Chapter Nineteen
Tamzin rang Diane. ‘Can I come over, today? Or do you want to be left alone with Bryony? I understand, if you do. But if I do come, can I bring George? He’s got no exams this morning so he said he’d pick me up and bring me over.’
She heard the smile in Diane’s voice. ‘Yes, come. Bryony won’t wake until afternoon, I’ll bet. She’s shattered.’
The journey to Purtenon St. Paul took twenty-five minutes. Thirty-five if you counted the initial ten minutes spent kissing in the car, slewed around and scrunched over to avoid the hand brake. It was George who broke it up, golden-brown eyes regretful. ‘I could do this all day but I suppose we’d better hit the road or I won’t get back for uni.’
After they’d cleared Crowland and turned right off the main road he picked up her hand from where it lay on the seat and placed it just above his knee. Whenever his left hand wasn’t occupied on the gear stick or the steering wheel, he dropped it casually on hers. His flesh was warm and firm through the fabric of his jeans and she went suddenly breathless and shy.
George treated her like a proper girlfriend and his friends had made themselves her friends, too, slicing through the distrust for groups and gangs that the Coven had given her.
‘The others want to see a film tomorrow night at The Showcase. I said I’d see if you were up for it.’
‘Yes!’ she squeaked, before she could think about being cool or laid back. ‘What are we seeing?’
George glanced in his mirror, indicated and turned left. ‘Erica and Marty are still bickering about it. What’s your sort of thing?’
‘Not horror, not cowboys.’
‘You’re such a girl.’
Tamzin giggled. ‘It seems a while since anyone noticed.’
She thought about being alongside George in the darkness of the cinema. Probably holding hands. About the way their relationship was going. How long it would be before he went for it, sex-wise. Her heart bumped, uncertainly. Sex hadn’t happened for her until uni. Was that what had marked her out to the Coven as different?
Certain that all she had to do to be accepted was bin her virginity like a dress in last year’s colour she’d thrown herself into bed with Lucas — until Lucas began referring to her as his ‘fuck buddy’. Pathetically, hoping he thought she didn’t care, she moved on from unprotected sex with Lucas to unprotected sex with others. She’d been so lucky not to get herpes or chlamydia.
At least she’d guarded against pregnancy with the pill. Some days, it had been her only solid food.
Since then, she’d discovered that counsellors link casual sex with depression, risky behaviour and low self-esteem. A counsellor wouldn’t demand, ‘What were you thinking ? That letting boys you hardly knew inside your body would solve something?’ But, instead, would explore good-for-me and bad-for-me relationships, carefully avoiding passing judgement.
But Lucas had been bad for her. So had all the others. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that.
Tamzin hadn’t had sex since she’d left university. Sexual opportunity didn’t leap out at you when you lay alone in bed or on the floor or hung out with your mum and dad.
But it could be pretty important to the girlfriend of a funky young god who was something of a local hero.
* * *
‘Diane, this is amazing!’
Diane beamed as Tamzin stroked the ivory fabric of the first top. The slightly boxy style made her appear slender rather than thin. And maybe she was putting on just a pound or two? She looked miles better, with a flush on her cheeks and her hair brushed into a corn-coloured sheet.
While Bryony slept the sleep of the jet-lagged upstairs they’d indulged in a cosy half hour around the kitchen table with coffee and a biscuit tin and Tamzin had eaten two biscuits that George selected for her. She was certainly going through what James termed a good patch. Diane let her mind linger on James: his smiling eyes, his brushy hair. She’d received a text from him this morning: Thinking of u. Want 2 b with u.
She had still been considering her reply when her text alert beeped again. Can u come here alone? Would like 2 talk.
But it was from Gareth.
She’d flushed with guilt, as if Gareth’s text could somehow look into her inbox and scurry back to him to report. She’d returned, OK, will have 2 b 2morro. Fittings 2day. Perhaps, by then, she would have decided on a path to dance through the marital minefield. She really didn’t see that she was going to be able to bring herself to have a relationship with James without distancing herself from Gareth, but Bryony wanting to play Happy Families made that difficult.
Unnerved, she sent to James: Me 2. And turned to applying her talents to dressing his daughter in something more flattering than shapeless T-shirts and old oversized jeans.
