In June 1982, I was thirteen. Pre-internet. Pre-Facebook. Pre-Twitter. We were oblivious to the #proudparents of four-year-olds who’d swum five metres for a duckling certificate. We had no idea how many people were eating perfect poached eggs for breakfast. We certainly didn’t know that our neighbour down the road ‘loved her husband to the moon and back – twice’. And we didn’t have the pressure of capturing the one nanosecond that the whole family was happy against a sunny backdrop of turquoise sea, so that everyone else could feel a grumbling sense of dissatisfaction with their own lives.
1982 didn’t seem different to any other year. At weekends, I’d disappear off on my bike with a couple of jam sandwiches, a bottle of squash and a warning from my mother to ‘Mind what you’re up to’ before reappearing at teatime hours later. When it was rainy, I’d lie on my bed taping Kool & The Gang off the radio with the microphone jammed up against the speaker, desperately trying to get a version of Get Down On It that didn’t have the DJ talking over the beginning or someone shouting ‘Dinnertime!’ in the middle. When it was hot, I’d sunbathe on the Norfolk dunes slathered in baby oil, flicking through Smash Hits and plotting how to buy and wear a mini skirt without my mother finding out. The perennial arguments still raged on: why I couldn’t have my ears pierced, why we couldn’t have a video recorder, why I still had to go to church every Sunday.
The one thing my mother and I weren’t at loggerheads about was how often I needed to cycle to the library after school to find new reference books for a particularly onerous history project.
Or at least, that’s what I told her.
And that little lie made the big difference. It led to the ten minutes I could never get back, never undo. Like smashing your iPhone, leaving your bag on the bus, driving into a bollard in a car park – but with consequences that money couldn’t fix. That sick feeling of self-loathing that all of this could have been avoided if you’d just slowed down, taken your time, thought things through. Or as my sixteen-year-old son would say now, ‘Not been such a dickhead’.
But in those glorious ten minutes, I didn’t even realise I was making a mistake.
Let alone one I could never leave behind.
If the internet had existed back then, I’d have dreaded logging onto Facebook. No doubt my classmates would have been retweeting and WTFing until their fingers fell off.
But in 1982, the only thing that went viral in my little Norfolk village was glandular fever. I wouldn’t have expected to get away completely unscathed, of course. I would have braced myself for shocked disapproval from the milkman, an abrupt halt to conversation in the greengrocer’s or some knowing looks from the neighbours. Worst case scenario, I’d have skulked past the bus shelter, ignoring the jeers from the boys sharing stolen Benson & Hedges and swigging Bacardi filched from their parents’ cocktail cabinets.
No, for a mistake to go viral in the ’80s, you needed a deputy headmaster for a dad. A dad who adored his daughter and ended up in prison. To make sure it haunted you forever, you needed a Catholic mother to fall on her rosary beads and declare that ‘all that business’ should never be spoken about again.
Ever.
Birthday presents terrify me. Nothing shows up the chasm between who you are and who everyone else would like you to be more than what they ‘saw and thought of you’. And what anyone thought of me never quite matched what I thought of myself.
By far the most dread-inducing present was the flourish of a gift from my mother, delivered in recycled paper carefully smoothed out and reused. Nothing screamed ‘this is the person I wish you were’ more than the parade of diaries, drawer dividers and polo-necked sweaters delivered to me over the decades. But this year, on my forty-third birthday, she’d surpassed herself. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, expectation scaffolding her face. She nodded at the box on the table. ‘Go on then. Open it.’
I picked at the Sellotape, taking care not to tear the paper. A gold cross necklace. I only wore silver. And I never wore crosses. Never. Of all the ways I’d tried to make amends over the last thirty years, giving in to my mother’s rampant Catholicism had remained a glittering exception. No conversation was complete without a variation on ‘God knows what’s in your heart’ – which was really my mother’s shorthand for ‘God will get you back’.
A great bubble of resentment surged up. An image of flinging the necklace into the patch of nettles at the bottom of the garden rushed through my mind.
‘That’s lovely, thank you.’
‘Put it on, darling. Come here, I’ll do it up for you.’
I sat down with my back towards her – a straight back in order not to cop the ‘You’re becoming so round-shouldered’ speech. As she clicked the necklace around my neck with a satisfied ‘Perfect’, I resisted the urge to leap up, throw open my kitchen cupboards and fling out the Wedgwood tea service she’d bought me ‘for best’. To sweep my Christmas present of fussy cut glass tumblers to the floor. To hurl around the collection of jugs she’d infiltrated into my home over the years in the hope that my children would stop their ‘uncouth’ dumping of plastic milk cartons on the table.
