Skeletons (10 page)

‘So …’ she said. ‘Happy birthday.’

‘Thirty-eight effing years old. Can you believe it?’

‘You don’t look it, Jess.’ She knew just how to get on the good side of this particular sister-in-law.

‘OK, for that you get a piece of the birthday cake early. Will you get it out of the fridge, Mum?’

‘I’ll do it.’ Jen hated the way Jessie always barked orders at Amelia, as if she was a stroppy teenager. ‘Amelia, sit down with us.’

Amelia obliged, happy to do whatever anybody asked of her. ‘I wonder what time Poppy will get here?’

‘Why didn’t she come with you?’ Jessie demanded. ‘That would have made more sense than her getting the train, surely.’

‘She took Maisie to the seaside yesterday. They stayed in Bognor.’

‘Jesus. Really? Why?’

Just at that moment the doorbell rang and Poppy let herself in, holding Maisie with one hand and dragging a large suitcase with the other.

‘Don’t you ever lock your front door?’ she asked as she gave Jessie a cursory hug.

‘This is the countryside,’ Jessie said smugly. ‘No need.’

Amelia swept Maisie up, sitting her granddaughter on her lap.

‘How long have you come for?’ Jessie demanded, eyeing Poppy’s suitcase.

‘I have a four-year-old, Jess. You’ll soon find out what that’s like,’ Poppy said tetchily.

‘OK, OK, I only asked –’

‘This is my favourite weekend of the year,’ Amelia interrupted, oblivious. ‘Now all we need is for Charles to make the gin and tonics, and it’ll be perfect.’

‘So,’ Poppy said, when they somehow found themselves on their own for a few minutes. Actually, Jen had gone to use the bathroom and, when she came out, her sister-in-law had pounced on her like a trapdoor spider.

‘What’s new with you?’

Jen had been dreading this question. Obviously, she wasn’t about to blurt out her suspicions, but she was terrified Poppy would know she was holding something back. Poppy had this kind of bullshit radar that could cut through anything. Jen
had once tried to keep from her the fact that she was pissed off with Jessie over something she’d said to Jason. (She couldn’t now remember what it had been about – Jessie had an endless back catalogue of harsh remarks and faux pas. It had been a long time ago, when Jen
didn’t know them all so well, and she hadn’t wanted to criticize one sister to another. These days, dissecting Jessie was one of Jen and Poppy’s favourite pastimes.) Anyway, Poppy had seen through it in an instant, refusing to get off the phone until Jen had told her what
was wrong.

Actually, that was when they had made their ‘no taboos’ rule. Jen had stuck to it ever since, more or less, and as far as she knew, so had Poppy.

‘Nothing much. Oh, how did the date go?’

Poppy sighed. Poppy was a great sigher. ‘It didn’t.’

‘Ryan didn’t show up?’

‘No. Well, he didn’t stand me up either. He emailed me the day before and said he’d been thinking about all those demands I’d made, and there was no point in us meeting. He basically said that if I was that pushy now, he
couldn’t imagine what I’d be like to go out with, and he didn’t think it was worth finding out.’

‘He said that?’

‘Well, that was the subtext. He was much more circumspect. But I knew what he was getting at.’

‘Or perhaps he just didn’t look like his picture after all.’

Poppy laughed. ‘Maybe. I did wonder if it was really all my fault or whether it was more that he had something to hide. Like acne scars. Or a wife.’

‘So … what now?’

‘I’ll keep trawling. Someone else will catch my eye one of these days. It’s a shame. I quite liked the look of him.’

‘Like you said before, better to find out now. His loss.’

‘Don’t say anything, will you?’

‘How many times? As if.’

‘Not even Jason.’

‘Not even Jason. Although I don’t think he’d judge.’

‘No, Jen.’

Jen started edging towards the safety of company, hoping Poppy would follow.

‘Is something up?’ Poppy said. The question Jen had been dreading. ‘You seem a bit low.’

