‘Thank you.’ Fortunately for Tamsyn, the poor woman seemed too overwhelmed by her illness to be listening to Tamsyn’s rambling, bending over double in agony as she tried to stand.
‘Actually, I’ll get that nice vet lady to pop in and have a look at you if she’s still around,’ Tamsyn said. ‘You look pretty terrible.’
‘Thank you,’ Catriona said, straightening with some effort. ‘But I am quite all right, really. It’s just this horrible bug; loads of us have got it. I’ve had worse. Mother always used to say that ninety-eight per cent of all illness was in the mind, and she never had a day of it in her life. Not until the cancer. I do sometimes think if she hadn’t ignored the symptoms for quite so long we might have had her around for a bit longer, but as she always said, when it’s your time it’s your time, no point in crying about it.’
‘Your mum sounds like quite a lady,’ Tamsyn said, tactfully. ‘You must miss her terribly.’
Catriona’s face seemed to crumple inwards as she struggled not to let her emotions get the better of her.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘I do. Mum told me that the grief would pass, that I’d find new interests. People always thought she made me live with her, made me look after her. They always thought I’d sacrificed my youth to run around after a silly, selfish old woman, but it wasn’t like that at all. I loved her, I loved our life together. I never really wanted a husband or anything, outside of the church. I’m a quiet person; I only want a quiet life. If anything, Mother put up with me. She could have had another life altogether after Father died. She could have had another husband, more children. She gave all that up for me. So yes, yes I do miss her. You must think I am a very silly fool to talk so.’
‘I don’t,’ Tamsyn said gently. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without my mum, even though she is actually the most annoying person I know. I don’t think there is ever an age when you’re ready to lose your mum, no matter what sort of person you are. Everyone always needs their mum. I hope Mo’s mum realises that and comes back for her.’
Catriona shuddered, despite the beads of sweat on her forehead. ‘Silly girl, probably not got enough sense to take care of her child. The baby is most certainly better off without her.’ She rose from her chair, taking a breather about halfway up to gather her strength. ‘Now I’m off back to quarantine. I think I’d better take this mug with me.’
‘Well, Mo,’ Tamsyn said, as soon as they were alone again. ‘Nappy-change time. Cover me, I’m going in. But preferably not in poo.’
‘Dirty stop-out,’ Cordelia opened one eye, still smeared in yesterday’s make-up, as Tamsyn crept in. She’d had no luck at all in finding nappies anywhere else on the ground floor, and had been forced to bring Mo back upstairs for her feed. ‘Honestly, only you could pull, in the middle of a national crisis, in a castle, while holding a baby. It’s like that time when the whole of your class got kept in detention and you made out with Danny Harvey under a desk, and everyone thought you were the coolest, and then Danny Harvey’s girlfriend walloped you with her geography book.’
‘Is it just me whose past indiscretions you love to bring up at every available opportunity, or is everyone else in our family fair game?’ Tamsyn asked her in a whisper. ‘I was going to come back up, but I didn’t want to wake you all.’ Keira’s bed was empty; she had probably been dragged in to play with the boys already, but their mother lay prone on her back, her candlewick bedspread pulled right over her face.
‘You didn’t want to answer the questions about the secret boyfriend, more like,’ Cordelia yawned, forcing herself into a seated position. Tamsyn gently put Mo down on the bed in front of Cordelia, shaking out her arms for a few moments before she reached for a nappy and the wipes.
‘Imagine leaving this gorgeous little thing like she’s a bag of rubbish,’ Cordelia said, as she looked down at the face that returned her gaze with an air of gravitas.
‘Someone must have been desperate, I suppose. I hope they find her today, whoever she is,’ Tamsyn replied.
‘Getting bored of babysitting?’
‘No, just worried for the poor mother. I may work in fashion, but it’s not compulsory that I have to be evil, you know. It’s just that the industry happens to attract a lot of people from the dark side. They like the capes, you see. And the plucked eyebrows.’
She took a deep breath as she swiftly changed the nappy, and Cordelia covered her nose with a pillow. Tamsyn bagged up the offending article and before she could decide what to do with it, Cordelia grabbed it from her and threw it out of the open diamond-paned window.
‘You can’t do that!’ Tamsyn cried, going to the window and peering out. ‘That’s littering! At altitude!’
