The Other Mothers' Club

by Samantha Baker

  “Eve!” Clare was on the stairs below them. “I thought we were going to be late,” she said. “The traffic’s a killer.” Then she looked at her sister. “Where’s Liam?”

  “Keep your hair on. He just got held up.”

  “Where?”

  “Erm…Manchester?”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Clare said. “Come on slow coach.” Turning, she swept up a small girl with olive skin in a floral dress and neat white socks. “Where’s Daddy, Mina?”

  As if summoned, Osman appeared, taking the stairs two at a time, a boy of five or six, who was the mirror image of the girl, on his shoulders. Lou, Ian and Sophie were right behind them.

  “Osman! You’ll drop him!”

  A bony elbow dug Eve in the ribs. “Who’d have thunk it?” Lily said. “Our Clare, an anxious stepmonster.”

  “I heard that,” Clare said. “And I’m not…yet.”

  “Yet?” Lily hissed.

  “She’s such a tease,” Eve said. “Is Mandy coming?”

  “Don’t think so.” Lily frowned. “I don’t see her much since she moved and I started spending one weekend a month in Manchester. Clare sees more of her than I do. She told Clare her mother was ill and she probably wouldn’t make it.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  It wasn’t that the group wasn’t together often enough, but with Lily’s trips to Manchester, Melanie’s business demands, and Clare’s new “commitments,” the meetings had become less regular, the turnout more sporadic.

  “Is that Melanie’s mom and dad?” Lily asked as an elderly Chinese couple rounded the corner, followed by a Chinese guy in his thirties.

  “Must be. Did she know they were coming?”

  “She was hoping.”

  How did they look to Melanie’s parents? Eve wondered as everyone crowded into the register office and took their seats. No “Whose side are you on: bride or groom?”—just a mêlée of friends and children, and a handful of family all piling into whichever seats were free.

  What did Melanie’s parents see when they looked at the life their daughter had made for herself three thousand miles from home?

  Eve hoped they saw what she did: a room full of people who loved their daughter.

  Uppermost of the people who loved Melanie was Loni. Standing in the front row, obsessively running anxious hands through his recently grown-out hair, he glanced over his shoulder and caught Eve’s eye. He grinned nervously, and Eve smiled back.

  Who among Melanie’s friends could have predicted this?

  Not Eve, certainly. Not anyone who knew the first thing about Simeon, even if only from seeing his picture in the paper. Twitching from foot to foot beside Ed, his best man and business partner, Loni even managed to make the Lanvin tuxedo Melanie had borrowed for him look like something dragged from a bin bag at the bottom of his wardrobe.

  Eve adored him. All Melanie’s friends did.

  And so did her parents, much to everyone’s surprise, none more than Melanie’s. Far from disapproving, they marveled that their daughter had gone halfway around the world only to marry a man whose mother was Chinese. A man of whom, on paper at least, they could legitimately approve. Melanie’s brother thought it was the best joke he’d heard in decades.

  The fact that Loni was five years younger than Melanie (if older than he looked) and dressed like a bum (an elegantly wasted one, but a bum nonetheless) made no difference. It probably didn’t hurt that his film editing company was so busy he could hardly spare time for a honeymoon. And here they were, both her mother and father, chaperoned by her brother. It was not much short of a miracle.

  “Where the hell is Liam…?”

  “Here, babe. Sorry, train got held up.” Liam slid into the row beside Lily and nuzzled her neck just as the music struck up. Eve and Clare rolled their eyes at each other. Not entirely reformed, then.

  No bridal march for Melanie. Instead The Kooks’ “She Moves In Her Own Way” blared out of the iPod speakers Loni had set up at the front.

  Turning, Eve saw a vision in ivory gliding up the short aisle toward her, the elderly Chinese man at Melanie’s side. She looked fabulous. It still surprised Eve that her friend had turned down all the offers of designer frocks for her big day. Instead, she’d found a ’50s dress in a vintage shop and altered it herself.

