The Other Mothers' Club

by Samantha Baker

  “Fascinating,” Eve said. “But I think we need to stick to our angle: how divorce spurred her into launching a business.”

  “Well, you’d better not be so snotty when she calls you.” Nancy sounded put out.

  “Calls me? Why would she call me?” Eve felt herself tense. “Tell me you didn’t promise her copy approval?”

  “God no. What do you take me for?”

  “So, why is Melanie Cheung going to call me?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. I told her about your club.”

  “My…what club?”

  “Oh, you know, the stepmother thing. That get-together you have for women landed with other people’s kid-shaped baggage.”

  Eve wanted to smack her head on the desk.

  “Nancy! That was a coffee. One coffee. With one other woman, plus her sister. It was just for moral support.”

  “Well, whatever. Club, support group, coffee morning. I mentioned it to Melanie and she asked if you’d mind if she came along. So I said, contact you.”

  “Thanks,” said Eve.

  “That’s OK,” Nancy replied, the sarcasm going right over her head. Or maybe not. “Melanie says she needs all the moral support she can get. So I gave her your work number and e-mail address. She’s going to call to find out when the next meeting is. If you don’t want her to come, all you need to do is tell her.”

  Next meeting.

  What next meeting?

  Her good mood evaporated, Eve stabbed irritably at her keyboard, deleting e-mails. She could kill Nancy, really she could. Mind you, she could kill herself more for mentioning it in the first place. You’re a journalist for crying out loud. The first rule is you never tell anyone—especially not another journalist—anything that you don’t want to see in print.

  As she dumped updates from dailycandy, mediaguardian, style. com, mediabistro and the Washington Post without bothering to open them, her eyes alighted on a name she’d been entirely unfamiliar with until a few days earlier. But it wasn’t just Melanie Cheung’s e-mail address that made Eve’s heart sink. It was what Melanie had written in the subject box: Other Mothers’ Club.

  “Melanie? You in there? There’s a call for you…”

  Clambering to her feet, Melanie Cheung peered around one of the dozens of plastic-shrouded fashion rails that lined her stockroom. If personalshopper.com kept growing at this rate, they were going to have to outsource fulfillment, and do it soon. The warehouse off the Caledonian Road had seemed perfect eighteen months ago when she’d been setting up, not least because Melanie could live above the shop. Now she could barely move for cardboard boxes. Her company was growing too big and too fast. Melanie knew that was better than the alternative. In the current climate, the entire shopping population of London didn’t have enough fingers to count the number of start-ups that had gone under in the last year. And now the recession was squeezing more. So the scale and speed of the company’s success terrified Melanie.

  Terrified and thrilled her.

  This monster was hers. The first thing she had done for herself—done at all, in fact, beyond shopping and smiling and making small talk—since she’d moved to London as Mrs. Simeon Jones, and the mere thought made her heart pound with excitement.

  “Tell them I’ll call back,” she said. “I’m kinda busy right now.”

  “Already did,” said Grace, Melanie’s office manager, right-hand woman and what passed for friend. Scratch that, only friend. “But she’s pretty persistent. It’s from that magazine you did an interview for last week. She says you’re expecting her call. Eve someone. Sorry, I didn’t catch the surname.”

  Melanie swallowed hard. Now she’d really done it. “OK…,” she said. “Tell her I’ll be right there.

  “Melanie Cheung speaking.”

  Two years after the split, eighteen months after the decree absolute, it still surprised her how easily she had become Melanie Cheung again. Melanie Jones had vanished as quickly as she’d appeared. Sometimes it seemed to Melanie as if the other her had only ever been a ghost. The real her had always been there, lurking just beneath the surface, biding her time, waiting to make her move.

  “Hi, this is Eve Owen,” said a voice on the other end of the phone. “From Beau.”

  The woman sounded cool; official, if not exactly unfriendly. “I got your e-mail. And, to be honest, I think Nancy might have given you the wrong impression.”

  “In—in what way?” Melanie’s heart was pounding.

