“Dominique.” He drags his fingers down his strained face.
She looks at him blankly. “Dominique? Who’s…”
“Seb Lewis’s sister. You remember Seb, our mutual friend?”
“Oh.” She still looks like she doesn’t get it. Neither do I. “Dominique. Right.” Her expression changes. Something’s dawning. “Didn’t you two once…”
“Look, I know how this looks,” he says quickly. “I need to ask you a favor.”
“Sorry, but…”
His blue eyes flash electric as he smiles his most charming smile. “Natasha, there’s no such thing as free legal advice.”
Twenty
Three weeks later and Ollie’s words were still spinning around Jenny’s head like fairground horses: “I’m so pleased you exist; you’ve no idea how pleased I am that you exist.” Every morning she had to shoot those horses down, one by one, reminding herself of her own inherent absurdity, her disloyalty, the sheer vileness of her own brain. What was going on with her feelings toward Ollie? How on earth could she escape them? Damn. She needed distance, quick.
What she needed was a plan.
The next day, she stepped over the huddle of marinating nappy bags in Suze’s hall with a new sense of purpose. Yes, it was a bloody good plan, if she said so herself.
“Tea.” Suze pressed a cup into her hand as she sat down on a wicker chair, before she had a chance to draw breath. “Sophie’s R.I.P. Facebook page now has eight hundred and forty-five condolences, can you believe it?”
“That’s a lot of friends she never met.”
Liz laughed loudly. “One of them was in her yoga class but had never actually spoken to her. Hey, they stretched hamstrings together.”
“Those that stretch together stay together,” muttered Tash, picking some icing off a slice of cake and pushing it to the side of her plate as if it might be radioactive.
“Ladies, I have an idea,” said Jenny brightly.
“Hit us with it, Jenny,” said Suze, looking at her, pouring water out of a bright blue jug.
They all turned to face her.
Jenny took a deep breath. “An au pair.” She looked around at the blank, silent faces. There was a terrible silence. Liz coughed and looked down at the table. Er, why weren’t they hailing her genius? “Let’s hire an au pair for Ollie.”
“You are fucking joking,” hissed Tash, murderous.
Jenny glanced at Liz appealingly. Help! What was going on?
“The thing is…” began Liz, face contorting in a way that suggested Jenny had made some steaming faux pas.
“Since when is having some gold-digging freaking eighteen-year-old Ukrainian wearing street market lingerie move into a widower’s house a sensible idea?” spat Tash.
What on earth was going on here?
“I can name you two marriages that have been atomized by au pairs,” Lydia said quietly, making a funny half nod toward Tash and trying to tell Jenny something with her widening eyes.
“Three!” corrected Tash.
“The Sebolds.” Suze shook out some chocolate flakes from a silver sprinkler into her palm and licked them off. “Alec had an affair with her for three months while Lily was pregnant. The Wintersons. Actually, that was a manny. Do mannies count?”
“And me, Jenny,” Tash snarled. “My husband ran off with my au pair!”
Jenny crushed her hands over her mouth. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“No, of course you didn’t,” said Liz kindly, putting her hand lightly on Jenny’s arm. “Look, an au pair for Ollie is not a bad idea, not at all. Let’s look at this with fresh eyes, shall we, ladies? What happened to you, Tash, it’s awful but we can’t presume all au pairs are the same, can we?”
“I don’t see why not,” muttered Tash.
“How about we make sure the au pair’s got buck teeth and weighs thirteen stone?” asked Jenny brightly. Suze stiffened and slammed the chocolate flake sprinkler hard down on the work surface, sending a puff of chocolate into the air. Did Suze weigh thirteen stone? Oops.
“It makes no difference,” said Liz. “Astrid had such bad teeth it looked like she’d eaten a brick.”
“Can I just say?” said Lydia, putting up her hand. “What’s wrong with Operation Help Ollie, Jenny? We can do all the stuff the au pair does.”
“Yes, we can,” said Jenny carefully. “It’s just that Help Ollie can’t go on forever.”
“Well, I don’t see why not,” said Lydia, affronted.
