Such a Good Mother, page 1
praise for
SUCH A GOOD MOTHER
“I picked up Such a Good Mother and was absolutely transfixed. What mother hasn’t considered doing absolutely anything to get into a circle of friends who can make her life more bearable, and give her children access to the best things in life? I completely identified with Monks Takhar’s heroine, Rose…until I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Mothers and hustlers can be a lethal combination—and the perfect recipe for a novel to keep you up all night.”
—Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters
“Wickedly paced and devilishly clever, Such a Good Mother showcases the terrifying lengths some parents will go to secure privileges for their children. A delicious and addictive read that goes straight for the jugular of modern motherhood.”
—Lindsay Cameron, author of Just One Look
“Everyone wants to join The Circle. But is it all that it’s cracked up to be? Who is conning who? And can one woman outplay them all? If you’re looking for smart, suspenseful prose, look no further. Helen Monks Takhar is now on my favorite list of authors. Exceptional, taut, and emotional storytelling in Such a Good Mother.”
—Georgina Cross, author of Nanny Needed
praise for the work of helen monks takhar
“An addictive thriller…A hypnotic dance…that doesn’t let up until its final unnerving reveal.”
—People
“Delicious.”
—New York Post
“Chilling, smart, and brutal…A triumph of a debut.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“Absolutely haunting…I don’t believe I will forget these characters, nor their story, anytime soon.”
—The Nerd Daily
“Epic.”
—CrimeReads
“Enjoyably poisonous.”
—The Independent
“Enthralling.”
—The Sunday Times
“An impressive, unsettling debut.”
—Woman & Home
“Dark and totally gripping.”
—Bella
“[A] clever, truly creepy, and uniquely modern tale.”
—Woman’s Own
“We were hooked from the first page—a brilliant and dark story.”
—Closer
“Tightly plotted and gripping.”
—Woman’s Weekly
“Sexy, scary, and satirical, [it’s] a cat-and-mouse tale on steroids.”
—The Bookseller
“Wickedly sharp.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Monks Takhar delivers an excruciatingly tense slow burn that’s rife with twists that shock and devastate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Perfect for those looking for psychologically twisty thrillers…à la The Girl on the Train.”
—Booklist
“Creepy and unnerving, with observations that are often dead-on…A breath-taking debut by Helen Monks Takhar.”
—Samantha Downing, internationally bestselling author of My Lovely Wife
“A deliciously dark, addictive, and twisted page-turner.”
—Alice Feeney, New York Times bestselling author of Sometimes I Lie
Such a Good Mother is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Helen Monks Takhar
Book club guide copyright © 2022 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Random House Book Club and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Monks Takhar, Helen, author.
Title: Such a good mother: a novel / Helen Monks Takhar.
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022010403 (print) | LCCN 2022010404 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984855992 (trade paperback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781984856005 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PR6113.O534 S83 2022 (print) | LCC PR6113.O534 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20220303
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010403
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010404
Ebook ISBN 9781984856005
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Carlos Beltrán
Cover image: based on © Shelley Richmond /Trevillion Images
ep_prh_6.0_140597720_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One: Outside the Circle
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Two: Inside the Circle
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part Three: The Center of the Circle
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Book Club Guide
Other Titles
About the Author
While more women than ever are working, they’re also bearing the brunt of household chores and feeling the pressure to raise perfect children…It’s exhausting for them.
—Cary Cooper, professor of psychology, Manchester Business School
“Your baby has gone down the plug
The poor little thing was so skinny and thin
It should have been washed in a jug
Your baby is ever so happy
He won’t need a bath any more”
—“A Mother’s Lament,” music hall song, unknown writer
HER BODY HAS BARELY BEGUN to cool. She awaits discovery on the playground’s tarmac, hidden behind the wide metal gate that leads into The Woolf Academy where Ginny Kirkbride is currently punching the wrong sequence of digits into the entrance’s keypad.
