The Bad Mother (32 page)

Charlie was standing in the middle of the room. He held out his hand, and for a moment she thought he meant to shake hers; then she saw that he was brandishing a mobile phone. ‘Look at this,’ he ordered.

Tessa took the phone and sat down, curling into herself to guard against his peremptory manner. She looked at the little screen and saw a photograph of a young girl, naked, on a bed. Shocked that Charlie should show her this, and still reeling from the obscenity of Roy’s betrayal, she handed the phone straight back to him. ‘No, I won’t.’

He refused to accept it. ‘Scroll through,’ he ordered again. ‘Look at the others.’

Her head full of what a convicted paedophile had paid to do with holiday snaps of her by a rock pool in Brittany, she covered the screen with her hand. ‘No, I won’t look. They’re private.’

‘Your son took them.’

Now Tessa looked, and realised the young girl was Charlie’s daughter, Tamsin.

‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Of him too.’

‘That’s not Mitch’s phone,’ Tessa managed to say.

‘No. It’s Tamsin’s. She left it in my car.’

‘Then you have no right to look.’

‘She’s barely sixteen.’

‘You still have no right. I don’t want to see them.’

‘I’d like to know how long this has been going on,’ Charlie insisted.

‘Have you asked her?’

‘You know Mitch turned up at her school? In Kent.’

Tessa did not know. She realised with a jolt that for months she had seldom known where Mitch was or what he was doing; had not cared, if she were honest, so long as he made no demands on her.

‘The teacher who found them said there was an empty vodka bottle nearby.’

‘No!’ cried Tessa in disbelief.

‘Where is he?’ demanded Charlie.

‘I’ve been out all afternoon. I …’

Charlie went out into the hall. ‘Is he here?’ he called out.

Tessa went after him. ‘Please. Come back in here.’ She had a sudden recollection of Charlie’s magnetic effect on the crowd at the opening of Sam’s brasserie, but saw now the petulance and self-indulgence that lay beneath his air of command. ‘Tell me what Tamsin has said,’ she insisted.

‘Tamsin’s leaving. She’s going to spend the summer with her mother in Los Angeles.’ Abruptly Charlie softened, looked a little chastened, and consented to return to the sitting room. Tessa closed the door behind them.

‘I’ve sacked her nanny,’ he said. ‘And spoken to Sonia, our housekeeper.’

Tessa froze: she could guess the flavour of Sonia’s gossip and didn’t want to hear it from this man. ‘Let me fetch Mitch,’ she told him. ‘He’s probably upstairs.’

Tessa climbed the stairs unwillingly. She felt unqualified to negotiate her way through whatever was about to unfold, feared that she would get it wrong, and prayed with every step for someone else to appear and to wave a wand to make everything all right. After what she’d learned from Janice, she had no way of judging what humanity might be capable of, what depravities she might fail to consider. She felt shaky, incompetent, a danger to others.

As she reached the attic flat Mitch came out of their living room, a book in his hand, and smiled warily at her. She knew she deserved it: he’d tried to talk to her about Roy and she’d cut him short, not trusting his good intentions. She reached out now to give him a hug. He submitted, but barely returned it.

‘Charlie Crawford’s here,’ she said. ‘Did you know?’

‘No. What does he want?’

‘You’d better come down.’

‘Wait, Mum. What does he want?’

‘It’s about you and Tamsin.’

Seeing how he flushed a deep red, Tessa felt completely overwhelmed. ‘You’d better come down,’ she told him, turning away.

‘Mum!’

‘Mitch, I’ve had a very long day. You have to sort this out for yourself.’

‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked. ‘To the prison again?’

The accusation she heard in his voice was too much. She felt panicky and hysterical, knew it would be better not to speak. ‘What have you been up to?’ she demanded. ‘Do you know what he’s just made me look at? I shouldn’t have to deal with this!’

‘Mum, wait! What are you talking about?’

‘Have you and Tamsin been having sex?’

Mitch hung his head, and Tessa thought he was about to cry.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she shouted at him. His face crumpled the way it used to as a kid when punished unfairly, and her anger fell away. ‘Mitch, I’m sorry.’ She reached out for him again but he dodged aside, out of her grasp, and headed downstairs. It took every ounce of her strength to follow.

Charlie had drawn himself up just enough to be able to look down at Mitch, who, though clearly apprehensive, greeted him courteously. ‘Is Tamsin Ok?’ he asked.

