Mad About The Girls

by Francesca Clementis

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

All Lorna has ever wanted is a husband and four children. And now she has just that - except they are someone else's husband and someone else's children. But Robert Danson and his kids are practically hers. After all, Robert's wife had walked out on the family ten years earlier, and, having fallen for Robert, Lorna has been happy to step into the breach.

So now Lorna has everything a real mother should have (aside from the stretch marks) and couldn't be happier, until Robert's real wife returns into their lives. She's beautiful, assured and looking for forgiveness. But is that all she wants? Lorna can't help but feel that this family isn't big enough for both of them . . .

Release date: July 5, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

It is eight sixteen a.m.

‘Mum! Where’s my lucky Biro?’

‘Mum! Can I have a sleepover at Peter’s house?’

‘Mum! Why can’t I have a bra?’

‘Mum! I’ve given up meat. Do smoky bacon crisps count?’

‘Biro is on the floor by the video, Phoebe, no sleep-overs at boys’ houses, Claire, you can have a bra as soon as you need one, Jude, and smoky bacon crisps don’t count, Ali, but pepperoni pizza does, so put it back in the fridge.’

Four daughters. Four questions in twenty-eight seconds all answered without breaking my stride from the tumble dryer to the ironing board. Four lunchboxes on the table packed with the perfect balance of the healthy, the chocolatey and whatever is currently advertised on TV. Two dogs of indeterminate parentage hoovering the terracotta floor with licky tongues. The house is all cosy clutter, happy lives mapped out in photos and fridge magnets and Post-it notes. There is enough mess to reassure the kids that I am not neurotic about housework but the occasional whiff of disinfectant to reassure myself that I am not breeding E-coli on the breakfast bar. Radio One is playing and I know the words to Prodigy’s latest hit. I am truly supermother.

Eight nineteen a.m. The girls are running late for school as usual. But not too late. They rush out of the door, kissing me quickly and barely making contact with my cheek. Except Phoebe, my eldest and strongest and neediest girl. She is currently weighed down by adolescent burdens and hugs me at every opportunity. Poor Phoebe, she’s got the lot: spots, orthodontic braces, greasy hair, a constant sense of existential doom and the biggest bust in her class. She hasn’t needed me this badly since she was four and I love this renewed dependence even while my heart shreds at her suffering. She smells of medicated shampoo and Clearasil.

She is my favourite but I’ve learned how not to show it. It’s one of those parenting skills that are never taught or even mentioned in books. ‘I love all my children equally.’ ‘I may like one more than another, but I love them the same.’ Like children learning the Lord’s Prayer, we recite our lines in monotones, hoping that the words alone will convince. But we don’t mean it. I share my love equally between the four girls but I always find additional scraps and extras from somewhere inside me for Phoebe. Maybe it’s just that she asks for more. I stroke her hair as she pulls away from me and we exchange a look that makes me feel complete.

‘Bye Mum!’ they all shout. And then they are gone.

It was pretty much the same routine yesterday. They’d all left for school and I’d switched the radio off. For a few moments I allowed my ears to adjust to the silence. Then I metamorphosed into my other self – the one who dusts to Kilroy, who shouts out the answers to Supermarket Sweep, writes down the recipes on Ready Steady Cook and sews name tags on gym kit while watching Richard and Judy bicker about hysterectomies. These are my domestic sins, to be confessed only after a few glasses of wine with other mothers. It is our shared secret, one that we conceal from our husbands and, indeed, from our other friends who not only have their radios tuned to Radio Four but actually listen to it.

Sometimes, when I remember that I once read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time (and understood at least seventy-five per cent of it), I worry about the effects of Vanessa Feltz and Australian soap operas on my soul. But I console myself that perhaps I am really watching daytime TV from a postmodern critical viewpoint. It’s a lie but at least the word ‘postmodern’ is still part of my vocabulary after years spent in almost continuous communion with Postman Pat.

