Page 12 of The In-Laws

Nancy had never forgiven Amanda for ‘trapping’ her eldest son, but Amanda didn’t care. She had got what shewanted, and if suffering the odd lunch or dinner with Nancy and her barbed comments was all she had to put up with, she’d take it.

It was Amanda who had convinced Ross to move to London and there they had enjoyed a blissful, Nancy-free fifteen years … until now. Now she needed Nancy, Ross needed Nancy, and so did Theo. Amanda had to push down all of her dislike for her mother-in-law and suck it up. Without Nancy they were, frankly, screwed.

But the minute Nancy was back on her feet, they were moving into their own place. Amanda didn’t care where they went, or how small the place was, she needed her own space.

‘It’s very early days. It will just take a while to settle in. Besides, you only have yourself to blame, Theo.’

He looked out of the window. ‘You could have found me another school in London.’

‘No decent school would have wanted you. Being expelled for dealing cocaine isn’t exactly what top schools are looking for in their students.’

Theo groaned. ‘For the millionth time, I wasn’t dealing. I gave a few bags to a few of my friends.’

‘In exchange for money!’ she reminded him. ‘You let us and yourself down so badly, Theo. I will never forget the shock and shame I felt in your headmaster’s office.’ Amanda’s stomach clenched at the memory.

The headmaster had been so calm. Every word from his mouth had been carefully considered and thought out. There was no room for argument, bargaining or changing his mind. He was crystal clear that Theo was no longer welcome at his school. End of discussion. Amanda had never seen Ross so quiet. He was devastated. His son, his pride and joy, had humiliated him.

‘I’ve said sorry so many times. Everyone does it – I justgot caught.’ Theo brought up the same excuse he’d been throwing about since the expulsion.

Amanda gripped the steering wheel. ‘Not everyone does it. I guarantee you that Julian Taylor-Lloyd wasn’t dealing cocaine.’

‘He’s a nerd.’

‘No, Theo, he’s just a good kid who used to be your friend before you became “too cool” for him. So while he was acing his exams and representing the school in cricket, you were snorting cocaine.’

Amanda had been gutted when Theo had moved away from his friendship with Julian. She knew Julian was a good influence on him, and Julian’s father was anactualduke. Amanda had loved that she knew a duke and duchess. The first time she’d dropped Theo to their house/mini-palace for a party, aged twelve, she’d almost died of excitement. Her son was friends with a future duke.Look at me, she’d thought, as she drove up the sweeping, tree-lined driveway,a girl from a crappy town in the arse-end of Ireland hanging out with English aristocrats.Ha, if Mona Rafferty and Karen Higgins could see her now, they’d die of jealousy. They’d nicknamed her ‘Notions’ in school because she’d wanted to go to Trinity College in Dublin.

‘You’ve notions, Amanda. Who do you think you are?’ they’d asked, their voices dripping with scorn.

Someone who is getting the hell out of here, Amanda had vowed.

That had been her goal since as far back as she could remember. She’d never felt as if she fitted in there. Gortown had always seemed claustrophobic and backward. She had spent half her life sitting in the corner of her parents’ hardware store, reading glossy magazines and dreaming of a better life. Her parents had never understood her. Theywere happy with their life. Why was their only child so dissatisfied? Amanda didn’t know how to explain it. She just felt as if she had been born into the wrong family. She had been convinced for years that she was adopted and was secretly the biological daughter of a famous movie star and a fashion designer … but it turned out she was the biological daughter of boring old Kieran and Siobhán O’Brien.

That day, walking into the duke’s home, had been the best day of Amanda’s life. She had done it. Amanda O’Brien had shed her dingy, nothing past and arrived!

She had bent over backwards to forge a friendship with Julian’s mother, India, but it hadn’t been easy. India had lots of friends, ‘my chums from boarding school and uni’, all of them equally posh and marble-mouthed. In the early days, India had invited Amanda to a coffee morning at her house. Amanda was beside herself with excitement and had spent a fortune on a new outfit. It was an Erdem dress and she felt fabulous in it. She was slightly worried it might be a bit too dressy, so she’d opted for flat ballet pumps to wear with it. She didn’t want to stick out, she wanted to blend in, and she’d heard India talking about how much she loved Erdem. But when she’d arrived, the other women were all in tailored jackets, jeans and trainers, with low-buttoned silk shirts and stacks of gold necklaces casually ‘thrown together’. They all had that boho, Sienna Miller vibe. Amanda had got it all wrong. She’d felt so silly in her designer dress, barely able to breathe because of the Spanx underwear cutting off her circulation. She’d tried to compensate by being charming, but she didn’t understand point-to-point (it was a form of horse-racing, according to her online search later on) and she didn’t summer in St Barts or ski in St Moritz. Once again she’d felt like an outsider.

She hadn’t been invited to another group gathering,but occasionally she’d persuaded India to have a coffee with her and they had been invited over, as a family, to Julian’s end-of-school-year barbecue two years ago. That was before Theo decided he was too cool for Julian, too cool to be friends with a duke-in-waiting who was clever, focused, nice and a credit to the school. Theo had moved on to befriend a wilder bunch of boys, who were ‘more fun’. They were ‘not nerds like Julian’ … What an idiot. She’d tried to guide him back to his old friends, but you can’t tell a teenager what to do because they know everything. In her wildest dreams she had never imagined the horror of her son being expelled. Amanda remembered crying for days and days as her carefully curated life, the one she had dreamt of and worked so hard to achieve, imploded around her.

A drug-dealing son and a cheating husband. Double whammy. Double kick in the face. Double rug being pulled from under her. No gentle let-down for Amanda, oh, no: her life had been destroyed in the space of a few weeks.

Theo bit his thumbnail. ‘I could go back to London on my own. Boris said I can live with him for the year.’

‘Boris’s parents clearly don’t know why you were expelled, because I can assure you that if Florence found out about your little cocaine incident, she would not have you to stay for one hour, never mind a year.’

Theo sighed.

‘Besides, it’s not about living in London, Theo. It’s about no decent school accepting you. We were bloody lucky to get you into St Ronan’s here. Your dad had to pull a lot of strings to get you a place. You’re not going anywhere. You need to put your head down and finish the year.’

‘I know I messed up, but I really hate it, Mum.’

Amanda wavered. He looked so forlorn. But he had tocomplete the year, there was no backing out. There was no plan B.

‘It’s only eight months until your exams. Come on, this isn’t easy on any of us. Try to make the most of it.’

‘Eight months of no mates and just studying is hell.’ Theo’s voice shook.

Amanda put a hand on his arm. ‘Look, I know it’s tough and I’ll help you get through it in any way I can. Once you get to university here you’ll meet lots of new people and make new friends. Come on, Theo, be strong.’

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