Conditional Love (25 page)

‘Talk about raunchy! Ooh, those Latin American men know what to do with their hips.’ Mum closed her eyes and shook her head, dreamily. ‘I’m going to take you when you come over. You’ll love it. You could do with loosening up a bit.’

She peered at the screen and smiled. ‘Actually you look like you’ve had a late night yourself. What have you been up to?’

I could do with a slurp of Mum’s vodka right now. I took a gulp of my tea instead for courage.

‘I went to bed early, but I didn’t get much sleep.’

‘Ooh!’ She clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Me and my big –’

‘I’ve met Terry, Mum.’

‘What?’ All of a sudden, my mum looked every single one of her fifty-two years. It was as if my words had sucked all the life out of her. The effect was instant; her shoulders slumped, her mouth sagged and she sat motionless, staring at the screen.

I should have waited. I should have told her face to face, when I was there to put my arms round her and reassure her. I chewed on my lip. Too late now.

‘I didn’t tell you the truth because I didn’t want to upset you. But I had to meet him. It was a condition of the will. It’s OK though, Mum –’

‘Well, no doubt you’ve heard the whole sordid story?’

I hadn’t really, but I didn’t need to. I knew enough to understand that they’d both been young and these things happened, she had felt humiliated and was literally left holding the baby. Whatever my father had to tell me, one thing was for certain, my loyalty was, and always would be, to her.

‘No one’s blaming you in any of this, Mum,’ I stressed. ‘You’ve done a brilliant job of bringing me up on your own. He let us both down from the start. But there are still gaps in my childhood.’

I took a deep breath. I felt so guilty for doing this to her, but for once, I was determined to get my own way.

‘Either you fill me in on all the details, or I’ll have no choice but to ask him.’

Mum’s whole demeanour changed. She drew herself up tall in her seat and threw the rest of her vodka down in one. Leaning slowly in towards the webcam, she narrowed her eyes and pinched her lips together in a hard red line. Her voice, when she spoke, was so low, I thought at first there was interference on the line.

‘Blackmail? All the sacrifices I made for you and this is how you repay me. All this … this prying, digging up dirt. You take, take, take like a leech, sucking my blood; you took my youth thirty years ago and now you’ve taken my heart. How could you?’

I gasped. A leech? Was that how she saw her only daughter? Surely that was a heat of the moment reaction, she was in shock, that was all.

‘It doesn’t change how much I love you,’ I pleaded.

‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t go behind my back like this. No, I’m sorry, Sophie. It’s him or me and it sounds like you’ve already made your choice.’

‘But Mum –’

She shook her head and flared her nostrils and as her hand reached towards her laptop, her last words were, ‘I hope you’ll be very happy together.’

The screen went black.

Would it be too dramatic if I changed my Facebook status to ‘orphan’? With shaking hands, I turned the laptop off and threw the rest of my tea down the sink. A text alert made my phone ping:
I’ve cancelled your birthday massage
.

What have I done?

This sudden interest in my father, was it worth damaging my relationship with Mum for? Perhaps I was dredging up ancient history which would be better off left buried in the past?

Either way, it didn’t look like I would be enjoying ‘La Vida Loca’ anytime soon.

I trudged out of the kitchen. My bedroom opened its shabby chic arms and surrounded me like a comfort blanket.

‘The sacrifices I made for you,’ Mum had said.

The duvet beckoned. My body felt heavy and tired. I could so easily have dived back under the covers, blanked out all my problems with sleep. Instead, I sat down at my dressing table and attempted to weigh up those sacrifices, balancing them against the ones I had made, unbeknownst to her.

At twenty-one, I had been utterly confident of a successful future. I had had it all mapped out in a three-year plan. By twenty-four I would be an interior stylist for a top London magazine. The world would be my exquisitely accessorised oyster.

I had set myself a goal and worked my naïve little butt off to get there. I spent hours working on my portfolio, designing schemes for rooms of all shapes, sizes and styles. From Shaker to chic, beach house to Bauhaus, rustic to romantic, I had more ideas than Kirstie Allsopp. Finally, after writing letter after letter, applying for job after job, I’d cracked it.

I opened up the slim drawer of my dressing table.

