Best Supporting Role (4 page)

I was heading back to the car when I saw Imogen Stagge striding towards me. Was she wearing pj’s under her raincoat?

“Sarah . . . I’ve only just heard.” Imogen made the Queen sound like Eliza Doolittle. Her hug involved much vigorous back rubbing. I felt like a forlorn Labrador being greeted by its mistress. As she released me, I could see that she was indeed wearing pajamas. Tartan flannel. The trousers were tucked into a pair of dog-eared Ugg boots. “Dreadful news. Just dreadful. How
are
you? And how are the children coping? They must be devastated, poor little mites. I think if anything happened to Oliver, I’d completely fall to pieces.”

“We’re bearing up,” I said.

“Good for you . . . Doesn’t help to wallow. Now then . . . it occurs
to me that what you need is something to keep you occupied. And in my role as chair of the PTA, I have been put in charge of organizing the spring bring-and-buy sale and I’m on the hunt for people to man the barricades.”

Mike had loathed Imogen, on the grounds that she was bossy, condescending and most of all—posh. “And as for that disingenuous charm, they’re taught it at school—how to engage the lower orders in conversation and make them feel like nobody else in the room matters. Five minutes later they can’t remember who the fuck you are.”

It was well-known that Imogen came from a titled family and was in fact the Honourable Imogen Stagge.

I rather liked her. I admired her self-confidence—the fact that she said what was on her mind. I knew this was mainly down to class. The highborn tended not to go in for self-doubt, but it occurred to me that her assurance was also born of age. Having been delivered of the Honourable Arthur (her second son) in her mid-forties, Imogen was now over fifty and by her own admission had reached the stage in her life when, “Quite frankly, I don’t give a flying fart what anybody thinks of me.”

“I know it’s only January,” Imogen was saying now, “but the sale will be upon us in no time. What do you say?”

“Well, actually . . .”

“First planning meeting is next week. I’ll put you down, shall I?”

“I don’t know. . . . You see, things are still pretty . . .”

“Come on. . . . It’ll take you out of yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“Good girl. That’s the ticket.”

She patted my arm and urged me to keep my chin up, before striding off again.

•   •   •

I
t was a few more days before I could persuade Mum and Dad that I was strong enough to be on my own and that they could go home. So far I hadn’t had the luxury of being able to grieve alone. I needed that. They went, but not without a fight and not without making sure my fridge and all my food cupboards were full to bursting. Even then, Mum popped in every day with a chicken casserole or some chopped liver—“To keep your iron up.”

As the weeks passed, the nature of my grief changed. I started to feel angry. It hit me at the oddest times—while I was emptying the trash or loading the dishwasher. I would look up at the ceiling and rage: “How dare you bloody die and leave me alone and broke with two children to bring up.” Then I would call Mike a bastard son of a bitch and collapse in tears at the kitchen table.

Steve, the financial advisor we’d consulted before Mike died, broke it to me—not that I needed telling—that now that I was without Mike’s income, there was no chance of negotiating a debt payment plan with the mortgage company or any of our other creditors. If I wanted to avoid bankruptcy, my only option was to sell the house. The equity wasn’t huge, so there wouldn’t be much money left after the sale—certainly not enough for a deposit on a new place. I would have to rent.

“Tell you what I’ll do, though,” he said. “I’ll try to buy you some time. I’ll write to all your creditors and let them know that the house is for sale. I’ll also explain that you’ve been recently widowed
and that there are young children. If I appeal to their better nature, they might give you some breathing space and stop hounding you for payments. But you have to understand, I can’t promise anything.”

When Steve called a couple of weeks later to tell me we had a deal, I burst into tears.

“Steve, that’s amazing. I don’t know what to say. Thank you . . . thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.” He paused. “Oh, and . . . regarding my bill.”

“Don’t worry. Just invoice me for what I owe. I need to find a job soon, so I’ll pay you in installments if that’s all right.”

“No . . . sorry . . . you misunderstand. I wasn’t remotely hassling you for money. I was going to say that I don’t want paying.”

