A Thousand Tiny Disappointments, page 13
‘No, Mrs Evans. You will now need to apply for a grant of probate to carry out your mother’s wishes. You can do that yourselves or we can do it for you. I can give you a list of our charges, if you’d like.’
‘That’s fine, thank you,’ said Patrick. ‘Come on, Martha. Let’s get out of here.’
22
‘What was that all about?’ he said, as they walked to the car. He was striding ahead, Martha running to catch up with him. ‘God, you were almost begging him to tell you there was something else he hadn’t mentioned.’
‘I just couldn’t believe it,’ panted Martha. ‘I’d been so worried we were going to find out Mum had told someone else about that codicil. I thought he might have a copy.’
‘Well, he didn’t, so that’s the end of it,’ said Patrick. ‘And a bloody good thing too. I need whatever we can get from the sale of that house. We’ll lose a couple of hundred thousand in death duties anyway, possibly more if she’s got savings, so it’s not as if we’ll just walk away with whatever the place is worth. You have no idea how much I have to pay out each year in school fees, plus there’s the extra tuition and the transport. It’s bloody thousands each term. I earn a decent whack, but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad to get some help towards it.’
Martha started the engine and pulled out of the car park. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t think he wanted her opinion.
‘Helen was livid when I told her about Mum’s note and the fact that the house might have gone to that girl,’ he went on. ‘She’s planning for us to go to Antigua before the kids go back to school in the autumn. There’s a spa resort on the south-east coast, which she’s taken a bit of a fancy to.’
‘Wow, lucky you,’ muttered Martha. ‘I’m sure you’d have been able to afford to do that anyway.’
‘Well probably, but that’s not the point,’ said Patrick, missing the sarcasm. ‘It’s a question of what’s right. This is our inheritance.’
Now that they were away from the solicitor’s office, Martha was feeling even worse than before. She’d been running on adrenalin all morning and, although relief had flooded through her when she realised Judith hadn’t officially changed her will, her head was now thumping and she desperately needed to eat something.
‘I still can’t understand what she must have been thinking,’ Patrick was saying. ‘I mean, how did she imagine we would react to her leaving her house to that girl? The whole thing is crazy.’
A few minutes later, as she watched him walk away from the car towards the station, already putting his mobile to his ear, Martha wished she could share his sense of righteousness. But it was easier for him to be like that: he had no guilt to deal with because he’d made sure she was the one who’d destroyed the handwritten codicil.
She didn’t even make it as far as the motorway before she started to cry. Pulling over into the car park beside a children’s playground, she sat staring through the windscreen at the fencing in front of her, the weathered grain of the wood swirling and blurring as the tears rolled down her cheeks.
The whole mess should be over now, but how was she ever going to be able to put it behind her? Why had her mother done this? She’d clearly grown very fond of Alice, but what had turned this from an arrangement about walking the dog into such a firm friendship that she wanted to give the girl her home? On paper the two women were an unlikely match, even if you didn’t count the fifty-year age difference.
Judith had been a secondary school teacher all her life and was bright and articulate; brought up in the home counties, she had been well-spoken, with old-fashioned attitudes towards modern society which sometimes made Martha cringe with embarrassment.
Alice came from a broken home and had left school at sixteen, falling pregnant shortly afterwards. She had no qualifications and no prospects. She must have reminded Judith of some of the girls she’d taught over the years at the secondary school where she’d been head of history for two decades – the handful who refused to work hard to secure their own futures, preferring instead to run wild and drop out. Judith always held up these girls as bad examples when Martha moaned about school or threw a teenage hissy fit about homework. ‘You’ve got so much potential!’ she would say. ‘Don’t throw everything away at this stage in your life. You’ll never be able to make it up later on.’
But that was exactly what Alice had done, so surely it would have frustrated and irritated Judith? This girl was the antithesis of everything she had encouraged her own daughter to be. Yet, despite their differences, the two women had become good friends.
Right now, Martha was finding it hard to feel anything for Alice, apart from jealousy. But, in spite of herself, she could see what her mother had liked about the girl: she was friendly and open, and seemed to have a good sense of humour. She was also a hard worker and had clearly loved both Nipper and his mistress. Martha remembered the girl’s shock at hearing the news; her tear-streaked face as she left the bungalow.
She suddenly felt as if she might be sick. She got out of the car and walked towards the entrance to the playground, taking deep breaths and wiping the tears off her face with her sleeve. On the other side of the low fence, a young man was pushing a toddler on a swing, the child squealing with delight as she flew backwards and forwards.
This wasn’t really about Alice, though, was it? The girl was involved, but none of it was her fault. Judith was the one who had chosen a course of action which she must have known would hurt her children, even though it seemed so completely out of character. Martha knew her mother had loved her. She’d loved Joe as well. The fact that they lived a hundred miles apart, meant she didn’t get to see her grandson as often as she would have liked, but that was only – Martha always reassured herself – because it was such hard work. Last summer she had taken Joe to Surrey for the day and the three of them had sat in the garden; Judith had made lunch and they had taken it in turns to try to feed the little boy, who’d been fractious and tired.
