Although only twenty-two when the sixties began, Olivia Jewell seemed to belong to another era. But she would never admit to the long years of rep and resting. In her conversation, and perhaps even in her feverish head, she was all that her teachers at RADA and Kenneth Tynan had predicted she would ever be.
Olivia’s star burned brightest the year after she left home for ever. Fleeting fame, when it came for their mother, arrived late. She was pushing forty – and admitting to thirty-two – when she landed the part of the posh, nosy neighbour in the mid-seventies ITV sitcom, More Tea, Vicar? The man in the back of the cab was the male lead, playing a diffident young priest who had an electrifying effect on his female parishioners, and in the sweltering summer of 1976, while London seemed to melt in the heat and Cat cooked for her sisters and tried in vain to find this new group the Sex Pistols on the radio, Olivia and her dirty vicar appeared together on the cover of the TV Times.
Then her star faded, and within a few short years the humour of More Tea, Vicar? swiftly seemed as though it came from some older England that was now embarrassing, racist, and ludicrously out of time.
The characters in it – the eye-rolling Jamaican, the goodness-gracious-me Indian, the bumbling Irishman and, yes, the plummy old crumpet from next door, who must have been a bit of a goer in her time – were all swept away on an angry tidal wave of jokes about Mrs Thatcher and bottoms.
Eventually the man in the back of the cab left Olivia alone in the rented St John’s Wood flat and went home to his wife and children. But somehow Olivia never seemed cowed by time and experience. The haughty grandeur she had mastered in the fifties had never deserted her. Megan believed in her.
‘What am I doing, Mum?’
‘You’re doing the right thing, dear.’
‘Am I? I am, aren’t I? What else can I do?’
‘You can’t be tied down, Megan. You’ve got your whole life in front of you. And what if you meet some young buck? Some handsome young surgeon?’ Olivia’s huge eyes twinkled with delight at the thought of this Harley Street hunk. Then she scowled, furiously stubbing out her cigarette, angry with her youngest daughter for throwing away this perfect match. ‘He’s not going to want to take on some other man’s child, is he?’
‘It’s not a baby yet,’ Megan said, more to herself than her mother. ‘Jessica wouldn’t understand that. That’s why I can’t tell her. Or even Cat. It still has a tail, for God’s sake. It’s more like a prawn than a baby. Admittedly, it would grow –’
Her mother sighed.
‘Darling, you can’t have some screaming little shit-machine holding you down. That’s what went wrong for me. No offence, dear. But you can’t have this brat.’
Megan’s eyes stung with unexpected tears.
‘I can’t, can I?’
‘Not now, darling. Not after passing all those exams. And being such a clever girl at medical school. And emptying bedpans in those horrid hospitals in the East End.’ Her mother looked pained. ‘Oh, Megan. A baby? Not now, chicken.’
Megan knew exactly what her mother would advise. That was why she had wanted to see her. To hear that she had absolutely no choice. To be told that there was no other way out. That there was nothing to even think about. Perhaps the reason that Megan was closest to their mother was because she remembered her the least.
The last meeting of Olivia and all of her daughters had been more than fifteen years ago. Megan was a bright-eyed, still boyish twelve-year-old, Jessica a shy, pretty sixteen, pale and quiet after getting mangled on some school skiing trip – at least, that’s what they told Megan – and Cat at twenty was clearly a young woman, emboldened by two years at university, openly bitter and keen to confront their mother over the designer pizzas.
When their mother casually informed them that she would not be attending the prize-giving day at Megan’s school – Megan was always the most academically gifted – because she had an audition to play a housewife in a gravy commercial (‘Too old,’ they said when she had left, ‘too posh.’), Cat exploded.
‘Why can’t you be like everybody else’s mother? Why can’t you be normal?’
‘If I was normal, then you three would be normal too.’
Megan didn’t like the sound of that. Her mother made normality sound scary. Maybe if she was normal then schoolwork wouldn’t come so easily to her. Maybe she wouldn’t be collecting a prize from the headmaster. Maybe she would be as slow and stupid as all the other children.
‘But I want us to be normal,’ Jessica sobbed, and their mother laughed as though that was the funniest thing in the world.
‘How is my little Jessica?’ said Olivia.
‘This is a tough time for her,’ Megan said. ‘She’s been trying for a baby for so long. She would feel terrible about – you know.’
‘Your abortion, yes.’
‘My procedure.’
Olivia never asked about Cat, although she sometimes offered an unsolicited, and unflattering, opinion on her eldest child.
‘I tried to speak to Jessica on the phone recently. Pablo said she was sleeping. Bit of tummy trouble, apparently.’
‘Paulo. His name is Paulo.’
‘Of course. Lovely Paulo with those gorgeous eyelashes. Like a girl, almost. I heard they were taking away her womb or something.’
‘That’s not it. She just needs some tests. She gets these excruciating periods. God, Mother, don’t you know that?’
Olivia looked vague. ‘I never really had much to do with Jessica’s cycle, dear. But you’re right, of course – you can’t talk to her about your, you know, condition.’
Megan stared out over the lake. ‘This should be happening to Jessica. This should be happening to her. She’ll be a terrific mum.’
‘Who’s the father?’ said Olivia, lighting a cigarette.
‘Nobody you know.’
And Megan thought – nobody I know, come to that. How could I have been so stupid?
‘My baby,’ Olivia said, and she touched her daughter’s face. Unlike her sisters, Megan had never doubted that her mother loved her. In her special way. ‘Get shot of the bloody thing, okay? You’re not like Jessica. The little woman who can’t be fulfilled until she has a couple of screaming brats sucking her tits to the floor. You’re not like that. And you’re not like Cat – determined to be a spinster wasting herself on some inappropriate man.’ Her mother smiled triumphantly. ‘You’re more like me.’
And Megan thought, is that really what I am?
Paulo hadn’t been expecting the magazines. They were a surprise. Who would have thought the NHS would provide you with a bit of porn to help you fill your little plastic jug?
Their attempt for a baby had been so overwhelmingly unsexy, so stripped of anything resembling passion or lust – saving up your sperm as though they were points in Sainsbury’s, only doing it when the ovulation test decreed, his wife’s tears when it turned out that the act had all been in vain – that Paulo was stunned by the sight of what he thought of as dirty magazines.
Blushing like a teenager, he grabbed one called Fifty Plus and headed for his cubicle, wondering if that was their chest size, their age or their IQ.
The doctor had assured Paulo that his sperm test wasn’t really