Little Disasters Read online

  ‘I didn’t drop the boys back after football. Jill, Ben’s mum, wanted to swap, so that she could go on a work night out next week or something, and so after I’d left them at the pitch I had some free time. I’d been thinking about how little I’d seen of Jess since she’d had Betsey – and so I thought I’d be spontaneous and pop in . . .’

  ‘OK . . .’ She is making me nervous.

  ‘Well, I rang the door but no one answered. I tried the landline but it just rang out. Then I thought that perhaps she’d gone out not expecting us back until seven, except that I could hear Betsey crying. I needed to get some petrol so I gave up on her, drove to the garage and filled up.’

  ‘Well, she was probably just changing her nappy, or getting Frankie in the bath. She didn’t expect anyone that early. I never answered the door around bath time.’ I’m relieved to think of this explanation. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘That perhaps she wasn’t there.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Where exactly do you think she was?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she’d popped out for a few minutes. People do all the time.’

  ‘Do they? Have you?’

  ‘Once or twice.’ Her tone is stiff. ‘Just for a couple of minutes. George is nearly ten, after all, not a baby like Betsey. Don’t tell Andrew.’ She pauses. ‘Why, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, no I haven’t – and Jess would never leave a baby.’ ‘It’s not the worst crime in the world,’ she mutters. ‘I’m sure plenty of people do it.’

  I’m dumbfounded. Does that mean that Charlotte did this when George was small? Perhaps I hardly know her, after all.

  I dismiss her suggestion. It’s hard not to think that it’s somehow motivated by malice. She’s always been critical of Jess’s choices, not recognising why she wanted to stay at home with her children, rather than returning to work. I can see why Charlotte might resent her. They’re a different breed, the stay-at-home mums. At the school gate at a quarter to nine and half past three; relaxed and cheerful in their running lycras like exotic birds chirruping away. Distinct from us working mothers, shrouded in navy or black, who drop and run, our guilt firmly compartmentalised; our choices justified by our desire for fulfilment and the demands of our mortgages.

  But Charlotte is still fond of Jess. Why else would she socialise with her, attending book groups and mums’ nights out, dinner parties and barbecues, linked by those first few months of self-doubt and sleepless nights? There’s an affinity, built up over a decade. Is her attachment really so fickle that she’ll immediately doubt her now the police are involved?

  ‘Liz. Liz! Thanks for holding onto the kids.’

  Mel is walking briskly towards us.

  ‘My pleasure,’ I say, but my smile slips as I see her expression.

  ‘Did you get my message? Can we talk about Jess?’

  ‘I did, but you know I can’t talk about it. I’ve talked to Ed and tried to reassure him but I can’t be involved any more.’

  Her face crumples in disbelief. ‘Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? Initiate this whole great mess and then distance yourself from it completely.’ She is properly angry with me, not just distressed as I’d thought. ‘You didn’t have two distraught little boys staying with you all weekend. You didn’t have to deal with their questions and their anxieties and then work out what to tell your own children. Four kids I’ve had this weekend on my own; two of them traumatised, Frankie completely hyper, not that Jess will ever accept that. Plus Ed, who’s in bits: completely beside himself.’

  ‘Oh, Mel, was it awful?’ It’s a stupid response.

  ‘What do you think? I can’t believe you would do that, Liz. What got into you?’

  ‘Do what?’ Charlotte is quivering with interest.

  ‘Do you want me to tell her, Liz, or shall I?’

  I’m taken aback by how aggressive and uncharacteristically brittle Mel is. I’ve only seen her this angry once before – back in May when she discovered Rob was leaving her for his twenty-four-year-old personal assistant, a woman who had no intention of burdening him with children.

  ‘Liz is the one who decided that police and social services should be involved,’ she tells Charlotte now. ‘She’s the one who unleashed all of this upon them.’

  ‘Come on, Mel.’ I am not going to just take this from her. ‘The whole team thought there were safeguarding concerns. You’d act if you had concerns about something one of my kids had said.’

  ‘I guess.’ She looks uncomfortable. ‘But that would never happen and I’d set that against my knowledge of you.’

