Something Good Read online

  “You weren’t talking about me?” She sounded like a little girl.

  “No, darling. Go to sleep.” Jane bent to kiss her cheek. An acidic smell hung in the air.

  Later, as dawn crept into her room, Jane wondered if it had really happened: Hannah throwing up, Max blurting out that Veronica stuff. It had been a night, she decided, for all kinds of stuff falling out of mouths.

  Nancy’s knife rapped against the chopping board like some manically pecking bird. While Jane had ploughed gallantly through her mother’s dinner, Hannah had shunted tinned peas and boiled potatoes around her plate before excusing herself to watch TV in the living room. “How’s the window business going?” Nancy asked, battering a nectarine with the rusting knife.

  “Really well,” Jane said, refusing to be riled by her mother’s refusal to use the term stained glass. Window business made Jane think of cold callers trying to hard sell double glazing.

  “Had many commissions?” Nancy asked, swiveling round from the worktop to fix Jane with her beady gaze. Her eyes glimmered like sequins.

  “It’s been a good month,” Jane said firmly. “I’ve done a window for a restaurant, I’m restoring a panel for a church in Stoke Newington and Max has this window—”

  “You’re working for Max?”

  “Why wouldn’t I, Mum?”

  “And three jobs is a good month?” Nancy remarked, for once resisting the urge to comment on her curious relationship with Max. Jane had never told her mother why she’d left him. Throwing everything away over one silly one-night stand? Nancy would have thought she’d lost her mind.

  “It’s enough,” she said, perching on the table’s softly worn edge. “A panel takes me at least a couple of weeks—sometimes months.” Months, Nancy would be thinking, and I had that wall concreted in one afternoon?

  Nancy lived alone in an echoey house in a quietly fading tree-lined road in Muswell Hill. Her kitchen was of a 1950s vintage with the odd post-war toast crust poking out from under the oven. One afternoon, when Jane had been helping her mother prepare dinner, she’d opened the oven door and glimpsed the grisly remains of what appeared to be an antique shepherd’s pie.

  Nancy was short and stocky with wiry hair cut close to her face. Her hands were large and powerful, like a farmer’s. Since Jane’s father had died five years ago, Nancy had appeared to be entirely self-sufficient. When a car had skidded into her front garden wall, Nancy had rebuilt it. She’d boycotted supermarkets with the advent of loyalty cards—“Do these people really think they can bribe me, Jane?”—shopping instead at local butchers and greengrocers and lugging her purchases home in numerous disintegrating shopping bags.

  At sixty-seven years old, Nancy still maintained the clippings library that she’d run for over three decades. She’d come up with the idea the week Jane had started at primary school. Other mothers, giddy with freedom, had launched into a convivial round of coffee mornings and charity committee meetings. Nancy wasn’t one for baking brownies or manning a Guess the Knitted Scarecrow’s Birthday stall. She read voraciously, stored information in her brain like a primitive but remarkably effective filing system, and had put her talents to work. Articles about actors, musicians, artists, the royal family—anyone with the merest smidgeon of interest about them—were snipped from newspapers and magazines, filed and sent on request to journalists and researchers.

  The smaller downstairs room—it had once been a dining room, Jane vaguely remembered—was lined with looming filing cabinets and tea chests piled high with dust-strewn files. On top of the cabinets were stacks of ancient jigsaws that Jane and her mother—then, later, Nancy and Hannah—had pieced together on the threadbare carpet. As a child Jane had tried to avoid going into the clippings room. She’d feared that, if she had so much as touched one file, the entire library—years’ worth of painstaking work—would come crashing down all around her.

  Nancy piled the fruit into three bowls and sploshed Rose’s Lime Cordial over the top “to make juice.” She and Jane carried the bowls into the living room where Nancy snatched the remote control from the sofa. “Gran,” Hannah protested as Nancy flipped from the music show to a documentary about wildlife in the Scottish Highlands.

  Jane squeezed on to the worn sofa and nibbled a chunk of brownish apple. On TV a stag was posing on a hillside while a doe emerged from a nearby forest. With its wide eyes and tremulous legs, it reminded Jane of Veronica. The doe stepped gingerly toward the stag and nuzzled around him.

