Second Time Around Part 3

Lucy paid out an absolute fortune for a room you couldn't swing a cat in. 'It hasn't worked since you moved in. I feel like ringing the landlord up and giving him a piece of my mind.'

'Don't you dare,' snapped Lucy. 'I'm the one paying the rent. Do you want to make me look ridiculous?'

Jennifer, with no desire to see the argument escalate any further, bit her tongue. She pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. Why was Lucy still acting like a rebellious teenager? She and Lucy ought to have gotten past this stage and moved on to a more harmonious relations.h.i.+p, like the one she shared with Matt. 'Come and sit down,' she smiled, patting the seat of the chair beside her. 'And tell me all about your week.'

Lucy complied, folding herself into the chair with her shoulders hunched, like she wanted to disappear. She'd had an issue with her height since primary school when she'd been the tallest girl in her cla.s.s. Jennifer wished she could make her believe that her height was something to be proud of. She would look so much better if she stood up straight and tall, and a cheery smile would help too but there was no telling Lucy.

'I went out for a drink with the girls in the house a couple of times,' said Lucy, brus.h.i.+ng crumbs off the table with the sleeve of her dressing gown. Jennifer watched them fall to the floor and decided to let the behaviour go unremarked. 'But everywhere's so expensive these days. It's nearly four quid for a gla.s.s of wine in some places. Apart from the Union,' she went on, 'but you wouldn't want to go there every night.'

Jennifer clasped her hands together and rested them on the table, trying not to look alarmed. Lucy didn't talk much about her university life, academic or social, and Jennifer sometimes wondered if she was keeping something from her. But then all students kept secrets from their parents, didn't they? She told herself not to worry so much it was all part of growing up. But still, she couldn't help herself from commenting, 'I hope you're not drinking too much.'

'Of course not,' said Lucy evenly, 'But you can hardly go out without having a couple of gla.s.ses of wine, can you? And taxis home are expensive too. You wouldn't want me to be walking home from the city centre late at night, would you?'

'Well, no. But aren't there late night buses?'

'Not always.' And for some reason Lucy blushed. Jennifer suspected she was not being entirely truthful, but, pleased to hear that Lucy had friends to go out with, she decided to let it go. 'It's great that you're going out with your friends and having a good time. That's what university's all about. So long as your studies don't suffer.'

'They don't.'

Jennifer yawned and glanced at the clock and said without moving, 'I guess I'd better go upstairs and get out of these glad rags. I'll show you what I bought tomorrow, shall I? I don't think I have the energy for it tonight.'

Lucy toyed with the frayed belt of her dressing gown. 'So, as I was saying,' she said with a note of urgency in her voice, 'things are expensive. Even food.'

'Tell me about it,' laughed Jennifer good-humouredly, and she stood up. 'Your brother just about eats me out of house and home.' She collected her bags and coat, and added, rather sadly, 'Though not for much longer.'

'So I was wondering,' said Lucy, interrupting Jennifer's thoughts, 'if I could have a hundred quid. Just to see me through till the end of the month.'

'What?' said Jennifer, doubting what she'd just heard.

'I'm a bit short, Mum. I was wondering if you could give me a hundred pounds.' She paused and looked searchingly into Jennifer's stunned face and added, 'Just this once.'

'But I don't understand,' said Jennifer, setting her bags and coat down again on the adjacent chair. 'I gave you an extra fifty only a week ago.'

'But that was for text books.'

Jennifer, confused, sat down again. 'But how can you be short of money? Your monthly allowance is more than enough to live on. And I thought you said you would budget?' Last year, her first year at uni, she'd tapped Jennifer constantly for money. At the end of the summer they'd had a long chat about finances and Lucy had promised that she'd manage her money. And here they were, less than a fortnight into the new term, and she was asking for more. 'This can't go on, Lucy.'

Although the business was doing okay and she could meet her monthly commitments, Jennifer wasn't exactly awash with money. David paid the bulk of Lucy's living costs and education, but Jennifer contributed a hefty sum too. She rested her elbow on the table and rubbed her brow with her thumb and forefinger. 'I'm sorry, pet,' she said, feeling both guilty and resolved, 'but I don't think I can help you out. You'll have to go overdrawn for a bit and pay it back at the end of the month.'

Lucy's face reddened and she pulled the folds of the dressing gown defensively round her thin frame. 'It's only a hundred quid, Mum,' she said grumpily.

'Only a hundred quid!' repeated Jennifer in astonishment.

'And Dad said the overdraft was only for emergencies.'