  ‘But if one of mine alleged something – or you saw something that worried you in a child of a friend – you’d have to do something, wouldn’t you?’

  She nods ever so slightly.

  ‘That’s what happened here. I couldn’t guarantee one hundred per cent that no one had harmed Jess’s baby girl.’

  ‘You can’t think that of Ed, surely?’ Charlotte draws herself up.

  ‘Nor of Jess.’ Mel glowers at her.

  ‘I don’t want to think it of either of them – but their baby is lying in hospital with a skull fracture.’ My voice starts to break. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve said far more than I should; this is really unprofessional. Please, can we just drop it?’

  We walk in somewhat frosty silence to the school gate, and I try to think of how to steer the conversation in a different direction. But it’s clear that Mel isn’t finished with me. It’s as if the trauma of the past eight months has been given a fresh focus. This isn’t just about Jess and the fracturing of her family, but about Rob and his apparently casual wrecking of theirs. I sense this but it doesn’t make her criticism sting any less.

  ‘Come on, Liz. We should be sticking together,’ she says, as we near the school gates, where our children are waiting for us. She stops, and drops her voice to a hissing whisper, though we’re still out of earshot. ‘I know people can surprise us – and my God I’ve learned that in the last year – but we have to trust our instincts. You must know that Jess would never lay a finger on her children.

  ‘She’s always been completely emphatic about that, hasn’t she? She’s never even smacked them. Don’t you remember that dinner party, years ago, when Rob was a prick – oh yes, what a surprise – and her response to him? How icy she was when he told you all that he’d smacked Mollie?

  ‘Don’t you remember her saying there was never, ever an excuse for smacking your kids?’

  LIZ

  Saturday 26 January, 2013

  Fourteen

  ‘Well, we’ve done it. Here’s to surviving five years of parenting!’ Ed holds his glass of champagne up high.

  ‘Hear, hear!’ Andrew agrees, loudly.

  ‘That sounds particularly heartfelt.’

  ‘God, but it’s hard, isn’t it?’ Andrew looks over his shoulder to check that Charlotte isn’t listening. ‘We hadn’t a bloody clue, when we first met at that awful antenatal class, had we? Not a bloody clue.’

  ‘Come on, George isn’t that bad,’ I say.

  ‘He’s the devil’s child.’

  ‘Oh, Andrew!’

  ‘Oh I don’t really mean it. Mustn’t let Charlotte hear me say that. But he wants so much attention, and you’ve got to watch him all the time – as this week’s antics showed. Sometimes I just feel too ancient for this – and as if I’m the world’s most inept dad.’

  ‘You’re a wonderful dad.’ I put an arm around him and give him a quick hug.

  ‘One whose son is running away from school at the age of five?’ He pulls a wry face. ‘Charlotte’s livid.’

  Nick grins. ‘I think you’ll find our daughter had something to do with that, too.’

  ‘She initiated it,’ I admit. ‘Told him they should make a run for it at first break.’

  ‘Yes, well. I’m sure they’re just as bad an influence on each other,’ Andrew harrumphs, trying to walk the impossible tightrope of not criticising a friend’s child for something
while simultaneously damning his own.

  The eight remaining members of our antenatal group are at Ed and Jess’s house, supposedly celebrating our children hitting that five-year milestone. But conversation has so far been dominated by the scandal of Rosa and George’s truanting, during yesterday’s first playtime at St Matthew’s primary school.

  I’ve a sneaking admiration for my daughter, though I wouldn’t admit it to Andrew or even Nick, who’s particularly risk averse when it comes to the children’s safety. Four months into reception, Rosa realised that school was boring and persuaded George to take advantage of the button at the school gate, which, being wheelchair-friendly, was also at a conveniently child-friendly height.

  The headmaster, Mr Fox, embarrassed by the ease with which two small pupils had flouted school security, has disciplined them with a week’s suspension. It’s excessive, enormously inconvenient, and Charlotte and I are appealing against it but I really hope it doesn’t continue to dominate tonight. After all, they barely reached the main road before being spotted by another parent, no one was run over, and no one was abducted. They were gone less than five minutes. Obviously it’s far from ideal, and it’s concerning that no one immediately noticed their absence, but I’m not allowing myself to catastrophise about what could have happened. It could have been far, far worse.

