The Not So Perfect Mum: The feel-good novel you have to read this year!

‘I have seen someone die. Sometimes it happens even when we try our very best. But Tarants is going to be okay. There’s nothing stopping you becoming a doctor. You just have to work hard at school – and have a stomach for blood, which you obviously have.’ He said it like he really believed Harley could do it. And that made me want to smother him with big fat grateful kisses.

Just as I was noticing that he did have quite nice lips, I heard, ‘Hey, Bronte. What you doing here? I thought you was late home from school. I came out to see where you’d got to.’ I turned to see Colin standing behind us, hands on hips. When he came out to see where his little princess was, he was just being a good dad. I, on the other hand, was ‘blinking neurotic’.

‘Bleeding hell, Maia, I thought you’d be home by four. I didn’t realise you was going to get the kids. You’re not going to have time to cook tea before you get off to work.’

I didn’t want to confirm Simon’s SD1 expectations by launching into a slanging match in the street. Colin glanced down at Tarants but apparently the thought of his own hand-to-metal contact with a tin opener was a far greater tragedy than leaving your brains splattered on the road.

I tried to pacify him. ‘I went out to put a notice up in the post office and as it was home time, I thought I’d meet the kids, and then—’

Simon looked up, right into Colin’s paint-spattered sweatshirt. ‘Your wife saw this young man had hurt himself, so she very kindly called the emergency services and was good enough to stay here to make sure he was okay. He should be fine but I’ve got an ambulance coming to take him to the hospital so he can be checked over,’ he said, as though Colin had been falling over himself to make Tarants’ welfare his top concern rather than his ever-rumbling belly.

‘Mai, you’ve done your Good Samaritan bit, so stop bloody standing there and get your arse into gear.’ Colin ignored Simon as though he was just supermarket music.

Simon was obviously a stranger to SD1 customs. He looked over to me and nodded towards Colin. ‘Don’t you mind him talking to you like that?’

For a paramedic with all those qualifications, he wasn’t very bright. I shrugged, knowing that getting my arse into gear had rocketed up from an order to an urgent necessity. I started grabbing the school bags, hustling Harley and Bronte on their way as the first darts of panic shot through me.

Colin stood there, arms folded, jaw bull-dogging like a bouncer from a two-bit nightclub.

‘Come on, let’s go.’ I grabbed hold of Colin’s sleeve.

‘Hang on a minute. You got something to say, mate? Maia here’s got work to do. She needs to be at home sorting out her own family, not sticking her beak into other people’s business and looking for trouble when we got enough of our own. Why don’t you get on with saving the world and leave how I talk to the missus to me?’

I wasn’t so much grabbing as hanging on now.

‘Sorry,’ Simon said. ‘I wasn’t having a go. I think your wife did a kind thing for Tarants here and it seems disrespectful to speak to her like that. You should be proud of her. You’re a lucky man.’

I tried to make out the look on Simon’s face. Not confrontational, just matter-of-fact. Politely surprised even that Colin had spoken to me like that rather than licking the ground clean in front of me. I willed him to shut up before he became his own customer.

‘Since when have you been the expert on me missus?’ But I felt the tension in his forearm sag. Colin always loved having something someone else admired: the red Kawasaki when I first knew him; Bronte as a toddler, with her brown ringlets and eyes like little walnuts; that bloody phone that had nearly landed him in prison for handling stolen goods. Simon didn’t respond, just carried on packing up, arranging rolls of gauze in his bag and checking the bandage around Tarants’ head. Colin was used to men who either quaked in their boots or charged in, arms and legs flying like a Tom and Jerry scuffle. Indifference seemed to floor him.

I called Bronte over. ‘Start walking with Dad, I won’t be a minute.’

Bronte put her hand into Colin’s. ‘Fuckwit,’ Colin said over his shoulder, and walked off, all big man swagger. I breathed out.

Harley hung back with me. I said a quiet goodbye to Tarants but he didn’t answer. The girl mumbled, ‘Cheers’, and gave me a wave, which round here was almost a handwritten thank you note. There was no shock, no soft sympathy in her face. I braced myself for the pity on Simon’s, but instead he thanked me and turned his attention to the ambulance that had just raced round the corner.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c244c327-f3fd-566f-93e3-4ee8ac597a66)

‘Twenty-four thousand pounds a year, until the children are eighteen?’ I said. Twenty-four thousand pounds was so many hours of cleaning that I thought I might start laughing and never stop.

The professor’s solicitor, Mr Harrison, nodded and shuffled his papers. ‘Yes, she left enough money so that both children can stay at Stirling Hall School until they finish their A-levels, should they wish to do so.’

‘Why would she do that?’ I asked. ‘I was thinking that she might’ve left me something little, y’know, like her reading lamp or some of her books. I mean, not that I would rather have had that, I’m really grateful, but I was just the cleaner.’ I fidgeted on his very upright chair. I wasn’t used to wearing a skirt and I felt as though I had been rootling through my mum’s dressing up box. Trousers hadn’t seemed right though, and I didn’t want this guy in his pinstriped waistcoat to think I wasn’t paying proper respect to the prof.

