‘Oh, not bad I guess, considering we were at Robert and Vesna’s. They gave everyone
handmade
presents.’
‘Nice,’ he managed.
‘Yeah, just what I needed, a pair of gingham-covered photo frames.’ Deborah laughed sharply. ‘With lace.’
The door opened suddenly and all the racket of the dining room burst in. Rose appeared, asking loudly, ‘We’re making coffee, James, will you have some?’
‘Sure!’ he cried, squashing the open mobile to his chest. ‘Be back in a tick!’ Rose nodded, smiling, and the door closed again.
‘Sorry, Deb,’ he said.
‘Who was that?’ Deborah asked.
‘Friend of ours. Ah… ’
Should I lie?
he thought desperately.
Make up a name?
‘God, that voice sounded familiar. Someone I’ve met?’
James felt like he might faint. ‘No, don’t think so,’ he said. ‘English friends. People we’ve met here.’
They talked a little while longer and said their goodbyes. James rejoined the party feeling as though he’d just avoided a nasty car accident.
‘Everything okay?’ Silver asked him quietly. He nodded and squeezed her hand. Then he took his phone out again and turned it off, just in case.
Lying in bed that night, the house restored to order, Rose murmured to Roland, ‘I think that was one of the loveliest Christmases we’ve ever had, don’t you?’ And Roland sleepily agreed.
But after he’d fallen asleep Rose lay there, thinking about that odd little moment before the meal when she had sensed James’s momentary withdrawal from her.
What was it we were talking about?
she asked herself, and rebuilt the conversation. The dress, the MoMA exhibition, Erica nutcase Lambden… Had she sounded like she was showing off? Or smug? Oh, if only they knew! She hadn’t just worked hard back then, she’d been exploited. Twelve- and fifteen-hour days, hardly a day off, for ridiculous pay, and Erica’s terrifying tantrums to deal with…And she’d told them about Rachel (
Ah, dear Rachel!
Rose still missed her) and the Ibiza boutique…That was hard work, too, it hadn’t just been handed to her on a plate. And she had hit middle age there, surrounded by dewy hippie chicks and glamorous blow-ins spoilt for choice. She remembered with a blush of humiliation even now, thirty years later, that semi-famous musician she’d gone to bed with once who lost his erection after he’d taken her bra off, his contemptuous ‘I can’t screw a bird with floppy tits!’. She had never confided that to a soul. How grateful she was that her children would never know of the idiotic things she’d done in the promiscuous, drug-addled seventies.
Carefree? No, we were careless, that’s all. We had no idea how to care about anything.
Then a single sentence from that pre-dinner conversation froze her.
I walked away that night without a backward glance.
How could she have said that, so blithely! To James, whom she had also walked away from, without a backward glance.
That’s what she’d done to her parents, too, when she was seventeen: packed up and moved on forever virtually overnight, and there’d been nothing they could do about it. She’d done it to Alex and the children thirteen years later, when she couldn’t bear that life a moment longer. Just walked out. And in London, once she’d taken what she could from Erica Lambden, and got a better offer. And again with that perfectly pleasant Dutch chap Bart she’d been living with (for five years! think of that!) when the whole Ibiza thing became stale and jaded…
She put her hands to her face, covering her eyes, as she thought with sudden painful clarity,
That’s what I’ve always done!
She felt overwhelmed with horror. All the ghastly messes she’d left behind, again and again.
But I will never, never leave Roland
. This popped unbidden into her mind, this rock of truth. Her rock. Roland.
Every time she’d felt held back, she had blamed other people. Thought they must be discarded, like an old coat. It had taken her such a long time to get beyond that; to grow up. It was Roland who kept her steady in the world now. Not about to fly off! Not any more.
And James. Already he was such a precious part of her life. Would that happen again, more and more perhaps, once she got to know her other children, too? Was she really going to have that chance again?
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 16
Olivia’s secondary school was three times the size of her old primary, which meant three times as many kids to deal with. Twelve hundred individual cases of mutual bafflement. On the very first day she stood at the edge of the quadrangle feeling assaulted by the tumult, wondering how on earth she was going to get through even a week of this, let alone six years, when a girl walked up to her. She was a fairly small girl with almost white-blonde hair and an old-fashioned sort of face, not sweet-and-pretty old-fashioned but solemn, long, like a medieval painting, and in a cool self-possessed way, without smiling, she said, ‘You look interesting. What’s your name?’