  ‘We don’t mean to sound flippant,’ I try to reassure Andrew, who has already mentioned using a solicitor to appeal against the suspension. ‘We’ve talked to Rosa. We’re seeing it as a wake-up call for us, and for the school to improve their security. It was a very lucky escape.’

  ‘Sounds a sensible approach,’ Ed says, topping up my glass, and lightening the conversation with the social ease at which he excels. ‘They’re hardly Bonnie and Clyde.’

  ‘Exactly.’ I smile at him warmly.

  ‘Shall we join the others? Jess says it’s time to eat.’

  *

  The conversation swirls and settles, over five-hour lamb, on the topic of our children. It’s the thing that binds us, even if Rob briefly succeeds in steering us in the direction of the Bank of England’s fiscal policy, and Charlotte – making a concerted effort not to discuss ‘Schoolgategate’, as Ed has dubbed it – grows animated as she discusses the rise in house prices in our area, always a source of glee.

  Rob is irritated when Mel begins a lengthy anecdote about something Mollie, their eldest, has done.

  ‘It’s always the kids!’ he says, his sensuous mouth sliding into a sneer.

  I don’t like him, I suddenly realise, a fact not unconnected to Jess confiding earlier in the kitchen that he tried to play footsie under the table. (‘Really? Are you sure?’ ‘I’m not that clueless at reading the signs.’ ‘Poor Mel. Will you tell her?’ ‘Of course not,’ she says.)

  ‘Well, they’re a pretty central part of our lives,’ I say, now, looking at him directly across the table. I’m feeling combative. Rob takes a traditional view of parenting in which he is the authoritarian father while Mel does the bulk of the childcare. ‘It’s inevitable we want to chat about how they’re doing. They make us so proud.’

  ‘Though not when they’re being naughty?’ He raises his wine glass and looks me in the eye.

  ‘I think we’ve already discussed that at length.’

  There is a slight frisson. I’ve been sharp and committed a dinner party faux pas in saying something to sour the atmosphere.

  ‘More wine, Liz?’ Ed asks. Charlotte and Andrew murmur in appreciation, and the tension slackens as he tops up our glasses with generous amounts of Bordeaux. Nick and I don’t go to many dinner parties and few where the wine flows this freely. I have three glasses – for champagne, white wine and red wine – and have drunk far more than usual. Tiredness and the excitement of going out for once have combined to make me tipsy and a little reckless, and so perhaps that’s why I choose to goad Mel’s husband, now.

  ‘But, tell me,’ I say. ‘What should Nick and I, and Charlotte and Andrew, do? How would you discipline Mollie if she’d behaved like Rosa and George?’

  ‘I’d give her a short, sharp smack on the back of her legs.’

  There’s a collective intake of breath.

  ‘Rob!’ Mel flushes, and I wonder how often this happens.

  ‘What?’ He snaps at his wife then turns back to us. ‘Don’t judge me! I’ve smacked Mollie twice in her life. It may not be politically correct to do so,’ he spits, as if the phrase is distasteful, ‘but it’s quick and effective and she won’t do it again.’

  ‘That’s interesting. That’s how I was parented – and at boarding school of course, where we still had the cane,’ Andrew says, deflecting attention from Mel, who looks close to crying. ‘I hated the latter – but I’m not sure the odd smack from my father ever caused me any harm.’

  ‘Everyone gave their kids the odd wallop in the Eighties, didn’t they?’ Charlotte concurs, in a brief show of marital harmony. ‘Not that we’ve ever smacked George, of course.’

  ‘God no. I’m far too much of a softie,’ Andrew laughs, then undermines his argument. ‘Though perhaps that’s where we’ve been going wrong.’

  Nick starts to talk about how corporal punishment is never the answer, and the difficulty of trying to curb violence among secondary school boys who’ve experienced it meted out by their parents. ‘The cycle of abuse continues. They see violence as the way to impose authority because it’s all they’ve experienced,’ he explains, a vein in his forehead pulsing as he becomes animated. ‘We see it all the time.’

