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Helen’s tempted to crow for having provoked him into speech, but she thinks better of it and silently watches him take a large gulp of air before his inevitable onslaught.
‘You are a bad parent if you’re buggering off to America without giving us a second thought. Rupert needs you here. I need you here, as well you know.’ Charlie’s face goes from frenzied to truculent. He puts his hand on his chest and makes a small cough. ‘Besides, I’m not going to see the headmaster or anyone else.’
‘Why on earth not? Do you want him to be expelled?’ Helen replies with surprise. It’s a response she hadn’t expected.
‘Perhaps I do want him to be expelled if it’ll stop you from waltzing off to God knows where. I have a job, Helen, an important job and I couldn’t possibly be left in charge of a juvenile delinquent on my own. I don’t suppose you’ve given a second’s thought to what we’ll do with Rupert in the holidays.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, Charles, our son is not a juvenile delinquent, as you so generously put it, he’s just growing up and experimenting. It’s natural. Don’t tell me you didn’t try the odd puff or tab at university. I certainly did.’
Charlie stares at Helen for a few moments. She thinks of Paddington Bear and his hard stare, except Charlie’s eyes are grey, not brown. The blue dressing gown he usually likes to wear for breakfast adds to the mental image and she has to try very hard not to chuckle.
‘Well, that explains a lot,’ he eventually replies before scraping the chair back and stomping off in his slippers, slamming the oak-panelled door behind him.
Sophie waits for the click of the front door, then lowers herself on to the toilet seat, puts her hands to her face and weeps. Heavy tears. Frustration, anger, anxiety and despair blending with the intoxicating aroma of Sami’s aftershave. The tears soon stop, but she doesn’t move, she doesn’t have the energy. Or the inclination. And it’s only the ladies book club. She can go back to bed and ignore the doorbell. They can all sod off somewhere else. But eventually Sophie remembers the glorious chilled wine waiting in the fridge and by the time Antonia arrives, first as always, she’s cleaned her teeth, done battle with her contact lenses, applied make-up, got dressed in a too-tight lycra bodycon dress, danced to some Beyoncé and drunk two large glasses of wine.
‘He’s told his fucking mother!’ she announces at the open front door.
‘Can I get in first? He’s told his fucking mother what?’
‘About the IVF.’
‘Oh.’ Antonia shakes her umbrella and looks at it doubtfully. ‘It’s raining. Where should I put this?’
Sophie ambles to the lounge. ‘It pisses me off. He pisses me off. It’s always the same. If he’s got something to say that he knows I won’t like, he lets it out as a parting shot when he’s halfway out of the front door. He’s afraid of confrontation. He’s a fucking coward.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Sophie follows Antonia’s eyes and shrugs. ‘I couldn’t be bothered with tidying. But I did buy Kettle Crisps. Oh, and wine. I’ve started, join me. Of course he knows I’ll simmer down. No doubt he thinks I’ll be nicely caramelised by the time he gets home. More like anaesthetised.’ She looks thoughtful for a moment, then smiles. ‘But it’s the book club, so Sami can’t possibly complain about wine, sweet wine. At least that’s a result.’
Antonia stoops to the coffee table, collects some dirty mugs and heads for the kitchen. ‘Shall I open the crisps?’ she asks.
‘And why has he told her now?’ Sophie continues, following Antonia into the kitchen. ‘He didn’t before. Understandably. He hates failure. I mean, what does one say to one’s mother who has so many kids that she obviously couldn’t say no?’
‘Sophie! That’s not—’
‘He’s told her because he doesn’t want me to back out. Of course that’s a joke; it shows just how little he sees. If he understood anything at all, he’d know that the last thing his mother wants is the tie of a grandchild, she’ll never get rid of me then.’ Sophie puts her hands on her hips and frowns.
‘I’m sure Martha—’
‘Oh God. The fat old cow’ll put her oar in every step of the way. What if she wants to come to appointments and pretend to hold my hand when Sami’s at work? Suppose she asks the doctor questions?’
Antonia puts a hand either side of Sophie’s shoulders and holds her firmly. ‘Sophie, calm down. Everything’s fine. Really. And there’s the doorbell. I hope you’ve read the book this time.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_adbcf214-f558-584b-afad-15f16bd5fee1)
Antonia drops David off outside the Royal Oak as usual, but after waving her off, he walks away from the pub, past Aladdin’s, the deli and Cartridge World towards the huge Victorian houses on Parsonage Road, most of which have been converted into flats.
David had lived in Withington as a student at Manchester Poly and he still feels a tremendous affection for it, for its buzz, its strange mix of young and old, its pubs and late drinking clubs. The best kebab take-out in South Manchester too, still going strong at midnight over twenty years on.
He’d got a place at the polytechnic through clearing to read law at pretty much the last moment and had to search for digs. It had been a lonely search. School and the Proctors had been his family until then, but suddenly he was eighteen, he had three duff A levels and the trustees who’d carefully nurtured his parents’ wealth just handed it over to him, job done. Still officially under his aunt’s roof in Matlock, he’d gone a little wild at first, buying a silver soft-top MG and spending the summer visiting school mates dotted around the country, dishing the dosh. But Charlie intervened when David crashed the MG on a lonely Derbyshire lane. He’d taken to the narrow tree-lined lanes when he was bored at his aunt’s, ‘to test the motor to its limit’,and on one of those days of boredom, ‘a bend appeared in the road which hadn’t been there before’, as he laughingly told Charlie.
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