‘No,’ Jen shot back, far too quickly. ‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Where are those girls?’ she heard Amelia calling from the kitchen.

Jen breathed an almost audible sigh of relief. ‘Here!’ she called back, and started to head in that direction. If she was going to keep her suspicions to herself, then she was going to need
to become a better actor.

Halfway through lunch Jen realized she felt exhausted. Eight people around one dinner table all shouting to be heard. Plus one soon-to-be-delivered baby – who was probably rethinking its decision to be born into this family at all, by now.

Jessie had reduced them all to tears of laughter re-enacting a recent antenatal class that had dealt with breach births and forceps and all manner of other horrors, describing how one of the other mothers-to-be had kept saying, ‘I’m
not giving anyone permission to do that to me. I just want that on record,’ over and over again.

Amelia kept slightly misunderstanding the point of the story and saying things like, ‘Were they actually trying to make her sign a consent form, then?’ or, ‘Had she gone into labour during the class?’ which would set
everyone off again.

Then, almost immediately, Jessie and Poppy started to have a fight because Jessie thought Poppy had made a disparaging comment about the size of her car – when, in fact, all Poppy had done was make a joke about it being bigger than her own flat.
It might have been, actually, Jen thought. It was close. It threatened to develop into one of those ‘You’re always putting me down’, ‘You think you’re better than the rest of us’, ‘Well, you’re just jealous, you always have been’ fights
that happened every couple of years and could blight a whole weekend.

‘You always do this. You always ruin it,’ Jessie said, becoming tearful.

Martin ran a protective hand over her belly and said, ‘It’s OK, Jess, don’t get upset.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Poppy said fractiously. ‘Grow up, Jess.’

‘Girls!’ Charles said, a warning note in his voice.

Jen still hadn’t really been able to look at him. She was sure he had noticed, because out of the corner of her eye she could see him watching her every now and then. She’d decided that, if challenged, she would claim another
migraine. A special kind of migraine that somehow rendered it possible to make eye contact with every person in the room except one.

‘Have I already told you about John from next door tripping down his front steps and breaking his ankle?’ Amelia suddenly asked, out of nowhere. This was always her tactic whenever a squabble broke out, pretend she hadn’t
noticed it, and it might just go away.

‘I didn’t start it,’ Poppy said defensively. ‘All I did was make a joke about the car being big. It wasn’t a value judgement.’

‘He’s been in St Thomas’s for a week and a half, waiting to have physio. They can’t send him home, because there’s no one to look after him.’

‘Can’t social services send someone round?’ Jason chipped in, trying to help derail the train.

Jessie’s eyes welled up with big fat tears. ‘I’ve lost my appetite now. I’m going to go and lie down.’

Jessie could have won competitions in crying. A shelf full of trophies for weeping, bawling and sobbing. A
certificate for first prize in the blubbering open. She was a frequent and dramatic crier. Of
course, she was also an actress, so Jen never knew how seriously to take her histrionics. She always fooled Martin, though. In all honesty, Jen usually just pretended it wasn’t happening, but with Jessie about to give birth any moment, she felt she perhaps ought to indulge her.

‘How’s the nesting been, Jess? Have you been tempted to clean out all the kitchen cupboards yet?’

Jessie turned to her, all smiles again, now she was the focus of attention. ‘Oh God, yes. And I’ve started baking, haven’t I, Martin? I mean, I’ve never been interested in making a cake in my life and now I can’t
stop.’

‘And I have the expanding girth to prove it,’ Martin said fondly. Martin already had three grown-up children by his first wife, and had never intended to have a second family, but – and Jen had to give him credit here – once Jessie
had announced she was pregnant, he had thrown himself into the role all over again with enthusiasm. He was still a big part of his older kids’ lives too and, unlike most men who end up with much younger second wives, he had actually been divorced from their mother before Jessie had
come along. He was a nice man, Jen thought, if a little too fond of babying Jessie who, in turn, was all too happy to be babied and treated like an indulged child rather than a wife. She had a tendency to treat Martin like a necessary irritation, and Jen often found herself feeling sorry for
him. He, on the other hand, seemed oblivious. He adored his wife and was blind to any of her faults.

