Supper, a quick update of her blog, and then bed. Nothing more complicated than that, she hoped.
The bicycle bell resumed within seconds. Huffily, Eve dragged her cell phone from her pocket and was surprised to see Clare’s number on the screen for the first time in weeks. Eve had been feeling bad about that. Before Ian, she’d spoken to Clare if not every day, then every other. Now they sometimes went whole weeks without speaking. In fact, they hadn’t been in touch, give or take the odd text message or cursory e-mail, since the last meeting of the club.
And Eve knew she’d been a bad friend to Clare lately. Precisely the kind teenage magazines used to run articles about—probably still did. Every girl knew no boy ever came between real friends. But this was different. This was Ian—The One—and unfortunately The One came with baggage. Industrial quantities of the stuff.
“Hello stranger,” Eve said. “What’s up?”
Nothing came down the line but static and traffic. Glancing at the screen, Eve checked to see that Clare’s name was still there, lit a sickly shade of green. Perhaps her friend had sat on her phone and it had just dialed the last number in its memory.
“Clare? Are you there?”
“Eve?”
Eve could just make out her friend’s voice over the sounds of traffic coming from both ends. Traffic and something else. It was the sound of sobbing, the hysterical gasping for breath of someone who’d been crying so hard they could hardly speak. Panic gripped her.
“Clare? What’s happened? Is Lou OK?”
“Yes…Lou’s…fine…”
Thank God. “What is it then, are you OK? Are you ill?”
“It’s Will…”
“What about him?” Clare hadn’t mentioned Will since she’d received that letter at the end of summer, and that had been months ago. Eve had been so absorbed in her own dramas that she’d just assumed that no news was good news.
“Will’s come back. He wants…He wants…Lou.”
“What?” Disbelief mingled with outrage. “He wants to take her away from you? That’s ridiculous.”
“No, no…” There was another pause while Eve heard Clare take a deep breath. “I’ve just seen him and he means it, Eve. I know he does. He’s determined to see her whether I like it or not. I know him. He’ll just come around to the apartment and knock on the door if he has to.”
The knot in Eve’s chest loosened itself a little. This was bad, but not as bad as she’d first thought. Then it dawned on her. “You’ve seen him?” she said. “I mean, actually seen him? When? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Hold on, hold on.” On the other end of the line, Eve could hear Clare struggling to regain her composure. “I didn’t know what to do. He kept phoning and then he threatened to come around to the apartment if I didn’t agree to meet him.”
Eve was horrified. “He threatened you? Why didn’t you say? I could have come with you. We could have told the police. We…”
“No, we couldn’t. And I didn’t mean it like that, not threatened. Not violence. Although I just threatened him if he goes anywhere near Lou.”
“Clare.”
“His name’s not on her birth certificate. He has no rights.”
Eve kept her silence.
“So, no…,” Clare was saying, “he didn’t threaten me. This is Will we’re talking about, remember? I mean he threatened to talk to Lou without my permission. Anyway, I’m not being funny, but when would I have told you? You’ve got enough on your plate right now. You don’t need my problems too.”
Eve was impressed. Clare had gone from hysterical to back together in a matter of minutes. Nearly fifteen years of coping clearly did that for you.
She glanced at her watch and hated herself for doing it. Bad friend. Bad, bad friend.
It was six fifteen. Barring a subway disaster, she would still make it back to Ian’s in time. But there was Clare, plus Lou. And they were practically, if not literally, family.
Clare needed her. She’d seen Eve through some rough times. Whenever Eve had needed a shoulder, Clare had been there. Now it was payback time. Ian would understand. He’d have to.
“Where are you?” Eve asked. “I’ll come and take you home.”
“Don’t be silly, I’m nearly at Euston.”
But Eve could hear the hesitation in Clare’s voice. She knew her friend was tempted.
“Honestly, I’ll jump in a cab and be with you in no time.” Eve cast around, but there was not an orange taxi light in sight. Never was when the heavens opened and you needed one.
“No need, honestly. I’m fine now.” Clare sounded anything but. “I’m almost at the station anyway, and I promised Lou I’d be back by half six. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Of course you should.” Eve hoped her relief wasn’t obvious. She would have gone to Clare without question. They’d always sworn they wouldn’t let a mere man come between them, toasting the promise to make it binding. But Eve was grateful not to have to make that call. Nor the one to Ian telling him his big family night in was canceled.
“What are you going to do?” Eve asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing. For now.”
“Nothing?” Eve sounded as skeptical as she felt. “Doesn’t sound like nothing’s an option, to me.”
“Nuh-huh.”
“OK,” said Eve, snapping into work mode. “How hardball are you prepared to play it?”
“Pardon?”
“How tough do you want to be?”
“I’m not sure now…”
“Tough enough to deny that Lou is his? Tell him you need DNA tests before you let him anywhere near her?”
“Eve…”
“Well, that answered that one.”
“He was my first,” Clare said. “I thought he was going to be my only…” She was crying again.
“Sorry,” Eve said. “I just needed to know how dirty you were prepared to play it to keep him away from Lou.”
