Hope didn’t feel inclined to lend her assistance, and even though Jack’s face was right in front of her, she stared pointedly at a spot over his left shoulder where they’d tried unsuccessfully to hang the kitchen clock and made a mess instead. She needed to add it to the list. ‘Is it just a sex thing, then?’ she muttered, when Jack pinched her waist.
‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ Jack said, and Hope didn’t know why he felt the need to tell her this, or why he thought she’d be interested, but when she tried to disentangle herself, he clung to her like she was the last lifebelt on the Titanic. ‘I keep thinking it will burn itself out. It has to.’
‘And you expect me to wait for you to get it out of your system?’ Hope asked a little bitterly, even though she suspected that if Jack asked her to, she would wait. And to think that usually people described Hope as feisty. All her feisty seemed to have upped and left. ‘Because Susie’s all fiery-hot and I’m like, tepid.’
‘It’s not like that.’ Jack glared at her as if she was deliberately not getting a clue. ‘Susie’s like a really spicy Thai meal and you, well, you’re pumpkin soup or shepherd’s pie or … or … freshly baked bread.’
Hope tore herself out of Jack’s arms so she could put some distance between them. ‘My God! Do you go out of your way to think of the most hateful things to say to me?’
‘Don’t you get it though, Hopey? Thai food is amazing and, like, if you go to Thailand you eat it every day …’
‘You’ve never fucking been to fucking Thailand!’
‘But say that I had, and when I got home I thought I’d want to go back to eating freshly baked bread and shepherd’s pie, but it didn’t happen.’ Jack ran long fingers through his hair but it was too short now and he gave up with a frustrated groan. ‘I know I’m behaving like a complete tosser. If it’s any consolation, I hate myself for it.’
‘Well, no, it isn’t,’ Hope said brusquely, and she turned her back on Jack, which he took as his cue to get off the stool and try and put his arms around her again. ‘Can you stop mauling me, please?’
‘I’m trying here, Hope! Could you at least meet me halfway?’
Well, try harder because it doesn’t look like you’re trying at all! she almost said. ‘If your mum hadn’t called, you’d have eaten your bowl of soup and taken some more of your stuff and gone back to Susie’s,’ Hope pointed out, and she thought she should be given some credit for hardly raising her voice. ‘I was starting to think that maybe you were having regrets, but nothing has changed at all. You’ve just had an attack of conscience.’
‘I’m just trying to explain why I’ve acted the way I have,’ Jack said, and he sounded as if he really meant it. ‘And I’m trying to tell you that I don’t think it will do any good for the dads to come down to talk some sense into me. Otto and Marvin have already tried and failed.’
Hope felt compelled to turn round. ‘Really? I thought they hated me for daring to smash a sacred phone manufactured by Apple?’ She flushed. ‘Did you have to buy a new one or did you manage to claim it back on the insurance?’
‘I had to buy a new one, but it’s really not that big a deal,’ Jack said. ‘And of course Otto and Marvin don’t hate you. They both said that I was lucky that you only took it out on my iPhone.’
‘Oh. So much for “bros before hos”, eh?’
‘Hope, honestly, I don’t see the point of our parents staging an intervention,’ Jack said earnestly. ‘You have to admit our relationship has been broken for ages and there isn’t a way to fix this, to fix us.’
Hope would admit no such thing, and as she understood it, there were lots of ways to fix them: Jack could stop seeing Susie, forswear Thai food, exercise a bit of bloody restraint and stop being led by his dick. She didn’t say that, but was sure that the sour expression on her face said it for her. ‘Well, if you’re not even going to try, then I don’t see why I have to be the one to go back to Whitfield and you get to stay in London,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think you’ve put me through enough without a two-pronged attack from both our mums?’
‘But you’ve got to get a comb-out at Hair by Mandy.’ Jack grinned, and Hope also wanted to tell him that they weren’t in a joking place, not at all, and that the agony she was going to go through on Saturday afternoon (and actually for the entire weekend and for the foreseeable future) was no laughing matter.
‘I don’t know how you can act like this is funny,’ she said. ‘That I’m not important. That what we had doesn’t matter to you.’
