a whole shelf full of make-up to keep herself tinted, lined and glossed for several years to come and certainly no glaring omission I could see that merited getting a criminal record. Stupid, stupid girl. I didn’t know whether I was more disappointed by her stealing or by the fact that it didn’t really surprise me. How did someone like me, apologising for the inconvenience if I returned the wrong size trousers to Marks and Spencer, unable to relax in my seat on a crowded train if there was someone even a couple of years older than me nearby, end up with a daughter who thought it was okay to steal?
‘Was Victor with her?’
Mrs Grosvenor sounded puzzled. ‘Victor? No. He’s in his economics class. She was with Georgia Samuels.’
I didn’t know whether it was my imagination, but there’d been a matter-of-factness about Phoebe’s involvement but a hint of ‘it’s very out of character’ about Georgia’s.
‘She’s at Teen Dream now but was withholding her name, so of course they phoned us because they’re in school uniform. We pieced it together because she was with Georgia, who was cooperating.’
Withholding. Cooperating. Despite my shame at Phoebe’s behaviour, Mrs Grosvenor’s sudden descent into police speak seemed a bit extreme, as though Phoebe was a key witness in a murder trial rather than a stupid sixteen-year-old who’d made off with a tube of Kisses Under the Stars.
‘Are they calling the police?’
‘I’m not sure, but I suggest you get down there tout suite.’
Mrs Grosvenor was veering into Hercule Poirot territory.
‘Right. Yes. Sorry about this, Mrs Grosvenor. I’m really embarrassed.’
‘We’ll talk to them both when they get back here, but, clearly, we can’t have pupils from the school playing truant and running amok in town, giving us all a bad name. There’ll have to be some sort of sanction.’
‘I completely understand. Of course. We fully support any sanctions.’ I wanted to cry and say, ‘I’m not a bad parent. I cook broccoli. I monitor screen time. I draw the line at (really bad) swearing.’
I ended the call and grabbed my coat. I stuck my mobile on speaker in the car, left a message for Patrick and drove the ten minutes to town. I tried to ring Faye, but her phone went to voicemail.
She was already there when I got there, in the manager’s office. She had her arm round Georgia, who was sobbing her heart out. Phoebe’s face was set, but there was no doubt a wave of relief passed over her when I walked in.
The manager wasted no time. ‘We’ve taken their photos and will share them across our network of stores. They are banned from all our shops and if there is any repeat offending, the police will be called.’
My body sagged with gratitude that we would be spared the humiliation of sitting in a police station. It would be just my luck to bump into my mum’s neighbour whose social life revolved around reporting the speed of the traffic through our village. This was one escapade that my mother didn’t need to know about. ‘Thank you. It won’t happen again. I am really sorry.’
We walked out of the shop in silence.
As soon as we got out into the street, Faye turned to us. ‘I’m grounding Georgia until Christmas and I’d appreciate it if you would keep your distance for a bit, Phoebe. I don’t think you two are a good influence on each other currently and it’s a very important year, so it’s best if you don’t see each other until you sort yourselves out.’
I nodded. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you both. What on earth were you thinking?’
Georgia sniffed. ‘Phoebe said she’d done it loads of times and got away with it.’
‘Phoebe! Dad is not going to be impressed by this at all.’
I knew I’d just become a version of my mother’s ‘Wait till your father gets home’, but Phoebe didn’t acknowledge she’d heard any of it.
Faye wasn’t cutting me any slack. There was no sense of ‘We’ve both got a challenge on our hands.’ Just an ‘I will be keeping my daughter away from yours.’ And I wasn’t sure if it was my own shame at being the mother of a daughter who went on shoplifting jaunts, but I felt that the whole walk back to the car park was enveloped in a cloud of unspoken blame, laced with, ‘Georgia is going to Oxford and I’m not letting your daughter derail my dreams.’