Page 43 of Mad About You

‘You’re taking the bare piss, Jacqueline,’ Cal said.

‘You’ve got nothing to do with this!’ Jacqueline said to him. ‘You have no idea what went on between these two. Stay out of it.’

‘Sounds like a perfect description of your own situation,’ Cal said.

‘I know plenty, thank you,’ Jacqueline said, returning her basilisk stare to Harriet.

‘Do you know your son committed common assault on me the other day?’ Cal said.

Jacqueline’s face dropped. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Point made, I think. Harriet, you’ve told Jacqueline you have no interest in her opinions or willingness to do what she says. Do you want her in your house?’

Harriet steeled herself to look Jacqueline in the eye. She was an arachnophobe being forced to fondle a tarantula.

‘Nope.’

‘Right. Jacqueline. You heard her. Go, please.’

Cal gestured to the doorway and Jacqueline huffed through it.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she spat at Harriet, as a parting shot. Perhaps Harriet should, in some ways, but Jacqueline was never going to be the one to tell her how.

Cal closed the front door firmly behind her and returned to Harriet’s side as they watched Jacqueline back out of the driveway, glowering, with one hand over the adjoining head rest as she reversed.

‘Thanks for that, Cal.’ Oof. Yet more humiliating spectacles. This man would surely be throwing a celebratory ceilidh once she was out of his property.

‘Sorry to have barged in: you were holding your own but she was being so disrespectful to you that I snapped. DidJonlet her talk to you like that?’

Her throat thickened. ‘She wasn’t usually as blatant, but more or less.’

‘Wow.’

Harriet got a little ache as she thought:so, this is what it feels like when someone’s on your side.She watched his face closely, expecting to see that confused pity again. Instead, he looked … amused?

‘Whaton earth, though?’ Cal laughed, the release of endorphins following the face-off. ‘What century is she in? She sounded like one of those costume dramas.Now you have slighted my son you will never make an advantageous match!She knows this is suburban Leeds and notBridgerton, right?’

‘Maybe it’s a very-well-off person thing. It antiquates you. Jacqueline has always been a lot but even I am blown away by that tirade.’

‘I genuinely thought you handled her with aplomb,’ Cal said. ‘Total harridan.’

‘Oh. Well. Thank you.’

A beat where, apparently, neither of them knew what to say.

‘Look, I’m off to meet Sam at Zucco in a minute. Want to join us? If anyone ever needed an Aperol Spritz the size of a baby’s head, it’s you.’

‘Oh …’ She felt wrong-footed again. ‘Won’t I get in the way of you-and-Sam time?’

‘Sam and I have known each other since junior school. We couldn’t be more pleased at someone getting in the way of our time.’

As they walked to the restaurant, Harriet considered that an unintended side effect of Cal’s involvement would be to bolster Jon’s suspicions. At hearing Cal had white-knighted her, he’d go up like Jeff Bezos’s cock rocket, surely.

This time, she really, definitely, didn’t care. Setting his rabid mother loose on her was evidence of real malice, and it had finally snapped Harriet’s patience, and expired her goodwill.

How perfect if it rebounded on Jon, not her.

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