  This probably wasn’t what she’d thought it was. Probably the woman was just calling to check some facts, but still Melanie had to resist the urge to check her reflection in the small mirror that hung on the back of her office door.

  “Well, we’re not really a group, to be honest. Or a club, or anything like that. We’re just friends, well, two of us are. And we’ve only had one meeting so far. And that wasn’t so much a meeting as a couple of cups of coffee. And one of us isn’t even a stepmom.”

  “Oh.” Melanie didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. “It’s just that Nancy—your reporter—well, she said…”

  “So I gather. Anyway, to get to the point, I’ve spoken to the others.”

  “The other members?”

  “Like I said, it’s not a club, so there are no members. But I’ve spoken to my friend Clare, and she’s spoken to Lily, who’s her sister, and we’ve decided…”

  Melanie sighed. To say this woman sounded reluctant was the understatement of the year. But if she’d learned anything from her ill-advised marriage to Simeon Jones, it was that there was no such thing as a free handbag. If something sounded too good to be true, in Melanie’s experience, it usually was.

  She was about to put the woman out of her misery, tell her not to worry, it was all a misunderstanding, when Eve spoke again. “We’re meeting next Tuesday at seven. Starbucks on Carnaby Street. Come along if you’re free. You can meet the others and we’ll, you know, see how it goes…”

  For several seconds the words didn’t sink in.

  “Unless you don’t want to?” Eve said, slightly too quickly. Her tone was part relief, part irritation.

  “No, no. I do,” said Melanie. “That’s…perfect. Just perfect. I’ll see you then.”

  Seven

  You remember Eve?”

  The small blonde girl sitting cross-legged on an old rug peered shyly through her bangs. “Hello,” she said. “I finished my book. It was good.”

  “Hello, Sophie,” Eve said. “I’m glad you liked it.”

  “Alfie hasn’t read his,” the girl said. “He says it’s Venom’s vehicle.”

  Eve smiled inside. Were small girls in some way programmed to tell tales? “That’s fine,” she said. “It can be whatever Alfie wants it to be. Where is he, anyway?”

  A thundering on the hall stairs, in no way proportionate to the size of the shoes making it, answered her question. “Eeeeve,” he shouted, launching himself into the room. “Have you bought me a present?”

  “Alfie!” Ian said.

  Eve just laughed, for there was no way she’d get caught out like that again. Alfie was easy enough to buy presents for, but then she’d have to buy presents for the other two and that meant finding something Hannah wouldn’t reject.

  “No presents this time,” she said. “It’s not a special occasion.”

  Alfie cocked his head to one side as he processed the information. “Oh,” he said. “When is a special occasion?”

  “Christmas,” Eve said, thinking on her feet. “Easter, your birthday, that sort of thing.”

  His face crumpled in confusion. “But you gave me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it wasn’t my…”

  Eve looked at Ian in panic.

  “It’s OK,” Ian said, rumpling Alfie’s hair. “That was different. That was a late present because Eve missed Easter.”

  “Oh,” Alfie seemed satisfied. “What’s for lunch?”

  “What would you like?” F
rom the way Ian asked, Eve gathered he already knew the answer.

  “Pizza!” Alfie yelled and galloped from the room, leading his imaginary army in search of a takeout menu, which, apparently, was in his bedroom.

  “Red wine? White wine? Beer? Tea?” Ian asked as he led Eve back into the hallway. At some point, its original black and white Victorian floor tiles had been lovingly restored. Eve tried not to wonder by whom.

  “White please, if you’ve got one open.”

  “What do you think?” he asked, pushing open the door to the kitchen. Sun poured through a large bay, bouncing off the white walls and giving the scrubbed pine table and cupboards a golden glow. “Like it?”

  “What’s not to like?” she gasped. Eve couldn’t imagine owning a place like this. You could fit her apartment twice into the kitchen alone. “It’s beautiful.”

  Throwing a glance over his shoulder before he pushed the door to, Ian slid his arms around her. “So are you,” he said and kissed her.