  “You might learn something, Han,” Nancy teased. “I know what you girls are like with your heads full of boys.”

  “I’m not you girls,” Hannah retorted. “I’m me.”

  Nancy’s face softened. She slid a chunky arm around her granddaughter’s shoulder and said, “I know you are. You’re my wonderful girl and you’re to tell your mother to give that business of hers a kick up the backside.”

  Jane glanced at her mother: an infuriating woman who wrecked perfectly acceptable fruit by dowsing it with cordial, refused to call in tradesmen and had stood by her husband—despite his perpetual philandering—just to prove that she was tough enough to handle that, too.

  They left Nancy’s road with the windscreen wipers flapping urgently. Nancy’s was one of the few places Jane drove to. She’d bought a car only when it had become apparent that she’d need transport to bring equipment into the studio, to pick up supplies of glass and deliver finished panels. She drove a metallic green Škoda that Hannah had nicknamed “The Embarrassment”, but otherwise she preferred to walk or cycle. Jane’s bike was a lumpen no-frills model—a cart horse with crumbling joints compared to Max’s nifty gazelle—and was currently nursing a puncture back in the hallway.

  “Kate from work said she saw you last night,” Jane said, casting Hannah a swift glance.

  “Yeah?” Hannah murmured.

  “She said you were in some bar-restaurant place near the canal, couldn’t remember its name. Some new place.”

  “We just went for something to eat.” Hannah released a small sigh.

  “And drink,” Jane added. “Did you have enough money?”

  “Ollie—a friend paid. It wasn’t much.”

  “Okay, Han. You know, don’t you, that if you drink that much you’re going to get sick?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How did you manage to get served?”

  “I don’t know. Suppose I must look older.”

  “You don’t,” Jane insisted. “You look your age. You look fifteen. Were you with older people?”

  “Yeah.” Hannah gazed pointedly out of the window.

  “Getting that drunk,” Jane continued, “makes you vulnerable. God knows what could have happened. Don’t feel you have to keep up with the kind of people who go to these places.” She hadn’t intended to lurch into a sermon, not with Hannah in a reasonably pleasant mood after visiting Granny Nancy. Now that she’d started, she couldn’t stop. “There’s plenty of time,” she rattled on, “to go out drinking when you don’t have school in the morning and you’re old enough to—”

  “All right!” Hannah’s right ear was burning bright red.

  “I rang Amy’s mum, did I tell you? She said you haven’t been to their place for weeks. You’ve been lying to me, Han.”

  “Can we forget it, please?” They’d stopped at a red light. Jane’s chest was juddering with the effort of trying to sound controlled, and not lose her cool or carry on past the point at which Hannah would listen. So much of being a parent required one to be in control at all times; to talk calmly, as if you’d been programmed not to overreact, when what you really wanted to do was grab your kid by the shoulders and yell, “Who’s this Ollie?”

  The familiar streets snaked between row upon row of redbrick houses. Jane breathed deeply, remembering going to pubs when she wasn’t much older than Hannah; it wouldn’t have occurred to the jaded staff to ask for ID. Her father, a neurologist, would be too wrapped up in his work and extracurricular affairs to note where she
went, and her mother would spend long days in the clippings room with the door firmly shut. Unlike Jane, Hannah wouldn’t be allowed to touch alcohol again until she was twenty-seven.

  “You would tell me,” Jane added, “if something was worrying you?”

  Hannah paused, biting her lip. “Actually, there is something.”

  Jane tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “What is it?”

  “I only had a few of Gran’s horrible peas. Can we stop for chips?”

  Jane smiled, indicating left. “Of course we can.” This was their secret pit stop after a visit to Nancy’s: the Golden Fry, featuring Jane’s sleek stained glass fish above its entrance.

  As they ate in silence in the car, Jane replayed her talk with Max. He was right; some kids went out and got drunk all the time. They took drugs and had underage sex and got pregnant. They were lucky, Jane reflected, to have a daughter like Hannah. She and Max had a lot to be thankful for.

