‘Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous.’
It was a ten-minute walk from the station through identical streets of identical houses until Nina was turning into the cul-de-sac where her parents had lived for the last thirty-three years.
Number nineteen looked the same as it ever did. Front garden completely paved over to make room for her dad’s black cab and her mother’s nippy Mazda convertible. As Nina stood on the doorstep and fished for her keys in her handbag, she could see her reflection in the gleaming gold doorplate.
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the rapping on the window next to her. She turned to see her two nieces, Rosie and Ellie, jumping up and down and waving at her.
Nina waved back, grabbed her keys as she heard shouts of ‘Auntie Nina has pink hair now!’ and got the door open wide enough that Rosie and Ellie could hurl themselves at her so hard, she rocked back on her heels.
‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’ They both shouted at an ear-perforating volume, hugging Nina so enthusiastically, she was amazed that she didn’t snap a rib.
‘Steady on, ladies!’ Nina panted. ‘Let me put down my bags.’ Rosie and Ellie loosened their grip by a fraction so Nina could drop her bags on the floor then held out her arms. ‘OK. Now you can give me some loving.’
Nina had forgotten that there were some good things about her contractually obligated once-a-month trip home and she had her arms full of them. Two curly blonde heads nestled against her chest, fists clutched around the material of her dress in a way that would definitely leave wrinkles, but Nina didn’t care.
‘I have to breathe now,’ Nina said softly and her nieces relinquished their Vulcan-like hold on her so they could gaze up at her.
‘Your hair makes you look like a mermaid,’ eight-year-old Rosie said gravely.
‘Or a princess,’ her five-year-old sister Ellie added.
‘Mermaid princess was the look I was going for,’ Nina agreed. ‘Where is everyone?’
It was no surprise that ‘Nana and Mum’ were in the kitchen cooking lunch and that Nina’s father and her brother Paul were performing some acts of DIY upstairs. It was all about the traditional divisions of labour in KT10, Nina thought, her lip curling.
‘Did you bring us presents?’ Ellie wanted to know. ‘We have both been very good.’
‘We’ve been excellent,’ Rosie said.
‘Well, in that case, I might have a small gift for both of you,’ Nina said because she always had presents for them whether they’d been excellent or not. Books, usually.
This time she had a book called Bad Girls Through History, a collection of stories about everyone from Cleopatra to Rosa Parks for Rosie, and a lovely picture book called Ada Twist, Scientist for Ellie. Nina didn’t doubt that her mother was filling her granddaughters’ heads with all sorts of nonsense so it was up to her to redress the balance. Besides, she and her nieces had agreed that while it was perfectly all right to want to be a mermaid or a princess when they grew up, it was good to have other options.
Nina left both girls settled on the sofa with their new books and headed down the hall towards the kitchen where her mother, Alison, and sister-in-law, Chloe, had finished their lunch prep and were perched on stools with a big glass of white wine each.
That was the one other good thing about coming for Sunday lunch – there was alcohol. Chloe looked up as Nina came into the room.
‘Hope the girls haven’t been driving you mad,’ she said by way of a greeting. ‘They both had sleepovers last night but I don’t think either of them did much sleeping.’
‘No, they were lovely as usual,’ Nina murmured as she got close enough to brush her cheek against Chloe’s. ‘Did you and Paul go out for a date night with the girls away?’
Chloe shook her head and grinned. ‘No. We were in bed by half past eight. Solid twelve hours’ sleep. It was the best thing ever.’
‘Oh, Nina, what have you done to your hair now?’
Nina exchanged a long, long, long-suffering glance with Chloe then turned to her mother.
‘It’s a pink rinse,’ Nina said evenly and this time she didn’t make skin-to-skin contact but kissed the air somewhere near her mother’s cheek. ‘You look nice.’
It wasn’t a word of a lie. Alison O’Kelly was a youthful fifty-three. On the very rare occasions that she and Nina were seen in public together, somebody always remarked, ‘Oh, but I thought you two were sisters!’ She was blonde, blue-eyed, went to great lengths to maintain her size-eight figure and was never anything less than impeccably put together.
For a family Sunday lunch she was wearing a blue-and-white striped Breton top, smart, slim-cut black trousers, discreet gold jewellery and a pair of patent black ballet pumps, no slippers for her.
Not that Alison was pleased that Nina was wearing a dress and heels, her own version of Sunday best. ‘You look like you’ve put on weight again,’ she commented, ignoring Nina’s compliment.
