The Bad Mother (11 page)

‘You haven’t told Mitch and Lauren about this, have you?’ asked Hugo.

‘No. Not yet. Though I don’t want any more secrets either.’

‘You’re not going to contact him!’ pleaded Pamela. ‘There’s no need. You owe him nothing.’

‘I haven’t thought it through yet.’

‘You’re nothing to do with him,’ Pamela insisted. ‘You have a father.’ She reached out for Hugo’s hand, but he squeezed hers briefly and let go.

‘Tessa’s right, no more secrets,’ he said, his voice dull.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tessa. ‘I’m not doing this to hurt you. But I do have to find out. I have a right to know who I really am.’

‘Of course you do. But …’ Hugo gathered himself
together. ‘You deserve better, that’s all. What can there possibly be of you in this man?’

‘What if he has other children?’ asked Tessa. ‘What if I have other relatives, or grandparents still alive?’

‘Be careful, darling. Tell her to be careful, Hugo!’ begged Pamela. ‘She listens to you.’

Hugo shook his head. ‘We can’t stand in her way. Not if she has other family out there.’

Pamela looked as though she wanted to argue, but said nothing more.

‘I won’t say anything to Lauren and Mitch until I’ve decided what I want to do,’ offered Tessa.

‘No,’ agreed Hugo, lifting himself to his feet.

‘It’ll be Ok,’ she said, though she knew it was a futile refrain.

Hugo nodded. ‘You know where we are, if you want us.’

‘Ok,’ repeated Tessa.

She watched the two of them pause for a moment in the doorway and thought they all might as well be a thousand miles apart, three barren little atolls dotted across a vast ocean. Whatever the magic essence was which made people into a family was no longer here between them. Right this second, if she could be granted a single wish, it would be for these two people to be once again, uncom-plicatedly, her parents. But that was no longer possible.

FIFTEEN

Sam stood with his arm draped around Nula’s waist as she attended to the stir-fry on the stove. She laughed at something he said and he pushed his face against her long wavy hair, kissing her head. Mitch tried to look away, but it was difficult in Nula’s tiny kitchen.

Lauren was peering into one of the kitchen cupboards as if memorising its contents. Standing on tiptoe, she reached in to pull a jar out from the back, examined the label, then turned to put it down beside her place at the table. ‘Do you have any ketchup?’ she asked.

‘In the fridge.’

She added ketchup to the collection of dressings and sauces fanned out around her knife and fork and then sat down, waiting for supper to be ready. Mitch could see that she had given no thought either to what anyone else might want, or to how little room there was on the table for superfluous jars and bottles, but nor did she notice when he shook his head at her. He would like to have felt
more affectionate towards his sister, but sometimes he couldn’t be bothered.

Sam spooned rice from the steamer into a mould, levelled off the top and upended it deftly onto a plate, leaving a neat mound around which, taking the wok out of Nula’s hands, he arranged the ingredients from the stir-fry. As Nula handed each plate to the table she gave Sam a little grin, though Mitch could see that he didn’t grasp the reason for her admiration, so used was he to serving food with this kind of perfection.

‘Looks great, Dad.’ Mitch realised he was hungry, and dug in. Sam’s rice was perfect, but Nula’s stir-fry was gelatinous and Mitch couldn’t entirely blame Lauren for smothering it with ketchup – though she could do so with more tact. He chose not to examine the various reasons why his dad tolerated Nula’s culinary lapses (and expected them to do likewise), nor why Sam might find Nula’s casual failures more beguiling than Tessa’s tidy achievements. ‘Thanks, Nula,’ Mitch added, struggling not to be unfair: it wasn’t their fault he didn’t want to be here, that he’d rather be with Tamsin.

‘So, how’s the revision?’ asked Sam.

‘I’m sticking to my timetable. Can’t say how much is going in though.’

‘It’s important to take breaks,’ said Nula. ‘Get some oxygen to the brain.’

‘Mitch is always sneaking off somewhere,’ said Lauren. ‘Won’t tell me where.’

‘He doesn’t have to,’ Sam pointed out.

‘I wanna know what you’re being so mysterious about,’ complained Lauren.

With all three of them looking at him – Sam and Nula with amusement, Lauren with stubborn resentment – Mitch was tempted to tell them. The holidays would soon be over anyhow. But the fear of how it would be once Tamsin was out of reach at boarding school for weeks on end was too terrible, and he wasn’t sure he could bear to share that misery with anyone.

