Wish You Were Here (3 page)

‘Right, well, she can jolly well find her voice while she's working,' he'd said hotly as we'd got into bed later that night. ‘She can get a job. A proper one. Get off the frigging pay roll.'

Knowing this would go down like a cup of cold sick, I'd suggested the gap year first, as a balm, unaware that Amelia considered it mandatory anyway. Like a polio vaccination.

‘Well, of course I'm having a gap year,' she'd said scornfully when I'd offered it up to her magnanimously, beaming delightedly as I did so. ‘Everyone does.'

‘And then, your father thinks … a job?'

‘Well, obviously I'll do something short term, everyone does that, too. To pay for my travels. In a shop, maybe. Or a bar.'

No. Long term. For ever, James was thinking. A career. Working from the bottom up, as an apprentice. Whereas I still harboured dreams of further education of some sort, because I didn't care if all her photos turned out like everyone else's, or even if she arranged flowers for three years, I just wanted her to meet someone other than Toby Sullivan, with his ponytail and his van with the mattress
inside and his decks – I'd learned not to call them turntables – which she wouldn't do working in a bar and living at home. This, though, I couldn't share with James, whose focus was to stop paying through the bloody nose for his bloody layabout children, not to steer their emotional lives. Well, except Tara, perhaps. Tara had embraced her A levels and was keen to be a vet, and I could see James being very willing to accommodate the expense of her ambition.

I sighed as I got out of the car and retrieved our case from the boot, lugging it up the path to the terraced house in a row of identical Victorian terraced houses. Identical lives, mostly, too. Stockbrokers and their wives, who'd once worked in advertising or publishing, bankers and doctors, hard-working professional people, many of whom I knew and who'd had children growing up with mine, all of whom were battling identical problems. Many far worse than the ones I had with Amelia. Some of their offspring sampled drugs on an epic scale: thank the Lord, Amelia was vociferous in her opposition to them, after a friend had died tragically in horrible circumstances at a festival the previous summer, reshaping my elder daughter's world for ever. I wasn't sure about the Trog, though, and when I'd asked Amelia she'd regarded me sternly and said everyone had to be their own person and what business was it of mine? Only that I cleared up her bedroom and, those funny little papers I found littering her carpet … were they really just for his roll-ups? And didn't he smell quite strange? Or was that joss sticks? I'd tried to buy some to remember what they smelled like, but the Indian woman
in the gift shop on Lavender Hill had looked at me pityingly, saying there wasn't much call for them these days.

Heaving another great sigh up from the bottom of my recently purchased Parisian boots which, less than an hour ago, I'd been enjoying enormously but were now beginning to pinch, I trudged after Amelia to the front door, secretly admiring her trailing gypsy skirt scattered with tiny mirrors glinting amidst the embroidery, topped by a vintage matador jacket. If nothing else, Amelia had style. She turned to me on the step, twirling the car keys on her finger.

‘Oh, just to give you the heads up, Granny's given everything the Swedish look. I said you wouldn't mind.'

I frowned. ‘Granny's …' I crossed the threshold to the smell of fresh paint and the sound of James spluttering within. My heart lurched as I walked down the hall. I collided with him as he emerged from the sitting room with a face like thunder, pushing past me, hissing, ‘
Your bloody mother!
' before storming upstairs to his office at the top of the house. The attic door slammed hard.

‘Mum …?'

I rounded the corner in gypsy girl's wake to see my mother on her hands and knees, paintbrush in hand, at the far end of the knocked-through sitting room, newspaper thankfully covering the carpet. She was just putting the finishing touches to a heavy sideboard which sat opposite the dining table and which, historically, had been dark oak but was now a streaky shade of pale grey.

She sat back happily on her heels, popped the brush in some turps in a cup and beamed with pleasure. Then she
pushed her blonde hair from her eyes, stretched out her slim brown arms and gave me some jazz hands. ‘Ta-daa!' My mother is far more beautiful than I will ever be and, when animated, as she was now, could still dazzle.

‘Good
God
…' I gaped. But not at her beauty.

‘Surprise! Don't you love it, darling? You know how you said you hated all that heavy brown furniture? Well, look! The girls and I have transformed it! Given it all a makeover.'

‘All …?'

