by Judy Astley
Her response (that Waitrose was a long way from being a jolly French marché, that availability of mangetout from Peru in November was not exactly ‘seasonal’ and that the only likely pleasantries were a curt ‘Do you need a bag?’ followed by a ‘No, thanks’) seemed to make her – as too often – sound peevish and controlling. She didn’t mean to; she just didn’t see why everything couldn’t be properly organized.
Emily leaned back on the sofa and put her hand on her stomach, feeling the muscles grow hard and the taut-stretched skin tighten. Definitely Braxton Hicks. Just a practice run for her muscles but all the same she was glad she’d thought to put the big stripy throw across the seat cushions. These contractions had been coming and going all morning and she was sensing that a bit of leakage might be going on. Nothing to worry about, just a feeling.
‘Helloooo! Anyone home?’
Emily sat up abruptly, startled. That bloody Charlotte. Why did she always turn up by way of the kitchen and never just ring the front doorbell like a proper visitor? Since she’d turned up in Cornwall the previous Christmas as ‘a friend’ of Emily’s father, and then been unable to leave because of the endless snow, she’d almost made herself an extra family member. She reminded Emily of a cat that has several owners and makes itself at home with all of them.
Awkwardly, she hauled herself off the sofa and went through to the kitchen, conscious she was actually waddling like a comedy pregnant woman, hand on her aching back. Just you dare bloody laugh, Charlotte, she thought, seeing her waiting by the door. Just you dare.
‘Hi, Emily! I just popped in to see—’
‘Sam’s not here.’ Emily stood aside as Charlotte, not to be put off, clattered in past her with a selection of carrier bags, which she dropped on to the table. A couple of cans of lager spilled out and Emily caught them as they rolled to the edge. ‘He can’t come out to play with you because he’s taken the children for a playdate with one of Milly’s friends.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Charlotte said, unabashed by Emily’s lack of welcome. ‘I’m not just his friend you know. I’m a whole-family bargain bucket, me.’ She laughed, but Emily didn’t. Charlotte glanced at her distended front, ‘God, look at you, you poor sod. No wonder you’ve got a face like a slapped arse. You’re about ready to burst. Sit down, I’ll make us a pot of tea. Shame you’re not allowed anything stronger; you look like you could murder a glass of medicinal Merlot.’
She practically pushed Emily into a chair and started bustling round the kitchen. Emily told herself to loosen up – Charlotte was only being kind. But seeing her making free with her kitchen, opening and closing her cupboards, being familiar with where everything was, made it clear how often she’d been here in the house just hanging out, laughing, smoking in the garden, having lunchtime beers with Sam while she – Emily – had been up to her eyes in other people’s tax returns and phone calls to HMRC. She loved her job, loved figures and finance and putting everyone else’s fiscal houses in order, but she didn’t do it so Sam could slack about at home with his father-in-law’s ex-mistress.
‘So you’ve finished with work then? Are you taking the whole year off or splitting it with Sam?’ Charlotte asked as she plonked one of Emily’s favourite mugs in front of her. A couple of drops spilled over the side. Emily scooped them up with her finger and licked it.
‘Sam’s always here anyway, so I suppose I could take the whole of it,’ she told her. ‘But I’m not sure I want to stay away from the office for that long.’
‘You don’t sound keen. I’d love it, all these children. You’re so lucky.’
‘I know, I know,’ Emily said, rubbing her aching back. ‘But I hate being away from work. Things might go wrong. Bad habits set in, you know?’ She probably didn’t, Emily thought. Charlotte was a self-confessed free spirit, late forties, blowsy, cheery and unsettled, lurching from singing gigs in anything from rundown clubs to quite prestigious theatre shows as and when she could get the work. Not having regular work didn’t seem to bother her at all, whereas it would send Emily thoroughly frantic with terror. Look how she’d been last December, sacked from the pantomime in Plymouth she’d been booked for, only days before Christmas. Did it bother her? Not at all.
