Mum in the Middle: Feel good, funny and unforgettable

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2017

Copyright © Jane Wenham-Jones 2018

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Jane Wenham-Jones asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008278670

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008278663

Version: 2018-08-10

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Family Gatherings and How to Survive Them – Jane’s Top Tips

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

For Karen with love – I wish you were here to read it.

Chapter 1

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 as an interesting mixture of bohemian creative and woman of formidable capability. She was renovating the big old rectory over the road, and I’d seen her both floating around in a kaftan, apparently reciting poetry to herself, and up on the roof with a hammer.

‘All straight, then?’ she demanded, crossing the street and surveying me. ‘I hate bloody Sundays, don’t you?’ she continued, clearly not caring whether I was ‘straight’ or not. ‘Can’t get on with anything till the bloody plumbers turn back up tomorrow. If they do …’

‘How’s it going?’ I nodded towards the beautiful grey-stone house with its mullioned windows and creeper.

‘Want to see?’ Jinni jerked her head towards her front door. ‘Fancy a drink?’

I looked at my watch. ‘I’d love one,’ I said, thinking that a spot of lunchtime alcohol was exactly what I could do with. ‘But I’ve got to drive to Margate. To see my mother,’ I added, as Jinni raised her brows.

‘I’m an orphan now,’ – she gave a loud and not entirely appropriate-sounding laugh – ‘so I don’t have to do all that Mother’s Day crap.’

I rather wished I didn’t have to either, but Alice had spoken. My sister does not believe in ‘me’ time – especially if it’s mine.

Jinni pointed down the road. ‘Seen all the kids scuttling to the church to get their free flowers? Never go any other time. Little buggers …’

‘Do you have children?’ I asked.

Jinni nodded. ‘Dan’s in Australia, working for a surf school, and Emma’s teaching up in Nottingham.’

She did not look at all sad about this. In fact she was smiling widely. ‘Haven’t seen either of them since Christmas,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But Dan’s back in the summer and Emma will roll up at some point. What are yours doing?’

I tried to sound as pleased as she did. ‘They’re all in London. Oliver is a trainee surveyor, Tilly’s finished drama school and is working in a diner while she tries to get auditions and Ben’s at uni doing computer science with music.’

‘Off your hands, then,’ Jinny said.

‘Yes.’

I thought about telling Jinni that, as odd as it sounded, it was the first time in my 47 years I’d ever lived alone. That since Friday when Ben had abandoned his sensible plan of saving money by living with his mum while studying in the capital, for the much better one of taking up a box room near the Holloway Road and disposing of his student loan in a variety of bars – I was not finding it very easy.

I’d been lucky to have him here at all. How could a small market town, known for its pottery and teashops, with four pubs, a tiny theatre and a KFC – deemed such a potential den of iniquity, it had by all accounts had the locals up in arms – compare with life in the city?

But I didn’t know Jinni well enough to start bleating. Instead I forced my face into bright smile. ‘And what about you? What do you do – or did you do? I can see this must be a full-time job …’

‘Bloody nightmare,’ said Jinni merrily. ‘I was an actress too, if your Tilly needs warning onto a better path. Did you ever see Maddison and Cutler?’

‘Er, I may have seen the odd episode, I remember it being on …’

Jinni laughed. ‘It’s my only claim to fame – unless you count playing a prostitute in Casualty. I was Maddy!’

I stared at her dark eyes, defined cheekbones and red lipstick and had a sudden flash of recognition. Remembered Rob watching appreciatively as the hot young TV detective – always dressed in tight black leather and invariably waving a gun about – strutted her stuff.

‘Oh my God,’ I said. ‘My ex-husband fancied you rotten!’

Jinni laughed again. ‘It made me a fortune, well, enough to eventually buy this place, anyway. And I married well.’ She laughed again. ‘And divorced even better. He was the producer’, she added. ‘Egocentric bastard …’

She talked on, telling me her plans to open a boutique B&B, dropping in details of her past, her hands waving about expressively, her glossy dark hair tossed back over a shoulder, kohled eyes fixed on mine. She had an energy and passion about her that made me feel dull and mousy.

She’d just finished a diatribe about how men were all largely useless but she did miss it if she didn’t have one to go to bed with occasionally and had moved onto the sort of bathrooms she was planning.

‘They are going to be really sleek and classy,’ she was saying, ‘with rain showers and power baths, but I want to give each bedroom a totally different style with a mix of contemporary and vintage.’ She stopped and gave another of her strange honks of laughter. ‘In other words, I’ll be round the junk shops and … Oh Lord, here we go!’

