Queen Mum (13 page)

Juno was wearing a grey devoré skirt suit and a tiara. The tiara was from Manny.

‘He says I’m Queen Mum, whatever happens,’ she laughed. ‘Let me top your glasses up.’

Tom was smiling because he was mildly drunk and it was late, but I couldn’t tell whether it was an ironic smile or a genuine one. I followed his gaze across Juno’s living room and
saw Sophie draping her arm across the back of Ben’s chair. Ben was doing his best not to notice.

‘It’s so wonderful to be back,’ Juno was saying. ‘You don’t realize how many little domestic things you rely on to get you through the day.’

‘Such as?’ I held my glass up for Manny.

‘My cookbooks. My herbs. The Gaggia.’

‘It’s all food-related, notice,’ said Manny. ‘She hasn’t said anything about missing the family.’

‘But I
did
! How can you doubt it?’

She was glittering this evening. The sleeveless tunic top draped beautifully across her hips and the skirt kind of swirled round her ankles every time she stood up. I’d have liked one of
those skirts but it wouldn’t have looked the same on me. I’m not as willowy as Juno, and my complexion’s too fair for grey, I look washed out. I’d have looked an absolute
twit in a tiara.

Even Tom had seemed impressed by how lovely she looked. ‘Goodness, we must have the wrong house, Ma’am,’ he’d said when she first opened the door to us. He’d done a
little bow. ‘You’re very regal tonight, Mrs Kingston.’ While Juno was taking our coats, I took the opportunity to kiss him on the lips. He squeezed my hand; not angry tonight.

‘And you should see the way Lee eats pizza,’ Juno was saying now. ‘He folds it up and
stuffs
it in. Then his mouth’s so full he can hardly chew.’ She mimed
it for us, and it was funny. ‘Of course, the boys just copy him, and the whole lot talk with their mouths full, so there’s all this mashed-up food on display.’

‘Charming,’ said Tom. ‘You’ve put me right off my cashews.’

‘I don’t know why Kim hasn’t said anything to them. What were her table manners like, Manny?’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice.’

‘But you reckoned her cooking wasn’t up to much.’

‘It was mostly ready meals.’

Juno pulled a face. I thought, We had Tesco’s lasagne last night, but I didn’t say anything.

‘The horror, the horror,’ said Tom. ‘You’ll all have gone down with scurvy by the end of the week.’

‘We did have vegetables,’ said Manny. ‘We weren’t fed entirely on E numbers and preservatives.’

‘And she’s a real chain-smoker, isn’t she?’

‘She’s giving up,’ chimed Sophie from the arm of the sofa where she was now perched. If she got any closer to Ben, she’d be in his lap. ‘We persuaded her,
didn’t we, Paxo?’

Pascale, sitting on the floor at Ben’s feet with her back against the sofa, nodded seriously. ‘We gave her all the facts, and told her it was her choice.’

Juno smiled sadly. ‘I’m sure that’s what she intends to do, Soph, but I wouldn’t pin my hopes on her sticking to her resolution.’

‘Her sort never do,’ I heard Tom whisper, but luckily nobody heard him except me.

I said: ‘Do you think they will change their lifestyle in any way as a result of your visit? What kind of an impact do you think you made, overall?’

‘They didn’t appreciate you, did they, my love?’ said Manny.

Juno laughed. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

‘You did say it. When you first got home.’

‘I was tired and emotional, that’s all. No, there was a little friction, it’s true, especially at the end of the first week, but that’s only natural when you come into
someone else’s household and disrupt their rhythm. Everyone’s feelings had settled down by the start of the second week, though. Lee’s so passive it’s not true; I think you
couldn’t have a good row with him if you tried. And the boys were hardly there. I’ve never seen such a fragmented family. Lee kept saying, “It’s the modern way,” and I
kept pointing out that my family weren’t like that. It’s not parenting what Kim and Lee do, it’s Bed-and-Breakfasting. I swear they don’t know where the boys are half the
time. See, I
always
know where Soph and Pascale are.’

‘That’s true,’ said Sophie.

‘No, but that’s because I’m being a responsible mother. And you’re only thirteen.’

