Family Gatherings and How to Survive Them – Jane’s Top Tips
For Karen with love – I wish you were here to read it.
To a Wonderful Mother on Mother’s Day.
Mum, I want to tell you
On this your special Day
How much I do appreciate
You in every way
I may not always show it
I may forget to phone
But today I just want you to know …
Ahh. They may fleece you, your kids. They may fill your spare bedroom – the one you need to turn into an office – with their junk and unstrung guitars. And empty a fridge in one sitting and spill cider on the new rug. But when push comes to Mothering Sunday shove they come up trumps. A small sentimental lump rose in my throat as I turned over the card from my darling youngest son:
… I need another loan!
Ho ho ho! Ben had scrawled, next to a large smiley.
Ha, Ha, Ha! You and me both, sonny.
I put the card on the kitchen dresser, with the one from Tilly and the florist’s greeting from Oliver, who’d sent an extravagant arrangement of creamy roses the previous day (no doubt arranged by his girlfriend, Sam, but gorgeous of him nonetheless) and surveyed the line-up.
My three lovely children – still costing me a bloody fortune but caring enough to remember what day it was. Even if they couldn’t be here. I allowed myself a small pang of self pity.
‘You time,’ Caroline, my best friend and one-time sister-in-law, had said at our last drink, before I’d got the train from London back to Northstone. ‘Time to get your life back.’ She had wagged a perfect ruby nail in my direction. ‘Kids gone, new house, new town, all sorts of fresh opportunities.’ By the back door was the final remaining black sack stuffed with detritus from Ben’s bedroom.
I missed him crashing and banging his way around the kitchen, leaving trails of sweatshirts and unwashed cups. And not simply because my boss had dropped a bombshell at Thursday’s meeting and put me in charge of the company Facebook page and I didn’t have a clue where to start.
Feeling a twinge of anxiety rising – Instagram had been mentioned too – I looked at the clock, grasped keys, handbag and Ben’s unwanted junk and went outside to peer into the bins. Not having yet got the hang of what was collected when, I’d left both wheelies on the pavement. The blue one was full of beer cans and last week’s newspapers. The black one was empty.
I dumped the sack inside it and began to pull the bin back up the drive of Ivy Cottage. A misnomer if ever there was one, since the only ivy in the entire place was wrapped around an old sycamore tree at the bottom of the garden of this decidedly non-cottagey, rather lumpen-looking semi, with an incongruous extension on the back. The estate agent had called it quirky.
‘Quaint,’ he’d added, waving his arm at the way the front door opened straight onto the square sitting room – a feature which still slightly took me by surprise if I came home post-rosé – and the steep stairs that ran up one side. The kitchen beyond needed updating. The whole place cried out for paint. But it had a garden and a pond and a walk-in larder. And after too many years of living in a house still half-owned by my ex-husband, it was all mine.
‘Living the dream,’ Caroline had called it. Away from the rat race in a gorgeous little town I’d always hankered after. ‘The next chapter,’ she’d declared, topping up our glasses with celebratory fizz and ticking off the excitements. The home to do up exactly as I wanted, the cool new friends waiting to be made, the space I’d now have in which to take stock and plan the rest of my life.
It was only because I was tired, I told myself now. Wrung out by moving and work and scrubbing and hauling furniture about – more drawn to a long lie-down than adventure. That’s why I found myself looking around at my unnaturally tidy sitting room, unsullied by a single lager tin or take-away container, thinking wistfully of that other perpetually messy, noisy abode where there was always a starving teenager sprawling, a manic cat killing something and washing piling up.
All the things I used to complain about, really, I mused wryly, as I went back for the other bin, making a mental note to write in my diary it was bottles next time, and then jumping when a piercing voice cut through my thoughts.
‘Hey! OY!’
I looked around for a wayward dog, very possibly chewing on a small child, only to find that strident tone was directed at me.
‘Tess! How you doing in there?’ My opposite neighbour was standing by her gates, dressed in a quilted jacket and wellington boots with flowers on. ‘SURVIVING?’ she yelled.
I’d met the striking-looking Jinni before – she’d hollered at me when I first moved in – and I had her down