Nina had put on weight again. That was an unfortunate side-effect of having Mattie foist baked goods on the shop staff at regular intervals. I am not going to react, Nina reminded herself and she even managed to dredge up a smile. ‘Actually, talking of which, I’ve brought you cake. I told you about Mattie and the tearooms, didn’t I? You really should come for a visit.’ Nina pulled out a Tupperware box containing the best part of Mattie’s famous Raspberry Meringue Layer Cake. ‘Anyway, we’re shut on Sunday so on Saturdays we get to divvy up all the cakes and pastries that are left over. Thought we could have this for pudding.’
Alison shied away from the Tupperware that Nina was holding out as if it were covered in some kind of radioactive ooze. ‘You know I don’t eat cake!’ she hissed.
‘Well, everyone else can try a piece,’ Nina said through gritted teeth. Although she was meant to be not rising to the bait, her blood pressure was certainly climbing. ‘Dad can have some cake. Dad loves cakes.’
‘Meant to be watching my cholesterol,’ said a cheery voice behind her and then Nina smelt Davidoff Cool Water and a faint whiff of wood shavings and engine oil, and a pair of arms wrapped around her.
Nina was almost thirty, but when her dad put his arms around her, she felt the same as she did when she was almost five or almost ten or almost fifteen. That she was safe and she was loved and she was protected.
‘The cake has raspberries in it,’ she said, as Patrick O’Kelly kissed her cheek. ‘It’s practically a health food.’
‘Maybe just a little slice then,’ Patrick agreed and Alison’s lips tightened and Nina thought she was going to say something, but then the oven timer beeped at the same time as the doorbell rang.
‘The roast,’ she said over the sounds of squealing in the hall as Rosie and Ellie ran to the front door. ‘Somebody let Mum and Dad and Granny in.’
Then it was a flurry of activity. Nina’s grandmother, Marilyn and Nina’s great-grandmother, Hilda, came into the kitchen to supervise the last stages of the Sunday roast. Nina knew to stay well out of the usual heated debate over steamed veggies vs. boiling them for so long that they resembled sludge, so instead she poured herself a generous helping of Chardonnay then went to waggle her tongue piercing at Rosie and Ellie to make them shriek with horrified glee.
On the dot of one, Sunday lunch was served. Nina sat between her mother, so Alison could watch and comment on every piece of food that Nina put on her plate, and her great-grandmother, who had already been the grateful recipient of two large-print romance novels.
Of course, Nina’s grandparents wanted to know if she was seeing someone special. To which the answer was no. It was always no, even when Nina was seeing someone special because the thought of having to bring a man home to Worcester Park to meet the family was too terrifying to contemplate. Gervaise had been Nina’s last someone special and his bleached blond hair and unisex black clothing (often a black kilt over leggings) would have gone down like a ‘whore at a christening’, as her grandfather would have said once he’d had a couple more lagers.
It was the same old Sunday lunch chatter. Both her dad and her grandfather, Teddy, were black cabbies so they had a good old moan about how slow trade was. Paul was a plumber so he had a good old moan about the water company trying to get the local residents to fit smart meters. Chloe was a childminder so she had a good old moan about the parents of one of the children she looked after who were in the middle of an acrimonious break-up and were using the poor kid as a pawn.
Nina didn’t really have that much to moan about. She had a sweet, rent-free flat in Central London and although things were quiet on the finding-her-one-true-love front, they had to pick up soon and she liked her job. Except she was still worried about how long she’d keep her job, which led her thoughts swinging back to Noah.
‘Paul, you’ll never guess who I’ve been working with,’ she said in the break between the roast and pudding. ‘Do you remember Noah Harewood from school?’
Her brother shuddered so hard that the dining table shook. ‘That’s a blast from the past,’ he said slowly. ‘Christ, I’ve gone clammy just thinking about what we used to do to that poor sod. How is he?’
Back in the day, Paul had been the scourge of Worcester Park. He’d run with a gang who styled themselves as gangsters, when actually they’d been a bunch of white kids from Surrey in tracksuits and Gazza haircuts. They frequently bunked off school to shoplift, hang around outside the dodgy off-licence where they could buy single cigarettes or loiter outside the station on their bikes probably telling passing women that they had nice tits. And when they were at school, they were rude to the teachers, disrupted lessons and made Noah’s days a living hell.