“Not that dirty,” Clare said, hiccupping. She was back in control.
“How did you leave it?”
“I’ve got Will’s cell phone number. He’s got mine. He’ll call me if I don’t call him.
“I know, I know,” she said, anticipating Eve’s comment. “But at least this way I’ll know when it’s him and I know Lou won’t answer it.”
“Will you call him?”
“What do you think?” The sadness in Clare’s voice was unbearable. The question was rhetorical, but Eve answered it anyway.
“I think you haven’t got any choice, my love,” she said.
Nineteen
She was late, but only by fifteen minutes. Not late enough to require UN intervention.
“Tubes, rain, Clare, in no particular order,” Eve muttered as she hurried into the kitchen, thrust the profiterole pyramid, its box now soggy from the rain, into the fridge in the vain hope it hadn’t already collapsed, and hugged Alfie, Sophie and Ian in quick succession.
“Clare…?”
“Tell you later.”
The kitchen was warm and welcoming. Exactly as it would have been in Eve’s fantasies, if she’d ever had those kinds of “comfortable kitchen/bubbling pots on the stove” fantasies. The windows were hidden by steam from an enormous saucepan of chilli; the table was laid with glasses, plates and forks, bowls of tortilla chips and a stack of tacos and enchiladas. Alfie was in his pajamas, Sophie was still in her school uniform. Only Hannah was missing, and Eve tried not to wonder what that meant.
“Upstairs,” Ian said, reading her mind. “On her cell phone…just for a change. Thank God it’s pay-as-you-go and when it’s gone it’s gone until next month.” He grinned to show it was no big deal, everything was going to plan. “I told her to come down whenever she’s ready.”
And what if she’s not? Eve wanted to ask. But she knew the answer. If she’s not, we leave her there. Those were the new rules.
“Inge?” Eve asked, lifting an already open bottle of Rioja off the table and waving it a
t Ian.
“Please,” he said. “She’s out, with the au pair posse.”
Eve poured a glass of wine and took it to him, sneaking in a hug as she did so. Ian let go of the wooden spoon he’d been using to stir the chilli and wrapped both arms around her. “Love you,” he whispered into her hair.
“Cuddle! Cuddle!” Alfie shrieked, dropping his plastic men onto the table and throwing himself at their legs.
A stupid grin broke across Eve’s face as the small boy locked his arms around them. Sophie slid down from the table and came to lean against them; not hugging, but close enough. Reaching down, Ian tousled his younger daughter’s hair. For a moment Eve forgot Hannah and felt at peace. They’d done it. They’d gotten through their first crisis as a proper couple and come out the other side in one piece, more or less.
Then she thought of Clare, her carefully constructed existence—a Jenga built from sheer force of will, hard slog and determination—shattered by the whim of a man who’d turned his back on her almost fifteen years ago.
Eve felt both incredibly fortunate and terribly, terribly guilty.
Three hours later the steam and the rich, dark scent of chilli still lingered in the warm kitchen, where Eve sat typing on her laptop.
“Work,” she’d said, swinging her feet off Ian’s lap as he’d settled in to watch Newsnight. “Just going to catch up on a few e-mails.”
He’d nodded distractedly and squeezed her hand. “Put the kettle on while you’re in there, will you?”
Eve did check her e-mails first, so it wasn’t a lie, exactly. She wasn’t sure why she still hadn’t told Ian about the blog. Why she hadn’t, in fact, told anyone. Apart from the obvious. An anonymous blog was meant to be anonymous. Telling him, telling anyone, would defeat the object.
Just scratch the surface, Eve thought, logging on and waiting for her page to download. The broadband was slow tonight.
Nobody went around announcing that they were a stepmother. As if. Hi, my name’s Eve and I’m a stepmother….
It wasn’t as if it was anything to be ashamed of, or even that unusual anymore, but still, it didn’t seem to be something most stepmothers spoke about in polite company. Yet the minute you announced you were one, the stories came flooding out.
Now every time Eve logged on there were new comments. Some from the few regulars whose names she’d begun to recognize, but more and more from first-time visitors every day.
And then there were the hits.
She held her breath and looked at the counter. The first time Eve had worked out where the information was, there had only been twenty or so hits. Women, she’d assumed, who’d stumbled across her blog by accident. Then, what had literally seemed like overnight, several other blogs and a couple of the “Blended Family” sites had fixed inbound links to her, and the number of hits had started rising. One thousand six hundred and thirty-seven. Even higher than last time. Half of the returning traffic, Eve suspected, was to read each other’s comments, rather than her posts, which she only updated a couple of times a week at the most.
Eve hadn’t expected her blog to take off in the way it had. Of course, she’d fantasized about there being thousands of women out there like her, all looking for advice and support, and ways to blow off steam about their partners, their partners’ exes, their partners’ children. She hadn’t realized it was actually the case until the comments had started coming thick and fast.
At first it had been exhilarating. Now it was terrifying. Her own personal Frankenstein’s monster.
