‘I’m only concerning myself with this because Icarefor you,’ Lillian said, in the tone she might have used on a toddler teetering perilously close to a tantrum.
Jude heard another laugh then, a bitter one, and surmised it had come from Joe. ‘You care about him so much you’re desperate to see him back on the other side of the planet, when he’s just said thatisn’twhat he wants. Make it make sense, Mother.’
‘Pipe down, Joseph. You’re only here to—’
‘Oh, I know why I’m here,’ Joe said, cool and collected in the face of Lillian’s rising temper. ‘I was supposed to witness your triumph, wasn’t I? Your checkmate moment. This was about youwinning– besting me, after he refused to listen to you and insisted on staying for my wedding. But your mistake was thinking that any of this was a game. I’ve never wanted to influence or control him. Jude,’ he said, finding his brother’s eyes and holding them, ‘I hope you know that. I love you and I want you to live well, and happily. That’s all.’
‘I know,’ Jude said. He believed his brother entirely.
‘You simply cannot pass up an offer like this,’ Lillian said, turning to him almost desperately. ‘I see now that your head’s been turned again by thatstupidgirl. But surely someone of your intelligence can see that—’
‘Hannah isn’t stupid,’ Jude said. ‘She’s the best person I’ve ever met. The only woman I’ve ever loved, or will ever be capable of loving. And I’ve always known that. What’s worse is that I think you have, too.’
‘She iswrongfor you in every way!’ Lillian hissed. ‘She always was.’
‘How would youknow?’ Jude asked, emotion thundering through him, pulling him up and out of his seat. ‘What do I enjoy, Mum? What do I care about? What makes me happy, or sad, or scared? You care so much about what I can do, what I can achieve .?.?. but I don’t think you have any real idea who I am.’
‘She broke your heart!’ Lillian cried, incredulous.
‘She sees me clearly,’ Jude said, chest aching with the truth of it. ‘She knows me better than anyone. And I broke my own heart – at least some of the way. Aided and abetted by you, I now realise.’
‘I’d say that’s lunch over,’ Joe put in, standing up and addressing Jude. ‘How d’you feel about skipping dessert and heading to the Fox and Feathers for a pint?’
‘Good,’ Jude answered. ‘I feel .?.?. very good about that.’
‘Youcannotdo this,’ Lillian shouted, slamming her palms down on the mahogany tabletop, rage erupting as she rose to address her sons. She was furious in a way Jude hadn’t seen since his mid-teens. As he watched her face redden, it hit him that her anger didn’t scare him anymore.
‘I simply will not allow it,’ she yelled. ‘You can’t be so stupid, so ungrateful as to throw away an opportunity like this – an opportunity I made sure you received. Irefuseto let you damage your prospects in this way.’
‘The thing is, Mum,’ Jude said, with a desolate, almost disbelieving shake of his head, ‘it really isn’t up to you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said, the moment he and Jude were settled at a tiny table in the village pub, pints of IPA in front of them.
‘What on earth for?’ Jude asked, astonished.
‘So many things,’ Joe sighed. ‘Enough to fill a psychology textbook, probably. I didn’t realise I was doing it when I first started acting out, when I first began resisting her, but I made you into the responsible one. The good one. And then you felt you had to live up to it.’
‘I know that wasn’t deliberate,’ Jude said. ‘You were a kid yourself, and dealing with coming out, which I know she didn’t make easy. And I could have “resisted her”, too. Why didn’t I?’ He felt like he didn’t quite know himself; like he was a far weaker, far less perceptive person than he’d thought. It hurt.
‘Because you had no one else,’ Joe said, ‘especially after I went to university. When I began to sort through my ownissues, I realised I should never have left you with her. By then, it was too late. The best I could do was stay close to you in any way that was possible – refuse to let you go from my life.’
Jude took a large sip from his pint glass, then said: ‘Honestly, Joe, you’re taking on too much here. It’s not like she was .?.?.’ He forced himself to say the word. ‘Abusive.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Joe asked gently. ‘The level of control she wanted to exert over both of us went way beyond the bounds of what might be considered healthy. I suspect she was the same with Dad – that he effectively ran away, like I did. Rather cowardly of him to leave us behind, you might think. But I’ve sometimes wondered how far she’d have gone to keep us. What she might have accused him of, or fabricated, if he’d pushed for a divorce and tried to take custody.’
‘Fuck.Seriously?How could you never mention any of this, Joe?’
‘I was waiting for the right time. And the problem with that is, the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to find. Too late, I realised the risk had become too huge for me to speak out. If I’d tried to step in and stop you from going to Cambridge, for instance, how might that have gone? I’d have been right – I could tell it wasn’t what you wanted. But would you have welcomed the intervention, or would Mum have convinced you I was just jealous of your success? Driven a wedge between us?’
‘Fuck,’ Jude said again. That was precisely the tack Lillian would have taken, and he couldn’t be sure he’d have seen through it.
‘Fuck, indeed,’ Joe said. ‘In the end, I reasoned I couldn’t interfere until you started to ask questions by yourself, show signs you were seeing things differently. I could back you up, but not lead you to conclusions you weren’t ready to draw on your own. Ironically, I think trying to put you out of Hannah’s way came back to bite Mum in the end. When you got back from Oz, you’d achieved some distance.’
Jude nodded. He’d felt it almost immediately after he returned; the heavywrongnessof worrying about Lillian’s reactions to everything he said and did. Then there’d been the drip-feed of revelations that came through interacting with Hannah again.Hannah.?.?.
‘Mum made me do the interview with Larry in Sydney four years ago,’ Jude said, putting his head in his hands. ‘Convinced me not to book a return flight, even though Hannah and I had agreed on it. She understood the impact that would have better than I did.’
‘Yes.’ Joe said nothing else, but Jude felt almost as if he could hear his brother’s thoughts.