Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (36 page)

It was no wonder that Hope ended Saturday afternoon with a killer headache and zero possibility of being left alone to sleep it off when her mother had plans for them to
reorganise
the linen cupboard together. Hope knew she couldn’t take much more.

As soon as Jeremy came back from his friend’s house, she persuaded him to come with her to Oldham to see a film. Persuade was perhaps not the right word. Hope pleaded, begged, cajoled, threatened and reminded him at five-minute intervals that he was responsible for her current predicament by opening his fat mouth and landing her in it.

‘God, did you take nagging lessons from Mum?’ he spat in disgust before he capitulated, and Hope was so mad at him for even daring to suggest such a heinous thing, that she forced him to see a rom-com and pay for his own popcorn.

On Sunday morning, Hope stayed in bed for as long as she dared, which was hard when her mother was pointedly vacuuming right outside her bedroom door for a good twenty minutes until Hope gave in to the inevitable and got out of bed to face the second performance of the music.

At least Jeremy was there to diffuse the tension with his endless demands for help with his coursework and more toast. Then her dad phoned, which necessitated her mother shutting herself in the conservatory with the phone and refusing to tell Hope how the London arm of the peace talks was going.

‘Never mind that,’ her mother said briskly, as she shut the Sunday supplement that Hope was trying to read. ‘No time for that either. Go and get washed and dressed, so we can go over to Matthew and Kathy’s for lunch. She’ll need help with the prep – apparently she’s still got post-natal depression,’ she added sceptically. ‘We never had that in my day.’

It was the next phase of her mother’s evil masterplan. Her oldest brother and his wife had recently had their third child, her brother Luke and his wife, Lisa, were turning up with their two children, and the only reason her brother Adrian and Hope’s favourite sister-in-law, Tanya, weren’t coming was because they didn’t have any children so had
the
time, money and energy to jet off on a last-minute mini-break to Brussels.

As soon as they walked through the door, three-month-old Gretchen was dumped in Hope’s arms and actually she didn’t mind at all. Gretchen was warm, smiley and felt wonderfully solid and comforting as Hope obediently sniffed the top of her head, which smelt of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. What she did mind was her mother watching her like a hawk, eyes narrowed, as if she could see right through to Hope’s uterus, which should have been clenched in longing. It wasn’t, and when Hope followed Kathy into the kitchen to help with making lunch, her sister-in-law wasn’t exactly the poster girl for procreation either.

‘Gretchen’s so adorable. Don’t you just want to cuddle her all day long?’ Hope remarked as she peeled potatoes, because she could totally appreciate other people’s babies, even though she didn’t want one of her own in nine months’ time, and she could never really think of what to say to Kathy, because she collected little china cats and had a framed photo of Michael Bublé on the hall wall.

‘It never sleeps,’ Kathy said through gritted teeth, pushing back her lank hair, which hadn’t been highlighted in months, so Hope could see her red-rimmed bloodshot eyes. ‘It just never bloody sleeps so, no, I don’t want to cuddle her all bloody day long, I just want to get an hour’s uninterrupted sleep.’

‘Oh dear,’ Hope said helplessly, glancing through the serving hatch into the lounge where her eighteen-month-old niece, Kirsten, and three-year-old nephew, Alex, were pummelling her brother Matthew as he tried to programme the SKY box. ‘Still, it’s nice that the three of them are so close in age.’

‘Are you fucking joking? Three children under the age of four? It’s like I’m stuck in a nightmare that I can’t wake up from because I never get to bloody sleep.’ Kathy sounded too manic to even cry, and Hope was beyond relieved when
Lisa,
Luke’s wife, came into the kitchen with her two sons clinging to her skirt. They demanded to know if Hope had bought them a present, and when she pulled out the Ben 10 toys she’d bought them, it turned out they already had them and she ‘was a stupidhead’ and ‘smelt of wee-wee’. Being an aunt was different to being a teacher, and Hope didn’t really feel as if she was in a position to put them on a time-out or deprive them of stickers. Not that Lisa paid them any attention. She and Kathy were having a horrific conversation about episiotomy scars and mastitis and how it was ‘a load of bloody bollocks that putting a cabbage leaf in your bra helps’.

