The Family Way by Tony Parsons

Author:Tony Parsons [Tony Parsons ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007375462
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

They were celebrating.

At sixty-two, Jack Jewell had landed his first Hollywood role. At an age when his contemporaries were scrambling for bit parts as pub fodder in the soaps, Jack was looking forward to three weeks in LA, playing the father in a Vietnam War-era remake of Little Women.

‘The devoted dad of a difficult, demanding brood of daughters,’ he smiled.

‘That’s going to be a real stretch,’ Jessica said.

‘Talk about typecasting,’ Cat said.

They all laughed, but Megan wondered how close to life it would really be. As much as she loved him, she knew their father had always been quietly bewildered by what he called ‘girls’ stuff. As much as he loved them, Jack’s daughters had always been a mystery to him.

It had been Cat who had guided first Jessica and then Megan through their debut periods. She guessed that their father had no idea that Jessica had had an abortion at sixteen, or that Megan was on the pill when she reached the same age. Even now there was a look of quiet panic in his eyes when Jessica’s endometriosis or Megan’s pre-eclampsia came up. Megan had always felt sorry for their dad. A father couldn’t become a mother simply because the mother had done a runner.

‘Little Women,’ Jessica said, and they raised their champagne flutes, although Megan’s contained only peach juice. ‘It’s going to be good.’

‘It’s going to be great,’ Cat said.

‘Go get ‘em, Dad,’ Megan said.

It was just the four of them. No boyfriends, no husbands – which really just meant no Paulo, as Jessica was the only one of them with anything resembling a partner. But Paulo was happy to sit it out. When the sisters and their father got together, he always felt like he was gate-crashing some club where he wasn’t a member.

‘How’s the new place, Jessie?’ their father asked.

‘Five bathrooms,’ she said, and they all made impressed noises. It was always the absurd number of bathrooms that she felt compelled to draw attention to. ‘It’s just so good to get out of the city. It’s cleaner, greener, safer.’

‘And the people are friendlier, I bet,’ their father said. ‘More time for you.’

Jessica quickly agreed, even though it wasn’t true at all.

She had found that the suburbs were bursting at the seams with smug mums – all these women with Mrs degrees (Hons), fulfilled biological destinies, who saw the world in their little charges. The truth was that she missed her sisters, Naoko, Chloe and the city.

If you smiled at the children in the suburban parks and streets, the self-satisfied mums acted as though you were going to steal their child away. Jessica secretly wished that she had never left their old house, their old life, Naoko and little Chloe. Naoko understood that she would never do anything to hurt a child. Naoko knew she loved children. Naoko knew that she was only smiling.

‘I have to pee immediately,’ Megan said. ‘I mean – now.’

She eased herself out of her chair, and almost immediately heard the explosion of a bottle of champagne hitting the ground.

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