The Hope Family Calendar

by Mike Gayle

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

Tom Hope is broken. Ever since his wife, Laura, died he hasn't been the same man and definitely not the same father. Luckily for Tom his mother-in-law, Linda, is around to pick up the pieces and look after his two struggling daughters, Evie and Lola. But Tom getting arrested on the first anniversary of his wife's death is the last straw for Linda. In a last bid attempt to make Tom reconnect with his daughters, she takes drastic action and leaves for Australia.

With two fast-maturing daughters, Tom has to learn how to accept his responsibilities and navigate the newly discovered world of single fatherhood—starting immediately. With only himself to rely on, will Tom fall back into grief or finally step up and be the father his girls need?

Release date: June 16, 2016

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

If I could be around more, I would

Tom

It was late when I reached home from work. Home, just so you know, is a four-bed house in Reigate, Surrey. It was Laura who found it. I don’t think the house had even properly come on to the market when she took me to see it. The owner was deceased. Having lived there all her life, the elderly lady had passed peacefully away in her sleep, apparently. She died intestate and so one of those ‘heir-hunter’ companies had got involved. In return for a slice of the action, they informed a middle-aged bookkeeper in Llanelli that she had just inherited an entire house from a great-aunt she’d never met. With no desire to move to the Surrey commuter belt, the bookkeeper called an estate agent on the High Street to put the property on the market, and a matter of moments after the agent had finished taking down the details in walked Laura, heavily pregnant and sick to her back teeth of renting. We went to see the place that same night and Laura fell in love with it. First thing the following morning she convinced me to make an offer for the full asking price, even though the house needed everything doing to it. It was a big gamble but it paid off in spades, leaving us living in a house that after the market picked up we couldn’t have come even close to affording. But that was Laura all over: somehow everything she touched turned to gold.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’d just arrived home from work, or to be more accurate I’d come home from work via dinner with a couple of talent agents who’d spent the entire evening singing the praises of their clients, in a bid to get me to have them on one of my shows. I’m a TV producer by trade, mainly entertainment stuff, the sort of shows people love to watch on a Saturday night. In fact, when I was the subject of a profile in Broadcast magazine, the title for the piece was ‘Mr Saturday Night’.

The house was quiet, which was to be expected. Left to their own devices the kids would stay up until their eyes fell out, but thankfully they didn’t. They had Linda. And, I suppose, Linda had them too. It was an arrangement that worked well for everyone concerned. The best thing about Linda was that she was an early-to-bed type. Never stayed up much past ten o’clock if she could help it, which meant that if I timed it right, generally speaking, most nights I’d get the ground floor of the house to myself. Tonight was different, however. As I stood at the kitchen counter, bottle of red in one hand and an empty wine glass in the other, I turned around to see Linda, cocooned in her fluffy blue polka-dot dressing gown, standing in the doorway.

‘Good day?’

‘Long day.’ I sighed and set both wine and empty glass down on the counter. ‘Can’t sleep?’

‘I was actually waiting up for you. Have you a moment? There’s something I need to talk to you about quite urgently and, well, you don’t seem to have received any of the messages I’ve left for you lately.’

My heart sank. All I’d thought about for the entire cab ride home from the station was this next hour of my life: how I was going to pour myself a large glass of wine, put on a little music, sit on the kitchen sofa in semi-darkness and try my best to think about absolutely nothing. But now that wasn’t to be. Linda had made sure of it.

We sat down to talk on the very sofa where I should have been enjoying my glass of red. I looked over at Linda. You know that thing where you look at someone and it dawns on you that they look nothing like you’d pictured them? Well, in my head Linda was a youthful sixty-six. Yes, she was grey of hair and wrinkled of skin but she’d always had a sparkle in her eye, a spring in her step and a laugh that was just the right side of filthy. The woman next to me, however, looked like she was auditioning for the role of ‘old lady’ in a comedy – not quite half-moon glasses and a walking stick, but not that far off either. She seemed old. Proper old. Old like if she died you’d think, ‘At least she had a good innings.’ Sixty-six isn’t old these days. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I wondered if she, like me, hadn’t been sleeping very well of late. A couple of rough nights can easily add a few years on here and there. I thought briefly about offering her one of the sleeping tablets I’d picked up on my last trip to the States for work, but I could see that she was waiting for me to ask her what she wanted and so, with no little reluctance, I obliged.