“An au pair will give him more autonomy,” Jenny said. “And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” It would also mean that she could put some distance between herself and number thirty-three and stop these weird…feelings.
“Let me digest, let me digest…” Suze pulled at the long sleeves of her purple mohair sweater, so that her fingers poked out through the loose stitch like finger puppets, and riffled them back and forth anxiously along her lower lip. “Okay, let’s consider the possibility that Jenny is right.”
“Don’t tell me you’re saying our services are no longer needed too?” Tash pushed her cup of tea away and glared at Suze, as if she’d defected traitorously to the other side.
“Come on, Tash, he’s probably sick of the sight of us,” said Liz. “We’ve become helpful through sheer persistence and he’s had enough. We’ve become the ‘helpful friend’ that everyone dreads.”
Jenny laughed. “It’s not that.”
“He did end up with four kettles.” Liz caught Jenny’s eye and they both tried not to laugh. “Three babysitters all turning up on the same Saturday night. A night when the poor guy didn’t actually want to go out anyway.”
Tash sat up very straight. “Is this all because Lydia let herself into his house last week to do his recycling?” She glared at Lydia.
“You didn’t!” Jenny laughed.
“Can I take this opportunity to say, Lydia, that you’re welcome to do my recycling anytime,” Liz interrupted. “Quite welcome.”
“I thought he’d appreciate it.” Lydia shrunk back into the floppy roll neck of her gray cashmere sweater sulkily. “Sorry for breathing.”
“You wouldn’t fuss about like that for your own husband,” muttered Tash, crossing her arms over her chest.
Lydia covered her mouth with her hand. “You know, the funny thing is I probably wouldn’t. That’s food for thought, isn’t it?”
They sat in musing silence for a few moments, the sound of children fighting in the background.
“Onwards and upwards!” said Suze, reverting back to her officious meeting voice. She looked around the table. “It’s been fun, in a weird way, hasn’t it, girls? But maybe it is time to move things on.”
Tash bristled.
“Let’s vote. Hands up for an au pair.”
Liz raised her hand slowly. Suze followed suit. “Sorry,” said Jenny to Tash, as she put her hand up too. “Not personal.” But she couldn’t help but get a little kick out of triumph out of it all the same.
“Okay, three in favor of an au pair. Two not. An au pair it is!” Suze refilled everyone’s glasses. “Anyway, I don’t know about you but I need to refocus my energies on my own family. Right now I’ve got a mother-in-law threatening to move into the shed at the bottom of the garden. And a seven-year-old child who can’t spell his middle name.”
“It is Zebedee,” Liz pointed out.
Suze ignored Liz. “I actually sent Chris packing to the pub tonight so that we could have this meeting. He didn’t want to go. And you know what? I feel shitty about that now. I keep neglecting my own husband because of Ollie. Not that it’s Ollie’s fault,” Suze added. Following it with the requisite, “Poor Ollie.”
“You’ve done so much, Suze,” said Jenny warmly, sensing the downward shift in mood. “I know Ollie really, really appreciates it.”
Lydia’s eyes were filling with tears. She sniffed and stood up, pulling her handbag over her shoulder. “George didn’t really want me to go out tonight either. And
maybe I’ve been pouring all my energies into…” Her voice broke and trailed off. “I need to reassess my priorities too.”
The oven pinged. Suze leapt up, slid a tray of charred mini pizzas out of her range cooker. Cursing as she burned her fingers, she picked up three of them and threw them into a paper towel, which she handed to Lydia with too much force. “I insist.”
Lydia accepted the smoking offering reluctantly. “Keep me posted,” she said winsomely.
“Jesus Christ. It’s like she’s got some irrigation system going on in her tear ducts,” Tash muttered as the front door closed behind Lydia. “Is she ever going to stop crying?”
“Troubles with George,” said Suze knowingly. “That’s what that’s about.”
“They’re not happy?” Jenny asked, thinking not of Lydia but Sophie suddenly.
Liz swallowed a mini pizza whole. “Come on, is anyone happy?”
Jenny was taken aback by the question. It was a dangerous question. No, she wasn’t happy. But Sophie had died. How could she be happy?