‘She’s on a plane to LA,’ Charlie replied.

Mitch swallowed hard. ‘For how long?’

‘We’ll have to see. I don’t want her back here if you’re going to harass her, keep turning up at her school.’

‘Once! And she asked me to go!’

‘I don’t want this sort of thing to continue.’ Charlie held up Tamsin’s iPhone. Mitch looked puzzled. ‘If I’d known about this when the school rang me, I would’ve called the police. Maybe I should do it now.’

Mitch, frowning and incredulous, turned to Tessa, who could see that he had not yet understood what Charlie meant about the phone.

Tessa was afraid. She knew nothing of what Mitch had been up to, but he must have taken these photographs of the two of them naked together. What if Charlie did call the police, and they found out that Roy was Mitch’s grandfather? What if Charlie were right, and Mitch had been hassling Tamsin at school, stalking and controlling Tamsin the same way Roy had any woman he thought belonged to him? Terrified, she looked into her son’s unblemished face and suddenly saw only his physical resemblance to Roy.

Mitch looked back at her and must have seen her momentary dread, for he paled and backed away.

‘I love Tamsin,’ he cried to both of them. ‘I went to see her because she was upset.’

‘Upset about what?’ demanded Charlie.

Mitch gave Charlie such a look of contempt that even Tessa could see Mitch had hit a nerve. ‘Tamsin was upset about you and Quinn,’ Mitch said. ‘Ask her.’

‘If you’re going to start inventing ridiculous stories—’

‘Ask her!’

‘I’m not listening to this garbage,’ said Charlie.

‘I saw you with Quinn. You know I did.’

‘You stay away from my daughter, do you hear? I should’ve known better than to let her mix with you.’

‘When is she coming back?’

‘Never, so far as you’re concerned.’

‘You know we go up to her bedroom,’ Mitch cried. ‘But you never cared because it suited you. You’re useless!’

‘How dare you say that to me! Who do you think you are?’

‘You never even noticed that she took cocaine out of your room, never made sure she was Ok.’

Tessa whirled around to face him. ‘You’ve taken cocaine?’ A terrible image of Mitch at a table in a fluorescent tabard flashed into her mind. ‘Have you?’

‘It was his.’ Mitch pointed at Charlie. ‘Tamsin says he does it all the time.’ He turned on Charlie. ‘You didn’t even notice it was missing.’

Charlie gave a sneering laugh. ‘This is fantasy!’

‘Ask her friends,’ insisted Mitch. ‘Why aren’t you talking to their parents?’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ cried Tessa. ‘Do you want to end up in prison? Locked away like Roy?’

Too late, Tessa registered Mitch’s anguish. He barged out of the room, and moments later the front door banged.

Left looking at one another, Tessa finally saw Charlie betray a flicker of unease. She seized her advantage and held open the sitting-room door with a trembling hand. ‘You’d better go.’

‘I won’t contact the police this time,’ he told her, shamefaced. ‘But make sure he stays away from my daughter.’

Tessa left him to walk down the hall and let himself out. Close to collapse, she went into her office and dialled Sam’s number.

FORTY-FOUR

Mitch sat on the beach, chucking pebbles into the water. Around him, families were packing up for the day, hunting for missing shoes and shaking sand out of clothes and towels. Tired children whined with the effects of too much sun while their parents, contented after a good day out, chivvied them back to the car. The tide had begun to turn, and he watched as the low creamy waves crept further up the beach.

In the distant haze he followed the dot of an aeroplane as it made its way across the sky, and was stabbed by an actual physical pain at the thought of Tamsin sitting in her seat, headphones on, watching a film as the packed jumbo flew onwards, further and further, thousands of miles away from him. He took his phone out of his pocket and stared at it: even if she wasn’t on a plane he couldn’t call her, because Charlie had her phone. The thought of Charlie looking at the images of him and Tamsin was intolerable. Almost reflexively, Mitch bent his arm and flung his own phone into the sea. It was a good throw, following
the same arc as all the pebbles, and only as the device hit the water did the thought strike him that, without it, Tamsin wouldn’t be able to call him. He leapt up and ran to the water’s edge. He already knew, from all the times as a kid that he’d searched in vain for lost treasures, that it was gone, but kicked off his trainers and waded out. He parted the moving waters with his hands, trying to see down to the shifting sands beneath, but it was futile.