‘It’s about the weekend after next.’ Her eyes scanned my own for signs that I recognised the significance of the date in question, as though she thought it could possibly have slipped my mind. ‘The girls have been talking with me about what they might like to do, and they’ve said that they want to go to Southwold. And well, I for one think it’s a great idea. You know how much Laura loved Southwold.’

Linda was right. Laura always did love Southwold. It had been her favourite place to go to get away from it all, even before the girls came along. She’d often talked about us retiring there, so that when the girls were older and had families of their own we’d be able to take our grandchildren for long walks on the beach. Southwold was Laura’s place, and the perfect setting in which to remember her. I was all for it, up to a point.

‘That’s a great idea. You should definitely take them. Spend what you like, they deserve a good treat.’

‘So you’ll be coming too?’

‘Me? I’d love to, Linda, really I would, but with everything the way it is at work at the moment – two shows in production, one in pre-production and more in development than we can handle – there’s no way I can take the time off. You’ve seen for yourself how little I’ve been home at the weekends.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ said Linda pointedly. ‘One might almost think that you lived at the office, the amount of time you spend there. Do you really need to work quite so hard? The girls miss you terribly.’

‘And I miss them too,’ I replied. ‘And once things calm down, I promise that you, the kids and me will take a proper break somewhere really special. I can see it now: the girls jumping in and out of the pool all day while you sunbathe in a slinky two-piece, sipping on a cocktail.’

A few years ago the gag about ‘a slinky two-piece’ would’ve had her chuckling away and making jokes of her own, but today it got nothing. Zero. In fact, it seemed to make her visibly angry.

‘You think this is all a joke, don’t you?’

‘Far from it.’

‘Those girls need you, Tom, they need you to be their father and at the moment you’re just never around.’

‘And I’ve told you I’m working, Linda. If I could be around more, I would.’

She shook her head. ‘I knew you’d say that . . . which is why I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands.’ She stared at me with a steely defiance. This wasn’t a bluff. She’d done something sneaky, something I hadn’t seen coming at all.

‘What are you talking about?’ A trace of urgency in my voice.

‘You didn’t leave me any choice.’

‘What have you done?’ The panic in my voice grew more pronounced.

‘I called your MD this morning and demanded that he let you have the time off.’

I lost all pretence of being in control. ‘You did what?’

‘You said yourself that you’d come if you weren’t working. Well here you are: he says you can have the weekend off. He said it was no problem at all. He was actually quite delightful about it.’

I was so thoroughly enraged, so utterly livid that I rose to my feet and as I did so, an equally outraged Linda did the same. We squared up to each other, all six foot of me and all five foot five inches of her, like two comically mismatched boxers.

‘You had no right to do something like that!’

‘And you have no right to be acting like such a selfish pig! Your daughters need that weekend, Tom. They need you to be there with them while they remember their mother. It’s their rights I’m concerned about, not yours. They need this. And if plotting and scheming is what it takes to get you to go to Southwold with them, then that’s what I’ll bloody well do! I’m the only grandparent these girls have got, so believe me when I say that there isn’t a damn thing in this world I wouldn’t do to make them happy.’

 

Linda

Tom didn’t talk to me again for the rest of that week. As a tactic it probably would have had more impact on me if he’d been particularly given to long chats over the dinner table but as it was, these days we barely spoke at all anyway. During the year I’d lived with him and the girls, my relationship to him had morphed into an unsettling mix of housekeeper, childminder and (chaste) wife-substitute. I cleaned the house, washed and ironed clothes and looked after his children, and in return he gave me a room of my own, paid all the bills and gave me more spending money than I knew what to do with. We weren’t friends any more, at least not in the way we used to be, but we weren’t enemies either. We were simply two people, side by side, miles from land with no hope of rescue, treading water in a bottomless ocean and getting more tired by the day.

It had all been so different when we first met. It was the summer of 1997 and Laura was at university in London in the final year of her photography degree. I’d just split up with Tony, my partner of the last nine months, following my discovery that his relationship with his ex-wife wasn’t anywhere near as over as he’d led me to believe, and so Laura had invited me to stay with her for a couple of days. Desperate to do something for the weekend other than mourn the passing of yet another relationship, I’d leaped at the opportunity and travelled to London straight after work on the Friday evening.

