My Mother's Secret (13 page)

‘Would you please do me a favour, just for today, and ignore him,’ said Roisin. ‘I’m sorry, Bernice. She certainly wasn’t invited and I’m raging at him for bringing her, but …’

‘Out of respect for your parents,’ said Bernice. ‘Not because I don’t want to take a meat cleaver to him.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘That’s sorted, then.’ Roisin wasn’t completely convinced that Bernice and Carl weren’t going to create a scene, but she couldn’t do much more about it. ‘Paul is dishing out drinks on the veranda, so that’s the place to go for some refreshment. We’ll be serving food shortly.’

‘I’ll get a drink,’ said Bernice. ‘Coming, Colette?’

‘Yes. Could do with one myself.’ Colette smiled briefly at Roisin, then followed Bernice to the veranda.

‘Has she got a knife in her bag?’ asked Steffie when Roisin returned.

‘It wouldn’t surprise me!’ said Roisin. ‘What on earth is going through her head? If I was having a row with Paul, I sure as hell wouldn’t turn up to his parents’ party, even if I did want to kill him.’

‘Actually you would,’ said Steffie. ‘Although in your case, you’d pretend that everything was fine.’

‘You might have a point,’ agreed Roisin. ‘But that’s because we’re married.’

‘Maybe she feels they might as well have been married,’ said Steffie.

‘In that case she should’ve dragged him up the aisle. Or given him up as a lost cause. All this faffing around is pointless. She needs to fix things, either by staying or going.’

‘Not everyone sees things in black and white like you,’ said Steffie. ‘By the look of her, she’s either trying to woo him back or show him what he’s missing.’

‘It’s a massive makeover all right.’ Roisin decided to ignore Steffie’s comment about her seeing everything as black and white. She didn’t. She was a realist. ‘She’s lost a ton of weight, too,’ she added. ‘Clearly having a break is foolproof in the diet department.’

‘Not for me,’ said Steffie. ‘I usually eat my way out of misery.’

‘You’d never guess,’ said Roisin.

‘I never get miserable enough.’ She laughed before her expression changed as a low rumble in the sky above distracted both of them. ‘Oh crap. That sounded like thunder, didn’t it?’

Roisin glanced upwards. The sky was now a hazy blue, with banks of thick clouds on the horizon.

‘It doesn’t look thundery,’ she said. ‘And it’s not forecast until tomorrow.’

‘I checked it on my phone a little earlier,’ Steffie told her. ‘It had changed to a lightning symbol for this afternoon. Although it could’ve been the crack on the screen from where I dropped it.’

‘Idiot,’ said Roisin. ‘We’d better get a move on, though. Just in case.’

The bedroom door opened, startling Jenny, who smudged her lipstick, leaving a red slash across the corner of her mouth. She reached for a tissue and wiped it away as Pascal walked into the room.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’

‘Not far, obviously,’ she said.

He sat on the bed behind her.

‘Sure everything’s OK?’

She sighed, and turned to face him.

‘I would be if I felt that all this was OK too,’ she said, extending her arms to include the house and, Pascal assumed, the people in it.

‘It doesn’t matter, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s irrelevant.’

‘Roisin has gone to so much trouble,’ said Jenny. ‘Steffie and Davey too. It seems wrong to … to pretend, basically.’

‘We’re not pretending,’ said Pascal.

‘Excuse me?’ Her eyes widened.

‘Forty years isn’t a pretence.’

‘I have to tell them.’ She stood up. ‘I have to tell them everything.’

‘Jenny!’ Pascal stood up too. ‘Not today. Tomorrow, maybe.’

‘It’s always tomorrow,’ said Jenny. ‘And that’s my fault.’

‘In later years that might have been true,’ conceded Pascal. ‘But earlier it was mine. Look, Jen, today is all about having a good time and celebrating. And there’s no reason we can’t celebrate. None whatsoever.’

‘But what exactly is the celebration?’ she asked.

‘We are.’ He put his arms around her and pulled her close to him. ‘We are, Jenny Marshall. We’re celebrating forty years of us.’

He kissed her.

She kissed him back.

He was right.

He was always right.

Steffie and Roisin had just taken the last plate of carved ham from the fridge when Jenny walked into the room. She was holding a glass of the sparkling rosé, although she didn’t appear to have drunk any of it.

‘Are you enjoying your party, Mum?’ asked Steffie when she saw her mother at the doorway.

