Mum’s the Word

‘Please, Mum? I’ll wash up the breakfast things,’ whined Jack.

‘I’ve got a dishwasher.’

The studio – once the washhouse adjoining Susie’s cottage – smelt of linseed oil, turps and oil paints, mixed today with the smell of hot wood, baked tin and stone where the sun burned in through the open French windows and drank up the spilt water from the profusion of herbs and geraniums in pots and window boxes. The cottage and the little studio formed an L shape, with a flagstone terrace set with tubs and planters, and cane furniture framed in the crook of the right angle.

Outside, Milo, the hairy hound, had found his spot in the sunshine and was snoring softly.

Susie taught art three days a week at the local college in Fenborough, and worked on her own projects in the time left over. Not that there had been that much time since she’d been going out with Robert; he found the whole art thing completely unfathomable.

The charcoal rasped softly under her fingertips. Susie had drawn and painted for as long as she could remember, long before she knew what art was, discovering very early in life that, somehow, laying her feelings and thoughts down on canvas or board or paper made more sense of them. When it was going well she felt as if she painted right from the core of herself, totally connected to the painting and yet at the same time almost an observer, as if the hands working across the canvas weren’t her own.

Not that she told many people that, having come from a family who were about as creative as tin tacks. Susie was altogether more pragmatic when she talked about her work, realising that people had enough preconceived notions about artists without being told that when it was going well she felt she was possessed by the spirit of Elvis. Worse still, Susie really did paint at the top of her game when she was unhappy. This morning the lines were flowing onto the blank canvas effortlessly, like melted chocolate.

‘I don’t mind unloading it. Or I could walk the dog – oh, how about I water the garden?’

‘For god’s sake, Jack, I’ve only just started. And you chose the pose: young man reads newspaper.’

Jack shifted his weight without breaking position. ‘I hate doing this. My leg’s gone numb now. I should have done young man sleeps peacefully in hammock.’

‘Bear in mind that you could have very easily been doing young man emulsions spare room. And besides, you didn’t used to hate it.’

‘Only because you bribed me and Alice with sweets and money and trips to the zoo.’

‘You could always go and stay with your father.’

Jack sniffed and flicked the page over. ‘Did I tell you you’re a cruel and heartless woman?’

‘I thought we’d already established that. Now, do you want me to put the radio on?’ Susie said, glancing back at the canvas and then back at Jack, her eyes darting quickly between the two, trying to catch him in the cross-hairs of her imagination.

‘Radio Four?’

‘Yup.’

‘Not really.’ There was a second’s pause and then he said, ‘So, are you going to ring what’s-his-face, try to kiss and make up?’

‘You know the rules, Jack,’ said Susie, without taking her mind’s eye off Jack’s silhouette. ‘At least ten minutes at a time without talking, now stay still. And no, I don’t think I’ll be ringing Robert, we’ve got nothing to say to each other as far as I can see. He wants a baby and, let’s be frank, I’m all babied out.’

She smudged the charcoal with her thumb and then paused to gauge the effect.

Jack sniffed. ‘Radio Four then?’

‘If you want, the afternoon play will be on soon. It’s always good on a Saturday.’

‘Says you. Are you feeling okay?’

Susie nodded. ‘Bit battered but I’ll be fine, now sit still.’ She had made a habit of never discussing her emotional life in depth with her children and she wasn’t going to start now. All the way through the death throes of her marriage, the hand-to-hand combat of divorce, and the new men, broken hearts and false starts since, she’d always kept the gory details to herself, never expecting her children to take sides or, worse still, dispense advice. Besides, she wasn’t the only one nursing a broken heart. It couldn’t have been easy for Jack to come home and find that Ellie had upped sticks and gone. Ironic really that they were in the same boat, and that while she kept encouraging Jack to talk about it, saying it could really help, she kept her own pain neatly tidied away.

Susie let the charcoal sweep down the page, catching the line of Jack’s back, working down over his shoulders, her eye and fingertips guiding the charcoal, trying to capture the subtle thing that was him, wondering as she always did if there was any way to truly capture the shadows and the texture and the vitality, so that someone would look at the finished work and see Jack as she did.

