Nine Uses For An Ex-Boyfriend (35 page)

Marge and Caroline shared a brief, panicked look. ‘Well, no, that’s where you’re wrong because if Jack didn’t love you, then why would he agree to Roger and Bill going down to London to talk to him?’ Marge cried in desperation. ‘He loves you, Hope. He was
sobbing
!’

Hope put her head in her hands. ‘I don’t want to talk about this any more. We’re just going round in circles.’ She forced herself to look her mother in the eye, but bottled out at the last second. ‘You said we could thrash this out but, can’t you see, you’re just flogging a dead horse?’

Her mother flapped her hands dismissively. ‘Nonsense! Jack just needs a gentle nudge in the right direction.’

‘He needs to be reminded of where his priorities lie,’ Marge chimed in, and Hope steeled herself for a completely inappropriate pep talk about putting the spice back into their sex life, and if they started talking about buying some raunchy underwear and taking striptease lessons, she was going to run screaming out into the night. Or hitch a ride to the station, she really was.

‘… time to think about having a baby …’

Hope’s head shot up. ‘Say
what
?’

‘Obviously you’ll have to stay in London at that school to qualify for your maternity benefit, which is a shame, because the health service is much better here,’ Caroline Delafield said with a sniff. ‘Then once you’ve had the baby, you can both come home. You’ll want to have another child quite soon, nothing worse than an only child, then you can go back to work once they’re both at nursery. I can easily find you a teaching job. I do have rather a lot of sway with the local education authority. There might even be a position at my school. That would be nice, us working together, wouldn’t it?’

Hope was appalled. If this was their cunning plan, then she’d totally wasted the price of a return train ticket. She did want babies, of course she did, but
years
from now. And she didn’t want babies with a man who was in love with another woman. And Christ, she never wanted her mother as her boss. Just kill her now. ‘I’d take Jack back in a heartbeat, he knows that I would, but I’m not going to trick him into staying with me, by getting pregnant!’

‘Well, you want to get married to Jack, don’t you?’ her mother demanded. ‘Remember that barney you had when you thought he was going to propose in Spain? Well, having a baby is practically the same as getting married.’

‘It’s
nothing
like getting married, Mum!’

Marge patted Hope’s hand. ‘But Jack wants to be with you, he’s just confused right now, and I know it’s not very fashionable to say this, but biologically this is the best time for you to start a family.’

‘But there’s tons of stuff I want to do, and I’m only twenty-six, and Gurinder at work had her kids when she was in her late thirties.’

That stopped them in their baby-making tracks. All thoughts of Hope and Jack’s rapprochement were forgotten as they began to harangue her about all the birth defects that Hope’s hypothetical children would have if she left it too late. ‘Do you know what the medical term is for women
who
have babies after thirty-five?’ her mother shouted, her face red. ‘
Geriatric
mothers. Do you want to be a geriatric mother?’

‘You were forty-five when you had Jerry, so just stop it!’ Hope shouted back. ‘I mean it! When you said that we could find a solution to this
fucking
nightmare, I actually dared to hope that you meant it, but all you have is some bullshit scheme that’s not going to bring me and Jack back together. It’s just about you trying to micro-manage our bloody lives like you have done for the last twenty years! I don’t even know if I really did want to get married, or if it was because you banged on about it so much that I went along with it just to get you to shut up!’

‘Hope Louise Delafield! I won’t be spoken to like that!’ Caroline Delafield banged her fist on the table so hard that her wine glass bounced off the edge and shattered on the slate-tile floor. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’

‘Fine! I’m going!’

Hope got up, flounced out of the kitchen, flounced back to apologise to Marge, then stomped up the stairs to her room. Flinging herself on her lonely single bed seemed like the right thing to do – she really was channelling her not-so-inner teen.

Jack, as ever, had definitely got the better of the deal. The three of them had probably gone down the pub and were talking about football. Then in the five minutes before they left on Sunday morning, her dad or Roger would say, ‘We’re relying on you to do the right thing, son.’ Jack always got off easy.

Hope could remember lying on this bed when she was thirteen and thinking about Jack then too. But in those days it was hatching plan after plan to get him to stop seeing her as his friend who just happened to be a girl, and to start seeing her as a potential girlfriend. She’d stuffed her trainer bra with cottonwool balls, which had given her very fake, very lumpy boobs. And she’d stood shivering on the
sidelines
of a muddy, waterlogged field, cheering until her throat was hoarse, when Jack had played football for the local youth team. When that hadn’t worked, she’d doled out huge amounts of icy disdain in Jack’s direction in time-honoured ‘treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen’ tradition, which Lauren and
Sugar
magazine swore would work where everything else had failed.

She must have done something right because then there’d been that night Jack was walking her home from the once-a-month Youth Club disco, which he always did because her mum had asked him to and he did live next door, when he’d suddenly coughed nervously and asked if he could kiss her.

Hope could still remember every single detail of that first close-mouthed, bumped-nose kiss. It had been unexpected and utterly thrilling but also scary to have Jack’s lips on hers, and she hadn’t known what to do with her mouth or how to breathe or if she’d freak out if he used tongue. No other kiss ever could compete with that first kiss and all the months and months of desperate yearning that had preceded it.

But then there was that other kiss. A kiss that she never expected, because she’d imagined that the only man who’d ever kiss her for the rest of her life was Jack. Jack’s first kiss had filled Hope full of longing but when Wilson had kissed her exactly one week ago, it had triggered a deep, dark lust that Hope hadn’t known she was capable of feeling. Kisses could change your life, or at least change the direction that your life was going.

