Chapter 6
SIX
I’m still seething as I jam my key in the door. Still seething a couple of hours later when my phone rings.
‘Hey, Mum. What’re you up to?’
I try to sound the very opposite of someone who has just spent the last two hours chewing the inside of their cheek until they’ve almost put a hole in their face. ‘Oh! Nothing much!’
‘You sound terrible. What’s wrong?’
‘I’m not terrible. I’m fine!’
‘Okay. You’re worrying me. As in, really worrying me.’
I force a smile, my lips resisting all the way. But it stops me from sounding like I’m sucking on a helium balloon. ‘I am truly fine,’ I say. ‘I’m just distracted.’ I ask her how her day has been.
‘It’s been amazing. Aiden and I just played tennis. He just hopped in the shower.’ She goes on to say how he helped her solve a complex economics problem that she was over-thinking. ‘And you know how he did it? He just applied basic logic. He thought of the obvious. Of course, I totally kicked his ass on the tennis court.’
She finds his outsmarting her endearing. I’ve never known her idolise anyone before. I’d always hoped that when she did meet ‘the one’, he’d love her slightly more than she loved him. It had felt safer, somehow.
‘So…’ she says, like she’s doing a drum roll. ‘Aiden adores you, Mum. He thinks you’re super cool.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. That means the world.
‘You liked him too, right?’
I think of Frank’s words about my daughter – mistake. So if there’s a contest for who dislikes whose child more, then I’m going to win. But taking the hard-line approach in theory is not quite the same as in practice. I try to stifle a sigh but stifling clearly isn’t my strong suit. ‘It’s not about liking him, Harriet. As I told you, he seems like a very nice young man. But you’re from very different backgrounds. He grew up in a world of privilege and he’s trying to pass himself off as an ordinary guy, and yet you actually are ordinary.’
It sounds a bit like the idiot’s novel. Rich boy. Poor girl. Marriage…
And then she dies.
Oh my God!
‘So, you don’t like him because his dad achieved something with his life?’
‘I didn’t say I don’t like him. I said I did like him.’
‘Oh, well, if this is you liking him…’ She poofs! I can tell this is going to be one of those conversations, then she adds, ‘You just wish you didn’t like him, that’s the problem.’
I try to appeal to her sense of reason, say it unthreateningly, more like a friend than a disapproving parent. ‘Harriet, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still a little too young to be thinking of him as anything other than a lovely guy who you can have your first very special dating experience with.’
‘Dating experience?’ She says it like she can’t believe her ears. ‘I told you, he’s more than that. Much, much more to me than that.’ Her voice wobbles with emotion. ‘He’s the person I want to be with forever.’
Forever. Marriage. The One.
Those words should be stricken from the English language.
I close my eyes for a second and let out a surreptitious breath.
‘Why are you sighing?’ she says.
I go to sigh again but make a conscious effort to stop myself. I shouldn’t have turned this conversation into a lecture.
‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Say what you want to say. I think we need to thrash this out.’
Damn it. I got us into this. I try to think of the least inflammatory way of saying it. ‘The only point I’m trying to make, Harriet, is that at this age you barely know who you are, let alone who you should be hitching yourself to for the rest of your life. And you won’t understand that now, because the years need to rack up before you gain that sort of clarity about yourself – trust me on this.’ I swallow a giant lump of my own cynicism – then I’m suddenly so angry at Rupert for turning me into a cynic, for destroying my ability to trust anyone, or myself, again.
‘I disagree,’ she says. ‘I do know who I am. And it’s true, I didn’t expect to fall in love at nineteen, but I’m not going to say no to a life of happiness because it’s not your idea of good timing.’
‘I get it,’ I say, ‘I truly do. But I can promise you that a life of happiness is not dependent on you being with Aiden. You’re smitten. But you don’t think about marrying someone just to try to keep that feeling permanent.’
‘Wow,’ she says, after a beat, like I might have hit on the acid nerve of truth. ‘Look, Aiden’s done. I have to go. I don’t want him hearing any of this because he’ll be very hurt that you feel the way you do.’
Let’s not hurt his feelings then.
We make a loose pact to go for a bike ride later in the week. But by the piss-off-y quality of her tone, I won’t bet on it happening.
Once she’s gone, I sit there trying to get my head around this other Harriet: Harriet in love. Was I ever like that? I must have been. Surely. Even a teeny, tiny bit like that. It was such a long time ago. I remember meeting Rupert and it being like a stone rolling down a hill. It just kept turning and turning, and even when it ran out of momentum, it somehow still went the distance. But I’m not sure that’s the same thing.
Ping!
I think it’s Harriet about to take me to task again for something I’ve said, but then I see that number again.
SIRED? Is this still a word? I’ve met a few Brits like you over the years. Think because you use olde English you’re better than everybody else. But putting that aside, we do have one thing in common: splitting them up. Propose we meet to strategise.
I respond so quickly my phone almost takes fire.
Meet you again? Not if my life depended on it!
So take that, asshat!
This is not all about you. It’s about my son and your daughter. I thought we agreed on at least one thing – that there can’t be any Aiden and Harriet happily ever after.
Ugh! He’s so self-righteous. But he’s not entirely wrong. I take a deep breath then type:
I have zero desire to share another breakfast, lunch or dinner with you any time soon or even in the afterlife – but it ’ s true that we do have the same goal. So in that case, I am willing to meet for any of the above in order to hatch a plan. Moira.
Ping!
Why do you sign off texts with your name? Clearly, anyone texting you knows it ’ s you. And I’m definitely not proposing breakfast, lunch or dinner. Do you hike?
Hiking is my least favourite activity in the world. I loathe it more than life itself.
He sends me a link to a trail in the Malibu Canyon and a pin in a map for where to meet.
See U tmw 6AM. (Before it gets oppressively hot)
Huh?