Jack had broad shoulders but was still rangy like a colt; he had his father’s jaw line and her long neck, blue-green eyes deep set under heavy brows, a good tan, and taut skin that reflected the light so he seemed to glow. She smiled; her baby had grown up to be a rugged outdoorsy man, with strong, gentle features.

She had painted and drawn Jack and Alice and their father hundreds of times, but never Robert. Robert had objected, saying it felt invasive, and that he didn’t like the way she looked at him. It felt, he said, one day when she got him to sit for half an hour, almost as if she could see right through him. Shame she hadn’t really, thought Susie miserably as she added another line, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

‘He seemed like a bit of a no-hoper to me,’ said Jack, without moving.

‘Really? And how could you tell?’ said Susie, eyes working back and forth, back and forth. When Susie was certain she’d got the right line, she’d look less often, for reference, but at the moment Jack’s pose was the only thing she had to hold the image. At the moment there was no dense safety net of lines or shapes or shading, just an idea caught by the most fragile gossamer of charcoal marks.

‘I was being polite,’ he said. ‘If I’m honest, I don’t really know what you ever saw in Robert, Mum, he didn’t seem like he was your sort at all – came across like a real stuffed shirt. Selfish, a bit spoilt. How long did you say you’d been going out with him?’

‘Jack, instead of picking over my love life, why don’t you go and ring Ellie when we’ve done here and try to sort things out with her,’ she said. ‘You can use the house phone as you haven’t got any credit.’

There was silence. He looked away. And then Susie noticed that there was the merest vibration, a tiny shudder in Jack’s shoulder and then another, and as she watched a single tear rolled down his cheek and plopped silently onto the newspaper on the table in front of him.

‘Oh Jack,’ she said gently. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, honey.’

He sniffed, shoulders lifting. ‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, I ought to ring her. The trouble is I don’t know what to say to make it come right – to make her come back.’

Susie laid the charcoal down and put her arms round him, and as she did the dam burst and he started to cry. It was all she could do not to cry with him.

‘Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured as sobs racked him. ‘C’mon, talk to me. Tell me –’

He sniffed the tears away. ‘Christ, this is crazy. I love her, Mum, it seemed so simple. What the hell am I going to do? I don’t know what happened. I thought – shit – I thought everything was fine, just fine. I thought Ellie would be coming out to join us at the dig at the end of the month; that we’d spend the whole of the summer together in Italy. She loved it last year. I really thought she was happy – okay, so things hadn’t been that great recently, she said I was always away, and money’s been a bit tight, but those things happen to everyone – and we’d got the summer to look forward to. We could have worked it out, worked through it.’ He stopped, sniffing miserably. ‘I thought we were it, Mum, I thought we were forever. What am I going to do?’

‘Oh baby,’ she whispered, stroking the hair back off his face, her own voice ragged. Still holding him close, Susie pulled a crush of tissue out of her pocket. ‘Here, honey.’

They never mentioned anything about tending broken hearts at antenatal clinic, not a whisper in any of the childcare books about how to deal with shattered dreams, or girls who ran off with your baby’s future in their hands. Or, come to that, men who ran off with dreams of future babies in theirs.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he snuffled. ‘A big blow for Mummy?’

Susie smiled sadly. ‘You could say that.’

On Monday morning during one of her classes Robert rang and left a message on her mobile.

‘Damn, of course,’ he muttered on the voicemail. ‘It’s Monday, isn’t it? I’d forgotten, you’re at work.’ Three years and he still couldn’t remember her schedule. ‘I just rang to see how you were. I was going to ring over the weekend, but I didn’t want to upset you again. Best to leave well alone, eh? I realise that it must have come as a little bit of a shock.’ The man was all heart.

‘The thing is –’ he hesitated. Susie could imagine his rather pained expression even on voicemail. ‘The thing is … sorry – maybe I’ll ring later, you know how much I hate these damned machines. I’ll be at home if you’d like to ring me when you get in, maybe that’s a better idea.’ He immediately sounded much brighter. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you give me a ring when you’ve got a minute? When it’s convenient, obviously.’

So, not much in the way of comfort there.

‘So?’ said Nina, carrying her coffee over as Susie deleted the message and dropped her phone back into her handbag. The art rooms were rarely empty but there was always a lunchtime lull, despite the end of term looming.

‘Come on then, tell me all about it. How did it go?’

