19
It couldn’t possibly be Jacqueline Barraclough’s ‘little town runaround’ sports car that was backing into the drive early that evening, boxing Harriet’s Golf in, could it? Why would she be here? How could she be here?
Harriet’s stomach went on spin as a familiar silver-blonde head emerged from the driver’s side. Harriet had no time to escape: she was visible through the front room’s bay window.
The doorbell bing-bonged and a gut-churned Harriet opened the door to Jacqueline, wearing an imperious expression. Sunglasses with rhinestone-encrusted arms were pushed up into her hair and she was clad in a seashell-pink silk jersey sweater, thrown over a starched white shirt with turned-up collar. She was wearing a rose-gold locket which she’d once shown Harriet contained infant photos of Jon and Martin Junior: ‘my babies, always near my heart’.
Harriet sensed she was not about to be asked how she was settling in.
‘Hello, Harriet.’
‘Hi.’
‘Aren’t you going to ask me inside?’ Jacqueline said, in a combative tone, that suggested the imminent rinsing might be better behind closed doors. Harriet led Jacqueline through to the front room, wondering if she’d just stupidly invited the vampire across the threshold when she could’ve simply shut the door on her. Why didn’t being wholly innocent feel more powerful? It was an ambush and Harriet was unprepared.
Jacqueline glanced around at the furnishings, to make it clear that Harriet was being judged. ‘Jon says you’re renting a room that you found online.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Harriet said.
Jacqueline looked back at her with a triumphal pony-shake of her head, as if the fittings proved a point. ‘You’ve walked out on Jon to doss in a stranger’s spare room. I hope she likes having you here.’
Harriet briefly wondered why Jon hadn’t added ‘and she is dwelling with a MAN’ to the list of charges, then thought, ah, it was because it’d lead to confessing to lamping him.
‘How did you get my address?’ Harriet said, as if she didn’t already know the answer.
‘Jon gave it to me. Lest you attack him for that, he’s still so protective he’d not have handed it over had I told him the truth. He thinks I’m here to see if I could talk you round, persuade you to give him another chance. I think we both know that’s not going to happen. This is more some woman-to-woman honesty.’
Oh, what a fucking HERO. He’d immediately unleashed his mum on Harriet, on the outside chance it might get him what he wanted. And Jacqueline genuinely thought that gave him nobility?!
Jon didn’t overlook his familial vices, Harriet had been woefully naïve on that score. He gave them a pass in the certainty they’d do the same for him – all in it together, co-enablers. Somewhere there was a Barraclough family crest with a Latin motto that translated as Eat Shit Losers. He knew perfectly well his mother was a nuclear warhead in Hobbs occasionwear, but she was never going to raze his village.
Harriet finally accepted the truth of everything Lorna had said that night when she’d told her about his proposal. It was ruthlessness. Ruthlessness using a telephone voice, in chinos.
He gave himself a psychological comfort zone of wilful ignorance. When you confronted him, tried to make him take responsibility for the consequences, he slithered through your hand like a bar of soap. He meant no harm! He’d simply not spent a second considering or caring if he would do harm, which actually was the same thing.
Offstage, Harriet heard the front door open and close and wished, fervently, that Cal Clarke hadn’t got home from the Yorkshire Post this very second. He’d now hear all of this. Jacqueline had the sort of voice that cut through.
‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ Jacqueline said. ‘I wasn’t going to bother with you, but then I thought, no – someone needs to force you to look at what you’ve done. And it sure as hell won’t be your victim: my distraught, loyal son.’
He was loyal alright, loyal to his own interests.
‘You are not a mother, Harriet. If you were, you might have some idea how it felt to see my youngest son, broken, sobbing, asking why doesn’t she love me, Mum? What did I do wrong, Mum? The shame he felt in confessing to YOUR behaviour was devastating. You have humiliated and shattered him.’
‘I’m sorry if Jon is hurt, but—’
‘I will finish, thank you!’ Jacqueline barked, with a vehemence that startled Harriet into silence.
‘I never thought you appreciated him, and it was agonising to watch. I could see him striving, so hard, for you to love him the way he loved you. I could see the effort he made that you didn’t reciprocate. You made him feel like he wasn’t worthy of you, like he wasn’t enough for you. In fact it was quite the opposite way round, but of course, a besotted man cannot see this. But even I could never have anticipated the sheer viciousness required to throw that ring back in his face, on the same night you accepted his proposal in front of his entire family.’
Harriet wished she hadn’t blushed a shade of nectarine. ‘That situation was chosen by Jon. Would it have been better if I’d said no on the spot, and let him down with you all as an audience?’