A small thin woman in her sixties with cropped grey hair and sharp, pretty features was coming along the pavement in jeans, dark donkey jacket and a red patterned scarf. Her dark eyes looked us both up and down.

‘Hello, Jinni,’ she said coolly, before holding her hand out to me. ‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ she added, her voice low, but with an edge.

‘How remiss of you!’ Jinni’s tone was dry. ‘Not harangued Tess with one of your many petitions yet? Not even the one about me?’ Jinni turned back to me, unsmiling. ‘Ingrid is against what I am doing here. She thinks if I am allowed to open a B&B it will bring ruin and devastation on the town and all who live here …’

Ingrid released her grip on my fingers and gave a chilly smile. ‘I am concerned,’ she said in her cultured tones, ‘about extra traffic and congestion in this narrow road.’ She held out a flyer. ‘We are already seeing a greater influx of Londoners using this as a weekend base and contributing nothing to the local economy Monday to Friday. And now, with the high-speed rail link bringing in new residents who can comfortably commute from here,’ she paused and raised her eyebrows at me, ‘the housing stock is shrinking and local people are being priced out of the market.’ She gave an extraordinarily sweet smile that was framed in steel.

‘Tess is my newest neighbour,’ Jinni told her. ‘Ingrid is Northstone’s foremost agitator, she said to me. ‘No issue too small! The local council adore her.’

‘I prefer the term “campaigner”’ said Ingrid, with another sugary-tight beam. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she finished. Jinni made a small snorting noise.

‘Well, nice to meet you,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I must get going. Jinni, I’ll um–’

‘Come over soon,’ Jinni finished for me shortly. ‘And shout if you need anything.’ She turned abruptly and strode back over the road towards her house.

As I moved back towards my car, Ingrid fell into step beside me. ‘Do you have a view on this … development?’ she asked, enunciating the final word as if it could do with a dose of antibiotics.

‘Well, the plans sound lovely,’ I said, trying to sound friendly and reasonable. ‘And Jinni seems very nice to me.’

I shivered. It had got cold while I was standing there. Ingrid looked at me with a pitying expression and then gave an odd little laugh. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Things aren’t always what they seem.’

Chapter 2

It seemed like a stroke. That’s what her best friend Mo said when she phoned to say my mother had been taken to A&E. The patient, discharging herself in a matter of hours, insisted it was a fuss over nothing much.

‘Gerald’s taking me away for a few days,’ she’d announced, moments after I’d cancelled work to rush to her bedside. ‘We’re going to see Sonia in Dorset. Well he is. I’m going to the pottery if it’s still there. Not been to Poole for donkey’s years.’

‘Shouldn’t you be resting?’ I enquired, knowing I’d have more luck suggesting a little light pole-dancing or a ride on a camel.

‘What for? They can’t find a thing wrong with me. It was likely migraines with what do you call it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do – migraines where you can’t speak.’

‘I really don’t know anything about them.’

My mother had sounded impatient. ‘I wish you wouldn’t be deliberately obtuse.’ While I was spluttering she swept on. ‘I’ve just looked it up and already it’s gone. So annoying. That word to do with light – they take pictures of it.’

I felt a frisson of unease. ‘Mum, what are you talking about?’

‘Migraines! It’s not that I mind Sonia, you know I don’t, but I don’t want to sit there all afternoon, when there’s the harbour to see.’

‘Well you don’t have to, do you?’ I said, struggling to keep up with my mother’s conversational switchback technique. Was she usually as scattered as this? ‘Sonia won’t mind if you go for a walk. She can catch up with her dad.’

‘We’re not staying there. Gerald’s got us a hotel.’

‘That’s nice. Can I speak to him?’

‘He’s gone home to pack.’

I listened while she talked on, covering a myriad subjects ranging from the problems of deciding what to take when March was cold one minute and sunny the next, Mo’s dog’s possible gallstones and the squirrel in her garden who’d eaten all the bulbs.

She did sound okay – her voice was strong enough and she appeared to be wandering about the house as she told me about the nice staff at the hospital, who were forced to work such long hours with little thanks from this government, and how the doctor had been impressed with her blood pressure.

Keeping her to the point was no easy task, but then again, as I wrote to my sister, that was nothing new.