‘Go and look in the mirror.’
I walked out to the downstairs cloakroom and peered at myself in the mirror, amazed that my face looked smooth and neutral rather than like a ball of dough in the proving stage. I touched the cross. Not quite as hideous as the Pope Francis thimble, Pope John Paul II commemorative plate or the absolute pièce de résistance, the china Popemobile complete with waving pontiff. I could have made a fortune if I’d allowed the kids to put it all on eBay, but I kept it as an insurance against the day when she’d ask, ‘Now what happened to…?’
I knew Mark would tease me and say, ‘Why didn’t she have done with it and buy you a hairshirt?’ All our married life, he’d kept out of the tangled dynamics that passed for a relationship between my mother and me. He’d reluctantly agreed to have Jamie and Izzy baptised, but put his foot down about a full-blown Catholic upbringing. ‘I’m not having the kids indoctrinated with guilt, blame and shame in the name of religion.’
It was the one time I’d been forced to stand up to my mother when she got her needle stuck on when they were going to be confirmed. I’d fudged it by saying we’d let them decide when they were old enough. Now they were teenagers and refusing even to go to church, my mother was on a mission. But so far, neither of them appeared the slightest bit worried about going to hell.
I walked back in, concentrating on a light, sunny step.
‘So, what are you doing for the rest of the day?’ my mother asked, in a tone that suggested she’d been the highlight.
‘I’ve just been elected chairwoman of the fundraising committee at school. They want a new rugby clubhouse, so I need to go to a meeting about that.’ Even I could see that as birthdays went, it was rather short on celebration.
I was prepared for a little dig of ‘Hasn’t Mark planned anything special for you?’ but instead my mother burst out with an animated ‘Really, darling? You should have said earlier. You have done well.’
My mother wasn’t given to over-the-top praise. Any praise, in fact. But she was teetering right on the edge of a squeak of approval at my ‘news’, which was proof indeed that my bar for success was not so much low as buried. Hallelujah for climbing up another rung on the redeeming scale. I usually managed to haul myself up a notch about every five years. There was nothing she liked more than a crumb of evidence that Lydia Rushford, miscreant offspring of Arthur and Dorothy Southport, was no longer the social pariah of yesteryear.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. The softness of her skin surprised me.
I waited.
My mother selected a tone several decibels below the one she’d used to congratulate me. ‘It’s wonderful how you’ve moved on from all that…you know…’
I stared at her. In our family, no one moved on. The passage of time had covered the worst wounds with a scattering of normality. But like watchful crows gathered on a garden fence, our conflicting resentments were always waiting to swoop down for a vicious peck. Just before I took my dad’s arm to walk down the aisle to marry Mark, my mother clutched my hand and whispered, ‘It hasn’t turned out so badly, considering…’ My first born, Jamie, had barely taken a breath in the world before she murmured, ‘We’ll keep an eye on this one, we don’t want history repeating itself…’
Too flipping right about that. Whatever mistakes Jamie made, I wouldn’t cling to them like a koala to a eucalyptus for three decades.
Unfortunately, I now had my mother’s full attention. ‘What will you have to do on this committee, dear?’
The full horrors of what it would entail eluded me. Despite my mother’s delight, being voted chairwoman wasn’t a question of ‘doing well’. In any half-accurate poll, I reckoned there would be a one in two chance of people opting to clean the sports hall loos rather than chair a school committee.
Personally, I would have happily put on the Marigolds and got scrubbing. I was cringing at the thought of sitting in front of the headmaster, discussing the merits of a hog roast over a quiz evening. I should have refused immediately when the class über-rep, Melanie, had put my name forward at the coffee morning. The enthusiastic endorsements from the others had paralysed me. It seemed easier to get the spotlight off me if I agreed than to explain why the very word – headmaster – made me want to hide behind the bike sheds and start smoking for the first time in my life.
When I tried to discuss my misgivings with my mother, she might as well have stuck her fingers in her ears and tra-la-la’d. ‘You spend your life fiddling about with balloons and coffee in that wedding business of yours, don’t you? You’ll be perfect.’
After all these years, it was astonishing that my mother could still engender a little frisson of fury every time she talked about my career. ‘That business of mine’ often took care of the exorbitant school fees, plus the running of the whole Rushford household whenever Mark’s kitchen business was in a slump. But unlike my doctor brother who saved lives, my job keeping bride and groom calm with precision event planning was a little frippery – a small step up from origami and pom-pom making.