'Do you think I'm made of money?' said Jennifer, losing it a bit. 'The car needs to be taxed and MOTed, I need to get the leak in the shower fixed and the outside of the house desperately needs painting. Not to mention replacing this kitchen.' She looked at the pale blue paint peeling off the cupboards she had painted herself when they'd moved in, the dripping tap, the cracked wall tiles and shook her head in exasperation. 'Anyway, what do you need it for?'

'I told you,' said Lucy irritably, avoiding eye contact, as she had done for most of this conversation. 'Things are expensive. Everyone at uni's in debt.'

'Well, you don't need to be. Not with the money you have coming in. I thought you knew how to budget, Lucy. Haven't I been over it with you time and again?' Jennifer sighed heavily, got up, opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a pen and a notebook.

'What are you doing?' said Lucy.

Jennifer sat down again and opened the notebook. 'Let's go through this one more time. It's not rocket science. I'll help you draw up a monthly budget and, if you stick to it, you'll see. It'll be so much easier to manage your money.'

Lucy put the flat of her hands on the table. 'No,' she said forcefully and then softened her tone. 'It's late, Mum. You must be tired. Let's go to bed.'

'But I can see this is troubling you,' said Jennifer with a weary smile. Perhaps Lucy was embarra.s.sed to ask for help. 'We can have this sorted out in no time.'

Lucy's face reddened. 'No really. It's okay. I got you a present.' She got up abruptly, the legs of the chair squeaking on the lino. 'I'll go and get it,' she added and dashed out of the room.

When Lucy came back into the room a few minutes later, she sheepishly handed Jennifer a small present and a card. 'Happy Birthday, Mum. I'm sorry it's a bit late.'

'Oh, that doesn't matter one little bit, Lucy,' smiled Jennifer. 'I'm just so pleased that you remembered. Thank you.'

Lucy went and stood by the cooker, gnawing on the nail of her right thumb. Jennifer set the present on her lap and tried not to let her disappointment show. It was sloppily wrapped in her own paper, a distinctive roll of metallic wrap with coloured b.u.t.terflies on it that she kept under her bed. And it had been hastily done perhaps just this very moment. For as she looked down at the parcel, a piece of sellotape came away and the end of the parcel popped open.

'It's not much,' said Lucy, hastily. 'Just a token really.'

Jennifer looked up. 'I don't expect you to buy me expensive things. What have I always told you? It's the thought that counts.'

Jennifer opened the card, an odd, humorous one that she didn't at first understand. When she got the joke, at last, she smiled and said, 'That's nice,' and set the card on the table. Then she ripped the paper off the present to reveal a small box of budget dark chocolates. The sort of thing Jennifer might put into a raffle at the senior citizens club her father attended. She set them on the table and scrunched the paper into a tight ball in her fist. 'Thank you,' she said, hoping to G.o.d that Lucy couldn't read what she was really thinking.

Lucy smiled back weakly and cleared her throat. 'I know it's not much, Mum. But as I said, I haven't got a lot of spare cash at the moment.'

'That's okay, darling. You're a student, for heaven's sake,' said Jennifer in a cheerful voice, blinking. 'The real treat for me is spending time with you. I'm looking forward to our shopping trip on Sunday.'

'I guess Matt's in the same boat,' said Lucy. 'I mean he hasn't got a lot of money either.'

'No, you're right. He hasn't,' said Jennifer, grasping at the opportunity to move the conversation on from this hurtful, thoughtless gift. It was a standing joke within the family that Jennifer hated dark chocolate with a pa.s.sion. How could Lucy have forgotten?

'Matt didn't buy me anything. Not even a card,' she laughed, trying to sound light-hearted. 'He made one.' She got up and threw the ball of paper in the bin, lifted Matt's card off the top of the microwave and handed it to Lucy. It was made from a sheet of stiff white card folded in half with a funny caricature of her in black ink on the front. He'd drawn her at her office, in boots and one of the wrap dresses she sometimes wore for work, surrounded by rolls of wallpaper and carpet samples. Matt was a good cartoonist. Inside it read, 'To the best Mum in the world. Love from Matt.'

'Isn't it fabulous?' said Jennifer, pressing home the fact that a gift could cost nothing and yet mean the world to the recipient.

When Lucy had examined the card, Jennifer placed it carefully on the shelf again and said, 'Well, it's time I went to bed.'

'Mum?' said Lucy in a small voice. 'What about the hundred pounds, then?'

Jennifer's heart sank and she looked away. Didn't Lucy listen to a word she'd said? Did she have to make this any harder than it already was?