‘
Regard!
'

She waved an armful of jangling bracelets to indicate yonder, through the kitchen to the garden, where, sure enough, under cover from the rain on the veranda stood a large chest of drawers, a tallboy, a knee-hole desk, the hall table, all now distressed – in every sense of the word – to a stripy pale grey, which, as far as the naked eye could tell, had been achieved simply by dragging a paintbrush full of white paint across them.

‘The girls …' I faltered, staring.

‘Oh yes, they helped. They were marvellous. Well, Amelia did. It's fab, isn't it?'

My mother still relied heavily on her sixties vocabulary.

‘But it's James's stuff, Mum. His family's. Who knows how much it's worth?'

‘Oh, very little. I had the local auction house come and look at it first and they said it would fetch barely anything. Said people are chopping it up for firewood these days and they simply can't shift it in the sales. This has transformed it!'

It certainly had. And, in a way, it was quite nice, and I
did hate the heavy brown oak which seemed to loom oppressively and almost consume me sometimes, particularly on gloomy winter afternoons, but …

‘But you can't just barge in and do it!' I stormed. ‘It's got sentimental value, for James at least!'

‘I didn't barge in, darling. I told you, I did it as a present. Like a surprise party. I've been planning it for ages. Didn't for one moment think you'd prefer it as it was.'

Her china-blue eyes widened in alarm and she became childlike in her consternation and confusion. She got up from the floor.

‘You are
so
mean, Mum.' Amelia rounded on me furiously. ‘Granny's spent ages doing this!'

‘And did Tara help?'

‘Well, she put the paper down and washed the brushes, yes!'

Damage limitation, clearly, on the part of my younger child. I was aware of Tara moving silently around in the kitchen, out of sight, keeping a low profile. I was pretty sure she'd have tried to put the brakes on these two. She appeared in the archway now: petite, pretty and blonde like her grandmother, barefoot in jeans and a white T-shirt. She came across and we hugged silently. Amelia glared at her, daring her to show her true colours.

‘It
was
a bit depressing, Mum, all that dark wood,' she said.

‘Yes, but it was your father's dark wood!'

‘I know.'

It was all in those two little words.
I know … but what could I do?
Against the steamroller of momentum that was my mother and elder daughter, what on earth was my
level-headed younger child to do except suggest they keep the paint off the carpet and clean up afterwards?

‘Well, darling, I can take it off,' said Mum, lighting a cigarette and looking around speculatively, completely undaunted by the magnitude of her actions, at transforming someone's home without a by-your-leave. Oh God, she'd even done the
grandfather
clock! She pursed her lips doubtfully. ‘But I honestly think you'll be making a mistake.'

‘Mistake? Mistake?' I heard James yelp from halfway up the stairs, clearly thundering his way back down from the office. ‘It was a mistake to imagine we could escape this madhouse for one weekend, to have the temerity to claim precisely thirty-six hours to ourselves, to leave the cares and worries of our poxy little lives behind for one single, solitary –'

In one fluid movement I'd stepped across and shut the sitting-room door firmly on his diatribe. I can move when I have to.

‘D'you know, I think he's right,' remarked my mother quietly after a moment. ‘I'm not sure this break
has
done him much good, Flora. He looked terribly pale and strained when he came in, and he barely said hello to me.'

‘Yes, but that's because he was looking forward to coming home to the house he'd left behind!'

‘What about taking up sailing again? Getting him out in a boat?' She puffed away on her ciggie and perched on a sofa arm. ‘D'you think that might help? He enjoyed that weekend in the Isle of Wight, when you went with the Milligans. And Philippe always loved a sail in Antibes.'

How to explain to this free-spirited, flower-powered
mother of mine that if one took seriously the responsibilities of a house and family, they weighed heavily on one's mind. She came from a different planet to that of my husband: one that had accommodated her getting pregnant when she was nineteen, not even knowing who the father was, and dancing on through life in a glamorous yet highly irresponsible manner, and yet I loved them both equally. How to explain to one that bobbing around in a boat was not going to transform this Englishman's view of his castle, or to the other that she was only trying to be kind? Personally, I didn't care about the grey streaks, just about keeping the peace, and what I wanted more than anything right now was a cup of tea and to take these sodding boots off.

I disappeared, limping, into the kitchen, where Tara was already putting the kettle on.

‘What were they thinking!' I seethed, perching on a stool at the island and kicking my expensive footwear off with gusto.

