And then I turn back to the hall, staring at Archie’s shut door. Tonight I can’t resist. It’s something I used to do, when Archie was little, but stopped because I didn’t want him to wake up and see me standing there. Thought it might scare him. But tonight the pull is too strong. I tiptoe into his room, and stand by the side of his bed, listening to the gentle sound of his deep breaths as he sleeps. My boy, who deserves so much better than this: a huge Christmas tree, a playroom of his own, a hamster in a cage. A sibling. A father. A mother who doesn’t make up pathetic fibs so that people will like her more.
A mother who can cope.
YVONNE
We’re about to go to Simon’s parents’ for lunch and I’m dreading it more than usual. Last night, I woke up at 2am worrying about Violet and Henry, and lay there wondering if I should call the local hospitals, even though that would be hugely inappropriate. At 5am, I gave up wondering and got up, creeping downstairs to do my usual round of Google stalking. But there was nothing to reassure me, and I was left with my imagination playing the worst-case scenario on a loop.
I’m exhausted this morning. But it’s Simon’s mother’s birthday, so even though we saw them last Sunday, there’s no chance of getting out of this one. If only I was pregnant already, I could feign exhaustion, morning sickness, the potential for hyperemesis, but it’s still too early. I’ve got another week of torture to get through before I get my reward.
We climb into the car and he whistles softly as we turn out of our tiny, uneven driveway on to the road. He’s happy, staring straight ahead, his thoughts floating somewhere gentle.
It’s only a thirty-minute drive to his parents’, and I pass the time daydreaming about names. I’ve yet to broach the topic with Simon. I read somewhere that a woman becomes a mother when she gets pregnant, but a man only becomes a father when he holds his baby in his arms. Even if Simon knew what I know, it’s all too abstract for him at the moment. I can’t expect him to feel any kind of relationship with the bundle of cells that will be implanting in my uterus either tomorrow or the day after.
While Simon drives, I check in with the other GoMamas women in my group on my phone—my Trying To Conceive buddies. I’ve never met any of them—don’t even know what they look like—but they know more about this than anyone in my real life. And the whole ridiculous plan was Jade79’s idea. I wonder if I would have come up with it myself.
Of course I would have done, but her validation definitely made me feel less insane.
You deserve your rainbow baby, she had written. After everything you’ve been through.
My GoMamas friends are all as nervous as I am. A few are a couple of days behind me and one is testing tomorrow, even though most people would agree that 9 DPO is the absolute earliest you can POAS. Pee on a stick. The acronyms are ridiculous, but they make me feel like I’m part of a club, a secret club full of anxious but supportive women. We only turn on one another when one of us gets a BFP (big fat positive). The lucky mother-to-be gets a perfunctory congratulations after announcing her news, then she is cast out. They cease to exist; they disappear from the Trying To Conceive threads and move on to the Expectant Mother ones.
After giving advice that makes not one ounce of difference to whether one particular woman is actually pregnant or not, I open the forum thread about Violet. It’s quieter than last week, when she initially disappeared and there was a rush of people posting, all sharing their various conspiracy theories. No one’s updated it this morning and it’s already 11am. I wonder if Violet’s out there, reading all these messages, thinking everyone is an idiot for caring so much about someone they’ve never met before.
I quit the forum app and open Instagram instead, scrolling down my feed. It’s a mix of celebrities and real-life friends, most of whom are photographers like me. I double tap each picture as it loads. Everything on social media is so fake, so contrived, it doesn’t actually matter what I’m liking.
One image catches my eye. Katie took it. No surprises there—her work is breathtaking. It’s a woman in her wedding dress, standing on an enormous staircase. I don’t recognise the venue but I can tell it’s somewhere expensive because the raw silk of her dress has been picked up by the lens, and everything about the photograph screams money. I think of our wedding, late last year. My dad had given me a thousand pounds towards it, most of which I’d spent on my dress. Simon’s parents had offered to put some cash behind the bar, but the rest of it had been down to us, and we’d just bought the house, so we were broke.