The truth is, I just like TV. Always have done. Indiscriminate television-watching is my nicotine, a slow drip-feed of reliable pleasure. I love it all, soaps, dramas, sitcoms, game shows, documentaries. Good or bad, I don’t care. I love the synthetic parallel universes that punctuate my own linear existence; I love the vicarious lives the box allows me to experience; I love having a common point of reference to share with strangers. Being part of an audience is a form of belonging and I like that. I love being able to join in conversations with strangers at checkouts about Ken Barlow’s bizarre commitment to wearing inappropriately tight denim jeans. TV straddles the class and education divide in a way that the Labour Government can only dream of doing. So here I am. I’ve come out. Hello, my name is Lorna and I watch The Bill.

Yesterday morning was sublimely normal. I had a huge pile of exam papers to mark and I was making myself a cup of tea and scrambling about in the biscuit tin for something like a digestive or a Rich Tea finger that wouldn’t leave tell-tale fingerprints on my work. (I am a professional, you know.) Then I heard a key in the door and I was terrified.

Not terrified of some unknown intruder. I knew it was Rob. When you’ve lived with someone for ten years you know exactly the sound of their key in the front door. It’s one of those familiar touchstones that still thrills me with its intimacy. No, the terror came because it was Rob. He never came home in the morning. Not even when he was ill.

Rob is a dog behaviourist. It’s how we met. All those years ago, I had a psychopathic German Shepherd called Shipshape who had developed a fear of gravel. I had to carry her over my drive every day and my back was packing up. Even then, Rob was well known (in Clapham doggy circles, that is) so I took Shipshape to him. His wife had left him him two months earlier and he was in a desperate state.

I sometimes wonder if it was his situation that attracted me in the first place. I admired the way he coped with the children, I liked the way they all needed me, I enjoyed the drama. I moved in within a matter of weeks with cured dog, a vanload of possessions and a deaf ear to friends’ warnings that this could not possibly work out. And then there were the girls. I’d always wanted children, not necessarily for the birthing business, that didn’t really bother me one way or another, I just wanted lots of kids, a big loud all-encompassing family of my own. I loved this family on sight. They came as a complete package, Rob and the girls, and it was exactly the package I wanted.

It took a while but their lives eventually all got back on track. Now Rob has a national reputation and a suite of offices in a local vet’s practice. He has back-to-back appointments every day which is why, for him to come home at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning, something terrible must have happened. I didn’t want to know what that was. Not when our lives were so good, so secure.

I heard the dogs scrambling over him in excitement. ‘Hello JR. Kili. Come on girls! Where are you, Lorna?’ he called from the hall.

‘I’m in here.’ I quickly switched off the TV and composed myself. Whatever was going to happen, I intended to handle it bravely, with grace, with style, with humour. That’s one of the advantages of a life founded on early, consistent disappointment – you end up with a well-tested armoury of punchlines to deflect most attacks.

In the short time it took Rob to walk the eleven steps from the hall to the kitchen, I’d imagined most of the possible scenarios, played them through to their inevitable conclusions, amazed him with my stoic acceptance of the grim situation, comforted him in some strong, wise, womanly way that I like to think I possess and come up with practical solutions to every problem. (Note to myself: I definitely watch too much daytime television.)

Then I saw his face and I knew, I just knew, that it was more serious than anything I’d contemplated. It wasn’t pain on his face, or devastation or resignation, but confusion. He took a deep breath. ‘There was a letter waiting for me at the office. From Karen.’

He waited for me to respond but this wasn’t one of my scenarios. I had responses for redundancy, cancer, repossession of house and death of distant family member but not a letter from Karen. And a letter from Karen did rather imply that she was alive. Which was very bad news for me indeed. It was bad news for us all, but particularly for me.

Karen was – is – Rob’s ex-wife, I mean wife. They’ve never been divorced so she’s still his legal spouse. And she’s the girls’ mother, birth mother I mean, since she hasn’t been a ‘mother’ to them in ten years; not in person, not by phone, not even by post. Walked out on four children under the age of five. Does that sound like a mother to you?

‘What are you thinking, Lorna?’

I decided to filter out the bit about Karen not being dead and that being bad news. Even with spectacular comic delivery, I sensed that it would not raise a laugh. And I wasn’t joking anyway. So there.