‘I couldn't stop them, Mum. You know what they're like when they're in the grip of a good idea.'

I did. And not for the first time it occurred to me how strange it was to have two so different daughters: one who so obviously not only looked like me but behaved like me, too – oh, I knew where Amelia's dark looks and combative streak came from – and another who looked like her granny and behaved more like her father. What would the next one have been like, and the next? I'd often wondered. Right now, though, I wondered if I could gratuitously exploit this one's good nature even further. I kneaded my sore toes with my fingers and sighed.

‘I've
got to go to this bloody Italian restaurant in Charlotte Street tonight, Tara. Maria wants some copy by the morning. I'm not sure I can sit opposite your father in his condition for three hours. He'll be breathing more fire than the flaming sambucas.'

She paused, but only for a second. Then she nodded. ‘Yeah, OK, I'll come. I want to ask you something anyway.'

‘Oh?' My ears pricked up. ‘Ask away.'

Tara looked a bit furtive. She picked at her blue nail varnish. ‘No, it's OK. It'll wait. I'll go and change.'

I was about to say no, tell me now, as I hate having to wait for news of any sort, good or bad, but my phone rang in my bag, and by the time I'd plunged my hand in, rooted around and found it, then assured Fellino that, yes, we were definitely coming, he wasn't to worry – Tara had disappeared.

It takes experience to canter through a three-course
à la carte
menu complete with
amuse-bouches
, not to mention petit fours, but Tara and I had had years of it. We therefore had certain things down to a fine art. Don't, for example, choose courses that involve lengthy preparation in the kitchen, like slow-roasted, hand-trapped pigeon (you'd be forgiven for thinking they were still trapping it); go instead for the goat's cheese salad or the soup. Never have an aperitif or a coffee, and glance at the menu on the iPad en route. Obviously, I'd ruined my children's haute-cuisine restaurant experiences for life, since they'd been accompanying me on such lightning gourmet missions for as long as I'd been able to pass them off as adults, but needs must. I couldn't sit there on my own, looking so palpably like a restaurant critic, even though, it has to be said, I nearly always warned a chef before I came in, feeling it was unfair to spring it on them.

‘It totally defeats the object,' Amelia would say scornfully as we'd sweep into a sea of bowing waiters. ‘You're supposed to be the average punter, not have the red-carpet treatment because they know you work for
Haute Cuisine
.'

She was right, of course, but I'd tried it the other way many times and, for some reason, it always seemed to be when the kitchen was having an off day. Too many times
I'd had grudgingly to write a bad review and have my favourite chef ring me in panic:

‘Oh, Flora – I can't believe you came in on Thursday! My fish supplier literally let me down at the last minute, which was why the Dover sole was off. I had no idea the muppet in the kitchen would unfreeze a lemon sole instead!'

Once or twice, they'd been tears. ‘Oh God, Flora, is there any way you'd come in for a free meal next week? The owner is absolutely going to kill me when he reads I overcooked the rabbit and, if we lose a star, I'll be fired.'

How could I possibly be responsible for the livelihoods of people I liked and admired as chefs? Watch them lose their jobs as I wielded the hatchet? We all had our off days – my copy didn't always bear forensic scrutiny – but my head didn't roll as a result. On the other hand, I couldn't lie, either, say the rabbit had been cooked to perfection, even though, nine times out of ten, I knew it was. This way, I gave them fair warning and, if they got it wrong, they couldn't say I hadn't warned them. They rarely did. I'd write a glowing review and everyone was happy, except my daughter.

‘Pathetic. And you're deceiving your readers, you know that, don't you?'

‘I do now, Amelia.'

She was derisive, too, of my survival kit. The Rennies she reluctantly accepted, speed-eating being an occupational hazard, but the napkin I brought from home to spit revolting morsels into and spare the kitchens' blushes, she did not. Neither the plastic bag for entire meals ‘employed
only once, Amelia, when that sweet young guy at Mason's put salt instead of sugar in the meringue.'

‘Twice,' she'd retorted. ‘Remember when you had those dodgy langoustines you should have reported but instead put them in your bag and forgot about them until people started moving away from you on the Tube?'

I sighed as Tara and I approached the entrance to the Italian restaurant on Charlotte Street.