“What? No . . . That’s ridiculous. I won’t have you treating me like a charity case.”

“Well, I’m not taking any money from you and that’s final.”

“Look, I know you mean well, but for my own self-respect, I have to pay you what I owe.”

He let out a sigh. “OK . . . I’ve got another idea. Get yourself back on track financially and then pay me. It doesn’t matter if it’s five years from now.”

“No. I need to pay you now.”

“Sorry, but that’s my best offer. I refuse to take money from you when you don’t have it.”

“OK . . . it would seem that I have no option.”

“You don’t. So do we have a deal?”

“I guess we do. And thank you. I really appreciate your generosity. But be in no doubt. I’ll be paying you back . . . with interest.”

“We’ll talk about that when the time comes.”

Steve wished me all the best, and a few days later I sent him a bottle of posh Scotch to thank him for his kindness.

•   •   •

I
t wasn’t long before the dinner invitations started to arrive—mainly from people I knew at ABT. They were concerned that I was at home moping and getting depressed—which I was—and that I needed to get out of myself—which, according to my mother, I definitely did. I’d always enjoyed getting together with Mike’s workmates. They were a hard-drinking bunch, but they were funny and irreverent and great company. I was so touched that they’d thought of me that I said yes to all the invites. Mum and Dad came to babysit and I attempted to find my way to houses and flats on the other side of London. Lost in the wilds of Streatham or Deptford, cursing myself for having been one of those ditzy, oh-it’s-all-too-complicated-for-me women who always let their husband take charge of the GPS, I’d never felt so alone.

I was surprised to discover that being surrounded by people, couples in particular, did little to make the feeling go away. I wasn’t ready for the “Oh,
we
love that show. . . . No,
we
hated the food there. . . .
We
always pop a Valium before we have a long flight.” I hated their smug mutualness. I hated
them
.

When I wasn’t busy being bitter and jealous, I was doing my best to cope with the children’s emotions. Soon after the funeral, Ella started wetting the bed. Both children insisted on sleeping with me. On top of that, they required constant cuddles and assurance that I wasn’t about to die.

“In
Annie
, the children are orphans,” Ella said—she was
practically watching the movie on a loop. “That means they don’t have a daddy or a mummy. What would happen if you died? Who would look after us? Would me and Dan go into a orph-nige?”

I spent hours trying to reassure her that I had no plans to die until I was very, very old and that if by some chance I did happen to die while she and Dan were still children, then Grandma and Granddad would look after them.

“But they’re old and they could die.”

She was right. They could. I had no idea how to reassure her. In the end all I could do was take her in my arms and promise her faithfully that nobody else was going to die.

Then there were the outbursts of anger. They never acted out at school. They saved it for home.

My failure to produce the right flavor of potato chips or yogurt could result in toys being thrown, kicked and trodden on. Once when I suggested to Dan that he might think about tidying his room as the floor had pretty much disappeared, he started screaming and punching me. “I hate you. I hate you. I don’t want you. I want my dad.”

They were blaming me for Mike’s death. Judy the grief therapist (who I’d found through Barbara the addiction counselor) told me what she always told me, that they were exhibiting textbook behavior and it was to be expected.

“I don’t care if it’s bloody textbook. It’s driving me insane.”

“I know, but try to understand. Mike was snatched away from them in the most brutal way. Of course they’re going to be angry. And who else are they going to take it out on? Children see their mothers as protectors. According to their logic, you should have
been there to save Mike.” She promised me it was just another stage in their grieving process and that their anger—and mine, come to that—would eventually subside. Meanwhile I had to stay calm, grit my teeth and wait for the storm to pass.

“So once I’ve worked through all my bad feelings,” I said, “what do I get left with?”

Judy smiled. “I can’t tell you that. People’s experiences vary depending on what sort of relationship they had with the dead person. All I will say is that you don’t get over the death of a loved one—or even an unloved one. With time, the feelings of grief become less intense, but they never go away. You simply learn to live alongside them.”

