Chapter 21 Jenny
Jenny
D ownstairs, where the party was in full swing, the focus wasn’t on Rosie’s absence.
“Stop staring.” Jenny nudged Audrey in the ribs, almost spilling her drink in the process.
“Staring? I’m not staring, I’m observing. I’m feasting my eyes on a picture I’ve imagined in my head a million times.”
“I wish you’d keep your thoughts in your head, alongside those images.” Jenny stepped in front of Audrey, blocking her view of Will and Becky, who were chatting on the other side of the room, heads close together.
“You’re no fun at all.” Audrey tried to peep round the side of her.
“They look so right together. Just look at the expression in her eyes. The way she’s looking at him.
And Will is so protective, did you notice that?
He’s not leaving her on her own for a moment. And his hand has never left her back.”
“Audrey—”
“It has to be serious. There is no way those two would finally take the plunge and announce they’re together unless they were sure that this is it.”
Or unless such an announcement diverted attention from something else entirely.
Jenny decided that this wasn’t the moment to voice her suspicions.
She’d naively assumed that worrying about your children would end when they grew up and left home but she’d discovered that as soon as the well emptied itself of the worries of childhood it was immediately refilled with other worries.
Like now.
She had no idea what was going on with her daughters, but at least Rosie and Declan had left the room together. That was a start. But it did nothing to alleviate her unease about Becky.
She was tempted to pull her aside and ask her directly, but Becky never liked talking about her relationships and Jenny had always been careful to respect that.
The best thing she could do for her daughter would be to somehow shift Audrey’s attention elsewhere. She felt guilty for not being able to protect Becky from the speculation.
She focused on her friend. “Will you and Paul be going to France next summer?”
“What? Yes, probably.” Audrey’s gaze was fixed beyond Jenny’s shoulder. “Although we’re obviously not going to book anything at the moment.”
“You’re not?” Jenny knew that her friend usually organized her holidays right after Christmas because she liked to have something to look forward to in the dark days of January. “Why?”
“Because there might be a wedding.”
“Audrey!”
“What? It’s not as if this is a whirlwind courtship, Jen.
Not like your Jamie, or even Rosie. Will and Becky have known each other forever.
They don’t exactly need time to discover if they’re right for each other.
They’ve had their whole lives. They know.
And don’t pretend you’re not scheming too because I seem to remember that you were the one who invited Will to stay for Christmas. ”
Jenny was beginning to regret her actions. “You don’t think you’re jumping ahead?”
“Who is jumping ahead?” Phyllis appeared. “Don’t Will and Becky look adorable together? Becky looks so happy. I think this could be it .”
Jenny gave up her valiant attempts to divert attention. If her mother was joining in, then the battle to protect Becky was truly lost.
She turned her head, allowing herself to look at her daughter. Becky did look happy. And now she was starting to doubt herself. She’d been so sure that their relationship wasn’t real—that Will was somehow protecting Becky.
But looking at the two of them now, she started to wonder.
Maybe it was real. Maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she was right and the whole thing was about to come crashing down.
With that thought hovering at the front of her mind, she went to find Martin.
“Do you know what I want for Christmas?”
His look was one of alarm. “I’m not sure I want to know given that it’s too late for me to deliver on it.”
She shook her head. “It’s not a thing. Nothing you can buy.”
“Our bank account thanks you.”
“What I really want for Christmas is one hour, just one hour, where it feels as if everything in the family is steady. One hour where everyone is happy, and nothing is complicated, and I can leave maternal anxiety at the door and just enjoy the moment instead of worrying about how we’re going to handle the next crisis.
” She stared out of the window, at the snow that was drifting slowly through the darkness.
“Do you think people without children worry less?”
“No. They just worry about different things.”
“You don’t worry as much as I do.”
“I don’t need to, because I know you’re doing the worrying for both of us. You’ve got that covered. No sense in duplicating.”
After all these years he still made her laugh.
“How did I end up being responsible for worry?”
“Hey, I got bins and clearing the gutters. Serious stuff.”
“You pay someone else to clean the gutters.”
“Nothing wrong with delegating.”
“I wish I could delegate my anxiety. Just hand it over.”
He leaned closer. “I tell you what, for Christmas this year I’ll take half your worries. You can just hand them over and forget about them.”
“You won’t take them seriously. You’ll dismiss them.”
“You mean I won’t nurture them, feed them until they grow and grow and gradually take over? What I do with my half is my responsibility. Stop micromanaging.” He put his arm around her. “Which worry in particular is at the top of your mind?”
“I have a few fighting it out for top place.”
He gave her the same thoughtful look she’d seen him wear when he was checking a patient’s test results and was trying to figure out what they meant.
“One thing I learned when I was working was that it usually takes something big to go wrong for people to understand how worry-free their lives were before. Over and over again, I’d hear people say ‘I worried about stuff that just wasn’t important,’ or ‘my life was pretty perfect and I never even noticed.’”
“You’re saying that the answer to my worry is to give me something bigger to worry about?”
“I’m saying it’s all about perspective.” He glanced across the room to where Will and Becky were standing together. “We have healthy children, living their lives, and yes, those lives are full of ups and downs and drama, but that is normal.”
“Stop being so reasonable and logical.” She saw Becky smile at Will. “Do you think the kids know how much we worry about them?”
“No. We’re their parents. We’re the solid, dependable foundation of their lives.
We’re like a charging unit—forgotten most of the time, until we’re needed and then they plug into us and hope we still work.
They don’t think about us as individuals.
They see us only in relation to them. They don’t know that we’re mere mortals with vulnerabilities and worries, capable of making decisions every bit as dubious as the ones they make. ”
“Maybe we should tell them.”
“No. Best to allow the illusion to continue for as long as possible.”
And she realised she felt the same way about her parents, often seeing them in relation to her, rather than thinking of them as individuals with their own hopes and fears.
She felt a pang of guilt and made a promise to herself to encourage them to talk more about their lives when they were growing up.
To listen more. And she was going to tell the kids to do the same.
More often they teased them, or corrected and educated them, telling them that they just couldn’t say things like that now .
There was a casual assumption that they were too old to understand, but maybe it was more that the kids were too young to appreciate just how much their grandparents did understand.
The world changed, technology advanced, but people’s emotions didn’t change.
Fear, excitement, hope, grief—those things were experienced by everyone, whichever generation you were born into.
She reached for Martin’s hand, doing it sneakily in case one of the children noticed and said yuck, Mum, please!
“I’m glad I married you.”
His fingers tightened on hers. “Even now when I’m driving you insane, moping around and feeling sorry for myself?”
“Especially now, and you’re not moping. You’re adjusting.”
“Adjusting.” He nodded. “I’m going to use that as an excuse every time you try and get me to do something I don’t feel like doing. ‘I can’t do it right now, I’m adjusting.’”
There was so much they’d shared together, so many struggles they’d helped each other through. And she didn’t need something bad to happen to know she was lucky to have him.
And although she knew he couldn’t take the anxiety from her, it made her feel better to know she wasn’t alone with it.