Perfect Daughter (12 page)

She grabbed a sheet of kitchen roll and swiftly picked up his mug and slipped the paper towel underneath. ‘Better not get this wet in case Rob wants it back!’ The little lie slipped easily from her mouth. She used her sleeve to wipe the residue of tea from Sven’s image. Even holding his picture in front of Pete made her cheeks flush. She was beyond relieved that he hadn’t recognised Sven.

The front doorbell rang.

‘I’ll get it!’ Martha hammered down the stairs, making the glass in the kitchen windows rattle. ‘See you later, Mum!’

‘But your tea’s nearly ready!’ Jacks walked into the hallway and watched as Martha cringed.

‘I’ll have it when I get back.’ Martha nodded towards the open front door, where Gideon stood, his hands in his jeans pockets, flicking his head to move his thick fringe from his eyes, the rest of his hair firmly in place under an Arran-wool beanie.

‘Oh, hello, love!’

Gideon raised his palm and smiled. ‘Martha, if you’ve got to eat, we can go out later.’ He smiled again at Jacks.

‘No!’ Martha almost shouted. ‘Come on.’ She grabbed her parka with the fur-lined hood from the banister. ‘Won’t be late!’ And she was gone, just like that.

‘Where’s she gone?’ Pete asked.

‘Out with her friends.’ Jacks didn’t want to elaborate, not until she had the situation a little more under control.

‘Well, it’s right she lets her hair down. It can’t be all work and no play.’

‘Mmmnn,’ Jacks hummed, in semi-agreement.

After tea, she climbed the stairs to return her mum to bed and as she did so she thought about the shine in her daughter’s eyes. She knew exactly what that felt like. Nearly nineteen years later, she could still recall that night on the school playing field as if it was yesterday. The feel of her hand inside his, the way her heart jumped.

The phone in her bedroom rang. Jacks darted across the landing. ‘Hey, Gina!’

‘Well?’ Gina’s tone was keen.

‘Well what?’ Jacks whispered, hating having to be so conspiratorial.

‘What did you think of Sven? Did you read the article? Weird seeing him all grown up and successful, isn’t it?’

‘S’pose so.’

‘What do you mean, “s’pose so”? I got the feeling you were a bit unsettled by it earlier. I honestly felt like a gooseberry and that was just with his photo around!’

‘Don’t be so daft.’ Jacks tutted as the blush crept up her neck. She was embarrassed and awkward at having this conversation while sitting on the bed she shared with her husband and with him on the floor below.

Gina laughed. ‘I’m only teasing you! But don’t tell me you haven’t thought about jumping on a train and going to the Boat Show in January? Not after what I learnt today, that you still burn a little candle for him.’

‘G! I do not!’ Jacks remonstrated, unable to call her a liar. She could honestly say that she hadn’t seriously considered going to the Boat Show, not until Gina had mentioned it.

‘I mean, it’s probably the only time in your life you are ever going to be in the same country. Plus you know exactly where he’ll be. Unless you’re planning to jet off to San Francisco any time soon?’

And there it was: the suggestion, the seed of an idea that would grow. ‘I don’t know why I’d go and see him. What would be the point?’ Jacks asked.

‘The point, Jacks, would be to see an old friend. Nothing more, nothing less.’

The bell rang in Ida’s room.

‘Gotta go. Mum’s ringing. Speak soon.’ Jacks replaced the phone in its cradle and raced across the hallway with a spring in her step and a flutter of excitement in the pit of her stomach.

As she tucked the bedspread over her mum’s legs and went to draw the curtains, something along the street caught her eye. It was a couple standing under the streetlamp, encircled by the soft glow of yellow light, kissing in the rain. They had their arms wrapped tightly around each other and were clutching at each other’s clothes, running fingers over each other’s faces and clinging on as if their lives depended on it. She squinted into the darkness, confirming what the jump in her stomach had suspected. It was Martha and Gideon.

‘For the love of God!’ Jacks sighed and made her way downstairs.

She passed Pete in the hallway. ‘Think I’ll have an early night, Jacks. Shall I see you up there?’

