One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [48]
‘Yeah, but I think he does more than take out Mum’s rubbish,’ drawled my son. I gaped, red-faced, as everyone roared. Seffy shrugged at me, grinning. ‘Sorry, Mum, but, like my aunt says, she made me. I was tortured. You try not answering Granny’s questions.’
‘You just tell her to mind her own business!’ I spluttered, but I was secretly pleased too. He liked Ivan. I thought he did, but I was pleased to hear it: publicly too.
‘How young?’ Biba was mouthing across the table to Seffy, clearly gripped, and clearly annoyed she hadn’t been in the loop about this. She boggled as Seffy mouthed something back.
‘Hattie. You’ve got a toy boy!’ she squealed.
‘I have not got a toy boy!’ I roared, the colour of the tomato ketchup bottle now.
‘Well, if he makes Hattie happy, I think that’s wonderful,’ said Laura, grovelling for all she was worth, having spilled the beans, and shooting her daughter a look.
‘I agree,’ said Dad staunchly. ‘It’s about time you had a boyfriend, darling. I couldn’t be more pleased.’ I sent him a grateful look. ‘And if he’s still in short pants with a catapult in his pocket, it’s all the same to me.’
More hilarity. Oh, splendid.
Later that evening, after coffee and much more drinking, and when Maggie and I turned in for bed, she stopped outside my bedroom door, cheeks flushed.
‘Your family are great,’ she observed. ‘I’d forgotten. You’re so lucky.’
That had never really occurred to me, and I was surprised. My family were loud, opinionated, quarrelsome, easily offended, sparky and often intensely irritating, but great fun on the whole, and I supposed I was lucky. We got together very regularly to bicker and snap and roar, and couldn’t really go a couple of weeks without seeking one another out. Mum, Laura and I certainly spoke most days. It struck me I knew very little about Maggie’s family. A widowed mother in Hendon, no brothers or sisters. She had lots of lovely girlfriends, though, many more than me: the phone was always going in the shop and it would be Hannah, or Sally, or Alex, but when I’d commented on this she’d say, ‘That’s because you don’t need them. People from big families never do.’ I knew she lapped up my family’s affairs, regarding it as a never ending soap opera, particularly here at the Abbey.
As we said good night, though, I thought how it made a change to feel blessed. Most people, apart from Maggie, regarded me with a hint of pity: late thirties, no husband, a single mother, and when they pressed me on what I did now that Seffy was at boarding school and I said, ‘Oh, work, mostly,’ I could tell they were thinking: poor Hattie. It was competitive, life, wasn’t it? I shut my bedroom door and crossed to the window. Like in that Two Ronnies sketch with John Cleese, I felt slightly sorry for Maggie with no happy extended family and no child, but looked up to Laura, with a husband, three children, and a huge house; yet Laura looked up to friends who could live in their houses for perpetuity. Where did it end? When did we ever stop wanting more?
I didn’t ask myself that in all seriousness, though, because I knew, with gut-wrenching surety, that if I could have had what I wanted, what I’d always desired, years ago, the only man I’d ever loved, I’d never want for more. Never. I reached up to pull the curtain across and saw a curtain draw simultaneously in a house in the valley, in Little Crandon. It affected me like a few thousand volts. I stepped back from the window. It was The Pink House, where Dominic and Letty had lived, but I knew it would only be Letty doing the pulling now. On her own, like me.
11
Dominic was killed in a terrorist attack in London in the summer of ’95, two years after I’d left the House of Commons, one year after I’d come back from Croatia. I say an attack, but they hadn’t actually been targeting him per se as an MP, not like the Brighton bombings, nor the bomb in the Commons car park that killed Airey Neave. No, this was the usual, random, cowardly, bomb-on-abus routine, designed to kill and maim ordinary