by Lucy Lawrie
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Epilogue
Copyright
For my girls, Emily and Charlotte
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my agent, Joanna Swainson, for her dedication, imagination and unwavering support. Heartfelt thanks also to the team at Black & White Publishing, for believing in my story and bringing it to life.
I am greatly indebted to Anne Fine, for reading the manuscript in its infancy, and for giving me the advice and encouragement I needed to keep going. Thank you to Ute Carbone, Shuna Meade, Dorothy Shamah, Geoffrey Gudgion, Paul Hutchens and Julie Erwin for their thoughtful critiques of the manuscript at various stages. I would have been lost without the friendship, insight and writerly support of Jane Farquharson and Lesley McLaren throughout this process (thanks also for fixing my plot, Jane!). To Arlene Eves, Vicky Watson, and Katherine and Adam West, thank you for so many things, but especially for telling me I could do this.
Thank you to my mum and dad, for all of the love and the stories. And finally, thank you to my husband Colin, and my daughters Emily and Charlotte. This is my love story to you.
1
I’d been awake for eighty-six hours when I realised what my husband had done. We’d just got home from the hospital and he was upstairs holding Sophie so that I could make myself a cup of tea and possibly have a nap.
But by the time I’d inched my way to the kitchen, tea-making seemed too daunting a task – something I’d been used to doing in a previous life, but not now. From the fridge magnets and the Isle of Skye tea towel to the strand of spaghetti dried onto the hob, everything seemed familiar but distant, as though I’d returned to a house I’d lived in a long time ago.
My eye caught the laptop, open on the kitchen table. People were bound to have heard about the birth by now – maybe I should check my emails. Perhaps some words of congratulation would flick a switch, jump-start me, and shake me out of this jittery, twilight world.
To my surprise, I had a hundred and four unread emails, all with identical subject descriptions. I opened up my sent box, a terrible suspicion forming in my mind. The offending communication was right there at the top.
Subject: 48 Stitches Later!
Attachment: sophiebreastfeeding.jpg
She has arrived! Sophie Louise Carlisle, a bouncing baby girl 7lb 5oz. Cassie’s waters broke on Monday afternoon (at work!) and we rushed up to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in a taxi (taxi driver NOT happy). However, she wasn’t dilated enough, so we were sent home. Contractions started overnight, and when we went back the next morning, we were rushed up to the delivery suite where the midwife decided . . .
Unable to read any more, I opened the attachment. It was a photograph of my top half, naked and white against hospital sheets. I was frowning in concentration as I tried to coax my nipple into Sophie’s mouth.
It had been sent to every name in my contacts list, including the following recipients:
1. David Galbraith, Senior Partner, Everfield Chase, London office. He’d been the lawyer acting on the other side of a multi-million pound joint venture called Project Vertigo. I’d been advising on transfer of employment issues and for some reason got involved in some late-night emailing from my home computer.
2. Everyone else from Everfield Chase who had ever worked on Project Vertigo. This ran to dozens of people, including: Nadeem Madaan (employment law), Bill Harkness (banking), Julie MacDonald (tax), Benjamin Trent (property), and Ashley Green (night typing secretary).
3. Doreen King of HM Revenue & Customs – provider of guidance in relation to a tax issue that had arisen in another corporate transaction.
4. Elliot McCabe, Manager of Braid Hills Funeral Home – correspondence concerning Great Auntie Judith’s funeral.
5. Renato Di Rollo, Reservations desk, Hotel San Romano. Holiday booking.
6. Malkie Hamilton. Ex-boyfriend. Oh my God.
‘Jonathan!’
He eventually appeared, carrying Sophie snug against him on one forearm, supporting her head in his palm.
‘Is it time for your paracetamol?’ he asked with a bright smile.
‘What . . . is this?’ I whispered, my hand pointing somewhere in the direction of the screen. The effort of twisting my head to look up at him had dissolved my vision into a field of black swirls.
‘What? Let me see.’ He peered in closer. ‘It’s the email I wrote in the hospital – remember, the one I showed you?’