‘I’m not centre stage at work. No one is watching me. I’m just creeping about behind the scenes, straightening bows and making sure there are enough wine glasses.’
But nothing would derail my mother from her cock-a-hoopness that her daughter had reached the pinnacle of social acceptability. Who could blame her? After the miracle of snagging a husband in the first place, I’d spent nearly two decades airbrushing myself into a perfect wife. Just enough small talk, Boden and discreet pearl earrings to pass through life, slipping under the radar, as unremarkable as a mid-range estate car. No wonder Melanie had peered at all the mothers scrabbling down the hallway, FitFlops flapping at the mere mention of ‘volunteers needed’ and thought, ‘Where’s Lydia? She can organise baskets of almond favours and rose petals on tables. A couple of quizzes and a raffle should be well within her grasp.’
As a measure of my mother letting her hair down in wild celebration, she sawed another slice off the birthday Battenberg, saying, ‘I shouldn’t really,’ and mumbling, ‘Accolades like that don’t come along every day.’ If I’d just kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t have to endure months of my mother wanting to know the minutiae of every tedious meeting. Or worse, grilling me on my social connections: had I met any lawyers, doctors or dentists? Whether or not they were nice, decent people didn’t even feature. And now her interrogations were spreading down the generations with ‘innocent’ enquiries whenever she clapped eyes on my children –
‘Izzy, so who are you friendly with now? Hannah? Isn’t her mother the one with a stud in her nose? I wouldn’t bother with her. Don’t you see anything of the little girl whose father’s a surgeon in London, what’s she called, Alexandra?’ – followed by Izzy disappearing upstairs with the insolent stomp of a thirteen-year-old.
If Jamie wasn’t quick enough to evaporate at the same time, the focus would switch to him. ‘I hope you’re going to join the orchestra? It’s a very good way to get to know the right people.’ Which was enough to make him sever a few fingers so he’d never have to pick up his saxophone again. Luckily, at sixteen, Jamie had mastered the art of the grunt that could be construed as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.
As usual, my mother heard what she wanted to hear.
Eventually the conversation came full circle, a rainbow of Battenberg crumbs flying out of my mother’s mouth as she made the point – again – that ‘after all that business’ I’d been lucky to end up with a husband and family.
After thirty years, the only reply that allowed us to grind along without bloodshed was ‘Another piece of cake?’
Unlike my mother, Mark had been more put-out than proud that I was head honcho of the fundraising committee. ‘Couldn’t they find someone who doesn’t work to do it? Surely one of the Eastington House mothers could take a break from making quinoa and pomegranate salads to push around their plates?’
The fact that Mark even knew what quinoa was made me laugh. ‘Get you, MasterChef. I know. It was just really hard to say no.’
Mark stabbed at his phone and sighed. ‘I hope you’re not taking on too much. I don’t want you keeling over with exhaustion. And frankly, I need your fundraising skills a bit more than Eastington House’s posh and privileged. I’ve no doubt those kids can go on to lead fulfilling lives without underfloor heating in their changing rooms. I could really do with a hand chasing up kitchen leads before Christmas. The order book is completely empty for November.’
‘I don’t suppose it will be very onerous, so perhaps I could do some follow-ups for you in the evenings. The main event is the hog roast in October to raise money for the new clubhouse.’
‘I’d much rather have a few grand a year off the fees than a swanky new bar. I’d be quite happy to sit on a camping chair under a gazebo.’
Yet again, I wished I’d stood up to my mother when she’d done her whole ‘private school or die’ as soon as I’d had kids. By the time I’d packed Jamie off to Eastington House kindergarten aged three – in his cap, for god’s sake – I was still deluded enough to think I could build some bridges with her. Instead, I’d just signed us up for a lifetime of tightening our belts, which made my poor husband feel as though he’d let me down.
If only he knew the truth about me.
About all of us.
I heaved a sigh of relief as Mark picked up his laptop and started packing his briefcase for work. I had to squeeze in a meeting with my fellow fundraisers before racing off to a consultation with a woman who’d sounded more funereal than bridal. Black tulips, black jelly babies and black candles. The idea of standing my ground with the bossy women on the committee was stressing me enough without having to persuade a client that caves, crypts and dungeons were not suitable wedding venues.
