‘She needs a reason to get out of bed,’ Mum says, turning down John Humphrys on the
Today
programme. ‘She’s still in bed, Harvey. It’s like having a teenager in the house again. Do you think we should suggest counselling?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘Why aren’t you wearing your aid?’
‘It makes a horrid noise. Can you pass the marmalade?’
‘I’ve heard her, talking to herself upstairs. I’m worried, Harvey.’
‘Let her be.’ Dad sighs. ‘What do you expect her to be doing? She needs time to grieve.’
‘I know.’
‘Did I tell you I bumped into Jeremy at Sainsbury’s?’
Jeremy is an old family friend.
‘Eleanor has broken her ankle – she slipped on a cattle grid,’ Dad continues. ‘She’s in hospital.’
‘How awful. We must send her a card, or flowers. Which hospital?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’
‘How long will she be there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It must be a bad break, if she’s in hospital.’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Well, you should have asked! I’ll give him a ring. I’m still worried about Becca,’ she adds.
‘It’s going to be a long hard road.’
‘She’s talking to herself. I can’t hear what she’s saying but—’
‘I talk to myself, in my shed.’
Mum laughs. ‘Yes, but come on, it’s different for you. You’re an old man. Marjorie was asking if Becca would like to help her.’
My shoulders stiffen. Marjorie is one of Mum’s tennis friends who runs an online business called Country
Knick-Knacks. Country Tat, Dad calls it. I hide from her when I see her in town.
‘I might call her …’
NO!
I scream inside.
The pinger rings. Dad’s boiled egg is ready. ‘No,’ Dad argues. ‘Don’t rush her. Our job right now is to be here, that’s all.’
14
It’s mid-August, the morning of my twenty-week scan. I have been living at home now for eight weeks. Mum, Dad and I have slotted into a routine. I take Audrey out for walks, often with Janet and Woody. Sometimes Mum joins me with the twins, which makes the walk an event.
There’s a contest between them as to who opens the small white kissing gate leading into the water meadows. Often there are tantrums, and it’s usually Oscar who refuses to walk, sitting down,
splat
, in a cowpat in his newly washed and ironed combat trousers. Theo then copies him. I don’t know how Mum looks after them on such a regular basis while Pippa works at the tennis club. By the end of the day she is snappy and hits the vodka bottle an hour early, skipping a cup of tea.
I’m in touch daily with friends. Jamie was just as
shocked as me when he heard Joe was living in Winchester. Sylvie is curious to meet him again, although they were never close at Bristol. She doesn’t know what happened between Joe and me. None of my friends do except for Kitty. Carolyn and I talk regularly. She tells me about the vegetables and herbs she’s growing, adding how she loves the long summer evenings when she can do her planting. I imagine her garden is her sanctuary.
I’ve been helping Mum cook, yet even that isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ she said last time, when I’d added lime juice to my chicken marinade. ‘Clare Francis says lemon works better
and
you should add the zest.’ Clare Francis is Mum’s friend and cooking guru.
I talk to Olly. Sometimes I hear his voice inside my head, sometimes I don’t. He continues to say that nothing was worrying him on the morning of the accident. I wish Mum, Dad and I had the courage to mention his name across the supper table.
‘No, Pippa, I’m sorry, but I can’t,’ I overhear Mum say down the telephone, as I finish reading an email from Glitz.
My heart lifts when I read: ‘I’ve worked out a bonus for you, plus maternity leave, and then, after you’ve
had the baby, we can review. I’ll be sending the cheque shortly.’
Lovely Glitz. What a supportive boss and friend he has become. This money will give me a sense of security. After my appointment, I’ll call to thank him.
‘I miss you,’ he finishes. ‘Marty and I think of you often. Good luck with the ultrasound. Love, Glitz.’
‘I know it’s still the holidays, but it’s Becca’s scan,’ I overhear Mum saying. A couple of minutes later she puts the phone down.
‘Come on, Rebecca, you can read that later,’ she orders, and for a second I feel like I’m ten years old and being told that if I don’t get a move on, I’ll be late for school. Still, it’s good of her to be coming with me, I remind myself. ‘What did Pippa want?’ I ask.
‘To look after the boys. I can see it’s difficult for her, but …’
‘I can go on my own, Mum.’
‘No. I can’t always be at her beck and call.’
Why don’t they get an au pair? It’s a question that’s been on my mind for some time, but I don’t ask Mum. I don’t want to rock the boat just as we’re about to go to the hospital.