‘What? I’ve never seen this before in my life!’
He paused for a moment, frowning while he considered his response. ‘Well, maybe you were a bit . . . out of it . . . at the time . . .’
Scenes from the birth, fragmented and disconnected, surfaced in my mind: Jonathan fiddling with his BlackBerry during the pushing stage, at around the point where I’d reached a calm acceptance that I would never get out of that room alive; Jonathan taking pictures as the midwife hauled a purple, blood-stained Sophie onto my chest for skin-to-skin contact; Jonathan waving the BlackBerry in my face just as the haemorrhaging started . . .
‘You needn’t look like that, Cassie. You said it was okay.’
‘I might very well have done. But I was not of sound mind at the time.’
This lawyerly pronouncement didn’t seem to make much of an impression on him. He merely bent his head and kissed Sophie’s nose six times. Her arms flew out in a startle reflex. It occurred to me that we’d have to take off the hospital bracelet that still encircled her thin, translucent wrist; she was ours now. I could scarcely believe they’d let us take her home.
‘And anyway.’ I glared at Jonathan again. ‘Then you decided to email it to half the lawyers in the UK?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve managed to send it to all my contacts, which seems to include everybody I’ve ever sent an email to since I got this account.’
He was quiet for a moment, taking this in. ‘Hmmm. You’ll need to change your default settings.’
‘So it’s my fault now?’ Rage was bubbling up in the pit of my stomach, but somehow it wasn’t reaching as far as my voice, or the part of my brain that formed words. I sat back with a big shuddering sigh.
‘Don’t you think you might be overreacting? And besides,’ he said, narrowing his eyes, ‘you’re not supposed to do work emails from a personal email account. You know that, Cassie.’
‘There were other people on that list too.’ I scanned through it again. ‘The damp proofing guy, the fish deliverer . . . people who are now going to think I’m mad.’
‘So? I hardly think that matters. If you like, I’ll send out another email saying it was my fault, and that it wasn’t intended to reach them.’
Before I could reply, the doorbell rang, and Jonathan rushed off to answer it. He came back beaming, an enormous bouquet of flowers in his non-Sophie arm.
The cellophane screeched as I tore off the card, making Sophie startle again.
‘Congratulations! With best wishes from
the Joint Ventures Team at Everfield Chase.’
With a squeal, I tossed the bouquet onto the table. ‘For God’s sake! It’s from bloody Everfield Chase!’
Jonathan seemed delighted. ‘You see, Cassie, everyone is going to be happy for you. I hope there were some clients on the list too. It’s quite an original marketing tool – you’ll certainly stand out in their memories, look at it that way.’
‘Yes, I should think the mental image of their employment lawyer naked and breastfeeding in the delivery room will be quite hard to erase.’
‘I’m sorry, Cassie-Lassie.’ He came over and folded me into a hug with his spare arm. I detached myself and took Sophie from him – a process that took several moments as I eased my hands around her back, working my fingers upwards to support the back of her head. She felt more like a kitten than a baby; a pliant bag of bones. She curled into an upright position against me, nose nodding into my shoulder as she tried to move her head, sensing milk nearby. I stroked the nape of her neck with one finger, lost in the utter softness of her skin.
‘Our very own joint venture, Cassie,’ said Jonathan, curling his palm around the back of Sophie’s head, his eyes looking moist.
And although it was a terrible line, it did make me smile. Because it was his way of saying that Sophie had been born out of our love, because of our love, and would grow up in our love like a little bud unfurling its petals towards the sun.
2
‘Cassie.’ Jonathan’s voice woke me, pulling me up through fathoms of deep dark sleep. I opened my eyes, disorientated.
‘Where’s Sophie?’ I jerked upright.
But there she was, asleep in her Moses basket beside the sofa.
‘Oh, she’s fine,’ I breathed. She stirred at the sound of my voice, twisting her upper body towards me, pulling the plain white babygrow taut over her middle. One of her hands, resting by her cheek, opened and closed. But she didn’t wake up.
