The part that really threw me was the “instead of coming and talking to me” bit. I made the mistake of reminding her that, before the party started, I’d spent two hours helping her prepare the food and set everything up and we’d been chatting nonstop that entire time. “So?” she snapped in myface. “That wasn’t the party, was it? That wasn’t you talking to me at my birthday party.” Conrad was so upset at the thought of me carrying on my friendship with her that… Well, that was it, pretty much. And she later told Michelle Hyde that I cut her out of my life because I’m shallow and can’t stand it when people honestly express emotions.
Having said all that, I’m positive Lesley didn’t do this. Why? Because look what happened to her. She suffered as much as anyone else, and her whole ethos, I eventually realized, was “Everyone has to suffer apart from Lesley Gavey, who has to reign supreme.” No, she didn’t do it. No one will ever convince me she did.
10
Like Tess Gavey, Mum would have been told no, she couldn’t have a dog, if she’d asked for one as a child. She never asked, nor did she get one as an adult—not until her father died. Granddad, from what I’ve gathered, had a strange, secret power: He was able to make all those close to him forbid themselves from doing things they wanted to do, if they knew or even suspected he would prefer them not to do those things. Mum once told me it was as if he’d found a way to insert a little secret police force into your brain so that he could control you from inside your own system:No, he won’t like that at all. Better not do it. Better not ask for it. Better not suggest it.
Granddad, according to Mum, would not have been at all happy either to be visited by a dog, ever, or to visit a house that contained a dog. Dogs, he firmly believed, required far too much attention, created inconvenience and anxiety, and you never knew when they might wreck everything, since it was impossible to ensure they would always obey the rules of civilized social behavior. I onceheard Mum say to Tobes, “That was actually a scarily accurate description of Granddad himself, not of any dog I’ve ever known.”
The first thought that crossed Mum’s mind when she heard from Granny that Granddad had died was,Now I can get a dog.Immediately afterward she burst into tears—not because she’d just lost her father but because she was furious with herself. She should have learned how to stop “forbidding herself” in accordance with Granddad’s wishes long before he died. If she could only have turned back the clock and gone back to when she was seventeen or eighteen, knowing what she knew now…
She wouldn’t, in fact, have chosen to travel back in time in this way, even if it were possible. No one who has endured any sort of living-in-fear situation ever wishes they could go through it all again. Much better to tell Champ what her perfect response would have been, as the two of them walked around Shukes’s front garden: “I’d have said, calmly, ‘It’s reasonable for you to feel upset and angry sometimes, Dad. Everyone does, and your reactions are your business. But I’m afraid, from now on, I’m not going to sit here while you bellow and rage at me for as long as you feel like it. Let me know when you’re ready to talk politely, respectfully, and without hostility, and we can discuss it then. And please understand that if you use verbal aggression or ever raise your voice to me again, I’m going to walk away. To protect myself from you—the wayyoufailed to, from the second I was born until the moment you died.’”
There was no point waiting for Champ to point out that if Mum had been saying all that to Granddad, it would have made no sense to mention his death because he wouldn’t have died yet. Champhas many brilliant qualities, but spotting discrepancies of that sort isn’t one of them.
When Granddad died, he left Mum and Auntie Vicky £17,000 each (he was always extremely generous with his money, which was (a) lovely of him and (b) not a bad tactic if you’re planning to continue to treat your loved ones appallingly in other ways and want to incentivize them not to tell you to fuck all the way off and never come back), and he left Granny (a.k.a. Julia, whom you met in the chapter before last) everything else, which was a substantial amount—nearly half a million pounds.
Granddad’s financial adviser, Pascale, arranged a meeting with Granny and asked her if she’d be interested in investing some of this money she was now in charge of, so that it could grow into even more. Pascale insisted that this was nearly always what happened when people invested in stocks and shares and bonds via her company.
“Why not?” Granny said. “I’ve got more than enough to live on and no mortgage. I can afford to gamble a bit. How exciting!” Pascale was astonished by this response. Granny couldn’t understand why.
She soon found out. “Your husband would never let me do anything with the money if there was even the slightest risk attached,” Pascale told her. “I explained to him eight years ago, when we first met: He could quadruple his…your joint wealth, if only he had a slightly higher tolerance for risk—”
Mum says Granny laughed at that point. Risk was something Granddad had cut out of his life as far as he’d been able to. He would have felt far more comfortable having—definitely, guaranteed—only a hundred pounds forever than putting that hundred poundssomewhere where it might either turn into a million pounds or shrink to only fifty pounds within a few years.
“The most chilling part isn’t the maybe-millions Granny missed out on, thanks to Granddad’s stupid choices,” Mum once said to me. “It’s that Granddadnever asked her what she thoughtor wanted to do—and then when she found out after his death that Pascale had urged him to pursue the path that was highly likely to be more profitable and he’d said no,she didn’t mind. When she told me and Auntie Vicky, she was all ‘Ha-ha, can you imagine Granddad taking a risk?’ Like, there was no element of ‘Can you believe what he did?’ She didn’t feel even the tiniest bit…oooh, I don’t know, robbed by a coercive controller?”
Yes, this was said to me by Sally Lambert, my mother—the same person who also, on 17 June 2024, made a plan to run away with the family dog without consulting her husband or children.
Granny invested, with Pascale’s help, not only most of the money Granddad left her but also ten grand each of Mum’s and Auntie Vicky’s inheritances. Ever since, she’s kept a close eye on how their “chunks,” as she calls them, are performing in the markets. Once a month, when she gets a statement from Pascale, Granny sends a homemade one of her own to Mum and Auntie Vicky. Whenever the total amount has decreased, the subject heading reads, “Your chunk has shrunk!”