The front door clicking shut, for me, was right up there with a baby’s laugh and the first cup of tea after the school run. The moment of the day when I could just be myself. The self that no one knew. The person who wanted to shake my mother by her scrawny shoulders when she banged on about the right way to behave, the right circle of friends, the right connections. The wife who wanted to make plans for the future without fearing the past. The mother who wanted to encourage her children to live expansively, joyously, to cultivate a healthy immunity to what ‘everyone’ thinks.
About anything.
Instead, I checked my make-up and took my navy blazer from the coat cupboard. I tried to ignore the whimpering of our black Labrador, Mabel, who had just realised that a walk was not on the immediate agenda.
Despite arriving at the café twenty minutes early, Melanie was already sitting in the far corner. I paused on the threshold, recoiling from a one-to-one spotlight with the woman whose opinions came at you with all the finesse of a prop forward: ‘We shouldn’t allow alcohol at school social evenings. One father was sick in the flowerbed that had been specially planted to look like the school crest last year’; ‘The school really needs to serve plain water, not fruit juice, at sports matches because of the risk of tooth enamel erosion.’
And if that wasn’t bad enough, Melanie also seemed to have a secret hotline to the exam results of every child in her son’s year, with a special terminal illness announcement voice for anyone with less than fifty-five per cent in Maths. As it was the start of a new term, she’d no doubt be up till midnight trying to crack the teacher’s streaming code. It would only be a matter of time before she worked out that the duffers were languishing in the Rhododendron set, with the brainy ones beavering away in the Apple Blossom group.
Although Melanie was scribbling in a notebook, she appeared to have little antennae on the top of her head that swivelled round the second my foot creaked on the step. ‘Lydia. Lovely to see you.’ She untucked herself from the armchair in a graceful movement, her black trousers swishing to attention above her ballerina pumps. ‘Come and sit down.’
‘I’ll just get a coffee.’
‘I thought we’d do one big round when everyone gets here, to save wasting time. There are a few things I’d like to discuss with you first, without the others.’
It seemed a bit childish to get into a big hoo-ha over the cappuccino timings, even though I hated giving into Melanie’s little power play. I pulled out a chair.
Melanie crossed her legs and tapped her pen on her notebook. ‘Now, the main project this year is the new rugby clubhouse. It’s going to be your job to keep the form reps involved and force them to push the other parents to help out. You’ll have to be a bit dictatorial, otherwise nothing will happen.’
I told myself that I made life-changing weddings happen all the time, without ever needing to draw on my inner dictator. Quiet efficiency and polite requests had worked well enough so far.
Melanie stared at me. ‘You’ll have to accept that not everyone is going to like you. As I’m sure you know, I’ve ruffled a few feathers, but that comes with the job.’
I couldn’t even tell the dog off without kissing her head and giving her a biscuit afterwards.
‘We need to raise at least twenty thousand pounds. There’s a parent who’s joined the school this year who’s very interested in photography. He’s going to take photos at various sports matches, which he will then print and sell at other events. He’s coming along this morning so you can meet him.’
‘Don’t we need permission from the parents to take photos?’
Melanie twittered her fingers airily as though I was obstructing her brilliant ideas. ‘You’ll have to get permissions signed. The sports staff can send them out to the parents.’
Oh dear. That would mean talking to Mr O’Ryan who called all the pupils ‘Boooooy!’ and frothed at the mouth whenever Eastington House was losing.
Before I could sink any further under my burden of duties, a few other women came clacking in. Melanie pointed them into seats, cutting across chatter about the new Italian restaurant. She whistled up a waitress and dispatched her to get coffee. ‘White Americano okay for everyone?’
I dared to disrupt Melanie’s call to action with a request for soya milk, earning me an irritable glance as though I’d started discussing a complicated order for a triple decker sandwich, hold the mayo, no tomato.
Melanie tapped her clipboard for silence. She turned to Fleur, an ex-model and Pied Piper for the dads at any school event. ‘Right. Fleur, your job is to source some shawls, scarves and shrugs we can sell at the Christmas fair. Do you think some of your connections in the rag trade would be happy to donate?’
Fleur raised her eyebrows and smoothed her glossy hair behind her ear. ‘Fashion designers, do you mean, Melanie? I’m sure a few of my friends will be able to oblige.’
‘Good.’ Melanie ploughed on. ‘Terri, could your husband offer some complimentary tickets to… What is it he does? Bingo evenings?’ Melanie managed to say the word ‘Bingo’ in the manner of someone who’d just bitten into a maggot-ridden nectarine.