Mother’s made of stern stuff, I typed, as much to reassure myself as Alice. And it was true. She was rarely ill, still gardened and her gleamingly clean house put mine to shame. She travelled, went to galleries and the theatre, was a sterling member of Margate Operatics and had more friends than I did. Seventy-four was no age these days. Even if she has had a TIA and is keeping it quiet, I concluded, knowing that Alice would immediately Google the full implications of a Transient Ischaemic Attack and be an expert on it by the next time she wrote. It will take more than a few microscopic clots to finish her off.

I pushed away the memory of Tilly saying that when she’d last phoned, Granny sounded even more bonkers than usual and the way my mother had suddenly sounded vague and distracted and appeared to temporarily struggle to recall Ben’s name. Was she feeling unwell more often than she was letting on?

I’d been phoning daily, I told my sister instead, as I tried to still the anxious fluttering in my stomach as I imagined my seemingly indestructible parent suddenly helpless and frail. Her dear old friend Mo was there a lot; Gerald as often as he was allowed to be.

Alice was having none of it. No amount of explaining that our mother herself had actively discouraged me from going down this weekend, saying the traffic would be bad with all those other mothers being towed out to lunch, that I had a long list of household tasks to complete and a presentation to finish before Tuesday, would sway my elder sister. You need to see for yourself, she instructed. While actually numbering my duties: 1) get a proper list from Mother of all symptoms. NB What exactly was said by medics? (suggest you take notes). 2) double-check with Mo for accuracy. Have noticed Mother can be woolly of late. 3) Speak to Gerald (do not be fobbed off by Mother. I do not have a number for him. Make sure you obtain. 4) I think it would be best to phone her GP on Monday and you’ll need to be fully armed with the facts …

I growled and sighed. Years of experience have taught me that when a diktat arrives from the US, it is quicker in the long run to follow it. Alice may be three thousand miles away in Boston. But her sheer will can still fill a room.

Thus on an afternoon when I would rather be perusing my sample pots and deciding which shade of foodie yellow – I am hovering between autumn honey, golden sugar and lemon delight – to use on the dining-room walls, drinking wine with Jinni or even wielding the Shake n’ Vac in Ben’s bedroom – Tilly has complained it smells of hamsters – I am crawling around the M25, with a potted azalea and the gnawing suspicion that by the time I actually have the opportunity to start this brave new life of mine, I’ll be on a mobility scooter.

Then I hear Alice’s voice reminding me it’s the least I can do on Mother’s Day when I haven’t seen our mother since before I moved – even if she was away with Gerald on an art appreciation cruise and then spending every spare minute rehearsing H.M.S. Pinafore – when she, Alice, is sitting on the other side of the world, worrying.

‘Get on a bloody plane, then!’ I say out loud, looking at the line of traffic snaking ahead and braking sharply as the van in front abruptly stops.

‘Arse!’ I shout, as I inch forward again, shot through with guilt and resentment.

My mother’s not overly thrilled, either.

‘He’s a very clever man,’ she says, as I step across the threshold of her neat chalet bungalow. ‘But I do wish he wouldn’t go around in that dress.’

She has been to an exhibition by Grayson Perry at the Turner Contemporary, where she has admired the pots and ‘those wooden ones’ but still isn’t convinced the artist needs the frock and wig.

‘It’s the children I think about,’ she says. ‘They’ll get teased at school.’

‘I don’t think so, Mum.’ I say, handing her the plant and throwing my coat over the bannister. ‘As far as I know, he’s only got one daughter and she’s grown up now.’

‘Hmmm,’ my mother looks as though she doubts this. ‘Sonia hasn’t got any better either.’ My mother has always believed in the non sequitur to keep conversation zipping along. While I am still making the mental leap from the famous artist to Gerald’s rather dour daughter, she has moved on to her geranium cuttings having died in the frost.

‘You don’t expect it in March,’ she says. ‘Though Mo will say that May thing about casting the clout.’

‘How is Mo?’ I enquire, trying to analyse what is even odder about my mother than usual.

‘Still likes her tea.’

It is then that it hits me. My mother hasn’t moved. Usually by now I’d have been offered three different sorts of hot beverage and very probably a sandwich. But I’ve been in the house a good five minutes and she is still in the hallway in front of me.

‘Shall we go and make some?’ I suggest.

‘Some what?’

Everything in the kitchen looks as always. The surfaces shine, the sink is scrubbed, the storage jars arranged in formation. The floor is speck-free, the tea towels folded with regimental precision and the mugs lined up along the shelf have their handles pointing in the same direction.