would come down to the Fethering area and take his mother out for lunch. The meals were eaten in anonymous seaside restaurants or pubs, and passed off amiably enough.
On these occasions Carole would say the minimum about her local doings, but Stephen seemed quite happy to monopolize the conversation. He talked almost exclusively about his work, which involved computers and money in a combination his mother never quite managed to grasp. She should have taken more interest when he first started his economics course at Nottingham University; then maybe she would have been able to follow the subsequent progress of his career. As it was, when they met she felt increasingly like someone at a party who hadn’t caught the name of the person to whom they were talking initially, and had left it too late to ask.
So, if a question about their relationship had been put to them, both Carole and Stephen would have said they ‘got on’. In spite of the divorce, theirs could by no means be classified as a ‘dysfunctional’ family; it was just one that lacked spontaneous affection.
Inside Carole grew the suspicion, which she was unable to voice – even to herself – that the entire contents of her son’s gene-pool derived from his father, and that Stephen Seddon was, in fact, a deeply boring man.
But exciting things happen even to boring men, and that evening Carole’s son had had exciting news to impart.
‘Mother . . .’ he’d said. As a child, he’d always called her ‘Mummy’. When he left for university, the word seemed to embarrass him. ‘Mother’ was safer, less intimate. He’d stuck with it.
‘Mother, I’m engaged to be married.’ The wording, too, seemed formal, distancing.
It was the last thing Carole had been expecting. For Stephen to ring was unusual enough; for him to ring with anything to say beyond vague pleasantries was unheard of. ‘Ah,’ she had responded, caught on the hop. ‘Wonderful.’
Funny, she’d never really thought of her son as having a sexual identity. He’d certainly never brought any girls home. Though maybe, given the state of his parents’ marriage, he might have considered that an unnecessarily risky procedure.
‘Her name’s Gaby. I met her through work.’
‘And what work is that? Remind me again.’ Of course she didn’t say the words, but Carole was surprised how readily they came into her mind. The unspoken response struck her as funny, and she knew it would have struck Jude as funny too.
She managed to come up with a more socially acceptable, ‘So how long have you known each other?’
‘Three years. But we’ve only been going out together for the last seven months.’ Stephen spoke of his fiancée with exactly the same seriousness as he did about the work that Carole didn’t understand.
‘Does she do the same sort of thing as you do? Is she in the same company?’ Whatever that’s called.
‘Oh no, no, she was a client. We set up a financing package for the agency she works for,’ he continued, confusing his mother even more. She understood the individual words; they just didn’t seem to link together into anything that made sense.
‘Ah.’ Carole tried desperately to think what potential mothers-in-law were supposed to say in these circumstances. ‘So have you thought yet about when you’re going to get married?’
‘September the fourteenth,’ her son replied, surprisingly specific.
‘Well, that sounds fine.’
‘It fits in with Gaby’s parents. They always spend August in the South of France.’
Oh yes, of course. The fiancée would have parents. Presumably at some point Carole would have to meet them. She shrank instinctively from the thought of contact with these unknown people. If their daughter was called Gaby, and they spent their summers in the South of France, then perhaps they weren’t even British?
‘Also,’ Stephen went on, ‘that date suits Dad fine.’
Carole was shocked by how much that hurt. Not just Stephen continuing to call David ‘Dad’ while she had been relegated to ‘Mother’, but the implication of her ex-husband’s complicity in her son’s life. David had been told about the wedding before she had. He’d probably met Gaby. They all lived in London, after all. (At least, presumably Gaby lived in London.) Perhaps David was regularly included in social excursions with the young couple.
Her marriage, the event Carole thought she had locked away for ever, was evidently still capable of breaking out and reviving her pain.
‘I’d like you to meet Gaby,’ Stephen pressed on doggedly.
Carole felt new guilt. She should have said that before he did. ‘I’d love to meet Gaby soon’ – that’s what she should have said. And yet, in the shock and smarting from the hurt, she was forgetting even her most basic good manners.
‘Oh yes, I’d love that!’ Trying to make up the lost ground, she only managed to sound over-effusive.
‘We want to come down the weekend after next.’ As her son spoke, Carole realized he was following an agenda. His and Gaby’s lives between now and the wedding were rigorously planned. Telling his mother the news and introducing her to his bride-to-be were duties that had to be performed and fitted into their schedule. ‘We’ve got to be in the area.’
‘Oh, why?’
No answer could have surprised her more than the one Stephen came up with. ‘We’re looking at some houses down your way.’
‘Really?’
‘Gaby’s very keen to get out of London. We’re looking for a big family house in the country for the next stage of our lives.’
So formally did her son speak these words that Carole knew, had Jude been there to hear them, they would both have giggled. But, on her own, Carole was too winded by the implication of Stephen’s words to offer any response.
‘So I was wondering, Mother, whether you’d be free for Sunday lunch that weekend.’
‘Lunch? Sunday week. Yes, that sounds fine.’ Uncharacteristically gushing, she added, ‘I’m simply thrilled at the idea of meeting Gaby!’
‘She’s longing to meet you,’ Stephen asserted, with all the enthusiasm of a weatherman announcing a cold snap. But he hadn’t finished. ‘There is one thing, Mother.’
‘Yes?’
‘I am very keen that you and Dad should both be at the wedding. Will that be all right?’
‘Yes,’ said Carole Seddon. ‘Yes, of course it will be.’
That was only one of her worries after she had put the phone down. A lot of moribund emotions had been stirred up, reminding her they were still far from dead. And she knew they wouldn’t go away. September the fourteenth would be a climax, a day of maximum stress, but that would not end the process. She was reliving the myth of Pandora’s box. Now it had been opened, Carole was made aware of its fragility, and felt foolish for the misguided reliance she had placed on its security.
Another troubling thought occurred