  ‘We’re not talking about abusing our kids but one short sharp smack, when they’ve done something really bad.’ Rob leans forward, his expression intense, his tone unrepentant. ‘You can’t tell me psychological or emotional abuse isn’t just as damaging. God, when I think of the sort of things my old man said to me . . .’ He pauses, momentarily distracted, and I wonder at the phrases he’s recalling: whether he is dwelling on the most savage. ‘At least this way, it’s all over fast.’

  There’s a short silence: the kind that comes when someone you thought you knew relatively well lets slip something that makes you see them in a fresh perspective.

  ‘What’s your take, Liz?’ Ed asks and then, before I can answer: ‘We don’t do it – though like Andrew, I was caned frequently.’

  ‘Oh, it didn’t happen frequently.’

  ‘Perhaps my school was more draconian, or I was a more difficult child.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that,’ says Charlotte, almost flirtatiously. Her tone, with its gravelly undercurrent, sits oddly. ‘I imagine you were high-spirited, as you were at uni. Perhaps a rebel but never difficult or demanding. I bet you’re being too hard on yourself.’

  ‘I think my parents would disagree,’ Ed demurs, though he looks a little embarrassed. ‘As far as they, and my school, were concerned, I was a bit of a nightmare. But what do you think, Liz?’

  ‘We’ve never smacked our children,’ I say, trying to quash the rage that threatens to bubble up inside me. ‘And yes: I’ve seen some horrific cases. Not really the stuff of dinner party conversations, but enough to know that, although there is a vast difference between a smack and abuse, they’re on a continuum I don’t want to be part of, and I will never, ever hit my kids.’

  I look at the faces of my friends, drinking wine and eating expensive food, and for a moment I want to shock them out of their complacency. To tell them about two-year-old Jake Summers, and the red welts striated around his neck I’d assumed were a viral rash until my registrar explained someone had tried to strangle him. Or fourteen-month-old Louis Smythe, admitted with multiple fractures caused by his mum’s boyfriend. Or about the case that still haunts me at night: of eight-month-old Caitlin Clarke, who a colleague discharged in her first job in A&E, thinking she had a virus but who was brought back, fitting, a few hours later. In the intervening period, one of her parents – the courts could never prove which – had shaken her so severely she sustained life-changing brain damage.
/>   I swallow the hard plum at the back of my throat. Good old Liz. I’ve already changed the tone of the dinner party by being angry and earnest. No one wants to be harangued and no one wants a guest to cry either, as I feel embarrassingly close to doing now. Only Nick knows the more personal reasons for my never smacking our kids. My mother’s anger and the trauma of my brother’s accident, which means I already feel as if I’ve caused enough harm. I feel Nick’s leg press against mine in silent solidarity as I concentrate on trying to calm myself and on stilling my breathing. Know he probably hopes I’ll drop the issue, too.

  ‘Fair enough. Sounds like a pretty good reason.’ Ed is watching me, his expression sombre. His eyes crinkle. Are you OK? his look seems to say. Did I push you too far?

  ‘Sorry for being so serious,’ I manage, though I don’t feel apologetic in the least.

  ‘No need to apologise,’ my host says.

  I look around the table. Rob gives me a curt nod, as if acknowledging I have a point; Mel offers a watery smile: she’s still staving off crying. Nick takes my hand under the table and gives it a squeeze.

  But it’s Jess who seems to feel the strongest connection. She is looking at me as if she understands my motivation; as if she too has experienced a volatile parent, though she never talks about her background and I’d always understood her parents were benignly absent: her upbringing the sort of upper-middle-class one where parenting was largely contracted to boarding school.

  ‘Quite right,’ she says, raising her glass. Her gaze is too intense, and I wonder if she’s also a little drunk. She pauses and there’s a peculiar tension: as if there’s something she is poised to reveal. Jess has the capacity to shock. On the two occasions when I’ve seen her drink too much, she’s said or done something outrageous, something that belies her controlled image. On a mums’ night out ordering tequila slammers and dancing sensually with a group of delighted male students; more recently, challenging Andrew into limbo dancing with her at a school fundraiser. Now, she lowers her glass as if thinking better of it and I wonder if the moment has passed.