The Other Mothers' Club

by Samantha Baker

  Lily nodded.

  Her sister looked thin, Clare thought, and not fashionably so. More the hollowness that came from sleepless nights and endless rows. Too late, Clare wondered when Liam’s ex’s wedding was, and if Siobhan was really planning to move Rosie to Manchester. To judge by the shadows circling Lily’s eyes, Clare guessed she was. Opening her mouth to ask, Clare stopped. Not tonight. Tonight was not open season on the OMC’s problems. Tonight, Eve’s problems surmounted theirs. That’s what friends were for, after all. Being there when you needed them. Telling you harsh truths when you didn’t want to hear them. And picking up the pieces afterwards. No wonder Eve had announced she wouldn’t be coming, barely a week after miscarrying.

  “She’s not anymore,” Mandy said. “Pregnant, I mean.”

  “True enough.” The sadness Clare felt was unbearable. Which was nothing, she knew, compared to how Eve was feeling. Her friend had lost her home, the man she said was the love of her life (and Eve was not a “love of her life” kind of girl). And now she’d lost her baby too. A child she’d never known how much she wanted.

  “Beside Eve’s problems, mine pale into insignificance. In fact, thanks to them. Now I think about it, I don’t think I’ve moaned about Will for weeks.”

  “Thank God,” Lily said.

  Melanie smiled.

  Clare had told the group everything, every last detail—the pregnancy, the leaving, the miscarriage and its hideous aftermath: doctors, hospitals, scans…. Clare closed her eyes to regroup. She thought the misery on Eve’s face when the scan had confirmed what she’d already known would stay with her forever…but she’d drawn the line at telling them about Eve’s abortion. She knew that without this key piece of information Ian looked heartless, but Eve’s leaving him was less understandable. She also knew it was Eve’s secret to tell. And if she chose not to tell it…

  Well, agree or disagree, it was not Clare’s decision to make.

  “So, what d’you think?” she asked, looking at the faces around her, two of whom she hadn’t even known a year ago. Clare felt comforted, almost unbearably so. This evening, she didn’t feel judged for having full-fat milk in her latte or carrying a handbag that was not just last season’s but last decade’s, as she had felt on earlier occasions. Instead, she felt accepted and supported. When push came to shove, this disparate group of women had become a family of sorts.

  Not for the first time, Clare wished Eve had felt able to come. She knew she would have been better for having her friends around her. For seeing how much they all cared about her. And none of them would have told her the harsh truths, not really. None of them would have questioned her decision to walk away instead of trying to talk it out.

  Not even Clare.

  There was a time for tough love. Now was not it.

  “So, should I do it?” Clare asked, holding first Lily’s gaze, then Mandy’s and finally Melanie’s. Their faces were serious, but each woman nodded in turn.

  “Should I risk Eve’s wrath and call Ian?”

  Thirty-three

  Whose stupid idea had this phone call been? Clare was fully aware of the answer as she waited for the staff room to empty, willing the final few stragglers to drain their cups and head off after the last lessons of the day. In the far corner a man who Clare thought was the new chemistry substitute lingered over a pile of notebooks, a wry smile twisting his mouth.

  “Davey Winstone kills me,” he said, waving a book in her direction.

  Clare jumped. Was he talking to her?

  “Sometimes I wonder if we should try introducing community service, since detention clearly cuts no ice at all.” There was no one else in the room, so she guessed he was.

  “If that’s homework, you’re one up on me,” Clare said, politeness winning out. “I can’t remember the last time Davey Winstone even pretended to do any of the work I gave him. I’ve given up trying.”

  “Really?” He looked genuinely interested.

  “Yes, really. Davey Winstone and English homework parted ways a long time ago.”

  “I’m Osman Dattu, by the way,” he said, leaving his seat. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. Except my first day, when I had as much chance of putting names to faces as getting that boy through GCSE chemistry. Although if, as you say, Winstone doesn’t even bother doing his English Lit homework, maybe there’s a chink in his ignorance. Mind you, if that chink was chemistry, it would be a first!”