‘And the minute we turn, what, sixteen, seventeen, you’ll be off our case?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Juno.

‘Actually,’ said Manny, ‘I’m sure Kim does know where her boys are even when they’re out. She didn’t strike me as blatantly irresponsible. Even if her cooking
wasn’t up to much.’

While her dad was talking, Sophie murmured something in Ben’s ear. He looked shifty, then turned to Pascale and spoke to her. She nodded and got up. ‘We’re going to leave you
sad oldies down here,’ she announced, ‘and go listen to some decent CDs. If that’s OK?’

‘Us oldies’ll manage to stagger on without you, yes,’ said Manny. ‘You may be excused. But if your so-called music gets too loud, it’s a boat trip up the River Dee,
remember?’

Pascale grinned and held out a hand to Ben. He took it awkwardly, then Sophie grabbed his other arm and they more or less frog-marched him out. I couldn’t read his expression.

‘I do believe, though,’ Juno was saying, ‘that I gave them something to think about in some areas. I’m sure Kim will find Chris and Marco behaving much more responsibly
when she comes back. I did get them to make a meal from scratch, in the end, by standing over them. They promised me they’d do her my roasted vegetable and bacon sauce when she came back. In
fact, Chris said he couldn’t believe it was so easy.’

*

*

‘Do you think Juno was drunk?’ I asked Tom when we’d got back home.

‘Drunk on something.’

‘Rioja.’

‘Relief, I’d say,’ he smiled.

When I told Tom that Juno would be joining us in Cadgwith for the day, he groaned, but not with any real conviction.

‘It’s only for the day. Not even a day; lunch.’

He looked out of the hotel window at the narrow line of sea. ‘If they’re not still here for the evening meal, I’ll eat my suitcase.’

‘I had to invite them.’

‘Why? It’s our holiday. Emphasis on
our
.’

When I hung my head and sighed, he turned round and ruffled my hair, saying, ‘Oh, I don’t mind, really. So long as they don’t end up staying over, booking into the hotel next
door on one of Juno’s mad whims. I take it they’re all coming.’

‘Manny’s down to see a gallery in the area, an exhibition by someone he helped fund a few years ago, I think Juno said. So they were kind of going right past us.’

He nodded over at Ben, who was sitting on the opposite window seat, wearing his headphones. ‘If it’s a windy day, I still want to fly the kites.’

Ben had spotted a stunt kite on the second day and bought it immediately with his pocket money. Of course, Tom had to show him how to fly it – lucky we were holidaying on a cliff –
and from then on, they’d both been hooked. Tom had bought two more kites since, and was seeing if they could be modified to make them fly even better. Father and son hadn’t got on so
well in ages. Boring old Mum sat and watched them from far away, with an unread paperback in her hand.

When you lose someone you love intensely, you have to learn again how to sit alone and think. Time makes the memories manageable. Still painful; you never get over the pain, but you learn to
live around it. People talk about different shades of grief, but I’d say there’s a whole spectrum of colours, not all of them ugly. Four summers later, I could recline on the grass and
observe Ben and Tom together, and think: Joe would have loved this. What would he have been doing? We’d have bought him his own kite, and he’d be crashing it repeatedly and laughing, or
getting cross. He’d be bringing it over to me all the time to help him untangle it. Ben might be teasing him; Tom would be grumbling about the way he should look after toys more, the way dads
do in normal families. We probably looked normal from the outside.

Do you regard us as normal? I could have asked Juno, now, as she sat next to me making the world’s longest daisy chain: Does Manny?

She squinted sideways at me, shading her eyes with her hand. ‘I’ve never seen the sky so blue. Fantastic. We could be in France.’

It was still cold, sitting on the cliff top, watching kites. ‘If we were in France, we wouldn’t have to wear our cardigans.’

‘True.’

A brown butterfly landed on her handbag, fanning its wings gently up and down. ‘Oh, look,’ I said, in the voice I use at the nursery.

‘It’s a small copper,’ said Juno, amused, ‘and I’m not three any more.’

‘How come you know everything? Does it not get boring?’

