4. Amanda
They sat in the car outside the school gates. Theo fidgeted with his phone.
‘Go on in, Theo. You’ll be late.’ Amanda had a splitting headache from another sleepless night. She kept having the same nightmare over and over, then waking up and realizing it wasn’t a nightmare: it was her life. The shame of it all still threatened to overwhelm her.
‘I hate it here in this stupid country,’ Theo complained. ‘I get slagged for my posh English accent. All the guys have friend groups and no one really speaks to me except the geeks and freaks.’
Amanda wiped her nose with a tissue. It was freezing in Nancy’s house and the cold had seeped into her bones.
As beautiful and stylish as it was, it was old, with draughty windows.
Amanda reckoned Nancy must be part-Inuit: she didn’t seem to feel the cold, and when Amanda had suggested switching on the heating, she had snapped her head off and told her to put on a jumper.
Amanda missed their modern, warm, uncluttered, Jo Malone candle-scented apartment.
She felt like an intruder in Nancy’s house, someone who was not really welcome but whose help was required.
Amanda knew Nancy had never really liked her.
Her mother-in-law had been suspicious of her from day one.
Who was this small-town girl dating her eldest?
Ross, the bright son, the independent one, the son she had the most respect for.
Nancy had interrogated Amanda on that first meeting like an MI6 agent.
Where was she from? What did her parents do?
Did she have siblings? What was she studying?
What were her life goals? It had gone on and on.
But if Nancy thought she was going to scare Amanda away, she had been sorely mistaken. Amanda was not letting go of Ross.
In fact, Nancy’s coldness had just made Amanda all the more determined to marry him.
She’d doubled down, and within a year Ross had proposed – prompted by Amanda being pregnant.
She hadn’t exactly planned it, but she had conveniently (and privately) stopped taking the pill and then, oops , she was expecting a baby.
But she had known Ross was the man for her.
She just had to persuade him to take the next step.
Nancy had underestimated her, and she was incensed when she’d found out Amanda was pregnant and had done everything to push them into having an abortion.
When Amanda saw that Ross was wavering, she feigned shock and hurt and sobbed into his shoulder about the cruelty of aborting their precious child.
This baby was her ticket to a better life.
She told Ross that if they were married, his mother would have to stop bullying them about the abortion.
Within a week they were married in a registry office.
It wasn’t the big white wedding Amanda had dreamt of, but she’d got her man.
She didn’t, however, get the baby. She miscarried at seventeen weeks with complications that affected her ability to get pregnant again.
It had taken her many long years and a lot of fertility treatment to conceive her miracle baby, Theo. He was her world.
‘There’s no point in complaining, Theo. You just have to give it your best and find some people you like.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Theo grumbled, not making any move to get out of the car.
Nancy had never forgiven Amanda for ‘trapping’ her eldest son, but Amanda didn’t care. She had got what she wanted, and if suffering the odd lunch or dinner with Nancy and her barbed comments was all she had to put up with, she’d take it.
It was Amanda who had convinced Ross to move to London and there they had enjoyed a blissful, Nancy-free fifteen years …
until now. Now she needed Nancy, Ross needed Nancy, and so did Theo.
Amanda had to push down all of her dislike for her mother-in-law and suck it up.
Without Nancy they were, frankly, screwed.
But the minute Nancy was back on her feet, they were moving into their own place. Amanda didn’t care where they went, or how small the place was, she needed her own space.
‘It’s very early days. It will just take a while to settle in. Besides, you only have yourself to blame, Theo.’
He looked out of the window. ‘You could have found me another school in London.’
‘No decent school would have wanted you. Being expelled for dealing cocaine isn’t exactly what top schools are looking for in their students.’
Theo groaned. ‘For the millionth time, I wasn’t dealing. I gave a few bags to a few of my friends.’
‘In exchange for money!’ she reminded him. ‘You let us and yourself down so badly, Theo. I will never forget the shock and shame I felt in your headmaster’s office.’ Amanda’s stomach clenched at the memory.
The headmaster had been so calm. Every word from his mouth had been carefully considered and thought out.
There was no room for argument, bargaining or changing his mind.
He was crystal clear that Theo was no longer welcome at his school.
End of discussion. Amanda had never seen Ross so quiet.
He was devastated. His son, his pride and joy, had humiliated him.
‘I’ve said sorry so many times. Everyone does it – I just got caught.’ Theo brought up the same excuse he’d been throwing about since the expulsion.
Amanda gripped the steering wheel. ‘Not everyone does it. I guarantee you that Julian Taylor-Lloyd wasn’t dealing cocaine.’
‘He’s a nerd.’
‘No, Theo, he’s just a good kid who used to be your friend before you became “too cool” for him. So while he was acing his exams and representing the school in cricket, you were snorting cocaine.’
Amanda had been gutted when Theo had moved away from his friendship with Julian.
She knew Julian was a good influence on him, and Julian’s father was an actual duke.
Amanda had loved that she knew a duke and duchess.
The first time she’d dropped Theo to their house/mini-palace for a party, aged twelve, she’d almost died of excitement.
Her son was friends with a future duke. Look at me , she’d thought, as she drove up the sweeping, tree-lined driveway, a girl from a crappy town in the arse-end of Ireland hanging out with English aristocrats.