‘Yes, thank the Lord,’ said Jonathan. ‘You dozed off for ten minutes – and she’s still alive!’
‘Ten minutes?’ Tears of rage sprang to my eyes. ‘Why did you wake me?’
‘Your phone’s been ringing,’ said Jonathan. He thrust it towards me. ‘You’ve got five missed calls. I thought it might be important. You were trying to get Helen earlier, weren’t you?’
‘It’s hardly going to be her, is it?’ I snapped. ‘It’ll be the middle of the night in New Zealand.’ I still hadn’t entirely forgiven my best friend for moving to the other side of the world as soon as I’d got pregnant.
‘And anyway,’ Jonathan added. ‘You don’t want to sleep too long or you won’t get to sleep tonight.’
I stared at him in incomprehension. ‘I won’t be getting any sleep tonight. She’ll want fed every forty-five minutes as usual.’
‘Not now we’re back home, surely. That was just the hospital unsettling her.’
My phone rang again in my hand and I answered it.
‘Cassie?’ It was Murray Radcliffe, the managing partner at McKeith’s solicitors, the firm where I worked. His barking voice jarred heavily against the peacefulness of the lamplit room. The sound of the phone ringing had woken Sophie and her face crumpled and turned a deeper pink. Jonathan tutted softly and swooped her up into his arms. Why was it that he seemed to know instinctively how to handle her, didn’t seem intimidated by her fragility?
‘What the hell are you playing at?’
Black swirls again; I must have sat up too quickly. I rubbed my eyes with the back of a hand that suddenly seemed to be trembling.
‘I’ve seen your email. The one with the unsavoury pictures. I’m just going into a meeting with marketing to see what we can do by way of damage limitation. Joan’s making a list of the clients and firm contacts involved and it doesn’t make for comfortable reading, believe me.’
Oh God. ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that. There was a bit of a mix-up, I’m afraid, because my husband—’
‘It’s not just the pictures, Cassie. There’s also this: “If our Babycraft teacher can be believed, Sophie will be more demanding and unreasonable than even the most fearsome clients Cassie advises through McKeith’s – so don’t expect to hear from us for a while!” I mean, you’ve sent it to the head of RBS, for Christ’s sake.’
I stood up, forgetting that this wasn’t as straightforward as it used to be, and grimaced as I felt a hot trickle of blood down the inside of my leg. Clutching the crotch of my tracksuit bottoms, I hobbled towards the bathroom.
‘But the thing is, you see, that was only a light-hearted comment. Hopefully any clients will realise that. Some people have even emailed back with good wishes and congratulations.’ Not like you, you sociopath. ‘Listen, Murray, I’m going to have to . . .’ I’d reached the bathroom and was rifling in the cabinet for the heavy-duty maternity pads.
‘Who has? Who has emailed you with congratulations?’
‘Well, no actual clients, admittedly. But definitely people within the business community. Such as . . . oops . . .’ – two spare cans of deodorant toppled out of the cabinet and rolled across the tiles – ‘such as a very nice funeral director called Elliot McCabe . . .’
There was a pause. ‘Not THE Elliot McCabe?’
‘Umm . . .’
‘Elliot McCabe, who owns a chain of funeral homes across Britain and is thinking of expanding into Europe? Elliot McCabe, the husband of Lorna McCabe, Chief Exec of Turley Sturrock Holdings? How do you know him?’
‘Well, I was a client of his, last year . . . or rather, my great-aunt was. I mean, I wasn’t, you know . . .’
‘And he was nice to you, you say? Right, well maybe we can salvage something from this. We’ve been trying to approach him for months but he won’t give us the time of day. He’s a bit of an oddball, by all accounts.’
Murray’s tone was edging into the conversational now. Maybe if I could keep him on this train of thought he’d calm down and I could get off the phone without being fired.
‘Really? Why’s that?’