Susie had deliberately arrived late to avoid any pre-class interrogation; leaving Jack at home in bed, or rather in his sleeping bag on the floor of the spare room. He had been snoring when she’d shut the back door. He hadn’t rung Ellie either. It had been a long, dark and painful weekend for both of them.

Come lunchtime Susie had scurried into town with the excuse that she needed to pay her council tax – but apparently nothing was going to put Nina off the scent, despite there only being ten minutes before afternoon classes started. And she couldn’t avoid Nina forever.

‘I’ve been thinking about you since Friday. I want to know all the details. What happened? What did he say? What did he do?’ Nina pressed, breaking out the custard creams.

Nina was Fenborough College Art Department’s senior technician, in her late forties, with hennaed hair, dreads, big glasses, a slightly wacky wardrobe, and probably – Susie often thought – more talent than the rest of the art department put together, herself included.

Nina had worked at the college since before dirt. She exhibited regularly, her work – huge abstracts painted in primal reds, ochres and blues with rich metallic threads twisted through them – sold like hotcakes. Over the years she’d been hailed as the next big thing, reviewed, featured and raved about in the broadsheets and had pieces in half a dozen famous galleries, and still she turned up every Monday morning bright and early to set up the studio for the next influx of students.

She and Susie were also good friends; they’d shared success and failure, suppers, sandwiches, bottles of wine, exhibition space, gossip, moans, groans and broken hearts for the best part of ten years.

‘I can’t believe you didn’t ring me. I was going to call you, but I didn’t want to interrupt anything, you know …’ Nina said with a sly grin, tapping the side of her nose as she settled herself down in a big purple armchair that one of last year’s upholstery class had left behind. Susie had taken the moss-green one, the one with the deep-buttoned back and the slightly wonky leg.

‘So, come on, how did it go then? Did he do the whole down-on-one-knee, a-dozen-red-roses thing? God, I hope so; I’ve found this fantastic suit in that second-hand shop in the High Street. They’ve got some really nice stuff in there. Anyway –’ Nina got up to demonstrate. ‘It’s cream, gold and plum silk, fitted, v-neck, bias cut, and I found this fabulous hat in Bows and Belles – you know, the one with the woman who looks as if she just smelt something rancid in her handbag? It’s like a cartoon top hat, with a feather –’ the mime continued. ‘Although actually I’m not sure now if it’s a feather or some kind of silk quill, it’s something curved, but it needs good weather so I was hoping you’d plump for maybe spring or summer next year.’ She paused, eyes wide. ‘So?’

‘So, he finished with me,’ said Susie, taking a sip of her coffee. It was cold and bitter although she refused to draw any parallels, and besides, Friday evening felt like a lifetime away and the woman who had been eagerly getting supper ready, all puffed and buffed and full of anticipation, waiting to be proposed to, a total and rather naïve stranger.

Nina stared at her, and her mouth dropped open. ‘You are joking.’

Susie shook her head. ‘Unfortunately not.’

‘Oh my god, but I thought –’ There was a little pause. ‘You thought –’

‘I know what I thought, Neen, but I was wrong, really, really wrong. Wrong about everything,’ said Susie, bizarrely feeling guilty for having deprived Nina of her fabulous hat-and-plum-silk-suit day.

‘Oh god. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry,’ said Nina, jiffling around with pure discomfort. ‘I feel awful now.’

Susie smiled, trying hard not to let her voice crack or break. ‘If it’s any consolation I probably feel worse.’

‘Oh, Susie.’

Susie held up a hand. ‘Please, Neen, whatever you do, don’t be nice to me – no sympathy, no hugs or I’ll cry.’

‘God, what a complete bastard,’ snapped Nina. ‘I mean, I could never really see what it was you saw in him myself, but – you know.’

Susie sniffed and nodded. ‘I know.’

Good friends might disapprove of your choice in shoes, handbags or men but they would defend to the death your right to have them.

Nina shook her head. ‘And just when it was going so well. Is it too soon for details or would you like to get it off your chest, bearing in mind we’ve got a life class in ten minutes and Electric Mickey will be arriving any minute now?’

‘He wants a baby.’

Nina’s expression crumpled like damp origami. ‘What? Who wants a baby?’

‘Electric Mickey; who the hell do you think I mean?’