It would still be in here, I was sure of it; there was no way I would have thrown it out. My fingers scrabbled around, pushing past the bank statements, old bus passes and twenty-first birthday cards until they found their quarry.

There it was. Underneath a decade’s worth of detritus, hidden but not forgotten, a white envelope, ordinary enough, except for the franking label.

BBC Good Homes Magazine
.

My heart leapt as I read it, as it had all those years ago when it had arrived in the post. I remembered squealing with joy reading those words, ‘We are delighted to offer you the position of Junior Stylist.’

Jess and Emma hadn’t been at home for some reason and I was bursting to tell someone. Mum! I would ring Mum in Spain. She would be so proud of me. My dream was coming true, I was on my way!

I cast my mind back to that night. My mum hadn’t been in Benalmádena then. She had been living and working in a hotel further up the coast. It had been a nightmare to get hold of her. Mobile phones were really expensive in Spain at the time, so I could only ever speak to her when she was in her hotel room, and as she was such a sociable creature, that was virtually never!

I lost count of the number of times I phoned the hotel’s reception that evening, trying to catch her in. But at nine o’clock, Mum called me. As fate would have it, she had news of her own. The local Spanish hospital had removed a lump and she wanted to come home to start a course of treatment and convalesce. She wanted to stay with me, she explained, so that I could look after her, so she could see her old English doctor with whom she felt more comfortable, no problems with the lingo. It would only be for six months. That wasn’t too much to ask was it? After all she had done for me?

My dreams had come crashing down round my ears. As of that night, I turned my back on all those grand plans. What was the use? I clearly wasn’t in control of my own destiny anyway. Far safer to coast along and see where I ended up. If I didn’t have dreams then I couldn’t fail. Safe, secure and no surprises. That became my new motto.

Writing back to the magazine to tell them I wouldn’t be joining the team was one of the most painful things I had ever had to do. I never told anyone about that job offer. It didn’t seem fair to burden Mum with it and I didn’t want Jess or Emma to pity me; I could manage that quite nicely on my own.

From then on, I stopped thinking about the future and consigned myself to accepting what came along, my feet firmly on the ground instead of chasing the stars.

Now though, with Mum’s accusations ringing in my ears, I couldn’t help but wonder how things might have turned out if I had only kept hold of those dreams.

twenty-eight

It was a bright Saturday morning in October, one of those fresh autumn days when you get the urge to run through piles of carefully swept up leaves for the sheer hell of it.

However, my task for the day was much less fun. I had been procrastinating about clearing Great Aunt Jane’s bungalow for weeks. The idea of digging through a stranger’s possessions was giving me the heebie-jeebies. But as I had run out of excuses today was the day.

I pulled on my jeans, a hoodie and a pair of warm boots, collected a pile of Marc’s dirty clothes off the floor and went in search of willing assistants.

‘Ah, sorry, babes,’ said Jess, head bent over the kitchen table. She put a final stripe of varnish on her thumb nail. Her nails matched her violet leggings perfectly. For some reason, Tinky Winky came to mind.

‘Spike and I are calling in at Mum and Dad’s later.’ She beamed up at me and squealed, ‘It’ll be the first time they’ve met him! I can’t wait.’

I smiled back at her as I stuffed Marc’s laundry in the washing machine and did a rough calculation; she must have been going out with the policeman for about six months now. It was unheard of for her to be so restrained about getting the stamp of approval from her parents.

Jess had a catalogue of habits to frighten the bejaysus out of potential partners, which usually had them doing a runner with wedding bells ringing in their ears at the earliest opportunity; from practising her married signature in front of him, to checking how he felt about the names Scarlett and Rhett for their future children to stopping outside jeweller’s and pointing out her favourite rings.

Normally, the poor chaps are subjected to a ‘Meet the Parents’ ordeal within the first few weeks. Jess must be serious about Spike to be playing it so cool.

Emma appeared with her cheeks bulging, accompanied by a strong whiff of antiseptic. She gargled loudly, spat into the kitchen sink and grimaced.

‘I’m sure I’m coming down with laryngitis,’ she moaned, reaching for the kettle to refill it.

‘Come home with me and Spike. Mum will make you Ribena and a hot water bottle,’ said Jess.

