Chapter 3
My brother has been grating lemon rind for so long that I’m convinced his chicken dish will taste like floor cleaner.
Jeff would deny that he’s distracted, of course.
Least of all by the cocktails he’s been whipping up at any opportunity since his husband Andy sent him on a mixology masterclass for Christmas.
‘Can I do anything to help?’ I say, peering at his recipe book.
‘Hands off my Ottolenghi,’ he scolds me. ‘You know I don’t approve of meddling.’
‘Didn’t you say this had to be in the oven by seven so it’s ready by the time the others get here?’ I point out, but he nudges me out of the way, says it’ll be fine and cranks up a Blondie track instead.
I retreat to the dining table to pick up my phone. When there’s no new text, I click on WhatsApp to look there too.
Jeff peers out from behind the fridge door.
‘Jules. For crying out loud.’
‘What?’ I ask innocently.
‘She only messaged an hour ago.’
I straighten my spine. ‘I was checking tomorrow’s weather, if you must know.’
His lips purse. ‘So what does the forecast say?’
‘Rain,’ I say, defiantly.
He locks eyes with me. ‘What percentage?’
‘What?’
‘We live in Manchester and it’s February. Of course it’s going to rain,’ he drawls. ‘What’s the percentage?’
‘Who do you think I am, Alexa? Anyway, it’s been sunny for the last two days.’
‘I think we both know that you were checking on Frankie,’ he replies.
I take a mouthful of my gimlet. Then another.
‘So what?’ I confess, resentfully. ‘Given my mad dash with the passport yesterday, you can hardly blame me for wanting to satisfy myself there have been no more dramas.’
He sighs and backs off, shaking his head. ‘Poor Frankie,’ he says affectionately, finally opening the oven door to slide in his casserole dish.
‘Poor Frankie? I was the one who had to rearrange meetings, pay for a parking ticket and have a run-in with some random bloke at the tennis club. If something like this happens before she’s even left the country, how is she going to manage for the rest of the trip?’
‘She will be fine,’ Jeff says firmly, though it’s impossible to know if he actually believes this or is simply contradicting everything I say because that’s what we’ve always done.
My brother and I love each other deeply, but we love bickering almost as much. It’s a family sport. One we’ve been playing forever and which anyone without the good fortune of having a sibling relationship as close as ours might think indicates we don’t get along.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
I adored him from when I was tiny. Every photo album we’ve got from the 1980s is filled with pictures of me gazing up at him in admiration, surrounded by My Little Ponies, or at a table for a tea party while I served invisible cups of Earl Grey.
I’d have done anything for him. Despite being a shy, frankly cowardly child, I once challenged a boy to a fist fight for sneeringly calling Jeff ‘gay’.
To my astonishment, the kid backed down, at which point Jeff hugged me, declared me his hero and added, ‘But you do know I am gay, right?’
‘Can I give you a manicure, Aunty Jules?’ Bella, Jeff’s eleven-year-old daughter enters the room with her beauty case, followed by one of the family’s three cocker spaniels.
‘It’s nearly bedtime, sweetheart,’ Jeff says. ‘Time to get your PJs on.’
‘But you said I could stay up late if I finished my English homework, the essay about my favourite sandwich. I’ve written five pages.’
Jeff’s eyes widen. ‘Must have been a hell of a sandwich.’
‘My nails are in need of some TLC,’ I tell him, examining them.
‘Oh, go on then,’ he replies, kissing Bella on the head, before she happily skips over to me and takes out a bottle of polish.
Jeff and Andy had been talking about adoption for years before they got serious about it.
It was a big step, but I was still never sure what took them so long.
Jeff did once drop into a conversation that he was worried about people treating a child differently because they had two dads, to which I delivered an impassioned speech about how he simply mustn’t let other people’s prejudices prevent him.
We were in the veg aisle at Sainsbury’s at the time.
He told me to shush and stop threatening him with a courgette.
But I remain confident to this day that I was instrumental in persuading him it was a good idea, even if, annoyingly, I’ve since heard him attribute their decision to an episode of Modern Family.
