by Julie Cohen
And she had to catch her breath.
The man she’d chosen to share her life with was coming towards her through the crowded room. In his hands he cradled a child with his hair and his eyes, their dream come true.
Had she been afraid of Ben loving someone more than he loved her? This was miraculous.
Swiftly, holding the baby safe against him, he leaned over and kissed her on the lips. She took it like a breath of sweet air.
‘Happy Christmas, love,’ he said and just as quickly as he’d kissed her, he deposited the baby in her arms.
Her body adjusted to hold him by itself. His legs were curled up like the tops of grace notes, and his body was more solid than Claire had expected. She touched his cheek, his soft glorious cheek, and he turned his head. His dark eyes looked straight into her. He fitted against her breast as if he’d always been meant to be there. She saw how his hair whorled around his forehead, how his lips puckered out.
‘He’s so beautiful,’ she said.
‘He needs his mother. We both do.’
A little person, wholly new. It was the busiest part of the year but she had nothing to do but to hold him, nowhere else to be but right here and right now. He looked up at her and he knew her and she knew him.
She was in love, in all its danger and its wonder.
‘Matthew,’ she said. ‘His name is Matthew.’
Posie was riding on Jarvis’s shoulders, so Romily was rolling their suitcase along behind them. The London train was going to be crowded but they weren’t in a hurry and Posie was singing a song of her own invention about reindeer and motorcycles, and it was making Jarvis laugh. Neither of them saw Claire and Ben and the baby through the window of the café, but Romily did.
Claire was holding the baby. She was stroking his cheek with one finger. Ben sat close. His world was no larger than his wife and his child. The pane of glass between them and Romily reflected a galaxy’s worth of twinkling fairy-lights.
Through the window, Claire said something unheard, and Ben nodded. They did not glance up to see Romily where she stood not two feet distant.
Romily looked, but she did not pause. She caught up with the other two and slipped her free hand inside the pocket of Jarvis’s coat, where it was warm. He put his hand inside with hers.
Dear Matthew,
Romily says that I should write you letters even though you can’t read yet. I think this is a little silly because you’re never going to forget me even if I’m away for the whole summer, but then she said that you could read them when you were older and it would help you remember things that happened when you were a baby and were too young to make proper memories.
So anyway, this is what happened today. We had a Bon Voyage picnic in our back garden at the flat. Bon Voyage is French and it means good journey – it’s a nice thing to say to people before they go on a trip. You were sitting on a blue blanket on the grass and I made you a daisy chain and put it around your neck and you laughed. Do you remember that, now that I’ve written it? You poured your beaker of water over your head and Uncle Ben had to change you, and then I let you try a bit of the cake that Auntie Claire had made specially and you got it all down your front. Claire pretended she was cross but she wasn’t.
Grown-ups say that pretending is just for children but they pretend things all the time even when they know that nobody believes them. Mrs Kapoor says you should always give examples when you are trying to prove something and my example is this morning when I got up and Jarvis was pretending that he’d arrived at the flat really early, when any fool could tell he had been there all night. I have counted that he has done this four times that I have noticed. I don’t mind. I like it, actually, and so does Romily because she is smiling a lot.
Anyway, we have to get used to being together all the time because we are going on a real proper adventure together. All week for the past week I’ve been closing my eyes and picturing what it will be like when we get to Brazil. It will be worth all those injections we had. Jarvis has promised to teach me how to use his camera when he’s not working, and Romily promises that we won’t spend too much time looking at beetles.
You will have to look after Ben and Claire for me while we are gone. I know you don’t mind doing this because they’re your mummy and daddy. I used to pretend that they were my mummy and daddy, back when we used to see them all the time, more than we do now. I also used to pretend that my name was Prunella Ferrari and I owned fourteen cats. I never told anyone about that one. I didn’t believe it but I did believe it too, and I think this is the difference in pretending between children and grown-ups. But I could be wrong.
When I see you again in the autumn you’ll be older and maybe crawling. I’ll show you my photographs and I can teach you some more French if I learn any, and I’ll tell you all the stories about our adventures.
I love you,
Your godsister,
Mariposa Jane Summer, Esq.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to my agent, Teresa Chris, and my editor, Cat Cobain, who have taught me so much. Thanks too to the entire Transworld team who have made me so welcome.
Thanks to midwife Harriet Neville for answering my endless questions about pregnancy and childbirth. For information on surrogacy, thanks to COTS (www.cots.org.uk) and Surrogacy UK (www.surrogacyuk.org). I’m also indebted to Elly Teman’s book, Birthing a Mother. For information on fertility, thanks to Fertility Friends (www.fertilityfriends.co.uk) and to several of my own friends for sharing their private struggles with me.
Thanks to Matthew Williams and Angela Houghton for the tour of Reading Museum and particularly of the entomology store. Fond thanks to the staff and students of St Mary’s school, from which I have borrowed the grounds, graves and guinea pigs, but not the people.
As always, thanks to friends and fellow writers Ruth Ng, Anna Scamans, Brigid Coady and Lee Weatherly.
Last but not least, thanks to my parents, my husband, and most of all to my son, who’s taught me everything I know about identifying ladybirds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Cohen grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University and Cambridge. She moved to the UK to research fairies in Victorian children’s literature at the University of Reading and this was followed by a career teaching English at secondary level. She now writes full time and is a popular speaker and teacher of creative writing. She lives with her husband and their son in Berkshire.
Her website is www.julie-cohen.com.
Also by Julie Cohen
Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak
One Night Stand
Honey Trap
Girl from Mars
Nina Jones and the Temple of Gloom
Getting Away With It
The Summer of Living Dangerously
For more information on Julie Cohen and her books, see her website at www.julie-cohen.com
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Julie Cohen 2013
Julie Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448152605
ISBNs 9780593070826 (cased)
9780593070833 (tpb)
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