in him, but that’s just because he’s trying to catch up on lost time.’
Her crying subsided. Mum reached for Phoebe’s hand and I covered them both with mine. There was something about the little pyramid of hands on the table, Phoebe’s smooth fresh skin, my short square nails and chapped knuckles and Mum’s, wrinkled but soft, Nivea’d to within an inch of their lives. All that love held and passed down the generations, imperfect, sometimes antagonistic, often frustrating and annoying, but in a predicament, nothing said, ‘I’ve got you’ like a mum who’s endured the worst of you and still carries a seemingly refillable, recyclable, indestructible well of love.
Just before I got carried away, one step removed from thinking up my own quotations about adversity, triumph and tragedy and turning them into fridge magnets, Phoebe yanked on the tether that brought me back to earth.
‘Did you mind that Dad had shagged Ginny before you went out with him?’ She made an ‘ewww’ noise as though the thought was too horrible to contemplate.
This was not a conversation I wanted to have in front of my mother, and one that I was only mildly more comfortable having with my daughter. I decided not to get in a tangle about dates and let them work that out for themselves when we’d got over the initial hurdles.
‘To be honest, I don’t think there’s a woman alive who loves knowing that the man she married has also been involved with a close friend, even if it was a long time before they got together. I think that’s just human nature.’ I decided to adopt the ‘long time’ relative to a teenager’s life when a week seemed like forever. Thankfully, she seemed to assume that I’d always known about their dalliance.
Mum piped up. ‘Why didn’t Ginny tell you about Victor though? I mean, it’s not like Patrick had an affair with her when he was with you, did he? He wouldn’t have done that.’ Mum could never see any wrong in Patrick, not even now, with a random son dumped in her lap. I was pretty sure that if Patrick killed someone, she’d pat him on the shoulder and say, ‘Oh never mind, you didn’t mean to do it, your finger slipped on the trigger.’
I still managed to recognise that nothing good would come of her badmouthing Patrick to me or Phoebe. I followed her party line. ‘No! No, his relationship with her was over before we got together.’ I did my own internal eye-roll at ‘relationship’, but there was no backing out of that now.
Phoebe sat up but kept her arm round me. ‘You’re not going to make Victor leave, are you?’
‘We have to talk to Victor and understand what he wants. Not a word to him yet, though, Phoebe. We really need Dad here when we tell him.’
‘Do you think he’ll want me as a sister? Is that just weird?’
I hugged her, struck by how most of her thoughts were about how she wouldn’t live up to what people expected of her, that they’d be disappointed in her. All that bravado stripped away and the kernel of a vulnerable young woman struggling to find her place in life exposed.
And oddly, in this most complex and unwanted of moments, hope flickered that my daughter, who’d felt lost to me for so long, might be taking the first steps back to us.
I might come up with some witty wisdom for a fridge magnet after all.
Chapter Twenty-Four
About midnight, I walked Mum home. I wanted to get her out of the way before Victor came back. I didn’t yet have the stomach for her studying him and doing stage whispers of, ‘You can see Patrick in him. How I didn’t notice the similarity between them before, I don’t know. Those eyes!’
As soon as we got out of Phoebe’s earshot, she grabbed my arm and said, ‘Are you all right, darling? It must have been a shock for you to find this out.’
‘It was. I still don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t want to punish Victor – it’s not his fault – but I just wish I’d known before I married Patrick. I feel so betrayed, especially by Ginny. She out and out lied to us.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She always said Victor was premature.’
Mum slowed her pace. For someone who never stopped talking, her mastering of the art of walking and speaking at the same time left a lot to be desired.