‘Chill, Ems,’ Charlotte said, scrabbling about in one of her shopping bags (not from a supermarket Emily would visit) and pulling out a pack of chocolate biscuits. She opened it with her teeth and offered the pack to Emily, who took one and nibbled the chocolate round the edge of it. Charlotte ate hers fast in two greedy bites. ‘No lunch today,’ she explained, spluttering a few crumbs on to the table. ‘I’m on the 5:2 diet so I’m having five biscuits at a hundred calories each. If you’ve got to do near-starvation you might as well do it with stuff you love.’
‘Are you sure you’ve got the hang of it? It doesn’t sound quite right,’ Emily asked, still halfway through her own biscuit.
Charlotte reached for another and looked pensive. ‘Well, whichever way you look at it, it’s cutting down, isn’t it? I could give up these or I could give up whatever else I’d eat. I’ve opted for sin over sense.’ She grinned. ‘No change there!’
Emily couldn’t disagree. There was something about Charlotte’s honest exuberance for life’s indulgences that she almost – but not quite – envied. What must it be like to racket around doing whatever you pleased and not worrying about whether you were secure or had a pension or even a home of your own? Charlotte lived in a tiny rented flat overlooking the District Line. Emily had once said to her that it must be horrendously noisy but Charlotte, forever seeing an upside, had simply said, ‘Oh, but come on, who doesn’t love a train?’
‘So when’s your loved-up sister getting back from the sticks?’ Charlotte asked. Her hands were wrapped round her mug and Emily could see that her nail varnish was several different shades of pink. She must have come here this morning via the House of Fraser make-up department, Emily thought. She’d once said you could get a whole manicure free by asking the assistants at various counters if you could try out a colour and getting them to apply it. Last Christmas in Cornwall Charlotte had given Milly a full-scale manicure and the child had got a taste for it; she was forever pleading with Emily to let her have sparkly nails. Emily would know exactly whom to blame if Milly was sneaking mascara into school by the time she was eleven and dyeing her hair purple.
‘Tomorrow, I think,’ Emily said. ‘School starts on Tuesday so Thea will need the weekend to get ready.’
‘Will she?’ Charlotte looked puzzled. ‘I thought that with proper jobs like that you just rocked up at the right time and got on with it. Why does it take three days to decide what to wear?’
‘Teachers don’t just “rock up”,’ Emily said, taking another biscuit. What the hell – how much more weight could she put on at this stage? ‘They have to prepare lessons and so on.’
‘Oh I know, I know. But it’s a long time since mine was at school, I’ve more or less forgotten. He’s in Australia now. I’m lucky if he Skypes. You don’t get them for long.’
Emily felt her eyes starting to brim. The thought of life without Milly and Alfie, with them halfway across the world, rarely thinking of her, filled her with deep sorrow. It occurred to her she might well become one of those women who ends up with eight children, just because she couldn’t bear to be without a baby in the house. That was a vision that didn’t fit in with her job, her life plans or her preference for cream sofas. She hustled the very notion out of her brain before it took hold.
‘Still,’ Charlotte went on, seemingly oblivious, ‘so long as he’s happy. That’s all you want for them, isn’t it? I suppose he might be home for Christmas but probably not. On which note,’ she said, getting up to switch the kettle on again, rinsing the mugs and finding more teabags, ‘what are you all doing for it this year? Last year’s was a hoot, wasn’t it?’ She gave a deep and dirty chuckle. ‘I bet you didn’t ever think you’d end up snowed in miles from anywhere not only with your family but with both your paren
ts’ lovers. Hee hee.’
‘I don’t think Alec actually was Mum’s lover. Not when he spent most of Christmas in bed with you.’ This was something Emily definitely didn’t want to think about. The very idea was absurd. She’d guess Alec had been only in his mid-forties or so and her mum was … well, she’d had a bus pass for a few years now.