The following morning I took Laura clothes shopping on Oxford Street and later, over lunch in a nice little café on Monmouth Street, she told me all about the new man in her life: Tom Hope. Tom, she told me, was twenty-five and originally from Reading but had lived in London for the past four years, working as a researcher for a TV production company. She told me he was tall and handsome and easily the kindest man she had ever met. Always the concerned mother, I asked her what his parents did for a living and crossed my fingers, hoping they might be better than the last lot – a pair of hippy types who thought nothing of offering me ‘a smoke’ five minutes after I’d met them for the first time. Laura told me that Tom’s mum had run off with another man when he was young, and his father had died two years ago following a long battle with lung cancer. Though I knew he was a grown man and had, no doubt, long since come to terms with his situation, it was such a sad state of affairs that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor lad. Even grown-up children need their parents. Even young independent men like Tom need a mum.

After lunch we went back to Laura’s flat in Hammersmith and met up with all her flatmates again, including her best friend Marina, who she’d known since her first day at university. The sizeable age gap between Laura’s friends and me didn’t stop us from cracking open a few bottles of wine and having a real hoot talking about men and the like. They all had something to say about my recent experience with Tony and, fuelled by the vino, we started cooking up all manner of plans as to how I should take revenge. Then who should call on Laura’s landline but the man himself? He said he needed to talk to me, and against my better judgement I agreed to listen. Sensing that I might need some space to take the call, Laura and her flatmates took themselves off to the supermarket to get a few things in for supper.

My call with Tony was every bit as wearing as I knew it would be, but I remained resolute to the end that he and I were through. Afterwards, however, as I sat alone in Laura’s flat reviewing the time I’d wasted on yet another excuse for a man, all I could think about was how unlucky I’d been in love throughout my entire life. If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve thought I’d been cursed. Before Tony there was Andrew (who ended our two-year relationship after falling for his secretary), before Andrew there was Christopher (who didn’t so much want me, as a free babysitting service for his kids), before Christopher there was Stephen (who seemed to delight in ruining my peace of mind by blowing hot and cold on a whim) and before Stephen there was Edward (who, much like Tony, had an ex-wife who it turned out was anything but). The list of losers went on and on, spanning more than forty years, but right at the top was the one who started the whole thing rolling – King Rat himself – Frank Smith, Laura’s father: the very first man to well and truly break my heart.

Right in the middle of this painful reverie the door buzzer went, not just once or twice but five times in quick succession! I wasn’t the kind of woman who enjoyed having her thoughts interrupted at the best of times, but at this particular moment I was in no mood to be trifled with and so, angrily, I made my way downstairs. I flung the front door wide open, ready to give the caller a piece of my mind, only to find a tall, kind-faced but somewhat scruffily dressed young man on the doorstep. I guessed who he was from Laura’s description and the bottle of bubbly in his hands, along with the bouquet of what were clearly garage forecourt flowers, only served to confirm what I thought: this was Laura’s new man.

His face bore a look of thorough confusion. ‘I think there’s been a mistake. I was buzzing Flat Three.’

‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, my ears are still ringing.’

‘So . . . you know Laura Wood, then?’

I laughed and raised an eyebrow. It was naughty of me but I just couldn’t help myself. ‘I should hope so.’

It took a while but finally the penny dropped. ‘You’re Laura’s mum, aren’t you?’

I nodded. ‘And you must be Tom. Weren’t you supposed to be working this weekend?’

‘We finished early. And I completely forgot that you were stopping with her tonight. I should go.’

‘Don’t be daft. Laura and her friends have just popped out, you’re more than welcome to come in and wait, if you like.’

You should have seen the panic in his eyes. Make small talk with his new girlfriend’s mum? I think he would’ve sooner bitten off his arm and thrown it at me.

‘No, really, I’ll come back later,’ he said, flustered. He thrust the bubbly and the flowers in my direction. ‘Could you give Laura these for me?’

‘You can give them to her yourself,’ I said. ‘She’s right behind you.’

I should’ve known from the size of the grin that appeared on Laura’s face the moment she saw Tom that she was in love. It was like she’d been lit up from inside and couldn’t help letting her light shine out. If someone could make you that happy just by turning up unexpectedly then you were definitely on to a winner, make no mistake about it.

With her arms around his neck, Laura fixed her eyes on Tom like she was boring down into his very soul. ‘I’ve missed you, Tom Hope.’

They kissed on the spot and probably would’ve carried on for some time had Tom not recalled the fact that I was still in the doorway.

‘Er . . . Laura, your mum’s here.’

Laura laughed. ‘I know, I invited her.’

‘But . . .’

‘It’s freaking you out a bit, isn’t it?’

Tom nodded.

‘No need,’ she said, turning towards me. She looked so beautiful, so happy at that moment, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. ‘You don’t bite, do you, Mum?’