‘He came up in discussion at the Signet Library do last week. Apparently there have been all kinds of goings-on at this Braid Hills funeral home of his. Peculiar stuff. Rich pickings for us, by the sounds of it. I want you to telephone him, apologising for the email and introducing yourself on behalf of the firm. Try and set up a meeting.’
I looked up and saw myself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door – a bare-legged creature perched, Gollum-like, on the loo, tracksuit bottoms abandoned on the blood-streaked tiles. My hair was stringy and wild, and my face was grey with heavy smudges under the eyes. I looked like the victim of a mining accident, just winched to the surface after being trapped underground for months.
‘A meeting? But Murray, there’s no way I can—’
‘Cassie, I don’t need to remind you how important it is to build up your practice area, get some clients of your own? It’s one of the factors we’ll be looking at in the redundancy exercise. You did get the email about that, I suppose?’
‘I would love to be able to take this on, really, but the problem is—’
‘Just do it, Cassie, if you would. I need to get to that meeting now. Okay? Great. Bye.’
He hung up. I sank my head into my hands and growled, furious with Murray, and even more so with myself for my lack of assertiveness. He knew he wasn’t allowed to do this when I was on maternity leave, and he sure as hell knew that I knew.
‘Trouble at work?’ asked Jonathan, when I’d sorted myself out and returned to the living room. ‘Oh look, Sophie! Mummy’s brushed her hair.’
‘Murray just wants me to speak to a possible new client,’ I mumbled. ‘One of the people you emailed. I’ll sort it out.’
Jonathan didn’t yet know about the redundancy exercise. I hadn’t been able to face thinking or talking about it, on top of everything else. I couldn’t lose my job. It wasn’t just that we needed the money, it was the fact that I’d managed to negotiate a two and a half day week, to start o
n my return from maternity leave. The chances of finding a new job on the same terms were close to zero. I didn’t want full-time nursery for Sophie. The thought made me hollow inside.
I was about to put down the phone when I noticed that there was another missed call listed. I pressed a key to view the number.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Jonathan.
‘Nothing.’
‘Why have you gone all red?’
‘I haven’t,’ I said lightly, placing the phone on the seat beside me.
It was strange how something so embedded in the past could reassert itself in the present with no warning, boldly backlit on an LCD display. And even stranger, perhaps, how a set of digits could trigger such a profound, dizzying response from my circulatory system.
It was the number of Malkie Hamilton; my first head-over-heels love; the one who (as it had seemed at the time) got away; and unintended recipient of the email ‘48 Stitches Later’.
*
Mirroring my own feelings at that moment, Sophie threw up and started crying.
‘I’ll go and get her changed,’ I said, holding out my arms. Apart from anything else, I wanted to evade any further questions.
Walking up the stairs, step by slow, painful step, I felt it again. I’d been trying to ignore it since getting back from hospital, but the house felt odd, off-balance, somehow.
To look at, it was an idyllic house. Painted cream, with Georgian-style windows and a roof of weathered red tiles, set in a mature garden of long lawns and whispering trees. And it was perfectly situated on Ravelston Dykes, a wide avenue on the spine of a hill on the north-west side of the city. Walking along that street was always a pleasure. In September, the sycamore seeds would spin down around you like tiny helicopters. By October, you would be ankle-deep in smoky leaves. Come May, you would be trailing through a pink slush of blossom.
And it was the perfect house for bringing a new baby home. We’d spent months making preparations, first decorating the nursery, a white sunny room facing the garden. We’d put up a border and matching curtains featuring small pink mice. Jonathan had built the cot, the changing table, and a chest of drawers for all her things. I had washed the tiny baby clothes and hung them on the line to dry in the fresh air before ironing them, folding them, and placing them in the drawers. We’d grown fondly used to the sight of our hospital bags standing packed and waiting at the front door. There were three – one for me (Evian spray, lavender oil, three sets of new pyjamas – white, with broderie anglaise detailing), one for the baby (nappies, clothes, tiny organic baby toiletries) and one for Jonathan (swimming trunks, for the birthing pool that was never to be, and a spare t-shirt).