The House We Called Home: The magical, laugh out loud summer holiday read from the bestselling Jenny Oliver. Jenny Oliver
the Adamses for having a monstrous new extension that looked like an alien invasion to house a live-in nanny so they could work all hours – those little children needed to see their parents. She knew what Stella would say to that as well. Tell her that the parents had a right to be happy too. And Moira would have to bite her tongue to prevent herself from snapping back, ‘Did I? I gave up everything for your father and you kids.’
It was her new friend Mitch who had called her on it. Walking the dogs one day on the beach, he had told her she was jealous when she had been muttering about the cleaner.
Moira had felt herself bristle. ‘I’m not jealous.’
He’d laughed. Easy and carefree. Not looking her way. ‘Yes, you are. Bitching is jealousy. It always is.’
She’d gone to say something but hesitated. Feeling both astonishment and affront at being called on her behaviour. Graham never called her on anything, just nodded along at her stories.
‘It’s not bitching, it’s an opinion.’
‘It’s a judgement,’ Mitch had said, his smile irritating. His chin raised to enjoy the wind in their faces. ‘And not a very nice one. Why shouldn’t she have a cleaner? She’s busy. She has other focuses for her time.’
‘It doesn’t take very long to run a Hoover about the house.’
‘Moira.’ Mitch had stopped, his bare feet in the sand, his mutt that was humbly just called Dog on a long piece of faded orange rope, yapping at the surf. ‘If you could go back in time and have a cleaner and a live-in nanny, keep your job, and go for a drink on a Friday night guilt-free, would you? Do you think the kids would have turned out any different?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ Moira felt herself getting defensive. ‘Yes, I think they probably would.’ Would they? She wondered. Amy might be a bit less dramatic. A bit more self-sufficient. Stella would be much the same. She paused, or perhaps if Moira had had something else to focus on, their relationship would have been completely different. Moira wouldn’t have been quite so envious of Stella: of her easy camaraderie with Graham, or her unequivocal natural swimming talent, of the ease with which she laughed at her mother’s neuroses.
‘Would you and Graham be happier?’
Moira had swallowed.
Mitch laughed again. ‘You don’t have to answer that. Bitching, judgement – Moira, they’re all jealousy. And jealousy, well, that’s just fear isn’t it? Fear of taking the leap yourself.’ Mitch had started walking again, his brushed cotton tartan trousers like pyjama bottoms getting wet in the surf. ‘I think you actually quite enjoyed your life. It’s just now your boxes are empty.’
Moira stopped abruptly. ‘Excuse me!’
Mitch laughed. Then jogging to the shoreline to pick up a driftwood stick he drew two boxes for her in the sand: ‘If all your life is taken up with these two roles’ – he’d written MOTHER and WIFE in two separate boxes – ‘then that’s what your whole life becomes. It’s as simple as that.’ He’d stood there in his cheesecloth shirt with a lump of jade round his neck on a black thong, freshly tanned from a meditation week on the Algarve, and stared at her directly until she’d got embarrassed by the eye contact and had to look away. ‘You need more boxes, Moira,’ he’d said, pointing to the two in the sand with his stick then drawing lots more all around them. ‘You need more elements that create you, that we can write in these,’ he said, gesturing to the new, empty boxes, ‘otherwise your life just gets smaller and smaller.’
Moira had wanted to say, ‘I have Frank Sinatra now.’ But luckily she’d run the sentence through in her head before saying it and realised how pathetic it sounded, on so many levels.
And so she had joined the book club at the library. Where she was sitting right now, with an AWOL husband, in a fancy pair of jeans, next to Joyce Matthews (of cleaner fame), looking about guiltily to check no one was watching because Joyce had tipped a slug of brandy from a hip flask into her cup of lukewarm Gold Blend.
‘Don’t, it’s half past ten in the morning, I’ll be pissed as a fart. I shouldn’t really be here.’ Moira waved the brandy away.
‘Nonsense,’ said Joyce, pouring a dash into her own. ‘Your husband’s gone missing. Sometimes you just need to escape.’
Moira thought of her house filled up with her children, the view like one of those funny optical illusion pictures – look at it one way and they’re all as close as close can be, squint your eye and it’s a room full of strangers.
‘I haven’t read the book,’ she said.
Joyce shook her head. ‘Neither have I.’
Moira gave her a sideways look. ‘You never read the book.’
‘Shall we escape?’
‘I couldn’t.’
Moira could see the librarian walking over. She had her slippers on. She always put them on for book club – she wanted to relax apparently. Moira hated it. Why couldn’t she wear shoes like everyone else? That was judgemental. Surely she couldn’t be jealous of the librarian’s hideous pink moccasins? Maybe she could. Maybe she was jealous of her audacity, or her desire for comfort above all else. Maybe she was jealous that this lady’s husband had not gone missing and all she had to think about was slipping on her slippers to happily chat about what might well be, had she read it, a very good book.
‘Come on.’ Joyce gave Moira a nudge.
‘I can’t. It’s bad enough that I’ve escaped to come to book club. I can’t escape book club as well.’
‘Oh Moira, if you can’t escape now when can you? Come on, let’s go for a coffee. Or to the pub.’
But Moira said no. Propriety got the better of her. She couldn’t bear the idea of the slipper-clad eyes of the librarian watching her back as she retreated, going home to tell her husband or her cat about the terrible woman who lived in the big house by the sea who skived book club when her husband had disappeared. She couldn’t bear the eyes of the locals in the pub – ‘Is that Moira? Moira, good to see you! Take it Graham’s back then?’ ‘No, no, still missing.’
She pulled the book out of her bag and sat with it on her knee as the librarian started flicking through her own copy to the book club questions printed at the back.
As Moira hadn’t read it, the whole chat went straight over her head. So she sat staring at all the people’s shoes in the group and thought instead about Graham. About what a relief it was to come downstairs this morning and not find him sitting on the sofa.
She hadn’t minded Graham’s numb passivity when Bobby had first died. She understood that it was a bit like losing Stella all over again. Bobby had been the first athlete since Stella that Graham had got excited about. Bobby was a star in the making. An ace little surfer when he first met Amy. He just wasn’t strong enough, didn’t have the killer instinct. And so Graham had taken it upon himself to train him up. He had him swimming every morning at six, in the gym every evening on the free weights, constantly pushing him to better his maximums. It was Graham who gave him his pep talks and made his competitive acumen sharper and stronger with visualisation and meditation. It was Graham who got him his first big win. And when Bobby moved into a league higher than Graham could take him – not being a surfer himself – they would still train together, still swim those early mornings. Just like he had with Stella.
But Bobby had died over two years ago. And still Graham sat. To the point that it felt like he’d almost forgotten why he was sitting. The grief subsiding while the hopeless lethargy remained. He seemed to shrink away from life, getting grumpier, angrier, and more annoyed with the world he barely ventured into – bar the occasional trip to the pub but even that he muttered about – too far, TV too loud, beer not cold enough. It had been OK when Amy had moved back in. Her sadness after the accident enough to consume all their lives. It had given Moira back her familiar sense of motherly purpose, like having a baby bird to look after: feeding it, caring