The Golden Child Page 24

  But Dan is simply not interested in making her life any easier. ‘We need to keep things normal for the girls, Beth. We can’t sit around agonising about it constantly; it’s unhealthy,’ he says, sounding startlingly like his mother.

  And when Beth tentatively suggests that Margie instead comes to their house for dinner, the indefatigably hospitable Margie says that Beth isn’t to think of it, that of course it won’t be any trouble to have her mother for dinner – Francine is only one extra person, after all. ‘And we’ve had so few occasions to get together since the wedding. What, maybe once in the last ten years? It’ll be lovely to catch up. And right now,’ here a solemn pause just in case Beth hasn’t quite realised the gravity of her predicament, ‘right now, I think your mother and I should be putting our heads together to work out ways to help you both.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Beth chirps. ‘So generous. Thank you. Mum will be thrilled.’ She can see her mother’s polite shudder at the thought of putting her head anywhere near Margie’s, can already picture the thinly veiled hostility between the two women: her mother haughty and superior; Margie concerned to the point of caricature. It is going to be bad. She knows that before the event. She just doesn’t know how bad.

  Her mother promises to come early in the morning to watch the girls play in a holiday hockey carnival, but doesn’t arrive until almost five o’clock. In the event, only Lucy plays anyway. Charlotte hears that morning that a number of the team’s mothers are refusing to let their daughters play if she is on the field, and the coach – an old girl, only in her early twenties, who played State during her time at the school – calls Beth to let her know what’s going on. ‘Look, I think what they’re doing is really wrong,’ she says. ‘But I really don’t know what to do. Charlotte’s one of our best players, but if the other four don’t come we’ll have to forfeit. I can’t get on to Mrs Pollux, the sports mistress, she’s away.’ Beth doesn’t discuss it with Dan or the girls, but quietly responds in the way she knows the coach wants her to. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘Charlotte has a bit of a cold anyway. It won’t hurt to sit this one out.’ She breaks the news to Charlotte, who is sitting in her room, watching reruns of Supernatural on her iPad. She shrugs, barely looks up. ‘Whatever. It’s no biggie.’

  ‘Charlotte.’ She looks at her mother reluctantly. ‘It’s not okay. It’s awful. I’ll be talking to the headmistress when you go back. This isn’t right.’

  Charlotte rolls her eyes. ‘Whatever. Honestly, Mum, it’s just those idiots from the bottom class, so like, who cares? You know, Zelda Lamprati and Tegan Maxwell. Tegan is the one who got suspended for throwing her bra at the substitute art teacher. She actually took it off in class. I guess their mothers are just making some lame point.’

  Beth stays at the hockey centre to watch a few of Lucy’s games, but finds it difficult to maintain her composure, faced with the curious glances and the occasional frosty silence of the other hockey mothers. Lucy is her usual unflappably cheerful self, and even manages to deflect a pointed question about recent events from one of her less diplomatic team mates: ‘Hey, is it true that your little sister put that girl in a coma?’ The girl speaks loudly enough for all the players, and their parents, to hear.

  Lucy smiles and shakes her head, looking vague. ‘I heard she took some pills. The poor thing,’ she says, before turning away. Beth admires her daughter’s calm answer; if anyone had dared to ask her, she’s not sure how she would have responded.

  Dan and Lucy have already left for Margie’s by the time her mother arrives. Beth watches from an upstairs window as her mother gets out of her car. Francine gazes at the house, her face inscrutable, but her thoughts are as clear to Beth as if she’s had them broadcast: she would be marvelling that the house still looks like a dump – an eyesore in this otherwise salubrious neighbourhood despite months of work. She would be wondering, as she has from the moment that Beth met Dan, really, what Beth has got herself into. She would be looking for faults to point out: Doesn’t the car need washing? Actually, doesn’t the car need replacing? Why don’t you have someone in to mow that little square of lawn if Dan doesn’t have time? Why don’t you pave it? Do you think that old settee on the verandah is really worth keeping? So many things would irk her that Francine would find it hard to know where to begin. Beth is just glad she and Dan have agreed to keep the details of her absence from work to themselves, telling everyone that she’s on leave.