She felt the emotion well up in her chest and her throat narrowed. And her voice, when she spoke, came out hard and uncompromising and not conflicted like the way she felt inside. 'No, Lucy. I bailed you out all summer, even when you had a job at the Day Centre. You never saved a penny. I just don't understand what you do with your money. I don't think you know how to do without. When I was at '

'Yes, yes, I know all about when you were at university,' interrupted Lucy, rage bubbling up in the face of her mother's intransigence. 'You cleaned toilets in a pub and walked there in the rain with plastic bags wrapped round your legs because you didn't have a proper coat. And your student house had no heating.'

'Well, it's true! You wouldn't put up with the deprivations I did. Your generation doesn't know how to do without.' Jennifer ran a hand down the side of her face and sighed. 'You have to learn how to budget and budgeting requires self-discipline, forward planning, and sometimes a bit of discomfort and self-denial. How are you ever going to manage in a home of your own without those skills? And me giving you constant handouts isn't going to teach you them.'

Lucy scowled. 'Is that the lecture over then?'

'Oh, Lucy,' cried Jennifer in exasperation. 'I'm not trying to lecture you, I'm trying to help you.'

'If you want to help me, give me a hundred pounds.'

Jennifer looked her daughter straight in the eye, her heart pounding. 'I'm sorry, Lucy. I simply can't do that.'

'You can but you won't. There's a difference, Mum,' said Lucy coldly. 'I can't believe you're so heartless.' And then she let out a little sob and ran out of the room, leaving Jennifer feeling like the worst mother in the world.

Lucy was still in bed when Jennifer left the house the next morning for the supermarket and, when she came home, she found David sitting on the chocolate brown leather sofa in her small lounge with his long, athletic legs crossed. He wore dark blue jeans and a casual, ocean blue s.h.i.+rt under a tailored jacket and looked quite at home drinking a cup of coffee. She remembered that he'd come to drive Lucy over to his house for lunch with her two step-sisters Rachel, six, and four-year-old Imogen and Maggie, his wife of eight years.

Jennifer had been friends with Maggie for fifteen years. They'd met at an evening pottery cla.s.s in the community centre, when Jennifer was trying to find an outlet for her creativity and keep her marriage together. Their friends.h.i.+p had blossomed through shared interests Maggie was a talented amateur jewellery designer. Jennifer had been surprised when David and Maggie quietly started dating nearly two years after the divorce she could not reproach her old friend on that score but the marriage had effectively meant the end of a beautiful friends.h.i.+p. Jennifer wished her old friend well, but she couldn't help but be a tiny little bit envious of David. He'd gone on to start a new life and a new family and she was exactly where she'd started twelve years ago.

He set the cup on the coffee table, uncrossed his legs and said, a little embarra.s.sed, 'I hope you don't mind me helping myself.'

'Not at all,' she said graciously, wondering how he would feel if she came into his home uninvited and made free and easy with the facilities. But she pushed this rather mean thought away. She did not want them to be enemies.

'Lucy wasn't ready when I arrived,' he explained, his pale limpid blue eyes magnified by the stylish, silver-rimmed gla.s.ses he now wore constantly. 'She said she'd slept in.'

Jennifer raised her eyes guiltily to the ceiling. She'd hardly slept herself last night, torn between the desire to give in to Lucy on the one hand, and withstand her demands on the other. But she'd woken in the morning with a new resolve.

Upstairs someone walked across the room and then the shower came on. Jennifer dropped her bag on the floor and, without bothering to take off her suede jacket, sat down on the other leather sofa.

'Matt told me all about the new job,' said David.

'It's wonderful news, isn't it?'

'I think it might be,' he said, expressing his reserved approval. David was economical with his emotions, measured, thoughtful. Qualities she had once admired and now found incredibly boring.

There was a silence as David looked around the room. She'd recently introduced a neutral colour scheme whilst retaining the costly furniture; replaced the dated curtains with plantation shutters; and hung a keenly-priced, oversized mirror from Laura Ashley over the fireplace. Proof that you didn't have to spend a fortune to make a room stylish. 'You've made some changes in here. It looks good.'

'Look, David,' she said quickly, with a glance at the ceiling, 'there's something you and I need to talk about. It concerns Lucy. She asked me for another hundred quid, last night.'

'So?' he said and gave her one of his smug, ironic half-smiles she knew so well. David was supremely self-a.s.sured, a quality that irritated her now, yet it had been one of the things that attracted her to him in the first place. Theirs had never been an equal partners.h.i.+p. He always knew best. And she didn't realise how much he undermined her. It was only after the divorce that she'd had the confidence to start the business.

'I didn't give it to her,' she said firmly. 'It's time she took responsibility for her own finances. She can't seem to live within her monthly allowance. Not the odd time, but consistently week after week, month after month. What did she do with all that money she earned over the summer? I never took any off her for bed and board.'

There was a considered pause before David said, slowly, 'Do you expect her to live like a nun? All students overspend.'