Paul had left school with hardly a qualification to his name and then two life-changing things had happened to him. Firstly, he’d been involved in an accident on a stolen moped and he’d collided with a lorry and wrapped himself around a lamppost. He ended up in hospital with a broken neck and a full-body cast and no one had known for a week or so if he’d be paralysed for life. It had frightened the bad right out of him and then, to make sure that it stayed gone, he’d met Chloe at Cheam Leisure Centre, where he was swimming to improve his mobility, and had fallen head over heels in love with her.
‘Never underestimate the love of a good woman,’ Hilda had said sagely when Paul, determined to be the man that Chloe deserved, had got an apprenticeship with a local plumber and gone back to college to get his qualifications. Now, ten years later, he was a loving husband, a devoted father and had his own business. It was quite the turnaround. Paul was a completely different person to the boy he’d been back then and Nina could hear the guilt in her brother’s voice, see it in his eyes as he enquired after his adolescent whipping boy.
‘He’s all right,’ Nina said. ‘He looks quite different now, it took me a whole week to recognise him.’ She frowned. ‘He didn’t seem to recognise me at all.’
‘Why would he though? I mean, you look completely different to how you were at school.’ Paul waved a hand at his sister to encompass the hair, tattoos, piercings and all the other facets of Nina version 2.0.
‘Well, you’re at least four st—’
‘Anyway,’ Nina hurriedly cut her mother off from speculating on how much weight she’d put on since she was at school, when her main goal in life was to get into a pair of size-six skinny jeans. ‘I only just managed to stop myself from shrieking, “Oh my God, you’re Know It All Noah!” Can you imagine? How traumatic for him. As it is, I bet he’s had some hardcore therapy so he could get over his school days.’
‘Don’t! That bloody song we used to sing. We were so cruel,’ Paul moaned, head in his hands. ‘But what the hell is he doing working in a soppy bookshop?’
There was no point in arguing that selling only romantic fiction didn’t mean that the shop was soppy. Nina had tried countless times. ‘He’s not actually serving on the till or ordering stock. He’s come in as a business consultant to see how we can improve our working practices.’
‘Business consultant. Sounds fancy,’ Great-Granny Hilda decided. ‘Doesn’t sound like a proper job though.’
‘Don’t let his grandmother hear you say that,’ Alison sniffed. ‘Comes into the salon for her weekly set on a Friday and all she talks about is her wonderful grandson Noah and how he went to Oxford and then Harvard after that, which apparently is in America and doesn’t let in any riff-raff, and how he’s worked for Google, and your Aunt Mandy said, “Well, our Nina reads a lot and she works in a bookshop.” That shut her up.’
‘I don’t see why it would,’ Nina said, because reading a lot and working in a shop hardly compared to Noah’s achievements. ‘Noah was always really clever. I don’t even know what he was doing at our school.’
‘Well, his parents had very funny ideas about state schooling,’ Alison said. ‘The amount of times I had to go down to the school for a meeting with the head and that Noah’s parents when Paul had got a little too high-spirited …’
‘Mum, I was a thug in a Kappa tracksuit …’
‘He really was, Ally,’ Nina’s dad interjected.
Alison shook her head like it was all untrue. ‘Paul just got in with a bad crowd. As I was saying, Noah’s parents, they were very left-wing. Hippies.’ She said the last word in a shocked whisper. ‘The headmaster, Mr Hedren, he begged them to take Noah out of Orange Hill. Said the local grammar would be delighted to have him but his mum said that they didn’t believe in selective schooling and Noah would find his own path in life.’
‘I think finding his own path in life was why he took his A-levels two years early,’ Paul said. His head was still in his hands. ‘So he could get away from all us lot. Look, next time you see him, will you tell him I’m sorry? I’d love to take him out for a drink, install a new power shower in his gaff, do something to make it up to him.’
Nina grimaced at the thought of it. That was one conversation that she never wanted to have. ‘To be honest Paul, I’ve got no intention of telling him that I knew him from school. What’s the point? It would just be dragging up memories that he’d rather stay buried.’ She paused, rewound the conversation. ‘Anyway, Mum, what were you doing in Aunt Mandy’s salon on a Friday? You always go to get your hair done on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month.’ And had done for the entire time that Nina had been on the planet. ‘Isn’t Friday your Pilates day?’
There was an uncomfortable silence around the table, quite unlike the uncomfortable silence when Alison was needling Nina about just how many roast potatoes she was going to eat.
‘What? What’s going on? What are you not telling me?’ Nina demanded, eyes sweeping around the guilty faces of her nearest and dearest.
‘Oh, nothing you’d be interested in,’ Marilyn said quickly. ‘Really, you don’t want to know about all our comings and goings.’