Ha, if Mona Rafferty and Karen Higgins could see her now, they’d die of jealousy.
They’d nicknamed her ‘Notions’ in school because she’d wanted to go to Trinity College in Dublin.
‘You’ve notions, Amanda. Who do you think you are?’ they’d asked, their voices dripping with scorn.
Someone who is getting the hell out of here, Amanda had vowed.
That had been her goal since as far back as she could remember.
She’d never felt as if she fitted in there.
Gortown had always seemed claustrophobic and backward.
She had spent half her life sitting in the corner of her parents’ hardware store, reading glossy magazines and dreaming of a better life.
Her parents had never understood her. They were happy with their life.
Why was their only child so dissatisfied?
Amanda didn’t know how to explain it. She just felt as if she had been born into the wrong family.
She had been convinced for years that she was adopted and was secretly the biological daughter of a famous movie star and a fashion designer …
but it turned out she was the biological daughter of boring old Kieran and Siobhán O’Brien.
That day, walking into the duke’s home, had been the best day of Amanda’s life. She had done it. Amanda O’Brien had shed her dingy, nothing past and arrived!
She had bent over backwards to forge a friendship with Julian’s mother, India, but it hadn’t been easy.
India had lots of friends, ‘my chums from boarding school and uni’, all of them equally posh and marble-mouthed.
In the early days, India had invited Amanda to a coffee morning at her house.
Amanda was beside herself with excitement and had spent a fortune on a new outfit.
It was an Erdem dress and she felt fabulous in it.
She was slightly worried it might be a bit too dressy, so she’d opted for flat ballet pumps to wear with it.
She didn’t want to stick out, she wanted to blend in, and she’d heard India talking about how much she loved Erdem.
But when she’d arrived, the other women were all in tailored jackets, jeans and trainers, with low-buttoned silk shirts and stacks of gold necklaces casually ‘thrown together’.
They all had that boho, Sienna Miller vibe.
Amanda had got it all wrong. She’d felt so silly in her designer dress, barely able to breathe because of the Spanx underwear cutting off her circulation.
She’d tried to compensate by being charming, but she didn’t understand point-to-point (it was a form of horse-racing, according to her online search later on) and she didn’t summer in St Barts or ski in St Moritz. Once again she’d felt like an outsider.
She hadn’t been invited to another group gathering, but occasionally she’d persuaded India to have a coffee with her and they had been invited over, as a family, to Julian’s end-of-school-year barbecue two years ago.
That was before Theo decided he was too cool for Julian, too cool to be friends with a duke-in-waiting who was clever, focused, nice and a credit to the school.
Theo had moved on to befriend a wilder bunch of boys, who were ‘more fun’.
They were ‘not nerds like Julian’ … What an idiot.
She’d tried to guide him back to his old friends, but you can’t tell a teenager what to do because they know everything.
In her wildest dreams she had never imagined the horror of her son being expelled.
Amanda remembered crying for days and days as her carefully curated life, the one she had dreamt of and worked so hard to achieve, imploded around her.
A drug-dealing son and a cheating husband. Double whammy. Double kick in the face. Double rug being pulled from under her. No gentle let-down for Amanda, oh, no: her life had been destroyed in the space of a few weeks.
Theo bit his thumbnail. ‘I could go back to London on my own. Boris said I can live with him for the year.’
‘Boris’s parents clearly don’t know why you were expelled, because I can assure you that if Florence found out about your little cocaine incident, she would not have you to stay for one hour, never mind a year.’
Theo sighed.
‘Besides, it’s not about living in London, Theo. It’s about no decent school accepting you. We were bloody lucky to get you into St Ronan’s here. Your dad had to pull a lot of strings to get you a place. You’re not going anywhere. You need to put your head down and finish the year.’
‘I know I messed up, but I really hate it, Mum.’
Amanda wavered. He looked so forlorn. But he had to complete the year, there was no backing out. There was no plan B.
‘It’s only eight months until your exams. Come on, this isn’t easy on any of us. Try to make the most of it.’
‘Eight months of no mates and just studying is hell.’ Theo’s voice shook.
Amanda put a hand on his arm. ‘Look, I know it’s tough and I’ll help you get through it in any way I can. Once you get to university here you’ll meet lots of new people and make new friends. Come on, Theo, be strong.’
‘I hate this country, I hate living with Granny, I hate this prison of a school and I hate you and Dad for dragging me back here.’
‘That’s enough. Get out, go in, and bloody well get on with it.’ Amanda had had enough of her sulky son.
‘Fine. No need to rip my head off.’ He slammed the car door shut behind him.
Amanda swung the car around and drove away.
She was tempted just to keep driving to get away from all the hurt and humiliation.
But she was trapped. She had nowhere to go, no career, no money, no life.
She could divorce Ross, but then what? Live a single life?
Alone? Her parents were dead and she had no friends here.
When they’d moved to London, Amanda had never bothered keeping in touch with anyone.
She’d shed her life like a snake sheds its skin.
She had a new life, a better life. Besides, she didn’t have any very good friends, just some close acquaintances at best. She had what she wanted and needed – Ross, Theo and her glamorous new London life, her glamorous new London self.
She’d thought everything else was behind her, for good.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.