  She piled in more chips, trying to erase the lime cordial taste from her tongue.

  9

  What was happening to Max’s beautiful daughter? Getting drunk wasn’t really the issue. Didn’t all teenagers do that at some point? Barely a day had gone by in his late teens and twenties when he and Jane hadn’t gone out for a few drinks or got stuck into the wine at home. Back then, he’d been able to get away with it. As a student, and later a cycle courier, he’d been able to lurch through the following day without having to properly engage his brain. When he’d started to take cycling more seriously, acquiring not one gleaming steel-framed model but also a training bike, touring bike and mountain bike, Max had realized he’d have to start taking care of himself, not to mention watching his cash. The shop had changed everything. Spokes required every ounce of his concentration and energy. A couple of glasses of wine were pretty much his limit these days.

  “She was probably trying to keep up with her friends,” Veronica told him over the restaurant table.

  “I don’t even know who her friends are,” Max sighed. “She’s changed so much these past few months. Some days she’d come to the shop after school. She’d hang about in the workshop, helping the guys with repairs and make tea and—” What the hell was he saying? He was having dinner with a woman. A woman who’d booked the table and asked him out—in that order—which surely indicated a certain degree of keenness. Veronica was, he decided, charming company: attractive, full of life and sparkle, a fine antidote to endless DIY.

  Max wouldn’t have chosen the restaurant. It was a little too prissy, too self-consciously smart for his taste. Yet they’d fallen into easy chat, and the food was magnificent. Now he was going to ruin the evening by babbling on about Hannah. What did Veronica care about his moody daughter or, worse, his business? “Don’t talk about cycling,” Andy had warned him in the workshop. “Women can detect this obsessive glint in your eye. It puts them off, believe me. You can mention races—especially races you’ve won—but on no account start on about tubular steeling or alloy wheels.”

  “So,” Veronica murmured, “tell me more about your shop.” She’d ordered sea bass—not with the roasted root vegetables that were supposed to accompany it, but a mixed salad and dressing on the side. It glimmered with virtue from its white plate.

  Max shrugged. “It ticks along. Spokes isn’t your flashy, showroomy kind of place. We manage, but it’s pretty chaotic.”

  “And you’re happy with that?” she asked. A piece of watercress wavered on the end of her fork.

  “I’d love to expand, have more space. I’ve started looking for premises in Stoke Newington or Stamford Hill.”

  She leaned toward him eagerly. “The shop’s won awards, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, a couple.”

  “So why put yourself down, Max, by saying it just ticks along? It’s amazing what you’ve done. Didn’t you set it up when Hannah was a baby? Honestly, I don’t know how you did it.”

  He didn’t mention the fact that he’d hardly been there for Jane and their baby daughter. Although it pained him to admit it, he’d resented having to cut down on training and racing. Nothing could have prepared him for the sacrifices you were required to make as a parent. “I haven’t done it on my own,” he added. “I’ve got Andy, who manages the shop—at least the sales side of things. I’m not really a salesperson.”

  “What kind of person are you, Max?” Veronica’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight.

  He swallowed, wondering what kind of information was required at this stage. Max had never met anyone quite like Veronica; certainly no one who’d made their intentions so clear. He couldn’t help admiring her. And now, as he sawed into his medium-rare steak, he was glad he’d come. “I suppose I’m quite obsessive,” he said.

  “About what kind of things?”

  “Well, cycling, of course. The competitive aspect—the racing. You don’t get anywhere unless you push yourself.”

  “That’s what I feel,” Veronica said. “My business keeps me going but it’s not enough for me, Max. I’m ambitious, like you. I need to throw myself into something one hundred per cent.” She popped a morsel of fish the size of a fingernail clipping into her mouth. “Maybe,” she added, “you could help me.”

  “How?” Max asked.

  “By telling me how you’ve done it—built up a business from scratch.”

  Max shifted uncomfortably. “It’s been hard. The shop has affected other parts of my life.”

  “Such as?” She stabbed a halved cherry tomato with her fork.

  “My personal life, I suppose. My marriage.”

  “That can’t have been all your fault.”