The chatter among the cluster of parents amassed behind Ginny appears polite enough, but tension is starting to build. Each parent is primed, ready to follow her into the school for tonight’s fundraising auction, mentally preparing themselves to race inside to secure the front-row seats where their generosity might be best observed, but, of course, without appearing as though they are running at all.
Everyone senses the weight of the twisted steel words over their heads.
Magis et Magis.
More and more.
The school’s motto is both pledge and demand. Because The Woolf is more than a place of education. The once-humble outer-city neighborhood around it has gentrified at warp speed because of its allure, the school providing the sharpest-elbowed parents in town with a platform to shape their children to their sky-high specifications. And The Woolf has achieved this by promising as much as it asks—from its pupils, yes, but from their parents too. Could they ever expect the excellence they seek without The Woolf asking for a little extra here and there?
Take tonight’s event: on the surface, a well-intentioned gathering for established members of the parental community, the first of the new school year and one of a great many conceived of to keep the school’s coffers enviably replete. Parents, their businesses, and their employers have been relieved of highly valuable time, services, and goods, all lots for the evening’s auction donated voluntarily, though not always exactly willingly. Magis et Magis. Unshackled from local authority control, The Woolf has, officially, no fees to p
Many of the women in the crowd attempt to secure Ginny’s attention with ingratiating small talk as the gate refuses to release. Perhaps it’s the distracting efforts of these Woolf Mothers that causes Ginny to mistype the security code for a second time. More likely it’s the half bottle of Viognier she downed between settling her six-year-old twins and leaving the house that is to blame for her finger missing its target again.
As Ginny finally enters the correct sequence, the swollen knot of parents waiting on the pavement falls into determined silence before barely resisting the compulsion to surge ungraciously across the playground toward the entrance to the building.
But Ginny has stopped dead.
The parents are oblivious at first, jostling and banging into her and one another, still hell-bent on bagging their premium positions in the school hall. But a second later, the brittle stillness of the September air is snapped by a shriek from somewhere behind Ginny.
However, it was Ginny who laid eyes on the body first. Ginny, who has now forgotten how to breathe.
Manicured hands clamp over horrified faces as parents spill past her, before stopping to look back to Ginny for a cue on what they should do next. Everyone knows she’s used to leading them and expects to be followed. But Ginny remains frozen. Some parents start to break into sprints to get to their new target first, ignoring her inaction. Order is already collapsing.
And at this race’s finish line: a woman lying in a contorted S-shape on the black ground next to the outdoor gym equipment.
Ginny finally makes her feet take her to the dead woman and registers such a profound lack of motion about her: eyes still and open, the sand-colored silk of her shirt soaked darkest red and unmoved by the rise and fall of breath. And the pool of blood under her head, so sickeningly rich and glossy—two words that themselves may have described the deceased, until recently.
“Oh God, she must have fallen!” a dad cries.
Two mums exchange a glance and immediately check no one saw their shared, silent challenge to this benign assumption. True, the woman may well have somehow fallen five stories from the school’s “sensory roof garden” to the playground. Perhaps she was decorating the space for the post-auction cocktails when a freak accident caused her to tumble; maybe a book of Woolf lottery tickets flew out of her hand only for her to instinctively pursue it into thin air. Sure, she may have fallen, but given the state of her in recent weeks, some are wondering if a tumble without intention is too innocent a conclusion after all.
And there’s no denying one further suspicion seeping silently into the imaginations of the assembled. It’s often heard at the school gates and on playdates: “I’d kill to be on the inside.” She was one of Those Women, the luckiest of Woolf Mothers, but of late she’d begun to appear ungrateful for her gilded status.
Before her flesh is even cold, some parents are troubled less with the dead woman’s fate and the three children she has left behind than with what a body in the playground will do to the reputation of the school and the hitherto skyward trajectory of local property prices. And, as the emergency call is placed and the police officers and paramedics speed across town, each woman on the scene quietly eyes the small brooch, an outline of a thin golden circle, pinned to the collar of her Stella McCartney blouse.