‘Come on, darling,’ her mother had said, putting a spoon up to his mouth. ‘Just a little bit more.’ He’d grunted and turned his head away, clamping shut his lips. As he began to wail, Martha had suggested they give up and let him drink milk from the sippy cup he’d had since he was a baby. She didn’t want a scene.
‘Sometimes it’s easier to give in!’ she’d said brightly, fishing in her bag for the cup and putting it up to Joe’s mouth. She had noticed the cloud of doubt crossing Judith’s face, the slight disapproval in her mother’s voice when she started to take the lunch things back into the house. ‘Well, if you’re sure? You know him best.’
She had prickled at that. Yes, she did know her son best. She could read his moods and anticipate how he was going to react in almost every situation. She could pick up on changes in the way he was sitting, or how he was holding his head, and predict what that might mean. She knew how to look after Joe better than anyone else in the world. Better even than Simon. She’d ignored the implicit criticism in Judith’s voice that day because, actually, how could anyone else understand what it meant to dedicate your life to caring for a severely disabled child? No one – even her own mother – had the right to suggest Martha wasn’t doing the very best she could.
‘How could you be so bloody cruel?’ Martha screamed now, into the playground.
The man with the toddler turned and stared at her. He looked terrified.
‘I’m not talking to you!’ Martha yelled. ‘I’m talking to my dead mother!’
The man grabbed the chain of the swing and pulled it to a halt, taking his protesting child by the arm and moving away towards the far side of the play area.
‘I hate you!’ Martha screamed into the air.
But she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Her mother had been one of the three people she loved most in the world. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I just don’t understand.’
The man was now hoisting his toddler up onto a roundabout, still casting nervous glances back at Martha. As she turned and walked towards her car, she realised there was now no need to mention any of this to Simon. The codicil had been destroyed and she was going to inherit her share of her mother’s estate, which they could put towards the cost of sending Joe to Greenways, if he was offered a place.
Thinking about Joe made her heart jolt; she’d been so wrapped up in what was going on today, her son hadn’t even crossed her mind for the last couple of hours. Please let the taster session be going well.
As she stood beside her car, Martha noticed a scrape along the front wing; she was certain that hadn’t been there before. Someone must have parked too close while they were in the solicitor’s office. Damn, this was all she needed right now. Back in the car, she blew her nose and pulled back her hair into a messy ponytail. None of this was helping: screaming in a children’s playground wasn’t going to make her feel any better.
She despised herself for it, but couldn’t stop thinking about the money. Judith had known it cost a lot for Martha and Simon to look after Joe and had always been sympathetic. When Joe was two, she’d been staying with them for the weekend, and Martha had been looking online at options for his first wheelchair, telling her mother about the different specifications, and the modifications they’d have to request to suit Joe’s needs.
‘Let me pay for this,’ Judith had said. ‘I would have loved to buy him a little bike, when he was old enough for one of those. So, if I can’t do that, why don’t you let me buy the wheelchair?’
Looking back now, Martha could see how kindly the offer was meant. But at the time, she’d taken offence. She didn’t hear the words themselves, more the disappointment that lay beneath them: Judith knew her grandson would never be able to do all the things other children took for granted.
‘Thank you, but it’s fine,’ she’d snapped. ‘We can manage.’ They could; but that wasn’t the point. She should have seen Judith’s offer for what it was, and accepted it graciously. She should have allowed her mother to find an almost imperceptible chink in her own emotional armour, and gently push her way through it.
It hadn’t really occurred to her before, quite how much her relationship with Judith had changed over the last few years: a distance had grown between them, but it had stretched itself out so slowly that Martha hadn’t been aware of it. On her thirtieth birthday, she and her mother had met in London and spent the morning wandering around the shops, followed by a boozy lunch in a bistro on the South Bank. Afterwards, she had walked Judith to Waterloo, their arms linked, both weighed down by shopping bags, laughing about the stuffy woman who’d served them in Hobbs. Three years ago, on her fortieth birthday, neither of them had suggested doing anything similar. Judith had sent a card with a generous cheque inside, and left a message on Martha’s mobile, saying she hoped she’d have a lovely day.
When had they become so formal with each other, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing? Martha had no idea, but she suspected it was mostly her fault. Since having Joe, she knew she’d become less tolerant of her own mother. Surely the opposite should have been the case: when she became a mother herself, it ought to have brought them closer? Maybe it would have done, if Joe had been healthy and if Martha had had the chance to be the sort of parent she’d longed to be. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It was pointless wishing for a different past – or wishing she’d handled the past in a different way. But she felt like such a failure.
The man and his daughter were now leaving the playground, the little girl pulling on his hand and jumping up and down as they walked towards the gate. He stopped and turned to speak to her. It looked like he was getting cross with her. Martha wanted to wind down the window and shout across: tell him how lucky he was to have a child who pulled and jumped and misbehaved. But she’d done enough shouting for one day.
She started the engine, but still didn’t have the energy to start driving. Her body ached; she couldn’t remember feeling this drained since she was pregnant, when it had sometimes been an effort to keep her eyes open in the middle of the day.
