‘You OK?’ Jack asked, glancing Stella’s way.
‘I’m not sure.’ Stella took some deep, calming breaths.
Jack frowned. Stella was always sure.
‘Are you going to be sick?’ he asked, panic in his voice. ‘Do you need a cup?’
She had to laugh. ‘No, I don’t need a cup.’
Then from the back seat Rosie shouted, ‘I need to go to the toilet.’
And Stella was back in the moment. Her momentary lapse shaken off by the sharp immediacy of parenting. ‘OK there’s a service station just up here,’ she said, glancing round to reassure Rosie and then back to Jack. ‘I’m fine,’ she added, to dispel his look of nervous concern. ‘Absolutely fine. Dad can’t have gone far. As you say, he doesn’t go anywhere so it won’t be that hard to find him.’ She got ready to undo her seat belt as Jack pulled into the Little Chef.
‘We find him. We get Sonny. We go. It’ll be fine.’
Moira was nervous about her daughter arriving. She always got a little nervous around Stella, wrong-footed, feeling ever more the neurotic mother as she tried to make too many plans for their stay. Did the kids want to go to the new model railway, for example, because tickets were hard to get hold of and the queue without them snaked round the block. Stella’s replies of, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. We’ll decide when we get there,’ would leave Moira wound up like a spring – should she get tickets or not? When they arrived, Stella’s family would breeze into the house in a cloud of barely controlled pandemonium, eat everything in the fridge, traipse sand on the carpet, and uncork more wine than Moira and Graham drank in a month. Quite often Moira would escape to the kitchen to tidy up because the energy of them all was just too much. How many times she’d cleared up the plates at Christmas to the sound of one of Stella’s stories, loud and confident, secretly wishing she had a fraction of her daughter’s strength.
Now, as Moira stood in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea and glancing up at the driveway every time she heard a noise, convinced it was them, she thought how the memory of the few holidays Stella had with them existed in a short, loud blur. Like a rollercoaster – pause for too long and it would all fall from the sky.
She unhooked one of her Emma Bridgewater mugs from the Welsh dresser. It was a collection she’d amassed over the years – everyone buying her one of the decorative pieces for birthdays and Christmas after she’d once expressed a passing interest while flicking through a Country Living. Now she was almost overrun with the stuff, it was hard to know how to tell them to stop. When she’d had the kitchen done, Moira had considered packing it all away but couldn’t face the questions, imagining their faces, almost accusing about why she didn’t like it any more – if indeed she ever had. She wasn’t sure, it had just become who she was to them: ‘Mum, that’s the china you like.’ There would be too much hurt confusion to deal with if she changed.
The kettle clicked off. She poured the water three-quarters full, squished the teabag just so and added a long splosh of milk – far too much for Stella’s taste, which Moira would have to remember.
The day was warming up. She leant over and opened the kitchen window, filling the room with the heady, teasing scent of the jasmine that climbed up a trellis from a big pot by the front door. She stood, inhaling the perfume, her hip resting against her beautiful new rose marble kitchen worksurface – a recent, very expensive addition that Graham had huffed was change for change’s sake, but Moira adored. The smell of the jasmine was intoxicating. It made her want to pack up all that china immediately and go and buy the snazzy hand-thrown cups she’d seen in the local gallery with gold handles and bright turquoise stripes.
Graham would hate them.
Stella would mock them.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Moira paused. Maybe Stella would like a gold-handled mug. Moira sipped her tea and thought briefly about whether she actually knew Stella at all nowadays. The telephone conversation asking them to have Sonny to stay for a fortnight had been the first time Stella had asked for anything in years. Moira had felt a momentary flutter of flattery but knew better than to ask Stella what had happened. ‘Of course, darling. I can meet you in Exeter if you like, save you the full trip. I’ve just repapered the spare bedroom – a lovely Zoffany gold, did you know they did wallpaper in TK Maxx now? – so he can sleep up there. Have his own little space.’ Waffling on in a nervous attempt not to pry.
But my God, she had wanted to know what was going on. The desire had tickled her insides like beetles. This type of thing didn’t happen to cool, confident Stella. Or ‘Potty-Mouth’ as anyone who read the Sunday News knew her as, one of the genre originators of the slummy-mummy brigade. The worst example, according to the Daily Mail, of resentful, neglectful motherhood with her gin-soaked, laissez-faire attitude to childrearing.
While Moira had tutted over a few of the expletives in Stella’s columns she’d always been quietly proud of her daughter’s success. Stella had worked her way up with no help from anyone. It had been an old friend of Moira’s who’d posted the copy of the local magazine where Stella’s first ever article had appeared along with a tiny headshot, ‘Is this your Stella?’ she’d scrawled on a Post-It, and Moira had had to lie when she’d telephoned her friend back, saying she knew all about it. Then soon followed by-lines in the national papers – Stella texting to say when and where at the request of her mother – and then full-page editorials in the colour supplements. Then came ‘Potty-Mouth’, as divisive as it was loved. But however controversial some elements, Moira would often allow herself the odd snigger when a straight-talking anecdote about the frustrations of motherhood touched a nerve.
But right now she couldn’t help wondering if all was quite as it once was. She’d noticed a slightly more acerbic tone to a few of the columns recently. Nothing too bad, just a touch less light-hearted. Poor little moody Sonny, who was currently upstairs locked in some battle on his laptop computer, hadn’t fared so well in a couple of them. She’d almost rung Stella to say something but hadn’t quite had the nerve.
She thought again of monosyllabic Sonny, sulkily slamming the door of Stella’s car at Exeter Services, trudging over in the torrential rain, hood down so his hair got soaked in a seeming deliberate defiance of his mother, and barely scowling a goodbye.
Moira went over to the bottom of the stairs and called, ‘Do you want a cup of tea, Sonny?’
‘No,’ he shouted back. Then a second later, ‘Thanks.’ As if remembering that he wasn’t in his own home and couldn’t quite get away with his desired level of moodiness.
Moira was still getting used to the open-plan nature of the entire bottom floor of the house. When she and Graham had first bought the place, full of youthful exuberance, it had been part of their grand renovation plans but they’d never got round to it. Then after Christmas Moira had insisted. Determined to get Graham up and doing something, she’d thought it was the perfect project. But never had she heard someone grumble and gripe quite so much and, in the end, she’d put Graham out of his misery and taken over the project herself mid-way. After it was done Graham had complained of a draught from the front door. At the time Moira couldn’t have given two hoots about a draught, high on the fact she’d overseen the renovation almost single-handed – with a lot of help from Dave the builder. But nowadays, while she still adored the light and space, she missed the fact she could no longer shut herself away in the kitchen, imagining herself alone. And, if pushed, she might concede to a slight draught, on a chilly day.
Walking back across the beautifully sanded wooden floorboards, she remembered the look of terror on Sonny’s face when on Day One of his Cornish banishment Graham had stood