I hid a smirk. I was always amused when either of them referred to their parents’ house as home. Well, amused or envious. The flat was the only home I had, unless I counted the bungalow, which I didn’t.

‘No thanks,’ said Emma, looking like she’d rather have all her teeth removed with pliers than play gooseberry to her sister. ‘I’m helping Sophie clear the bungalow.’

She smiled at me and coughed delicately to reinforce how much of a sacrifice she was making.

Jess waved her nails in front of her face to dry them.

‘Dad is going to love him,’ she sighed. ‘Spike is every parent’s dream for their daughter.’

‘He’ll certainly send them to sleep,’ snorted Emma, pouring hot water in a bowl. I took the kettle from her and made myself a mug of tea with the remains of the water. She did have a valid point; the most interesting thing about Jess’s boyfriend was his name.

Jess pursed her lips and smiled primly. ‘We are two peas in a pod, Spike and I. Two servants of our community: I shape the young minds of the future generation and he keeps the streets safe, putting himself in danger so that we can sleep soundly in our beds.’

‘Give it a rest, Jess,’ said Emma, lowering her face down over the steaming bowl and covering her head with a cloth. ‘To hear you talk, you’d think he was trawling the streets of Miami instead of crawling through traffic in Mapperley.’

The doorbell rang. Jess pushed herself up from the table, still with her hands outstretched.

‘Jealous,’ she mouthed to me.

‘I heard that,’ muttered Emma from under her towel.

An hour later Emma and I were rattling along the country lanes towards Woodby in my new car. I had bravely dipped into my inheritance for the first time and bought a ten-year-old mini from a lady who had advertised it in
The
Herald
. Such a luxury to hop from the flat and straight into the car!

Emma wasn’t taking any chances against the autumn wind. She was wrapped in a ski jacket, wore a fleecy hat with ear flaps and had a scarf wound so tightly round her face that I could hardly hear her when she finally piped up, ‘I am a bit jealous.’

‘You don’t fancy Spike, do you?’ It was news to me if she did. She used her special brand of sarcasm when she talked about him, the one usually reserved for Marc.

‘God, no!’ Emma winced in horror. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. ‘She’ll be there now, parading her perfect boyfriend and their perfect jobs under Mum and Dad’s noses. Makes me sick.’

I smiled at her sympathetically. I hadn’t had much experience of sibling rivalry. Except that recently I had started imagining my father with a proud arm around his son. I shook my head to make the mental picture vanish.

‘I’m sure your parents are just as proud of you as they are of her.’

Emma turned away and gazed out of the window. ‘Nah, Dad said once that teaching was a proper career. He might as well have said that silversmithing was a ‘Mickey Mouse’ profession.’

I slammed the brakes on as a tractor pulled out of a farm gate in front of us. Emma swore and gripped the door handle so hard her knuckles turned white.

‘Prove him wrong then!’ I said, peering round the tractor and overtaking it as fast as the little car would allow. ‘Can’t you enter an award or something? There are always prizes being handed out in my industry. There must be an equivalent for jewellery? Your dad couldn’t fail to be impressed, plus it would do wonders for the business.’

Emma frowned and popped a throat lozenge into her mouth. ‘Not a bad idea. Not that I’d have a chance in hell of winning.’

‘Rubbish. I can see it now,’ I said pulling onto the drive of number eight. ‘Emma Piper – award-winning silversmith.’

‘Pfff.’ Emma rolled her eyes dismissively. ‘Talking about parental approval, what are you going to do about your mum?’

‘Let her stew,’ I replied, yanking the keys out of the ignition with more force than was entirely necessary.

One side of Emma’s mouth lifted in a half smile.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘Nothing,’ she grinned. ‘Good for you, that’s all. About time you stood up to her!

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said, catching a glimpse of my indignant face, ‘I love your mum; she’s the life and soul of the party. But you’re always walking on eggshells around her. Anyway,’ she nodded towards the bungalow, ‘what are we going to do with all the junk in there?’

My stomach lurched as I contemplated the ordeal ahead. Apprehensive didn’t begin to cover it; the idea of sifting through a dead person’s things was horrific.

‘No idea. Come on, let’s get this over with,’ I said, climbing out of the car.