‘I don’t think like that. Not at all.’
‘Because I love you. I can’t stop loving you, despite how much you’ve hurt me, and if you end this with her, I’ll take you back. No questions. No judgement. I’ll take you back. Please, Jack.’ Hope didn’t even care that all her pride was gone and she was giving Jack all her love and devotion, with absolutely no guarantee that he’d return them.
‘Please, Hopey, don’t,’ he said gently. ‘In the long run, getting rid of me will be the best thing you’ve ever done.’ He tried out a winsome grin on her, the kind of grin that even two weeks ago still had the power to make Hope’s foolish heart melt. ‘Look, if we end this now, before things get really ugly …’
‘Things already are really ugly,’ Hope said, because, lists aside, Jack had left misery and chaos in his wake and if this was only just the beginning …
‘If we end this now and don’t let ourselves get dragged down into more fighting and scoring points off each other, then we can still be friends,’ Jack said hopefully. ‘We’ll laugh about this one day.’
‘Yeah, I think I’ll just about die from laughing.’
‘Look, it’s only a weekend.’ Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘You break the bad news to the mums, and I’ll do the dads.’
‘But why do you get to decide that it’s over and I have no say in it?’ Hope asked, and she could feel her face wanting to collapse in on itself, as she forced the tears back. ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t gone through your phone? Would you still be pretending that we were OK?’
‘I wanted to tell you, but well …’ Jack looked down at his hands, in preference to looking at Hope’s frozen face. ‘It’s not easy to tell someone, to tell you, that it is over. Please try to understand, Hopey, I do love you, but it isn’t enough any more.’
‘It’s enough for me,’ she whispered, but her voice was so low that Jack obviously didn’t hear her.
‘We’ll talk properly once we’ve told our parents,’ he said, picking up his spoon. ‘So, do you reckon that the soup has heated up by now?’
AS SOON AS Hope stepped on to the platform at Rochdale station, she could feel herself regressing to her truculent fifteen-year-old self as she slouched towards her mother with a sullen expression on her face.
‘Goodness, Jerry was right. You have put on weight,’ was her mother’s cheery greeting, and Hope wondered if her mother had regressed to the hectoring martinet of her teen years, until she remembered that her mother had always been like that. She’d probably been born like that.
As they drove towards the village of Whitfield, where Hope had grown up and where her parents still lived in the same house, she could sense her mother looking at her meaningfully as if she suspected that Hope’s defiant pout was a flimsy façade, and that with a little prodding she’d break down and cry. It was a theory that Hope didn’t want to put to the test. Not when she’d already cried herself to sleep every night that week.
Instead she shot her mother a meaningful look of her own. ‘You look like you managed to catch the sun while you were away,’ she commented. ‘It suits you.’
‘Well, I’m not sure how. Did I mention that it rained the entire time that we were there?’ Caroline Delafield angled a glance at herself in the windscreen mirror and allowed herself a small smile of quiet satisfaction. Despite giving birth to four strapping sons and one heffalump of a daughter, she’d clung on to her trim figure with grim determination, and though she didn’t have the
delicate prettiness of Jack’s mother, Marge, she prided herself on always being immaculately groomed.
Caroline Delafield got up six every morning so she could wash and blow-dry her ash-blonde hair into regimental smoothness, never went anywhere without a little tinted moisturiser and a sweep of mascara framing her cornflower-blue eyes, and did not possess a pair of jeans. Or a pair of trainers. Or any clothing with a pattern or picture. As soon as she got home from a hard day’s headmistressing, Mrs Delafield changed out of her smart slacks and coordinated blouse and cardigan into casual slacks and a casual top, or sometimes if the weather was warm she really let rip and put on a T-shirt.
Now she cast a disapproving eye over Hope’s jeans and green and black stripy T-shirt worn over a long-sleeved black top. ‘Please tell me you didn’t wear that to school today.’
‘’Fraid so,’ Hope said, looking down at her outfit. ‘We were making a nature display and there was no point wearing anything smart if I was going to get glue or leaf mould on it.’