  If only you knew, he thought. “When I was setting up Spokes,” he told her, “Hannah had just been born. She’d wake in the night and start crying and I’d shut my ears and will her to stop. Jane dealt with all of that.”

  “You were working,” Veronica insisted, neatly aligning her cutlery on her plate.

  Max looked at her, wondered how it was possible to have such perfectly shaped, symmetrical eyebrows. “Yes, but what’s more important—work or family?”

  “But you’re a good dad.”

  “I don’t know about that.” He had no intention of telling Veronica what he’d done when Hannah was nearly five years old, when he hadn’t been a good dad or a good husband or even a particularly good human being. Max and his staff had gone out to celebrate a glowing article about Spokes that had appeared in Your Bike magazine. They’d all been drinking, knocking it back. Max had, too, even though he hadn’t had a drink for months. It had been a release: some fun and frivolity after years of slog.

  A release that had screwed up his life.

  “None for me, thanks,” Veronica said, waving away the waiter with the dessert menus.

  “Are you sure?” Max said. He was in no hurry to leave. His house was cluttered with stepladders and power tools and cans of paint. The Hazy Dawn bedroom still wasn’t finished.

  “I thought we could just…go home.” Veronica smiled coquettishly.

  Jesus, he’d never been propositioned so blatantly. He was blushing, for heaven’s sake, at thirty-eight years old. His palms were sweaty. He met the gaze of the woman who’d stormed into his life with her fabulous meals and legs, which, if he wasn’t careful, could turn him into a lecherous old man.

  She was absolutely gorgeous. He’d met some lovely women over the years but no one who’d knocked him out with her piercing eyes and succulent lips. Earlier that evening, when he’d gone to the loo, he’d half expected her to have upped and left by the time he returned to their table.

  They left the restaurant just after nine. Max’s head milled with the possibilities of what the rest of the evening might offer. He hadn’t slept with anyone for—how long was it? A year at least. He didn’t like to dwell on it. The last one had been Michelle, the life model. Sex had felt like something they were obliged to get over and done with, like asking about each other’s jobs. Afterward, she’d retrieved her nightie from somewher
e under the duvet, stepped neatly into her clothes and politely asked him to order her a cab. After a few weeks she’d stopped calling, and Max couldn’t find it in himself to care.

  Veronica stepped on to the pavement and hailed a cab. She took Max’s hand as it pulled up beside them. “You okay?” she asked as they settled into the backseat.

  “Better than okay,” Max replied.

  “You don’t mind going home this early?”

  “No, of course not.” Veronica had rested a hand on his knee. He felt warm, happy and about fifteen years old. The night was…Max almost laughed at the corniness of his thoughts. The night was still young.

  10

  Hannah carefully fed each arm into a coat sleeve and pretended to hunt around the church cloakroom for her bag. Although she was fully aware that she’d stashed it beneath the slatted bench, she carefully checked every corner of the room. So thorough was her search, she was starting to believe that she really had lost her schoolbag and would have to find Beth, who ran theater workshop, to report it stolen.

  Ollie had been here today but they’d been working in different groups and she hadn’t had a chance to talk to him. In fact, he’d paid her no attention whatsoever. He hadn’t even looked at her. She’d hoped that he might at least have asked what she was doing afterward, and had already decided to say that she was heading straight home. She’d think of some reason that didn’t make her look too school-girlish to hang around drinking wine at the Opal. She wouldn’t have him messing her around—being her friend one minute, blanking her the next. Now, it seemed, she wouldn’t need to trot out any excuse because Ollie must have wandered off without saying goodbye.

  Disappointment pooled in Hannah’s stomach. Had she done something to annoy or upset him? She wished she could stop caring so much what other people thought of her; that she could acquire a slick of confidence like those girls at the Opal, or Emma and Georgia and the theater workshop elite. The whole session today, they’d been full of their parts in Little Shop of Horrors. Ollie was playing Orin, the crazy dentist. At least he deserved it. Whenever he was performing, you’d stop noticing the grumbling pipes or the cleaning lady who’d propped open the door with her mop, letting in cold air.