The Ballroom Class (45 page)

Before he could protest any more, she turned and marched out of the bar, her heels stomping on the wooden floorboards as her blonde hair swung well above the general mass of heads. On her way out, she nearly knocked over Kian coming back from the bar with two pint glasses and a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.

‘Aye aye,’ he said to Chris, who was staring helplessly after her retreating back.

Bollocks, he thought. Bollocks. Lauren didn’t lose her temper often, because she hated upsetting people, but when she did, God, did he know about it. Besides, Chris knew, deep down, that this time she had the right to be mad.

But sometimes you had to say things, didn’t you?

‘She’ll be back, mate,’ said Kian, dumping the drinks on the table. ‘Probably just the wrong time of the month. Simple as that.’

Chris took a thoughtful draw on his pint, and Kian made a happy clicking noise with his tongue, meaning a new phone number had just been entered on his phone.

The trouble was, thought Chris, his life wasn’t as simple as Kian’s, because his life wasn’t just his any more. It was Lauren’s too. For twenty-five years, like the mortgage said. And the rest after that.

Bridget slipped into the spare room, and shut the door carefully behind her. Frank was dozing in his chair downstairs, and Lauren was having a night out with Chris, staying over at his afterwards. That gave Bridget at least an hour uninterrupted to sort things out, longer if Frank decided to make his own cup of tea when he woke up.

She blinked hard. If things could be sorted out in an hour.

No, she told herself, briskly, just as she told the children at school, when something’s wrong, you’ve got to face up to it. There’s no point ignoring what isn’t going to go away.

And before she could chicken out again, she opened the plastic folder with all the red bills and bank statements in, and spread them across the bed.

Bridget swallowed as the reality of her situation sank in.

Four credit cards, thousands of pounds of overdraft, one wedding, half of which was still to pay for. And no secret stash of cash to save her bacon.

Bridget and Frank had never used credit cards much during their marriage – ‘If we can’t pay for it straight off, we can’t afford it’, had been Frank’s motto, inherited from his own dad who’d only stopped keeping money under his mattress in 1985, when he’d gone into hospital and the nurses had refused to be responsible for it. Frank wouldn’t have understood the smartness of playing one card off against another. But he did like the novelty of having things now, instead of waiting.

So she hadn’t told him that the new lawnmower she’d treated him to had gone on her Capital One card, or that she’d also popped their Easter holiday on the card too, so she could use the cash in her account to pay for the hand-engraved ‘Save the Day’ cards Lauren had ordered without telling her, as well as putting a deposit on the band.

Bridget bit her lip as she surveyed the statements, each innocuous purchase looming up at her. None of them seemed so expensive on their own, but together  . . .

She’d managed to fit everything into her budget perfectly to begin with. But then Frank’s pension had turned out to be nearly a third less a month than he’d been expecting, and they’d had to spend fifteen hundred pounds putting the car right after the clutch went; that had gone on the overdraft. Then there were the household bills, so much higher than usual with Lauren back, on the phone and on the internet and in the fridge all the time, and Frank ‘enjoying his retirement’ with M&S luxury ready-meals, and buying her that eternity ring. Bridget didn’t want to alert Frank to the amount of money owing on the cards by writing massive monthly cheques to clear them, so she’d only been paying off the minimum balance, but the amounts splashed out at Bridal Path and Wedding Belles seemed to be double what she remembered spending.

And now she had no idea where she was going to find fifteen thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three pounds, seventeen pence – not counting the rest of the money the wedding was going to cost.

Bridget sat back and stared at the statements, and felt sick.

She knew she should come clean and tell Frank. She should have said something before now, before he even gave Lauren the money, but how could she now, seeing Lauren so sparkly eyed with excitement and love, hugging her dad and telling her what a lifesaver he was and how she had the best parents in the world? And him, all thrilled to be helping her. She’d have had to have a heart of stone.

She rested her elbows on the table and tried to think. They could try to get a second mortgage on the house, although where were they going to find an extra three or four hundred a month? They could cut back. (But on what?) She’d have to tell Frank.

Even as she thought it, something in her recoiled in shame. For their entire marriage, Frank had boasted to their friends about how his Bridget was so pennywise that they’d never had a moment’s worry over money in their lives. He was so proud of her for her common sense, and he trusted her to keep them right, financially. And now she’d let him down over something so stupid.

They’d been looking forward to retiring for years, knowing they hadn’t a fortune, but they had ‘enough to see us out’, as he liked to say. It was the time of their lives for relaxing. Enjoying themselves. Not scrimping and panicking about mortgage rates. Bridget’s heart ached as she thought about the times they’d slumped in front of the telly, after long days at work, and joked wanly about how it’d all be worth it once they were retired. ‘I can’t wait to do nothing with you, Mrs Armstrong,’ he’d said. ‘We’ll have enough for chocolate digestives then, eh?’

Frank’s blood pressure was only just coming down now after years of strain, and if he found out she was going to have to work longer to pay off a credit-card debt  . . .

A sudden, sharp image flashed in front of her eyes, of the two of them dancing at the social night, smooching round the crowded dancefloor, held tightly in each other’s arms despite their height difference, moving with the practice of thousands of songs and hundreds of nights. Frank had leaned down to whisper in her ear. ‘I don’t think I’ve been this happy since we first met,’ he’d said with that gentle smile that had been for her alone since she was seventeen years old.

No, thought Bridget, struggling to keep calm. I’m just going to have to work out a way of dealing with it. Frank needn’t know. Lauren definitely mustn’t know; if her special day was going to cost this much, there was absolutely no way she was going to allow it to be spoiled by worry.

Special day, thought Bridget. They’ve got you at last.