‘And the school doesn’t mind you wearing trainers?’
‘They’re plimsolls.’ At least the green flash on her Dunlops coordinated with her top. ‘Sometimes Mr Gonzales wears trainers too, Mum.’
Her mother actually harrumphed, glanced over at Hope one last time and sighed. ‘You really shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes when you’ve piled on a few extra pounds, dear.’
Hope understood why her mother gave her such a hard time and she sympathised, up to a point, but it didn’t make it any easier to deal with, especially in the cramped confines of her mother’s Ford Focus when she’d forgotten to slip an elastic band on her wrist to ping when her mother was goading her to the very edge of her temper. If things had gone according to her strict plan, Caroline Delafield wouldn’t have needed four attempts to make a perfect daughter, one who’d delight in shopping trips and cake-baking sessions, who’d come to her mother for advice on boys and how to apply foundation correctly, a daughter who’d also be a best friend and a source of maternal pride. Instead she’d had son after son after son, so when Hope had finally arrived, all her dreams and expectations for a daughter, of delightful pink clothes and girly toys – after six years of blue, grey and khaki and Lego – had all rested on Hope.
There was no way that any girl, let alone Hope, could have lived up to such high ideals. And Hope was far more interested in winning the approval of her three rambunctious, girl-hating older brothers than in baking fairy cakes with her mother, and she’d preferred Tonka toys and digging for worms over Barbie dolls and ballet classes. Though this evening she could tell from her mother’s compressed lips that she was pissed off with her, Hope knew that she’d never reach the same levels of wrath as the time when she’d been expelled from Brownies for being a disruptive influence.
Hope wished that she and her mother had a better relationship than the sniping, passive-aggressive behaviour they always fell into. It was very easy to make her mother happy, though most of the time Hope didn’t even bother to try.
‘Hey, Mum,’ she said, as her mother expertly parallel-parked the car next to her father’s Volvo. ‘You said we were going to have a girly weekend, so why don’t we order a takeaway, open a bottle of wine and watch a soppy movie? Just the two of us?’
That was usually the magic incantation that made her mother dare to believe that she was finally getting the daughter she wanted. ‘We can’t,’ her mother said flatly, unclipping her seatbelt. ‘Marge is bringing round dinner so we can thrash out this silly argument you’ve had with Jack.’
‘Mum, don’t you think we should keep Marge out of this for now?’ Hope asked as she got out of the car. ‘It’s a bit of a delicate situation, her son cheating on me, y’know.’
‘Marge is family,’ her mother insisted. ‘She’s as horrified as I am, and anyway, she said she was making lasagne, though you’d probably be better off with a salad.’
Hope was sent upstairs to freshen up. The Delafields lived in a solidly built stone house, formerly the old vicarage, on the outskirts of the village. Behind the house were rolling open fields and beyond those, the Pennines. On a cold early-November night, there should have been something warm and comforting about being back in her childhood home, but as Hope opened the door of her bedroom, right next to her parents’ room, and was assaulted by the lingering smell of the Bodyshop’s White Musk perfume, she felt as confused and as uncertain as she had been when she was a teenager and these same four walls had been her sanctuary – apart from the times her mother had blatantly ignored the huge ‘KEEP THE HELL OUT!!!!!!!’ sign on the door and barged in without knocking. There were still Kenickie and Amélie posters on the wall. Her old textbooks were still neatly arranged on the shelves, and even the cuddly toys that she’d never played with were amassed on the bed. It was reassuring yet depressing at the same time.
Hope pulled off the derided stripy top and dug out an old black jumper, which she hoped was slimming enough that her mother would relent and let her have some lasagne. Well, she was going to have lasagne whether her mother approved or not, but she’d prefer to eat it without a running commentary about how many calories she was wolfing down, and wasn’t it odd that she stored the fat in her face like a hamster?
The doorbell rang at eight on the dot. Hope raced down the stairs to get to the front door before her mother could bustle out of the kitchen.
Marge, at least, looked pleased to see her. ‘Darling girl, you look beautiful,’ she said, as she stepped into the hall. ‘I would hug you if I wasn’t carrying a very hot, very heavy baking dish.’