  “Something old,” she’d said when she’d told them. And even Clare had to admit there was far more to Melanie than the skinny-latte-size-zero-lady-who-used-to-lunch she’d once mistrusted.

  The bouquet was blue, the bridegroom’s tux was borrowed. They knew that for sure, but what was new? Everything else, probably.

  A hand on Eve’s shoulder made her turn. “Don’t you think Melanie looks…glowy?” Clare whispered.

  “Of course she’s glowy. She’s the radiant bride, remember?”

  “And…” Clare paused. Eve couldn’t quite decipher the look on her face. “Bosomy?”

  Eve smothered a laugh.

  “What?” Ian hissed.

  “Clare says Melanie looks bosomy.”

  Ian eyed Melanie as she passed. A touch too long for comfort. “Oi.” Eve nudged him. “No need to look that closely.”

  “Clare’s right,” he said, kissing Eve. “The bride definitely does look…bosomy.” And he gave her a meaningful stare.

  After the ceremony and the photos and the illegal confetti, the wedding party moved to Marine Ices for the reception, a decision that had been really popular with the knee-high guests. “Who needs a wedding breakfast when you can have wedding ice cream?” Loni had said, and they had shared a secret smirk and wondered if he knew he was marrying a woman who hadn’t let ice cream pass her lips since she was knee-high herself. That was when they’d known how much Melanie loved him, because she’d gone along with it.

  After the knickerbocker glories and before the speeches, the members of the Other Mothers’ Club gathered outside, on the pretext of keeping Lily company while she had a sneaky cigarette.

  “Who’s next?” Melanie said. “It’s gotta be you?” She turned to Eve.

  Eve shook her head. “Nah, not us. The Newsome-Owen household is just fine as it is, thanks.” Instinctively she crossed her fingers in her pocket and thought how close they had come to falling apart. It was a distant, bad memory, but she kept it safe in the back of her mind, in case she ever forgot how good things were now.

  “How about you, Lil?” she said. “Planning on making an honest man of Liam?”

  “Fat chance of that,” Lily laughed. “He’s reformed, not transformed. Anyway, I’ll be too busy moving to Manchester.

  “Not yet,” she added, throwing up her hands when everyone started talking at once. “It’s just that I spend so much time on trains it might be worth a try. They have theaters in Manchester, don’t they? Anyway, if you’re looking for a wedding, I think my sister’s a better bet.”

  “I didn’t say…,” Clare protested.

  “No, you implied.”

  “I was winding you up. We are thinking about moving in together, though. But you know, I’ve been in my apartment so long. I’m not sure I want to give it up.”

  “Your palatial Finchley abode?” Lily grinned. “I would have thought you’d be glad to see the back of it.”

  “In a weird way, the apartment represents freedom,” Clare said. “Lou doesn’t agree. She says it resembles a small hamster cage! Of course, she’s judging it by Will’s house these days. They’re off skiing after Christmas. Will, Suzanne, the lot of them.”

  “And you’re cool with that?”

  Clare shrugged. “I’ll live,” she said, then smiled. “To be honest, Osman and I will be glad of a few days to ourselves…seriously though, I do have something to say. An agent’s agreed to take on my novel.”

  “What novel?” Lily demanded.

  Only Eve knew about Park Bench Blues, although she hadn’t been allowed to read it. The story of a feisty teenager who fell pregnant and decided to go it alone and have the baby. Eve wondere
d if the fictional father came back for his long-lost love, as well as for his daughter. Until Osman had become a fixture she’d have put money on it. But, to judge by the way Clare had smiled at him during the ceremony, now she wasn’t so sure.

  “The novel I’ve been writing.”

  “About stepmothers?” Lily demanded.

  “Not directly.” Clare looked as if she wished she’d never started the conversation. And the glance she cast at Eve was almost pleading.

  “We think you’re the one with the real news,” Eve said, deflecting everyone’s attention to Melanie.

  “I’m the blushing bride,” Melanie said.

  “Positively glowing,” Clare said.

