“Oooh. Clever boy.”
“And handsome boy?”
“Well . . . not in the conventional sense, I don’t think. He’s a redhead.”
“Ginger pubes.” Lisa nodded sympathetically.
“Gross!” Hannah groaned.
Amanda gave Lisa a playful shove. “I wouldn’t know—we’re not all slappers.”
“Ah—those were the days.” Lisa shook her head in mock wistfulness.
“So are you two seeing each other?” Jennifer asked.
Amanda smiled shyly. “I think so, yes, a bit. We only met a couple of weeks ago, so it’s early days. And, what with Christmas and stuff . . .”
“Is he at home, doing the family thing?”
“Yes. In Cornwall. He’s from this huge family, apparently—you know, a million cousins.”
“Was
he
the call this morning?”
She nodded. “He was. He gave me a present, the other day, before he left. He wanted to see if I’d opened it.”
“We didn’t see it.”
“I opened it on my own, early.”
“And . . . what was it . . . ?”
“Mind your own business!”
“You’re leaving us with no choice but to assume it was, I don’t know—Agent Provocateur knickers or something. . . .”
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“Assume what you want.”
“Leave her be,” Jennifer chided Lisa. “A girl is allowed a secret.”
It had been a square box, wrapped so beautifully— so Mumlike—that she wondered if he could possibly have done it himself.
Inside, nestled on gold tissue paper, was a CD with no markings. The note had said, “I know this is obsolete technology, but I could hardly steal your iPod and load this, so it’s the best I could do. I hope you have a CD player at home. You seem like the kind of girl who wakes up early and sneaks a peek at her presents. I’m the kind of boy who will be woken early by half a dozen hyperactive nephews, so listen to this before breakfast, and I’ll be thinking about you. . . .”
It was a mix tape. She hadn’t had anything like it since she was about fifteen and mix tapes were really tapes, and Paul Young was on all of them. It was a mix tape full of the cheesiest, most saccharine-laden, goofy love songs. Really. We were talking Cliff Richards’s “Miss You Nights.” Phil Collins’s “Groovy Kind of Love.” A Top 10 of naff.
She’d snuck into Hannah’s room while she was in the shower and borrowed her boom box, which was, indeed, the only piece of compatible technology in the house, and she listened to it while she got dressed. She had laughed delightedly and danced and sung along. The last song was Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which she belted out from atop her bed, her hairbrush in hand, missing the falsettos by a mile.
It was quite possibly the best present ever.
When he’d called, he hadn’t said who he was, which normally drove her mad. She knew, of course. The caller ID on her phone announced that Tintin was calling.
“So? What do you think?”
“What—no Paul Young?”
“Nope. ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s My Home’ is about the in-evitability of leaving someone. Not a happy tune at all.”
“What—nothing recorded post-1990?”
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“Listen—I have all that stuff. I could have done a Damien Rice, Green Day mix tape. But where’s the fun in that? All that angst . . .”
“It was perfect.”
“It was, wasn’t it? I loaded it onto my Nano—listened to it when I woke up, as promised.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Crazy about you.”
“Aha—chat-up lines to match the music. Nice touch.”
“Just didn’t want you to be in any doubt.”
“About what?”
“I’ve got it pretty bad.”
“You’ve got something pretty bad. That’s true. But I’m sure you can get a lotion to clear it right up.”
“See you New Year’s Eve?”
“Will there be music?”
“There’s always music.”
“Then I’ll have to think about it.”
“You think about it. I’ll dream about it.”
“I’m hanging up, Monsieur Fromage.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Tin?”
“Call me Ed.”
“Ed?”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Amanda.”
So that explained the grin.
“It must have been good. You’re going to crack your face open.” Jennifer was watching her intently.
“It was nice. Now bugger off, you lot, and mind your own busi-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 77
ness.”
“I’ll save you.” Lisa put her arm around Amanda. “Allow me to deflect the attention. . . .”
“What with?”
“Andy asked me to marry him.”
Amanda’s jaw dropped. “He did!”
“He did. At a party last week.”
“And . . .”
