Chapter 7
SEVEN
After plugging in her phone, Ellen sat on the bed and waited for the home screen to come back to life so that she could send Grace a quick text.
Robert maintained that Grace was old enough to sort out her own relationship problems, but he had no idea what it was like for Ellen.
If something was going on with either of the girls – big or small – she couldn’t rest until she knew what it was and had tried to help.
No one tells you when you have a child how you feel every emotion of theirs like it was your own.
Worse, if they were going through something upsetting, she’d wish she could take it from them and carry the feelings herself.
As soon as the screen lit up, she wrote a quick text to Grace.
Everything okay?
Though she waited a few moments for a reply, there was nothing. Just in case, she turned the ringer up to full volume and left the bedroom door open.
At the breakfast table, Robert and Lucy were deep in conversation.
Whatever they were discussing, it clearly wasn’t small talk.
Lucy – leaned forward in her seat – was waving her arms around.
Robert faced away from Ellen, but she knew him well enough to intuit that his straight back and folded arms meant that he didn’t like whatever Lucy was saying.
As soon as she saw Ellen, Lucy dropped her arms to the table and smiled. ‘Did you find your charger?’
‘Yes. Phone’s plugged in. Everything okay here?’
Robert turned in his seat, his face flushed. ‘Of course.’
Before she could probe further, they heard the crunch of the gravel at the front of the house and the roar of a throaty sports car engine. Lucy put her hand to her ear. ‘That’ll be Joe.’
Joe Meads had thick dark hair and the kind of tan that came from being outside a great deal.
He wore a light-grey suit with a black shirt, button opened at the neck.
He was very handsome. If anyone had asked Ellen, she would’ve guessed he was Spanish, so his clipped English accent was almost a surprise.
‘Ellen! So great to meet you at long last. Lucy has told me so much about you.’
He kissed her on one cheek, then – when he went in for the second cheek – they bumped noses. He laughed, but she was mortified. ‘Has she?’
Why would Lucy be telling him so much about her? And what was she telling him?
Joe’s greeting for Robert was very different. ‘Robbie! Hi, how are you?’
He grasped Robert’s hand to shake it, then placed his other hand on Robert’s shoulder. There was something terribly familiar about his greeting. Robert’s response was similarly warm. ‘I’m good. Your place is fantastic. Thanks for having us here.’
‘Sorry, have you two met before?’ She looked between them. Robert’s expression didn’t change but Joe looked confused.
‘Of course they haven’t.’ Lucy swept between them and kissed her husband – once on each cheek, much more smoothly than Ellen had managed – before holding out her arms. ‘Now we’re all here, shall we go out for a drive? Show Robert and Ellen the sights and sounds of Malaga?’
‘Great idea.’ Joe picked up his brown leather travel case from the floor. ‘Let me take this up to our room and have a quick shower and then we’ll head out. A couple of hours doing the tourist thing and then we’ll take you to one of our favourite places for lunch.’
They’d only just finished breakfast, although, she noticed, Lucy hadn’t actually eaten anything. Robert was nodding. ‘I need a shower, too. Ten minutes?’
As soon as she and Robert were back in their room, she was going to ask him what was going on.
It was clear that he and Joe knew each other, so why were they lying to her?
But then Lucy took her arm. ‘While the boys are making themselves pretty, come and talk to me while I clear away the breakfast things.’
She could hardly make her excuses without it looking like she didn’t want to help Lucy, so she followed her, filing away her annoyance for later when she and Robert were alone.
In the kitchen, Ellen insisted that Lucy allow her to stack the dishwasher. ‘You’ve been waiting on us since we got here. Let me do something.’
As she perched on one of the bar stools, Lucy held up a perfectly manicured hand. ‘If you insist.’
Turning the coffee cups over onto the top rack, Ellen kept her voice light. ‘Joe seems really nice. Really friendly. It was almost as if he’d met Robert before.’
She turned to catch Lucy’s reaction, but she merely shrugged. ‘That’s just how he is. Best friends with everyone he meets. He’s been excited to meet you. If you space those mugs out a little, you’ll be able to get the glasses in between them.’
Did she think Ellen had never stacked a dishwasher? She took the glasses from the counter and slotted them in. ‘We’ll have to stop talking about university days now he’s here or he’ll feel left out.’
Lucy didn’t take the hint. ‘Oh, he won’t mind. He’s always interested in stories from my youth. It’s been fun talking about old times. I can’t believe that our youngest daughters are now the same age as we were then.’
Several times since she’d dropped Abigail off, Ellen had told Robert that she was worried about their youngest daughter being away from home.
If Grace was sunshine and showers, Abigail was a temperate spring day.
From a young age, she’d had a small group of friends who were her absolute world.
They did everything together. Frequently, Ellen and the mothers of the other girls would remark on how lucky they were that the girls were all happy to spend their evenings at one another’s houses rather than out on the town.