‘I’m about to enjoy the bubbly that your dad poured for me,’ said Jenny.

Roisin beamed at her. ‘You deserve it.’

‘Do I?’ asked Jenny.

‘Of course. You’re celebrating.’

Jenny swallowed a mouthful of rosé.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’ There was a hint of concern in Steffie’s voice. She thought that Jenny sounded brittle and anxious.

‘Of course,’ said her mother. ‘I’m still in shock, that’s all.’

‘Good,’ said Roisin. ‘We wanted to shock you. In a nice way, of course.’

‘You’re very thoughtful,’ Jenny said. ‘Both of you.’

‘And me.’ Davey walked in the door. ‘I’m hearing nice things being said about the Sheehan siblings and I want my due respect.’

Roisin laughed. ‘Respect for turning up?’ she asked.

‘And why not?’ Davey gave her a playful punch on her arm and Roisin yelped.

‘You have horribly bony fingers, Davey Sheehan,’ she said. ‘You always did have. That hurt.’

‘Cry baby,’ Dave teased.

Jenny smiled at them. She knew they were joking around for her benefit, but it was nice to see all the same. It didn’t matter that her children were adults now. Whenever they were together she saw them as she’d aways seen them. Her babies. She released a slow breath.

‘So we’ll tell everyone to come and eat, then cut your cake afterwards,’ said Steffie.

‘Cake?’ Jenny blanched.

‘Of course there’s cake!’ cried Roisin. ‘It’ll be just like your wedding. Or maybe not, because you didn’t get to do the whole cake thing in Rome, did you. Or the speeches or anything. So it’s nice to do it now, don’t you think?’

Jenny was prevented from replying by a roll of thunder, which was clearly audible even over the music from the iPod in the speaker.

‘Please let it not rain,’ begged Roisin out loud. ‘It isn’t supposed to rain today.’

‘Even if it does, it’ll be dry on the veranda,’ said Steffie. ‘And it’s not cold or anything.’

‘This is a garden party, not a veranda party,’ wailed Roisin.

‘That thunder was miles away,’ Davey assured her. ‘It mightn’t make it here at all.’

Jenny glanced towards the increasingly cloudy sky.

‘You should be good at weather forecasting, given that you’re into all that climate control stuff,’ Roisin said to Davey. ‘What do you think?’

‘Um, there’s a big difference between making wind turbines and weather forecasting,’ he told her.

‘Same ballpark,’ said Roisin.

‘Not.’

‘I thought that’s how you met the gorgeous Camilla,’ Roisin said. ‘Weather stuff.’

‘At a conference,’ said Davey.

‘And you love her madly,’ said Steffie.

Jenny was enjoying their banter but didn’t speak herself.

‘We’re good,’ Davey said, even though Steffie knew it was more than that.

‘Good?’ Roisin snorted. ‘What does that mean, Davey Sheehan?’

‘Taking it easy.’ He hadn’t minded saying something to Steffie, but he didn’t want Roisin to know about the engagement ring in his pocket. She’d only start trying to stage-manage his proposal. ‘No pressure.’

‘You too?’ Roisin shook her head. ‘You and Steffie are quite a pair. There’s some excuse for her – she’s still in her twenties – but you’re nearly forty. Practically middle-aged. The time for taking it easy has passed you by.’

Steffie chuckled at Davey’s offended expression.

‘It’s true. Tell them, Mum.’ Roisin put her hands on her hips. ‘These days everyone thinks they have all the time in the world to do what they want. But it’s not that straightforward. Women leave it late to have their children and then find out they can’t get pregnant. Men can’t keep up with their kids because they’re the wrong side of forty.’

‘Roisin has a point,’ said Jenny. ‘You think you can have it all, when you want it, but you can’t. Life isn’t like that, no matter what the self-help books and the advertising companies want you to believe.’ She set her empty glass on the table, surprised that she’d finished the rosé without noticing.

‘I don’t believe I can have it all,’ said Steffie. ‘But I have what I want right now.’ If you discount the fact that I’m going to break up with Steve and I haven’t heard anything about my design bid yet, she added to herself.

‘So do I,’ said Davey. He went to pat the box in the pocket of his jacket and then remembered that he’d finally taken it off and hung it in the hallway. Which possibly wasn’t the brightest thing to have done, he supposed. But he’d been sweltering and the time wasn’t right to propose to Camilla yet. That would be later, when everyone was chilled after a pleasant day. Which it had been so far.