‘Olivia Hume,’ said Olivia.
‘I’m Fleur,’ the blonde girl said. ‘Hansen,’ she added. She tilted her head slightly to one side. ‘Olivia,’ she said consideringly. ‘Oh-liv-ee-ah.’ She looked up at the sky, and back again. ‘That’s an awful lot of syllables for just six letters. Don’t you think?’
‘I get called Ol. Or Ollie.’
Fleur pulled a face. ‘Oh no! You can’t go through life as
Ollie
! It makes you sound like a cartoon character. A fat one. Which you are not.’
Actually, come to think of it, she was right. It was a crap nickname, and probably time for a change. ‘So what do you suggest, Fleur Hansen?’
‘Let’s see…. ’ Fleur clasped her hands in front of her face, resting the bridge of her nose on her interlocked fingers. She looked a bit like a saint praying. Then she lowered her hands and nodded. ‘As a name for teachers to use, Olivia is fine. To be read out at assembly, or written, or printed, Olivia Hume is perfectly acceptable. It has poise, it has dignity.
Ollie
, on the other hand,’ and here she held her right hand up at face level and used a pinched thumb and forefinger to pick up the offending diminutive and dump it in an imaginary bin, ‘is ugly, goofy, and gone.’
‘And with those few words,’ Olivia observed, ‘the companion of her childhood years was banished from her life forever.’
‘Correct. And from the chrysalis into which the ugly caterpillar had disappeared there emerged the dazzling butterfly –
Liv
.’
‘Liv. Liver?’
‘Puh-lease! Liv has an upward quality. Leaping.’ Fleur’s small pale hand gracefully indicated this. ‘Almost weightless.
Liv
. Liv Tyler springs to mind.
Lord of the Rings
: elven princess, valiant and beautiful
and
she gets the guy. This is impeccable. You can’t complain about Liv.’
‘Am I complaining? I hardly know her.’
‘That will come, my friend, that will come.’
My friend
. The words gave Olivia a little jolt. Had she ever heard them before, applied to her? Not that she could think of. A friend. A new name.
Why not?
She liked this girl, the look of her and the way she talked like she was reading from a book, almost, but not stiff like that. And she was not sarcastic, but…
sardonic
, that was it. She’d heard her mum say that approvingly,
a sardonic sense of humour.
Olivia liked all of that.
This could be good
, she thought.
This could be excellent.
To Robert’s surprise, being the principal was both easier and more pleasant than being the vice-principal. He’d dreaded saying goodbye completely to classroom teaching, not being ‘at the chalk-face’ as he liked to say, but he found he didn’t miss it at all. When Robert had first gone into teaching he’d talked about having ‘a vocation to imbue children with a love of learning’, but over the years he’d come to realise that in fact he’d decided to become a teacher because he loved schoolwork. He’d enjoyed teaching, certainly, but now he found that the work of running the school was just as satisfying; more so, if anything. How odd, that it should be the paperwork he loved.
He had been so anxious about whether he was up to the promotion, but once in the job he found it refreshingly unequivocal to be the acknowledged leader of the school community. As vice principal he’d had to keep a foot in every camp: the students, the parents, his fellow teachers, the various committees and administrating bodies. The first port of call for anyone with a problem. Robert’s new role protected him from a great deal of time-consuming petty bickering between factions. It was much easier to just get on with things. Privately he rather wished that the old-fashioned title still stood: he had always been a little in awe of the unabashed arrogance of ‘head’ combined with ‘master’. A little like ‘Superman’. He kept to himself the thought that it was a pity the title had had to change to the non-gender specific ‘principal’, because he knew it was a good thing. Progress!