Mr Harrison put the lid on his pen. He had that look about him. Teachers have it on parents’ evening, that blank face that doesn’t give anything away. ‘She’s written you a letter. Would you like to go into the waiting room to read it? I’ve got some phone calls to make, so don’t rush.’

I went and sat in a bright little room next to piles of Country Life magazines. My eyes pricked when I saw Professor Stainton’s careful writing. She’d addressed the letter to Amaia Etxeleku, which almost made me smile. No one called me Amaia, but Professor Stainton thought nicknames were laziness, ‘especially if one has a name to reflect one’s heritage’. The fact that my mother came from a little village in the Basque country fascinated the professor. I hadn’t been there since I was a teenager. Mum and I had always planned to go back together but she’d died before there’d ever been enough cash for jaunts abroad. The Basque thing probably wouldn’t have meant anything to me at all except it was obvious I wasn’t English. I often got mistaken for an Italian with my long dark hair and big cow eyes, just nowhere near as stylish.

I almost didn’t want to open the letter. I knew it could change my life, and all change, even change for the good, made me nervous.

Gatsby,

Stamford Avenue,

Sandbury,

Surrey,

SD2 7DJ

23 November 2013

Dear Amaia,

This may come as a surprise to you as I know you never wanted anything from me. I always felt that you were a very intelligent young woman whose life would have been vastly different had you been afforded a better education. I do not consider it to be too late for you. I know we spoke of you taking an OU degree and I do believe that you will.

However, at my age, I have to make decisions about the future, which is becoming shorter and shorter for me. Since my son died, I have been forced to consider how to make the best use of the little that remains dear to me and consider the legacy I would like to leave to mark my time on this earth. For me, education is the most valuable thing one can have after health, of course, and successful relationships. Therefore it would give me great pleasure to offer your lovely children a good start in life. The time that I have spent with them leads me to believe that they both show intelligence and enthusiasm for learning and I would certainly consider it a wise use of money. Purely because of your domestic circumstances and my fear that my money might find its way onto the horses at Newmarket, I have left my will so that the money can only be used for education at Stirling Hall School. I know from my time as a governor there that it will provide excellent and rounded instruction for your children and open doors for them, which might otherwise remain closed. I hope you will seize the opportunity to help them and keep in mind George Peabody’s wise words: ‘Education: a debt due from present to future generations’.

Finally, Amaia, I wish good things for you and your family. I am so grateful to you for making my last few years as comfortable as possible, with your kindness and attention to detail going beyond the call of duty. I urge you to consider my proposal very seriously.

With my very good wishes,

Rose Stainton

Who the hell was George Peabody? Was he famous? The professor couldn’t resist leaving me one last little puzzle to expand my mind. I started raking through my hair, pulling out all the loose strands. It was a wonder I wasn’t bald.

I screwed up my eyes, trying to find one thought that didn’t pull in a knotty old tangle of other problems with it. Sweat started to gather under my armpits, turning my silk blouse from pale blue to navy and reminding me why I kept it for special occasions. By now, I should have learnt that Etxeleku sweat glands and silk didn’t mix. I was just considering a damage limitation exercise with the kitchen roll by the water cooler, when Mr Harrison called me back. He looked relieved, as though he had been expecting to hand over his handkerchief for a huge nose blow. He settled back into his big boss’s chair and cracked his knuckles. ‘I assume you are going to take the opportunity to send the children to Stirling Hall?’

Assume. How wonderful to be in a life where you could assume anything. Assume that your husband would take care of you. Assume that your kids would be at a school where their days were about education and not survival. Assume that twenty-four thousand pounds a year was fantastic news, not some Australia-sized crow bar to wrench the lid off Pandora’s box.

I remembered my armpits and folded my hands in my lap. ‘I need to think about it, I mean, I’m grateful, of course, the professor has been very generous, but I need to discuss it with the children’s father, like,’ I said, immediately hearing the professor’s voice in my head. ‘Amaia, “like” is for people we are friends with.’

‘May I be so bold as to enquire what the obstacles are?’ said Mr Harrison.

I ignored the ‘being so bold’. He could, of course, just ask, though he was trying to be kind. ‘God, this is so embarrassing. I’m sorry to be so stupid, but how much are the fees at Stirling Hall? You said she was leaving me twenty-four thousand pounds a year. That can’t just be school fees.’

‘I’m afraid it is. Four thousand pounds a term for each child.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said, then squirmed. ‘Sorry, I mean, that’s a heck of a lot of money. Sorry to sound ungrateful. So all that money would just go on the school fees. Wow. That’s the only option?’

‘I’m afraid the professor has been quite clear. She’s tied the money up so that it can only be spent on Stirling Hall. It will be transferred directly to the school at the start of every term. If you don’t take up her offer, she has left instructions for the money to go to the cancer hospice in town.’

The hair stood up on my arms. Mum had died there three years earlier. I forced away the memory of her little room with the flowery border and the horrible hours I’d spent there, watching her poor, knackered body rise and fall. I needed to think about the next generation, not the last.

‘I don’t want to sound graspy, but has she left any money for uniforms and that sort of stuff?’ I’d seen the piles of hockey sticks, rugby gear and coats for every occasion in the children’s bedrooms where I cleaned. I wouldn’t be able to get away with any old anorak and a West Ham football kit.

‘No, but I believe most of these private schools have good second-hand sales.’