‘No, dear, of course he wasn’t.’ She winked at Emily. ‘Ah, but your lovely dad and me though … till he got second thoughts. Still, I can’t grudge him sticking with his own wife. I really like your mum – she’s a bit special. Not a word of rancour towards me. It was a kind of honour to give Mike back to her.’ She gazed out of the window and Emily felt yet another cramp across her middle. She really didn’t want to discuss the complications of her parents’ sex life, not now they’d managed to shake off their mid-life madness, change their minds about a possible divorce and restore themselves to being a perfectly normal (for that hippie generation anyway) semi-retired couple with possible house-selling projects and a future together to get on with. Whatever blips, lovers, deviations from the path they’d had last year (and frankly it had all been a bit too Jeremy Kyle at the time), it now seemed calm again; their proposed divorce, the bombshell that they’d dropped on the family the previous autumn, was now a notion in the past. That Christmas at Cove Manor, with Charlotte and Alec as the unexpected interlopers, was long behind them, never to be repeated, thank goodness.
‘So you didn’t say. What are you doing this year? Or is it too soon to have made plans?’ Charlotte persisted.
‘Oh, it’s never too soon for plans, not for me. We’ll be home, here,’ Emily stated firmly. ‘I don’t want to travel anywhere. And Sam promised that whatever happens, we won’t have to …’ A repeat of last year was not to be thought of, she’d decided the moment they were on their way home from Cove Manor after the previous Christmas. Being snowed in so spectacularly had been appalling. Emily still had nightmares about it. When Milly had fallen off her new bike on Christmas morning, Emily had been frantic with terror that she might have broken a limb. How would they have got her to a hospital when no traffic could get through? The nearest one had been over twenty miles away. The isolation, the lack of control over where she was: it had tainted the whole holiday and she never wanted to go through that again. ‘I want to be in my own bed on Christmas morning with my new baby and my children and Sam and have a tree with only our decorations on it and Sam cooking the turkey and—’
‘Being at home sounds lovely,’ Charlotte interrupted. Emily looked at her quickly, checking to see if she was teasing but she wasn’t. She was smiling and looking soft and gentle. She was quite beautiful really, Emily thought, in a blowsy sort of way. She liked to show plenty of plump cleavage and had a very sparkly taste in earrings but she had an underlying grace and a natural sexiness that lean, clean and carefully smart Emily just never could achieve. No wonder all men liked her. She had wondered about Sam for a brief moment but dismissed the idea. He’d once said of Charlotte, with a journalist’s casual cruelty, ‘You never know where she’s been.’ She hoped that was enough for him to remember to keep his distance.
‘So how about you?’ Emily felt she should ask but she was slightly dreading hearing an answer that might upset her. Was loneliness a reason why Charlotte had kept so determinedly in touch with them? She hoped not. Charlotte was always out at night, singing in pubs, and recently there’d been a four-month stint in a musical, touring what she still called the provinces. It hadn’t made it to the West End but as Charlotte had said, ‘An audience is an audience and it’s London’s loss if they can’t be arsed to go north of Watford.’
‘Well, it looks like it’ll either be Cinderella at Woking or Babes in the Wood at Richmond.’ She got up to put the now-empty mugs in the dishwasher, and turned to grin at Emily. ‘I’m a bit long in the tooth for a Babe, aren’t I? So I’ll probably be channelling Cinderella, one way or another. As per. No balls for me.’ Then she rallied and laughed. ‘Not the sort you dance at, anyway.’
FOUR
It was the last day of August, and luckily the day was a hot one: they could have lunch in the garden, as Thea’s house was a bit small to accommodate a lot of people for a sit-down meal. More than six could be done but it was then a matter of people squeezing past each other, of her warning them – as if they were small children – that if they wanted the loo then please go before they sat down so as to avoid everyone having to shuffle chairs around to get out of the way later. She counted up on her fingers: Emily, Sam and the two little ones; Mum and Dad; her brother Jimi with Rosie (if she hadn’t got one of her heads) with their son Elmo (age sixteen, taller by the day) and herself. That made ten.
