turned to Josh. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing!’
She looked at Polly, knowing her daughter would be only too happy to testify against him.
‘He keeps moving his leg over onto my bit of the seat, and I’m compressed enough as it is. I did warn him I’d make him move it if he did it again.’
Well, she couldn’t fault Polly’s logic, but she could hardly let her daughter police the rest of the family’s behaviour – they’d all be locked up and sentenced to torture within the week if that were the case. Even Juliet. ‘If the boys give you trouble, you’re supposed to come to me about it,’ she told Polly. ‘Understand?’
Polly rolled her eyes, but eventually gave her a reluctant nod.
When Juliet turned back round to face forwards again, she noticed the clock on the dashboard. It was already three forty. Where in the world was Violet? She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and sent another short and to-the-point text to her daughter, warning her that the taxi service was leaving in exactly three minutes, and that if she wasn’t here by then she’d have to get two buses home instead.
Just as she was turning the key in the ignition to start up the car, the door opened and Violet flopped into the passenger seat with a sigh. She was smiling, looking completely unconcerned that she’d kept the rest of them waiting.
She laughed, shaking her head. ‘You’ll never guess what Abby just said—’
Juliet turned the key and revved the car. ‘We’ve all been sitting here in the cold waiting for you, and you know the boys have swimming tonight!’
Violet’s warm, open expression closed down and she scowled back at her mother. ‘I’m not that late! God, Mum! And I was helping Kiera find her scarf, so it wasn’t my fault anyway.’
Juliet shook her head, clipped her belt back up and winced at the sound of crunching gears as she put her car into reverse.
Not my fault … Now where had she heard that before? Violet was turning into a mini version of Gemma.
As she drove she could see Violet out of the corner of her eye, hunched in the passenger seat, arms folded and scowling. The atmosphere wasn’t improved by the start of a squabble in the back seat, either, as Polly accused Josh of leaving his arm two millimetres further into her space than it should have been, and then Jake jumped in to defend his brother and deliberately drew Polly’s fire by invading her space from the other side.
‘Stop that!’ Juliet yelled. ‘Jake, you just kicked me in the back! Now, the three of you calm down and behave yourselves.’
And then she turned to her eldest daughter. They needed to have a little chat about her attitude, or else she’d turn out just like her aunt, causing mayhem for everyone else then refusing to take responsibility for it, but she realised she was now approaching a mini roundabout that always got clogged up at that time of day. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Vi,’ she said, glancing quickly in both directions. ‘But you’ve got to learn to express your opinions without being rude, because I won’t have you talking to me like—’
Unfortunately, the fight in the back seat erupted again at that moment and a deft kick in the back of her seat from Jake caused her to pitch forward. Her foot slipped off the clutch as she was crossing the roundabout and the car growled then stalled as it straddled the little white hump.
The car to her right slammed on its brakes and the driver leaned on his horn. Juliet’s heart pounded and her arms shook. The man was using his hands in the most creative of ways and she could lip-read enough of his tirade to know he thought she was a middle-class bitch who shouldn’t be allowed to operate a vehicle.
A stalled car in the middle of the junction meant that traffic backed up in all four directions. Horns blared. Drivers swore. All four of Juliet’s children started to scream and shout at each other, letting each other know, without holding back on the toilet-related insults, just whose fault it was.
Juliet found she couldn’t move. She was just frozen, fingers clenched around the steering wheel. She couldn’t even remember which pedal to press or what to do next to get the car started again. But the noise – the engines, the horns, the bickering children – was burrowing into her skull in a way she just couldn’t bear.
‘Will you just shut up!’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs, surprising herself with the volume, hearing the croak as her voice broke when she reached maximum decibels.
Outside the car the commotion continued, but inside everything went still and quiet. Violet, Polly, Josh and Jake stared at their mother open-mouthed.
She could feel the echo of her words pulsing around inside her head and it scared her slightly. She didn’t shout like that. Ever. And she certainly didn’t lose her temper with her children, not to this degree, anyway. Of course, she disciplined – she’d read countless books on how to do it properly – but she never just screamed at the kids. Right from when they were babies she’d always feared the kind of woman who did that was also the kind of woman who dragged toddlers down the street with their arms half out of their sockets or walloped them in the middle of supermarkets.
She’d had a feeling that things were a little off-kilter for weeks now, but she’d just put it down to the idea of Christmas looming ahead of her. As much as she loved the season, it would now be forever associated with the departure of the man she’d planned to spend her life with. If your husband choosing Boxing Day to announce your marriage was over didn’t leave a stain on a celebration, then she didn’t know what did.
Still, Juliet was good with stains, knew all the tricks and tips to get them to vanish. With the right amount of determination, you’d hardly ever know they’d been there once she’d finished with them. This one would be no different. She’d just have to try harder.
She became aware of quiet breathing beside her and in the back of the car. Silence verging on the miraculous. For the first time in years all four kids had shut up at the same time. She needed to reward them for that, didn’t she? Positive reinforcement.
‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, and if she’d been able to feel anything in the numbness of the after-shock of her outburst, she’d have been pleased at how calm and rational she sounded.
‘Mum …?’ a shaky voice said from beside her. ‘Are you okay?’
Juliet took some air in and held it. There was nothing left now. Not the dizzying frustration, not the clawing sense of racing towards a goal that got ever further away. Not even the fear that Violet would turn out to be exactly like Gemma and push her away for ever. Just nothing. It was wonderful.
‘Yes,’ she said, letting the breath out again. ‘Everything’s fine.’
The ability to not only think but also drive returned, so she started the engine, yanked the car into gear and without making eye contact with any of the drivers giving her withering looks she carried on her journey to the swimming pool.
The kids