He and Andy were finally introduced to Bella as a curly-haired sixteen-month-old, after they’d jumped through endless hoops, sat through panel meetings and were vetted by social workers.
He dived into parenthood wholeheartedly.
One minute, he was a man with a wardrobe full of Italian investment pieces, whose idea of a fun weekend involved vineyard tours of the Duoro Valley.
The next, he was embracing the noisy, vaguely unhygienic world of soft play and Splash Land.
He’s even the chair of the school PTA these days, so spends weekends planning end-of-term discos and selling tea towels printed with Year 6 self-portraits.
He’s extremely good at it, hence my owning four myself, all printed with pictures of children I have never even met.
As for the prejudice he feared Bella might face, it hasn’t materialised so far.
Teachers fall over themselves to compliment him on his parenting, which is not a phenomenon I’ve ever experienced myself.
‘Oh no!’ Bella exclaims, as she smudges a nail and examines the result. ‘It’s not very neat, is it?’
‘It’s lovely!’ I insist, though in truth it looks like I’ve trapped my fingers in a paper shredder. ‘Very professional. If you go into my handbag I’ll give you a tip. I think there’s a pound coin in the inside pocket.’
She hesitates. ‘Maybe a bank transfer would be easier?’
Jeff nearly chokes on his cocktail. ‘Get out of here! The words you were looking for were thank you, Aunty Jules.’
‘Okay! Thank you!’ she says, giggling, as she takes the coin and disappears with her beauty case.
‘Outrageous. I don’t know how many times I’ve told her to ask for crypto,’ he laughs, sitting down next to me. ‘Now, before anyone else arrives, how’s Gavin?’
I can’t believe it took him this long to ask.
‘Fine,’ I shrug, not meeting his gaze.
‘Still seeing a lot of him?’
‘A fair amount, yes.’
He narrows his eyes sceptically.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I ask.
‘He is real, isn’t he?’ he asks.
‘Of course he’s real.’
‘So why have you been dating for weeks now and I still haven’t even laid eyes on the man in question?’
‘Jeff, he’s a living, breathing man. I assure you. But we’re taking things slow. Plus, he’s very busy,’ I say, hoping that’s the end of the matter. But even I know that’s unlikely given that this is one of Jeff’s favourite topics of conversation.
Since I became a widow five years ago, I have discovered that people have a preconceived idea about how long it’s acceptable to grieve.
As far as my brother is concerned, I passed that mark a long time ago.
He was the first person to raise the possibility of my ever letting another man into my life, deliberately choosing a moment of weakness after we’d watched Moonstruck.
As the end credits rolled, he started on about how it was time and what Ed would have wanted and if I wasn’t careful I’d turn into a Miss Havisham-type character and just wither away and die, decrepit, bitter and alone.
‘How very reassuring of you,’ I said snippily, though I knew his heart was in the right place.
The difficulty is that mine was not, no matter how much he, and later others, would try and force the issue.
I think everyone accepts that there is no chance of me falling in love again, that a replacement for Ed doesn’t exist even if I’d wanted one.
Which I really don’t. But people seem determined that there’s room in everyone’s heart for ‘a little romance’.
Jeff’s words, not mine. Personally, I find the prospect stomach-churning – though I know from bitter experience that if I say this sort of thing out loud I’m almost guaranteed to get a lecture.
But it was a comment from Frankie that made me realise that I ought to make a semblance of being emotionally available, for her sake if nobody else’s.
‘Do you think you’ll ever get a boyfriend, Mum?’ she’d said, out of the blue, when I was driving her back from a shift at the care home.
My knuckles tightened on the steering wheel, my voice high and unnatural as I casually enquired: ‘What brought this on?’
I imagined that she’d got all dewy-eyed again, after chatting to one of the old dears about their six-decade marriage.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I just saw one of your tatty old bras hanging on the line,’ she said, turning up her lip in distaste. ‘Seriously, Mum. At the very least I think you need some new underwear.’