People LIke Her(29)
The usually unembarrassable Irene actually called to ask if I could have a word, but she knows very well Virginia can’t be managed.
She knows this because she’s her manager.
Instagrans have turned into quite a lucrative sideline for Irene, and my mother has taken to social media like a natural. She doesn’t need the money, but that doesn’t stop her delightedly squirreling freebies like a survivalist stockpiles baked beans, and insisting on discounts for dinners, free nights in spa hotels, and once, memorably, a brand-new Range Rover, by waving her iPhone and demanding, “Don’t you know who my daughter is?” Her dedication is impressive—it makes me sad she’s never had a career to plow this much effort and energy into. With her brains and beauty, she could have done anything she put her mind to, if Dad hadn’t sucked the drive out of her. I’ve always sworn that I wouldn’t waste my life like that.
The irony, of course, is that in many ways, we’re identical. Or at the very least, she’s responsible for my defining characteristics. Dr. Fairs traces almost every personality trait of mine directly back to Ginny and her drinking. Trust issues? Tick. Obsessive avoidance of conflict and confrontation? Yep, that too. And a fear of abandonment and a need to control everything and everyone around me. I guess it’s easy to distill an alcoholic down to their negative effects on the people who love them, but what Dr. Fairs doesn’t see is what a fizzing ball of energy she is, how she can change the temperature of a room, how she draws people to her like toddlers to a tube of Smarties. She can be a complete and utter pain in the arse, but it’s impossible to dislike my mother.
There’s a ripple of excitement among the guests when they realize who this size-six whirlwind of Chanel No. 5 and Chablis is. She’s so busy hamming it up over by the pi?ata that she doesn’t see her granddaughter come for a cuddle and accidently bats her around the head, sending her flying. Coco picks herself up and dusts herself down, little brow furrowed and bottom lip wobbling. Finally, my mother spots me and comes over.
“Darling! I nearly chose that skirt!” she cries. “Decided it was a bit frumpy in the end. Good God, what are those hideous stains on your T-shirt? Now, where is my beautiful Coco?” She sashays across the room to the flower wall, looks it up and down disapprovingly. “Bit funereal, no?”
“Mum, this is the journalist who wrote the lovely piece about us. And you remember Polly. We were at school together. She was maid of honor at our wedding.”
With some effort, Ginny’s newly microbladed eyebrows knit.
“Oh gosh, yes, Polly. You’ve not changed a bit! Always so pretty—not that you knew it. I used to say to Emmy that you’d be the beautiful one if you just tried a little harder!”
Polly shoots my mother the close-lipped smile I remember well, as Virginia neatly sidesteps a floral-print toddler making a dash for the cake table.
“I am sure children used to be better behaved than this in my day,” she tuts. “Where are your little ones today, then, Polly?”
“Oh, we’re not . . . I don’t actually . . .”
I realize, with a twinge of regret, that I don’t know whether Polly and Ben are trying or not, and am about to change the subject when I spot Irene out of the corner of my eye, with her arm around the brand’s PR. She’s mouthing something at me and gesturing that I should join them. Thankfully, Winter finally arrives armed with my clean T-shirt a second later. I give Polly’s arm a squeeze as I point at the milk stains, which have dried into chalky rings. “Sorry, Pol, excuse me, both of you. Back in a second. Just got to sort this out before we cut the cake!”
When I look for her ten minutes later, she’s gone.
“Christ, what did you say to her, Mother?” I ask, as if I am joking, which I am not really.
Virginia feigns offense.
“What do you mean, what did I say? I didn’t say anything at all. We were chatting away perfectly happily and then Coco came over with her doll and asked if she wanted to play babies and your friend couldn’t get away quick enough. Went barreling off across the room looking like she was about to start blubbering.”
Virginia indicates with a finger the direction in which Polly departed.
I eye my mother narrowly.
“Are you sure you didn’t say something?”
She literally crosses her heart, the wine sloshing dangerously in the glass she’s holding as she does so.
“You know, if you ask me, there was always something a bit odd about that girl.”
Westfield was a trial run. A test for myself, to see how far I was willing to go. How far I would be capable of going.
I could have taken her. Just like that. One of the things that surprised me was how smoothly the whole thing went. I followed them from the house to the station, down the stairs to the platform, onto the Tube. We were sitting on opposite sides of the carriage. He, the dad, Dan, was reading a copy of Metro. She was watching something on his phone. At one point, she glanced up, caught me looking, and frowned slightly. I gave her a broad, friendly smile. She returned her attention to whatever she was watching.
I guess if you are Coco Jackson, you are used to people giving you funny looks, recognizing you, doing a double take. Being a woman in her sixties, of course, I get exactly the opposite treatment. For three days I ensconced myself in a corner of the Lord Napier with a cup of coffee or a pot of tea or a sandwich, watching them come and go—Emmy struggling to get the pushchair over the front doorstep, one of them taking Coco to nursery in the morning and the other bringing her back in the afternoon. Seeing the parcels come in, all the deliveries. Nobody gave me a second look. People came and sat at the table next to me and laughed and talked and drank their pints and ate their lunch and left, and I doubt half of them even noticed I was there.