Fellino, stout and with his waistcoat stretched over his ample stomach, hastened to meet us at the door, hand outstretched.

‘Don't have the fillet steak,' he whispered confidentially as he hurried us to a corner table, knowing I liked to get a wiggle on. ‘I couldn't get the Aberdeen Angus, so it's a bit tough, but the calf's liver is
magnifico
.' He kissed his thumb and forefinger.

‘Thanks, Fellino,' I said, settling down as he flicked pristine white napkins over our laps and in record time had our glasses filled with the wine Tara had ordered by text from the car. Shame. Fillet took two minutes, but never mind; the calf's liver should be equally quick, and Tara sensibly opted for flash-fried prawns.

‘And thank you so much for coming. I know you just got back from Paris, I speak to James to check you on your way, we haven't been reviewed for so long, and you know, opposite …'

He jerked his grizzled head meaningfully, shrugged and spread his hands despairingly.

‘I know, Fellino.'

Rodrigo's new venture had opened across the road last week, to glowing reviews, one of which had been mine.

‘He
steal our march,' he said sadly, smiling at Tara, who'd taken a bread roll he'd offered her. ‘Take a poppy-seed one,
bambino
. Ees better.' She obeyed and replaced the brown.

‘Nonsense, you've been here for ever,' I said, ‘and your food's just as good. It's only because he's the new boy on the block, that's all. You got our text about starters?'

‘I did, and ees coming out right now in two shakes of a lion's tail. I go to see.'

He did, scurrying off, while Tara tucked into bread and wine and I resisted manfully. The temptation, of course, was to eat everything (it was so delicious) and to become the size of a house – oh, and get completely plastered, too – but after a year in my late twenties when I'd been well on the way to looking like the ‘Before' photograph in a Weight Watchers ad, I'd imposed my own rules, which I'd pretty much stuck to ever since. No bread, no more than a glass of wine and just taste the carbs, don't eat the lot. This would be sacrilege if I were only doing it once a month, but I wasn't. These days, with the internet and blogging and a bit of freelance on the side, I could be out every other night. Lizzie, my best friend and partner in gourmet crime for ten years, was lyrical on the subject. ‘One mouthful of each course is all you need to know about an establishment.'

‘But, Lizzie, that's quite rude. And it's supposed to be fun, what we do. Eating for a living.'

‘But because you insist on doing it properly, you've come to dread it. You should have widened your net, like I did.'

Lizzie still wrote for
Haute Cuisine
, but not as a restaurant critic: she'd defected to the other side, to editorial, to
write their weekly column, and did it with aplomb. In fact, she did it so well she could pretty much write about anything she fancied. She plundered her own life for copy, her friend's, her ex-husband's, mine, she was ruthless in her rummaging and pillaging, but ever since she'd written about ‘the crab that twitched', which she swears happened when I took her to Le Gavroche, I'd cut her off my list.

‘Please take me. You know I love a good pig-out, and Jackson can't afford it.'

Jackson was her latest beau. Young – very young – black and gorgeous: a jazz singer with nothing to his name besides a second-hand Armani suit.

‘No. You lie. You lied about the crab and you lied about the man dying next to us after one mouthful of soup.'

‘He did die!'

‘Yes, but not because of the soup. Poor Henri Dupont had to instruct lawyers in the end. It cost him a fortune.'

‘I won't do it again.'

‘I don't believe you. Any woman who tells the world her best friend has piles on her perineum and has to take a cushion along to restaurants is going to invent some fiction about a winking octopus in the seafood salad.'

‘The world doesn't read
Haute Cuisine
– according to Maria, we've got a readership of five at the moment – and, to be fair, I didn't invent the piles and there was a cushion. Anyway, no one knew it was you.'

‘Everyone who knew me knew it was me, which is everyone who matters.'

She'd sighed. ‘Oh, well. Forget the feasting. Can I still come on holiday with you?'

‘What d'you mean,
still
? I haven't asked you yet.'

‘No,
but you did last year.'

‘That was last year. Yes, of course you can come. How can I survive it without you?'

‘And can Jackson come, too?' she'd asked.

‘Of course. He's much nicer than you.'

‘But won't James's father mind?'

‘Why would he? You brought Neighing Nigel last year.'

‘Yes, but he was my age and …'

‘White? The Brig's got a broader mind than you have, Lizzie.'