  Melanie looked coy. Checking the coast was clear, she beckoned them closer. “A ten weeks’ pregnant blushing bride,” she added. “Shhh,” she begged, when their shrieks could be heard on Hampstead Heath. “I don’t want to jinx it. And I don’t want my parents to know just yet. Let them get used to having a daughter they can approve of before I break it to them that I’m giving them a grandchild too.”

  Behind them a door opened, and the group grinned at each other.

  “I’m not sure you lot need a support group anymore,” Ian said. He and Liam were carrying four champagne glasses each. Osman followed with a fresh bottle.

  “Quite right,” Liam said. “We’re the ones who need support. How about it?” He flung an arm around Lily, and she groaned as champagne sloshed onto her jacket. “Oops, sorry, Lil.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s your jacket anyway.”

  Clare laughed. Her sister had been wearing Liam’s jackets as long as she’d known him. How could he not have noticed?

  Loni appeared around the door. “Come back,” he hissed, his eyes pleading. “It’s speech time and I feel like the warm-up act in an ice factory in there.”

  Melanie let herself be pulled toward him and he folded her in his arms. The others traipsed inside, leaving them to kiss in private.

  “Now, I have a card here from someone called Mandy.” As best man, Loni’s business partner was doing the traditional read-through of cards from people who “Are sorry they cannot be with us today.”

  “Read it, read it,” Melanie said.

  “OK, give me a chance.” Ed cleared his throat. “It says, ‘To my dearest Melanie, and Loni who’s lucky to have her.’”

  “Too right,” Lily yelled.

  “Sssh!” Clare hissed.

  Ignoring her mother, Lou stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled.

  “‘I propose a toast’—that’s Mandy, not me,” Ed continued. “I haven’t the faintest clue what she’s on about, so I’m just going to read it out.”

  “Get on with it, will you?”

  Ed’s face turned serious as he read the card. “‘Please raise your glasses,’” he said.

  Turning to the bride and groom, Ed raised his champagne flute. “‘To the Other Mothers’ Club. Because Loni, if Melanie hadn’t been masquerading as a stepmother, you might never have met her!’”

  There was a burst of laughter, a flurry of applause, and chairs were scraped back around the room.

  Clare caught Eve’s eye across the table and they both grinned. Eve didn’t think she’d ever seen her friend so happy. Melanie might be glowing, but Clare looked truly radiant.

  Lily, Liam and Louisa were on their feet, glasses raised; Alfie had clambered onto his chair, his glass of Coke held aloft.

  Clasping Eve’s hand, Ian pulled her to her feet.

  “To the OMC,” Ed announced.

  Gently Ian chinked his glass against Eve’s as the toast echoed around them. “To the OMC.”

  A+ AUTHOR INSIGHTS, EXTRAS & MORE…

  FROM

  SAMANTHA

  BAKER

  AND

  AVON A

  Author Q&A

  How do you get an idea for a book?

  As far as The Other Mothers’ Club goes, in my day job as editor-in-chief of the British glossy magazine Red, I started to notice that whenever we did a feature that touched on a modern relationship concern, e.g., step-parenting, dating a divorcé, it struck a massive chord. We ran one first-person feature by a woman who felt her stepchildren hated her (and vice versa) and nearly drowned under the sea of e-mails.

  Then, when I wrote about being a stepmother in my editor’s letter, I got loads of requests to go on the radio and TV to talk about my experience. One show I went on did a phone-in, and all these women were calling in asking me for advice. Me! What do I know? But because it’s not one of those things you go around saying, “Hello, my name’s Sam, and I’m a stepmother,” I think people take advice where they can. That’s where the support group came from. Personally, I’m really interested in female friendship and wanted to combine it with that whole support network that most women have (the way you have some friends you can say anything at all to).

  With my next novel (What to Wear to Your Best Friend’s Funeral—which is about what happens to a group of women who’ve been friends since college when one of them dies from breast cancer and leaves them all letters bequeathing them the things—and people!—who have been important to her) it was a bit different; I’ve stuck with the theme of women’s friendship, but side issues that arose in the course of writing this book that I knew I wanted to explore further mulched the story for months. It’s no exaggeration to say I literally woke up at 6:00 a.m. one morning in January and thought, “I have to write that down.” That became the synopsis.