Just like that, the tension dissipated and all attention
turned back to Jessie and the impending arrival of a new addition to the family. It was always that way. Privately, Jen called it the Masterson
tidal system. Out of nowhere, something would come along and wash away whatever had been there before. It was totally unpredictable. At first, Jen had watched in horror as Poppy and Jessie would go at it tooth and nail. How could two people she loved so much be throwing such hurtful darts at
one another? It was only after she had survived her own first fight with Jessie that she realized Jessie calling her a ‘fucking annoying bitch’ meant that she was totally accepted. It was almost a sign of affection. Like when a cat lifts its tail and pees up your curtains.

‘Please, have a boy,’ Jason was saying now, removing any last traces of tension in the air.

‘I’ll do my best,’ Jessie said, mock serious.

‘No chance,’ Charles said, knocking back the last of his wine. ‘Not in this family.’

‘God, we’re like freaks,’ Poppy chipped in. ‘Biologically unable to produce males.’

‘Good,’ Jessie said, laughing. ‘Who needs them, anyway?’

Jen did her best to smile along with everyone, but really she was scrutinizing her father-in-law. He was smiling at his wife fondly, laughing like he hadn’t a care in the world. She couldn’t work it out. How could he be so blasé, so
unconcerned, so … oblivious? How could he be so exactly like his usual relaxed, easy-going self, if he had a whole secret life going on?

He was flanked on one side by Jessie and on the other by Maisie. Leaning back in his chair, taking it all in, smiling
expansively, loving every moment. He looked up and caught her eye. She looked
away.

This wasn’t Charles. This wasn’t her adored father-in-law. This was a man who cheated on his wife – a man who had purported to be a shining example of stable husband and fatherhood to his three children his whole life, while
practising anything other than what he preached himself. Someone who, it turned out, was not the man all the people around the table, basking in his paternal glow, had always thought he was. This man felt like a stranger.

In the past few days, she had started to question whether everyone she knew mightn’t be harbouring a big secret. Not Jason, obviously. She had never doubted him. But now she found herself looking at Martin, wondering whether he might be a
secret philanderer. God knows, living with Jessie couldn’t be easy. Or did he like to dress up in her clothes whenever she went out? Or put a nappy on and get spanked by random strangers when his wife thought he was down the pub?

Unlikely, Jen knew, but suddenly anything seemed possible. Maybe Poppy was an alcoholic or a bulimic or had an addiction to sticking a compass into her thigh? Perhaps Jessie had a fancy man in Bognor? Or maybe she went shoplifting whenever she
got the chance? Actually, that last one didn’t seem so incredible. She had an inflated enough sense of entitlement – it might well stretch to thinking shops ought to give her stuff for free.

How did you ever truly know that the people you were close to were really the people you thought they were? Maybe if she had been there the day Charles had first laid eyes on Cass, it would have been obvious. He would have
come home looking different, smelling different, casually dropping the name of a woman he’d just met into the conversation.

Maybe there were always signs, it was just whether you chose to read them, or not.

‘Everything all right, sweetheart?’ Charles loomed large in the doorway of the slightly mouldy-smelling bedroom that had been allocated to Jen and Jason for the night. She had sneaked upstairs to unpack their things, safe in the
knowledge that overindulgence in food and wine had left the rest of the family almost comatose in the living room. Apparently, she’d been wrong.

Jen jumped, tried to laugh it off, managed to drop the clothes hangers she’d been holding.

‘You startled me.’

Charles turned on his megawatt smile. ‘I just thought you seemed a bit quiet at lunch, that’s all.’

