My Husband's Lies by Caroline England

Author:Caroline England
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780008215071
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Jen

Jen soon discovers putting on a smile is exhausting, though it probably isn’t the best description. It’s more a question of not looking worried. Smiling constantly would surely alert Ian and the girls to her anxiety about bloody everything. Will’s text and Holly’s blood tests, Ian’s frequent strange glances and frowns.

She and Holly went back to the doctor’s to see the blood nurse on Friday. In fairness she was lovely, though she never stopped talking. ‘Just be quiet for a moment!’ Jen wanted to yell. ‘Just for a moment while you insert that evil-looking hypodermic into my gorgeous girl’s arm.’

‘Do you pluck your own eyebrows?’ the blood nurse asked Holly when they sat down. ‘Of course you don’t,’ she continued before they could work out the question, let alone answer it. ‘You’re just lovely as you are. But your mum will understand.’ She looked at Jen and smiled. ‘It’ll be less painful than that.’

Holly looked away and flinched, but only a little.

What a brave girl, the blood nurse prattled as she filled several phials. She wasn’t very good at faces, but could remember every patient by their veins. She was called Gwendolyn, Gwen for short. Was Holly born at Christmas? Is that how she got her name? What did she want to do when she was older? She’d wanted to be a violinist but found her real vocation when she failed her exams, which shows you never can tell. And how was Mum coping? The children are brave, it’s the mums who’re the trouble.

Jen had wanted to ask what Gwen thought the tests would reveal, to glean something from the doctor’s notes, but there wasn’t a gap in her patter.

There’s more chatter now at the hairdressers, but Jen doesn’t mind as she stares blindly at her reflection. It’s therapeutic to listen to other people’s stories, often banal, but important to them. And it blocks out her own thoughts, if only briefly.

A lilac-haired lady is describing her day out with an over-sixties walking group and Jen drifts, wondering if her mum would be interested in joining. Nola likes to keep busy. She picks up litter in the local playground, spends time with the elderly at a nursing home, helps out in a charity shop. Always volunteering, never paid. At least not since Jen and her brothers were born. It’s what their dad wanted when they married; a wife who was entirely dependent on him. Their dad who uprooted Nola from her friends and family in Cork because he got work in Manchester; their dad who repaid Nola’s loyalty and sacrifice by fucking some other woman in Ireland.

The heat spreads in Jen’s chest. There he is again. Her bloody, bastard father. He still pays for Nola’s keep, as she puts it. She wonders if the two of them ever talk.

Lindsay appears in the mirror and speaks, bringing Jen back to her surroundings. Jen has travelled the five miles to this salon for a couple of years now, so no longer notices the zebra-patterned chairs, the leopard-print towels or the black-haired clones who wash her hair.

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