Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (14 page)

I was just hopping into the minicab when my phone rang. It was Mum. And for the first time in ages, I was eager to talk to her. I am a very bad daughter.

‘Hi, Mum,’ I said, trying to sound cheery.

‘Are you having a great time, love?’

‘I am, it’s been really lovely,’ I lied.

‘Oh, I am pleased. Where are you? I can’t hear any music.’

‘No, I’m standing outside,’ I said. ‘It’s too loud to hear anything in there.’ In the rear-view mirror I saw the driver raise his eyebrows.

‘Well, I won’t keep you – you must be freezing out there. I was round at Celia’s today – she asked me to call you. She was going to give you a ring herself but she’s ever so busy with the kids. Michael was at golf.’

Just for a change.

‘In any case, she was wondering whether you could make it for lunch tomorrow. I mean, since you’re out this way. It would be ever so good to see you. You
could stay over with us if you like, get back to London on Monday.’

Well, it wasn’t like I had a job to go to.

Sitting on the bright orange bedspread back in my room at the B&B I tried to form a mental list of the top five things I should be most depressed about:

1. Ali. Was our friendship really worth so little to her that she was going to dump me now that I was poor, unemployed and unglamorous? Or was it just now that she saw me for what I really am, a lower-middle-class nobody from Kettering, not the sophisticated City girl she’d met a couple of years ago?

2. Dan. I didn’t want him to be at number two, I didn’t want him to make the list at all, but I couldn’t deny that seeing him at the wedding with her had been like a blade to the heart.

3. Joblessness. Four weeks had passed since I was made redundant and I hadn’t had a flicker of interest from a serious employer.

4. Poverty. OK, maybe not poverty as such, but relative financial distress. It does not suit me.

5. The fact that I had to have lunch with my sister and her husband the following day.

Cassie Cavanagh
loves her mum

The next morning I rose early and got the train from Chipping Campden to Banbury and from there to Kettering. Although I wasn’t keen on the idea of lunch with Celia and Michael, for the first time in a long time I was actually looking forward to going home. It was the first time in a long time that I’d thought of my parents’ house in Kettering as home. But for some reason, the presence of Jude the Judgemental perhaps, the flat in London was feeling a lot less welcoming these days.

I was looking forward to seeing my mum – I was in need of a little TLC – and also to having a conversation with my father. It struck me, on the train, that perhaps, if I asked them nicely, they might be able to help me out with a loan, just to tide me over for a few months. That way I could relax a bit about the job hunt, take time to refocus myself, to get in touch with what I really wanted to do. Perhaps I could go to a spa or a
retreat or something for a few days? That would definitely help. There was a good detox place I’d heard about somewhere in Oxfordshire. In fact, that would be ideal. I could get away, have a few days of completely healthy eating and no drinking, do a bit of yoga, have a massage … It would be just what I needed. Plus, if I could squeeze a bit of cash out of Dad I just might be able to get Jude off my back for a week or two.

And it wasn’t as though I ran to them for money all the time. OK, when I was at college I had taken a couple of loans which were never fully repaid, but since I’d been working I hadn’t borrowed any money at all. Unless of course you count the security deposit for the flat, but that was an emergency. (I had saved up for the security deposit myself but then that money ended up going towards the Dante kingsize bed from Heal’s which was, after all, an essential. I couldn’t very well sleep on a mattress on the floor, could I?) And they would get the security deposit back, eventually. Assuming we don’t trash the place, which is unlikely – although with some of Jude’s friends you never know. Perhaps I should suggest that the anti-capitalist lot get disinvited from our next party.

The key to getting money out of one’s parents is, like so many things in life, about timing. Diving straight in is not to be advised. Money matters should wait until after lunch, when everyone’s feeling sated and relaxed and has had three glasses of wine. In any case, if I asked Dad for money before lunch I could guarantee that
someone would mention it over the dinner table and I could just imagine the reaction from Saint Celia and Miserly Michael who would never dream of hitting Dad or anyone else for a loan. Celia and Michael ‘don’t do credit’, unless you count the mortgage.

‘I don’t trust anything that allows you to spend more than you earn,’ Michael says.

Michael is living proof of the truth of the Wildean maxim that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

When I arrived at the house, around eleven thirty, Dad was out front in the garden, pruning something or other. Dad likes his gardening, although he’s not a very imaginative planter. It’s all pink and yellow roses, geraniums and begonias.

‘Hello, darling,’ he said when he saw me. ‘You look tired. Rough night?’

‘Not too bad,’ I said, giving him a kiss.

‘Well, you go on inside and have a cup of tea with your mother. I need to finish up out here.’

He always does this. Whenever I come home he makes himself scarce for about a half an hour or so, to let me and Mum chat. I’ve never worked out whether he does it because she tells him to, or simply because he can’t stand to sit through the inevitable friends and boyfriends catch-up conversation we always seem to have when we get together.

Over a cup of tea at the kitchen table, Mum launched straight into it.

‘So that Dan’s history now, is he?’ She did not seem distressed at the thought. Although she’d never met him, he’d gone down in everybody’s estimation over the whole Dad’s birthday affair. I nodded glumly.

‘Are you OK, love?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine,’ I said, doing my best I’m-putting-a-brave-face-on-this-face, aiming for sympathy as well as admiration for the fact that I was trying my best to cope under difficult circumstances.

‘And work?’

‘I’ve been applying for everything in sight, but it’s an incredibly tough market at the moment. I have been doing part-time work though. Things are a little tight. I couldn’t afford a new dress for the wedding, for example.’ OK, that was a lie, but I honestly don’t think a dress from H&M should count.

‘Well, you’ve got lots of lovely things anyway, haven’t you? Never known anyone with so many clothes. So, the wedding was fun, was it? Was Ali there? How is she these days?’