He was fishing. He was worried that she’d seen through his charade of pretending Cass was his client, and he was trying to find out how serious the damage was.

‘Nothing wrong, is there?’

‘No! Of course not.’

‘Ah, there you are …’

Jen almost cried with relief as she saw her mother-in-law appear in the hallway.

‘… I have cake, and I can’t seem to get any takers. You’re my last hope.’

Jen leaned over and hugged her with relief. ‘Are you trying to kill us all?’ she said, with a forced laugh. ‘If I eat any more, I’ll explode, but I will come down with you, though.’

She began to follow Amelia down the stairs, leaving Charles hovering in the doorway of the bedroom.

‘I think an afternoon nap’s on the cards, don’t you?’ she said, not looking back.

Sometime later – she still didn’t know if it was twenty minutes or two hours – Jen became aware of Martin standing white-faced in the doorway. The rest of the family were dozing in their armchairs. Only Jessie was nowhere to be seen.

‘I think it’s started,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘Shit. Are you sure?’ She leapt up, feeling she should do something, although not entirely certain what.

‘What?’ Jason said groggily. It had gone dark outside, and it might as well have been six in the morning as six in the evening to the people inside. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The baby.’

‘I’ll ring for an ambulance,’ Jason said dramatically, wide awake now. ‘None of us can drive her to the hospital, we’re all over the limit.’

‘No. Wait. How far apart are her contractions?’

‘I haven’t timed them,’ Martin said. ‘Should I?’ He had clearly forgotten anything he had learned in antenatal class. Or at the births of his three older children come to that.

‘Yes,’ Jen said, glad of something constructive to do. ‘I’ll come in with you. Jason, make us some coffee, will you?’

‘Has something happened?’ Amelia was saying as they left the room.

‘What’s going on?’ Poppy added. ‘What time is it?’

Jessie was half sitting, half lying on the bed, pale and sweating, hair fanned out on the pillow as if it had been arranged by a stylist. Jen thought she looked more like Kristen Stewart’s older
sister playing someone who was in labour than someone who was actually in labour. She had never really seen Jessie act, by the way. Not because she hadn’t made the effort, but because Jessie’s career always seemed to be lodged more in her head than in reality. She had played a
car crash victim in
Casualty
once, but that was about it. Jen remembered her being incensed that her head had been bandaged in such a way that her face was unrecognizable.

‘Why did no one tell me contractions were this painful?’ she demanded when she saw Jen now.

‘I’m sure they did, Jess. Do you want me to get your mum? Or one of the others?’

Jessie grabbed Jen’s wrist. ‘No, you stay.’ She sat up and shouted, ‘Jason, get Mum!’

Jen wasn’t sure he’d heard her, but then Jessie let out an almighty scream. Jen was convinced she was shouting more loudly now that she had an audience, thereby ensuring that no one in the house could remain in ignorance of what was
going on for long. The performance opportunity of a lifetime.

The next few hours were a blur. Jen, Poppy and Amelia sat around the bed timing, soothing and advising, while Martin held Jessie’s hand and wiped her forehead tenderly. Jason had eventually managed to track down a midwife at the nearest
hospital, in Arundel, and was now barking occasional pieces of information through the door.

‘She says to call back when they’re about four minutes
apart. When she has three in ten minutes, that’s when it all starts getting really serious,’ he shouted, running back
downstairs to make more coffee and check on Maisie – who was hiding out in the living room, probably traumatized by the sick cow noises coming from her aunt’s bedroom.

‘I told her we’d all had a few drinks, and she told me off, but then I explained it was a birthday lunch – and that the baby wasn’t due for two weeks, anyway – and she was a bit nicer after that. She gave me the number of a
local minicab firm,’ he called out the next time they heard from him. ‘She’s trying to track down your allocated person.’

Jessie let out another almighty wail, and dug her nails into Martin’s hand, almost drawing blood.

‘How long?’ Jason shouted through the door.