I tried to remember what agony aunts and TV shrinks do in situations when highly charged questions are fired at them. Perhaps answering with another question was safe. At the very least, it would buy me time to sort my feelings into a cohesive, non-threatening stance.

‘Why did she write to you at work and not here?’ It was a reasonable question. It was not as if she didn’t have this address. This had been her home for six years before she abandoned it so it was safe to assume that she remembered where it was.

‘She knew that it would be a shock for me to hear from her after all this time, so she thought it best that I get the letter at work where my reaction wouldn’t upset the girls.’

‘Wow. That must get her through to the next round of “Mother of the Year”.’

‘I’m not defending her, Lorna. I’m just answering your question.’

And so the first microscopic wedge of division was tapped into our relationship with that ever-so-slightly impatient tone in his ever-so-slightly defensive reply. All at once, Karen morphed from some translucent phantom of the past into a fleshy substantial threat.

For the first couple of years after I met Rob, I lived in permanent terror that his wife would come back, remorseful, laden with presents and well-documented excuses for her outrageous behaviour. But she didn’t come back. She communicated via her parents that she was making a new life for herself in the USA and would not be returning. There was talk of a nervous breakdown and, by the time she recovered, she was aware of my existence and concluded that the children were better off with me.

To be honest, during those early months when I first took on the care of Rob’s children, I understood her actions entirely. I know they weren’t my children and, so the story goes, that makes a difference, but four children under five – I was demented with tiredness, frustration and awesome responsibility. Not only did I understand why she walked out, I was amazed that she’d stayed as long as she had. Without smothering them, that is. And if that shocks you, then you’ve never lived, month after month, on no more than two consecutive hours’ sleep at any time. You’ve never been tyrannised by four small creatures twenty-four hours a day, demanding and rejecting your attention in alternate onslaughts. You’ve never known what is to be tortured by inconsolable crying and whining and screaming for days on end. You’ve never been a mother.

I only survived it because I was simultaneously demented with love for Rob. Our love was a distraction, a coat of emotional sustenance that provided a potent salve to the torment of child-rearing. Maybe that’s why couples who have children to buoy up a struggling marriage inevitably find that the marriage dies under the pressure of a new baby. If you weren’t laughing before the baby came along, you can be sure that you’ll find precious little to amuse you when it does.

But all these generous assessments of Karen’s desertion evolved in the certainty that she was gone, never to return. Now she’s back and I don’t feel so generous any more.

Rob sank into a chair, weighed down with decisions. ‘It was only a short note really, not a letter as such.’

I went over and put my arms around him. He was a tall man, over six feet, and yet he looked small right now. He looked so vulnerable as he slumped over the kitchen table. It was hard to believe that he would turn forty in a few months’ time. He was one of those ageless men who looked about thirty from the age of eighteen until sixty. His hair was the same style that he’d worn since puberty, thick, naturally curly and settled comfortably around his face. His eyes were blue, blue, blue and so, so, so kind. His skin was totally unlined and I realised, in a shocking revelation, that this was probably because he didn’t laugh a great deal.

I mean, he’s not miserable or gloomy or anything, it’s just that he has a quiet, dry sense of humour that doesn’t often express itself in belly laughs. He’s the smiler and I’m the laugher. Rob always said that he most loved me for bringing laughter into his family. There hadn’t been a lot of it in the year leading up to Karen’s departure and there was none at all after she’d left. I squeezed him a little more tightly, hoping he’d interpret the hug as comforting rather than proprietorial.

He came from a family rather like my own where, when he was sad, his mother gave him paracetamol rather than hugs. This left us with a thirst for physical reassurance that we both tried to satisfy in each other. There were other similarities in our backgrounds, comforting coincidences that we chose to make the foundations of our relationship. We were both only children, both lost our fathers when we were eighteen and took on the unwelcome responsibility of looking after mothers who had been utterly dependent on their husbands for the practicalities of life. We’d both escaped to redbrick universities a few years later than our peers and had consequently felt displaced by the gap in age and maturity between us and our fellow students. We both needed an excuse not to return home so Rob got married and I just carried on studying. You know the rest.

