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‘Your husband is saying we should stand further back so we don’t freak her out, but we have to be here to support her!’
Dan shakes his head and widens his eyes at me. He’s grasping two drinks and hands me one.
The compère, a girl in denim cut-offs and a glittery top, steps onto the low stage and grabs the mic. ‘Okay, everyone. Thanks for coming tonight. So it begins! Please welcome the talented, addictive, enigmatic POÄNG. Enjoy!’ She skips off as Jenna and her bandmate Nils shuffle on behind her: Jenna at the back, Nils taking the mic and grinning into the bright lights. He’s a tall, lanky Swedish boy with floppy hair and some choice facial tattoos.
It’s their first gig outside of uni socials. They’re the first of the supporting acts. Nils is definitely in love with my daughter, but Jenna denies it and Rose doesn’t seem to mind. Jenna tried to get Rose to learn to sing, but it isn’t one of Rose’s many talents.
I didn’t think a schoolgirl romance could last uni years, especially long-distance, but the pure sunshine brilliance of Rose and the dark, cool depths of my genius daughter just work somehow.
Rose has never quite forgiven herself for that day though. Jenna called her from the bathroom of Trevethan House and Rose cycled there immediately. She stepped out to wave in Lydia from the lane, take her upstairs, not realising her mother knew the house intimately. Not realising Georgia had parked in the garage and was eating a sandwich, gathering courage in the gloom. Once Rose had walked out of the house, out of the gate, Georgia slipped into the house as Rose waited in the hot sun.
Rose says she should never have left Jenna alone for a second, but I’ve told her it won’t help to keep clinging to that guilt.
I watch Rose beaming at Jenna, her cheeks swollen with pride, and I wonder how Lydia, so bitter and intense, raised such a happy, straightforward daughter.
Lydia was struck off the nurse’s register after her conviction. She should have sent Jenna to hospital the second she found her. She was negligent. And then everything else she did…
I went to see her when she was inside. She seemed more grounded and had found it hard to look me in the eye. She booked herself into The Priory when she got out.
‘Testing, testing,’ says Nils into the mic, and there’s a smattering of laughter. Jenna plays a chord on her keyboard, picks up her viola and retunes a string, places her hand on each instrument – twelve of them – arrayed on a grubby velvet throw, one after the other.
Jenna and I didn’t just immediately bond into an inseparable mother–daughter pair. I tried, but she found it hard to open up, and it was difficult to break the lifetime habit of smiling over everything. And all of the court cases took up the best part of two years. My little stint in prison: that’s what gave her the space to hear how much I wanted our relationship to be better.
And finally, she told me. The Bob Dylan concert, when Jenna was fourteen. Tristan had gone off for a dinner and let Theo take her on his own.
Theo had put his arm around her and she had been flattered and excited, and when they’d got back to the Pimlico hotel, he’d kissed her. She had tried to kiss back – it was her first kiss – but then she’d tried to push him off, and he’d kept going until she managed to writhe away.
She said he’d slid his hand down the back of her trousers and whispered something so vile she couldn’t repeat it. The thought of it made me sick.
‘It was nothing really,’ she said.
And I realised that if it had happened to someone else, and I’d been told a few years earlier, I would’ve agreed.
I held her tight, waited till our breathing synced.
She had been missing that night for eight hours and I hadn’t even known it. She had wandered around, over the bridge – a fourteen-year-old country bumpkin lost in the dark in South London – and then sat on the hotel’s front steps till morning.
She said when they’d got home, she had tried to talk to me, but I don’t remember anything other than her staying home from school with an upset stomach.
Theo had played it safer after that. He did everything he could to make it up to her, to woo her, and Tristan had assisted. My brother helped orchestrate time alone for them. He bought the ruby necklace. Because Theo was so invaluable to him. And Theo knew all his secrets.
Jenna said that Theo and Rose were the only people who had made her feel good about herself. And he was hot. And she’d thought the family would consider Theo more acceptable than Rose. And she’d tried to convince herself she wasn’t scared of him.
A man twice her age, a man who’d sexually assaulted her when she was underage, was more acceptable than her best friend?
I’ve hung her spider maquette in our new living room, to remind me.
It’ll be a long time before Theo gets out of prison.
Tristan…
I’ve read all of Mina’s interviews and we go for lunch sometimes. I don’t know if she’s right about him.
When I went to visit him, he asked me if I really thought he’d ever done anything wrong. When I said yes, he laughed. I started to talk about the things I was working through in therapy, our childhood, and he looked at me like I was a stranger.
‘Father could be a bully sometimes, but he was never abusive, Frankie. What are you talking about? He had rules. There was a code of conduct. When you’re as busy – as important – as a man like our father, I think it’s fair to demand order and calm and a little bit of iron core from your family, don’t you? And our mother – sometimes I wonder if she was a masochist. But actually I just think she isn’t very clever. And she never knew how to take a joke.’
And then he frowned. ‘And she’s the twisted one, really, Frankie, isn’t she? Because she beat a woman half to death and let her son believe it was him.’