Rewardingly, Tamzin looked like a model in the creamy top with the brassy gauze. Diane saw her looking at George for approval and ached. She wanted to warn, ‘Don’t, Tamzin! Don’t expose your fragile heart. George is a good boy but he’s . . . a boy . He doesn’t think in the long-term or that you might fall to bits when it ends.’ But, of course, she just smiled auntishly. And she crossed her mental fingers really hard.
Tamzin’s eyes were shining. ‘It doesn’t need any alteration, does it, Diane? It doesn’t. It’s so cool, I want to take it home.’
‘Cool,’ George agreed.
Diane walked around her, critically. ‘What do you think about the length?’
‘Great.’
‘And the sleeves?’
‘Excellent.’ Tamzin put her arms out at her side like a scarecrow.
George blew her a kiss. ‘You look amazin’.’
Immediately, Tamzin declared the top to be perfect and rushed off to the bathroom to change to the pink one. When she reappeared, she was beaming at how the beautiful, delicate colour lent its blush to her skin. George ran his fingers over the clear washers and black embroidery. ‘You design cool stuff, Diane. When the band’s famous I’m going to get you to do all my stage stuff. Tamz just looks really wicked.’ He gave Tamzin a hug.
. . . Just as Bryony bounced through the door in pink shortie pyjamas. ‘George , I heard you — Oh. Who are you?’
Diane’s heart sank as, looking about ten, curls on end and a thunderous scowl on her sleepy face, Bryony glared at Tamzin.
The warming tone of the blouse couldn’t disguise Tamzin’s sudden pallor.
George looked at Bryony as if trying to remember who she was. ‘Wow,’ he said, at last. ‘Hey, Bryony. Great to see you.’ He let go of Tamzin long enough to stoop to kiss his cousin’s cheek. ‘Wow, can’t believe you’re home. Diane said, like, you’d be asleep until this afternoon.’
‘I heard your voice.’ Bryony’s dark gaze flipped from George to Tamzin.
‘Oh, right, sorry. Diane kept telling us to be quiet but I forgot.’ George laughed. ‘This is Tamzin, by the way. She’s your half-cousin, same as I’m your half-cousin.’
With a frozen smile, Bryony said, ‘Hello, Tamzin.’
With an uncertain pucker between her eyes, Tamzin returned, ‘Hello, Bryony.’
They stared at each other until Bryony said, abruptly, ‘I met Granddad, yesterday.’
Tamzin nodded, slowly. ‘The rest of us call him Pops.’
‘Shall we get on?’ Diane pulled her tape measure from around her neck. ‘George has to get off to uni after Tamzin’s fitting. There’s plenty in the fridge if you’re hungry, Bryony.’
Bryony shrugged. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed now I’ve said hi to George. You’re all obviously . . . busy.’ She turned on her heel and stalked from the room.
‘Right, Tamzin,’ said Diane, ignoring both Tamzin’s uneasy expression and Bryony’s less-than-perfect manners. ‘I’ve decorated the first two pairs of jeans. Hop into a pair and we’ll see how you look.’
* * *
Diane waited until she’d seen Tamzin and George off and then made two cups of tea and a couple of slices of toast to carry upstairs to the room at the front of the house where her daughter had slept since she was a few weeks old. Knocking, she walked in. The curtains were closed and the room thick with the mustiness of sleep. Bryony was a shape beneath the quilt. ‘I’ve brought your breakfast.’ She didn’t insult Bryony’s intelligence by pretending she thought Bryony might be asleep.
Slowly Bryony stirred. ‘You shouldn’t have.’ Her voice was dull.
‘It’s been ages since you ate.’ She waited while Bryony hauled herself up, propping her pillows between herself and the pink-buttoned headboard, then deposited a mug on the bedside and passed over the plate of buttery toast before opening the curtains and a small window.
Bryony regarded her toast with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. A blue inhaler lay on the bedside table and she took two puffs from that instead. Bryony would always have an inhaler and use it several times a day.
Diane was just grateful that modern drugs let her lead a normal life with so little intervention and pushed away the memory of the years of Bryony’s childhood, when that certainly hadn’t been the case.
She parked herself on the foot of the bed and blew across the surface of her tea to cool it. ‘Is it very odd?’
‘What?’
‘Coming home after a year. Is it like Narnia? You feel as if you’ve been away for ages but now you’re home nothing’s changed?’
Bryony nibbled one corner of the toast. ‘The opposite. It’s as if I’ve been away no time but everyone else thinks I’ve been away forever.’
‘Dad’s narrow squeak must have rocked you.’