“Don’t all stare at me like that. I mean happy in the way we thought we’d be happy when we were young, you know, imagining being married and grown up.” Liz stared searchingly into the plate of charred pizza as if it somehow held the answer to her question. “Most mere mortals don’t get Soph and Ollie’s marriage. That soul mate thing they had. Most of us meet our soul mates in our twenties and the relationship implodes in a bloody combustion of sex and insecurity and clashing levels of timing and commitment.” She shrugged. “My experience, anyway.”
“Sure as hell didn’t imagine I’d be divorced by the age of thirty-five.” Tash let out a short, shrill laugh. “What about you, Suze?”
“Happy?” Suze stopped lowering a string of mozzarella cheese into her open mouth like a worm. “I don’t really have time to wonder if I’m happy or not, to be honest.”
“That answers that question then.”
“Actually, Liz, I think I am pretty happy,” said Suze. “I mean, life’s not what I thought it’d be but then, you have no idea what having kids is going to be like before you do it, do you?”
Jenny became aware of Tash staring at her. She could feel the question coming and wished she could duck out of it with a “no comment.” She waited. And it came.
“What about you, Jenny? I mean, if I’m Marriage, the Sequel, you’re still at the trailer stage, yeah?” Jenny thought there was something about the way she asked the question that made it seem craftily rhetorical. “Glued to your seat. Eating popcorn,” added Tash.
Jenny laughed. “Oh, no, I hate people who munch popcorn in cinemas. I discreetly suck lumps of chocolate.”
“Sounds like a women’s mag question.” Liz smiled. “Are you a muncher or a sucker?”
“You have a filthy mind, Liz.” Suze turned to Jenny with an intent look on her face. “Do you ever wish you’d settled earlier, Jenny? Like Sophie.”
“No. I feel like I’m only grown up enough to make the right decision now.”
“I’m not sure falling in love has anything to do with being grown up,” said Liz with a just barely detectable note of weariness.
Suze patted Jenny on the hand, leaving a smudge of grease on her skin. “Well, I hope you have a marriage like Sophie’s.”
Jenny smiled ruefully, knowing that she wouldn’t have a marriage like Sophie’s. No one had a marriage like Sophie’s.
“They had the perfect marriage, didn’t they? That’s the tragedy of it all.”
“They had their problems just like everyone else,” said Jenny and immediately regretted it. Why had she said that? The letters. It was that damn box of letters again. She wished she could forget them. She wished she’d never found them.
The women swiveled to look at Jenny, the evening newly energized by a shudder of schadenfreude.
“What you do mean, Jenny?” Tash asked. “They weren’t having problems, were they?”
“No, not really,” she said quickly, feeling guilty that she’d betrayed her discretion to Sophie. “Just that they were like any couple in a way—well, a pretty gilded version admittedly.”
“I always did wonder why Sophie never had another child,” said Tash. She exchanged a knowing glance with Lydia.
Jenny remembered the maternity wear carefully folded in Sophie’s drawers. To disclose this would be an even greater betrayal. She kept her mouth closed.
“A shame. It would be easier for Freddie if he had a sibling.” Liz looked wistful. “Poor little Freddie.”
“He might still get one!” blurted Tash with rather too much enthusiasm for Jenny’s liking. “Ollie could have more kids. Why not?”
“Whoa! One step at a time. The guy has not even thought about dating yet, has he, Jenny?” said Liz.
Jenny bit her lip. “No,” she lied. She couldn’t bring herself to admit even the gist of their conversation the other night. His words would be misinterpreted. She must protect him from himself. From the predators. From Tash.
“Hold your horses!” Suze grabbed Jenny’s sleeve. “Has the time come for us to introduce him to other women, do we think?”
“No!” protested Jenny.
“Nothing serious, Jenny,” Suze said, eyeing Jenny with obvious amusement. “Just someone to have dinner with?”
Tash sat up very straight and sniffed. “That’s not necessary. I’m his dinner partner.”
Liz kicked Jenny under the table.
“Well, you know, just the odd dinner.” Tash’s eyes glittered. She couldn’t keep the smile down. “Why is everyone staring at me like that? We’re both on our own; it’s natural.”