It was exactly what she expected him to say. Not just because he disagreed with her in principle but also, she suspected, because money wasn't an issue for him. He owned the only, very successful, vet practice in Ballyfergus. And when it came to his children, he was too indulgent.

Thankfully m.u.f.fin padded into the room just then, breaking the tension.

'Hey, boy,' said David, reaching out his hand to the collie.

The dog licked it, flopped down at his feet, silvery trails of saliva dripping onto David's scuffed desert boots. David ruffled the rangy fur between his ears. 'That's a good boy,' he said softly, reminding Jennifer how his kindness to animals had won her heart. m.u.f.fin put his head on his paws and sighed contentedly. David ran his long fingers down the animal's back, gently probing.

'He's a bit thin,' he observed. 'How's his appet.i.te?'

'Much the same as always. He doesn't want to go out much though.'

'Mmm.' He rested his hands on his thighs and, staring at the animal, nodded slowly to himself. 'Well, let me know as soon as you think he's in any discomfort.'

Jennifer swallowed the lump in her throat. 'Of course,' she said, understanding perfectly his meaning. He would be the one to put m.u.f.fin down when the time came.

'I'll make sure he doesn't know a thing.'

David looked at his watch and Jennifer, who could not let the matter of Lucy and money go unresolved said, 'She'll ask you for money, David. Promise me you won't give it to her.' And then she remembered that David never liked being told what to do.

He arranged a pained, affronted expression on his face. 'Are you telling me that I can't give my own daughter money?'

'Of course not,' said Jennifer, retracting hastily. She rubbed suddenly sweaty palms on the thighs of her blue jeans. 'All I'm asking,' she said carefully, 'is to please consider whether it's in Lucy's best interests to do so.'

He stood up, his well-built frame towering over her. m.u.f.fin never stirred. 'I think I'm capable of making that judgement call.'

Jennifer tilted her chin up and met his eye, refusing to be intimidated by his height and the size eleven feet planted firmly on her carpet. 'She's not going to learn anything about money management if we keep bailing her out every time she gets into trouble.'

He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and looked down at her scathingly. 'Would you really see her short, Jennifer? Leave her without money for food and bus fares?'

'Of course I don't want to see that,' said Jennifer, choking up with emotion. 'But I also know that if we don't stop these handouts she's never going to learn to stand on her own two feet.'

David, who never listened to criticism of his children, said, 'Well, I for one am not going to send my daughter back to uni without a penny in her pocket. And I have to say, I'm quite astounded by your att.i.tude, Jennifer. How can you be so mean to your own daughter?'

'I'm not being mean,' she responded robustly. 'I'm trying to be a responsible parent. And you're doing what you always do, David. Spoiling her.'

He reacted angrily. 'That is not true,' he said loudly. 'My children aren't spoiled. They appreciate the value of things, they don't take what they have for granted and they know what's right and wrong.'

Jennifer considered this, recalling Lucy's somewhat dubious moral code. Only last week she'd been undercharged in Boots but instead of pointing it out to the a.s.sistant at the time, she'd come home crowing about it. 'I'm not so sure about Lucy. And she's thoughtless. She gave me dark chocolates for my birthday.'

'Well, give them to someone else if you don't like them.'

A deathly silence followed during which they glared at each other. And then m.u.f.fin, sensing the charged, negative atmosphere in the room, hauled himself to his feet and padded towards the door. Jennifer turned to watch him go and let out a little gasp.

Lucy stood in the doorway dressed for outside, wet hair plastering her head and a huge bag slung over her shoulder. Her eyes glinted with angry tears, as yet unshed, and the expression on her long, thin face was furious.

'Lucy, I ... I didn't see you there,' said Jennifer feebly, desperately trying to recall exactly what, in her rage, she had said. How much had Lucy heard?

'I'm ready to go,' said Lucy coolly, ignoring Jennifer.

David gave Jennifer a sort of triumphant look, pulled his car keys out of his front pocket and said cheerfully, 'Me too, pet.'

'Do you mind if I stay the night?' said Lucy, addressing her father. 'I don't want to stay here.'

'Sure.'

So Lucy was up to her old tricks again playing one parent off against the other, acting like a petulant teenager. Mind you, her tactics only worked because David played right into her hands.

Jennifer felt that she ought to try to resolve things between them. And so she said, damp patches of perspiration forming under her arms, 'Lucy, please. Don't be like this. I thought we could go out for something to eat tonight. And go shopping tomorrow.'

Lucy furrowed her brow and feigned confusion. 'Why would you want to go out with a, what was it, Dad? A "spoilt brat"? And I can't go shopping. I don't have any money. You know that.'