sighed as I walked back to my desk. Posh! was now so insidery it was going to print pictures of the aristocracy’s wombs.
My Tuesday evenings were traditionally spent having supper with my mum in her Battersea flat and tonight, as a birthday treat, I was doing exactly the same thing.
It was a chaotic and mummified flat. Mum had lived there for nearly twenty years, ever since Dad died and we’d moved to London from Surrey. She worked in a curtain shop nearby because her boss allowed her to bring her 9-year-old Jack Russell to the shop so long as he stayed behind the counter and didn’t wee on any of the damask that lay around the place in giant rolls. Bertie largely obliged, only cocking his leg discreetly on the very darkest rolls he could find if Mum got distracted by talking to a customer for too long.
It was the curtain shop that had landed me a job at Posh!. Peregrine’s second wife – the Venezuelan one – had come in to discuss pelmets for their new house in Chelsea while I was in there talking to Mum one Saturday. And even though Alejandra had all the charm and warmth of a South American despot, I plucked up the courage to mention that I wanted to be a journalist. So, because I was desperate and Peregrine was miserly, he offered me the job as his assistant a few months later. I started by replying to his party invitations and buying his coffees, but after a year or so I’d started writing small pieces for the magazine. Nothing serious. Short articles I mostly made up about the latest trend in fancy dress or the most fashionable canapé to serve at a drinks party. But I worked my way up from there until Peregrine let me write a few longer pieces and interviews with various mad members of the British aristocracy. It wasn’t the dream role. I was hardly Kate Adie reporting from the Gaza Strip in a flak jacket. But it was a writing job, and, even though back when I started I didn’t know anything about the upper classes (I thought a viscount was a type of biscuit), it seemed a good start.
‘Happy birthday, darling, kick my boots out of the way,’ Mum shouted from upstairs when I pushed her front door open that night to the sound of Bertie barking. There was a pile of brown envelopes on the radiator grille in the hall, two marked ‘Urgent’.
‘Mums, do you ever open your post?’ I asked, walking upstairs and into the sitting room.
‘Oh yes, yes, yes, don’t fuss,’ she said, taking the envelopes and putting them down on her desk, where magazines and old papers covered every spare chink of surface. ‘I’ve made a cake for pudding,’ she went on, ‘but I’ve got some prawns in the fridge that need eating, so we’re having them first. I thought I might make a risotto?’
‘Mmm, lovely, thank you,’ I replied, wondering whether Peregrine would believe me if I called in sick because my mother had poisoned me with prawns so old they had tap-danced their way into the risotto.
‘Have you had a nice birthday?’ Mum asked. ‘How was work?’
‘Oh, you know, Peregrine’s Napoleonic tendencies are as rampant as ever. I’ve got to write a piece on Royal babies and their playmates.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mum vaguely, as she walked towards the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. In the four years I’d worked at Posh!, I’d learned more about the upper classes than I’d ever expected to. A duke was higher than an earl in the pecking order and they were all obsessed with their Labradors. But Mum, a librarian’s daughter from Surrey, while supportive of my job, wasn’t much interested in the details.
She poured two glasses of white wine and handed me one. ‘Now, let’s sit down and then I can give you your present.’
I collapsed on the sofa whereupon Bertie instantly jumped on my lap and white wine sloshed over the rim of my glass and into my crotch.
‘Bertie, get down,’ said Mum, handing me a small jewellery box and sitting down beside me. She stared at Bertie and pointed at the floor, as he slowly and reluctantly climbed off the sofa. I opened the box. It was a ring. A thin, delicate gold band with a knot twisted into the metal.
‘Your dad gave it to me when you were born. So, I thought, to mark a big birthday, you should have it.’
‘Oh, Mum…’ I felt choked. She hardly ever mentioned Dad. He’d had a heart attack and died at forty-five when I was just ten years old. Our lives changed forever in that moment. We had to sell our pretty, Victorian house in Surrey and Mum and I moved to this flat in Battersea. We were both in shock. But we got on with our new life in London because there was no alternative. And we’d been a small, but intensely close, unit ever since. Just us two. And then Bertie, when I left for university and Mum decided she needed a small, hairy substitute child.
I slipped the ring on my finger. It was a bit tight over the knuckle, but it went on easily enough. ‘I love it,’ I said, looking at my hand, then looking up at Mum. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good, I’m glad it fits. And now, listen, I have something I need to chat to you about.’
‘Hmmm?’ I was trying to turn the ring on my finger. A bout of dysentery from prawn-related food poisoning might not be the worst thing, actually. I could probably lose half a stone.
‘Polly?’
‘Yes, yes, sorry, am listening.’ I stopped fiddling with the ring and sat back against the sofa.
‘So,’ started Mum. ‘I went to see Dr Young last week. You know this chest pain that’s been worrying me? Well, I’ve been taking my blood pressure pills but they haven’t been doing any good so I went back on Thursday. Terrible this week because the place was full of people sneezing everywhere. But I went back and, well, he wants me to have a scan.’
‘A scan?’ I frowned at her.
‘Yes. And he says it may be nothing but it’s just to be sure that it is nothing.’
‘OK… But what would it be if it wasn’t nothing?’
‘Well, you know, it could be a little something,’ said Mum, breezily. ‘But he wants me to have a scan to check.’
‘When is it?’ I felt sick. Panicky. Only two minutes ago I’d been worrying about the sell-by date on a packet of prawns. It suddenly seemed very silly.
‘I’m waiting for the letter to confirm the date. Dr Young said I’ll hear in the next couple of weeks but the post is so slow these days, so we’ll see.’
‘It might help if you looked at the pile of post downstairs every now and then, Mum,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘You don’t want to miss it.’
‘No. No, I know.’
I’d always told myself that Mum and I had done all right on our own over the years. Better, even, than all right. We were way closer than some of my friends were with their parents. But every now and then I wished Mum had a husband to look after her. This was one of those moments. For support. For help. For another person to talk to. She could hardly discuss the appointment with Bertie.
‘Well, will you let me know when you get the letter and I’ll come with you? Where will it be?’ I asked.
‘Oh there’s no need, darling. You’ve got work. Don’t fuss.’
‘Don’t be silly, obviously I’m coming. I work for a magazine, not MI6. No one will mind