‘Not Robert? Oh please, please tell me you’re joking,’ she hissed, eyes so wide now that she looked as if she had been electrocuted.

‘Yes, of course Robert.’

‘Bloody hell.’ Nina paused, features folding and refolding as she considered the prospect. ‘A baby. Jesus. Really? Who would have thought it? Bloody hell. Broody. With those ears.’

Ears? Susie stared at her. How come she had never noticed Robert’s ears? ‘Presumably you got them to put the suit and the hat on lay away?’ asked Susie.

Nina nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Till the end of the week. I mean it could have been an autumn wedding – or the Caribbean. That hat would never have travelled.’

‘There you go then,’ said Susie with forced good humour. ‘Problem solved. Oh, and by the way, Alice is having a baby apparently. I’m going to be a granny in January.’

‘Sweet Jesus, it’s been one hell of a weekend,’ said Nina, slumping back into the armchair, exhausted by all the facial contortions.

At which point Electric Mickey ambled in through the double doors carrying a basket of organic carrots, the tab end of what looked and smelt suspiciously like a joint clenched between his last remaining teeth.

‘Yo,’ he said, setting the basket down between them. ‘Y’okay?’

No changing room or false modesty about Electric Mickey: the second that the basket was down on the bench he started getting his kit off, which, despite appearances, although well worn was also well washed.

Naked as a jaybird, save for his sandals – broad-fitting with a therapeutic footbed – Mickey neatly folded everything – faded cotton dungarees and a spotless white tee shirt, not being a man who had embraced layering or underwear as a concept – in beside the carrots and said, ‘So where do you want me today then, ladies?’ without a trace of salaciousness.

Susie smiled up at him, wishing as always that she had stood up as soon as he came in: the view from the armchair was not one that she would have cared to share with many.

‘Well, we were thinking classic Roman today,’ said Nina, getting to her feet. ‘I’ve got you a nice pillar and a plinth set up over here by the gas heater.’

Electric Mickey was in his late fifties, former sailor, reformed alcoholic and ex-electrician with an exquisitely broken nose, skin the colour of good coffee, and with one of the most beautifully defined bone structure and musculatures that Susie had ever seen. His whole body was lean, wonderfully proportioned, with great definition and muscles as taut as knotted string from working dawn to dusk in the little market garden that he shared with his wife, Jolie. He was a mature masterpiece of the human form, which was why Susie booked him over and over again to pose for her classes to prove that you didn’t have to be eighteen to be beautiful.

His broad chest was covered with a sprinkling of white wiry hair, which travelled down in a fine line over his solar plexus and belly to regions further south, thickening as it did to a dense pelt framing his wedding tackle in a ruff as lush as the coat of a well-fed polar bear.

By contrast, the top of Mickey’s skull was completely bald and shiny, despite him having a thick beard and a great curtain of white hair sprouting from below the bulge of his not inconsiderable cranium, cut pudding-basin style, by Jolie, to shoulder length. Occasionally there were a couple of fine plaits in it, once in a while a bright twisted thread or piece of ribbon, which he seemed totally oblivious to – but today there was only hair. Electric Mickey was a great natural landscape of textures, surfaces, colours and shades for the students, and a joy to draw.

‘Fancy a coffee, do you?’ asked Nina, indicating her mug.

‘Not for me, thank you, Neen, don’t want to be dashing off to the loo every five minutes. Carrots if you want them,’ he said, nodding towards the basket. ‘Should be some Swiss chard next week. Now, what are we today? Toga on? Toga off?’

Susie smiled. ‘Off would be great. You’re a bit early though. The students won’t be back till two. Do you want to slip a robe on so’s you don’t get cold?’

‘Don’t mind if I do. I’ve just dropped my granddaughter off at nursery,’ he said, by way of explanation, taking the blue towelling bathrobe Nina offered him. ‘She wanted to get there early today; they’ve got their teddy bears’ picnic this afternoon. She’s got a new dress and we had to fill the van up with all her bears and then me and Jolie did little sandwiches and carrot cake.’ He smiled fondly. ‘She’s so excited.’

Susie sighed. Mickey, with his Father Christmas good looks, was the stuff of which proper grandparents were made.

