The Other Mothers' Club

by Samantha Baker

  Through sheer force of will, Clare had held back the retorts that had flooded the tip of her tongue. Just as she’d held back when the doorbell had rung and the living-room window had drawn her like a magnet. Instead, she’d kissed her daughter good-bye, tried not to hug her too hard and turned and walked in the opposite direction. In her bedroom, Clare dragged out her box of old notebooks, just as she had every time since Will’s first visit.

  Old notebooks, and photographs (those hurt). A photobooth snapshot of Clare and Will with a dozen drawing-pin holes in one corner and a Blu-Tack map on the back. And notes, pages and pages of notes. And something that might have been a chapter breakdown for a novel, if you stretched your imagination.

  Reading through her diaries, it was hard to tell when her life had started to go awry. Was it really all Will’s fault, or had things soured before that? When her father had left them for the stepmonster? Left them, and then left them again, for good? Or even before that? When Lily was born? The Elastoplast baby that wouldn’t stick. If Elastoplast babies even existed then. Of course they did, Elastoplast babies had always existed.

  No, Clare decided. If there was one person who could not be blamed for the mess of Clare’s life, it was Lily. Annabel was a much more obvious culprit. But it was only thanks to the club that Clare was beginning to see her father’s culpability in all this. She would no more blame Eve for Ian’s decisions than she would Lily for Liam’s messes. So why was everything Annabel’s fault? Because it was easier to blame a woman she’d only met twice than a man who was meant to love her, unconditionally?

  The apartment still felt weird without Lou, but Clare was surprised to find she was slowly getting used to it. It was almost as if the apartment knew Lou would not be back tonight and had closed in protectively around her mother.

  Finding a scrap of paper, Clare noted the thought down.

  This was the sixth time Lou had seen her father, but it was the first overnight visit. Not the first night she’d ever spent away from her mother, but somehow this felt different from her other sleep-overs. This time Clare felt truly alone.

  As a miniature act of rebellion, the ten pounds usually spent on pizza had gone instead on a bottle of Chablis. A scandalous extravagance, but one Clare felt she’d earned. She’d made a mushroom risotto to go with it—ordinary mushrooms but Arborio rice—and now she was sitting in her usual chair at the kitchen table with the decades-old notebooks in front of her. Beside them sat another notebook. Far newer, blue and spiral bound. The first half now filled with her neat, child-legible teacher’s handwriting. It was part fiction, part concealed memoir. Although, inevitably, the parts that were fictionalized were far greater. It was the seventeen-year-old revealed to Clare through the pages of her diary that stirred her interest. The young woman, she was astonished to realize, she’d once been. Strong-willed and passionate, full of hope and dreams. Not the woman she’d turned into, sitting with a pile of old diaries in a walk-up north London apartment. A woman whose dreams had been shattered by the decisions that seventeen-year-old had made.

  Lou didn’t know about her mother’s novel-writing ambitions. Would probably never know, since, once written, Clare’s novel was likely to languish on a publisher’s slush pile. Most did. And then only if Clare summoned the nerve to send it out at all. And that was the way Clare wanted to keep it. The girl would only laugh at her middle-aged mother’s delusions. That was how it was. Clare saw it every day at school. Only the young were allowed ambition. As far as her pupils were concerned, once past thirty you might as well be dead.

  “You?! A writer?!”

  Clare could picture Lou’s howl of derision now.

  And of all the things that Clare had had to bear over the last six months—things she’d believed she couldn’t—her daughter’s scorn was the one she was pretty sure she really couldn’t. She couldn’t stand that.

  An attack of cramp spasmed through her right hand, forcing Clare to put down her pen. She filled the kettle and made herself a coffee, then went to stand in the bay window. Watching the human traffic of a January Sunday, she plotted the second chapter in her head. The one where a seventeen-year-old girl tells her first love she’s pregnant and discovers they don’t share the same dreams after all.

  The growl of Will’s engine had grown familiar over the past few weeks. Its hum interrupted her reverie, and she took a step back just as a dark-blue Audi stopped a few doors up, on the far side of the street.