Terri cackled with laughter and slapped Melanie’s knee as though she’d cracked a great joke. Melanie made a big show of struggling not to spill her coffee. ‘Come on, Mel, don’t be naughty, you know he owns casinos now. You should come down sometime. Get you on the blackjack tables. Free drinks when you’re gambling. I’ll sort out some freebies for you. You’ll have to stick his name at the top of the programme though – he likes a bit of a fanfare.’
At that moment, a stocky man strode up to the table. Melanie leapt to her feet, running her fingers through her hair and straightening the neckline of her T-shirt. ‘Sean! You found our little gathering. Come on in. He’ll make a great addition, won’t he, ladies? We could do with a bit of male insight.’
I looked up at the object of her adulation and blinked hard, feeling the world quiver slightly. While Terri launched in with a hundred questions about what year his kids were in and where he was living, I excused myself to the loo, aware of my feet skittering on the wooden floor like the dog when she was trying to escape the Hoover.
Why would it be him, here, now?
I lowered the loo lid and sat down. I couldn’t be sure. There was no sign that he’d recognised me. He probably didn’t see me in the worshipful fog surrounding him. I hadn’t seen the man in thirty years. I hadn’t forgotten about him – how could I? – but I’d stored him away in the understairs cupboard of my mind, to remain there undiscovered until I died, with any luck. Last I’d heard he was living in America, some big-shot estate agent for the rich and famous. Why would he turn up in a Surrey backwater? Sean was a pretty common name. It didn’t have to be Sean McAllister. I re-applied my lipstick and prayed that it was any other Sean: Sean Smith, Sean Connery, Shaun the flaming sheep.
My body seemed to think it was him, though. Every time I tried to bring his face to mind and compare the chunky adolescent with today’s broad-shouldered man, my stomach suffered from air turbulence. If it was him, his hair wasn’t as dark as I recalled. But maybe, like me, he had plenty of grey. I hauled myself up and leant on the sink. My hands were shaking so much I was rattling the taps. I had to go back out there. I’d brave a few more of Melanie’s diktats, then I’d make an excuse to disappear.
I opened the door and pretended I was stepping into a meeting with a new client, steeling myself to look smiling, confident and capable. I hovered at the side of the room, staring straight at the back of the man who’d blown my life apart so many years ago. Was it him? I didn’t remember his hair being that wavy. I strained my ears. There was a deep timbre to his voice. Was that a slightly American inflection? Or Irish? Mark always teased me about my inability to distinguish a Brummie from a Liverpudlian. I consoled myself that if Sean wanted to ingratiate himself with the great and good of Eastington House, he wouldn’t be in a hurry to tell the story either. Too many of the women out there had teenage girls themselves.
I slunk towards the group, undecided whether I was going to introduce myself or just slip in quietly. Melanie made the decision for me. ‘Sean. This is our new chairwoman – the very capable Lydia Rushford.’
Hallelujah for my parents’ decision to call me by my middle name when we moved away after everything that had happened. For the millionth time I thanked my lucky stars that I’d married Mark. Right now, the fact that he was kind and honourable was a bonus. Having his surname, totally different from my original name was the real prize. Sally Southport sounded like a weathergirl on the TV to me now.
Sean stood up. If it was him, he’d ended up quite tall, well over six foot. I remembered him as a thickset bulldozer on the rugby field, steaming through the opposition, stubby legs powering away. I’d loved watching him play. Saturday was my favourite day of the week, when I was allowed to linger on the edge of the ‘in’ crowd. When I stopped being the deputy headmaster’s daughter and became one of the rugby girlfriends.
My hand shook a little in his firm grasp. ‘Lydia, lovely to meet you.’ Had he lingered on ‘Lydia’? Put a little bit of emphasis on ‘meet’? Would he even recognise me now, with my blonde highlighted bob rather than the long brown hair I used to have? I’d been stick-thin then as well. I was what my mother would call ‘solid’ now. Certainly not the thirteen-year-old girl with the jutting hip bones of adolescence. Mark chivalrously called me ‘hourglass’, which would have worked if I’d been three inches taller.
I automatic-piloted, ‘Pleased to meet you, too’ and sat back in my armchair, unable to concentrate on any of the bulk-buying of jelly snakes as prizes, glow-in-the-dark antlers for the fireworks evening or rigid rules for the contents of the Christmas gift box for the children of Africa.
‘Toothpaste, toothbrush – yes. Chocolate, soldiers, a. . .
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