A Proper Family Christmas (42 page)

Those ambitions were nipped in the bud when Ronnie turned seventeen and discovered she was pregnant.

It was a disaster. Just days earlier, Ronnie and her form teacher had been talking about university applications. Her teacher had suggested a string of top colleges. ‘The sky’s the limit for you, Ronnie Benson,’ were her encouraging words.

It certainly hadn’t been part of the plan to become a teenage mother.

Jacqui and Dave were strangely unfazed by the news of their elder daughter’s unplanned pregnancy. Ronnie had expected them to be furious. She had expected recriminations and talk of having let them down. Let herself down. In the end, there was nothing of the sort.

‘We’ll get through it,’ said her dad as he squeezed her in a bear hug. Jacqui agreed.

‘We’re right behind you, love,’ she said. ‘Every step of the way.’

Likewise, Ronnie’s teachers were sympathetic and did all they could to help her continue with her A-level courses, but Ronnie found her pregnancy surprisingly difficult and postponed her exams, with the intention of going back to a sixth-form college after the baby was born. However, when Sophie arrived, Ronnie was hit with a malaise she now knew to be postnatal depression. By the time Ronnie had enough energy even to brush her hair in the mornings again, her brightest contemporaries were already on their way to university. Although she had actually only missed out on a year, Ronnie felt she would never be able to catch up and so she didn’t bother.

Fifteen years later, Ronnie told herself that everything had turned out for the best. For a start, despite everyone’s predictions to the contrary, Mark had stood by her. They’d been together since they were both fourteen. Mark had already left school and was working as an apprentice at a joinery company when Ronnie told him she was pregnant. He vowed right away he would provide for Ronnie and his child, and he had definitely made good on that promise.

Mark moved in with Ronnie and her parents as soon as the baby was born. When Sophie was two, the little family was able to move out of Ronnie’s parents’ house and into a rented place of their own. With overtime and a bit of work on the side at weekends, Mark earned enough for Ronnie to stay at home until Sophie could go to school. When Sophie was nine, Ronnie considered finishing her A-levels at an adult-education college, but then she fell pregnant with Jack and the cycle started all over again. Including the postnatal depression.

But this makes it all worth it, thought Ronnie, at such moments as when she watched twelve-year-old Sophie, tall as a giraffe, make her precocious debut as goal defence in the school netball team. And what high-flying job could have been more satisfying than seeing four-year-old Jack play a sheep in his first school nativity play? These were the consolations for having so spectacularly short-circuited her plans for world domination with an unprotected shag. Ronnie might not be living in a posh house or driving a fancy car like some of her old friends from school, but she had been able to see her children grow up, while her contemporaries were so scared of stepping off the career ladder they put their carefully planned babies into childcare at six months old. You never got those early years back. If you missed the first word, the first steps, that was it. Those were the things that magazine writer Chelsea didn’t understand when she talked about how bored she would be if she were a stay-at-home mum.

‘I don’t know how you can stand not using your brain,’ Chelsea had said the last time she and Ronnie were together. It was at that barbecue to celebrate their grandfather Bill’s eighty-third birthday (Bill was celebrated every year now, just in case). That was the comment that sparked the discussion that became a full-blown row that ended with Chelsea accusing Ronnie of having become a mummy martyr and Ronnie accusing Chelsea of having turned into a self-obsessed snob, and subsequently led to the sisters’ two-year-long estrangement.

‘
Not using my brain!
’

Mark had become used to hearing Ronnie exclaim those four words at random moments during their week. It was usually when she had finished overseeing Sophie’s maths homework or had finally deciphered an incomprehensible instruction in a letter sent home from Jack’s school. Ronnie would then segue into a rant about how Chelsea had no idea how taxing family life could be. Ensuring that two children and one other adult were fed, dressed, happy and healthy, all on the kind of budget that would have been tight enough for a singleton? That was no mean feat. And now Ronnie was working part time as well. She never had a minute to herself. From time to time, she really did feel as though she was running an army battalion. Chelsea did not have a clue what a mother’s life was like.

Perhaps that’s why she didn’t see the need to apologise for her remarks, Mark occasionally dared to suggest. Only when Chelsea had a family of her own – assuming she could ever hang on to a man for long enough – would she realise the gravity of the insults she’d delivered over a chargrilled sausage in a bun.

‘I don’t care. I won’t ever forgive her,’ Ronnie claimed.

Jacqui’s birthday wish was to change all that. Ronnie had to promise their mother she would put her anger to one side for just this week. For what might be their last ‘proper family holiday’.

‘The best birthday present you could ever give me is for you girls to be friends again, like you used to be.’

As though to emphasise her point, Jacqui looked towards that ancient photo of the sisters building a sandcastle on Littlehampton beach.

‘All right,’ said Ronnie. ‘But Chelsea has to make an effort too.’

‘I’m sure she will,’ said Jacqui.

If only Ronnie could believe that. As it was, about a month before the trip, when Ronnie picked up the phone to offer the olive branch so that their first face-to-face meeting would not be too strange, Chelsea acted as though those two years of radio silence hadn’t even happened. She just went straight into a story about some fancy cocktail party she had attended for work. As Chelsea twittered on about the guest list, Ronnie was mortified to realise that while she had been nursing the mother of all grudges, Chelsea had carried on regardless, not questioning her sister’s absence because her swanky London life and career were just
so
fulfilling. She simply hadn’t noticed she and Ronnie were not on speaking terms.

Reading Chelsea’s text from Gatwick, as she stood in the check-in queue in Birmingham, Ronnie fumed. She was certain that her snooty sister had missed her flight deliberately. Next thing, Chelsea would claim she couldn’t get another flight. Ronnie would have put money on Chelsea not coming to Lanzarote at all.