  Don’t look, she told herself. You’ll only regret it. Go back to the kitchen and clear away the notebooks.

  It was true, on both counts.

  Across the street, the Audi’s far-side doors had been flung open and Lou and Will emerged. Clare winced as Lou flung herself at her father and for a moment he lifted her off her feet. Then, too late, she noticed a near-side door had opened too.

  Clare froze.

  Louisa and Will were not alone.

  It was hard to tell at that distance, but it looked as if two small dark heads bobbed in the rear seat. Clare took another step back. From where she stood, she could see but not be seen.

  Snooping, Lou would say, sneaking through my things.

  In this case, Lou’s life. But Clare couldn’t help it. Transfixed, like sitting up late into the night watching a horror film she knew would guarantee her a sleepless night, but unable to turn it off, she watched as slim denim-clad legs emerged from the car. It was too far for Clare to be able to see the woman’s face clearly, but from where Clare stood everything looked as if it was in the right place—dark eyes, broad smile, dark hair tossed effortlessly into a knot at the back of her head.

  Effortless was the word, Clare decided. Effortless was something she’d never been able to pull off. You had to have money to do effortless.

  “Masochist,” she muttered. “No one’s making you do this.”

  But she kept looking anyway. Taking in every inch of the woman Will had married, the woman who had borne the children he did want. The woman who, Clare could see now, was not, and probably never would have been, her. Not in this life, at least.

  When Lou’s footsteps echoed up the stairs and the door slammed, Clare was back at the kitchen table, her old school notebooks replaced with a pile of marking.

  “Hello, my love,” she said as Lou bounded into the kitchen. “Did you have a good time?”

  She needn’t have asked. Lou was beaming widely.

  The fact that Lou had come to the kitchen at all, rather than heading straight for her bedroom, told Clare all she needed to know. For three months their relationship had been all scowls and slammed doors, the trust that had been the linchpin of their little family destroyed when Will had come back into it. Three months and they still hadn’t been able to stick themselves back together. Clare felt such a perverse mixture of emotions that she hardly knew where to start. But above all she felt guilty…guilty for wishing her daughter had had a bad time.

  “Brilliant,” Lou said, pulling out the other chair. She flung herself onto it and began gabbling. “Dad’s house is so great, Mom. You should see it. It has four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a downstairs bathroom, and the kitchen and sitting room are open plan, like one enormous room. And there’s a huge garden. It’s messy though, because there are trikes and pedal cars, and a jungle gym for Bobby, and the house is full of toys and diapers and kids’ stuff.

  “Diapers, yeuch!” She made a face, and Clare reached out to flip her bangs out of her eyes. Lou let her. It was the closest she’d come to real affection since Will had walked back into their lives.

  “And Bobby and Katie are cute. It’s great having a brother and sister…sort of,” she added, throwing a nervous look in Clare’s direction.

  Clare forced herself to smile reassuringly.

  “And Suzanne is really cool. We just hung out and talked when Dad had a bit of work to do, and Suzanne said I can decorate the spare room any way I want so it’s really mine…”

  As she took a breath, her gaze fell on the
pile of homework on the table.

  “Mo-om,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You haven’t been doing that the whole time I’ve been gone, have you?”

  “Of course not,” Clare said, torn between relief that the litany of fabulousness had finished and gratitude that her old Lou was back, if for all the wrong reasons. “I do have a life, you know.”

  Lou rolled her eyes again.

  They both knew that was not remotely true.

  “So,” Clare said carefully. “Suzanne’s all right, then?”

  Lou eyed her mother as if trying to gauge whether she really wanted the answer. Then she launched into it anyway. “Suzanne’s great,” Lou said. “She’s young and cool. She has great clothes and says I can borrow them when I’m a bit older. Although I’m already taller than her so they’re never gonna fit! She’s nowhere near as tall as Dad and me. Suzanne said we could go shopping next time. So I’ve got stuff there instead of you having to keep packing and unpacking…”

  As Lou rambled on, listing her replacement’s many assets, Clare made herself zone out. Slowly she counted down from ten, and then from fifty, trying to suppress the panic that rose inside her. She’d never felt so threatened in her life.

