Mum in the Middle Read online

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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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  and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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  written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008278670

  Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008278663

  Version: 2018-05-10

  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 flow
ers 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 wher
e 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.