Chapter 2
Today, it’s tackling the fortnight’s worth of post she has allowed to accumulate, much like the coarse hairs that seem to keep sprouting out of her chin with increasing regularity.
She hopes that dealing with the mail, if not the hairs, will give her a sense of achievement before her life-changing meeting with Stephen.
It will enable her to go into his office with goddess energy, which is something she’s heard about (on Instagram) and that she feels she should probably be exuding now that she’s about to be made Queen of The Morning.
She pulls the post out of her tote bag, notes the grey footprints which have been stepped into the various envelopes over the last few days, the effort of picking up the post clearly too much for a single one of the Greenwoods, herself included.
There is a phone bill she can ignore, a message from the DVLA she can’t, some vouchers for Pets at Home that might have been useful if Jack’s guinea pigs hadn’t shuffled off their mortal coil six months ago, and then, there is the thick, gold-lined envelope bearing the unmistakable cursive handwriting of her mother, addressed to Mr and Mrs Nick Greenwood.
It embarrasses Olivia, the formality of it all: the fact her own mother refers to her by her husband’s name, the fact she still writes in the ridiculously pompous script she taught herself as a teenager, via a library book called Classic Calligraphy Techniques for the Modern Twentieth Century (lol) and a fountain pen complete with actual ink pot that a distant, sympathetic uncle had gifted her.
Olivia had heard this story on a number of occasions, usually to underline how lucky she had been to have an expensive education that both her parents (but mostly her mother) had grafted hard for, but also sometimes to hammer home the fact that Tina had managed to lift herself up and out of the grime of her terrible childhood, scrubbing it off her person so that, in public at least, she could pretend it had never been there in the first place.
What did the Greenwood girls (but mostly Olivia) have to complain about, given the life of relative luxury that their parents (but again, mostly their mother) had created for them?
Could they (but mostly Olivia, because Lily had always been sweetness and light) not see how lucky they were?
Tina was well into her sixties now, but still she couldn’t drop the sob story about her impoverished childhood in Essex, her neglectful parents who had basically abandoned her so they could drink themselves to an early death.
It was sad, Olivia got that, but the woman now lived in a sprawling five-bedroom Georgian house with views of the South Downs while her estranged husband squatted in Olivia’s shed, drinking himself to an early death on his daughter’s watch instead of Tina’s.
Olivia wondered why her mum couldn’t at least have offered her dad ‘the Coach House’, the grandly titled actual annexe at the end of the grounds, where Lily now essentially lived, surrounded by her crystals and her incense sticks and the ‘supplements’ that Tina believed were vital to her youngest daughter’s health.
It was one way of explaining the mushrooms, Olivia supposed.
As Olivia stares down at the gilded envelope, her heart sinks at the thought of her mother sitting in judgement on her, complaining to her new alt-right boyfriend Clive about Olivia’s jealousy, her inability to put petty sibling rivalry to one side and RSVP like a grown-up.
Is that why Olivia hasn’t, as of yet, managed to open the invitation to her sister’s fortieth birthday party?
Some sort of childish strop at Tina pulling out all the stops for Lily, while all she got for her fortieth was a WhatsApp.
Olivia hates how this still rankles, even though she knows logically that her fortieth happened during the height of one of the lockdowns, when Tina could hardly take over the local Italian restaurant for a huge knees-up, as she is doing now with Lily, and when she was still with their dad, and probably didn’t much fancy throwing him, a public event and plenty of booze into the mix together.
As the train rumbles on, Olivia folds herself into the luggage rack like a buggy and wonders why, at the age of forty-four, she still can’t let this stuff go?
Why does she have to make everything so difficult?
Olivia has a variety of tactics she uses to stop herself from appearing difficult – including, but not limited to, nodding along to opinions that are diametrically opposed to her own, saying yes when she actually means no, and staying silent when she feels the need to speak up.
At work, her boss Stephen once joked that she was like the human equivalent of a chaise longue, forever bending herself into impossible shapes in order to make everyone else more comfortable.
Incredibly, Olivia took this as a compliment – for being a human chaise longue, she was certain that today she was finally going to be given her own throne.
Let’s get this out of the way, she thinks, as the suited men sitting comfortably tap away at their laptops.
Olivia tears at the envelope and feels something twist inside her as she reads its contents.
Something very primal and very childish, like that feeling you had as a kid at Christmas when you decided your brother or sister had been given a bigger present than you.
Mrs Tina Fryer
cordially invites the Greenwood family (and Peter)
to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Ms Lily Fryer
RSVP essential by 10th April
Olivia looks at her watch, sees it is the 12th.
She begins to berate herself, in the style of her mother.
Why couldn’t she get her shit together? Could she not do this one little simple thing?
Would Saskia be less controlling about protein bagels if Olivia wasn’t so thoughtless and chaotic?
Would Jack have a stronger sense of self?
Unexpectedly, she feels her eyes sting with tears.
She shakes the thoughts from her brain and searches for the WhatsApp group she is in with her mother and sister.
‘Fabulous Fryer Ladies ’ last saw action several months ago, a series of perfunctory messages confirming that both Tina and Lily would be coming to Jack’s tenth birthday party.
Double digits, wouldn’t miss it for the world! Lily had written.
It’s very kind of you to extend an invitation, her mother had written. Clive sends his apologies as he has a council meeting. I will of course be there.
Of course.
Olivia starts typing a suitably contrite message to try and make up for the inexcusable act of RSVPing late.
I am so unused to invitations to anything other than smear tests that it took me a while to recover from the shock of this one. Please forgive me. The Greenwoods (and Peter) would love to come to Lily’s party xxxx.
Send. She feels suitably confident in answering on behalf of her dad (Peter) owing to the fact that his social life, much like Olivia’s, seems to largely take place entirely in her living room.
Olivia puts the invitation back in her bag and shakes her hands as if ridding herself of her mother’s energy.
Once she’s got this new job, the late RSVP will all be forgotten about and Olivia can set about offering her mother her favourite thing: good news, the type that shows how stunningly successful Tina is as a parent.
To be fair, delivering good news is also Olivia’s favourite thing.
A delicious sweet treat that makes up for all the ‘nonsense’ Olivia has put everyone through over the years, like the time she would only eat food that had an even number of letters in its name, or that was orange in colour, two pretty specific neuroses that she still hasn’t got to the bottom of all these many years later, but has at least got over.
The thought of doing something right, of achieving something important …
it’s all Olivia has ever really wanted. To impress, rather than disappoint.
To lift people up, as opposed to dragging them down.
When she thinks back to the endless troubles she seemed to cause as a child, the upsets she was always at the sharp end of, no matter how hard she tried not to be, she feels a sort of desolate darkness that she would do anything to avoid.
Becoming a journalist at a national newspaper may not mean much to anyone of Saskia or Jack’s generation now, but back in the late nineties and early noughties, when everyone rushed to the newsagent on a Sunday morning to learn who had been diddling who, journalism had felt important.
Working for a broadsheet was honourable, cultured.
It was the kind of thing that her parents could be proud of.
She worked hard, because to be lazy – even if this translated into being burnt out and exhausted – was unforgivable.
Her mother’s values dictated that a lack of professional success was every bit as indefensible as the abandonment that Tina had gone through as a child.
Tina had decided that her firstborn was going to be academic, and that the second one would be a free-spirited creative, and both girls had gone out of their way to play these roles for their mother, Lily with far more success than Olivia.
How thrilling, how terrifying, that today could be the day when all her hard graft finally paid off.