Overall, happily, there has been growth rather than shrinkage, which is how Mum knew that thirty-seven grand worth of the stocks and shares that officially belonged to Granny were in fact hers. And when she got impatient and thought to herself,I earned every penny, she obviously didn’t mean she’d worked for that money, becauseshe hadn’t. What she meant was that she’d earned it by making the effort, for decades, to keep quiet about most of what she was really thinking and feeling, for the sake of keeping peace in the family.
That effort had needed to be maintained after Granddad’s death too. Once he was gone and the fear part of her life was over (or so we thought—until Tess Gavey and her lies came along), Mum could have turned round and said to Granny that it would have been nice, just once, to hear the words “Stop bullying our daughter, you emotional toddler.” If she had said that, though, Granny might not have felt inclined to put Mum’s ten grand in with hers as part of a bigger investment—and Pascale was no longer taking on clients who had less than fifty grand to invest. Therefore, Mum believed, it was her tactful silence about certain aspects of her childhood that had netted her the thirty-seven grand she could now use to fund Champ’s escape and, if necessary, his new undercover life (about which, more later).
Mum’s always saying she doesn’t blame Granny, who was just as scared of Granddad as she was, and she doesn’t even blame Granddad himself. “You can’t, in all fairness, blame a toddler for being a toddler even when he’s in his late sixties,” she says.
What I’ve never said in response but have often thought is, “Yes, but you doblame, though, don’t you? You’ve got lots of blame inside you which needs to go somewhere, and it does. You blame, for instance, the smell of gardenia—which has never, at any point, done anything to hurt you. All gardenia has ever done is happen to be an irrelevant detail associated with one of the many savage bollockings you got as a teenager.”
When Mum and Dad bought Shukes and were redesigning the garden, Mum said, “No gardenia. I can’t bear the smell,” andwouldn’t explain when Dad asked her why. She’s never told any family member about the gardenia body-lotion incident apart from me. That means a lot to me, and it’s why I’m anti-gardenia too, even though I don’t know what it looks or smells like. It’s always been important to me to be on Mum’s side the way she is unwaveringly on mine. I should have spoken up loudly and stuck up for both her and Champ on the Day of the Policeman, but I was scared in exactly the way Mum and Granny—and maybe Auntie Vicky too, though she would never say so—were scared of Granddad.
I wish I could ask Mum (I could, but the world might never be the same again if I did, so I can’t) if her belief that Granny was “always on my side, not Granddad’s, deep down” is based solely on wishful thinking or on something more substantial. Does she have any proof? Or is this the same faulty intuition at work that made her believe Avril Mattingley would instantly sign up to be on her side and help her save Champ?
To be fair to Mum, sides are complicated in our village. If asked, everyone who knows Swaffham Tilney would agree that it’s a village with two sides. The trouble is, they’d all mean different things when they said it. There are the two sides of the village green, with low, detached, thatched-roofed cottages on one side and terraced pantile-roofed ones on the other, but then there are also the two different ends of the village: one that contains the green, the large majority of the houses, the pub, the church, the village hall, and the bus stop, and the other, which is where you’ll find Bussow Farm, fields owned by the Farmer, and a handful of enormous detached mansions with so many screening trees around them that a visitor to the village might conclude all the most prosperous residents ofSwaffham Tilney are involved in shady activities that they don’t want anyone to witness.
This is where Bussow Court has recently been added, to the posh-pads-and-Farmer side, and with these six new homes came more potential for the creation of sides. There are already four—four!—pairs observable in Bussow Court:
The houses on the left and the houses on the right, as you drive in. This is definitely a case of “and” rather than “versus,” since in no way are the Barn, the Farmhouse, and the Byre in any kind of joint opposition to the Granary, the Hayloft, and the Stables. There’s the occasional rumbling about a north-facing/south-facing distinction but so far nothing that’s escalated.
The people who believe that the car parking spaces for Bussow Court residents are too far away from the houses versus (and never was the word “versus” more warranted than here) those who say, often and with escalating exasperation, “The parking spaces are just over there! God, what’s wrong with you? You’ve got legs, haven’t you?”
Converted agricultural outbuildings that have belonged to Bussow Farm for centuries versus new-builds that didn’t exist in any shape or form before 2022. It’s a very subtle “versus,” this one: double-edged remarks, rock-solid-plausible-deniability-plated, that either hint at how much more character old buildings have or celebrate how much cozier and better insulated new-builds are, how much less likely to contain the ghosts of machine-mutilated farmhands from days of yore.
And last but not least, the best-known and most viral exemplar of two sides in Swaffham Tilney, the one that’s made our village the most notorious in the country…
The Lamberts versus the Gaveys.
Someone should probably make a spreadsheet, so that we can easily cross-reference where each village resident stands on all of these issues, and all the others too—all the ones that aren’t Bussow Court specific, like the matter of the weeds growing up Corinne Sullivan’s front wall. Unfortunately, no such spreadsheet exists, so Mum had no way of knowing that Avril Mattingley had more than once described Corinne’s weeds as “a giant ‘Fuck you’ aimed at all of us, us peasants who don’t deserve her consideration.” This couldn’t be further from Mum’s position, which is that nobody’s front wall is anybody else’s business, and Corinne’s weeds look quite pretty anyway, and what if the difference between weeds and flowers is quite arbitrary?