Because the snap of this woman’s spine was the firing of a starting gun. Like it or not, there is now an unexpected vacancy at The Woolf’s top table. The race to fill it is on. Despite the rumble of misgivings, the rumor mill already grinding into action about what happened to her, each woman here wants to be anointed in the dead woman’s place; each furtively watching Ginny with the words “Pick me” burning in their throats as she makes the call to the one woman more powerful than she is, her leader, and, by extension, theirs.
But, as all these desperate Woolf Mothers know, the only way to get invited inside The Circle is to never ask.
Part One
OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE
1
December
THE BOY’S GOLD-AND-MAROON CAP DISAPPEARS around the corner. Jacq and I follow it and the squeak-squeak of his brogues as he turns down yet another dark, wood-paneled corridor. I’m trying my best to be more sure-footed, anticipate the turns ahead, ones I should know are coming. This was once my old high school and I must have been this way hundreds of times before, but either I’ve blocked my memories in the nearly twenty years since I last set foot inside this building, or everything about the place is as different as they say it is. I begin to wonder, if I was left alone here right now, whether I’d know how to get back out again.
My sister-in-law tracks the fast-walking boy, oblivious to my queasy disorientation. “You’ll be walking miles tonight!” Jacq calls behind him, but the boy doesn’t seem to register her attempt at lightheartedness as he comes to an abrupt stop in front of a set of double doors.
“This is the registration zone. Welcome again to The Woolf Academy. We hope tonight helps you find the most appropriate setting to educate your child.” The boy can’t be more than ten, but he sounds like a gentleman from the 1940s. He has what people say is the Woolf polish. The boys and girls who go here emerge with the combination of manners and confidence, not to mention grades, they’d normally achieve only from attending some ancient public school, not a free school that’s been open only a few years. He shakes my hand, then Jacq’s.
“Cheers, little man. You like it here, then?” Jacq asks, causing the boy to blink and look about him nervously.
“The Woolf is the top-performing school in the region. It strives to instill confidence and aspiration in every pupil.” The boy pauses, then nods at the ceiling with his eyes wide open, before snapping them shut, as if he’s trapping the words he needs to remember from somewhere above him. “Attending this school is a privilege.”
“Is that so?” Jacq sends raised eyebrows my way, the kind that say, Well, la-di-da!, then goes to peer through one of the door’s small rectangular windows. “Better get ourselves in there, then.”
I go to peek through the other window and fail to still the gasp in my throat.
Now, at least, I know exactly where I am.
It’s the old school hall: double-height ceiling and more wood paneling, a large open space with nowhere to hide. My insides twist, my body now unable to deny that the worst years of my life happened within these walls.
But that was then, this is the here and now, I tell myself. I’m not the same person the girls bullied here. I’m a mum, married to the man I love, with a respectable job at the bank. I’m not who those girls said I was.
Through the window, I can see in front of the hall’s stage two empty chairs waiting behind a long desk. Jacq pushes one of the double doors slightly ajar and a waft of familiar odors hits me: floor wax, snapped pencils, disinfectant. Whispers reach me from the freed air.
Rotten Rosie. Rotten Rosie.
I steady myself against the doorframe.
“You OK? Rose?”
“I’m fine.”
I push the door on my side open and approach the deserted desk as confidently as I can manage, but the heels of my boots seem to make a terrible clatter, rupturing the silence. The hall’s lights heat the crown of my head so intensely it’s as if a spotlight is tracking my every step, and while I realize the ridiculousness of this paranoia, something inside tells me not to turn around, in case someone does indeed have me in their sights. Old habits.
“Hello?” I make myself speak, fearing Jacq’s about to shout something like, Come out, come out, wherever you are! But my voice is too quiet to be heard.