  But it isn’t quite as bad as she imagined. They are running so late that there isn’t time for her mother to give the house any more than the most cursory inspection, and her only mildly critical comment is about how long the renovations are taking – Beth must be absolutely desperate to get new furniture, the old stuff is so depressing, how can she bear the smell? Perhaps her mother is more concerned with finding a way to bring up what she refers to as the Charlotte situation to bother with the house situation. Now, Beth hurries her mother and Charlotte, who has livened up markedly in the company of her maternal grandmother, down to her car. ‘Sorry to rush you, Mum, but you know Margie.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, I don’t actually know her at all, Beth darling. We’ve probably only spent an hour or two in one another’s company since the wedding.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you that Nan is a stickler for punctuality.’ Charlotte’s mimicry of Margie’s voice, the slight pursing of the lips, the conjuring of her ever-present air of disapproval, is so spot on that Beth can’t help laughing. ‘Oh, you’re being naughty, Charlotte,’ she says. ‘Stop it.’ Francine gives a little smirk, raises one perfectly maintained eyebrow. She pats Charlotte on the head. ‘Hmm. Glad to see it isn’t all sweetness and light around here. A little bit of goodness goes a long way, sometimes.’

  Beth winces but Charlotte giggles, oblivious.

  Dinner is on the verge of being served when they arrive. Margie pauses in her stirring of gravy – home-made of course, no Gravox here – and welcomes Francine with a warmth and solicitude that seem genuine, ignoring her air kiss and enveloping her in a bosomy hug. ‘Francine. It’s so lovely to see you! We really should do this more often. How silly that these two have been married for so long and we’re still virtually strangers to one another.’

  Ah. She never disappoints. There it is, the slight barb, so neatly slipped in that a stranger to her techniques (or the deliberately obtuse Dan) might not notice the carefully coiled aggression nestled in the warm and fuzzy heart of Margie’s most innocuous comment. Francine, on the other hand, is looking slightly affronted by the unsolicited hug, the warm ooze.

  Beth offers to help with the final preparations of the meal, but Margie predictably shoos both her and her mother into the living room, where Dan sits watching the news. ‘Lucy’s just setting the table, so it won’t be long.’

  Dan gets somewhat reluctantly to his feet, gives his mother-in-law an awkward squeeze and offers her a drink.

  ‘Just a small one, thanks Dan. I think I might head back after dinner, after all.’ She waves away their half-hearted protests. ‘I have a charity do in the morning and I’d rather not be rushed. At my age I really need my beauty sleep.’ Her mother’s charity dos were a joke during Beth’s childhood, she and her sister coming to the excruciating realisation during their adolescence that they were Francine’s code for meeting up with a man, and always entailed her arriving home, dishevelled and uncharacteristically merry, in the early hours of the morning. They never knew the names of either the charities or the men. But now, with Francine in her late seventies, Beth suspects that the charities are genuine, and feels momentarily sad about her mother’s solitary life.

  Dinner itself is pleasant enough, with both women behaving impeccably – Francine offering all the right compliments; Margie accepting them graciously. The girls’ table manners are not dreadful enough to excite comment from either grandmother and Margie says nothing when Charlotte boasts about getting top marks in an end-of-term maths exam. ‘It was geometry that we already did in grade school at Brookdal
e. I can’t believe that everyone here thinks this stuff is hard.’

  ‘Well, they’re not all engineers’ daughters, are they?’ Dan’s tone is slightly repressive. Lucy looks at her father and pouts. ‘Well, I’m totally hopeless at math, and I’m an engineer’s daughter too.’

  ‘Ah, I’m afraid you may have inherited that from me, Lucy dear.’ Margie gives her a sunny smile. ‘I’ve no idea where your father got his maths brain from. It certainly wasn’t from his father, and as for me . . .’

