Juliet found she couldn’t move. She was just frozen, fingers clenched around the steering wheel. She couldn’t even remember which pedal to press or what to do next to get the car started again. But the noise – the engines, the horns, the bickering children – was burrowing into her skull in a way she just couldn’t bear.
‘Will you just shut up!’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs, surprising herself with the volume, hearing the croak as her voice broke when she reached maximum decibels.
Outside the car the commotion continued, but inside everything went still and quiet. Violet, Polly, Josh and Jake stared at their mother open-mouthed.
She could feel the echo of her words pulsing around inside her head and it scared her slightly. She didn’t shout like that. Ever. And she certainly didn’t lose her temper with her children, not to this degree, anyway. Of course, she disciplined – she’d read countless books on how to do it properly – but she never just screamed at the kids. Right from when they were babies she’d always feared the kind of woman who did that was also the kind of woman who dragged toddlers down the street with their arms half out of their sockets or walloped them in the middle of supermarkets.
She’d had a feeling that things were a little off-kilter for weeks now, but she’d just put it down to the idea of Christmas looming ahead of her. As much as she loved the season, it would now be forever associated with the departure of the man she’d planned to spend her life with. If your husband choosing Boxing Day to announce your marriage was over didn’t leave a stain on a celebration, then she didn’t know what did.
Still, Juliet was good with stains, knew all the tricks and tips to get them to vanish. With the right amount of determination, you’d hardly ever know they’d been there once she’d finished with them. This one would be no different. She’d just have to try harder.
She became aware of quiet breathing beside her and in the back of the car. Silence verging on the miraculous. For the first time in years all four kids had shut up at the same time. She needed to reward them for that, didn’t she? Positive reinforcement.
‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, and if she’d been able to feel anything in the numbness of the after-shock of her outburst, she’d have been pleased at how calm and rational she sounded.
‘Mum …?’ a shaky voice said from beside her. ‘Are you okay?’
Juliet took some air in and held it. There was nothing left now. Not the dizzying frustration, not the clawing sense of racing towards a goal that got ever further away. Not even the fear that Violet would turn out to be exactly like Gemma and push her away for ever. Just nothing. It was wonderful.
‘Yes,’ she said, letting the breath out again. ‘Everything’s fine.’
The ability to not only think but also drive returned, so she started the engine, yanked the car into gear and without making eye contact with any of the drivers giving her withering looks she carried on her journey to the swimming pool.
The kids were still a bit subdued over tea that evening, but once they’d all tidied their plates away and headed off in their individual directions the sounds of normality began to creep back into Juliet’s household – the stomp of Violet’s feet on the stairs, an argument breaking out on the landing, the tinny cacophony of a cartoon show somewhere on a television …
‘Your dad’s going to be here at seven thirty,’ Juliet yelled up the stairs. ‘Make sure you have your stuff together by then.’
And, miraculously, they did. By the time Greg rang the doorbell four overnight bags were lined up in the hall and four children were in various stages of getting their winter coats on.
Greg looked tense when she opened the door. ‘Are they ready?’
Juliet nodded. It was odd, her standing here and him standing there. She hadn’t quite got over the shock of it each time he arrived to pick up the kids for his allotted weekend. She still wasn’t really sure what had gone wrong between them. They’d thought themselves the perfect couple, and this their perfect house, and then their four perfect children had come along and they’d been so happy … But now she could see how smug they’d been in the middle of all that perfection, how complacent.
She hadn’t seen it coming. Not in the slightest.
It was as if on her rigidly maintained To Do list she’d forgotten to reserve a tick box for ‘prepare for the disintegrating of your life and a painful divorce’. How stupid of her. She was never normally that disorganised.
‘Can I open the car, Dad?’ Josh said, pushing past Juliet’s legs and reaching for the key in his father’s hand.
‘No, I want to!’ Jake said, trying to nudge his brother out of the way.
Greg handed the key over to Josh. ‘Josh can open the car up now and you can lock it when we get there,’ he told Jake. Both boys ran off in the direction of the drive. At least Violet and Polly stopped to give their mother a kiss on the cheek before they went out the door.
She ran after them, hugged them to her, one under each arm, and gave them a proper kiss. ‘Love you,’ she said, squeezing them, ‘and I’m sorry about earlier on.’
Violet shrugged.
Polly gave her an unblinking stare. ‘You know, as shock tactics go, it was really rather good.’
Juliet couldn’t help but smile. She ran after the boys and kissed them as she helped strap them into their booster seats in the back of Greg’s car.
When the doors were closed, the kids effectively sound-proofed from their conversation, Greg looked at her across the top of the car.
‘You look tired, Juliet,’ he said as he knocked on the window and signalled for Josh to return his keys. ‘Maybe you should try to chill out a little instead of doing the whole Christmas rigmarole this year?’
The smile immediately dropped from Juliet’s face. Oh, he sounded so polite and reasonable. So polite and reasonable she wanted to knock his block off. He still thought he had a say about how she behaved, or could comment on how she looked? Seriously? He’d given up that right when he’d moved out and moved on.
And there was nothing wrong with wanting to make Christmas a happy time, when nothing went wrong and everything was perfect. Greg’s surprise exit had put a blight on the festivities two years ago and last Christmas had been their first one living apart, the poor kids ferried from pillar to post and feeling very unsettled, so Juliet was determined this year should be extra special, especially as their father was being totally selfish about the whole thing.
‘Goodbye, Greg,’ she said through teeth so tightly clenched her jaw was starting to hurt, and then she bent and smiled brightly and waved to their children in the car. They didn’t need to know their mother and father were arguing again.
She kept it up as he shook his head and climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled away, but the effort of keeping that smile in place as they pulled out of the drive started to make her head pound. Once the Mercedes had rounded the hedge and joined the traffic on the road outside, she let it all out in a most colourful and unladylike word, the sort of thing she’d trained herself out of saying when the kids had been small, and then she hugged her arms around her to stave off the cold and marched back into her empty house in her slippers.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so galling if Greg hadn’t found it so easy to