But Wilson was just … just the sexual equivalent of a couple of ibuprofen, and she had to stop transferring or displacing, or whatever the hell it was that she was doing. Hope hung off the edge of the bed so she could yank open one of the divan drawers and pull out a pink shoebox covered in Take That and Hello Kitty stickers.

Hope dumped the contents on her duvet and sifted
through
photos of teenage parties, daytrips to Blackpool, nights out at the indie disco in Oldham. She could still conjure up the smell of Elnett and singed hair as she got ready at Lauren’s house, swigging from Diet-Coke bottles filled up with Malibu and pineapple juice. They’d meet up with the rest of their little gang to get the bus into town, and she’d sit on the back seat with Jack, snogging. Once Jack had left for university, there were the weekends in London. Hope would swear blind to her mother that she’d have her own room in Jack’s shared house when in reality they’d spend the whole time shagging, in between the shopping and drinking. She’d been so happy back then, really happy in a way that you could only be when you were a teenager and you were in love, and in every photo that anyone took of you, his arms were around you and you were both gazing at the camera with goofy grins and red pupils.

They hadn’t been that kind of happy for a long, long time, but maybe that stopped when you had a mortgage and credit cards and full-time jobs. It was the kind of happiness that came from being young and completely free from any kind of responsibility. They could still be happy, Hope was sure of that, but it was more of a quiet contentedness than that wild exuberant rush that had always made Hope shiver with anticipation when she’d been on the London-bound train.

But how could you have quiet contentment with someone when every time that he said he was working late, you immediately suspected that he was with another woman? Or you had to stop yourself from poring over his Facebook account to see if he was getting wall messages from women that he’d sworn he would never have any contact with? Or if every time he bought you flowers or a tub of ice-cream, you assumed it was to assuage his guilty conscience because he’d been doing something with someone who wasn’t you?

Once the trust was gone, you weren’t left with much to base a relationship on, Hope thought as she stuffed the
photos
back in the box and shoved it out of sight. And if your other half didn’t want to be your other half, then you didn’t even have a relationship.

When her mother gently tapped on the door and opened it, Hope was in bed, squeezed into a pair of old pyjamas, listening to a Britpop mix CD Jack had made her on her battered old Discman.

Hope immediately tensed up and prayed that her mother would go against type, just this once, and not comment on how crying had left her eyes puffy and red. She unhooked her headphones as her mother came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Oh Hopey,’ she said, her voice a lot gentler than Hope had expected. ‘I know you think I’m too hard on you, but I just want you to be happy.’

‘I know,’ Hope said, as she let her mother stroke the lump that was her thigh. ‘But we never seem to agree on what would make me happy.’

Caroline Delafield sighed. ‘It’s just that I can’t wait for you to give me a grandchild. A little granddaughter with Jack’s hair and your eyes.’

‘But you already have five grandchildren,’ Hope pointed out. ‘Two of which are granddaughters.’

‘Yes, but it’s different when it’s your daughter, rather than your daughter-in-law,’ her mother said, and it was odd to be having a conversation together with no back-biting, no raised voices, even if the subject matter was making Hope die a little. ‘You know what they say.’

‘No, what do
they
say?’

‘That you have a daughter for life. You have a son until he gets married.’ Her mother was obviously on her way to bed as she’d taken off her make-up and her hair was tied back in a scrunchie. She looked older and a lot more tired than she usually did, and Hope felt moved to lean forward and give her a quick hug, even brush her lips against her mother’s cheek.

‘I’m sorry about this, Mum,’ she murmured. ‘And if there
is
a way out of this situation that doesn’t involve us breaking up or me getting up the duff …’

‘Hopey! That’s a revolting expression!’

‘Getting pregnant, then,’ Hope amended hastily, nudging her mother with her foot and teasing a brief smile from her. ‘I’m just saying, I’m willing to put the effort in if Jack will too but … it’s just … It’s like he’s changed so much and I can’t trust a single word he says any more.’

Her mother shot off the bed like she’d suddenly remembered an urgent load of laundry that she just had to do. ‘I’m sure that’s not the case. He’s always been very reliable in the past.’

‘Mum, he’s changed, and I don’t feel like I know the new Jack or, well, if I even like him that much.’

The conversation had taken a sharp turn into territory where her mother didn’t want to go because she was scurrying for the safety of the landing. ‘It’s late and you’ve had a lot to drink and we’ll talk about this tomorrow,’ she said, as she flicked off the main light, without even asking Hope if she was ready to turn in for the night.

CAROLINE DELAFIELD STAYED ABSOLUTELY
true to her word and she did talk about it the next morning. She talked about Jack and Hope and her plans for their future at lunch too, and came with Hope to the hairdresser’s so she could carp on about property prices and the standard of living in the Greater Manchester area, which were much lower and much higher respectively than they were in London.

She only paused before the Great Comb-Out began, when Hope mooted the possibility of cutting a good ten inches off so she’d end up with a jawline bob that wouldn’t need combing out.

‘But you’ve got such lovely, long hair,’ her mother exclaimed. ‘Or it would be if you ran a brush through it occasionally, and really you don’t have the bone structure to go that short.’

Then the tugging and pulling commenced and all Hope could do was say, ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Christ!’ and ‘Can you stop for a second?’ She wasn’t sure if she was talking to Mandy and her wide-toothed comb, or to her mother who was
still
talking babies, but this time about the future progeny of Prince William and the former Kate Middleton and how she hoped they wouldn’t inherit their looks from the Windsor side of the family.