“And I said yes.”
Amanda threw her other arm around her sister. “Yeah.”
Lisa backed away, her arms raised in protest.
“Not so fast. I shouldn’t have said yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I didn’t mean yes. I was a bit pissed, and a bit carried away. . . .”
“You don’t accidentally agree to marry someone, Lisa.”
“It wasn’t an accident. It was just . . .”
“So that’s why no announcement, no ring . . . you’ve told him, right?
God, poor Andy . . .”
“No, I haven’t told him.”
Hannah took a large fingerful of brandy butter. “Even I know that’s a really bad idea.”
Amanda shot her a filthy look. “Shut up, Hannah.”
�
New Year’s Eve
Hannah
She’d said no to the party invitation. Someone’s parents had a barn, and they’d said their kids each could have twenty friends over for New Year’s. They were having a black-tie dinner in the house, so it would be supervised, but only sort of. There were four kids—and Hannah’s friend Beth was the second youngest. So that would mean about eighty kids, half of whom would be older, and presumably, since Beth’s older siblings were brothers, male. Which made it pretty much the most exciting party invitation she’d ever had.
She knew if she told Dad about it he’d make her go. He’d lecture her about drink and drugs and abstinence and stuff, but he’d make her go. But that would mean leaving him alone on New Year’s Eve, and she didn’t want to do that.
She’d been out with her friends on the twenty-seventh. All day.
They’d been to the sales, armed with the vouchers and wads of cash that Christmas had yielded, in a big giggling crowd of girls exhilarated by being freed from conversation with their grandparents and aged aunts.
She’d been home much later than she’d said. When she’d opened the front door, there’d been all these boxes and bags lined up. Mark had cleaned out Mum’s wardrobe. He said he’d been meaning to do it for months, and that now was as good a time as any—new year, and all that.
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She’d known it needed to be done, and part of her was glad that she’d missed it. But he looked so sad and so pale and so lonely, standing among the carrier bags, that she felt awful.
He’d turned down all his own invitations. Vince and Sophie had practically begged him to go there. There were the usual suspects—
neighbors, colleagues, old friends. He said no to everyone.
So she pretended that the invitation she was turning down was the less than thrilling opportunity to waitress at the same friend’s parents’
dinner party, with free drinks thrown in after dessert was served. If he questioned her truthfulness, it didn’t show in his face. They had rented DVDs of some of the films they hadn’t made it to earlier in the year . . . for obvious reasons . . . and bought some extremely posh ready-made food from Marks and Spencer. Hannah told Mark she wouldn’t let him cook on New Year’s Eve, coming so soon after Christmas, and that she certainly didn’t intend to wash up. They had king prawns with dipping sauce, and lobster, and imported strawberries.
They ate in their pajamas and dressing gowns, in front of the fire, and let the machine pick up all their calls.
At 12:15 a.m., Dad woke her up, very gently, and they both went to bed. She’d missed it.
Once she’d climbed the stairs and slid between the sheets, cool on her skin after an evening in front of the fire, she felt very awake again.
The party would be in full swing now, everyone laughing and dancing and shouting to one another over the thump of the music, and the house was so quiet.
Lisa
Lisa and Andy toasted the New Year at 7:30 p.m. Cee Cee insisted. She also insisted they do it because it was already New Year for her mummy, sailing in the Caribbean, and no amount of cajoling would persuade her that the Caribbean was five hours behind and not five hours ahead. They had picked her up from Karen’s on Boxing Day, and she’d been dictating 80 e l i z a b e t h
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the content and timing of their meals all week. As well as waking them up at 6:30 every morning. She’d heard noises from their bedroom a couple of nights ago and come in while they were making love. Andy had grabbed the duvet and covered them, and she’d climbed up between them, and he’d told her Lisa was having a bad dream. It was certainly a nightmare, Lisa smiled to herself, lying there left high and dry, but not the one he described. Cee Cee had gone back to sleep there almost at once, and they thought she might have forgotten, but the next day in Pizza Express she described the scenario in no small detail to the waitress, who blushed knowingly.
