Mum’s the Word. Kate Lawson

at the moment Jack’s pose was the only thing she had to hold the image. At the moment there was no dense safety net of lines or shapes or shading, just an idea caught by the most fragile gossamer of charcoal marks.

      ‘I was being polite,’ he said. ‘If I’m honest, I don’t really know what you ever saw in Robert, Mum, he didn’t seem like he was your sort at all – came across like a real stuffed shirt. Selfish, a bit spoilt. How long did you say you’d been going out with him?’

      ‘Jack, instead of picking over my love life, why don’t you go and ring Ellie when we’ve done here and try to sort things out with her,’ she said. ‘You can use the house phone as you haven’t got any credit.’

      There was silence. He looked away. And then Susie noticed that there was the merest vibration, a tiny shudder in Jack’s shoulder and then another, and as she watched a single tear rolled down his cheek and plopped silently onto the newspaper on the table in front of him.

      ‘Oh Jack,’ she said gently. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, honey.’

      He sniffed, shoulders lifting. ‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, I ought to ring her. The trouble is I don’t know what to say to make it come right – to make her come back.’

      Susie laid the charcoal down and put her arms round him, and as she did the dam burst and he started to cry. It was all she could do not to cry with him.

      ‘Oh sweetheart, I’m so sorry,’ she murmured as sobs racked him. ‘C’mon, talk to me. Tell me –’

      He sniffed the tears away. ‘Christ, this is crazy. I love her, Mum, it seemed so simple. What the hell am I going to do? I don’t know what happened. I thought – shit – I thought everything was fine, just fine. I thought Ellie would be coming out to join us at the dig at the end of the month; that we’d spend the whole of the summer together in Italy. She loved it last year. I really thought she was happy – okay, so things hadn’t been that great recently, she said I was always away, and money’s been a bit tight, but those things happen to everyone – and we’d got the summer to look forward to. We could have worked it out, worked through it.’ He stopped, sniffing miserably. ‘I thought we were it, Mum, I thought we were forever. What am I going to do?’

      ‘Oh baby,’ she whispered, stroking the hair back off his face, her own voice ragged. Still holding him close, Susie pulled a crush of tissue out of her pocket. ‘Here, honey.’

      They never mentioned anything about tending broken hearts at antenatal clinic, not a whisper in any of the childcare books about how to deal with shattered dreams, or girls who ran off with your baby’s future in their hands. Or, come to that, men who ran off with dreams of future babies in theirs.

      ‘Don’t tell me,’ he snuffled. ‘A big blow for Mummy?’

      Susie smiled sadly. ‘You could say that.’

      On Monday morning during one of her classes Robert rang and left a message on her mobile.

      ‘Damn, of course,’ he muttered on the voicemail. ‘It’s Monday, isn’t it? I’d forgotten, you’re at work.’ Three years and he still couldn’t remember her schedule. ‘I just rang to see how you were. I was going to ring over the weekend, but I didn’t want to upset you again. Best to leave well alone, eh? I realise that it must have come as a little bit of a shock.’ The man was all heart.

      ‘The thing is –’ he hesitated. Susie could imagine his rather pained expression even on voicemail. ‘The thing is … sorry – maybe I’ll ring later, you know how much I hate these damned machines. I’ll be at home if you’d like to ring me when you get in, maybe that’s a better idea.’ He immediately sounded much brighter. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you give me a ring when you’ve got a minute? When it’s convenient, obviously.’

      So, not much in the way of comfort there.

      ‘So?’ said Nina, carrying her coffee over as Susie deleted the message and dropped her phone back into her handbag. The art rooms were rarely empty but there was always a lunchtime lull, despite the end of term looming.

      ‘Come on then, tell me all about it. How did it go?’

      Susie had deliberately arrived late to avoid any pre-class interrogation; leaving Jack at home in bed, or rather in his sleeping bag on the floor of the spare room. He had been snoring when she’d shut the back door. He hadn’t rung Ellie either. It had been a long, dark and painful weekend for both of them.

      Come lunchtime Susie had scurried into town with the excuse that she needed to pay her council tax – but apparently nothing was going to put Nina off the scent, despite there only being ten minutes before afternoon classes started. And she couldn’t avoid Nina forever.

      ‘I’ve been thinking about you since Friday. I want to know all the details. What happened? What did he say? What did he do?’ Nina pressed, breaking out the custard creams.

      Nina was Fenborough College Art Department’s senior technician, in her late forties, with hennaed hair, dreads, big glasses, a slightly wacky wardrobe, and probably – Susie often thought – more talent than the rest of the art department put together, herself included.

      Nina had worked at the college since before dirt. She exhibited regularly, her work – huge abstracts painted in primal reds, ochres and blues with rich metallic threads twisted through them – sold like hotcakes. Over the years she’d been hailed as the next big thing, reviewed, featured and raved about in the broadsheets and had pieces in half a dozen famous galleries, and still she turned up every Monday morning bright and early to set up the studio for the next influx of students.

      She and Susie were also good friends; they’d shared success and failure, suppers, sandwiches, bottles of wine, exhibition space, gossip, moans, groans and broken hearts for the best part of ten years.

      ‘I can’t believe you didn’t ring me. I was going to call you, but I didn’t want to interrupt anything, you know …’ Nina said with a sly grin, tapping the side of her nose as she settled herself down in a big purple armchair that one of last year’s upholstery class had left behind. Susie had taken the moss-green one, the one with the deep-buttoned back and the slightly wonky leg.

      ‘So, come on, how did it go then? Did he do the whole down-on-one-knee, a-dozen-red-roses thing? God, I hope so; I’ve found this fantastic suit in that second-hand shop in the High Street. They’ve got some really nice stuff in there. Anyway –’ Nina got up to demonstrate. ‘It’s cream, gold and plum silk, fitted, v-neck, bias cut, and I found this fabulous hat in Bows and Belles – you know, the one with the woman who looks as if she just smelt something rancid in her handbag? It’s like a cartoon top hat, with a feather –’ the mime continued. ‘Although actually I’m not sure now if it’s a feather or some kind of silk quill, it’s something curved, but it needs good weather so I was hoping you’d plump for maybe spring or summer next year.’ She paused, eyes wide. ‘So?’

      ‘So, he finished with me,’ said Susie, taking a sip of her coffee. It was cold and bitter although she refused to draw any parallels, and besides, Friday evening felt like a lifetime away and the woman who had been eagerly getting supper ready, all puffed and buffed and full of anticipation, waiting to be proposed to, a total and rather naïve stranger.

      Nina stared at her, and her mouth dropped open. ‘You are joking.’

      Susie shook her head. ‘Unfortunately not.’

      ‘Oh my god, but I thought –’ There was a little pause. ‘You thought –’

      ‘I know what I thought, Neen, but I was wrong, really, really wrong. Wrong about everything,’ said Susie, bizarrely feeling guilty for having deprived Nina of her fabulous hat-and-plum-silk-suit day.

      ‘Oh god. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry,’ said Nina, jiffling around with pure discomfort. ‘I feel awful now.’

      Susie smiled, trying hard not to let her