‘So what does Karen want?’

‘The note just said that she wanted to meet up with me to talk. That I wasn’t to worry, she isn’t planning on causing trouble etc. etc. She’s staying at her parents’ house.’

Two miles away. Oh God. ‘How long for?’

Rob shrugged. ‘She didn’t say.’

There were too many meaningful silences in this conversation for my liking. I lightened my voice. ‘Well, there’s no point in getting worked up until you find out what she wants. You do have to see her, don’t you?’ I added a false laugh to this last, rather desperate question.

‘Of course I have to see her.’ He touched my hand as I flinched at this. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. Anyway, look on the bright side. Perhaps she’s met someone in the States and wants a quick divorce so that she can go back and marry him.’

Now I’m not famous for looking on the bright side. I’m quite good at finding the funny side in a bitter, ironical sort of way. But bright sides have always eluded me.

Divorce. No. I wouldn’t even think about it. I wanted it too badly and we all know what happens when you want something too badly. Well, we know what happens when I want something too badly.

‘You should have known this would happen sooner or later!’ you scream from the dress circle. But don’t be too quick to heap scorn on me for being the author of my own circumstances. The outcome of the choices I made ten years ago may appear to be more dramatic than your average tale of Suburban Sue, but am I the only person who’s dared to hope that she might beat the odds, buck the trends, win the prize?

I know how easy it is to spot behaviour patterns in somebody else’s life. God, I do it all the time, anything to take my mind off my own mistakes. When was your first time? You know what I’m talking about. That first stab of panic when you looked ahead towards your dream or your goal or your destiny and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in front of you because it was behind you or over there or anywhere else except where it was supposed to be.

And dreams are the whole point, aren’t they, the arrow-head on the shaft? They give you direction, purpose, meaning. If we didn’t have something to aim for, we’d all be flitting in and out of parallel lives, toying randomly with hobbies, careers and partners. We all know what happened to my dreams, so let’s look at yours. Please. Indulge me. Humour me. Don’t let me carry the banner of female fallibility all by myself here. How did you lose sight of your goals, the original authentic ones, not the ones you’ve tweaked to fit your present situation?

It started early, didn’t it? When you longed to be Mary in the nativity play but were cast as fifth sheep; when you asked Father Christmas for a Sindy doll and you got an encyclopaedia; when you asked for a piano and got a stylophone – a second-hand one without Rolf Harris’s accompanying instruction booklet. And thus the pattern was forged.

You were going to marry in white in a pretty village church when you were twenty-one, weren’t you? To a man who looked like David Cassidy (my own choice – insert pop icon appropriate to your personal era), was sensitive, faithful, wrote and read poetry, was also a promising executive with a car, a flat and a mother who lived at least three hundred miles away. You actually got married, when? Were you thirty-one or even forty-one? Did you wear green? It was probably in a registry office in a new town civic centre and you had to pretend that you didn’t mind, really, and white weddings are just silly teenage fantasies. And no, of course you didn’t want a lot of fuss. And your husband? A nice man, I’ve no doubt but … but …

So how could it have happened? Where did that dream disappear to? Somewhere along your squiggly lifeline you’d meandered off and settled for second-best. Or sixtieth-best. Whatever. And you didn’t mean to. Nobody does. Pink bedrooms all over the world are full of little girls dreaming of being ballet dancers who will end up becoming aromatherapists. Or maybe there are children who dream of being aromatherapists. There’s a scary thought for our new millennium.

I didn’t plan things like this but I’ve done all I can to make the best of it. I’ve found a life I like, a man I love, the family I’ve always wanted and I’m not going to lose it now.

Rob was brightening up. ‘If you think about it, why else would she get in touch after all this time? It must be about a divorce. Wouldn’t that be great, Lorna? The girls would never even have to know she’d been in touch!’ He kissed me cheerfully. ‘Look, sorry I was in such a state. I just needed to see you and talk to you. I’ve calmed down now. I’ll call Karen this afternoon, get everything sorted out as quickly as possible. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.’ Then he was gone.