Bryony nodded and swallowed with an obvious effort. Before bursting out, ‘And then there’s the secret family thing — Mum, what’s been going on?’ Her eyes were as dark and shiny as Galaxy Minstrels. ‘When Dad phoned me to tell me I was, like, so pleased that there was some kind of explanation that meant he wasn’t having a scuzzy affair. And he’d had this mega accident in a helicopter and I got all emotional because he could’ve been killed. But in the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking, and it seemed really strange. It is strange, isn’t it? He’s got this family and he kept us secret from them. I mean, you call them his secret family but I think we were the secret. Is he ashamed of us?’ She discarded the plate on the bedside and it wobbled around in a noisy circle before settling.
Moving up the bed, Diane reached out to stroke Bryony’s pillow-matted curls. ‘I don’t think you need draw that conclusion, darling.’ She searched for a way to soothe her. ‘You have to remember what an underprivileged upbringing Dad had. In those days being poor meant more hardship than it does now. Benefits weren’t plentiful, especially not for single mothers. Granny and Dad did everything humanly possible to keep the family all under one roof. Wendy worked hard but women earned less than men.’ She knew the story by heart; Gareth had chewed over and over his childhood until his words ceased to have an impact.
But, for the first time for years, she felt touched by those old troubles. She remembered the worn but clean home, furnished with second-hand bargains. And that was the Jenner world well after Wendy and Gareth between them had hauled the family away from the breadline.
‘But we’ve always been poor, Mum, we know about it.’
‘Sweetie, we’ve never been poor! We’ve had to be careful; we’ve not been well off. But we’ve never gone hungry, never been without shelter. How can you say we’re poor when you’ve spent all that time working in Brasilia and seen what real poverty is?
‘I think that when Dad eventually met his father and sister, he didn’t know how to react. When Harold wanted to make things up to Dad financially . . . well, it was such a huge amount of money to Dad that he literally didn’t know what to do with it. For a while he just kept the knowledge to himself. And,’ she hesitated, ‘he has always thought that I betrayed him by not challenging my father’s will. That I’d cheated him — and you — out of a more comfortable life. He feels that what he did was no worse than what I did.’
Bryony snuggled her head into the crook of Diane’s neck like a child, arm around her waist. ‘That’s a crock of shit. You refused money your parents didn’t want you, or him, or me, to have. I don’t think I would’ve wanted it, either. But he’s lived a double life and kept us hidden so that he could keep all his money to himself . ’
Diane couldn’t think of a reply.
‘So that girl is Dad’s half-sister’s daughter?’
‘That’s right. Tamzin. I’m making her a load of clothes.’
‘And her folk are rich, I suppose.’ She wriggled herself into a more comfortable possession of Diane’s shoulder.
‘By our standards.’
‘What’s her problem? Is she anorexic, or something?’
‘Something. Unhealthily thin. She’s suffered from depression for the past couple of years. She’s going through a good patch, at the moment.’
‘Is she . . . is she George’s girlfriend?’
Diane’s arms tightened around Bryony’s body. Not a frail, bony body, like Tamzin’s, but a warm, fleshy, curvy young woman’s shape, on the verge of plumpness. Diane had always been too busy and too short of money to gain weight but Gareth’s mother had been a size in the last couple of decades of her life. She hoped Bryony wouldn’t go the same way. It would be so bad for her asthma.
‘It looks like it. Although they’ve only just started seeing each other.’ She hesitated. ‘I expect it took you by surprise, her being here.’
‘I felt so stupid. I crashed in expecting a big hug but George had his arms full of her,’ Bryony complained.
Diane continued absently to stroke her daughter’s warm back as she had done a thousand times when shocks, fears and spills had brought Bryony into the sanctuary of her mother’s arms. A lost toy. A scraped knee. Not getting the part of Angel Gabriel. A fickle friend. A fickle boyfriend.
And soon she felt the telltale hot wetness against her neck and the tiny shudders of the body pressed against hers. ‘Darling,’ she murmured. ‘Everything will be fine when you’ve settled back at home and decided what you want to do next. If you don’t want to go back to Brazil, you could probably go to university now.’ Some good might as well come out of Gareth’s money.
Bryony’s sobs only increased.
‘Or travel somewhere else? Or get a job here?’
The rounded shoulders heaved. ‘No I can’t. Oh, Mum — I’m pregnant ! The father’s name is Inacio, he doesn’t know about the baby and I don’t know where he is. And one of the other girls says he’s married !’