I push open the door to my mother’s room into a cloud of Shalimar perfume and, possibly, cigarette smoke. She better not have been smoking in here. Mum is sitting at the mirror in her silk kimono, busy outlining her lips in her signature carmine. ‘Goodness, that’s a murderous expression. What do you want, darling?’
Darling.
The strange cruelty of that word.
I keep my tone calm, reasonable. I am being my best self, today. ‘Olivia is going to behave herself tomorrow, isn’t she?’
My mother gives a weary sigh. Takes a sip of the drink she’s got next to her. It looks suspiciously like a martini. Great, so she’s already on the strong stuff.
‘I made her my bridesmaid,’ I say. ‘I could have picked from twenty other people.’ Not quite true. ‘But she’s acting as though it’s this big drag. I’ve hardly asked her to do anything. She didn’t come to the hen do even though there was a room free in the villa for her. It did look odd—’
‘I could have come instead, darling.’
I stare at her. It would never have occurred to me that she might have wanted to come. Besides, no bloody way was I ever going to invite my mother to the hen do. It would, inevitably, have morphed into the Araminta Jones show.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘None of that really matters. It’s in the past now, I suppose. But is she at least going to try and look happy for me?’
‘She’s had a difficult time,’ Mum says.
‘You mean because her boyfriend broke up with her or whatever it was? They were only going out for a few months according to what I’ve seen on Instagram. Clearly a romance of epic proportions!’ A note of petulance has crept in, despite my best intentions.
My mother is now concentrating on the more precise work of outlining her Cupid’s bow. ‘But, darling,’ she says, once she has
finished, ‘when you think about it, you and the gorgeous Will haven’t been together all that long, have you?’
‘That’s rather different,’ I say, nettled. ‘Olivia’s nineteen. She’s still a teenager. Love is what teenagers think has happened when actually they’re just stuffed full of hormones. I thought I was in love when I was about her age.’
I think of Charlie at eighteen: the deep biscuit-tan, the white line sometimes visible beneath his board-shorts. It occurs to me that my mother never knew – or cared to know – about my adolescent affairs of the heart. She was too busy with her own love life. Thank God; I’m not sure any teenager wants that kind of scrutiny. And yet I can’t help but feel that this all proves she and Olivia are much closer than we ever were.
‘When your father left me,’ Mum says, ‘you have to remember that I was about the same age. I had a newborn baby—’
‘I know, Mum,’ I say, as patiently as I can. I’ve heard more times than I ever needed to about how my birth ended what definitely, probably, maybe would have been a highly successful career for my mother.
‘Do you know what it was like for me?’ she asks. Ah, here it comes: the same old script. ‘Trying to have a career and a tiny baby? Trying to make a living, to make something of myself? Just so I could put food on the table?’
You didn’t have to continue trying to get acting jobs, I think. If you’d really wanted to put food on the table that probably wasn’t the most sensible way to do it. We didn’t have to spend your tiny income on an apartment off Shaftesbury Avenue in Zone One and not be able to afford to eat as a result. It’s not my fault you made some bad decisions when you were a teenager and got yourself knocked up.
As usual, I don’t say any of this. ‘We were talking about Olivia,’ I say, instead.
‘Well,’ Mum says, ‘let’s just say that there was a little more to Olivia’s experience than a bad break-up.’ She examines the glossy finish of her nails – carmine, too, as though her fingers have been dipped in blood.
Of course, I think. This is Olivia, so it had to be special and different in some way. Careful, Jules. Don’t be bitter. Best behaviour. ‘What, then?’ I ask. ‘What else was there?’
‘It’s not my place to say.’ This is surprisingly discreet, coming from my mother. ‘And besides,’ she says, ‘Olivia’s like me in that – an empath. We can’t simply … smother our feelings and put a brave face on it like some people can.’
I know that in a sense this is true. I know that Olivia does feel things deeply, too deeply, that she does take them to heart. She’s a dreamer. She was always coming home from school with playground scrapes, and bruises from bumping into things. She’s a nail-biter, a hair-splitter, an over-thinker. She’s ‘fragile’. But she’s also spoiled.
And I can’t help sensing implied criticism in Mum’s reference to ‘some people’. Just because the rest of us don’t wear our hearts on our sleeves, just because we have found a way of managing our feelings – it doesn’t mean they’re not there.
Breathe, Jules.
I think of how Olivia looked so oddly at me when I told her I was happy to have her as my bridesmaid. I couldn’t help feeling a small pang as, trying on the dress, she slipped out of her clothes and revealed her slender, stretch-mark-free body. I know she felt me staring. She is definitely too thin and too pale. And yet she looked undeniably gorgeous. Like one of those nineties heroin-chic models: Kate Moss lounging in a bedsit with a string of fairy lights behind her. Looking at her, I was caught between those two emotions I always seem to feel when it comes to Olivia: a deep, almost painful tenderness, and a shameful, secret envy.
I suppose I haven’t always been as warm towards her as I might. Now she’s older, she’s wised up a little – and of late, since the engagement party especially, she has been noticeably cool. But when Olivia was younger she used to trail around after me like an adoring puppy. I got quite used to her displays of unrequited affection. Even as I envied her.
Mum turns around on her chair now. Her face is suddenly very sombre, uncharacteristically so. ‘Look. She’s had a difficult time, Jules. You can’t possibly begin to know the half of it. That poor kid has been through a lot.’
The poor kid. I feel it, at that. I thought I’d be immune to it by now. I’m ashamed to find that I am not: the little dart of envy, under my ribs.
I take a deep breath. Remind myself that here I am, getting married. If Will and I have kids their childhood will be nothing like mine was – Mum with her string of boyfriends, all actors, always ‘on the verge of a big break’. Someone finding me a place to sleep on the coats at all the inevitable Soho afterparties, because I was six years old and all my classmates would have been tucked up hours before.
Mum turns back to the mirror. She squints at herself, pushes her hair one way, then the other, twists it up behind her head. ‘Got to look good
for the new arrivals,’ she says. ‘Aren’t they handsome, all of Will’s friends?’
Oh Christ.
Olivia doesn’t know how good she had it, how lucky she was. To her it was all normal. When her dad, Rob, was around, Mum became this proper mother figure: cooked meals, insisted on bed by eight, there was a playroom full of toys. Mum eventually got bored of playing happy families. But not before Olivia had had a whole, contented childhood.
Not before I had begun half hating that little girl with everything she didn’t even know she had.
I’m itching with the need to break something. I pick up the Cire Trudon candle on the dressing table, heft it in my hand, imagine how it would feel to watch it splinter to smithereens. I don’t do this any more – I’ve got it under control. I definitely wouldn’t want Will to see this side of me. But around my family I find myself regressing, letting all the old pettiness and envy and hurt come rushing back until I am teenage Jules, plotting to get away. I must be bigger than this. I have forged my own path. I have built it all on my own, something stable and powerful. And this weekend is a statement of that. My victory march.
Through the window I hear the sound of a boat’s engine guttering. It must be Charlie arriving. Charlie will make me feel better.
I put the candle back down.
