I’d done everything right: stayed at home when Phoebe was little, still married to her dad. We weren’t rushing off to Michelin-starred restaurants every weekend, but Phoebe hadn’t had to get a job in a supermarket two evenings a week like some of her friends. Anything other than a robotic delivering of food, clean clothes and cash seemed to irk her. All that giving and providing, the listening and loving and, latterly, the negotiating every damn thing hadn’t delivered up the great big pay-off I’d expected when the midwife had wrapped her up and placed her into my arms all those years ago.
At a loud sob from me, Patrick put his hand on my arm. He wasn’t crying, but his mouth kept twitching. That was probably as much emotion as a bloke who’d been brought up by a mother whose catchphrase was ‘Chin up, no one likes a crybaby’ could manage. He’d loved Ginny. Like me, she’d made him less serious, more spontaneous. When we’d all worked together in publishing and ended up sharing a flat in Stoke Newington along with Cory, Ginny had been at the heart of it, the planner of parties, the provider of cauldrons of food at short notice.
As Victor’s eulogy drew to a close with the words, ‘I didn’t keep her for long enough, but how lucky I was she was my mum,’ I felt pride sitting behind my grief. Pride that I hadn’t taken the easy way out, that, in the end, I hadn’t let Ginny down. I’d stood up to Patrick and Phoebe and pointed out that given how fortunate we were, we could afford to be a bit generous to Ginny’s son.
Victor stumbled down the steps of the platform and I slipped out to meet him and led him back to his pew.
‘Well done, love. Your mum would be so proud of you.’
He bowed his head, tears coursing down his face. There was no way I could have packed this poor boy off to Sydney.
I tried to push away the fear that in helping Ginny’s family, I’d end up destroying my own.
Chapter Two
Five weeks later, at the end of the summer term, Patrick and I drove to Cardiff to pick up Victor from his granddad’s house. I tried to be upbeat as we made slow progress along the motorway, but everything Patrick said, from ‘We would have to choose the hottest day of the year to start lugging cases about’ to ‘Let’s not hang about once we’ve packed everything,’ made me feel as though he was just going through the motions of supporting me. I suspected it wouldn’t be much of a leap if it all went wrong for the words, ‘You were the one who wanted to do this’ to rumble through the house.
I failed to hold in the ‘I’m sorry Ginny didn’t die at a more convenient time of year,’ though just managed not to yell, ‘Oh for God’s sake, just forget it. Turn the car round and we’ll let Ginny’s eighty-four-year-old dad who needs a carer himself pick up the pieces’ in case he took me at my word.
I’d always loved the fact that Patrick weighed up the pros and cons of any decision, not least because he did all the boring legwork on pensions and mortgages. I’d been secretly smug when the mums at school moaned about their husbands gambling on the horses, booking ski holidays they couldn’t afford or changing jobs on a whim and it all ending in disaster. But today, I would have loved a reckless husband, who said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be an adventure.’ A man who embraced a bit of chaos, who didn’t do an involuntary frown when Phoebe and her friends were shrieking away in the sitting room when he got home from work. Who could just hold my hand and at least pretend we were in this together.
And I didn’t feel any more confident when Victor opened the door. He was trying so hard to be polite, to act grateful that we were offering him a home, but there was anger in his movements, the way he slammed his cases down by the car, shoved his assortment of holdalls and carrier bags onto the back seat as though he couldn’t care less what he left behind.
As we staggered up and down the garden path laden with lamps, coats and boxes of books, Ginny’s dad, Tayo, sat in his wheelchair by the front door, repeating, ‘He’ll be so much better off with