By the time lunch was finally served, Hope was contemplating having her tubes tied the moment she got back to London. She was also seriously considering upping the limit on her overdraft, so she could fly off somewhere sunny instead of coming home for Christmas, because all five of her nieces and nephews had perfected a piercing squeal when confronted with anything they didn’t like, such as broccoli or her mother telling them to use their indoor voices, and the lingering headache from yesterday’s comb-out was threatening to upgrade to a migraine.

Then Jack walked into the room just as Kathy had refused to serve her any pudding because ‘your Mum says you’re trying to lose weight’. Hope had to rub her eyes because she was obviously hallucinating. It couldn’t be Jack, because Jack was in London with her dad and Roger. She shook her pounding head and yes, it was Jack, smiling nervously around the assembled guests as he tried to fend off the attentions of Alex, Hope’s youngest nephew, who was intent on punching him in the testicles.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hope gasped, standing up so she could hustle Jack out of the room, away from beady eyes. The beadiest eyes of all belonged to her mother, who looked as if she might just explode from sheer, smug satisfaction.

‘Thought you might fancy a lift home,’ Jack said, as she pulled him into the downstairs cloakroom, which was the only place where they would be sure of some privacy. ‘Also thought you might fancy being rescued.’

‘Yes. God, yes!’ Hope didn’t think she’d ever been so relieved to see anyone in her life. But as Jack kissed the top of her head and gave her a quick but fervent hug, she realised that she was actually pleased to see
Jack
, which was unexpected and confusing. ‘It’s been awful, increasing in awfulness every hour. How did things go with you?’

Jack moved his head from side to side as he considered the question. ‘It wasn’t exactly fun,’ he said at last. ‘Mostly we talked about football, and then we went to B&Q, and then we went down the pub to talk about football again, and they told me that I was a bloody idiot every five minutes. I mean, I’m approximating, but you get the idea. Your hair looks nice. Smooth. Guess the comb-out was worth it.’

Hope touched her hair, which was still relatively tangle-free, primarily because her mother had insisted that she sleep with a silk scarf tied around her head. ‘It was agony, but not as agonising as Kathy’s episiotomy scar, which is still stinging every time she pees, FYI.’

‘What the actual fuck?’

‘Can we go home? Now? Please?’ Hope begged, clutching the front of Jack’s denim jacket in her fists, even though she’d been determined not to cling and whine the next time she saw him.

‘Am I allowed a cup of tea and something to eat first?’ Jack asked, unlocking the cloakroom door, and he kept his arm around her shoulders as they walked back into the dining room, though Hope didn’t know if that was some indication of how he felt about her or whether he was keeping up appearances.

They stayed long enough for Jack to wolf down a plate of roast beef with all the trimmings and two helpings of apple
pie
and cream because
he
didn’t need to lose any weight. Hope tried to talk to her dad but after a brief discussion about the National Curriculum, he turned to Luke and Matthew for a riveting chat about the trouble they’d had coming off the M6 at the Croft Interchange, especially with Jack in convoy behind them.

Caroline Delafield had been so desperate for a daughter that when Hope had arrived, she’d made it clear to her husband that she’d given him three sons to do manly stuff with, and that Hope was all hers. Hope knew that her father loved her, that was a given, but he couldn’t talk to her about anything other than the weather, her job, his job and what he should buy his wife for her birthday, Christmas and their anniversary. It had become more noticeable since Hope got older, but it might also have had something to do with the fact that neither of them had recovered from the three unhappy years when he’d taught her geography at secondary school. To this day, Hope still broke out in a cold sweat at the mere mention of tectonic plates or glaciers.

As visits back to the loving bosom of her family went, this one had been pretty horrific, Hope decided, as Jack began to make noises about them heading off to beat the traffic.

‘Hopey needs to go home and get her stuff,’ her mother said. ‘We’ll come with you and have a proper chat.’