At least it had stopped raining, and the air seemed to have a particularly clean quality to it, as if every atom had been washed. Puddles laced the courtyard below, which was strewn with debris that had been blown high enough to find its way over the ramparts.
‘It’s fine. I’m not going to leave it there. I’ll go and collect it when I’m up, and put it in the appropriate bin,’ Cordelia told her. ‘I’ve had the same system since Petal was this big. That’s what happens when you insist on putting your nanny seventeen flights up. Can I feed her? It’s been ages since I fed a baby.’
‘OK,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Might give me a chance to get some feeling back in my fingers.’
‘So, what gives with the secret French lover, then?’ Cordelia asked her. ‘Is he married?’
‘No!’ Tamsyn sat down on the edge of her bed and flexed her fingers. ‘Well, except to his job, and also maybe his reflection.’
‘Right, so he’s really into you then?’ Cordelia looked sceptical.
‘We understand each other,’ Tamsyn said. ‘We both take what we want from the arrangement and we don’t expect it to be more than it is. It’s modern, it’s simple, it works.’
‘What is it that works so well?’ Cordelia asked her.
‘Really, really great sex,’ Tamsyn said, quite honestly.
‘Oh my God, wash your mouth out! Laura sat up suddenly, making Tamsyn jump.
‘Mother, I thought you were asleep!’ Tamsyn was horrified.
‘Strumpet!’ Laura said.
‘Bit unfair, Mother,’ Cordelia said. ‘And I hate to burst your bubble, but none of us are virgins any more, Mum. We’ve all done it.’
‘I am sadly aware of that,’ Laura said. ‘But as your mother, I don’t want to have to think about it, and as for you, Tamsyn Thorne, I thought you knew better, thought you’d learnt your lesson.’
‘Learnt what lesson?’ Tamsyn asked her.
‘Not to treat yourself so cheaply,’ Laura said. ‘You deserve so much more; a real relationship with a man who will care for you.’
‘I can’t think of anything worse! I’m enjoying my independence, my career and a very fulfilling physical relationship. There’s nothing wrong with that, Mum.’
‘Not if it comes with love and respect,’ Laura told her. ‘You father and I had amazing sex.’
‘Oh, God!’ Cordelia covered Mo’s ears and then her own. ‘Now who’s the strumpet?’
‘Too much information!’ Tamsyn said at the same time.
‘Well, we did; our bodies were in perfect harmony,’ Laura assured her two younger daughters, gesturing to illustrate her point. ‘Rub us together and we made sparks fly.’
‘Seriously, stop it,’ Cordelia told her. ‘I’m on nanny wages, I can’t afford therapy.’
‘But the reason it was good,’ Laura ploughed on in the face of Tamsyn pretending to throw up into a pillowcase, ‘was because we loved and respected each other. Because we cared. And all the technique in the world can’t make up for that, Tamsyn. You might think the sex is really, really great, but that’s because you haven’t had sex yet with a man who truly loves you. You’re wasting yourself on this man, whoever he is.’
‘I am not!’ Tamsyn insisted. ‘Honestly, he’s really great – funny and clever. I see Bernard every day and he does care about me, he cares about my reputation and my career, which is why we’ve kept it a secret.’
‘Oh my God, you are shagging your boss,’ Cordelia said, horrified. ‘That Bernard bloke!’ She pronounced Bernard’s name in the English way, as if he were a darts professional and not a member of the French fashion aristocracy.
‘Well,’ Tamsyn said, ‘what if I am? It’s got nothing to do with my work. I keep it completely separate.’
‘Oh Tamsyn, darling!’ Laura said. ‘What mess are you getting yourself into over there?’
‘No mess at all,’ Tamsyn said. ‘My life is very neat, ordered, stylish and happy. I love my life in Paris, I love my job and I love …’
‘Bernard?’ Cordelia finished the sentence that Tamsyn had just about managed to hold back from completing.
‘I love my arrangement with him,’ Tamsyn said, although the hard-won certainty that their relationship was completely equal and respectful seemed suddenly rather naive. When she thought about Bernard there was an ache around her heart, a sort of longing for something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He was kind to her. He treated her with his own sort of respect, other than insisting on keeping their relationship on the down low. Really, there was only one thing missing. Bernard might like her very much, but he certainly did not love her. Tamsyn had always thought she didn’t care about that, that love was an outmoded concept in the twenty-first century, but sometime last night – or was it this morning – she’d seen the way that Alex had leant against Ruan, and realised it was that simple certainty of affection that was missing. And knowing that had hurt, like a sharp, sudden blow to the ribs. She had gone and done exactly the thing she had promised herself would never happen to her. That had to be the explanation for the way she was feeling. She had fallen for Bernard, knowing he would never feel the same way about her. And it
hurt
.