  Do stepmoms get a bum rap?

  They really do, don’t they? And they always have.

  Think about fairy tales—stepmothers are the number-one baddie. Go back through fables from all over the world, right back through history—look at Disney films!—the stepmother gets the blame. But there are at least two sides to every story, so look at it another way for a minute.

  Take Cinderella, for instance: the wife/mother dies and husband/father immediately goes and finds another wife because he can’t look after himself. This woman (the “evil” stepmother) comes into the house with her two daughters and Cinderella’s dad allows the new woman in the house to send his daughter to the kitchen and make her a slave. Where is he when his daughter is sweeping ashes in the kitchen and being locked in the attic? Out hunting with his buddies?

  Now, I’m not saying the stepmother is behaving well—of course not—but where is the father when all this is going on? Of course Cinderella’s stepmother wasn’t in the right, but I do think there’s another side to the story. If Cinderella’s father had behaved like a decent father, there would have been no evil stepmother.

  Stepmothers aren’t perfect—no one is—and being a stepmother is a tough, and often thankless, job, with no rules or guidance. Who wouldn’t screw up occasionally in that situation?

  I say we should cut stepmothers some slack. And maybe stepmothers should cut themselves some slack too: a lot of stepmothers I know refer to themselves as “the stepmonster” or “the wicked stepmother” they really aren’t. I recently read an interview with Sandra Bullock where she did that. It’s like a preemptive strike.

  Do you plan out the whole book before you write it?

  Yes, I have to because my day job means I can’t keep it all in my head. I need it all on paper so I can pick up where I left off at any time. I start with a synopsis, then I plan all the character biographies so I know not just what they look like so their hair doesn’t change color mid-draft, but what motivates them, what and who they care about, what their dreams and fears are. Usually they start to do their own thing by chapter three, but the thought’s there! Then I plan the story outline and finally the chapter breakdown. I won’t necessarily stick to it—I had to cut a whole story thread because I was eighty thousand words in and if I stuck to my original plan it would have taken two hundred thousand words to finish—but it’s good to have as a guide.

  Describe a typical writing day.

  I write on weekends and on holidays. So mo
st Saturdays and Sundays I get up and go straight to Caffè Nero. I and my partner Jon (Courtenay Grimwood, who’s a novelist too) set up camp at a corner table and write til either 2:00 p.m. or two thousand words, whichever comes first. I can’t stay at home—I’m too easily distracted. When I wrote full-time for a few months, I had the emptiest washing basket in the country.

  What writing rituals do you have?

  Just that really: two-shot black Americano, skinny muffin, corner table and away we go. (Maybe with a late pub lunch at the end of it, as an incentive.)

  What do you do when you have writer’s block?

  I can’t possibly have writer’s block. It’s not allowed! Seriously, I only have weekends and holidays to write, so a blocked day is a day less to meet the deadline. I know it doesn’t sound very romantic, but it’s how it is. I consider myself lucky to have two jobs I love.

  How do you balance writing and your other full-time job?

  See above! I try to concentrate on my day job (I’m editor-in-chief of Red magazine in the UK—it’s a glossy monthly aimed at women in their thirties and forties) during the week and turn that bit of my brain off on Friday nights, so I can start writing Saturday morning. Another writer who juggles two jobs once said to me, “If you write a thousand words a day every Saturday and Sunday for long enough, you eventually have a hundred thousand words.” And that’s it in a nutshell. Although I try to write two thousand.

  Are your books or characters autobiographical?

  Not really. Of course, I’m a stepmother myself, so there are little snippets of my personal experience in there, but I spoke to lots of women about their experience of being a stepmother (or having one) in the course of my research and that informed my characters. There are lots of different experiences of being a stepmom—for instance, blending a family is totally different from coming to the relationship as a single woman without children of her own, which is why I wanted to have several stepmother characters instead of just one.