Mum and I gaze at the monitor screen. This time we can make out the shape of my baby.
I watch the nurse’s expression carefully as she studies the screen. I know how much I want this baby now because I am terrified that she will detect something wrong, but so far she is telling me all the measurements of its head and abdominal circumference and the thigh bone are just as they should be.
‘Would you like to know the sex?’ she asks.
Mum has advised I keep it a surprise, but I can see from the way she’s stopped knitting that even she is a tiny bit tempted.
‘It’s a boy, isn’t it?’ I say.
She nods. ‘It’s a boy.’
Mum and I look at one another tearfully. I reach for her hand, but then withdraw it just as quickly.
‘Mum! I felt him kick!’ It was like a little tap, an air bubble inside me. He kicks me again.
‘He’s saying hello, introducing himself.’ Mum smiles.
‘I’m going to cook supper tonight,’ I announce to Mum. ‘You go and put your feet up.’ Mum stares at me as if I’ve just told her to go paragliding. ‘I’ll make some spaghetti, if we have mince.’ Lemon chicken and spaghetti bolognese are about the only things in my repertoire.
I open the fridge, locate a packet of minced beef
behind a bowl filled with half a chicken fillet, a few tired-looking green beans and a couple of carrots soggy from gravy: last night’s leftovers.
‘We can eat it for lunch,’ Mum says, protesting when I suggest we bin it. ‘Or Audrey can have it as a treat.’
I peel off the outer layer of the onion, slice off the stem and root and start chopping. Mum is back in the kitchen only minutes later. I glance at the clock: six thirty on the dot. As she heads over to the vodka bottle … ‘Oh,’ she says. Soon she’s hovering over me like an eagle and I can feel my shoulders tense and my hackles rise.
‘You do it like that?’ Mum looks down at my onion.
‘What?’ I sniffle, wiping away the tears.
She pushes me out of the way as she peels the second onion and cuts it in half. ‘I slice it horizontally, three times towards the root,’ she says, before swiftly spinning the onion towards her and slicing it, she counts out loud, ‘one, two, three, four, five, six times, from top to bottom,
comme ça
,’ before swivelling the onion round again, holding it tightly with her thumb and forefinger, ‘and then,’ she says, as if this is the
pièce de résistance
, ‘you slice it over the top, and look! What neat little cubes, plus I’m not crying. Clare Francis tells us …’
‘Oh, stop banging on about Clare Francis,’ I say. ‘You make her sound like the Messiah.’
Mum laughs. ‘Sorry. But she is good. You should come with me to her next lesson.’ She dives into her cooking files, on the shelf above the bread bin. ‘Here we are: “Hassle-free Entertaining”.’
‘We’ll see.’
After supper, Dad picks up the television controls and stabs at a button. He lets out a giant groan when nothing happens, Mum and I exchange a secret glance. Eventually he finds the right channel. He is keen to watch a programme about the plight of tigers and how we must do everything in our power to save them from extinction.
Quietly I leave the room, deciding to make a telephone call. ‘Can I borrow the car?’ I ask Mum when I return, Dad already fast asleep.
She looks surprised. ‘Are you off somewhere?’
‘Annie’s.’ As I’m about to head out the door, Mum still knitting, I feel a tug of affection towards her; the wall between us is being chipped away, even if she irritates me in the kitchen. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘What for?’
‘For coming with me today. It meant a lot, and I know
Olly would have been glad I wasn’t alone too.’ There. I’ve said his name out loud, and it felt good. Liberating.
‘It meant a lot to me too.’
‘Maybe we can go shopping soon,’ I suggest, thinking of Glitz’s forthcoming cheque. ‘I need to start thinking about prams and cots and …’
‘I’d love to.’ Tearful, she holds up her half-finished matinee coat. ‘I can hardly believe he’ll be as tiny as this,’ she says.
15
Annie lives in St Cross, in a small street tucked behind St Faith’s Road, close to our old school and the water meadows. She opens the door in a bright-blue dress, the colour of an exotic bird. ‘Come in,’ she says, leading me down a narrow hallway and into an open-plan kitchen with an island in the middle. A small table is at the end of the room, in front of the double doors that lead out into the garden. ‘I’m on my own tonight. Richie’s at some conference on gum disease.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘So I’m glad you called.’ She lifts the kettle. ‘Tea, my darling?’