I remember the tinge of disappointment that followed me around all day, the way I couldn’t help but compare things to the weddings I’d photographed. And of course, my mind was inevitably drawn to the most lavish wedding I’d ever attended.
Violet’s.
My first encounter with her. It was at Carwell House, of course, beloved of celebrities and media types. They’d hired the entire place—Henry was good friends with the owner, so he’d probably got it for a discount. Even so, it was extravagant by anyone’s standards, and certainly more extravagant than any wedding I’d ever photographed before.
I have more memories of their wedding than I do of my own. Little details, things that have stuck. His face when he first saw me. The way Henry snapped at Violet in front of me at the reception. The way that Skye, who was only two and a half, wet herself during the ceremony. I’d heard Violet’s mother telling her she had to hold it in until after the vows were made, despite her noisy protests, and so it served them all right. Poor thing. They’d laughed it off—Violet even made a video about her “wedding disasters”—but I could tell she was embarrassed.
Violet was still breastfeeding Lula, and I couldn’t help but sneak a shot of her huddled in one corner of the huge banqueting room, her breast hanging out of her thin Maria Grachvogel wedding dress, Lula firmly attached to it. I thought perhaps she’d think it was a special moment. When I sent over the shots for them to pick their favorites, I was vindicated to see that Violet had circled it vigorously. Love this! She’d written next to it on the contact sheet. Her writing was as insubstantial as her.
But what did I expect? This was a woman who got married in bare feet.
I found out from the wedding planner that the day had cost just short of sixty grand. Sixty thousand pounds. A lot had been gifted in exchange for coverage in Henry’s magazine.
My thoughts are interrupted by Simon turning the radio on. I’d been enjoying the silence.
“Just want the headlines,” he says. He means the sports headlines, of course.
I stare out of the window at the row upon row of 1930s semis, wondering if Violet and Henry will ever share what’s really going on.
* * *
Pat’s not well, which has made everything a lot less stressful than usual. He’s been in bed all morning, Jane explained as we came in.
So she has spent most of this morning in the kitchen, cooking her own birthday meal. I offered to help, but I was shooed away. I’ve been able to sit in their stuffy front room, reading the latest news about Violet and Henry in a copy of The Sunday Chronicle, which Pat helpfully has delivered, while Simon helps her with the food. The feature hasn’t been published online yet, and I felt my heart race as I saw Violet’s face on the front page and turned to read it. It seems that a “source” claimed Violet chose to leave social media after becoming upset by the trolling she was experiencing both in public and in private. The source went even further to claim that there were rumors that Violet’s initial postnatal depression, the whole reason for her starting her YouTube channel in the first place, was an invention. That the entire story was contrived in order to prey on the misery of real women who were really dealing with it, in order to sell them her self-help book later down the line.
There was also another “source” claiming that Violet and Henry’s marriage was a sham. That they were tied together by the lucrative nature of their pairing, and that in secret they hated each other. There were more rumors of Henry’s alleged
infidelity, claims that he had never wanted to settle down, that Violet had tricked him into marriage, the insinuation being that she was a talentless gold digger.
That one seems a little unfair.
All in all, it’s the perfect tabloid story: taking up a whole double-page spread in the UK’s most popular Sunday newspaper. I read the whole thing twice, not letting my eyes linger too long on the photographs they’d used—mostly taken from Henry’s Instagram account. I then settle back, allowing Jane and Pat’s sagging sofa to swallow me up, amazed that no one has worked out the truth.
HENRY
I took Yvonne home after that first afternoon in the pub. Home to the flat in Chelsea, that my father had bought me as some kind of obligation of aristocratic parenting. Send them to Harrow, give them all the opportunities you can, kick up a stink when they refuse to do law at university, and then begrudgingly set them up in a flat off the Kings Road, and leave them to make a mess of their lives with a clean conscience. Parenting over. Job’s a (not so) good’un.