‘No,’ I replied, and gave Tom a cheeky wink. ‘At least not very hard.’

The easiness of our initial introduction seemed to set the tone for the rest of our relationship and as Tom and Laura grew closer, so did Tom and I. When Laura and I went on holiday the following year, it was me who insisted that Tom came too; when Laura’s granddad died a few months later, it seemed only natural to ask Tom to do a reading at the funeral, because by that time he was practically one of the family; and when Tony refused to repay the money I’d lent him from my savings for his printing business, it was Tom who, unprompted by me, drove up to York with a few of his friends and convinced him to repay the loan, with interest.

It wasn’t just the things he did either, but the way he was too. He loved to make people laugh; he worked hard and always had a plan for any situation. And as for the way he was with Laura, I honestly couldn’t have wished for a more dutiful, kind and loving partner for my beautiful girl. If I’d been cursed when it came to love then, thanks to Tom, it looked a lot like Laura had been blessed beyond belief.

That said, I admit when Laura told me she was pregnant I was worried at first. After all, it hadn’t been planned – they’d only been together two years and she was still only twenty-four. As a single mother I knew first-hand that raising a child wasn’t going to be easy, even with the added luxury of a loving partner helping out.

‘Mum, we’ll be fine,’ she said, as though I was making a fuss over nothing. She’d always been so sure of herself, that girl, so sure that she was indestructible. It’s the quality I loved about her most because it was so unlike me.

‘But what about your photography?’ I asked. ‘You’ve only just got started with your career. If you have this baby now, how will you make it work?’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ she replied. ‘And if it doesn’t work out that’s fine, I’ll do something else. Things don’t always go to plan, Mum, but do you know what? I wouldn’t want it any other way. I’ve got a whole life ahead of me, more than enough time to chase dreams, but right now, all that matters is me, Tom, and this little bean growing inside me.’

That ‘little bean’ came into the world eight months later in the early hours of 2 February. They called her Evie, and she was the bonniest baby I’ve ever seen. You only had to catch her eye for a moment and she’d smile at you like you were her favourite person in the world. Five years later, Evie’s arrival was followed by that of another little bean, at ten minutes past four in the afternoon of 3 September. They called her Lola, and I fell in love with my little Lolly on the spot.

Though Laura was still relatively young, she took to motherhood like a duck to water. She was an absolute natural and seemed to take greater pleasure in being a mum than she had in her pursuit of photography. And though there were times when I wondered whether she had taken on too much too soon, those times were few and far between. For the most part she seemed far happier and more full of life than I’d ever seen her, and everything she did for the children spoke of an inner determination to only ever give them her best.

As for me, to say that those girls transformed my life is a massive understatement. They lit up every corner of my world so that there was no longer any darkness left. I stopped worrying about whether I’d grow old without a man; I stopped grumbling about the ill-mannered primary school children I taught, their equally ill-mannered parents and the seemingly endless wave of demands that senior management placed on me. Nothing else mattered now that I was a grandmother. After a lifetime that had seen a lot of heartache, finally I had a happiness that no one could ever take from me.

2

I just can’t

Tom

There was nothing remarkable about the day that Laura died. No comets warning of impending doom, no meteors crashing to earth. Nothing whatsoever to suggest that it might be anything other than just an ordinary autumnal day in October.

I awoke that morning to the sound of the alarm clock: two bursts of high-pitched, two-note beeps signalling it was six thirty. With eyes still closed, I hit the snooze button as was my habit and Laura pushed herself closer to me as was hers. And there we lay, skin to skin, warmth to warmth, hiding from the world until the alarm clock indicated once again that it was time to get up and this time it really meant it. In a few minutes Laura would be in the shower and then once she was done, I’d follow. By the time I emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, Evie and Lola would be awake too, putting on school uniform and (in Evie’s case) finishing off homework.

Breakfast was a big deal in the Hope household. Laura made sure of that. It was important to her that we ate together as a family as often as we could. Most evenings the girls had long since eaten tea by the time I reached home, so breakfast was it. Our time to break bread and check in with one another, and no one – not even me – was allowed to skip it.

I wasn’t naturally a morning person, much preferring to say or do as little as possible before my first coffee of the day, but nonetheless I loved Laura’s insistence that breakfast was sacred. It showed exactly what her priorities were: family first, everything else second. In a world where it’s all too easy to lose sight of what’s really important, it felt good to know that there was a captain of our ship guiding us in the right direction. When it came to our family, Laura was the top dog, boss of bosses, CEO of The Family Hope plc.