Her own mum and dad had been perfect for the job too. Had they ever doubted they were ready? Susie’s mum had always seemed to know the right thing to do or say, although she had died when Alice and Jack were little, and Susie’s dad was forever patiently heading off to the shed to mend Jack’s punctures or his pedal car, chivvied on by Susie’s mum – they were made to be grandparents. Susie looked up and caught her reflection in a window and for a split second saw her mum’s features in her own. Surely Susie wasn’t quite there yet? Surely there had to have been some kind of mistake?

‘We were thinking Classic Roman – one of the senate staring out helplessly as the Carthaginians sack Rome,’ Nina was saying. ‘I had one of the girls in floristry whip you up a set of laurels.’ She rummaged around in one of the cupboards. ‘Here we are,’ she said, handing him a leafy crown which he cheerfully plonked on his head. As he took to the dais the first of the students started to trickle back in and set up their easels around him.

‘Actually, I think you’ll find it was the other way round, the Romans sacked Carthage,’ said Mickey, settling himself into position to get the feel of the pose. ‘It was the Barbarians who sacked Rome – the Vandals and the Visigoths and the Gauls, I think.’ He lifted one arm towards the pillar, eyes fixed into the middle distance; a vision in his faded Marks and Sparks dressing gown and matching laurels.

‘So, how did your weekend go?’ he asked Susie, getting himself comfy. ‘Neen was telling me all about it on Friday. Did he go down on one knee? Jolie’s been looking for a reason to get all dolled-up; she’s seen this really great frock in a shop in town – it’s cream and blue with all these tiny little pearl buttons down the front.’

Susie didn’t look but she guessed he was miming. Hopefully Jolie had got hers on lay away as well.

It was late afternoon when Susie finally arrived home. She banged the back door open with her hip and dropped a pile of shopping bags onto the kitchen table. From his basket by the Aga, Milo opened one rheumy eye, decided that on balance she was probably not a burglar, and settled back down to sleep.

‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ Susie called out in her best soap-opera Americana, before plugging in the kettle. ‘How’s it going, Jack? I’ve bought all your favourite comfort food.’

‘Mashed potato with onion gravy, a decent steak and a good bottle of Merlot?’

Susie swung round in surprise. Framed in the hall doorway was a tallish man with broad shoulders, short, dark greying hair, a deep tan and a broad grin. He most certainly wasn’t Jack. He was wearing an oversized black tee shirt with an abstract design across the front, faded jeans and trainers, and looked oddly at home in her house.

Susie stared at him. Maybe she’d missed something. ‘What the f—’ she began, as he stepped forward, hands up in a gesture of surrender.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you, don’t panic – you must be Susie, Jack’s mum? I’m Matt, Matt Peters. I’ve been working with Jack. Actually, I’m still working with Jack.’ He laughed, waving a large suntanned hand across the front of the tee shirt before holding a hand out towards her. She realised with a start that the jazzy abstract on the front of his shirt was magnolia emulsion.

‘It’s all right, they’re clean, I just washed them,’ he said.

‘You’re painting my spare room,’ she replied, more statement than question.

His handshake was warm and firm and something inside her tingled as his fingers closed around hers.

‘Most certainly am, amongst other things, ma’am – me and your boy have been working our butts off all day. We’ve got quite a lot done actually. It’s looking good. And it’s a great room – I really enjoy DIY and I love those little casement dormers and the stripped doors and boards.’

‘And where exactly is Jack?’

‘We needed a few more bits and pieces – some screws, brush cleaner – so he’s nipped into town to pick them up.’

‘Nipped? How the hell did you manage that? In my experience, Jack is pathologically incapable of nipping.’

‘Comes from working on archaeological digs for so long. It’s been here for three thousand years, what difference is ten minutes going to make?’ He grinned. ‘He should be back any minute now. He’s taken my car; he knew where the shop was, and besides, I was up a ladder at the time. Seemed sensible.’ With that the man took two mugs off the draining board and set them down on the worktop alongside Susie. ‘So how did your day go? Jack said you teach at Fenborough. You look completely knackered.’

She peered at him. ‘Well, thanks for that.’

‘Not a problem.’ He opened the fridge. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

Susie still hadn’t quite got a handle on this. ‘Whoa there, cowboy. Hang on a minute, I’m confused. Can you explain what exactly you are doing here and what you were doing up a ladder in my spare room?’