‘I think anything is better than telling a man you will marry him, and then withdrawing that an hour and a half later, Harriet, yes. Falsely accepting a proposal is plain hideous.’
Harriet could see how this version would effortlessly make her the gaudy whore of Ilkley boomers’ wine clubs and book groups. It was one of those anecdotes where no one would spoil it by asking themselves precisely what Harriet had: what was the good girl’s option here? Marrying someone you didn’t want to, because it was ill-mannered otherwise?
‘Sorry, but that’s total rubbish,’ Harriet said, with a force she didn’t quite feel, and saw the sour satisfaction pass across Jacqueline’s face. She should remember the law of being goaded: you losing your temper was a victory for them. It was proof of who you really were. ‘My crime is breaking up with Jon, the end. You’d hate me however it happened.’
Harriet feared she’d not heard Cal go upstairs. Please God, don’t be listening. She couldn’t reasonably object, if he was – Jon had provided Cal with a legitimate interest in the Barraclough family, and after all, this was his house.
Considering that she’d moved in with a man with a scandalous love life, so far, Harriet hadn’t exactly pulled off ‘low-key’ in this department either.
‘Irrespective of the precise degree of brutality with which you’ve treated Jon, you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life, I’m afraid. You peaked with my son,’ Jacqueline said. ‘Women will be queuing round the block to date JJ.’
Ewww. Bragging about your single son’s sexual prospects? Harriet hoped if she was ever a mother, she didn’t tell herself this sort of thing was ‘lioness with her cubs’ behaviour. Seemed a very gendered sort of brag, too. Harriet couldn’t imagine a father saying of his dumped daughter, ‘she’ll be alright as she’ll get mad amounts of dick’.
‘He’s handsome, he’s successful, and you could not ask for a kinder, more devoted man. He can’t see it yet, but he who laughs last, laughs the longest. And he will be laughing long, long, after you’ve stopped, my girl.’
Jacqueline cast another appraising look at their surroundings. Given the house was nice, Harriet took the implication to be: meh, none of this is yours.
‘I haven’t split up with Jon to look for an upgrade. I’m not replacing an iPhone. Relationships are about being right for each other, being happy.’
Jacqueline snorted. ‘And he couldn’t make you happy, could he? No matter how much money and attention he lavished on you, or how much praise he gave you … No. Not enough.’
She simper-poison smiled like she had a coat made of Dalmatians and Harriet decided that in fact, enough was enough. What had Cal said? Asserting yourself doesn’t make you cruel, and by that same measure, setting a boundary didn’t make you rude. Jon’s mother, however, was very rude.
‘Jacqueline, you’ve obviously created a mythical hate figure in my memory, a conceited gold digger who set out to hurt your son. She’s not real or anything to do with me, but feel free to hate her, she sounds awful. In reality, Jon and I are two people who had a relationship that ran its course. You being gratuitously nasty to me after the fact is completely unnecessary.’
Harriet was quite pleased at that succinct summary, given her animal terror at facing off with a woman twice her age who all her social conditioning had told her to try desperately to please.
‘It didn’t “run its course”’ – Jacqueline did air quote marks – ‘you were happy enough bumping along with the fancy holidays right until he wanted serious commitment. At that point you had to come clean that you always thought you could do better than him.’
Harriet twinged. She had strung Jon along, to some extent. These European minibreaks, where Jon wouldn’t let her pay for so much as an apricot Danish at the airport Pret, were not her finest hours.
No point now in saying Jon had insisted, acting as if her financial contribution was some sort of emasculation. Another vindication for Lorna’s take – those indulgences, as Jacqueline now made clear, were down payments on a future together. Harriet had defaulted on her debt; she was in the dock. She had gained pecuniary advantage by deception.
Meanwhile, Jacqueline’s indignance was reaching a crescendo.
‘I hope you enjoyed Antigua and the Cotswolds, Miss Hatley, because there’s not going to be a lot of that, in your future.’
‘Isn’t there?’ Was Jon keeper of her passport and the RAC road map?
‘Who do you think will be rushing to commit to a woman on the wrong side of thirty, who won’t run a comb through her hair and dresses like a surly teenager? Do you imagine you’re a femme fatale? You should SEE the young lady who Jon took to prom.’
Harriet mentally filed the last line to quote to Lorna and Roxy, to send them into paroxysms.
‘If we’ve reached the personal insults stage, I think you need to go,’ Harriet said, satisfied to hear no wobble in her voice. ‘I don’t give a rat’s arse what you think about my appearance.’