Now, she worried that Abigail had been too protected and cosseted.
How was she going to cope out in the world on her own?
‘It is weird. I look at Abigail and she still seems a child to me. But I felt so grown up when I was her age.’
Looking down into her mug, Lucy nodded. ‘Yes, me too. But we weren’t really, were we? We both got cheated out of a lot of our growing up years, having our children so young.’
Though Ellen knew that lots of people would assume she felt the same, it hadn’t been true. Grace’s conception was a shock, but she had loved every minute of making a home with Robert. ‘Maybe. They’re worth it, though.’
Lucy pushed the side plates across the counter towards her. ‘I think I enjoy being a mother a great deal more now that the girls are older. It’s so much easier than running around after a toddler and dealing with puberty.’
She laughed as if she was making an obvious point but, again, Ellen didn’t really agree.
Slotting the plates onto the lower part of the dishwasher, she had a sudden memory of a chubby two-year-old Grace sitting up in her high chair in their tiny first house.
‘I don’t know. I often find myself wishing they were babies again and I could keep them safe. ’
She closed the door of the dishwasher and turned to see Lucy raising an eyebrow at her. ‘Really? But they’re both doing fine, aren’t they?’
For all her irritation with Lucy earlier, it would be good to talk to another mother about her concerns about Max. ‘I’m worried about Grace. Her boyfriend is really unreliable. I’m worried he’s messing her around.’
Sometimes she wondered if being so young when she’d had Grace had been detrimental to her daughter.
She’d always done the best she could as a mother, but had she made mistakes with her as a parent?
She was so beautiful and clever and funny and kind that both Ellen and Robert were so proud of her.
Why, then, did she want to waste her wonderful self on this man who treated her as if she was disposable?
Lucy pulled a face. ‘He’s the one that upset her earlier?’
‘Yes. And it isn’t the first time he’s reduced her to tears, either. They’ve only been together for just over a year and, in that time, he’s let her down on her birthday, twice cancelled dinner to meet me and Robert and once booked a week away in Italy with friends without even telling her.’
Every part of Ellen wanted to shake her daughter and tell her that she was being a fool for putting up with it. And Lucy’s face showed she agreed. ‘It’s so hard to watch, isn’t it? And I’m assuming you have to tiptoe around and not tell her what you think?’
‘Exactly.’ That was the problem with adult children. You couldn’t risk going so far that they’d push you away or stop talking to you. When Grace spoke to her about Max, Ellen’s job – she’d learned to her cost – was to listen and say just enough to be invested, not so much to sound judgemental.
Lucy was nodding. ‘I know what that’s like.’
It was a relief to talk to someone who understood. ‘Has your daughter had any awful boyfriends?’
Lucy’s laugh was hollow. ‘Let’s just say that it hasn’t been plain sailing.’
Her support encouraged Ellen to go further. ‘Grace’s boyfriend has told her that he’s separated from his wife but I’m not convinced. He won’t let Grace tell anyone they’re together because he says it’ll be awkward at work. But that sounds really suspicious to me. I think he could still be married.’
Lucy didn’t appear remotely shocked by this. ‘That is a tricky one. But what can you do? You can’t control who they fall in love with, can you? Any more than we could control who we fell in love with.’
Ellen wasn’t so sure about that. Robert had been her first proper boyfriend and she’d known what a good man he was before they’d even shared their first kiss. ‘If I try and give any advice at all, Grace won’t listen. She always tells me that I’ve got no idea what it’s like to be single at her age.’
This accusation had been levelled at her many times in the past. Partly because she and Robert had settled down so young that neither of them had run the gauntlet of dating in their twenties.
But mostly, she’d realised, because neither of the girls saw her and Robert as actual people.
They were just Mum and Dad. Had arrived on this Earth at forty-odd years old and didn’t understand what it was to feel uncertainty or worry. Or jealousy.
Again, Lucy was nodding her understanding. ‘Charlotte has said the same thing to me. And they’re right. More’s the pity.’
More’s the pity? ‘Goodness, I’m glad I didn’t have to do that. The more I watch what Grace goes through, the more I think I swerved a bullet by meeting Robert when I did.’
‘Really?’ Lucy raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t wish you’d played the field more before you settled down? Travelled the world? Kissed a few frogs?’
‘Absolutely not.’ Ellen hadn’t ever felt like she’d missed out on anything.
Thanks to supportive parents, she’d been able to work and raise her family.
If anything, she’d enjoyed being a young mum.
But the look on Lucy’s face right now suggested that she didn’t believe her.
That she must’ve wanted more from her youth, just as Lucy had.
The glint in her eyes was similar to the sparkle in Robert’s a short while ago as he’d talked about Thailand and Vietnam over the breakfast table.
She hadn’t seen him so alive in months. Hearing Lucy talk about her regret at missing out on her ‘growing up years’ she was beginning to wonder if Robert felt the same.