I was lost back then. Had notions of being a serious writer, but could never quite be serious enough, not when there was so much fun to be had. My father, a QC no less, thought my job was a joke. Thought I’d get it out of my system and retrain in my twenties. I’m not sure he’s ever forgiven me, although Violet has done a good job of winning him over, as she does with everyone who meets her.
But this isn’t about Violet. It’s about her. I took her home and she was impressed with the flat, as they all were, and we made love twice, and I liked her, in a casual way. The problem was I had a girlfriend at the time. Nothing serious—not on my part anyway—after all, I was only twenty-six … But Camille was the little sister of a friend of mine, and he’d made jokes about breaking my legs if I ever hurt her, and to be quite honest, I thought he might.
So perhaps I wasn’t quite as chivalrous towards her as my mother would have hoped I’d be. When I woke up the next morning, Yvonne was standing over me, holding my cafetière and waving it at me.
“Coffee?” she said, a bright smile plastered all over her face. There was no trace of the meek picture assistant I’d naively assumed wouldn’t object to a one-night stand, no questions asked. This was a different person entirely. Lighter, more radiant. Even her hair was slightly kinked on one side, softening her features. She was attractive like this. Loosened up, like an undone tie.
I did what any man would have done. I had manners, if not morals. I stood up, kissed her, pulled out a stool for her at the island unit and made her breakfast. All the while secretly wishing she’d just cleared off while I’d been sleeping.
“Let me put you in a cab,” I said, when the morning started to roll dangerously towards afternoon and she was still sitting in my shirt, bare legs tucked up underneath her on my leather sofa, showing no signs of leaving. The sunlight was streaming through the window, throwing shadows across her face. I had a vision of her then, much older. “You must be wanting to get home.”
“Ugh,” she said, shaking her head. Home, it turned out, was a single bed in a house share in Clapham, and she didn’t have any plans that weekend. On the other hand, I was expected at Camille’s by 2pm. It was August, she was having a barbecue on her tiny roof terrace, and everyone was going to be there.
Hindsight is a glorious thing, as they say. If I had thrown her out on to the street, if I hadn’t made those bloody pancakes, maybe things would be very different now.
In the end, I did what all cowards do. I lied, told her with a pulled face of disappointment that I was off to visit my parents that afternoon. Thank God these were the days before social media, before your every move can be tracked and traced by the suspicious. She accepted my excuse graciously, collected up her things and left. On the doorstep, she told me it had been fun, gave me a little wink. My whole body relaxed, believing I’d got away with it, that we were on the same page.
I remember the smug feeling I had as I strolled to Camille’s. Thinking I had it all: the job, the social circle and the girls I’d always wanted. It was like a warm drink heating me up from the inside. The smug self-satisfaction of the least deserving.
LILY
“Henry Blake is a smug, self-satisfied twat,” Luke says, draining his paper cup. I glance around. This is not the sort of language you usually hear at the soft-play centre. Not out loud, anyway. Under harassed parents’ breaths, certainly.
Another Sunday at soft-play. When Ellie’s journalist friend Luke called me this morning, I had no time to arrange childcare. I’m embarrassed I had to meet him here, but it was the only place Archie was guaranteed to leave us in peace, at least for twenty minutes. I could have put Luke off, of course, but there was something in his voice that I warmed to. And after last night, I needed to get out. To spend time with other people.
Mind you, the coffee here is terrible. I look at Luke, taking in the bright blue of his eyes, the smattering of freckles over his nose. His hair is gingerish and styled in a perfect wave across his head. He’s staring at the multicolored foam-filled monstrosity in one corner of the room. Ellie hadn’t mentioned that he was this good-looking, and I wish I’d made more of an effort with my clothes. I don’t know what I was expecting from a popular culture journalist—he was careful to correct me when I said he “did celebs”—but this handsome vision in front of me certainly wasn’t it.