  He had a surprisingly firm grip.

  “Clare Adams,” Clare said, trying not to eye the staffroom clock over his shoulder. If he didn’t push off soon, she’d have to try calling Ian on the way home, and she didn’t really want to have that particular conversation over the roar of traffic. “English Literature.”

  “I know.” He let go of her hand.

  “You know?”

  “Some names I remembered.” Dark eyes crinkled behind small glasses, and Clare noticed he had the sort of lashes she’d have committed a serious crime for as a teenager, probably still would.

  He wasn’t bad-looking now that she thought about it. Tall, six or seven inches taller than her, and broad, with thick, swept-back black hair and amused brown eyes. Neat dresser, too…he had to be about Clare’s age, give or take a year or two in either direction.

  Concentrate, you’ve got a call to make, she told herself. But her eyes still dropped to his left hand. No ring. Still, no ring didn’t mean no complications.

  Wasn’t she living proof of that?

  Having met the first challenge—finding a place to phone from without risk of Eve or Lou eavesdropping—Clare faced a second, greater challenge: finding Ian home at all. So far, her success rate was precisely zero. Four calls had turned up two answering machine requests to leave a message, one au pair and one Hannah. This time, she decided, she’d leave a message regardless of who answered.

  The phone was picked up on the second ring, before Clare even had time to consider her approach.

  “Hello?”

  Clare’s heart lurched as she heard the small boy’s voice.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Who’s speaking, please?”

  The urge to tell Alfie who she was and how much Eve missed him was so overwhelming that Clare was almost forced to hang up. Instead, she said, “Could I speak to your daddy, please?”

  There was silence, then the crash of the receiver on a table, or possibly a floor, reverberated in her ear. “Daddy!” she heard Alfie yell. “Daddy! There’s a lady on the tephelone!”

  Clare could hear the echo of footsteps on polished wood as Ian neared the phone. Yes, the receiver was definitely on the floor.

  “Did you ask who it was?”

  “I forgotted.”

  “Alfie, what did I tell you? Don’t answer the telephone if you can’t do it properly.” And then, “Hello?”

  Ian’s voice almost felled her a second time. For some reason it conjured a picture of Eve’s face on that terrible morning, barely a week earlier. A morning it made Clare feel sick just to remember. Unsure what she’d find, she had bribed a worried Lou to go to school without her shower, just to get her out of the flat, so she could coax Eve from the bathroom, missing her own first lesson in the process.

  It had taken over an hour to persuade Eve to unlock the door. And Clare didn’t think she’d ever forget the pain on Eve’s face as she’d taken in the splashes in the bath and the bloodstained towels that had formed a nest where she’d been huddled on the floor.

  Clare had no choice. She had decided. The group had decided. They were unanimous; she had to do this. Eve, fiercely independent as she was, might not agree, but she needed Clare to do this now. Clare was sure of it.

  “Ian,” she said. “It’s Clare. Eve’s friend.”

  Silence, while Clare imagined him contemplating hanging up.

  “Don’t hang up, please. Eve doesn’t know I called.”

  There was one of those silences that last mere seconds but feel like minutes, then Ian sighe
d. It could have been relief, it could have been exasperation, she couldn’t tell. “Hello,” he said finally and there was no ice in his voice, only sorrow. “How is she?”

  Clare wasn’t aware she had been holding her breath until she let it go. “Not good,” she said. “Really, really not good.”

  Enough was enough, Eve decided. Tomorrow she was going back to work.

  She had to get a grip, get back to her old routines and get on with her life. Eve had called her boss, told her everything…well, almost. And, to her surprise, Miriam had been great, amazing, actually. All right, so Miriam had pointed out that Eve should have called in a week ago, rather than simply vanishing. But she told her to take the time as compassionate leave and reminded her she was covered by the company’s health insurance. Should she need it.

  It was only after Eve had ended the call that she’d realized Miriam hadn’t been talking about doctors, who Eve had spent more than enough time with already. She’d meant if Eve needed to talk to someone. A therapist.