As she prepared salads, Thea briefly wondered if this whole-family lunch would be better waiting till Sean could be there too so they could make their big announcement together, but he had various glitches and repairs to sort out at Cove Manor before the next lot of renters arrived, and, besides, this was her family. It was her job to tell them what was happening: she didn’t really need back-up. Surely they couldn’t be anything other than delighted for her and her news? Or would they think it a bit soon? She hoped not – after all, she was in her mid-thirties, not a ditzy young thing, and she knew her own mind. They already liked Sean, which was a big improvement on how they’d felt about Rich. Not that it was their fault; goodness knows they’d tried. Rich had been invited to lots of family lunches and birthdays and so on over the two years they’d been together. But he’d never really gelled with Mike and Anna and he hadn’t had much to do with her brother or sister. He’d kept himself very much on the periphery at the very few gatherings that hadn’t coincided with one of his dog shows or some essential visit to his poodle-breeder sister, who had seemed to loathe Thea from the start for distracting Rich from the dog-show circuit. It had been a lucky escape, she realized now: a hostile, jealous sister-in-law was never going to make for a lifetime of cheeriness.
Thea was putting the chicken pieces and their piquant sauce into the oven when the doorbell rang. The crinkly outline of Mrs Over-the-Road’s pinky-white perm was visible through the opaque glass in the front door.
‘Hello, June,’ Thea greeted her. ‘How are you? Have you had a good summer?’
‘It’s not over yet; September’s always the best bit.’ June sniffed the air and gazed past her along the hallway. ‘So you’re back then.’
‘Er – yes. Since Friday,’ Thea said. ‘Are you coming in? Coffee?’
‘No. I won’t, thank you. I just wanted to … er … to let you know …’ June glanced behind her as if expecting an attentive audience to be agog for secrets. She seemed very serious – this could only be momentous news.
Thea looked across the road, suddenly filled with a kind of dread. She hadn’t seen Mr Over-the-Road since she got back and he must be pushing eighty. Was June about to tell her the worst? What had she missed around here over this long and lovely summer? But she could see their front door was open and June’s husband Robbie emerged from behind their cotoneaster, brandishing shears and clip-clipping away to neaten it up for the autumn.
‘That young man of yours,’ June half-whispered as if the street were listening in. ‘He was here. You weren’t in.’
‘Sean? No, it can’t be him. He’s down in Cornwall. Or he was when I spoke to him this morning.’
‘No, not your new one.’ June was bright-eyed with the thrill of imparting information. ‘The old one. The one you didn’t marry. Not that you’ve married this one either.’ She had another sniff and her lips pursed as if she was stopping herself from coming out with, ‘Back in my day …’ and a lecture about being ladylike and waiting.
‘What, Rich? Are you sure? I doubt it was him. I haven’t seen him all this year. It must have been someone who looked a bit like him. Probably someone selling something.’
‘People selling things don’t usually look through the letter box and go round and try the side gate.’ June smiled and, with an expression of
maximum triumphant drama, delivered her killer line: ‘Nor do they have a great big orange poodle with them.’
Soon after she had seen that Thea was satisfyingly astounded, June went back across the road. Thea returned to the kitchen to deal with potatoes and think about what her neighbour had told her. What on earth could Rich have wanted? They hadn’t spoken since Christmas Day when he’d phoned while she was with her family at Cove Manor, not to wish her a happy Christmas or to share the sad memory that this was the date their ill-fated baby had been due, but to offer her a poodle puppy at half the usual price. All heart, that man. If she’d had any lingering doubts that she was well rid of him, that call had demolished them for good. It would be nice to see the dog again though. Benji had been far too big for this little house but she’d loved his company. He’d been a great lolloping heap of curly apricot fur, gentle, affectionate and blissfully warm to snuggle with on the sofa in winter. He’d also been a champion show dog, Rich’s pride and joy, and his offspring would certainly be future stars at Crufts if Rich and his dog-breeder sister had anything to do with it.