It was cathartic enough, but private was the last word she could use to describe what thereluctantstepmother had become. The other day it had even been name-checked in “Sidelines” on the Guardian’s women’s page, spotted and picked up by a journalist who was also a stepmother.
And the fact that she was writing a blog that was being read by thousands of people every week was hardly something to drop, cold, into conversation—even if you were getting on well, which they hadn’t been. Oh, by the way Ian. You know that blog in the paper? Thereluctantstepmother? Well, that’s me. No, didn’t think to mention it sooner…slipped my mind.
And so she still hadn’t told him.
Or anyone else for that matter. Not even the OMC.
But the mention in “Sidelines” had changed things. Miriam had seen it, and now she was on Eve’s case. The editor wanted an article on stepmothers for the next issue of Beau, and she wanted it hung around this blog. Eve being one herself, Miriam had announced, made her the perfect person to write it.
Eve’s first task was to track down the author.
If only Miriam knew.
Thank God she didn’t.
Miriam would have outed Eve in Beau before you could say “exclusive.”
Eve shuddered. It didn’t bear thinking about, so she opened a blank frame and began to type. She was looking forward to writing tonight’s entry. An upbeat one, for a change. How that would go down she wasn’t sure. Eve suspected some of her readers would be less than thrilled. The bad news crew, as she thought of them, only wanted to hear that someone else was having a worse time than they were. It made them feel better about their own situation.
They were cut from the same cloth as the readers who only liked gossip mags when they were slagging off celebrities: sweaty armpits and cellulite, broken marriages and rehab. See, you could be famous and a wreck. Life could be much worse.
But one regular, a woman calling herself Bella, would be delighted.
As far as Eve could tell from the little Bella had given away about herself in the comments she’d left, Bella was a bit older than most of the other visitors to the site. Her stepchildren were grown up, for a start, and the few experiences Bella described sounded very much in the past. Like Mandy, she’d advised Eve to give both herself and her eldest stepdaughter a break and leave her to her own devices. For a while, Eve had even wondered if Bella was Mandy, but her posts were all about taking on someone else’s kids, not blending another family into your own.
With Herculean effort Eve had heeded the advice, and she wanted them to know it. At dinner, Hannah had taken ten minutes to eat precisely two tortilla chips, then pushed a single tablespoon of chilli around, smearing it like a dark red glaze across her white plate, and Eve had let it sail over her head.
The supper had gone without a hitch.
It had been weeks since she had seen Ian looking so happy. Poor Ian, he must have felt as if he’d had four children this past month. Eve had been so busy wondering what she’d gotten herself into that it hadn’t occurred to her that Ian must have been feeling the same.
As she’d expected, there was a post from Bella near the top of that day’s comments. And it was, like most of Bella’s comments, brutal in the honesty Bella applied to herself.
I’ve been thinking about you, it started. Thinking that the differences in our situations are so much greater than the similarities, and wondering how I dared give you advice. For a start, I can see now that regardless of how brattish my stepchildren were—and one of them was quite, quite vile—I have only myself to blame.
Back then, I was selfishness personified. (Still am, but at least these days I tend not to inflict myself on other people!) You moved in with a man and found yourself a full-time stepmother to his three children, knowing right from the start that they were to be your new family. That was nonnegotiable, from the sound of things. Take it or leave it, and you took it.
I never factored my ex-husband’s children into the equation. I met him, fell in love with him; his children from his first marriage were obstacles to be gotten around. I understand that now, but I can’t tell you how hard it is to put it down in black-and-white. I didn’t want his ex’s children messing up my nice, neat life. I thought we’d have a family of our own one day, and that would be enough.
Turned out we didn’t, but that’s another story.
You’re already streets ahead of me. You are trying (too hard, dare I say?) to be a good stepmother. I was
never even prepared to try.
Eve read the post again, fascinated by this mea culpa. She was desperate to know more. Was Bella’s situation irredeemable?
Beneath Bella’s post was a shorter comment from Amiamug123.
It may be none of my business, Bella, but where was the steps’ father when all this was going on? He didn’t have to go along with you. He could have just said, “They’re my kids, take it or leave it.” It’s that whole wicked stepmother conspiracy again. Think about it, if Cinderella’s father had stood up for her, would Cinderella have ended up in rags, sweeping out ash from the hearth and waiting on her big-footed stepsisters? Forget the stepmother for a moment. What kind of father allows someone to treat his daughter like that? I mean, really!
Bella had already responded, less than half an hour earlier.
You’re right, of course. My ex was weak. He should have stood up to me. Who knows what would have happened if he had? Maybe our marriage would have collapsed sooner than it did. Maybe it would have improved. And, today, I’d be the proud stepgranny to a wonderful extended family. Who knows? Better not to linger on what might have been and never was, I find. Either way, the blame is still mine. I tried to mold his children to fit my life, and when they wouldn’t be molded, I told him it was them or me, knowing full-well he’d choose me. And then our marriage fell apart anyway. I dread to think what they think of me now they’re adults, but I doubt it could be broadcast before the 9:00 p.m. watershed.
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