Her mother and Marge were so in sync that instead of saying hello, they launched back into a conversation about the trouble the vicar was having finding someone to re-flaunch his chimney stack, which Hope supposed they’d started earlier in the day. She sat at the huge kitchen table, with Charlton, their enormous tabby cat, purring on her lap as she stroked him under his chin, and watched her mother and Marge work quickly and seamlessly to gather up crockery, cutlery and glasses.
Marge was tiny, dark and elegant with almost Asiatic features, but although she appeared to float ethereally through life in loose-fitting linen accessorised with chunky silver jewellery, she was a pillar of the community. As well as working as a part-time receptionist at the doctor’s surgery, she was chairwoman of the Parish Council, headed up the volunteer services at the local hospital and was also heavily involved with the Rotary Club, the Historical Society and the events committee at the Golf Club. Hope’s mother was no slouch in the local do-gooding stakes, but compared to Marge, she was a total slacker.
After they’d finished discussing the novel they were reading for their book club, Marge finally came and sat down next to Hope so she could hold her hand and tell her how pleased she was to see her. Hope wondered, as she often did, if her life would have turned out better if Marge had been her mum, instead of just her honorary auntie from next door. If she’d have turned out better.
While her mother made a salad and garlic bread, which she’d already forbidden Hope from eating, all she got from Marge was sympathy and a huge glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. ‘You’re pretty and you’re smart and you’re funny,’ she said to Hope. ‘I honestly think he’s taken complete leave of his senses.’
‘Hope is far from perfect,’ her mother remarked, then realised that she was being exceedingly harsh, even for her. ‘But you do have a kind heart.’
Coming from Caroline Delafield, this was quite the ringing endorsement, and Hope let herself relax and even took a huge helping of salad to please her mother, but the warm fuzzies only lasted the short time it took to dish up the lasagne. Then, before Hope could get the first forkful into her mouth, they attacked, without warning, and left Hope completely blind-sided.
‘What you have to understand about men of Jack’s age, dear, is that they go through these phases,’ her mother said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘He’s just having a last-minute panic,’ Marge added helpfully. ‘Men don?
??t crave commitment in the same way that women do. Don’t get me wrong, they settle into it eventually, but not as easily as us girls.’
They went on and on and on and although they didn’t use the phrase ‘sowing his wild oats’, they might just as well have done.
‘But what about love?’ Hope asked, pushing away the food that she suddenly had no appetite for. ‘If he loved me, really loved me, then he wouldn’t want to be with anybody else but me.’
‘He does really love you,’ Marge said earnestly. ‘But that can be very scary in itself and sometimes the easy option looks more appealing. This girl … this Susie, she sounds appalling.’
‘She was Hope’s friend,’ her mother reminded Marge, like if Hope had been more discerning in her choice of friends, then all of this could have been avoided. It was something Hope had thought herself, but how like her mother to bring it up.
‘And affairs don’t last,’ Marge offered weakly. ‘What you and Jack have is the real thing. This could make your relationship stronger.’
Hope shook her head. ‘It hasn’t …’ She took a deep breath because neither of them wanted to hear what she was about to say but they needed to hear it all the same. ‘The thing is, Jack doesn’t love me. He loves Susie. He says he wants to be with her, he doesn’t want to be with me, and nothing that anyone can say will make him change his mind. God knows, I’ve tried.’
She’d finally succeeded in getting the pair of them to listen, really listen, to what she was saying and had shocked them into silence as an added bonus. Then in direct contravention of her mother’s rule that you only ever had one glass of wine, then saved the rest of the bottle for another day, she poured herself another glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. ‘I’m sorry, Marge, I’m sorry, Mum, but it’s not like Jack and I haven’t discussed this. We have.’
Marge and Caroline shared a brief, panicked look. ‘Well, no, that’s where you’re wrong because if Jack didn’t love you, then why would he agree to Roger and Bill going down to London to talk to him?’ Marge cried in desperation. ‘He loves you, Hope. He was sobbing!’