And it
was
progress, too. Robert was aware that the appointment of a male principal could be seen as a conservative move these days, one which might well cause resentment among the overwhelmingly female staff, and among a number of the parents, too. He had sought the advice of Vesna, who as a senior nurse was adept at handling institutional tension between male and female authority, and that of certain trusted colleagues. Carefully then, he set about the work of consulting and reassuring, making it clear that his awareness of these issues was comprehensive, and that gender equity would be
addressed more thoroughly than ever under his leadership. Yes,
his
leadership, that was made clear, too.
A few weeks into the new school year, Robert knew that his appointment was now widely popular. The school community had breathed a collective sigh of relief and patted itself on the back. At last, he told himself, he could relax.
Just relax
, he thought, as he completed his end-of-day tour of the school late on a Friday afternoon, checking each empty classroom and office.
Settle in to the job.
He re-entered the cluster of offices, checking them one after another. He’d made it a rule never to turn off someone else’s computer, no matter how great the urge, but by now most of the administrative staff knew him so well that they humoured him and turned their own computers off completely at the end of the day. A last round – and there! In the room which used to be his, the vice-principal’s office, a skinny black tail emerging from under a pile of folders, a lead running to… a mobile phone! Long since finished recharging.
Hah!
Robert found the VP’s home number on his own mobile and rang her.
‘Bettina? Robert McDonald here. Yes, everything’s fine. Just locking up the offices and spotted your mobile phone here on your desk. Yes, thought you might have. Yes, that’s fine, we’ll be home, just doing pizza and videos tonight, you know, TGIF and all that. No problem. See you then, Bettina. Bye.’
You see? Eternal vigilance!
He wished for a jury before whom he could flourish this vindicating piece of evidence. He put Bettina’s mobile, with its charging unit, in his briefcase. And while he had it open, best to check the contents again: let’s see, his day-to-a-page diary, a few pieces of paperwork, a couple of notes from staff, some curriculum items for consideration. Featherlight, these days, his briefcase! All thanks to technology, there on its cord around his neck, weighing so little you couldn’t even be sure it was there without checking (so he checked): the USB key drive to transfer files between computers.
Marvellous gadget
!
The buoyant sense of achievement that finding the mobile phone had given him lasted Robert nearly all the way home. It wasn’t until he’d turned into his own street that a sneering internal voice intruded:
So what? So
what
if Bettina’s mobile had sat there all weekend? Do you honestly think the sky would’ve fallen in?
His shoulders actually slumped; he felt physically deflated.
Oh, you are pathetic!
At home, though, his mood was quickly restored. His daughters leaped on him as though he’d been away for a month. He hugged them happily. He and Vesna often talked about this, how lovely it was to have children who still enjoyed the company of their parents, and how they as parents must relish it, every minute,
now
, before the indifference (or worse) of adolescence changed things! Robert loved his domestic life, loved the way he and Vesna discussed every detail and apportioned the tasks and the responsibilities; he even loved the tasks themselves, right down to the pot-scrubbing and the lawn-mowing. Friday was their traditional relax-at-home night, so now there were Alexa’s and Bianca’s rival shortlists of preferred DVDs for the evening’s viewing to adjudicate on, then he made a simple salad while Vesna went through pizza choices and rang to order them. She came and sat beside him at the living room table, where the girls had put out the plates and cutlery and he was catching up with some stories in the paper.
‘Quick run-through of the weekend?’ she suggested.
‘I think I’ve got the schedule, darling’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, lunch with your family at Taylor’s Lakes, right?’
‘Yes, after I take the girls’ shopping for a present for Mum. And I’m getting them some new underwear, and socks.’
‘Jolly good. And they’re sleeping over at Joseph and Dana’s, that’s on the calendar, too. You’re on afternoon shift tomorrow,’ he said, stroking her hand, resting beside his on the newspaper. ‘Sunday I wouldn’t mind going to the nursery. I’ve been thinking some little white correas would look good in that new section of the rockery, what do you think?’
‘I think that would be lovely. And, something for Sunday afternoon.’
‘Oh? Not on the calendar yet?’ Robert’s fingertips started rubbing gently on his palms. What a good feeling that was, the dry susurration of clean skin on skin.
‘Not yet. I spoke to your father today. I think it would be nice for us all to go and see him. Maybe I could make a cake with the girls, take it over there for afternoon tea. Is that okay with you?’