Cursing himself, his jeans soaked up to his thighs, he threw himself back down on the sand. If he’d been alone he would have wept unrestrainedly, sobbed his heart out like the exhausted toddler being dragged past him by a mother whose arms were too laden with beach gear to pick the child up. He couldn’t bear it. Tamsin was gone. Charlie had ordered him never to see her again. His one hope was to be believed, yet even his mother had looked at him as if he were the Devil. And maybe he was.

The very worst pain, the one that ate into him, corroding every good thing that had ever happened to him, was the thought of Charlie making cheap assumptions about photographs taken so light-heartedly when he and Tamsin had believed themselves to be so happy and free. The idea of Charlie casting his jaded, grubby eyes over the best and purest moments of Mitch’s life made him mad with despair. He recalled the sight of Quinn kneeling on the laundry-room floor, her face buried in Charlie’s crotch, Charlie’s animal mouth snarling in the darkness. It was horrible that such a man should interfere with anything to do with Mitch’s love for Tamsin.

But then he thought of the savage, self-centred emotions he’d experienced when he’d snorted Charlie’s cocaine. He’d understood why people became addicted not to the physical effects but to the escape from self-imposed restriction, had recognised it in many of the people around them at the party. The sense of wild power it bestowed was dangerously seductive; whatever he did or thought, he was absolved by it being not him but the drug, and he’d reckoned that he might as well make the most of it while the effects lasted. If, under the influence, Tamsin had found a bigger stash in her father’s bureau, he knew he would have snorted the lot. But he did not like the kind of person be became. He would hate for Hugo, for instance, to have witnessed how callously he and Tamsin had pushed through the throng to grab the best view of the fireworks, how they had acted and spoken to other people as if no one else mattered, or what they’d done with one another later that night. In the morning, sharing the breakfast table with her two friends, he felt he’d tarnished something irreplaceable and despised himself for his weakness. Deep down he feared that this was why Tamsin had agreed to fly away without saying goodbye.

Everything was wrong and confused. He didn’t know what to think about anyone or anything. How own mother had just looked at him as if he were a stalker and a pervert; she’d not believed him when Charlie accused him of harassing Tamsin. And maybe she was right. He’d been a coward not to have told her straight away about his visit to Shirley. She’d never believe him now, and it would be his fault if that murderer hurt her in any way.

Mitch lay on his back, staring up at the sky. His wet jeans were clammy against his skin, but the sand had not yet lost its warmth and the faint breeze felt summery. The beach was almost empty now, and although it wouldn’t be dark for another hour or so yet, a pale moon was already rising. He would have to make a move soon, before the incoming tide reached him, but it no longer mattered to him what he did. He might never see Tamsin again. Life was pointless. He supposed he should go home. Tessa would yell at him, but he didn’t care. He deserved it. Everything was ruined, and he felt like a criminal.

FORTY-FIVE

Sam arrived along with the last two guests and went to sit in the kitchen while Tessa showed the couple to their room. Sam’s assurance that he was in no hurry – the brasserie was now running smoothly enough for Jozef to be left in charge for an hour – reminded her how distant and unreachable such mundane concerns had suddenly become.

Ten minutes later she found Sam at the kitchen table. He’d made spritzers from an open bottle of wine in the fridge and pushed hers towards her as she sat down. She told him first about Charlie Crawford, trying to justify how she’d handled things with Mitch. But Sam wasn’t inclined to regard Charlie’s threats as serious, though he hoped Mitch wouldn’t be hit too hard by Tamsin’s abrupt departure. ‘It’ll be a shame though,’ he said, ‘if Mitch spends his summer holiday nursing a broken heart.’ Tessa wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or consoled by how lightly he judged the matter.

Then, haltingly, she tried to explain some of what Janice had said in the dingy pub. She realised how difficult it was going to be to make anyone understand the intensity of the visits room, the impetus of the hope and expectation that had carried her there, and the horror of having that hope betrayed. She had decided she could never tell anyone about the photographs. Possessing that knowledge herself was bad enough, and she feared its contaminating power. If she told no one, then maybe eventually she could even erase it from her own memory.

Hearing herself tell Sam the truth about Roy’s criminal past, and believing in her very gut that these were not mere words but actual vicious deeds, Tessa hung her head in shame: Sam, Hugo, Mitch, Pamela, Erin – they had all tried to protect her from herself, and in return she had scorned them.