  Not even when that first letter from Will had arrived.

  Not even when he had called and called, and had kept calling.

  Not even when Lou had gone on and on about how brilliant Eve was and how fun and how much cooler than Clare she was, had Clare felt like everything she had worked for and loved and nurtured could be taken away so easily.

  Lou had found her father, and now she’d found a new mother too. Two for the price of one. Both really great.

  Clare was redundant. There was no other word for it.

  This was not how it was meant to be. Clare knew all about stepmothers. After all, she’d had one herself, briefly. They were A Bad Thing. Lou wasn’t meant to like her stepmonster, and the woman was certainly not meant to like her back. Lou was meant to hate her, resent her and despise her. She was meant to see Suzanne as an obstacle in her relationship with her newly discovered father, not an added bonus.

  Clare knew she was a bad person, but she’d thought, hoped even, that Lou would come back bursting with bile and resentment at her father’s wife. That her father’s wife would want this five-feet-six army-surplus-clad evidence of her husband’s past out of her cozy middle-class life as rapidly as she had entered it.

  But this…this Clare had not anticipated. Lou was even more enthusiastic about Suzanne than she was about Eve, and that was saying something.

  “So can I, Mom?” Lou demanded.

  “Can you what?”

  “Were you even listening?” Lou was on her feet now, hands on hips. Like Lily. Like Clare. The flash of an Adams family mannerism reassured her, and Clare grinned at her feisty daughter.

  “Of course I was listening.”

  “Then what was I saying?”

  “You were telling me how fabulous your dad’s wife is.” Her voice was light, but she wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all herself.

  “Ha!” said Lou. “That was at least five minutes ago. I was asking if I could go stay with my new family the weekend after next.”

  Clare’s smile slipped. Catching it, she super-glued it back on.

  “Dad’s working Friday,” Lou continued, “but he said, if it’s all right with you, Suzanne could pick me up after school and he’ll bring me back on Sunday after lunch.”

  The eagerness on Lou’s face was agony to Clare. Her daughter was alight with anticipation. There was no way she could bring herself to snuff it out.

  “I’ll have to talk to your father,” Clare said carefully.

  “No need! It’s cool with Dad. He suggested it. So can I call him to say it’s OK? Can I? Please…”

  Since when had Lou begun using please?

  “You’ve only just got back,” Clare protested. “Give the poor man some peace.” But her heart wasn’t in it. After weeks of hostile truce, her Lou was back, and Clare couldn’t bring herself to push her away again. “If you must…”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Lou said, flinging her arms around Clare’s neck and hugging her. It was very Lou. But this Lou hadn’t been living with her for months. “I’ll go and call Dad.”

  Only when her daughter bounded out of the room and up the hall did Clare let her smile and her head drop. As her forehead landed on the table, she noticed that she’d doodled in the margin of the homework she’d started marking when Lou had come in.

  Get a life.

  Thirty-one

  January was bleak at the best of times. No one really wanted to be at work. Miriam, Beau’s editor, was in a foul mood about print slots, budget cuts and wobbling advertisers, and half the junior staff was off with stomach flu. Miriam kept demanding they come in anyway. Eve wished they wouldn’t. If they did, she was pretty sure, they’d only infect the rest of the office. And she still hadn’t told Ian.

  The last two weeks had felt like the longest of Eve’s life. Constantly surrounded by people, the staff at the office, Ian’s children at home, she didn’t think she’d ever been this lonely. Hannah was still not speaking to her, which meant that Sophie, while friendly when her big sister wasn’t around, instantly closed down the second Hannah appeared. Which wasn’t often, since Hannah was refusing to be in any room that had Eve in it. She was working an effective line in walking out as soon as Eve walked in, whether she was mid-sentence, midforkful, midanything. The effect could be dramatic. In a different life, Eve might even have been impressed.