She could hear how flatly Yorkshire-accented she sounded, in ire, and Jacqueline would no doubt revel in this too.
Jacqueline bristled. ‘One final point. You need to return the jewellery that Jon gave you, while you were together.’
‘What?’
Jon had a habit of buying Harriet sparkly trinkets from Berry’s, which weren’t her taste and for which she thanked him profusely. She kept them neatly stacked, resting on their little silk beds in boxes, and rarely wore them. She’d never investigated their worth, as she guessed it’d give her vertigo.
A polite knock at the living room door sounded while she was still boggling at this.
‘Excuse me, I’m ever so sorry for interrupting,’ Cal ducked into the room. He was wearing a smart Oxford blue work shirt, rolling up the sleeves as if he’d been summoned to give a presentation in a meeting. ‘I want to help, here. Think of me as a mediator.’
They both looked at him in confusion.
‘Who are you?’ Jacqueline said.
‘Cal. I own this house. Carry on,’ he said, making a gesture towards Harriet. ‘She should return the jewellery …?’ He waved his hand.
Jacqueline jutted her chin. ‘Yes, she should.’
‘They were gifts,’ Harriet said.
‘Accepted under false pretences.’
‘What false pretence?’
‘That you weren’t going to treat him like ignominious dirt.’
Cal turned to Harriet, who was shaking her head, and on the verge of laughter.
‘Harriet, what are your feelings on being told you should give your personal property away, based on etiquette guidelines that sound like something from the eighteen-hundreds?’
‘I think she’s taking the bare piss,’ Harriet said, flatly.
‘You’re taking the bare piss, Jacqueline,’ Cal said.
‘You’ve got nothing to do with this!’ Jacqueline said to him. ‘You have no idea what went on between these two. Stay out of it.’
‘Sounds like a perfect description of your own situation,’ Cal said.
‘I know plenty, thank you,’ Jacqueline said, returning her basilisk stare to Harriet.
‘Do you know your son committed common assault on me the other day?’ Cal said.
Jacqueline’s face dropped. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Point made, I think. Harriet, you’ve told Jacqueline you have no interest in her opinions or willingness to do what she says. Do you want her in your house?’
Harriet steeled herself to look Jacqueline in the eye. She was an arachnophobe being forced to fondle a tarantula.
‘Nope.’
‘Right. Jacqueline. You heard her. Go, please.’
Cal gestured to the doorway and Jacqueline huffed through it.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she spat at Harriet, as a parting shot. Perhaps Harriet should, in some ways, but Jacqueline was never going to be the one to tell her how.
Cal closed the front door firmly behind her and returned to Harriet’s side as they watched Jacqueline back out of the driveway, glowering, with one hand over the adjoining head rest as she reversed.
‘Thanks for that, Cal.’ Oof. Yet more humiliating spectacles. This man would surely be throwing a celebratory ceilidh once she was out of his property.
‘Sorry to have barged in: you were holding your own but she was being so disrespectful to you that I snapped. Did Jon let her talk to you like that?’
Her throat thickened. ‘She wasn’t usually as blatant, but more or less.’
‘Wow.’
Harriet got a little ache as she thought: so, this is what it feels like when someone’s on your side. She watched his face closely, expecting to see that confused pity again. Instead, he looked … amused?
‘What on earth, though?’ Cal laughed, the release of endorphins following the face-off. ‘What century is she in? She sounded like one of those costume dramas. Now you have slighted my son you will never make an advantageous match! She knows this is suburban Leeds and not Bridgerton, right?’
‘Maybe it’s a very-well-off person thing. It antiquates you. Jacqueline has always been a lot but even I am blown away by that tirade.’
‘I genuinely thought you handled her with aplomb,’ Cal said. ‘Total harridan.’
‘Oh. Well. Thank you.’
A beat where, apparently, neither of them knew what to say.
‘Look, I’m off to meet Sam at Zucco in a minute. Want to join us? If anyone ever needed an Aperol Spritz the size of a baby’s head, it’s you.’
‘Oh …’ She felt wrong-footed again. ‘Won’t I get in the way of you-and-Sam time?’
‘Sam and I have known each other since junior school. We couldn’t be more pleased at someone getting in the way of our time.’
As they walked to the restaurant, Harriet considered that an unintended side effect of Cal’s involvement would be to bolster Jon’s suspicions. At hearing Cal had white-knighted her, he’d go up like Jeff Bezos’s cock rocket, surely.
This time, she really, definitely, didn’t care. Setting his rabid mother loose on her was evidence of real malice, and it had finally snapped Harriet’s patience, and expired her goodwill.
How perfect if it rebounded on Jon, not her.