‘Weird,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what’s going on with her. She’s been acting really strangely lately.’

‘Strange? How?’ my mother asked, her face the picture of alarm. ‘Do you think it might be drugs?’ My parents, who don’t smoke and who think that more than two glasses of wine a night constitutes binge drinking, are terrified by the very idea of illegal drugs. They firmly believe that a toke or two of marijuana will set you on a certain road to a lonely death in a bedsit with a needle sticking out of your arm.

‘No, I do not think it’s drugs, Mum. She’s just been … a bit distant. Quite unfriendly, actually.’

‘Perhaps she’s got man trouble? Does she have a boyfriend at the moment?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ I wasn’t about to tell Mum about the married Frenchman, but she had a point. I hadn’t thought about that. So wrapped up in my own Dan/Tania/bad dress drama that I hadn’t even thought about the Frenchman. Maybe he was at the wedding? Maybe he was at the wedding with his wife? God, that would have been awful for her, pure torture. And I didn’t even ask her about it. She was right, I
do
think about myself all the time. I am a selfish cow.

Dad appeared at the back door, kicking the mud off his shoes before coming into the house.

‘Right. I’m going to wash my hands and then we’d better get going. You know what Celia’s like if we’re late.’

My twenty-seven-year-old sister hit middle age early. I blame Michael. She was always a little uptight, a bit of a control freak, but I’m sure she was more fun when we were teenagers. She met Michael when she was nineteen and they were married by the time she was twenty-one. At twenty-two she had Tom, two years later Rosie, and three years after that she had Monty.

Celia and I are very different. For one thing, she has never worked. Well, she wouldn’t say that. She’d say she works harder than anyone else on the planet because she has three children of five and under. She
may well be right. What I mean is, she’s never had paid employment. She doesn’t know what it’s like to work in an office, to have colleagues, to receive a pay cheque. She went from school to Northampton college (where she did a catering course) but after she married they immediately started trying for a baby. Michael felt that the stress of working life would not be good for her while they were trying. She agreed.

She’s never lived alone either. She went from my parents’ house to a shared house at college to living with Michael. She says she can’t think of anything worse than living by herself. I lived alone for two years when I first came to London and I loved it; I still miss it sometimes – being the only person authorised to touch the remote control, not being judged for spending entire days lying on the sofa in one’s pyjamas reading
Vogue
and eating ice cream, never having to do anyone else’s washing-up. Solitude has its compensations.

Celia missed out being twenty-something. If you ask me, she’s already missed out being thirty-something, too, and pretty much fast-forwarded straight to her mid-to-late forties. She is incredibly grown up. I suppose you have to be once you become a parent. And while I know that Celia wouldn’t swap her life for anyone’s (and certainly not mine), I do feel a bit sorry for her. It doesn’t seem as though she has a lot of fun.

As a result, she can be difficult. And annoying. Punctuality is one of her things – lateness is right up there with second-degree murder in terms of severity. Turn up at Celia’s for dinner five minutes late and you
can guarantee that this fact will be returned to, several times over the course of the evening, in a number of contexts. All manner of ills – from the slight under-seasoning of the soup to the crème brûleé’s failure to set – will somehow be attributed to your lateness.

Fortunately, we arrived pretty much on time (she’s not keen on people turning up early, either). I steeled myself for the inevitable barrage of I-told-you-sos that I was due from Michael.

‘Cassie,’ he said as he came down the steps of his house, trying to disentangle himself from Tom, who was attached to one leg, ‘how are you? So, so sorry to hear about the job. But I did warn you. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?’ He gave me a hug.

He is the father of your niece and nephews
, I thought to myself.
You are not allowed to throttle him
.

‘Yes, you warned me,’ I said, smiling, but speaking through gritted teeth.

‘So,’ he slapped me on the back, ‘how’s the job hunt going? Slim pickings, I’ll bet. You should maybe think of getting out of the big smoke, you know. Sounds counter-intuitive but smaller towns – like Kettering and Corby – may well turn out to be more resistant to recession than the Square Mile.’

‘That’s a good point,’ I said. ‘I might well think about that.’
Just as soon as hell freezes over
.

Celia was in the dining room, putting the finishing touches to her table setting.

‘Hi, Cass,’ she said when she saw me. ‘How’s the job hunt?’ God, these people are obsessed.

‘Slow,’ I said. ‘It’s going very slowly.’

‘That’s a shame. Have you thought about looking for things somewhere around here? Because Michael was saying that we might not be as hard hit by the recession as you are in London.’ Honestly, the woman would have almost nothing to say if she weren’t able endlessly to parrot her husband’s opinions. Good thing he has opinions on virtually every subject you care to mention.

Over lunch (a very good roast leg of lamb, cooked to perfection – there are some things Celia excels at), we were treated to a round-up of Michael’s cases (conveyancing, conveyancing, one not particularly fruity divorce case, conveyancing) and, slightly more interestingly, a round-up of the kids’ latest developmental milestones. Monty is now clearly saying Mama and Dada at appropriate times (for a long time he got them mixed up), Rosie has mastered the use not only of a spoon but also of a fork and Tom can tie his own shoelaces.

‘A lot of kids don’t do that until they’re six,’ Michael told me.

By the time we got to dessert (plum crumble with custard), Celia and Michael turned their attentions to me – specifically, to everything that was wrong about me.

‘The thing is, Cassie, you have to learn to be a bit more sensible about things,’ Celia said. ‘Now that you have no job and no rich boyfriend, you’re going to
have to change your lifestyle.’

‘Whatever happened with the boyfriend, anyway?’ Michael asked. ‘We never did get to meet him, did we?’

Oh, that’s right, bring up Dad’s birthday
.