  When they discuss it later, Dan and Beth disagree on the origin of the argument, Dan insisting, naturally, that it was Francine’s fault, that Margie was – as always – blameless. That Francine had totally misread her meaning. That Margie had said one thing and she did not mean another.

  It begins innocuously enough. They are finishing dessert, a chocolate tart that Lucy has helped make. When Francine compliments Margie on the meal, she makes particular mention of the dessert. ‘It’s the sort of thing I never usually eat, but this is something special.’

  ‘Well, it was actually Lucy who made it.’ Margie gives a proud smile. ‘She’s a clever girl in the kitchen, our Luce.’ Francine’s answering smile is exaggerated. ‘I’m such a terrible cook, though I suppose I’ve no real interest in food. This talent must come from you, Margie.’

  ‘Well, I’m really just a good plain cook – and that’s all I’ll ever be. But Lucy’s got a bit of magic in her hands. The pastry – it’s so light. Don’t you think it’s a beautiful experience,’ she says, addressing Francine with a gravity that Beth knows her mother will find absurd, ‘watching your grandchildren grow up? It’s like watching your children all over again: they develop all sorts of skills and talents that you never had yourself. It always amazes me how children can be so different to their parents.’

  Her mother, clearly bored, and hoping to move on to a subject more closely connected to the world of adults, murmurs, ‘Oh, yes indeed.’ But Margie has more to say.

  ‘And it’s sometimes so difficult for parents to acknowledge this. In all my years of teaching it’s been one of the things I’ve found most difficult to deal with – that parents are so fixated on their children being who they want them to be that they see only what they want to see. Good and bad.’

  Beth can sense that Margie has already plotted her conversational destination. She might be weaving subtly towards her ultimate target, but her mother-in-law is, without doubt, in missile-lock. Beth tries to change the subject, in an attempt to deflect her, but Francine’s unerring sense of combat has picked up on it too.

  ‘Now that’s an interesting observation, Margie. I would’ve thought that these days parents were the opposite. That they take far too much notice of their offspring’s individual tendencies. Look at Beth. I’m sure by the time my girls were Lucy and Charlotte’s age, I more or less left them to sort things out themselves. I don’t think it worked out too badly. But Beth – and her sister, Susie, too – they never stop probing and worrying and arranging things and asking their children how they feel. They’re basically stage-managing their lives.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t disagree. Compared to this generation I think our mothering was a bit more in the direction of benign neglect. No, it’s not that . . . My concern is that so many parents really have no clue about who their children are. And they don’t seem to care. It’s as if they want a particular sort of child and they expect that if, as you pointed out, they choreograph their children’s lives entirely – orchestrate everything for them, ensure that every moment of their life is filled with some sort of activity or enrichment, arrange their friendships, pick the right schools – that everything will automatically fall into place. That they’ll become the people they expect them to be – regardless of their own personalities or interests. So many parents seem to feel that after all this they actually deserve a proper return on their investment – because that’s the language they’re using. They really can’t believe, after all the hours of violin and ballet and rugby and art or whatever, plus the classes in self-esteem and the visits to the psychologist, that their little Johnny isn’t actually perfect. They feel that he ought to be perfect, because he ought to represent the sum total of all their years of effort.

  ‘Even at our school, which isn’t exactly full of well-off families, we have such a hard time convincing parents when their children have done something wrong. Even when we show them the evidence, they just can’t see how it could be possible. Not after all their hard work; all the money they’ve spent. It makes effective discipline almost impossible – if you can’t convince the parents that their kids have done something wrong, you’ve got no hope with the children themselves.’

  Margie’s gaze settles briefly on Charlotte and then quickly moves away. But Francine hasn’t missed it.

  ‘Goodness!’ Francine is frighteningly direct. ‘Does this have something to do with what’s happened to Charlotte’s classmate? Are you implying that this mess is somehow Dan and Beth’s fault?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not! This is entirely theoretical. Dan and Beth are . . . exemplary parents.’ Margie looks so shocked, either by the thought or by Francine’s outrageous bluntness, that Beth almost laughs. Dan, however, is clearly offended on his mother’s behalf.