  It didn’t help that Hannah was making a show of having forgiven her father. And Ian, to Eve’s disgust, had let her. Even the grounding had been reduced to a measly fortnight. Apparently, they hadn’t had groundings at all before Eve had arrived.

  To Eve’s mind things were right back to where they’d been in the autumn. Eve against the Newsome world, with the honorable exception of Alfie, who immersed himself in his toys, demanded bedtime stories and generally made her long evenings endurable.

  But it wasn’t just Hannah. It was Bella.

  Bella had vanished. Eve had had no idea how dependent she’d become on the woman’s nightly posts until they’d stopped appearing. E-mails, comments, messaging, Eve had tried everything she’d been able to think of, eventually resorting to appealing to Bella directly on thereluctantstepmother.com. Plenty of other regular posters had responded, but there had been no sign of Bella.

  Eve had to admit it. Bella was gone.

  At least there was still Clare, always had been. But, just as Clare had always been there, so there had always been a small part of herself that Eve kept hidden from her best friend. A few details of her life she’d never shared. And the fact that she’d discovered Bella only to lose her again added to their number. Eve felt guilty and confused. Once she had even picked up the phone intending to tell Clare everything. Well, almost everything. (You see, I was e-mailing Annabel…yes, that Annabel…and she’s not so bad…you’d like her…you should give her a chance.)

  Yeah, right. Some things were too much. But Clare had been so grateful to hear Eve’s voice that she’d forgotten to ask why Eve was calling. Ending up, instead, telling Eve all about Lou’s “new family,” her “so cool and so fun stepmother.”

  “She adores the woman,” Clare said wryly. “She thinks she walks on water.”

  Lucky Suzanne, Eve wanted to say, but didn’t. Getting warm, loving, smart, feisty Lou as a stepdaughter rather than the spoiled blonde brat with a chip the size of Poland that Eve was lumbered with.

  And then there were the pregnancy tests. Boots had experienced an unexpected spike in sales in January, Eve had bought so many of them. Bought them, sneaked them to the bathroom on the executive floor, then hidden the incriminating evidence in a sanitary disposal bin. In an office full of women, no one would ever trace them back to her.

  But, just like the first time she’d been pregnant, no matter how many times she did the test, it always came back the
same. Positive.

  And, just like the first time, now all she felt was dread.

  Gone was the surge of euphoria that had shot through her on Boxing Day when she’d realized her period might be more than just tardy; it was replaced by a hollow emptiness when she wondered how to tell Ian. If only she’d told him sooner. If only she’d told him at New Year’s, when some remains of festive spirit still mellowed the atmosphere between them. Too late now.

  Instead she had another If only for her collection.

  “You sure know how to show a guy a good time,” Ian said when Eve crossed the road toward him carrying two polystyrene coffee cups and a white paper sandwich bag. “When you said meet me for lunch, I thought you had something more glamorous in mind.”

  “What could possibly be more glamorous than a picnic in Hyde Park in January?” Eve said. She smiled and stretched up to peck him on the lips, a small bud of hope flowering inside her when he kissed her back. “Here.” She handed him a cup. “I can’t vouch for the coffee, but at least it will keep your hands warm.”

  They strolled in something approaching companionable silence across Park Lane, past Speakers’ Corner and into the park, their feet crunching the frost-tipped grass.

  Companionable. Well, it was an improvement on uncomfortable, chilly or downright frosty. All more apt descriptions of the atmosphere between them over the past couple of weeks. But still, companionable was hardly ideal for a couple expecting their first baby.

  “Panini?”

  “Eve…?”

  They spoke in unison, and both laughed. “Yes,” they both said.

  “I’m sorry, it’s a fucking mess,” Ian said. “It’s not your fault. I should have made the decision myself, not asked you to make it for me.” He ran one hand over his cropped hair. “I was going to let Hannah do it, you know that, don’t you?”

  No, Eve wasn’t sure she did.

  “Such a mess,” Ian said.