“Only because we want what’s best for you,” said St. John, as if that wasn’t a terrible answer.
“There’s such a lot of prejudice around,” explained Cordelia, as if that made it better.
The Turkish delight was beginning to crystallise. “Okay. Let me try again. Because I think you’ve mistaken this for a discussion.”
“Well, you’ve hardly been clear, darling.” Cordelia still had the gall to look disapproving.
“Then listen. I am not going back to university. I do not want to go back to university. I do not want to be a doctor, and actually”—she’d never said this out loud before, but now she was forcing herself to, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world—“I’m not sure I ever wanted to be a doctor. It’s just that until Amelie it never occurred to me that I could want anything else.”
It had felt good to say. A feeling that dwindled rapidly as she saw the utterly uncomprehending looks on her parents’ faces.
“You’re not saying you got pregnant on purpose?” asked Cordelia, who was taking a solid crack at redefining the word “mortified.”
“No. But when I did I had to make a choice, and I think the choice I made was—well—it was what I wanted. I like my life. I like being—”
“A single mother who works in a shop?” St. John might have been trying not to sound incredulous, but he wasn’t trying very hard.
Rosaline gave half a nod. “I like that I have time for my daughter. I like that I’m not killing myself studying or working or whatever it is I’d have been doing now if my life had stayed on the track it was meant to be on. And I know I’m supposed to want to have it all, but I . . . don’t? I want what I’ve got. What I’ve got is . . . it’s enough. It’s everything.”
For a moment it seemed like it was over. St. John Palmer nodded in the way he used to do at the end of dinner to signal that it was okay for everybody to leave the table. “Just as long,” he said, “as we keep paying your bills.”
Rosaline was breathing hard as she threw herself into the double passenger seat of the van alongside Amelie.
“Your kid,” said Harry, “cheats at I Spy.”
Amelie was at that age where she had a strong sense of fairness when it came to anybody else while also having a strong desire to demonstrate her cleverness by finding as many ways round as many rules as she could. Thankfully, because she was eight, her resources were somewhat limited. “I do not cheat at I Spy. I said ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with a and the answer was—’”
“Atoms?” guessed Rosaline.
“You see. Mummy got it.”
Harry made a great show of exasperation. “You can’t see atoms, can you?”
“Everything is atoms,” explained Amelie. “So if you can see anything you can see atoms.”
Having checked their seats were all belted, Harry released the hand brake and eased them carefully out into the road. “Well, then I could say haitch for ham sandwich because I had one for lunch and so if you’re looking at me, you’re looking at a ham sandwich.”
Rosaline wasn’t sure how well she was hiding her just-had-a-blazing-row face. Given Harry’s commitment to distracting Amelie and not asking questions, she assumed the answer was Well enough for an eight-year-old.
Amelie drummed her toes impatiently against Harry’s toolbox. “That’s different.”
“Why’s it different, Prime Minister?”
“Because you’re made of atoms. You’re not made of sandwich. Otherwise you’d look like a sandwich.”
“I don’t look like an atom neither.”
“Yes you do because everything looks like atoms because everything’s atoms which is what I’m saying.”
Secretly Rosaline was a little bit proud that she’d raised her daughter to both fight her corner and know a lot about the structure of matter for a child. Picking her battles, however, was a skill that Amelie had yet to master. “Amelie, be nice to Harry. He took Mummy all the way home from the show and he’s been looking after you.”
It was the right call parentingwise. But it did have the unfortunate side effect of reminding Amelie that her mother existed. “Mummy, what happened with Grandma and Granddad and why couldn’t I finish my marbles?”
Well, fuck. Because while in her current mood Rosaline didn’t care whether Cordelia and St. John ever saw their granddaughter or, for that matter, their daughter again, weaponising your children in an argument was one of the shittiest moves it was humanly possible to pull. “Grandma and Granddad,” she said slowly, “are upset because I told them I don’t want to go back to university and be a doctor.”
“Why don’t you want to be a doctor? Do you not want us to have a new house and a dog and a cockroach?”
“It’s not about the house. Or the dog or the cockroach. It’s just . . . you know how you don’t want to do something, and I’ll say When you’re a grown-up, you’ll get to decide for yourself? Well, I’m a grown-up, and I’ve decided for myself that I don’t want to be a doctor.”
Amelie thought about this for quite a long time. “But if grown-ups get to decide and you’re a grown-up why are Grandma and Granddad upset with you?”
Being a good parent, or what she hoped passed for a good parent, always seemed on the edge of impossible. Trying to be a good parent ten minutes after you’d had a shouting match with your own parents about the way they’d parented you was over the edge and plummeting. “Lots of reasons. I think it’s hard for people to realise that their children are grown-ups too.”
“Yes,” agreed Amelie very fervently. “You still think I need to take Mary Shelley to bed even though I’m eight.”
“And Grandma and Granddad really do want the best for us. It’s just they think that means me being a doctor because they’re doctors.”
Amelie was thinking again. “Are they racist?”
Weirdly, they weren’t very. They tended to reserve their prejudices for people with less money or education than them. “Where did that come from?”
“Miss Wooding says racism is when you don’t like someone because they’re different from you so I thought Grandma and Granddad might be racist about people who aren’t doctors. We’re not supposed to be racist. We did a lesson on it.”
To be fair to Miss Wooding, England’s long history of colonialism and systemic injustice was a complex topic for Key Stage 2. “I think racism is more about”—yep, definitely complex for Key Stage 2—“culture and religion and, um, what someone’s skin looks like. I suppose Granddad and Grandma might be a bit . . . classist?” She shot a guilty look at Harry, whose grammar she’d once found so completely off-putting. “That’s when you don’t like people who talk a certain way or have certain sorts of jobs.”
“Like saying ‘ain’t’?” asked Amelie, who was sometimes far, far too perceptive for comfort. “Or being a man who fixes electrics?”
Rosaline was kind of paralysed. So Harry—with surprising gentleness—answered for her. “Something like that, I reckon.”