She nodded as he kissed her gently on the forehead. She hated the amicable formality of his gesture. When had they become so sexless? They never used to be like that, not when it came to the actual act. They had done it everywhere and anywhere at the beginning. It had been fun, exciting! Over the years, they had progressed to quiet, orderly sex, undertaken in the same position, only ever in their room, conducted under their duvet in silence and with the lights off. And after Jonty’s arrival, even that was infrequent. Every movie, documentary and book seemed to harp on about sex in such detail that they only served to highlight what she was missing. She had become an expert at finding distractions when something a little bit risqué came on the telly. From getting up to make a cup of tea or picking up her knitting and getting lost in the rhythm to faking a coughing fit for which she had to dash to the kitchen for a glass of water. Anything rather than be forced to watch what she was missing, what they were missing. And miss it she did; it had been a big part of them.

And now Martha too had apparently entered this world of sex and was at that very moment practising the art against the lamppost up the street.

Jacks sat on the stairs and waited.

It was half an hour that felt like a day before Martha placed her key in the door and came face to face with her mum.

‘What are you doing? Why are you sitting on the stairs?’ She looked bemused.

Jacks couldn’t help but notice that her lips looked swollen. ‘I’m waiting for you.’

‘Okaaay.’ Martha looked at her phone, her fingers red from the cold. ‘It’s not even ten o’clock.’ She pulled off her coat and shook her hair.

‘Come into the kitchen.’ Jacks stood and followed her daughter along the dimly lit hallway. ‘Sit down.’ She pointed to a chair. They both sat.

‘You like him, don’t you?’ Jacks watched as Martha’s eyes lit up and she nodded, trying to keep the smile from her face. ‘He seems like a nice boy.’

‘He is, Mum. He’s lovely.’ She smiled again with a dreamy-eyed tilt to her head.

‘I want you to be happy, Martha, I really do. And I want you to have adventures. But I’m worried.’

‘Well, you can stop worrying, because I am happy and I’m having a great adventure, so that’s all good.’

Jacks pulled her hair into a ponytail and fastened it with the band that lived on her wrist. ‘That is good. But what I’m worried about is you being distracted from your studies. That offer from Warwick means nothing if you don’t get the grades, and three As is going to take some work.’

‘I know that and I’m not distracted. I don’t see why I can’t have both. I will get my grades, but I need Gideon too.’ Martha looked close to tears.

‘You
need
him?’ Jacks was taken aback. This had clearly gone further than she thought.

‘I do, Mum. He’s makes me feel great. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. I really like being with him.’

Jacks quashed her desire to scream. ‘I’m sure he is, but your life is just beginning and you are on different paths.’

‘You mean because he isn’t heading off to uni and isn’t desperate to leave Weston?’

‘Kind of,’ Jacks confessed. ‘Who knows who you’ll meet at Warwick.’

Martha rolled her eyes and pulled her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands. ‘Maybe I don’t want to meet anyone at Warwick, maybe I like what I’ve found here – a local boy.’

‘No!’

‘What do you mean, “no”?’ Martha raised her voice to match her mother’s.

‘I mean you are too young to know what you want and I can see that this boy—’

‘Gideon!’ Martha corrected her.

‘Gideon, or whatever his bloody name is, might be the thing that stands between you and your dream of becoming a lawyer!’

Martha sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, scratching her scalp. ‘You don’t know him, but you’ve made up your mind that you don’t like him. I can tell you’ve decided you don’t like who he is or what he does!’

‘That’s not true, I’ve nothing against him personally. But why can’t you just accept that maybe I might know what’s best for you? That maybe I have your best interests at heart?’

‘Because
I
know what’s best for me! And for the record, being a lawyer is
your
dream, Mum. It’s not necessarily mine!’

Jacks sat in silence, as though she’d been struck. This was the worst thing that she could hear.

Martha wasn’t finished. ‘I think the problem is that you are living your life vicariously through me. And that feels like shit. It’s unfair.’

‘Watch your language, please.’ It was all Jacks could say, because she didn’t know exactly what ‘vicariously’ meant.

‘You’ve got so many opportunities, Martha. I just don’t want you to waste your life, not one day of it!’ Jacks plucked a towel from the laundry pile on the chair and started folding it, using her chest and chin to assist.