The butterfly took off again and Juno began draping daisies over my hair. ‘Unimaginably.’

In the distance, Ben crashed his kite at Pascale’s feet. She jumped and laughed, and Sophie took the opportunity to mock-hit him. Manny strode over to pick it up and Tom came and stood
next to him, holding one edge and flexing one of the struts.

I said, ‘I think Sophie fancies Ben. Don’t you?’

She turned her head to where Sophie was pointing up into the sky, stretching on tiptoe in a pose that showed off her bare stomach and slender waist. What teenage boy could resist that? Ben
apparently; he was studiously knotting a piece of new line to the centre of the smallest kite.

‘Soph fancies everybody at the moment. She’s a raging inferno of hormones.’

‘You are at that age.’

‘Pascale isn’t. Still. Ben doesn’t seem to be too much in thrall to his testosterone yet, does he?’

I caught my breath. Did she know? Was she trying to tell me?

‘He’s managed to stay out of trouble at school for the last term, so that’s something. No more fisticuffs.’

‘Has he got a girlfriend?’

Ben threw his kite into the air and the wind took it, pulling it up out of his control. He tipped his head back and the breeze blew his fringe to one side. He looked so handsome.

‘No,’ I said.

My daisy chains fell off into the grass.

‘We still can’t get Soph’s navel to heal up,’ said Juno. ‘You’d have thought, a tiny hole like that, it would have skinned over pretty quickly.’

‘Do you think Ben’s gay?’ I heard myself say in my head.

‘I can’t forgive Kim for doing that,’ she went on. ‘It was a
violation
. There should be something in the rules about it. I’ve written to Kieran. What if it
had gone wrong and she’d got septicaemia, or been scarred for life?’

I pulled a sympathetic face.

‘As it is, getting her navel pierced seems to have opened the floodgates on all sorts of unreasonable demands. She wanted boys at her fourteenth-birthday sleepover. Boys! I said to her,
“You know what people are going to start saying about you, don’t you?” Then, of course, we had a huge strop over it, doors banging, not eating, the works. And you know how liberal
I am in most things. Between you and me – ’ Juno lowered her voice, even though the others were out of earshot – ‘I think she looks a bit of a tart right now. But Soph
assures me that’s what
all
the girls are wearing, from eight years up. It’s, I don’t know, as if having Kim in the house unsettled everyone. Even Pascale had a row with me
the other day because I wouldn’t let her skip music practice to go out with her friends. Even though I
said
I’d drive her to the restaurant afterwards, at great personal
inconvenience, half an hour later: no, that wasn’t good enough, she wanted to go in the car with them all together. But if she misses one day’s practice here, then it’ll be
another there, and then she’ll get out of the habit and all that work she’s put in over the years’ll go down the drain. She can’t see it.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘And, to be honest, I’m not sure we should be keeping in touch with Kim and Lee. I know it’s the mature thing to do, but I didn’t especially get on with them. I had
thought we might be able to help Marco out with his work experience, although he doesn’t seem that interested so I’m not going to push it. Kim does want Manny to advise her on summer
schools, though.’

I was surprised. ‘What’s she want to study?’

‘Art history was one suggestion. Then it was crystal healing.’ She laughed briefly. ‘Not much difference. So I don’t know what she ended up with, but I know Manny went
all over getting her booklets on all the different courses that were running.’

‘That was kind of him.’

‘You know Manny. Anything to do with the arts and education.’ She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against her shoulders. The posture should have looked relaxed, but
somehow it seemed self-conscious and uncomfortable. Last month she’d said to me, out of the blue, ‘I feel as though the cameras never went away, like I’m still being
observed.’ I’d thought to myself, It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Now
Queen Mum
was twenty days away from airing and Juno was tight and brittle under the
banter. I wanted to reassure her that the nation would love her, but that would have implied she ought to be worried. I’d banned Tom and Ben from doing a countdown every time they saw her.
‘It’s like when you’re pregnant,’ I’d told them. ‘You don’t need anyone telling you, “Only four weeks to go,” or whatever. Trust me.’ Ben
had shrugged obediently, but Tom said, ‘She got herself into it.’