The ladies arrived, and Joy greeted them like she was the queen. They were all like her – silk scarves, fake smiles. I don’t know why, but I sat through an hour of tittle-tattle and macarons until I couldn’t take any more and offered to clear the table.
I smiled calmly, gathered some of the lipstick-marked teacups and took them into the kitchen, where I plonked them down, leaned against the kitchen oasis and took a big, deep breath.
‘Oh, so you’ve escaped?’ a voice said in the corner.
I jumped, but it was only Bob, calmly stacking plates into the dishwasher.
‘Oh, it’s all too much,’ I said, glad to have someone, anyone to talk to.
‘How about a nice mug of tea?’ he said, and I wanted to hug him.
‘That would be lovely. I’ve had enough fine china this afternoon to last a lifetime!’
He laughed. ‘Joy loves her fancy crockery – that china was a wedding present from an aunt of mine, cost an arm and a leg. “We can’t ask for that,” I said, “it’s too much money,” but you know Joy, she put it on the gift list and she got it.’
‘Mmm, Joy always gets just what she wants,’ I said, with a smile.
‘Yes, she can be quite… strong-willed, our Joy.’
I smiled in acknowledgement of this.
‘I know she can be a bit prickly sometimes,’ he said, like an apology. ‘But it’s been a difficult year for her – since Jamie and Ella… and everything. She’s worried about you and Dan now – thinks you might take the children and live somewhere else and we won’t see them.’
‘I would never do that, Bob.’
He looked down at me kindly. ‘That’s good news.’ ‘I know our Dan, he’s got a roving eye, but none of them mean anything – you were always his real love, wife, the mother of his children.’
A roving eye? So that’s how Joy and Bob were packaging their son’s infidelity now?
‘And that awful stuff with Ella. It really upset Joy to hear she’d said those things about Dan touching her. Like he said to me, “Dad, I only put my arm around her waist, might have accidentally touched her bum,” and off she goes saying all kinds of things. The world’s gone mad, Clare – and our Dan said she’d been giving him the come-on all holiday, then got all funny and said she was going to the police. It’s all that ‘me too,’ stuff it’s turned women’s heads. Political correctness gone mad, Clare.’
I couldn’t even find the words to respond to what he’d just said This was the other side of Bob I’d only glimpsed before, the part of him that smoked cigars round the back of the house, and ruined his appetite with contraband biscuits before a meal. This Bob was only unleashed when Joy wasn’t around to reprimand, or correct him.
Then he said, ‘But seriously, love, at the end of the day, even if you two aren’t together it still has to be about family. No one else matters – as long as the family are okay, that’s what Joy always says – and she’s right.’
‘Family is important,’ I conceded. ‘I just think that she might take it too far sometimes, protecting the family at all costs,’ I added, thinking of Dan and the way she dismissed the women he’d hurt like it was their own fault and none of the responsibility was his.
‘But at the end it’s all we’ve got, isn’t it, Clare, our family? Joy once told me that if anything happened to our boys, her life would be over. “We have to keep them safe, Bob,” she said. “Whatever it takes…”’
I felt the hair on my arms prickle and suddenly reality hit. I watched him pottering around the beautiful kitchen built on his sweat and Joy’s specifications.
‘Ella didn’t commit suicide, did she?’ I heard myself say into the silence.
He looked at me as he closed a cupboard door, folded a tea towel and eventually Bob shook his head, very slowly. ‘Ella was causing problems for our Dan,’ he said, taking a breath. ‘She wasn’t right for our Jamie, for the family.’ He refolded the tea towel a second time slowly so he didn’t have to look me in the eye. ‘I tried to reason with her, Clare, but she wouldn’t listen, said she’d ruin us all; well, we couldn’t have that, it’s not fair on Joy, the boys, you must understand. You won’t tell anyone, will you? Joy, she’d be so upset if she thought I’d—’ he started, and I saw tears in his eyes.
I couldn’t get my breath. After a year of wondering what happened, of trying to work out Ella’s death, this had never been a scenario I’d ever considered. Bob, the quiet one, the ineffectual washer upper in the background who lived to please Joy and keep her happy.