmistress asks everyone to turn off their phones and people grope in their bags, I take the opportunity for one more look around the audience, trying to find him. If he’s here, he must be right at the back.
Then the curtain lifts, and Antonio walks onto the stage with his Shakespearean bros. I send up a prayer that Bella doesn’t get stage fright or forget her lines, and I wait anxiously for her opening scene. After all the drama getting her to her dress rehearsal this morning, her nerves are frayed to breaking point. She dropped her eyeliner when she was putting on her make-up this afternoon, and burst into tears.