She looked up from a pile of old newspapers that had come to light. They went way back – one of them even mentioned food rationing. ‘But what makes you think Uncle Bert left the house to you?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t say that’s what I thought, did I?’
‘No. But … you do think so, don’t you?’
Frank grunted as he dragged a shoe box from under the bed. ‘Who else do you think he could have left it to? You? Since you were such great penpals?’
Susannah gritted her teeth at the little jibe. Dad would be out of her hair in an hour or so. Just put up with him for a bit longer, she told herself, and you needn’t see him again for – oh, ages.
‘Of course he won’t have left it to me,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t go building your hopes if I were you. It can’t be worth much, can it? Haringey isn’t exactly the up and coming area of London, you know. Anyway –’ she moved to peer over his shoulder as he blew grey dust off the lid of the box – ‘you’ve got loads of money, Dad. I don’t know what you’re getting worked up about.’
‘Why do children always assume that their parents are made of money? And I’m not getting worked up. If anyone’s getting worked up it’s you two hysterical women. Anyone would have thought I was trying to rob Bert’s grave.’
‘He hasn’t got a grave; he was cremated. And it’s not us making a fuss,’ she insisted, ‘it’s you.’
‘What’s got into you all of a sudden?’ Frank growled as the lid flew off. It wasn’t like Susannah to stand up to him like this.
‘Nothing. Nothing.’ Did everyone think she was behaving oddly? ‘Well, it looks like you’ve turned up trumps. That’s a will if ever I saw one.’
Frank didn’t need to be told. He’d already smoothed out the folds. ‘Christ!’ he muttered.
‘What? Tell me.’
He thrust the document towards her.
‘Who the hell’s this Dora Saxby?’ she said when she’d studied the interesting part. She could scarcely keep amusement from her voice: her father hadn’t benefited at all.
‘A woman he used to see.’ Frank’s watery pink eyes looked bleakly into the distant past. He put a finger in his ear, as he often did when upset about something, and absently raked it around. ‘I thought he’d given her up. She was married, you see. Perhaps he didn’t give her up after all. I lost track.’
‘A woman? I never knew.’ Susannah grinned. It was the best news she’d had all day. At least her Uncle Bert had lived a little. An image came to her mind. ‘There was an old dear at the back of the chapel today. I thought she’d got left behind by mistake. But I suppose it could have been her.’ She looked down at the will again and couldn’t resist rubbing salt into her father’s wound. ‘Did you see I’m to have five hundred pounds and the card table? Perhaps I’ll spend the money on air tickets for the family so we can all fly out to see you and Jan in your lovely romantic farmhouse. You must have finished all the renovations by now, surely? When would you like us to come?’
But they both knew she was only bluffing; Susannah would not voluntarily spend any amount of time in Jan’s company. Jan – a teacher at the same school as her father – had never been forgiven for befriending him and eventually taking her mother’s place. Even though her mother had been dead for several years by the time Frank and Jan married and Susannah then eighteen, she hadn’t been able to understand how her father could be so disloyal as to go after another woman. She still couldn’t.
The phone rang and rang in the empty cottage. Simon put down his receiver in disgust. Where had his mother got to? She hadn’t been at work – the guy who’d picked up the phone there had no idea where she was – and she wasn’t at home. But he badly needed her advice. He had no idea what he was going to do.
Reluctant to leave the comparative warmth of the phone booth, even though it smelled disgustingly of urine, he slumped against the Perspex wall. But his eyes fell on the baby buggy outside and he knew he ought to get moving. He would in a minute, he promised himself; right now he felt safe from the world.
Justin would be OK out there for a while. He was protected from the cutting wind by his plastic bubble and was fast asleep with three fingers in his mouth, blissfully unaware of his mother’s defection.
Simon made a fist and thumped the side of the booth. How could Natalie do this to her own child? How could she do it to him? Spurred by anger, he rolled out of the kiosk, grabbed the buggy, and set off down the street, hunched in his anorak and hoping no one would recognise him.
‘You aren’t normal!’ he’d flung at Natalie two days previously as she’d struggled out of their flat with a suitcase in one hand and a typewriter in the other.
‘Not all women are born mothers,’ she’d growled back. ‘I didn’t want him. And it was your fault we had him in the first place. So you can jolly well look after him.’
She humped her things down the stairs.
‘Oh, don’t keep dragging all that up!’ he groaned. ‘It wasn’t my fault the wretched thing burst.’
‘They test them to destruction, you know. Blow them up on machines. You just handled it wrongly.’
‘Well, there’s no point going over it again. It happened and we have to live with it. You should be thinking of Justin, not your stupid career.’
Simon couldn’t understand it. Justin was so cute and smart and lovable; a great kid. Nobody could not like him. How could his own mother be so set against him?
He had glared into the car that came to pick Natalie up. That friend of hers – Lara – had something to do with it, he was sure; she’d been putting all sorts of ideas into Natalie’s head, bit by bit. Feminist ideas. Ideas about independence and dedicating oneself to one’s career.
Of course, Simon acknowledged, jerking the buggy up a high kerb, feminism was nothing new to Natalie – she’d been brought up on it, after all – but she hadn’t pursued it so avidly before. Not until Lara had come on the scene. And everything had gone downhill from then on.
Losing his job had been the last straw.
‘Well, at least you can look after the baby now,’ Natalie had told him when he’d come home and broken the news. That was all the sympathy he’d got. ‘It’ll save me having to keep ferrying him around all the child-minders. And it’ll save the expense.’
‘But – but what are we going to live on? Your salary’s hardly enough.’ Teachers were notoriously poorly paid, and Natalie was at the bottom of the scale.
But she seemed to have worked things out already – as though she had been planning it all for months.
‘I –’ she cast him a wary glance before looking away again – ‘I think I’ll move in with Lara for a while. That should work out a lot cheaper.’
Simon blinked. And blinked again. ‘But what about me and Justin? There won’t be room for us – and I wouldn’t want to live with Lara if you paid me. We can’t go on living here either, with nothing coming in.’ He shook his head as though he had an insect in his ear. ‘Nat, none of this makes sense.’
‘Oh …’ She flapped him aside with one hand. ‘Go and move in with your parents. They’ll be delighted to have you, I’m sure.’
Had there been sarcasm in her tone? Simon reached the door of the flat that he must vacate at the end of the week. What had she been suggesting? That they wouldn’t welcome him with open arms? Well, they would; and they would love to see more of their grandchild.
Not that he could contemplate such a thing, of course. How would that make him look? A grown man, with responsibilities, running home to Mummy?
Not