‘I think he’s got a girlfriend,’ announced Lauren. ‘That’s why he won’t say where he goes.’

‘Good,’ said Nula. ‘Any boys in your life, Lauren?’

Mitch smiled to himself. But Lauren refused to take the hint. ‘It’s Tamsin Crawford, isn’t it?’ she crowed. ‘I saw you together.’

Mitch blushed and glared at Lauren in fury.

‘Really?’ asked Sam in surprise. ‘You don’t have to tell us,’ he added quickly, as Nula laid a hand on his arm. ‘None of our business.’

‘It’s not fair,’ protested Lauren. ‘You get to go inside her house, and you won’t even tell me what it’s like. I won’t tell anyone. Promise!’

Mitch didn’t believe her. ‘It’s just a house.’ He knew as he spoke that it wasn’t wholly true. He felt different around ‘Captain Gorgeous’, as Tamsin teasingly called her father. Being subjected to Charlie Crawford’s full-on charm was an extraordinary experience. He could quite see why Quinn was totally under the spell of it. And it was exciting to listen to Charlie on the phone making decisions – bang
bang bang – do this, cancel that, tell so-and-so to change it around and get back to me. It didn’t bother Mitch if Charlie’s attention was permanently elsewhere, if after their first few encounters Charlie just looked through him as though either Mitch were not quite present or Charlie himself was elsewhere, but Mitch despised him for treating his daughter that way.

He looked at his own father. Sam was making the brasserie happen: he was a fantastic chef and was in the process of transforming a ramshackle building into a shiny new restaurant. Mitch respected him for that, but also saw how it took every ounce of ingenuity and energy Sam possessed. And once or twice he had witnessed Sam’s despair when he worried about money or doubted his ability to see it all through on time. Captain Gorgeous never lost his nerve. He was on the phone to LA juggling multi-million dollar budgets, approving special effects and car crashes and night shoots in rain forests with temperamental stars and their huge retinues, while Sam could only just cope with the responsibility of opening one small restaurant in Felixham.

‘Charlie Crawford’s not much of a dad,’ he told Lauren. ‘He’s often only there at weekends, and then he’s usually working.’

‘So who stays in the house with the daughter during the week?’ asked Sam in a deliberately casual tone.

‘Her name’s Tamsin,’ supplied Lauren.

‘The nanny, Quinn, is there. She’s American,’ he added, in case they thought Quinn was a man.

‘How old is Tamsin?’

‘Nearly sixteen.’ Mitch could sense parental alarm beneath his dad’s questions and smiled, glad to have Sam’s qualities as a good parent confirmed: ‘Don’t worry, Dad. We’re not running wild.’

‘So has she met, like,
everyone
in Hollywood?’ asked Lauren.

‘Sure,’ replied Mitch. ‘Same as you’ve met everyone in Felixham. It’s not something she goes on about.’ Now his casual tone was fake; this was an answer he had anticipated and rehearsed, because it would feel so disloyal to Tamsin to admit how thrilled he’d been the first time she’d mentioned a few starry names. But he’d been aware of her discomfort, of how awkward it was for her to show that while this wasn’t stuff she got excited about, she didn’t judge you for being in awe. Once she began to trust him, she’d explained how sometimes people at school or wherever could be nasty, as if she was being patronising or making out like she was cooler than she really was. With some people, she said, she could never win. The regret in her voice made Mitch recall his first impression of her as lonely, and knew he would do anything –
anything
 – to protect her.

‘You’d be welcome to invite Tamsin over for supper,’ offered Nula, oblivious to the impossibility of squeezing another person around the kitchen table, and Sam signalled his agreement.

‘Wicked!’ said Lauren, her eyes shining.

‘Thanks,’ said Mitch. He felt mean, not committing
himself; it wasn’t as if he intended to cut Lauren out, but she was a kid, she didn’t understand.