So, a peace of sorts awaited me. I wondered how long it would take to reach it. For the time being, though, I had to put my search for serenity on hold and find a job. I was getting by on my state widow’s pension and the money I’d made from selling the Range Rover. (I’d begged Mike to sell it, but he always refused. The car and the house were outward displays of his success. Like he would be seen dead driving some old banger.) On top of my pension and the car money, there was a small pension from ABT. Had the contributions not been deducted automatically from Mike’s salary, he would have spent the money and left me with nothing.

I planned to spend the Range Rover money on school fees. I could live with being seen driving a ’97 Fiat hatchback. I couldn’t live with the children being forced to leave the school they loved and all their friends.

Finding a job in a recession was easier said than done. It didn’t help that I’d been out of the workplace since Dan was born. In that time I had developed excellent multitasking skills, but I doubted that
any employer was going to pay me to rustle up a spag bol at the same time as building a Lego fort, unloading the dishwasher and breast-feeding.

When Mike and I first met, I’d just set myself up in business designing and making rockabilly party frocks—halter-necks, huge petticoats under polka-dot skirts. I rented a grotty, airless cellar beneath a bagel bakery in the East End and worked on my hipster image—cropped, sexually ambiguous red hair, Rosie the Riveter head scarves and vintage twinsets.

After Mike and I got married, the business took off. My ancient Singer sewing machine and I were making a living. It was then that I started schlepping dress samples around the trendy boutiques and West End stores, begging for a few moments’ face time with one of their buyers. Mostly they showed me the door. Buyers were either in meetings, on conference calls, off sick or at lunch—at four in the afternoon. I would ask if I could leave my card and a couple of samples. People tended to say yes, just to get rid of me. When I heard nothing after a few weeks, I would go back to the shop to retrieve the samples. Occasionally they had been kept. More often than not, they’d been trashed.

One day, I’d been about to go back to Threads, a boutique on Carnaby Street, to collect my samples, when I got a call from the owner to say he was prepared to offer me a contract. I almost blew it because I assumed it was Mike on the phone, camping it up, and told him to bugger off. It took the guy a full five minutes to convince me that he was genuine, after which I spent another five minutes apologizing.

The order from Threads wasn’t huge—just a dozen dresses—but it was a start, and each dress would carry the Sarah Green label.

There was a second and a third order, each slightly bigger than the last. By now I’d hired two seamstresses to help manage the workload. I was high on the thrill of it.

Then I got pregnant with Dan. I realized that if the dressmaking business was to carry on growing, I needed to go straight back to work after he was born. I convinced myself that I could hand him over to a nanny, but in the end I couldn’t. Just the thought of being parted from him reduced me to tears. When Evie Sparrow, the Shoreditch hipster fashionista, invited me in for a meeting to discuss a possible contract to supply her shop, I explained that I was on maternity leave. She said that I should get in touch when I was back at work, but soon I was pregnant with Ella.

The Singer lived hidden behind my shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe—abandoned along with my hipster image. Occasionally I would get it out because a girlfriend had begged me to make her a dress for a party or a wedding. Then I would be reminded of all the hope and excitement I’d felt setting up my own business and later getting that order from Threads in Carnaby Street. Life had been about possibilities. Those memories always made me feel sad and homesick. I spent a lot of time lost in my thoughts, imagining what might have been. I was disappointed in myself. I should have grappled harder with my emotions, found a way to combine being a good mother with pursuing my dream.

Now that I needed money, my first thought was to go back to dressmaking. With the children at school, I could easily work from home, but these days I had no reputation. It took years to build one.

I traipsed round town handing my scant CV to every restaurant,
bar and shop. When I wasn’t traipsing, I wrote application letters and e-mails. I made follow-up phone calls and spent hours on hold listening to Vivaldi’s
Spring
. The message was always the same: no experience.

In the end, the police came to my rescue. A nonemergency crime helpline was being set up at the local police station and they were looking for people to man it. The only requirements were good communication skills and lack of a criminal record.

I applied and got an interview. The first question the sergeant asked me was: “So how would you respond in a hostage situation?”