Hope wanted to drop to the floor and beat her feet and fists on Matthew and Kathy’s worsted carpet, in much the same way as Kirsten was currently doing. ‘But Mum …’

‘You’ve had Hopey all weekend, Caroline, don’t you think it’s my turn?’ Jack asked with that cheeky grin that made her mother sigh happily and say to her father as soon as they were out of the door, ‘I don’t know what Hope thinks she’s playing at. She’ll never do better than Jack, and that’s a fact.’

Finally, after a protracted goodbye and enforced kissing of squirming young relatives who’d rather not have been kissed, it was just the two of them. They drove to her
parents’
house to get Hope’s weekend bag in silence. Not a tense silence, because they were listening to the Manics on the iPod, but once they got back in the car, Jack turned down the volume.

‘So …?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘My mum thinks that you’re just freaking out about being tied down to me for the rest of your life, and that you’re making up for never having the opportunity to sow your wild oats,’ Hope said, as if it was that simple and the last few weeks of hurt could all be explained in a way that completely exonerated Jack from causing all those weeks of hurt. ‘In conclusion, she thinks I should get pregnant, either with or without your agreement, and that will be the answer to everything.’

Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘Right. Wow. Suppose I should have seen that one coming. I guess my mum was in complete agreement?’

‘Yup, they were singing from the same hymn sheet, running things up the same flagpole, looking at the same blips on the radar screen,’ Hope said. ‘And by the way, I’m not in complete agreement and I am NOT getting pregnant.’

‘Well, thank God for that,’ Jack said with great fervour and, of course, that made Hope seethe a little. She was off babies after seeing the Delafield genes replicated that afternoon, but she wanted Jack to want to have a baby with her. Maybe. One Day.

‘So, how did you and the dads leave things, then?’ Hope asked tentatively, because she didn’t know what she wanted the answer to be.

‘Bottom line was, and this is a direct quote, I “need to shit or get off the pot”.’ Jack shot her a wry glance as Hope made gagging noises. ‘We all agreed that I was a daft fool, and we also agreed that I still loved you, and our two dads, who drink pints of bitter and play golf and call their wives “the little ladies” without any irony, think we should have couples counselling.’

It was just as well that Hope wasn’t driving, as she’d have ploughed into the central reservation. ‘What? They said that? They want us to see a relationship counsellor?’

‘They even said they’d pay for it.’ Jack paused. ‘I said I’d think about it.’

Hope folded her arms and slunk down in the seat so her chin was resting on her chest. ‘You did?’

‘I didn’t say I would for sure. I said that it was worth considering,’ Jack said, and boy, he really wasn’t giving her any false expectations.

After the baby-hatching madness, Hope had almost convinced herself that their end was nigh, and that neither set of parents was going to come up with a sensible solution that didn’t involve huge amounts of emotional blackmail. But it turned out she’d been wrong, because actually counselling wasn’t a bad idea at all. On the contrary, it was a very good idea and, even better, it didn’t involve her uterus. That said, she felt a tiny flicker of something in the pit of her stomach and she realised it was a little flame of hope. Hope that she might have a future that didn’t involve trying to get used to the idea that they were over, making to-do lists and grieving. True, Jack didn’t seem entirely on board with the idea, but at least she had something to work with now.

‘Well, it’s definitely worth considering,’ Hope said slowly, so she didn’t spook Jack. ‘I mean, if we talked things over with an impartial third party they might help us to resolve some of our issues.’ She angled a sideways glance at Jack who was staring straight in front of him at the road ahead. ‘How long would this counselling take?’

‘I don’t know. A few weeks, a couple of months, something like that.’

‘We’ve been together for thirteen years …’

‘Oh, Hope, please don’t start,’ Jack groaned, but he put his hand on her knee. ‘Don’t give me that speech again.’

‘It’s not
that
speech. Well, it’s a variation on that speech,’
Hope
insisted through gritted teeth, and she made mental note that she needed to find an elastic band when they stopped at the next service station because she wanted to get back to London without once shouting, screaming or in any way losing her temper. ‘We’ve been together for thirteen years and all I’m asking, Jack, is that you give us a few weeks, say to the end of the year, to come to counselling with me and see if we can get through this. That’s not much to ask, is it?’