another humiliating tussle, another test of my will against hers.
I drove past and parked a little way up the road.
Patrick said, ‘You stay here. I’ll see if I can find her.’
I don’t know whether Victor was terrified of being stuck where I could interrogate him with no escape but he leapt out. ‘I’ll come with you.’
In the rear-view mirror, I watched them walk across the road. Victor strode along, his gait confident and relaxed, whereas Patrick was padding along, tense and hurried. Maybe Patrick and I had been living in the sticks for too long, getting sucked into thinking any loud music or gatherings of young people was evidence of something illegal or dangerous going on. When we lived in London, we probably walked by, even frequented pubs like these without batting an eyelid. Maybe I was so middle-aged, I’d forgotten what it was like to be young, to party, to mix with edgy people who I wouldn’t necessarily want to give me a lift but who didn’t represent a threat to safety or sanity. Perhaps I was more like my mother than I thought, wanting to control Phoebe, mould her into the person I had in mind, rather than giving her the space to be who she was.
That little moment of liberal thinking was shattered by a fight breaking out right in front of Victor and Patrick, who ducked away from the shouting, swearing and glasses smashing. In the mirror, I saw headlights sweep round the corner.
Faye’s Range Rover came into view. I waited until she pulled up behind me, then hopped out. None of the usual hugs. ‘Are they in there?’
‘Patrick and Victor have just gone in to have a look. They’ll fetch Georgia too if she’s there.’
Faye stabbed at her phone. ‘Don’t really want to try and get past that lot. I can’t understand her doing something like this, especially when Lee’s away. She knows how worried I’d be.’
We shrank back behind the car as the fight between the two boys started to gather more bodies, more arms and legs flailing about.
Faye ran her fingers through her hair. ‘What the hell made them choose here? Surely there are plenty of other places for a bit of underage drinking?’
I made a non-committal noise that she interpreted as agreement. I daren’t tell her my biggest worry. That they weren’t here for tequila slammers. That they were here for the drugs.
The minutes ticked on with no sign of the girls or the men. We got into Faye’s car.
‘Does Georgia often sneak out like this?’ I asked.
‘No, I don’t know what she’s thinking of. She’s never gone out without telling me before. I don’t know how they even got here, do you?’
‘Uber?’
Faye shook her head. ‘God knows. I haven’t had to deal with all the stuff you have. Georgia’s never lied to me like this before.’
I sat, listening to Faye reframing this as an aberration on Georgia’s part. I, on the other hand, was the mother of a troublemaker, party to zero daughterly confidences and producer of a wayward child who wouldn’t know the truth if she ate it for breakfast.
‘Maybe it’s just how teenagers are these days?’ I tried to lighten the atmosphere. ‘I’d have had to run the gauntlet of ringing my friends from the landline in the hallway hoping that Mum and Dad had Beadle’s About on full blast.’
Faye snorted. ‘I don’t think there’s any universe where it’s normal for two schoolgirls to be in a pub where— Jesus Christ!’ she shouted as one man chased another up the road with a broken bottle in his hand. She pulled on the door handle. ‘I’m going in. I can’t sit here with all this kicking off. Surely someone should have called the police by now?’
‘What if the girls are taking drugs in there? They might get arrested.’
Faye’s mouth dropped open and she let the door swing closed. ‘Drugs? Well, that would be the end of her getting into bloody Oxford. I did talk to Georgia about that whole hotboxing thing the other week and she said they’d just been curious to see what happened, that it was a one-off and they’d learnt their lesson.’ Then as though an unguarded thought had escaped her, she said, ‘At the moment she seems more interested in hanging around the rugby pitch fan-girling with Phoebe than studying anyway.’
The suspicion swept through me again, that somehow Faye held us responsible for everything that Georgia did wrong. I wanted us to be united in this,