The Single Mums' Secrets - Janet Hoggarth Page 0,19

But that was maybe a touch too cynical…

‘Everything is mixed up with feeling so broken. I don’t feel right grieving him like this when I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. But I don’t want him to be dead either. I needed more time to make up my mind!’

The eighties flashed before me in a blaze of brown and egg-yolk yellow. Before we moved to the other end of Haslemere, Mum had pressed us to clear out all our discarded toys and give them to young Kay who lived opposite. Louise had a monumental meltdown when Mum suggested she hand over her Sindy doll collection. Louise had been twelve and hadn’t looked at the tangled Sindy pile-up for at least a year. They had been rammed in the back of her wardrobe, their hair melding into a frothy nylon bird’s nest, along with Kerplunk, Operation and various other abandoned items. ‘But I love them!’ she’d cried passionately. ‘I don’t want Kay to have them.’ And that was the crux: she didn’t want them, but she didn’t want anyone else to have them…

‘I don’t think it matters, Lou. You were married, you’d hit a rough patch like everyone does, you were working it out. You can’t determine which way it was going to go.’ She looked shifty. I had a hunch she had pinned a tiny flag of hope on this James idiot, thinking he would save her from having to make a decision. Louise’s MO was to swallow dive from one man to another with barely a lunch break between them. And now the Grim Reaper had stolen Nigel, like Kay had almost taken the Sindys…

‘It’s quarter to. You’d better get the kids,’ she reminded me. And just like that, the conversation was over.

6

Louise

Louise woke jittery from yet another lucid dream where a young Nigel asked her to marry him and she’d firmly said no. He begged profusely but she turned her back and replied she was off to travel the world. But she never got to the part where she travelled the world, because in real life she’d been too frightened. Her fringe clung to her forehead, plastered down with cold sweat. She turned towards the digital clock, a red electronic three-thirty burned into her retinas so that when she closed her eyes all she could see was the pulsing of the colon as it kept time in seconds, separating the minutes from the hours. Always three-thirty.

Louise lay staring into the gloom, her eyes gradually growing accustomed, picking out the familiar shapes of the furniture looming in the shadows. The bedroom was appointed in the style of a tasteful boutique hotel. The deep navy wood panelling along one side disguised all the built-in wardrobes and cupboards, leaving floor space for a red velvet chaise longue from a shop on the Kings Road, and a grand Regency chest of drawers, above which a TV was mounted on the wall.

Nigel had given her free rein of the generous budget to pimp the Edwardian house just how she’d envisaged. ‘No gold taps, Lou, they’re too nouveau riche.’ That had been his only opinion on the matter. She had laughed to herself at the time. Technically he was second-generation nouveau riche and his parents’ house in Rochester was like Midas’ palace: if it could be gilded, it was.

His dad had grafted so hard for his money that when he’d eventually sold his pipefitting business for millions, he was at a loss how to fill his time. Hence golf, the bug he’d passed on to Nigel. Brendon hadn’t wanted Nigel or his younger brother, Philip, to go into the family business – he’d thought they should broaden their horizons. He’d wanted them to enjoy a decent education, something he’d valued but had never been offered. Consequently, he paid for both boys to attend Dulwich College as boarders once they each reached twelve. He’d read a self-aggrandising article written by an alumnus in the Express that had turned his head.

Jean had stridently protested, but he talked her round, bought her annual membership to the spa attached to the golf club. She would see the boys every weekend and have the week to do what she liked. Philip had hated it, cried every Sunday, but Nigel had stoically soldiered on, forging friendships that had propped up the rest of his life. He was welcomed into a network that had opened doors in the city, as far away from pipefitting as possible. He’d amassed his own