She picked up a sheet of paper, with her neat figures running down the right-hand side. So far, she’d managed to drum up nearly four hundred pounds eBaying bits and pieces from around the house, without touching the two or three items that would raise the most money, but had far more sentimental value – her charm bracelet, a painting her mother had given her. Frank hadn’t noticed a few china dolls vanishing from the sideboard, but he’d notice if she suddenly wasn’t wearing her eternity ring.

The letter from the newest credit-card company sat unopened in the file, and she had to force herself to open it.

When she did, an involuntary gasp escaped from Bridget’s throat. There was a note about how much the calculated interest would be next month, when the 0% period expired, if she didn’t pay it off in full. When Bridget had been banking on making her smart transfer, that sum had seemed fairly outrageous. Now, along with the minimum payment that she didn’t have, it seemed terrifying.

She scrumpled up the letter in fear, then made herself unscrumple it, smoothing it out with shaking fingers.

Bridget sat on the bed, surrounded by the overspill of stuff from Lauren’s room – her boxes of wedding shoes, and Save the Day cards, and stacks of glossy magazines full of ideas for spending money on white things – and for the first time in her entire life, she felt scared.

The lights were on when Lauren pulled up outside her parents’ house and she sat in the car for a few minutes, to calm herself down. She took two or three deep breaths through her nose, like a horse, rehearsing how much she’d tell her mum, so she’d get the whingeing off her chest, but without making her worry that the wedding was off.

But bloody hell, it wasn’t on, all that ‘don’t make me choose between my mates and you!’ business. Who said there had to be a choice? That sounded to Lauren like a previous conversation
someone else
had had with Chris. That someone being a friend who had a vested interest in keeping him available for pub-crawling.

Lauren ran a hand through her hair, smoothing down her blonde fringe as she’d done since she was little. She felt like storming round to that building site and telling them to get a move on with her house, because the sooner Chris was away from Kian Matthews, the better.

She tried to ignore the voice at the back of her head reminding her that Kian wasn’t exactly handcuffing Chris to the bar stools, and that he was a big enough boy to say no if he really wanted to.

It was starting to drizzle again, and Lauren hopped from foot to foot on the step as she let herself in. She spotted Dad of the Year asleep in front of the television, a book about ballroom dancing rising and falling on his chest. He looked old, Lauren thought with surprise. When he was asleep, the bags under his eyes seemed pouchier, and his skin slacker, yet when he was awake and bantering away, he looked the same as he’d done all her childhood.

But then her parents
were
old – in their sixties. Her mum was filing credit-card statements with the coffee, and her dad actually wanted slippers for Christmas. Would Chris look like that, snoring in front of the fire with her in forty years’ time?

Lauren couldn’t picture it.

There was no sign of life in the kitchen, so she made a cup of tea for herself, and one for her mum, then headed upstairs, thinking Bridget might be eBaying more junk on her computer. Good for Mum, she thought, taking care not to tread on Mittens, sprawled out deliciously under the landing radiator. She might be getting on a bit, but she’s embracing the internet.

The light was off in her room, but there was a thin strip of light under the spare-bedroom door, the one her mother used as a study.

‘Mum?’

As Lauren pushed her way in, there was a flurry of activity, much more than if her mother had just been doing the monthly bills.

‘What are you doing?’ Lauren crossed the room in one step, and put the mugs down on the paper-strewn desk. Too late, Bridget swept away the papers, but even Lauren could see they were red bills. Very red bills. And when she looked at her mum more closely, she could see Bridget’s eyes were red too, as if she’d been crying.

‘Mum?’ she asked, her heart quickening.

Bridget wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried to look normal. Her mouth twisted in a crooked, unconvincing smile.

Mothers should never cry in front of their children, she told herself. Never, never. Not until you were so old they were looking after you and not the other way round.

‘I’m fine, love. I thought you were meant to be round at Chris’s tonight?’

‘I came home early  . . . Oh my God, Mum, are you all right?’ exclaimed Lauren, dropping to her knees and wrapping her arms around her mother where she sat in the chair. ‘Have you been crying?’

To her horror, she felt her mum’s shoulders start to shake under her, and for a moment, Lauren was swamped with panic. This was all wrong; her mum was meant to comfort
her
after her crap night with Chris, not the other way round. And if her mum was crying, her capable, sensible mum, then it had to be something
really
bad.

Her mind raced. What could it be? Dad ill? He looked OK downstairs. Billy ill? Something wrong with her granny, in the nursing home?

How can it be to do with those bills? wondered Lauren. Mum’s great with her budget. Maybe these are Gran’s bills. That must be it, she thought, her imagination filling in the gaps with lurid images as usual – she’s had her identity hi-jacked and someone’s run up store cards in her name and now Mum’s having to sort it out.

Lauren made soothing noises and stroked her mother’s thick hair. She felt so small and fragile in her arms. ‘Don’t cry, Mum,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we can’t sort out. Don’t cry.’

She felt Bridget make a gargantuan effort to stop sobbing and pull herself together, and was quite relieved when she sat up, wiping her bright eyes.

‘It’s fine,’ Lauren went on. ‘Isn’t it? Tell me what’s wrong.’

Bridget took a couple of deep breaths, but while she was composing herself, Lauren caught a glimpse of a bill that had slipped onto the floor while Bridget was trying to hide them. The name on the top was definitely Bridget Armstrong and the outstanding amount was thousands. Thousands that they wanted repaying really, really soon.

She looked up, shocked. ‘Mum? Are those your credit-card bills?’

Bridget nodded, miserably.

Lauren’s mouth dropped open as all the daytime TV shows she’d ever watched about stupid people who’d run up thousands of pounds of debt played in her head. People who’d lost their houses, and broken up their marriages. Chavvy people, greedy people, not like her parents. There had to be a mistake!