‘Of course I want to know about your comings and goings,’ Nina protested. ‘Maybe not all of them. I really don’t need a blow-by-blow account of Granddad’s visit to the urology consultant, but of course I’m interested in what you’re up to.’ That wasn’t strictly true and besides, none of her family were wildly interested in what Nina got up to, which was just how she liked it. A phone call every couple of weeks, a once-a-month family lunch and a lot of sending amusing gifs back and forth on Twitter with Chloe. She wasn’t even included in the family WhatsUpp group, but still … ‘Mum, you changing your hair date is huge.’
‘It’s not that interesting and …’
‘GRANNY’S GOT A JOB BUT NOBODY’S ALLOWED TO TELL YOU!’ Ellie shouted as if she couldn’t bear the lies and deceit any longer. ‘She answers the telephone at Great Aunt Mandy’s hair salon and says “Can I take your coat and do you want a cup of coffee?”’
Nina had to steady herself by clutching on to the table edge for dear life. ‘You’ve got a job?’ she asked her mother in a tremulous voice because this went against her entire belief system. In fact, it went against her mother’s entire belief system.
Alison believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Especially when that woman liked to clean that home from top to bottom every day. Nina looked around the dining room to confirm that everything was still in sparkling, gleaming form. Not a single speck of dust or smear. Not a single ornament on the sideboard out of place.
Her mother was the only person Nina had ever met who vacuumed twice a day. Once after dinner (and woe betide the person who made a mess after seven p.m.) and then again in the morning, in case the carpet had managed to cover itself in crumbs during the night.
It wasn’t just the hours of daily housekeeping. There was Zumba on Mondays, Pilates on Tuesday and Friday mornings and Aquacise on Thursdays.
And yet, somehow Alison O’Kelly had decided to take up the position of receptionist at her older sister Mandy’s salon, Hair (and Nails) By Mandy on the High Street.
‘This is why I didn’t want you to know. I knew you’d make a big fuss about it,’ Alison said in a strained voice.
‘I’m just a bit surprised,’ Nina said, which was the understatement of the year. ‘Why?’
‘Because things have been a bit tight recently so I’m doing my bit.’
‘Trade isn’t what it was, not with that bloody Uber,’ Patrick grumbled. ‘And that bloody Lyft mob too. I was going to work longer hours but we hardly got to see each other as it was, so when Mandy needed a new receptionist for a couple of days a week, your mum said she’d do it.’
Alison tilted her chin defiantly as if she expected Nina to make some disparaging remark, much as she would have done if their positions had been reversed. Still, Nina was struggling to think of something neutral to say about this staggering turn of events.
‘Are you enjoying it?’ she managed to ask at last.
‘I’ve only been doing it for a couple of weeks. There’s a lot of new things to take on board: the computer, the bookings software, but it’s all right.’
‘That’s good. I always think the idea of computers is scarier than actually using one,’ Nina said encouragingly because really she was a saint; the saint of unappreciated daughters. ‘They’re just like ginormous smartphones, right?’
‘Right! Yes, exactly,’ Alison agreed then she smiled shyly. ‘Mandy’s getting all sorts of ideas. Says she wants to train me up to do nails. Can you even imagine it?’
‘That would be great,’ Chloe chimed in. ‘You always do a good job on mine.’
Nina had a crystal-clear memory of Sunday evenings long ago: Spa Sundays, they’d called them. Nina and her mother would put on face masks and intensive conditioning treatments on their hair and do each other’s nails. To this day, Nina always used toothpaste and a toothbrush to clean her nails and get rid of any yellowing when she was doing her own manicure, just as Alison had taught her.
‘You should do it, Mum,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘It could be the start of a whole new career.’
‘Well, Mandy says she’s fed up with taking on these young girls who only last a few months before they decide they’d rather work in a posh salon in Earlsfield. She just can’t keep the staff.’ Now that Nina had got over the initial shock, she was genuinely pleased that Alison was expanding her horizons, even if it was only as far as Aunt Mandy’s salon five minutes’ walk away. But Alison’s face suddenly assumed a mournful expression. ‘Oh, Nina,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘Mandy still says that you were the best colourist she ever had.’
‘Don’t start!’ Nina groaned. ‘I love Auntie Mandy but I was stifled in there. The most exciting thing that ever happened was when someone wanted a full head of highlights.’