‘Does it seem like forty years?’ Steffie asked her mother.

Jenny shook her head. ‘My entire life seems to have passed in the blink of an eye,’ she said.

‘Exactly my point.’ Roisin looked pleased with herself.

‘I bet it was amazing getting married in Rome,’ Steffie said. ‘You looked so happy and so pretty in your dress. It was really cute and simple.’

‘Simple was all I could afford,’ said Jenny.

‘I prefer the pic of you on your honeymoon in Sorrento,’ Roisin remarked. ‘The one on the boat. You look very glamorous in that one.’

Jenny had been feeling glamorous. And forgetting how things really were. But then, she told herself, I’m good at that, I do it all the time.

‘It’s a pity they’re all so fuzzy,’ observed Steffie.

‘Your iPhone takes better photos than the camera we had back then,’ Jenny said.

And just as well Steve Jobs had only started tinkering in his garage in the seventies, she thought, as she refilled her glass. If there had been iPhones and internet and streaming and everything in 1975, things would have been very, very different.

After Rome, Sorrento had been glorious. The sea breeze was a welcome relief from the stifling heat of the city and Jenny had felt fresh and energised again. Pascal asked her every morning if she felt OK and she told him that she was fine and that it mustn’t have been proper morning sickness, because if it had been surely it would’ve lasted much longer. In fact, she said, she was sure it really had been nothing more than a bug. The test could have been wrong. After all, she didn’t feel pregnant. She didn’t feel anything.

Jenny wasn’t all that clued about pregnancy. Her mother had given her a booklet about it when she first started having periods, and there had been two lessons on The Female Body in her convent school, but neither had gone into any great detail about what was in store. The lessons had been given by Sister Genevieve, the youngest and prettiest of the nuns, but she’d blushed bright red every time she’d said the word vagina, and the class of girls had blushed along with her.

Pascal suggested that she take another test. It was harder to find a home kit in Sorrento than it had been in Rome, but when she did and she took the test, it confirmed her pregnancy. Which was just as well, she thought, given all the trouble they’d gone to in Rome a few days earlier.

Every morning she looked at her stomach, trying to assess how much it had grown. She thought she had a slight bump, but she was still significantly slimmer than most of the other people on holiday. So she was perfectly happy to lie on a sunbed by the pool of the Villa Maritimo in her skimpy bikini and devour the Harold Robbins book she’d bought at the airport. She’d never read a blockbuster before and she was enthralled by the glamour and sex on the pages in front of her. If she’d read it before sleeping with Pascal for the first time, she thought, she’d have been much more adventurous in bed. Although she supposed in the end she’d been adventurous enough.

It wasn’t all lying around – with her Celtic complexion Jenny couldn’t take too much sun, even under the biggest umbrella the Villa Maritimo could provide, and Pascal was happy to explore the town and surrounding area. They also took the ferry to Capri, where they visited the Certosa di San Giacomo and the Grotta Azzura before finding a pavement café where they ate ice cream and drank espressos. (Both of them developed a lifelong addiction to Italian coffee after their stay.) They only had a few photos left on their film roll, and they were keeping them for a visit to Pompeii, but on the return journey Pascal took one of her as she channelled her inner Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida by standing at the handrail of the ferry, a large sunhat on her head and equally large sunglasses on her face.

In the evenings they ate in the least expensive of the restaurants near their hotel, but it was still a big thrill to sit at a table in the night air and be waited on. That was another new experience for Jenny. Eating out in Dublin usually meant going to some kind of burger bar, because most of the other restaurants were out of her price range. Italy was a different life and she wanted to make the most of it. Because after her baby was born, she knew that things would change for ever.

She said this to Pascal, who agreed that there would be changes but who also reminded her that he was ready for those changes. He promised her that he’d be a good father to their child. He told her that she meant more to him than anyone in the world, and on their last night in Sorrento he didn’t wave away the flower sellers who went from table to table in the restaurants trying to get people to buy overpriced roses, but bought one for her and told her to keep it for ever.

Jenny wasn’t a sentimental person. She didn’t believe in keepsakes. But she’d kept the rose.

Chapter 12

‘Sweet Mother of God,’ muttered Carl. ‘I don’t effing believe it.’

‘What don’t you believe?’ Summer leaned her head on his shoulder.

‘Bernice,’ said Carl. ‘Over there.’