“Did you work with him then?” I ask, wishing I’d bought a bottle of water as well as the coffee. My throat is arid. Susie’s wine was heavier than I’m used to.
“Not directly,” Luke says, his eyes flicking back to mine. I try not to look away. “But I met him a few times, we had friends in common. You could tell he was very … pleased with himself, let’s say.” He pauses, points towards the soft-play hell in the corner. “Your little lad is really going for it. Fearless.”
He smiles.
There’s a hint of something in his accent—not Geordie exactly, but maybe further up the coast. Northumbrian? It’s gentle and reassuring and I think I could listen to him talk all day.
“So,” he says. He reaches into his leather record bag and pulls out a notebook. He still hasn’t taken his parka off. I wonder how he sees me. Probably as some washed-up single mother that he’s planning on getting away from as soon as possible.
“How old are you?” I ask, thinking aloud. I immediately regret my own rude question, but he doesn’t seem phased at all.
“Thirty-four,” he replies, cheerfully. “You?”
“Twenty-seven,” I say. “Sorry. You just … well, you look younger. I mean … you look, er, well, good for your age.”
He gives a long laugh, his eyes widening.
“Cheers. That’ll be my great skincare routine. Anyway … I won’t take up too much of your time, I can see you’ve got your hands full with your little lad…”
“No, it’s fine,” I say, a little too quickly. “Honestly. He’ll be happy for hours yet.” It’s a slight exaggeration, but Luke sits back, looking more relaxed, and I tell him about the rumor on GoMamas that there’d been a fight, resulting in an ambulance being called, and about last night and the mysterious Amy, holed up in Henry and Violet’s house and secretly meeting him in cafes. I tell him what Amy told me about Henry being at the hospital. He makes notes, his eyebrows rising at the revelation that I hung around outside Skye’s school, waiting to see her, but it doesn’t feel like he’s judging me. Not like I’d expect to be judged. But then again, he’s an investigative journalist, and stalking is part of their job description. Compared to phone-tapping and goodness knows what else, what I’ve done is small fry.
“You might have seen,” he says, when I stop speaking to take another gulp of weak coffee. “There was a big piece about them in The Sunday Chronicle this morning. Nothing substantial to it though. Just tabloid fluff. I want to do a proper piece about the price these vloggers pay. It’s been done before, but I like the mammy angle. So often it’s focused on the teen market, you know, but Violet’s a bit unusual in that she’
s older. You wouldn’t expect adults to be so easily drawn in by these influencers, and yet they are. And of course, Violet used to be a journalist herself, so she knows how to play the game.”
“Have you ever met her?” I ask.
“Hmm, yes. Once at an event.”
“Ellie thought you wouldn’t have even heard of her,” I say.
“My sister’s got a lad,” he replies, “about the same age as yours. He’s great. She’s a single mum, gets lonely, so she’s always chewing my ear off about the latest mammy trend. In fact, I spoke to her this morning about Violet and she was desperate for me to do the story.”
“I’m a single mum, too,” I say.
“Oh? Sorry to hear that,” he says, and his mouth twitches a little. Perhaps Ellie already told him. With a fright, I realise she might have actually been trying to set us up. My brain cycles through all the things I’ve written on the forum in the past. Have I ever sounded needy or desperate for a man? I don’t think so, but recent experience has taught me that I don’t always remember what I’ve posted online late at night.
“It’s OK,” I say, feeling my cheeks redden. I shouldn’t have said anything, and my words hang in the air. I must remember that he’s not interested in me, he’s interested in Violet. Time to change the subject. “So, tell me more about Henry. I’m curious. He always came across quite well on Violet’s vlogs. A bit full of himself, but he seemed very charming.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. He’s charming enough for the right audience. I don’t know, I didn’t get a good vibe from him. He seemed like there was a lot going on under the surface.”
“Do you think he was violent towards her?” The words come out in a rush. “Only there are some theories on GM…”
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