It’s odd how much I can recall about that morning but it’s all there: the smell of Laura’s shampoo in the hallway, the Taylor Swift song playing on the radio as I entered the kitchen and the first words I was greeted with as I approached the kitchen table.

‘I poured your cereal for you, Dad.’

It was Lola speaking. She was pointing to an unholy concoction of Cheerios, Coco Pops, Sugar Puffs and Raisin Wheats. Never had a solitary bowl of cereal looked quite so unappealing.

‘I don’t know quite what to say.’

Laura nudged me with her elbow. ‘You could start with thank you,’ she said pointedly. ‘Lola was explaining to Evie and me that she was very concerned you weren’t getting the right level of vitamins and minerals in your diet.’

‘We’re learning about them at school,’ said Lola.

‘You’re studying Cheerios at school? I wouldn’t mind a few lessons like that.’ I waggled my eyebrows to indicate that she’d become yet another unsuspecting victim of a Dad joke, the lowest form of humour known to mankind.

‘No, we’re studying vitamins and minerals, Daddy,’ she corrected patiently. ‘Food makers put lots in our cereal so we can be healthy.’

‘Well it looks disgusting,’ snorted Evie in a manner that of late seemed to be her chief method of communicating. ‘You wouldn’t catch me eating that for a million pounds!’

‘Well, you’ll never know just how delicious this really is then,’ I replied, grabbing a spoon and wolfing down a mouthful of Lola’s concoction. ‘Delicious,’ I mumbled, while trying not to visibly baulk as the sugar ravaged my taste buds. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

Despite Laura’s best intentions, breakfast rarely if ever concluded as sedately as it began. Sometimes it would be Evie who drifted off from the table, in order to reply to her friends’ texts; other times it would be Lola, as she suddenly recalled the half-dozen parental consent forms abandoned at the bottom of her school bag that needed signing; and once in a while it would be me, briefly checking my email at the kitchen table only to stumble across some work-related emergency that required my full attention. However, sometime after the disintegration of breakfast but before the mass exodus from home, Laura would somehow bring us all together again for the morning briefing. Taking the family calendar off the hook on the wall next to the fridge, she would hand out the next lot of tasks and reminders. And the day we lost Laura was no different.

To Evie she said: ‘You’ve got swimming today, sweetie, have you packed your kit yet?’

To Lola she said: ‘The eggboxes that Mrs Baker wants are in the cupboard next to the sink. Could you bag them up and leave them by the door, please?’

To me she said: ‘Don’t forget you’re picking up Evie from Mia’s on your way home. And Lola’s parents’ evening is tomorrow so if anyone tries to book you in for a meeting after five, make sure you tell them no.’

With that, she scanned the calendar one last time, double-checking that she hadn’t missed anything, before returning it to its rightful place on the wall.

Sometimes I used to joke that if there was a fire and she could only rescue three things from the house, it would go: kids first and second, and the family calendar third. Owning it, adding to it and reflecting on it seemed to bring Laura a peace that nothing else could. Because while there were things to dread about it (tax returns, dental appointments and MOTs), there was also a lot to look forward to (holidays, theatre trips and birthdays), and above all there was order. In a world where all manner of random events could occur, from home-grown terrorists blowing up buses, to train crashes caused by signalling errors, it helped us to believe that no disaster could ever overtake us, because we knew exactly what the future looked like – we could hold it in our hands.

Besides always eating breakfast together, the other golden rule of the Hope household was this: no one was ever allowed to leave home without first saying a proper goodbye. Not Evie distracted by a phone call, or Lola lost in a daydream, or me fielding a text: everybody said goodbye without exception. And as – more often than not – I was the first to leave, it was always me who got my goodbyes in first. On that day I got a big wet kiss from Lola, the offer of a forehead against which to place my lips from Evie and then finally, a big old-fashioned smooch from Laura.

‘Back usual time?’

‘Should be. I can’t remember, are you at uni today?’

‘No, but I’ve got a deadline looming.’

‘Need me to pick up anything for dinner?’

‘A nice Shiraz wouldn’t go amiss.’

‘Like that, is it? Not looking forward to today then?’

She leaned and pressed her lips against my cheek. ‘Put it this way,’ she said, ‘I’ll be glad when it’s over.’

I was about to ask more about her university assignment when we heard the girls’ raised voices from upstairs. They were both threatening each ot. . .