  ‘Francine.’ He frowns at her across the table. ‘You’re way off track here. Of course Mum wasn’t talking about Charlotte. Or us, for that matter.’

  ‘Oh, I think perhaps she was. And I think it’s quite an interesting perspective for her to take.’

  At that, the girls, who have been too busy scoffing tart to bother listening to the adult conversation, both look up, as if suddenly conscious of the tension. Beth recognises only too well the look on her mother’s face, the rising colour, the narrowed eyes, the superior smile; can sense her building up to something big.

  ‘Mum, I think you might leave it now. I don’t think the children need to hear—’

  But her mother interrupts. ‘No, I think this is exactly the sort of thing that the children ought to hear, Beth. It might undo some of the terrible damage done by their pushy, entitled parents.’

  Margie stands, her lips tight, and moves around the table collecting the dirty plates. ‘Of course I wasn’t talking about my own family, Francine. Lucy and Charlotte are both lovely girls, and Dan and Beth have done a wonderful job. What has happened to that poor little girl is a tragedy, but I don’t think it’s really our place to discuss the whys and wherefores.’ Her voice is bright, but to Beth’s ears somehow lacks sincerity.

  Lucy looks over at Margie, frowning. ‘But Nan, when you were talking to me before, you said that you thought we really need to talk about what happened to Sophie, and that our not talking about it properly was a . . . symptom? . . . of parenting today.’

  ‘Symptomatic.’ Her grandmother’s schoolteacherly habits kick in automatically.

  ‘Symptomatic. And then you said that our generation had everything provided for us except a moral compass—’

  ‘Thanks, Luce. We’ve got the picture.’ Dan’s voice is firm. ‘I think you girls can go in and watch television now. You can finish your dessert in there.’ Lucy’s face reddens, she gives her mother a bewildered, apologetic look, picks up her plate and follows her sister, whose face has remained stony throughout the conversation, into the living room.

  Francine picks up her wine glass and empties it in a single gulp. ‘I don’t know that it’s a lack of . . . how did you put it? . . . a moral compass that’s the problem. You don’t think that there’s some sort of media hysteria about bullying? Don’t you think that it’s wrong that a child of that age should think it’s a reasonable response to kill herself because some other silly girls are saying nasty things? You don’t think that might be an issue? I don’t think it’s our granddaughter who has the problem, Margie. I think she’s a strong, clever girl, and that she’ll develop as much of a conscience as she needs to get by in this world.’

  Margie is clearly offended. ‘It’s one thing to
be strong and clever, Francine,’ she huffs, ‘but surely we want more than that from our young people. It might be old-fashioned, but don’t we want kindness and humility as well . . . and more conscience than you need just to get by?’

  Francine gives a snort. ‘Oh, Margie dear. Your Dan hasn’t got where he is by being kind and humble, or by overtaxing his conscience, whatever you might like to think. The world’s not really how we’d like it to be, is it? The good don’t get ahead by being good, they get ahead despite being good. And on that note,’ Francine smiles benignly at the shocked company, ‘I think it might be time for me to leave.’

  ANDI

  SHE IS SURPRISED WHEN SOON AFTER BREAKFAST THE WARD nurse ushers in Dr Holding, the school headmistress. It isn’t the official visiting hour yet, and ordinarily visitors would be asked to wait until the doctors have done their rounds, but Dr Holding obviously has some sort of authority even in the hospital. The young nurse, Laura, seems nervous, anxious to escape, stays only to announce the woman’s arrival and then rushes off.

  Dr Holding watches her retreat, shakes her head. ‘Laura McMahon. She’s an old girl. A nice enough lass, if not one of our high achievers. There’s only so much even the best school can do. Nursing’s an excellent career choice for her. I know it might be old-fashioned, but I still maintain that nursing’s a good career for a woman.’