New Year’s Eve was no different. She was up before 7:00, demanding pancakes and
Charlie and Lola.
And to be honest, the absence of any kind of a lie-in all week meant that neither was inclined to argue anymore with her. They opened champagne, Cee Cee drinking hers from an egg-cup, lit sparklers, and attempted a linked-arm “Auld Lang Syne,” which was largely unsuccessful. Andy had bought a single-fuse firework box, which he’d lit at the end of the garden, so they had a damp and somewhat unimpressive two-minute firework display at 7:35, and by 7:45 the brou-haha was largely over. They’d argued a little, earlier. Andy thought tonight would be a good night to tell Cee Cee they were engaged. Lisa had stumbled on the perfect excuse and convinced him, forcibly, that it would be wrong to tell Cee Cee before they’d had a chance to tell Karen.
In case of trauma. Truth was, of course, that she did not want Cee Cee to know. There was definitely a trauma factor, but it was all her own.
Not that Cee Cee needed any encouragement in this area. She had apparently decided that she approved of Lisa, after all this time, and her line of questioning this week had run along such “happy families” lines that Lisa would have suspected Andy had already told her, if she didn’t know him to be so scrupulously honest and straightforward. Putting Cee Cee to bed at eight provided Lisa with some relief from the questioning about the likelihood of a new brother or sister for next New Year’s Eve.
When she got back downstairs, Andy had poured the rest of the
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bottle into her glass. She drank it, settling back into the crook of his arm to watch
The Mask of Zorro,
and they had both woken up at 12:40, having slept through the whole thing.
Jennifer
Jennifer wasn’t hungry, although it was after 10:00 p.m. and she hadn’t had anything to eat since lunchtime. She pushed her fettuccine Alfredo around the plate and sipped at her Prosecco. It was noisy and smoky.
Most people were already on the way to being drunk, although it was still an hour until midnight. Revelers passed by on the street, occasionally leering unsteadily through the window where they were sitting.
She wished she was at home. She wasn’t in the mood for all this good-naturedness. She spoke when spoken to, as animatedly as she could, and kept a smile frozen on her face, but, when left alone, her mind wandered to somewhere else.
It was New Year’s Eve three years ago that she and Stephen had first tried for a baby. It had felt like an appropriately adventurous thing to do, to celebrate the New Year by creating a new life. When she was a child, Jennifer used to like to see the front of the local paper the first week in January—it always carried a photograph of a smiling mother clutching the first baby of the year, born at the local hospital at two minutes past midnight on New Year’s Day . . . Mum used to look over her shoulder, clicking her tongue and exclaiming that being in labor was no way to spend New Year’s Eve, but she would always admire the baby, nonetheless. “You forget how small they are!”
They’d been in New York three years ago. The pound was strong against the dollar, airfares were cheap, and they’d found a little hotel off Times Square that had a good rate. They’d flown on December 28 and packed all the touristy things into a few days. The city was crowded with bargain hunters—Fifth Avenue was a jungle. It was bitterly cold; the wind whistled up the island like a thousand tiny knives, and many, many hot chocolate stops were required. Stephen bought them earmuffs from 82 e l i z a b e t h
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a street vendor. They’d been up the Empire State Building in bright sunshine, marveling at the urban tapestry laid out before them, danced ca-cophonously on the giant piano in FAO Schwartz, taken a ride around Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage, and skated—badly, and painfully—at the Rockefeller rink in the shadow of the biggest Christmas tree either of them had ever seen. Skating, it appeared, was the one sport Stephen was destined to fail at. He flailed and slid like a cartoon, landing on the hard ice from every angle, over and over. Jennifer and Lisa had begged their mum to take them skating at the rink in Queensway practically every weekend for about two years when they were about fourteen and fifteen. Although she hadn’t done it since, the memory of how to do it came flooding back when she stepped on the ice and let go of the sides.
“You can go backward!” Stephen’s tone was incredulous, but admir-ing. “You never said.”
“I’d forgotten. We used to go when we were kids.”
“You’re pretty good. You can do that one foot to the other glide thing.”