‘Courtesy of Pentonville.'

‘It was Dartmoor, actually, and I'd say Eton and the army did most of the work.'

She'd hugged me then, pleased to get her August plans under her belt, just as I knew my daughter, sitting opposite me now, was about to do.

‘
Buon appetito
,' murmured Fellino, having deposited our starters before gliding noiselessly away, as if on skates, back to the kitchen.

‘Looks good,' I hazarded, admiring the sheen on my scallops and Tara's pretty beetroot salad.

‘Mm,' she agreed, before plunging in. Conversationally, that is. ‘Um, Mum, apparently Amelia's bringing Toby on holiday. And of course you've asked Lizzie, which is lovely, so I was thinking …' She picked up her fork and toyed with her salad, wondering how to approach this.

‘You'd like to bring a girlfriend? Of course, darling. Ask Charlotte. Why not? She loved it last time.'

‘Well, no, it isn't that …'

I knew it wasn't. Had already worked it out in the
car. What I hadn't quite worked out was what I thought about it.

‘I thought I could bring Rory.'

I sighed. Sometimes I wished I'd married the sort of man about whom I could say,
Ask your father
, but he'd just say,
Yes, sure
, so I had to work this out for myself.

‘Where's he going to sleep?' Let's cut to the chase.

‘In the spare room, obviously.'

Obviously. Except that wouldn't happen. He'd end up in Tara's room, or she in his, and she was only just seventeen, and how did I feel about that? Weary, was how I felt. Weary of having to shoulder the responsibility of making the decisions whilst James took a more liberal view.

‘It's going to happen anyway, so why fight it?' I could hear him saying. ‘Not if I patrol the corridors after dark with a rolling pin.'

‘No, not if you do that. Quite tiring, though.'

I regarded my daughter now.

‘Well, I don't know what Grandpa would think.'

‘Grandpa won't mind. You know what he's like.'

Unpredictable. As rigid as you like about some things – the way his lawns were manicured, or his ancestral portraits cleaned, for example – but surprisingly unbuttoned about others, as I well knew. I was playing for time.

‘I'll think about,' I said, playing for more.

‘What's there to think about? We've been going out for ages now –'

‘Six weeks.'

‘Seven, and you like him, and Daddy likes him, and he gets on with Amelia and Toby. It'll be fun.'

Fun.
The annual holiday at James's father's pile in Kincardine: it was never fun. Oh, it might start out that way – in my head, at the planning stage – but it always evolved into a rather tense, tight-lipped affair. It didn't help that I had to bite those lips so hard around James's sisters – well, not Rachel but Sally, who, try as I might to make a new start every year and get off on the right foot, inexplicably found my nerve endings the moment I set foot in the house, the house which they both, as unmarried spinsters, regarded as their domain. And quite right, too, because they lived there, but … wasn't it a tiny bit James's, too? The Brig was his father as well. And he the only son. Perhaps we went for too long, I pondered, as I speared a slippery scallop. Perhaps three weeks was too ambitious. But the children had loved it so when they were young: the freedom to roam over all that land after the confines of London, the gloriously scented pine woods to hide in, the picnics by the stream, damming the burn, swimming in the loch. The little boat we'd patched up and rowed about in, catching trout, diving off the side into the freezing, clear water. There'd even been an old pony to ride as it clambered up the steep, rocky path amongst the purple heather behind the house, one girl on its back, the other leading.

These days, of course, they barely strayed from the television in the basement, or the terrace where they sunbathed, should that glorious, pure Scottish sun deign to shine, but still, it was a proper break and, more to the point, it was cheap. Yes, all right, free. And our finances were stretched to the brink these days – disastrous subsidence in our house which had been staggeringly expensive to repair had seen to that – so there was no point looking a gift house in
the mouth. Also, if I'm honest, ticking off the whole of James's family in one big flourish, particularly when we saw so much of my own mother in London, gave me a warm glow inside and made me think I'd done my bit on the in-law front for the rest of the year. I chewed briefly on the slippery mollusc in my mouth. How would my daughters' love lives go down with their maiden aunts? Neither had had boyfriends in tow last year. Again, reactions could be unpredictable. Rachel, fine probably – distant, but fine. Sally, sententious and disapproving or keen to be part of the bright-young-thing gang? And then hurt when she felt left out? My heart began to pound.