Posy and Verity thought that Nina had always worked in retail and Nina had never disabused them of this fact. But actually ever since she’d left school at sixteen, Nina had worked in hair. Namely, the dressing, cutting and mostly colouring of it. She’d started at her aunt’s salon while she studied for her NVQ and when Nina had finally left Hair (and Nails) By Mandy for a job in a fancy West End hairdressing salon, neither Mandy nor Alison had taken it very well. Short of Nina taking a job with Mandy’s arch rival, Derek of Hair to Eternity at the other end of the High Street, they couldn’t have acted more betrayed.
Now Nina’s mother straightened her shoulders. ‘We’ve moved with the times you know,’ she said as stiffly as her spine. ‘We even do balayage now.’ She folded her arms. ‘But you think you’re too good to do people’s hair.’
‘I don’t think I’m too good to work as a hairdresser.’ Nina could only spit the words out. ‘It just wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.’
Her mother snorted in derision even as Patrick said, ‘Come on, you two. Do we have to have the same row every time Nina comes over?’
‘It gives me the most dreadful heartburn,’ Hilda added, reaching for her handbag and her Rennies.
Alison wasn’t done. ‘Well, when you finally figure out what you want to do with your life, then please let us know because you’re thirty …’
‘I’m not thirty. I’m nearly thirty …’
‘… and you’re working as a cashier in a shop and you’re not even married.’
‘I’m not a cashier! I’m a bookseller and getting married isn’t the be all and end all of everything. I’d rather fall madly in love with someone and even if it only lasted a week, at least I’d have known passion and excitement,’ Nina proclaimed so loudly that she was practically shouting. ‘There’s nothing passionate or exciting about getting married before you’ve had a chance to figure out who you are, then a few years down the line you realise that you have nothing to talk about but endowment plans and whether the washing machine will last another month.’
‘There is a bit more to being married than that,’ Paul said with a hurt look at his sister because by the time Nina left the house, she would have managed to offend every single member of her family present. It was like a very useless superpower.
‘Yeah, we go on date nights,’ Chloe insisted. ‘And anyway, we’ve never once talked about taking out an endowment plan.’
‘I just want something different out of life,’ Nina said, in the same way she’d been saying for years, in the same way her family always took as a personal attack. What had been right for Hilda, then Marilyn and finally Alison – to be married with a baby on the way before they’d blown out twenty candles on their birthday cake – wasn’t right for Nina.
Though she was nearly thirty and still didn’t know what exact form the something different she wanted out of life would take.
‘There’s nothing wrong with being married,’ Alison said forcefully.
‘But you don’t have to get married to be happy,’ Nina said equally forcefully, whereupon eight-year-old Rosie burst into tears.
‘I want to get married so I can wear a pretty dress and eat cake,’ she sobbed, because Nina could even alienate the prepubescent members of the O’Kelly clan.
‘Rosie, sweetheart, you can get married if you want to,’ Nina said, getting up so she could hurry over to Rosie and put her arm around her. ‘And you can also wear a pretty dress and eat cake without getting married if you want to.’
‘Although no one will want to marry you if you eat too much cake and get fat,’ Alison said firmly and though she swore that she wasn’t talking about Nina and her non-married size fourteen to sixteen depending on where she was in her menstrual cycle, it sure felt like she was.
Nina left quite soon after that; refusing pudding, coffee or a lift to the station and taking her raspberry meringue layer cake with her. When she got home, she’d change straight into her pyjamas and eat the whole damn cake while she caught up on her reading or watched a trashy film.
She gave an angry snort as she got to the station, realised that the Waterloo train was pulling in and then had to run, in heels, in a tight dress, carrying a collapsible meringue cake in a Tupperware container.
She made it with seconds to spare. The doors slid shut behind her and Nina leaned against them to get her breath back and cast her eye around the carriage.
It was early Sunday afternoon, that strange lull when most people were still lingering over lunch, so there were lots of empty seats. Nina could have a whole four-seater to herself if she wanted and she did want. Didn’t want to have to look, or worse, talk to another human being for a good few hours. This must be how introverted Verity felt when she was overloaded at the end of a busy day.
Nina levered herself upright and tottered along to the middle of the carriage and the cluster of four-seaters. There was a man just sitting down in one of them. Nina hoped he wouldn’t tell her off for putting her feet up but God help him if he did.
Then she got nearer and she saw his face and he raised his eyes from his iPad screen as if he could sense Nina’s scrutiny and they both gazed blankly at each other for a very long moment.
It was Noah. Of course it was Noah because this was the day from hell.