  Miriam was big on therapists. But Eve didn’t need an expert to tell her this was a fork in her personal road. Time to choose left or right. After all, she couldn’t just stay in Clare’s bed, where she’d been camped for an entire week, and never get out again. Even forgetting the small matter of its not being her bed, her room, or even her flat.

  By way of a dry run, Eve pulled on her dressing gown, trying to ignore the fact that it smelled less than savory, and ventured as far as the kitchen. A skinny black-jeans-clad bottom protruded from the fridge.

  “Mom, did you cook any…?” Lou looked up and her face broke into a smile. “Eve!” she cried. “You’re up! Would you like a cup of tea? You look…”

  “Awful? Fugly? Like hell?” Eve supplied.

  “What you need is a shower, a shampoo and a blow dry,” Lou said with authority. And for the first time in three weeks Eve burst out laughing.

  And then she burst into tears.

  “I was going to Amy’s to do homework,” Lou said, watching Eve hug a mug of tea. Their knees bumped and Lou instinctively tucked hers as far under the chair as she could. Her legs seemed to grow longer by the day; she was almost too tall for the tiny kitchen. “Do you want me to wait with you until Mom gets home?”

  Eve shook her head. “No thanks, sweetheart. You head off. I’m fine now, really.”

  Lou looked doubtful.

  “I promise,” Eve said. “I’m fine. See?” Standing, she did a twirl to prove it. Not easy in the space between her pushed-out chair and the stove. “And I’m going back to work tomorrow.”

  “Work? Are you sure?”

  The look on Lou’s face reminded Eve of Clare, and a small shard of pain twisted inside her. “Absolutely certain,” she said. “I need to get back to the office, find somewhere to live, get myself a life…”

  “Bu—” Lou started.

  Eve held up a hand. “Can’t stay here much longer, can I? Your poor mom’s been sleeping on her own sofa for a week and I’ve turned her bedroom into a festering swamp. You haven’t had a living room for three weeks. And your mom’s been up all night every night marking homework in the kitchen, just to get some privacy.”

  “Oh,” Lou shrugged. “Don’t worry about that. She always does that. Says she can’t concentrate if anyone else is around.”

  “Yes, she was like that at uni too. But this is different.” Eve frowned. “We’re talking all night.” She hoped Clare wasn’t taking in extra marking to make ends meet. Tomorrow she would write her a check to cover her share of the bills, plus a bit. Better still, transfer the cash straight to her account so Clare couldn’t refuse to take it.

  “Don’t know what I’d have done without the two of you,” Eve said, squeezing her not-quite-goddaughter’s hand. “You’ve both been wonderful. But you need your lives back. So let’s start with you going to Amy’s right now.”

  The phone began ringing seconds after the street door slammed shut behind Lou. As Eve had been ignoring it for the past week, there was no reason to change now. After five rings, the machine picked up, and Louisa’s flippant voice warned callers of the futility of leaving a message.

  “Eve?”

  She froze halfway between kitchen and hall, and turned to stare at the machine. It was almost as if Eve expected to see Ian standing there. It seemed an age since she’d heard his voice, but nothing had changed. Her stomach plummeted and her heart soared simultaneously.

  “Are you there?”

  A pause. “Eve, it’s me, erm, Ian. If you’re there, could you pick up?”

  Eve felt rooted to the spot. This was what she’d been waiting for; so what was stopping her from reaching for the receiver? A part of her wanted to grab it and tell Ian how much she missed him. But another, bigger part, was scared of what she might hear, scared that he’d phoned to make sure she wasn’t nursing any false hopes…hopes she hadn’t even known she still had until she heard his voice.

  Come on, she thought, what happened to facing the future head-on?

  “OK. You’re not there. I’ll try again later. Or you could call me, you know the—”

  “Hello.”

  “You’re there!”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I called your cell phone and left a message, but you didn’t answer.”

  “Did you? When?” Eve realized she hadn’t looked at her cell phone for days, not since…in fact, she wasn’t sure she even knew where her phone was.