He’d been in and out in fifteen minutes. I still had exam papers to mark, the washing to sort out, shopping to do. All I could think of was Karen taking away my daughters. Even taking away Robert. I couldn’t breathe. I was becoming irrational. I needed a drink, a dessert and a friend. I picked up the phone and called Andrea. I left a message on her answering machine. ‘Hi, Ange. Me. Listen, when you get back from the school run, give me a call. I need to meet up for lunch.’

I instantly felt better. Andrea would understand. She’d know how I felt and she’d know what to do.

She was a mother. Like me.

The restaurant in Debenhams was packed with women. We were the only ones without shopping bags and the only ones drinking wine. We were almost through our first bottle and it wasn’t even midday.

I loved Andrea. She mirrored the me I pretended to be. Her hair was naturally blonde and wavy where mine was highlighted and blow-dried to the point of desiccation. She was slim. I was skinny. She was confident. I was good at acting confident. She was beautiful. I had an interesting face. She had one daughter of her own. I had four of somebody else’s.

She emptied her glass in one gulp and stared at me in mock-sincerity. ‘Right. Let’s sort this out then we can get drunk and start embarrassing the waiter. First things first. Have you set your video for Neighbours and Home and Away?’

I laughed despite my misery. ‘I’m not that bad, Ange!’

She raised an eyebrow. I held up my hands in defeat. ‘OK, OK, so I am that bad. But so are you.’

She considered this accusation. ‘Not quite. I never set my video for soaps.’

I snorted. ‘That’s because you know that I always do, so, on those rare occasions when you miss them, you can phone me the next day and get the updates.’

‘I rest my case,’ she proclaimed in triumph. ‘I can wait twenty-four hours for the latest gossip whereas you don’t go to bed until you’ve caught up with it all so that makes me much less sad than you.’

She’s right of course but I forgive her because I’m so grateful to have found a co-conspirator to share my passion for low television. ‘Well anyway, on this occasion you’re wrong. I was too stressed to set the video. Besides, I can watch the repeats this afternoon with the girls.’

‘So how are the girls?’

I answered on autopilot. ‘Phoebe is the victim of every cruel trick puberty has in its repertoire, Claire has discovered boys and, even worse, they have discovered her, Jude is looking for a way to rebel that doesn’t involve self-mutilation or any kind of deprivation and Ali is working her way through an A-Z of alternative lifestyles.’

Andrea looked puzzled. ‘That’s it? You haven’t found dope in a pencil case? Condoms in a backpack? No sign of anorexia or pregnancy?’

‘It’s not the girls.’

Andrea laughed. ‘It’s always the girls with you, Lorn.’

‘Not this time. It’s Karen. She’s come back.’

It took a few seconds for the name to register with Andrea. When recognition surfaced, it pushed Andrea back in her chair like a body blow. I watched her dredging memories to the front of her mind, memories that I couldn’t share. Because Andrea had known Karen, really known her.

They’d been friends, more than friends, I suppose. They’d been in the same maternity ward, in adjacent beds, when their first babies had been born. It seems to have provided the setting for the birth of most of the friendships between the mums in my circle. Andrea and Karen had been inseparable, meeting up every day in the park or playgroup or swimming pool. They’d shopped together, breastfed together, swapped nipple creams and weaning tips. And when Karen embarked upon her successive pregnancies with mind-boggling speed and regularity, it was Andrea she turned to for support.

I thought I’d got over my profound jealousy of this bond between Andrea and Karen that I could never replicate, but now it was all creeping back, washing over me like nausea.

When Andrea finally spoke, she seemed to be talking to herself. ‘After all these years. Karen Danson.’ She sighed and shook her head. I waited patiently for her to remember that I was here. When she did, she was mortified. ‘God, Lorn, I’m so sorry. You must be feeling terrible! So what’s she doing back? What does she want? I can’t believe she’s got the nerve to just turn up like this with no warning!’