I’m enjoying getting to know Annie again. I’ve discovered she used to live in Islington, worked in recruitment, but was always determined to run her own business. She lost her virginity on her twenty-first
birthday to a two-timing monkey called Christian. ‘Late starter,’ she’d laughed, ‘but don’t worry, I’ve more than made up for it since.’ She lived with Richie the dentist for a year before realizing she’d fallen in love with him.
Annie gives me a quick tour of the house. ‘Winchester was the one place we both loved,’ she says, walking into the sitting room, a cosy space with cream sofas and a guitar on a stand. ‘Can you play?’ I ask, impressed.
‘Badly. I was in a band for a while, in London.’ It reminds me of Olly. ‘My dream was to be famous and marry a rock star. I ended up working in a shop and marrying a dentist!’
‘Well, mine was to be an artist. I ended up selling other people’s art instead!’
Olly’s dream was to be a writer.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have dreams,’ I suggest to Annie.
She shakes her head. ‘If you don’t have dreams, you don’t have hope,’ she says.
Over a cup of tea we reminisce about our school days. She rushes out of the room and returns with a photograph. ‘Oh my God!’ It’s our school play. There’s Annie, wearing a red medieval dress that drowned her, with a matching headdress, looking miserable. I’m in the background, Friar Tuck, donning a brown hooded robe
with a makeshift rope belt around my substantial waist. ‘It was no wonder they gave me that part. I look pregnant!’ I gasp.
‘D’you remember our music competition, singing the Frog Chorus?’
‘
We all stand together
,’ we sing out, and I’m laughing properly for the first time in ages.
Annie says she’s longing to meet Kitty again. She remembers her being teacher’s pet, the swot sitting at the front of the class, waving her arm in the air, desperate to answer every question. The teachers often had to tell her to give someone else a chance. I tell Annie she works for a leading careers consultant in Piccadilly.
‘Single? Married?’
‘Single. She hasn’t had much luck with men.’ Her last internet date had been with a guy called Phil. ‘He had a head the size of a peanut,’ Kitty had lamented, ‘and mean little eyes. He didn’t pay for my drink either.’
When Annie asks how I’m doing, I tell her about the scan. ‘It’s a boy,’ I reveal.
‘A boy,’ she sighs. ‘Your first is exciting. I’ll write a list of all the things you’ll need if you like.’
I tell her Pippa has already done this, though her list was as long as a marathon. ‘I’m halfway through,’ I
joke, pretending I’m out of breath, ‘not sure I’ll reach the end.’ I accept Annie’s kind offer. Besides, it might be interesting comparing.
‘And if there’s
anything
else I can do …’
I take a sip. Go on, ask, she won’t bite. ‘Well, there might be.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m a little bored.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ Olly’s voice pipes up.
‘I don’t have enough to do.’
‘Christ, I wish I was in your position,’ she blurts out, before apologizing. ‘Oh fuck, it wasn’t supposed to come out like that …’
‘Annie, don’t worry,’ I smile, putting her at ease. ‘You don’t have to tiptoe around me. I get enough of that at home.’
‘Tact has never been my strong point. Right. What could you do?’ Annie strums her fingers against the table. ‘Join a few societies?’
I pull a face.
‘Learn French?’
‘Not sure,’ I say, knowing I don’t want to learn a language.
‘Japanese?’ She bows her head towards mine.
I bow my head back. ‘No!’
‘Swahili?’
‘Fluent already.’
‘Have some singing lessons?’ She tells me an opera singer lives next door and she wakes up to
The Marriage of Figaro
. ‘Join a choir. It’s the latest rage!’
‘I’m tone deaf,’ I laugh. When I had piano lessons, the teacher soon told Mum it was a waste of money.
‘Knit some tea cosies and flog ’em on a market stall? I know! You must join my bookworm club, though that’s hardly going to keep you rushed off your feet. Often we don’t even
read
the book. How about salsa classes? Hang on – not such a great idea when you’re pregnant.’
I’m going to just have to come out with it. ‘Annie, I wondered if you needed an extra pair of hands in the shop.’
‘Ah, I see,’ she says, chewing her lip. ‘Oh, Becca, you saw how empty it was that day you came in, like a morgue. Oh God, I’m so sorry!’ She claps a hand over her mouth.
We end up both laughing helplessly.
‘It’s so quiet that
I’m
going to have to look for a new job soon,’ Annie declares. ‘If I could employ another person you’d be top of my list, but …’