A silence followed this outburst, and Juliet took a long and welcome drink of wine. When she looked up, she saw her sisters’ shocked expressions. It was Frankie who spoke first.
‘Juliet, I had no idea that was how you felt. Apart from anything else, you’re incredibly talented – just look at how you’ve broken into that ridiculously male-dominated world of satirical cartoons. You’re a trailblazer.’
Juliet shrugged.
‘I’ve done well, I know, I just can’t get over the way Mum considered it a poor second to everybody else’s fine art, or your installations. But it’s not just that. I couldn’t get anything right – my hair, my clothes, my friends, the music I liked. It was constant nit-picking and criticism.’ She looked unbearably sad for a moment. ‘I don’t know why she hated me so much.’
‘Shedidn’thate you!’ burst out Martha, grabbing Juliet’s hand. ‘She just…I think she felt you were the most like her outof the three of us, and maybe that was hard for her…If anything, she loved you themostand wanted the best for you. She just went about it badly…’
She trailed off, and Frankie spoke.
‘And with Mum gone, surely you’re established enough now to come back on your own terms?’
Juliet fell silent again. This was the problem. She knew what her image was now; heaven knows it had taken her enough time and effort to establish. She came across as tough and sharp, up for an argument, strong-willed and independent, witty, feisty and wild. But, inside, she knew how fragile that image was. How, once she shut her front door at night, she shed it with relief and had started more and more to indulge in pastimes nobody would expect. She bought, then sketched and photographed flowers, one of her greatest pleasures, and had even sold some of her pictures to a country lifestyle magazine – under a pseudonym of course. It was the sort of twee publication that her London friends mocked and would have been horrified to learn of her attachment to. She had started dreaming up some ideas that she thought would make a good children’s book, using her signature cartoon style, but in a far softer way than her sly, satirical newspaper drawings. She avoided the news, other than what she needed to know for work, and preferred watching gentle reality shows about sewing or baking to the gritty Scandinavian crime dramas she read synopses of so she could join in the conversations at parties. To be fair, she did still enjoy the occasional party and she liked meeting new people. She knew she was at a crossroads and had to decide, or uncover, or justrealisewho she was, and feared that coming home would force her back into a box that she was unhappy with, whether that was her eighteen-year-old self, desperate to push away from her mother, or the persona she had been projecting more and moreconvincingly over the past decade. Juliet noticed her two sisters looking at her with concern, and she raised her glass.
‘Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t still let it hold me back, it’s silly. But can’t we drop it?’
Martha didn’t seem ready for that.
‘I have to say, it might be good for you to leave London, at least for a while. You must see Toby all the time, and it can’t be nice.’
In Martha’s world, things should always be nice.
‘No, it is not “nice”, but I can handle it.’
‘But he was so awful to you?—’
‘Yes, I know, and I don’t want to drag it all out again. So can you drop it?’
Martha looked down at her lap and flushed. Juliet knew she had been overly harsh to her kind and sensitive sister, but they had already talked about Toby once today and that was quite enough. He had been abusive in his levels of coercive control, and although in managing to escape him she knew that she had shown great strength, she still felt the whole episode as an open wound, where any mention of it was like squeezing fresh lemon juice on to sore flesh. She knew, too, that what had happened, the way he had treated her, was not her fault, but that didn’t stop her feeling intensely shameful about it. She didn’t want pity, or kindness; in a way she would rather have been castigated for her stupidity, that might have been more of a relief. But even Frankie didn’t do that, even she treated Juliet sympathetically whenever the subject arose, and it was sometimes more than she could bear. Her mother, naturally, had loved Toby and couldn’t understand why, as she put it, Juliet ‘didn’t just stand up to him as an equal’. If only she had known how hard she had tried, but he had a way of twisting your words so that you were always in the wrong, insisting you had said something you hadn’t. She knew the name, now, for what he had done, gaslighting, and shewas shocked at how skilfully he had confused and manipulated her.
Juliet suddenly realised that her heart was racing, and that she was staring at the table, while her sisters looked at her in concern. She gave them a shaky smile and upended her empty glass.
Frankie picked up the wine and refilled their glasses, pretending to wring out the bottle once it was empty. This small, rather weak joke broke the ice that was rapidly forming at the table, and Martha and Juliet smiled. Juliet grabbed Martha’s hand and squeezed it, and the smiles widened.
‘Now, if we are going to talk about men,’ said Frankie, ‘then I think we need to bring Léo back to the table. I must say, I like his commanding Gallic air, I’d be inclined to honour and obey, if it wasn’t for the way he was looking atyou, Juliet. Scorchio!’
She picked up a stray coaster and fanned herself theatrically. Juliet raised an eyebrow.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But Martha grinned and snatched up the baton.
‘Yes, I agree with Frankie. He wasdefinitelysmouldering in your direction. I think you’ve litun petit feuunder that one.’
‘Oh, shut up, both of you. He wasglaringat me, not smouldering. He obviously thinks I’m a spoilt princess, and since he found me in the garden this morning, talking to myself with my hair sticking out at all angles and breath like an ageing Labrador, he also, no doubt, finds me hugelyamusante.’
‘Well, if you move back, you’ll be seeing a lot more of him. Maybe he’ll grow on you?’
‘Frankie, really, stop it. He is not going to grow on me – no man is. Men only ever want you to do what they want, to a greater or lesser degree, to change you and mould you.’
‘Not all men are like Toby.’
‘No, Martha, I know, but I think it’s a rare man who doesn’t think he could make just aslightlybetter job of you than you have of yourself. I’m sick of it. Wherever I go, here or somewhere in London, it’s not going to be with a man in mind.’
She pushed away the image of the brown eyes and ready smile. Handsome he may be, and even sexy, but that was irrelevant. Attractive men were, in her experience, like cream cakes: tempting and fun in the moment, but something you only lived to regret, whether on your hips or in your heart.
‘Yeah, yeah, I give you three months. Anyway, let’s Google him, I want to know why he’s here and not ripping up Paris like he should be.’