All the same, since being with Tamsin Mitch had begun to cherish an active sense of what it would take to be a man, and now he asked himself how the kind of man he wanted to be would treat an annoying younger sister. He looked at his dad, trying to see him as Nula did: he was good-looking, easy-going, reasonably generous, but also weak, afraid of confrontation, keen on the line of least resistance. Sam would let Lauren take advantage of his lazy good nature whereas Charlie, so bold and dizzyingly ambitious, was a bit of a shit who would probably crush a kid like Lauren without a second thought. Mitch knew exactly the kind of man he wanted to be: Hugo would find a way to make Lauren feel better about herself without giving in to her. But whenever Mitch tried to get his head around how Hugo wasn’t actually related to him any more, his brain seized up and he had to think about something else.

SIXTEEN

Tessa dropped Lauren and her friend Evie at the station in time for the train to Norwich. The girls had insisted they were old enough to spend the day there shopping on their own, and Evie’s mother would pick them up on their return. They had chatted excitedly together in the back of the car as they planned their trajectory, and Tessa watched indulgently as they now disappeared through the ticket barrier clutching one another tightly by the arm. She had given Lauren money for lunch and emergencies, and hoped their adventure would not disappoint them.

She reversed the car, ready to head home, then, idling the engine, sat for a little longer, acknowledging her own desire for escape. Mitch was fine by himself, and she could always call him later. Tonight’s guests weren’t due to arrive until six, and Carol had already given her a hand making up the rooms. She put the car in gear and turned out of the station car park in the opposite direction, away from Felixham.

As she drove, she thought of Lauren the previous night remonstrating as she’d once again gone over the ‘rules’ that would safeguard a young girl in the city: ‘Mum, I’m not a kid any more!’ It was true. Her children were growing up and no longer wanted or needed her in the old way. True, too, that it was hard to let go, but there was also a measure of relief in being, as she felt now, off the hook. She took the slip road onto a dual carriageway, accelerating to pull out ahead of a lorry in the inside lane. It felt good to speed away from Felixham, to escape the tangle of old loyalties and new emotions. She wished she’d brought some CDs so she could play some of the music she and Sam used to listen to at college – Oasis, maybe or Nirvana. Maybe she should go shopping for some new clothes, get a different haircut? She wanted to remember how it felt to be young and without responsibility, to remember who she used to be.

When had life started to happen so fast that she forgot who she was? To begin with it had felt like contentment, part of being with Sam and of becoming a mother, of growing up and accepting herself. But maybe, without even realising, she had crossed some invisible line and lost sight of ‘Tessa’. One more year and Mitch would be leaving for university; whatever course Lauren followed, she wouldn’t be far behind. Whether or not Sam stayed with Nula, he’d be forever occupied with the brasserie. Tessa would be alone. But it struck her that the countryside through which she was driving was abundant with signs of spring – green rows sprouting in the arable fields,
young leaves on trees, white blossom in the hedgerows. Erin’s revelation had been, if nothing else, a wake-up call.

She stopped for petrol and to look at the map. There was no particular reason to drive so far except that the name, and images from some TV news programme, had stuck in her mind, and now she was determined to see it through. As she followed the route she’d outlined, the landscape became flatter and more featureless, the small villages further apart, huddled low under the spreading skies. She passed numerous waterways, the banks piled up with brown earth and rotting vegetation. After miles of nothing but wide fenland, she saw a sign ahead to HMP Whitemoor. Soon afterwards the prison loomed up ahead of her, the two-tone brick walls dominating a car park planted with young trees. A separate low building off to one side looked like a modern health centre or library. Except for the razor wire atop the wire-mesh fences, the whole place could almost have been built as an out-of-town shopping centre.

Tessa parked facing the high walls and switched off the engine. Although the facade of the prison was virtually unbroken, the sense of being under surveillance made her reluctant to get out of the car. Now she was here, she could not avoid questioning why she had driven so far. She had no idea which prison Roy Weaver was in, and had no reason at all to suppose he’d be here. She had already researched how to find him, and had learned that she was only allowed to know his location if he gave his permission. She supposed her reason for being here was to test
out if she wanted to take that next step; whether she could imagine herself entering such a place, could tolerate the idea of having a father who belonged here.

There was no one to talk to. No one could help her decide. She could drive away and no one need know she had ever come. Or she could stay and accept the challenge. She stared at the barricades, at the huge, fort-like entrance, at the flat, empty landscape that stretched away to the horizon. She was not being overly dramatic: this isolated stronghold was designed to incarcerate dangerous men. Behind the massive walls lived rapists, terrorists, child-murderers. It was not a place to enter lightly.