Judith must have believed both her children were doing so well for themselves that they didn’t need her help. Patrick certainly took every opportunity to brag about his job, his earning power and his hefty bonus. Martha wasn’t guilty of doing this; she’d never been the sort of person to boast. But maybe this wasn’t just about money. It had always been a matter of pride that she didn’t tell Judith, or anyone else, how much they were struggling emotionally and how hard it was just to deal with the relentless daily grind.
She didn’t care about keeping up appearances; it was the pity that was so hard to bear. If Judith or any of Martha’s friends knew she was struggling to deal with the less than perfect lot life had dealt her, it would have been yet another item they could add to the list of ‘reasons to feel sorry for Martha’. She’d had enough of other people’s pity when Joe was born; in the intervening five years, life had been about getting on and dealing with all the shit — sending out the message that she was fine and didn’t need anyone to feel sorry for her.
Maybe she should have let down her guard every now and then – at least to her own mother – and admitted how bloody awful her life was. Admitted she was only human.
23
Claudia came back to the table with a bottle of wine in one hand, two glasses in the other.
‘I said I only wanted one small glass!’ said Martha, moving her bag onto the floor. ‘I really can’t be late back; I’ve hardly seen Simon recently.’
‘Forget Simon,’ said Claudia. ‘You need a night out. And you need a proper drink.’ She set the glasses down and sloshed wine into them. ‘Right, here you go. Happy days!’
Martha picked up a glass and clinked it against her friend’s. ‘Happy days,’ she echoed. The wine was great: dry and perfectly chilled. The first mouthful slid down her throat and she could feel the tension ebbing away as the alcohol trickled through her body. She’d been drinking too much recently, but life had been so stressful. She felt guilty every time she opened the fridge and reached in for another bottle. But she would then remind herself that nothing was normal right now. Her mother had died: she was going through a traumatic experience, and the occasional glass of wine wouldn’t do her any harm. In fact, possibly the opposite – if drinking wine made life more bearable, surely it was a good thing? It’s amazing how easy it is to lie to yourself about things like that.
‘So how did it go with the solicitor?’
‘It was fine, better than I’d expected,’ said Martha. ‘I was really worried about it. I’d convinced myself that Mum would have gone to see him to make that codicil official. I was so nervous, sitting there waiting for him to announce she was leaving the bungalow to Alice.’
She desperately needed to share this with someone. Simon should have been the one she confided in, but he was hardly around at the moment – the IT problems at work had been solved but there was an ongoing impact on everything else: clients were furious, projects had been delayed, Simon and his colleagues were up against it. When she did see him in the evenings, he was moody and short with her and took himself up to the office as soon as they’d eaten. In such a charged atmosphere, it hadn’t been possible to find the right time to tell him about any of this. But she kept picturing herself back in the solicitor’s office, Patrick’s body rigid in the chair beside her, the solicitor’s yellowing fingernails grasped around the sheet of paper.
‘But he didn’t?’
‘No, it was all fine. That handwritten note was all there was.’
‘How did you destroy it? You never told me the nitty-gritty,’ said Claudia, leaning forward, her eyes wide with anticipation.
‘Does it really matter?’ asked Martha. Claudia wasn’t the right person to be talking to about all this; she seemed to be enjoying it too much, turning the whole thing into a spectacle. She took another mouthful of wine.
‘Yes, of course it does!’ said Claudia, slopping more wine into their glasses. ‘You had to make sure you did it properly, so go on – tell me! Did you burn it?’
‘No,’ said Martha, miserably. ‘I ripped it up and flushed it down the loo.’
‘Okay, well that’s sensible,’ said Claudia, nodding. ‘Your mum obviously didn’t know her note wasn’t legal, otherwise she would have done it properly. I wonder if she was intending to do that? You know, go to see her solicitor at some stage and get him to change the will.’
‘I have no idea what she was thinking,’ shrugged Martha, ‘it’s irrelevant really. The bottom line is that she wanted to leave her bungalow to Alice, but Patrick and I have stopped that happening.’
‘But you had to!’ exclaimed Claudia. ‘It’s your house. The whole thing would have been appallingly unfair.’
‘Well, there you go. It’s done.’ Martha really didn’t want to talk about this anymore.
‘So, when is it going on the market?’
‘What?’
‘The house, of course!’ Claudia took a long sip of her wine. ‘The sooner you get it listed the better. It’s a good time of year to sell property, the garden’s probably looking good and the weather’s getting better.’
She was beginning to sound like Patrick.
‘We aren’t going to do anything straight away,’ said Martha. ‘We can’t sell right now anyway.’
Claudia had picked up the bottle and was already topping up their glasses again, even though the levels had hardly gone down. ‘Why can’t you sell now?’
‘There’s so much to organise. We need to apply for probate and then I’ll have to start sorting through all Mum’s things.’
They sat in silence for a few seconds, staring at their glasses. Martha was suddenly aware of other conversations around them in the pub: the couple at the next table discussing their children, a group of men behind them talking about football. Had anyone else overheard what she’d been telling Claudia? Guilt stabbed at her again. But surely, what she and Patrick had done could never be used against them? The only people who would have cared were Alice – who didn’t know about it – and Judith, who would never have any idea that her wishes wouldn’t be carried out.