Twenty-one
It was a cool, sunny Saturday morning and the scent of white freesias in the window box puffed pleasantly through the café’s open window. Coffee. Pastries. Newspaper. Laptop. Bedhead hair. They looked like how they used to look before Soph died, Jenny thought, a happy couple, freshly woken in each other’s sleep-sweaty arms, easy in each other’s company. It would only be the most acute observer who’d notice how their silences went on a little longer than they used to, the fewer times their hands touched, the way Jenny no longer took a casual bite of Sam’s pain au chocolat.
“Hired yet?” Sam looked up from his newspaper, his eyes tracking the pert behind of a pretty, young waitress.
“I may as well have advertised for a nanny for a single Brad Pitt.” She’d been worried that every au pair would check the “no father-only households” box but instead she had two dozen replies from women all over the world: Australian, Bulgarian, Irish, Congolese, Thai, Swedish, and, yes, Ukrainian. Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one years old. Reams of bubbly CVs with thousands of exclamation marks and badly lit photos and declarations of being “hardworking!” and “loving children!” and “no job too small!!!”
Sam gestured to his mouth, meaning she’d got cappuccino froth on her upper lip. “I advise you to just pick the prettiest, Jenny,” he said, not looking up from the sports pages. “Seriously, cheer Ollie up a bit.” He shook out his paper. “I know what I’d want in an au pair.”
“Charming. Actually, Sam, the main priority is Freddie. It’s got to be somebody who’ll bond with Freddie.”
Sam laughed, stole the last remaining bit of croissant off her plate, dunked it in the small pot of jam. “You tell yourself that, Jenny darling.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not every man is as Neanderthal as you, Sam.”
“Ah, you’re so wrong.”
Three coffees later, Jenny had a short list. Out had gone the ones who couldn’t spell at all—they had to spell better than Freddie, that was the benchmark—and out went the ones with dodgy blanks on their CVs or dodgy jobs—“after college I worked as masseuse”—or unnerving hobbies “dog breeding and rifle shooting” or, rather ominously, no photo. And at Sam’s insistence out went the really plain or fat girls. This made Jenny feel mean because she was sure they were perfectly nice, nicer in fact than the prettier girls, and had she been sitting alone in the c
afé—as she should be, if she’d planned the exercise properly—she would have picked a plainer one.
Sam craned to the side, watching over her shoulder. This meant that she had to let a few more beauties through the net that she wouldn’t have done otherwise. Only when he went to the toilet did she get a chance to do a quick stealthy mass cull of the sexiest girls.
Finally, a list of five. All nice, bouncy, wholesome girls. Attractive, yes, but none showing cleavage in their headshots.
“Done?” Sam stirred another sugar into his coffee. He always rotated the teaspoon in the cup five times. “Can we reclaim our Saturday now?”
“Yep. I’ll email them later.” She shut the laptop with relief. Yes, she was closing one chapter of her life and moving on to the next, moving away from number thirty-three. The waitress took away the dirty plates and afterward Sam did that silent bill-scribbling motion with his hands, despite the fact that she was close enough to talk to.
Jenny knew better than to say anything. Sam enjoyed lording it over waitresses. Like he enjoyed being worldlier than her. It was all part of a power dynamic that pleased him in quite a boyishly endearing way. When they’d first got together he’d had to show her how to get the fish off its bone with the back of a knife: she’d previously always got around this by ordering a fillet. He was the kind of man who’d order braised offal whenever the opportunity arose. She’d always preferred a chicken breast done simply, and no, of course she’d never eat the skin. He thought this hilarious.
Sam’s phoned beeped. He looked at the message and his expression changed. “Completely forgot to tell you, babes, and I better tell you now in case she mentions it.…” He looked a little flustered. “I met Tash for lunch last week.”
“What?” Jenny stared at him, puzzled. “Tash? Muzzy Hill Tash?” First a phone call. Now lunch?
He leaned back in his chair, dangled his hand out the open window. “She called again, wanted free advice, and I was just round the corner from her, so, you know, we grabbed a sandwich.”
“Why didn’t you say anything last week?”
“Sorry. It’s crap of me. Been mental.”
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