‘Five and a half minutes since the last one,’ someone said.

‘Oh Jesus,’ they heard him mutter.

‘How are you feeling?’ Jen squeezed her sister-in-law’s free hand.

‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’ Jessie said through gritted teeth.

‘Our midwife is lovely, isn’t she, Jess? I wonder where she is. Did she say if she had holiday booked?’ Martin said, out of nowhere. ‘It seems odd to let someone else deliver the baby.’

‘I don’t care if the postman delivers it, just get this fucking thing out of me,’ Jessie said, causing the rest of them to stifle a laugh.

Three hours later, they were all still sitting there.

‘Me and Dad have made sandwiches,’ Jason said,
popping his head round the door. ‘If anyone can face eating. And Dad wants to know if anyone wants a drink.’

‘Is Maisie OK?’

‘Fine. She’s eaten. Don’t worry about her. It’s giving us something to do, otherwise we’d just feel helpless.’

Jen blew him a kiss just as Jessie let out another roar.

‘Oh my God, I’m out of here,’ Jason said, beating a hasty retreat. ‘How long?’ he called as he went.

‘Still five and a half,’ Poppy shouted. ‘Tell Maisie I’ll come down and say goodnight to her in a minute.’

In the end, the midwife – not Jessie and Martin’s allocated one, but a friendly, competent-seeming woman nonetheless – came to the house, arriving at four in the morning and shooing all of them except Martin out of the room. They all
congregated in the living room, which was spotless, Jason and Charles obviously having discovered that cleaning was a good displacement activity.

‘You’ve even organized the books in the bookshelves, by the look of it,’ Poppy said, incredulous.

‘By topic,’ Jason said. ‘Actually, before the midwife arrived we were about to go for alphabetical.’

Even if it hadn’t been for the array of noises coming from upstairs, no one would have dared to even think of going to sleep. Jen tried to persuade Amelia to lie down for a while, but she wouldn’t hear of it – although they all
promised to rouse her, if anything happened.

Jen snuggled up with Jason on one of the big sofas. It was the colour of undercooked liver and smelled of wet dog, despite the fact that Jessie and Martin’s beloved old beagle, Sparky, had finally keeled over about six months
before. Actually, their whole house was the colour of undercooked liver and smelled of dog. You couldn’t accuse them of not being committed.

Although she was shattered, Jen could still feel the adrenaline rushing around her body. Everyone was a bit hyper, a bit wired, a bit on edge. Excited, like they were kids, and it was the night before Christmas. Like they were all involved in a
big adventure together.

By midday, they had all slept a bit – on and off – despite the noise. They had half-heartedly made breakfast and picked at it, and a few of them had showered and changed, quickly, so as not to miss anything.

Jen was trying to think what they should do if the baby had still not arrived by the time she and Jason intended to leave for home. You heard about women who had long labours – thirty-six hours, forty-eight, even sixty – all the time, but both of
them had to be at work the next day and neither had the kind of job where you could just take the day off with no notice. It felt wrong to go before it was over, though. It would be like leaving a cinema without seeing the end of the film. Walking out of the football stadium just before
there was a last-minute goal. Well, on a much grander, more important scale, obviously.

She was just about to ask Jason what he thought they should do when a telltale wail suddenly announced the arrival of the newest member of the Masterson clan. They all sat bolt upright, not knowing what was expected of them. Jason got hold of
Jen’s hand and hung on to it. No one said anything until a couple of minutes later, when Martin ran down the stairs, stuck his head round the
door, a look of sheer delight on his face, and said, ‘Girl!’ before turning round and
running back up again.

As if on cue, Poppy, Amelia and Jen all burst into tears. Jen looked at Charles and saw that he had a smile on his face like the Cheshire Cat. Like he couldn’t have been more proud. Like all that mattered to him was his family.

She no longer had any doubt. Whatever it was that was going on, it had to stop.