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago.”

  “Oh, right. The battery’s probably run out.”

  “Eve…I…” He hesitated. “I don’t know what to say. I’m so, so sorry.”

  She stopped, confused. “About what, exactly?”

  “The miscarriage.”

  When Eve remained silent, he added, “Clare called me. She’s worried about you. I’m worried about you. She says all your friends are worried about you too.”

  And slowly it trickled into her grief-addled brain. Ian was calling her on Clare’s landline, which meant he knew she was staying here. All right, anyone with half a brain could have worked that out, but what else had Clare told him?

  “What did Clare say?”

  “Eve,” he paused. “She told me about the miscarriage. I’m sorry, I know how…how much you wanted the baby.”

  Unspoken words hung in the air. Enough to leave me.

  Eve twisted to sit on the arm of the sofa and decided against it. Standing made you stronger, studies had proved it. You could hear it in a person’s voice down a phone line.

  “That’s why you called?” Eve said, fighting to keep her anger in check. “Because the baby you didn’t want is no longer in the picture?”

  The stunned silence that filled the line wasn’t just his. Because now that she’d said the words, she realized how true they were. Oh, he wanted her all right. Just not her baby, and now that he had his way, he’d have her back.

  “No! Eve, be reasonable. You know that’s not true.”

  “Do I? How do I know? I don’t hear from you for three weeks and then, when you discover I’m not pregnant anymore, THEN you call.”

  “Eve, calm down. That’s not true. I wrote to you straightaway.”

  “You wrote to me. You call that horrible…Opening that letter”—she almost spat the words—“that was the worst moment of my life.” Eve paused. It was true. Reading it had been worse even than realizing she’d been pregnant the first time, worse than the abortion; Ian’s letter had gone straight in at number one. Usurped only by the miscarriage.

  “You want to know what my worst moment was?” Ian said, his voice chill. “Coming home and finding a note from the woman I love telling me she’s leaving—had, in fact, already left—without giving me any say in the matter. Without giving me a chance to change her mind. To change mine. That was my worst moment.”

  Eve felt sick and angry, bereft and very, very sad. “You had a say,” she told him. “You said no.” And with that she put down the phone.

&nb
sp; The apartment had grown dark since Eve had hung up on Ian, her noisy sobs soon giving way to silence. The past month had left her cried out and wrung out. It hurt so much it was almost beyond hurting. She was numb, but not comfortably so. Numb with rejection and Clare’s betrayal. Now the only sound was a whirr from the fridge in the kitchen and the boiler clicking as the timer ticked over. She’d intended to retreat to the bedroom before Clare got home so she could feign sleep and get a grip on her anger. But the keys in the apartment door told her it was too late now.

  “Hello?” Clare’s voice came from the hall. “Lou? Eve? Anyone home?” She sounded anxious.

  The living room light flicked on and they both jumped. Eve at the sudden light, Clare at the unexpected sight of Eve sitting there, in her dressing gown, staring blankly at the wall.

  “Are you all right?” Clare asked, slipping off her coat and hanging it on the door.

  “Am I all right?” Eve repeated. “Interesting question. Why would you ask that?”

  Clare frowned. “Perfectly normal question, I’d have thought, in the circumstances.” She backed toward the kitchen. “Coffee? Tea?”

  “Neither, thanks.” Eve followed her and stopped in the doorway, unintentionally blocking it. “What circumstances?” she asked.

  “Well…” Filling the kettle, Clare rinsed one of the mugs Lou had left in the sink and found a tea bag. She kept her back to Eve. “This morning, when I left, you were in my bed, showing no sign of moving, which is where you’ve been for most of the last week. Reasonable circumstances for asking how you are, I’d have thought.”

  “Why won’t you look at me?”

  Clare turned, mug still dripping in her hand, and looked at Eve, but her gaze slid away and she turned back to the kettle.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you.”

  Eve’s voice was quiet. She didn’t think she’d ever been this angry in her life. She was surprised at how calm she felt.