Martha scraped her chair on the tiled floor. ‘I’m not wasting one day of it! I’m spending the time I’m not studying with Gideon, and that’s not a waste.’ She looked at her mum, waiting for a response that didn’t come. ‘I’m going to bed, in the room I have to share with my little brother!’ she snapped. And she flounced out of the room.

Jacks lowered herself to the floor and sat with her back against a kitchen cupboard as she scrunched the towel in her lap, giving way to the tears that had threatened. She sat for some minutes before managing to compose herself. Then she rose on shaky legs and rummaged through bundles of string, old tubes of superglue and a needle-and-thread kit before she pulled the pocket dictionary from the back of the crowded bits-and-bobs drawer.

She ran her palm over the cover, which was slightly sticky in one corner. It had been her dad’s crossword companion for more years than she could remember. She cracked the spine and let the flimsy pages flutter against each other. Her eyes crinkled in a smile as she noted the occasional little red dot marked against a word. If ever her dad had had to look up a word, he would place a little red dot next to it; if he looked it up twice, he wrote it out three times to make sure he learnt it properly. There were never three dots.

Jacks held the book at arm’s length and there, nestling between
vicar
and
vice
, was
vicarious
. ‘Vick-air-ee-uss.’ She sounded it out and then read the definition:
Experienced
in
the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person
.

She closed the little book and stuffed it back in the drawer. Well, Martha was right, she did do that. But what mother didn’t? She recalled the ballet class Martha had attended at primary school, full of slightly podgy mums lined up on chairs at the back of the church hall, every one of them picturing their precious daughter in an elaborate tutu as she stood with an arm full of flowers, taking a bow at the Royal Opera House. It was a world away from Miss Greenwood’s shrill instruction to ‘point and smile, point and smile!’ And these mums weren’t only thinking of their ungainly cygnets transforming into swans; they were imagining themselves in the audience, graciously accepting the smiles in recognition of their daughter’s brilliance.

Jacks was no different, only her aspirations didn’t lie in tutus and tiptoeing on pointes. She saw Martha travelling business class, with a Jaeger suit and a corporate credit card. They could keep the Royal Opera House. Her girl was heading for the city and no brooding teenager with an aptitude for snogging and a lovely set of teeth was going to keep her from that.

Jacks felt her tears rise again, and then, as if on cue, the bell rang. ‘Fucking hell!’ she whispered as she trod the stairs.

12

Nineteen Years Earlier

It started out as a regular day, nothing to mark it as special. Jacks had walked to school and sat through double English followed by art, during which she tried her best to capture the bowl of fruit that sat on the table, while trying not to daydream.

She now stood tall in the lunch queue – being in the upper sixth afforded her a certain kudos in the school community. Her eyes darted to the doors every time they opened as she sought out Gina, preferring to be with her mate than without her during break times. Luckily she had a copy of
Marie Claire
rolled into the top of her school bag, should she find herself alone.

She waited for the slow queue to move along. The littler kids seemed to be taking an age, umm-ing and ah-ing over whether they wanted peas or beans and fumbling with cutlery, school bags and juice cartons. With her orange plastic tray resting on her hip, she sighed, trying to decide between a ham roll and the soup of the day. Two girls in the year below stood facing each other, close together as if colluding. Jacks tuned in to their conversation as soon as she heard Sven’s name.

‘Yeah, that Sven – the one with the funny jumpers who comes from Norway.’

This made Jacks smile.
Norway?
Stupid girls. But her smile soon evaporated.

‘He’s moving to America! I mean, that’s really cool, isn’t it? Even for a weirdo like him. My aunty went to America, said it was lush. I bet he’ll go to Hollywood and everything…’

Jacks felt her legs shake. She walked backwards as if she were casually removing herself from the queue and not because she felt like she might throw up. As she replaced her unused tray in the stack, Gina came rushing over.

‘Hiya! What we having? Go grab a chair and I’ll come find you!’ Gina shimmied her large frame as she broke into song, giving a heartfelt rendition of ‘Baby, Come Back’, quite oblivious of her friend’s situation.

‘I… I’ll be back in a bit,’ Jacks managed as she left the dining hall. She raced along the corridor and past the common room, where a quick scan told her he wasn’t inside, then up to the physics lab, where he was sometimes allowed to hide out, being a star pupil. But that too was empty.