  “Daddeee!” a wail came from halfway up the stairs. Ian rolled his eyes. “Talk about timing. Take a seat,” he nodded at the old pews that lined either side of the table. “While I go and sort that out.”

  “Ian? Where’s Hannah?” Eve asked when Ian reappeared. It was less than a minute later but enough time for Eve to analyze every inch of the room’s polished terra-cotta floor, clean white walls and minimalist white china. If it hadn’t been for Sophie’s drawings stuck to the fridge and a muddy lattice of paw prints on the kitchen window, the room would have been just a little too immaculate.

  “Oh, around somewhere. In her room, probably.” Ian shrugged and stuck his head in the fridge. “Pinot Grigio all right?” But his body language was nowhere near as casual as his words, and Eve felt her confidence dim a little.

  An hour sped past. Eve and Ian laid the table, washed salad leaves and mixed olive oil and vinegar to make dressing, while Alfie and Sophie skittered in and out. From Sophie, Eve learned that the paw prints outside the window belonged to the cat next door. From Alfie, she learned that Spider-Man beat Venom every time.

  As Ian chatted about photographing some up-and-coming artist, about Alfie’s school, about his occasional problems with Inge, the new au pair, Eve dared to let herself hope there might be other Saturday lunchtimes like this.

  Sunday lunchtimes as well. Maybe a Saturday night in the middle, too.

  “So, what d’you like?” Ian asked, shoving Alfie’s tattered take-away menu into her hand and interrupting a reverie that had included Ian, shirt undone, jeans, bare feet, making fresh coffee and toast some Sunday morning.

  “Oh,” Eve jumped, feeling caught out. “Anything. Really. Just get what you usually would.”

  “Now that’s reckless.” He grinned. “In this house that could mean tuna with bacon bits and pineapple…I’d better go see what Hannah wants. It changes from week to week.”

  Letting her hand drop, he pulled open the kitchen door. “Oh!” he said, but recovered quickly. “Hannah. How long have you…I mean, I didn’t realize you were there.”

  When Hannah stepped into the room, Eve resisted the urge to shiver; she could have sworn the sunshine had dimmed and the temperature had dropped a degree or two. The girl’s long, fair hair hung loose, and the white shirt she wore over her jeans looked vintage, but more granny’s attic—or even grandpa’s—than charity shop.

  “Not long,” Hannah said, glancing at Eve. Eve saw the girl give her outfit a cursory one-two. “I was coming to say hello, but I wasn’t sure if it was OK to interrupt.”

  “There’s nothing to interrupt,” Ian said levelly. “You remember Eve, of course.”

  “Hi, Hannah,” Eve said. “I love your shirt.”

  “This?” Hannah shrugged. “It was grandpa’s.”

  “It’s lovely,” Eve said, meaning it, but the girl had already turned away.

  “I hope you haven’t phoned yet,” she said to her father. “I want to change my usual order.”

  The pizzas were from Domino’s, the ice cream was Ben & Jerry’s, the washing up was virtually zero and, somehow, the kitchen still looked as if a hurricane had hit it. Hurricane Alfie. The polar opposite of Hannah, who perched at the far end of the table, in the opposite pew, speaking only when spoken to; she was like a cold front that hadn’t quite decided whether or not it was going to blow in.

  And even though she had changed her pizza order three times—the last after Ian had placed the order—Eve couldn’t help but notice that Hannah ate almost nothing.

  None of your business, Eve told herself. And since no one else seemed to notice, let alone comment, she helped herself to another slice of vegetarian supreme with jalapeños, sipped her Pinot Grigio and watched Ian juggle Sophie and Alfie’s constant demands. She’d never seen this side of him before—this side of any man, come to think of it, since in her thirty-two years she’d never before dated a man with children, and the only other man in her life, her father, just wasn’t that kind of dad.

  “Alfie, drink your juice. No, no cola, you know you’re not allowed cola.

  “Makes him even more hyper than usual.” This as an aside to Eve.

  “Sophie, wipe the tomato sauce off your hands before taking dessert. Chocolate or vanilla ice cream? No, we don’t have strawberry…because you said chocolate when I did the order.”

