against us. And if she’s grounded, it means Victor won’t really be able to go anywhere either because he hasn’t got his own social life yet.’
I knew what Patrick said about Victor was true but in that moment, I didn’t want to have to consider what was right for him when I was so worried about Phoebe. I was working out how to articulate that without sounding totally heartless when Patrick said, ‘Maybe we just need to take the pressure off and let her make her own decisions a bit more. Instead of encouraging her to go straight to university, perhaps she’d benefit from taking a gap year.’
My whole chest constricted with the horror of the idea of Phoebe lounging in bed until midday, watching Netflix all afternoon, bursting into my office willy-nilly and turning up her nose at any suggestion she might see if Morrisons needed any checkout staff. Meanwhile, Patrick would disappear off to his job as an HR consultant every day, imparting his wisdom about staff challenges at conferences and training courses, liberated from the tension at home.
‘I’m really wondering if we’ve bitten off more than we can chew with Phoebe playing up and Victor needing our support,’ I said, too stressed to care that I was dropping straight into the trap of Patrick’s original objections.
Wisely, he decided not to remind me of that. But he still infuriated me by looking as though I’d found a tiny little issue and blown it up into a big fuss. Then again, he wasn’t the one who had to go into the village and have Eileen who ran the newsagents peering over her glasses and tilting her head sympathetically, ‘How’s it going with that poor boy? It must be so hard for him. All of you. Not easy taking on another woman’s child.’ She’d pause, as though she was waiting for me to fill her in on exactly how difficult we were finding it.
I kept batting her off with platitudes – ‘He’s doing really well in the circumstances.’
‘Your husband was very good to take him in.’
The fact that everyone, including my own mother, thought Patrick was some kind of saint irritated me to an abnormal degree.
‘He’s a lucky lad. You’ll do a grand job of keeping him on the straight and narrow,’ she’d conclude. She managed to make it sound as though we’d plucked Victor from the jaws of gang warfare.
For one brief moment, I’d nearly succumbed to the temptation of sweeping all the pear drops and sherbet dip-dabs off the shelves and shouting, ‘He had a perfectly nice family. His mother loved him. He doesn’t need keeping on the straight and narrow.’ I’d love to see her face if I said, ‘Actually the one who’s going right off the rails is Georgia, you know, Faye’s daughter. Drugs and shoplifting in one month.’
And over the next week or so, I noticed that it wasn’t just people in the village who had opinions about our lives. At school drop-off, the women who always waved before, sometimes stopping to chat, were suddenly ducking into their cars as though they couldn’t be a minute late for the Starbucks they’d ordered on their mobiles. When I said as much to Patrick, he thought I was being paranoid but he didn’t have to face them all and ask himself if the whole school knew that Phoebe had been stealing. I’d pretty much got my answer the day before when Jasmine had knocked on the car window while I waited for Phoebe.
‘How are you doing?’
I considered responding with a cheery ‘I’m fine. How are things with you?’ but there was something about Jasmine that just made me want to be honest. ‘Not that great.’
Her face displayed no surprise, so I ploughed on.
‘Is it common knowledge that my daughter’s a thief?’
She laughed. ‘I had heard that there’d been a make-up incident in town, but I don’t think that makes her a Category A criminal. Isn’t it just a teenage rite of passage? I used to nick the plastic mirrors off Jackie magazine when I was about thirteen.’ She giggled. ‘Can you even imagine a teenager now being bothered about a crappy old mirror or lipstick on the front of a magazine? Christian Dior eyeshadow or not worth the bother!’
Jasmine always made me feel so much better about things in a way Patrick did not. And for some reason, probably because it was beginning to sink in that there was no quick fix for Phoebe, that we’d have