‘Coming home after a year. Is it like Narnia? You feel as if you’ve been away for ages but now you’re home nothing’s changed?’
Bryony nibbled one corner of the toast. ‘The opposite. It’s as if I’ve been away no time but everyone else thinks I’ve been away forever.’
‘Dad’s narrow squeak must have rocked you.’
Bryony nodded and swallowed with an obvious effort. Before bursting out, ‘And then there’s the secret family thing – Mum, what’s been going on?’ Her eyes were as dark and shiny as Galaxy Minstrels. ‘When Dad phoned me to tell me I was, like, so pleased that there was some kind of explanation that meant he wasn’t having a scuzzy affair. And he’d had this mega accident in a helicopter and I got all emotional because he could’ve been killed. But in the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking, and it seemed really strange. It is strange, isn’t it? He’s got this family and he kept us secret from them. I mean, you call them his secret family but I think we were the secret. Is he ashamed of us?’ She discarded the plate on the bedside and it wobbled around in a noisy circle before settling.
Moving up the bed, Diane reached out to stroke Bryony’s pillow-matted curls. ‘I don’t think you need draw that conclusion, darling.’ She searched for a way to soothe her. ‘You have to remember what an underprivileged upbringing Dad had. In those days being poor meant more hardship than it does now. Benefits weren’t plentiful, especially not for single mothers. Granny and Dad did everything humanly possible to keep the family all under one roof. Wendy worked hard but women earned less than men.’ She knew the story by heart; Gareth had chewed over and over his childhood until his words ceased to have an impact.
But, for the first time for years, she felt touched by those old troubles. She remembered the worn but clean home, furnished with second-hand bargains. And that was the Jenner world well after Wendy and Gareth between them had hauled the family away from the breadline.
‘But we’ve always been poor, Mum, we know about it.’
‘Sweetie, we’ve never been poor! We’ve had to be careful; we’ve not been well off. But we’ve never gone hungry, never been without shelter. How can you say we’re poor when you’ve spent all that time working in Brasilia and seen what real poverty is?
‘I think that when Dad eventually met his father and sister, he didn’t know how to react. When Harold wanted to make things up to Dad financially … well, it was such a huge amount of money to Dad that he literally didn’t know what to do with it. For a while he just kept the knowledge to himself. And,’ she hesitated, ‘he has always thought that I betrayed him by not challenging my father’s will. That I’d cheated him – and you – out of a more comfortable life. He feels that what he did was no worse than what I did.’
Bryony snuggled her head into the crook of Diane’s neck like a child, arm around her waist. ‘That’s a crock of shit. You refused money your parents didn’t want you, or him, or me, to have. I don’t think I would’ve wanted it, either. But he’s lived a double life and kept us hidden so that he could keep all his money to himself.’
Diane couldn’t think of a reply.
‘So that girl is Dad’s half-sister’s daughter?’
‘That’s right. Tamzin. I’m making her a load of clothes.’
‘And her folk are rich, I suppose.’ She wriggled herself into a more comfortable possession of Diane’s shoulder.
‘By our standards.’
‘What’s her problem? Is she anorexic, or something?’
‘Something. Unhealthily thin. She’s suffered from depression for the past couple of years. She’s going through a good patch, at the moment.’
‘Is she … is she George’s girlfriend?’
Diane’s arms tightened around Bryony’s body. Not a frail, bony body, like Tamzin’s, but a warm, fleshy, curvy young woman’s shape, on the verge of plumpness. Diane had always been too busy and too short of money to gain weight but Gareth’s mother had been a size in the last couple of decades of her life. She hoped Bryony wouldn’t go the same way. It would be so bad for her asthma.
‘It looks like it. Although they’ve only just started seeing each other.’ She hesitated. ‘I expect it took you by surprise, her being here.’
‘I felt so stupid. I crashed in expecting a big hug but George had his arms full of her,’ Bryony complained.
Diane continued absently to stroke her daughter’s warm back as she had done a thousand times when shocks, fears and spills had brought Bryony into the sanctuary of her mother’s arms. A lost toy. A scraped knee. Not getting the part of Angel Gabriel. A fickle friend. A fickle boyfriend.
And soon she felt the telltale hot wetness against her neck and the tiny shudders of the body pressed against hers. ‘Darling,’ she murmured. ‘Everything will be fine when you’ve settled back at home and decided what you want to do next. If you don’t want to go back to Brazil, you could probably go to university now.’ Some good might as well come out of Gareth’s money.
Bryony’s sobs only increased.
‘Or travel somewhere else? Or get a job here?’
The rounded shoulders heaved. ‘No I can’t. Oh, Mum – I’mpregnant! The father’s name is Inacio, he doesn’t know about the baby and I don’t know where he is. And one of the other girls says he’smarried!’
Chapter Twenty
‘I have to tell you something.’ Diane sank into the visitor’s chair. She had rung Ivan and Melvyn and told them she wanted the evening visitor’s slot, and sorry if it cut across their plans. They hadn’t minded. There was an athletics meeting on Sky Sports.
Gareth’s still-bloated head turned her way, brown and purple in the pouches and furrows as if he’d been washed carelessly. The bladder infection had disappeared almost as suddenly as it had come and the electric fan was gone. ‘I think I’d better go first. It’s quite important.’
What Diane had to say was pretty important, too. But then she remembered Gareth’s text. No doubt he assumed that she’d travelled in specifically to discover what he had on his mind. Not long ago she might have done that very thing.