  It was an endless litany, and Eve was surprised to find she loved it. And if she looked up occasionally to see Hannah watching her from under her hair, well, that was only to be expected, wasn’t it?

  “Well, I think we can call that a success, don’t you?” Ian said when the pizza boxes were in the recycling bin, the plates were in the dishwasher, Alfie and Sophie were in front of a DVD, and Hannah was wherever Hannah went doing whatever Hannah did. He emptied the remnants of the bottle into Eve’s glass.

  “Really?”

  Ian slid into the pew beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and leaning back against the wall. He looked as exhausted as she felt. “You don’t think so?”

  Eve wasn’t sure how truthful she could be. “We-ell,” she said. “I was glad just to survive, to be honest.”

  “You did more than survive,” Ian said, pulling her toward him. “You were brilliant. They really like you.”

  Eve leaned into him and closed her eyes. He was right, of course. It had gone much better than she’d feared, give or take Hannah’s silence, although even that could have been worse. But still Eve was exhausted. She’d only been there three hours and didn’t think she’d ever been so emotionally drained. How anyone did it full-time—even with “help”—she couldn’t begin to imagine. Maybe it was different if the children were your own; maybe some switch in the brain was automatically flicked. That was what Clare always said. But Eve wasn’t convinced.

  When she opened her eyes Ian was gazing right at her, as if trying to decipher her thoughts. He looked almost shy.

  “Do you think you could survive longer?” he asked.

  Instinctively, Eve glanced at her watch. “Why not? I haven’t got anywhere else to go.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” He paused, his nerves getting the better of him. “I meant, could you survive longer than a Saturday afternoon…a week, maybe? Or just a few days if a week’s too long? It’s just we’re going to my parents’ place in Cornwall for a couple of weeks in August, and I thought it would be a good opportunity for you to spend more time with the kids. And me, of course.”

  He smiled.

  “And, erm…if you’d like to, at the same time, I mean…I’d like you to meet my parents.”

  Melanie Cheung hadn’t been this nervous since her first date with Simeon, maybe even before then. Shaking the thought from her mind, she tried on and promptly discarded another outfit, before reverting to wide-leg jeans, smock top and flats. Exactly what she’d have put on if she hadn’t been thinking about it at all.

  And certainly no date with Vince had ever engendered this sense of excitement or dread. Theirs wasn’t that kin
d of relationship. This was no bad thing; she didn’t want it to be that kind of relationship. Stomach-churning excitement was not part of her plan right now. Easy and comfortable was what Melanie needed. Someone to chat about the day’s work and watch DVDs with—and it was what she’d had, until Vince had dropped his ten-year-old daughter on her.

  You look just fine, Melanie told herself as she knotted her shiny black hair at the back of her head, slicked on lip balm and grabbed her jacket. Better than fine.

  If she messed around any longer, she’d be late. And she didn’t want to give the other women—the group, the club, whatever they were—any excuses to reject her. They had enough already, given that she hadn’t yet met the child she was going there to talk about.

  C’mon, Melanie, she thought as she ran down the stairs, pulled the door to behind her, and stuck her arm out at a black cab, which sped straight past. Chase down your inner lawyer.

  She had managed it the day she’d done her presentation to the private equity firm that had agreed to help finance personalshopper.com. That had taken reserves of guts she’d forgotten she had since moving to London. As had pressing Send on her e-mail to Eve Owen, Beau’s features director, inviting herself to the next Other Mothers’ Club meeting. She could manage it now.

  Another cab passed without a light on, and then another.

  Shit, now she really was going to be late. If she walked really fast she could be there—covered in sweat, but there—in about twenty minutes, maybe thirty. The subway, on the other hand, would take a fraction of that; signal failure, overcrowding and bodies on the line permitting. Melanie hated the London subway, just as she’d hated the subway in Manhattan. It was hot, stuffy, dirty and crowded, especially at this time of the day, the tail end of rush hour. But Kings Cross to Oxford Circus was ten minutes on the Victoria line, and since ten minutes was as long as she had, she headed underground anyway.