I swallowed my jealousy and reminded myself that the length of my friendship with Andrea far exceeded the four years she had shared with Karen, however intense those years might have been. ‘Rob only heard from her this morning. We don’t know what she wants, just that she needs to speak to him. Rob thinks it might be good news. You know, she might want a divorce.’

Andrea snorted at this. ‘Has Rob actually said that he thinks that’s good news?’

I bristled at this. ‘Don’t start all this, Ange. I’m not in the mood. Not today.’

‘Ten years, Lorna. He could have divorced her after five years without her consent. He could have contacted her through her parents. All he had to do was—’

‘Thank you, Andrea. I’m painfully aware of British divorce laws. You know it’s more complex than that.’

‘No, it’s not complex at all.’

‘Ange, please!’

‘OK, OK. So Karen’s back. It’s a bit of a shock but you can handle it. You and Rob and the kids, you’re a family. She can’t hurt you. Rob’s probably right. She probably just wants a divorce.’

‘You just accused Rob of not wanting a divorce.’

Andrea raised her hands up in resignation. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m premenstrual, maybe even premenopausal. I’ll probably have to shoplift tins of pilchards from Asda after lunch.’

She smiled and so did I.

The drink was making me reckless. ‘What do you think she’ll be like?’ I asked.

Andrea shrugged. ‘Two years of therapy. Eight years in America. She’ll be taking Prozac and have big hair. Shall we get another bottle?’

I was going to be all right.

The hangover kicked in during the afternoon. I marked my exam papers in a Distalgesic haze, adding ten per cent to every student’s marks to compensate for my total lack of commitment to the exercise. All the girls got back in time for Home and Away. I fell asleep. They tiptoed around me knowing that, if I didn’t wake up to get dinner started until their dad got home, we’d all go to Pizza Express.

I didn’t wake up. Rob came home. We went to Pizza Express where I drank a litre of mineral water and ate five packets of breadsticks. Somehow I made it to my evening class where I delivered an incomprehensible lecture on the philosophical implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I didn’t understand it myself and I was giving it, always a bad sign. But I’m confident that the lecture was good. I was performing on pre-programmed autopilot and my students applauded.

It’s an impressive skill but this is not a rare feat, even or especially for a mum. It is commonly accepted among women (and among men – although they dare not mention it in female company) that a mother’s brain cells die at a rate in direct proportion to the growth of her children from embryo onwards. It makes little difference whether you’ve actually given birth or not, the erosion begins whenever you pick up the parenting process. Once you accept this fact, and we all do, believe me, there are only two possible outcomes: total cerebral atrophy or a carefully planned sacrifice of the less useful half of your personal cortex.

In my case, I needed to preserve my salary-earning teaching and analytic skills at the expense of my spatial awareness and physical coordination. Hence I can produce a competent discourse on Aristotle, even when drunk, but I will never get the hang of line-dancing. I have divided myself into two different, separate women – the mother one and the other one. And it’s absolutely essential for my professional and emotional wellbeing that the barrier between the two remains defined and unbroken.

As I packed my notes and books away, I began my soft-shoe shuffle back from teacher to mother mode. It was a short, easy, much-travelled bridge.

‘Are you OK, Lorna?’ It was one of my students, looking concerned. I clearly hadn’t applied enough make-up to my ravaged face.

‘I’m fine, Simon, just a bit tired, you know how it is,’ I replied cheerfully. What an imbecilic response. How could he possibly know how anything is? Simon Flynn is twenty-nine, single and his biggest responsibility seems to be keeping his rather magnificent head of curls in order. In one of my rare moments of enhanced self-esteem, I had considered the possibility that he might have a crush on me. Ridiculous word, crush, for one grown-up to use about another but the whole notion is a bit ridiculous in itself.

I’d never got very involved personally with my students. I was always too tired to join them for a drink after college and the course was sufficiently demanding that the two-hour sessions allowed no extra time for any chit-chat. But Simon had often walked out to my car with me and, over the nine months that I’d been teaching him, we’d covered quite a lot of each other’s lives.

He was the classic example of the bright student who was never encouraged at school and left with all his potential untapped. After drifting from job to job, he found he had a skill for computing and design just at the time when Internet website-building was eme. . .