A knock at the door punctuated the moment of revelation, and Tamsyn was glad when Alex’s head appeared.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘We’re going down to help with breakfast and then Mum, Jed, Lucy and I are going to check on the dresses and the church. I don’t suppose any of you would like to come along, would you? Ruan’s gone off already to see what the lower half of the town is like. See if they can start cleaning up, and making things safe. I’ve heard it’s pretty bad out there; a lot of people have lost a lot.’
‘I’ll come,’ Tamsyn said unexpectedly. Alex looked just as surprised as she was by the offer. ‘Well, Mo could do with a bit of fresh air, and I think I can see a tiny bit of blue sky out there. We won’t go anywhere that’s not safe and besides, I need to get out. It’s suddenly stifling in here.’
Her departure from the house out into a surprisingly benign, blue-skied and warm June morning was significantly delayed by Sue producing a contraption she claimed was called a baby sling, but which, Tamsyn decided as she patiently waited for Sue to strap her into it, most resembled a sort of baby-shaped bulletproof vest. Tamsyn watched Alex, who was leaning against the door waiting for her, and couldn’t help but admire her long, strong-looking thighs and the way her hips tapered into a waist. She was the very definition of hourglass, whereas Tamsyn was and always had been more or less straight up and down, whatever way you looked at her. In Paris, or in fashion in general, this was positively a very good thing, but when confronted with such a glowing example of womanly health, she had to admit that she felt rather meagre and inadequate. Besides, it was always boring designing clothes for the same shape of woman again and again, and that size-zero ideal rarely existed in real life.
Sometimes Bernard would let her help him with his couture work, which every now and then involved crowbarring a normal-shaped woman into one of his creations and promising her that she didn’t look terrible, but even then, there was no pleasure in it. Tamsyn would look at the client and imagine the dress that would bring out all of her best features, and then have to measure her for something that would make her resemble an air-conditioning unit. And yet that was how the fashion business was, the way it had always been and always would be, labouring under the conviction that clothes were meant for hangers rather than people.
‘Then we pop Mo in here, thusly,’ Sue said, producing the baby and sliding her legs into two holes at the bottom of the sling thing. ‘Do this button up here, and hey presto, you can walk around with her all snug as a bug and keep your hands free for … well, whatever it is you want them for.’
‘Thank you, I think,’ Tamsyn said, looking down at her new appendage. ‘I feel a bit like I’m in one of those sci-fi movies when something evil bursts out of your stomach.’
‘Welcome to motherhood, darling,’ Sue said.
‘I’d forgotten it was June,’ Tamsyn said to Lucy as they stood at the top of the hill looking down into the town. ‘It’s actually warm. Look at the sea; it looks so beautiful, sparkling, like it’s full of crystals.’
‘And strangely quiet,’ Lucy added. ‘I think the storm must have scared away all the birds. It was just a storm, wasn’t it? We didn’t miss the official end of the world, did we?’
‘I’d hope I’d get some sort of notice if that was the case,’ Jed said as he listened to the ominous quiet. ‘Four horsemen, maybe some sort of plague.’
‘Come on then,’ Gloria hooked her arm through Alex’s. ‘Let’s go and see what the damage is. And remember, everything always looks worse than it actually is.’
‘Well, except for those safety-pin leggings of Cordelia’s that you are wearing,’ Lucy told Tamsyn. ‘They really are that bad.’
The damage was considerable, and as the extent of it gradually revealed itself the further they descended into the town, Tamsyn was surprised by how deeply it affected her, liked someone had taken her childhood glitter-globe memory of the town and smashed it, hard, onto the floor.
They had only had to take a few steps down the steep incline to see that the road was strewn with debris, not all of it the sort of thing you would imagine coming in the aftermath of a British storm. Smashed roof tiles scattered the cobbles, yes, and the muck and mud that had been dragged through the town by the deluge from the swollen stream at the top of the hill silted every inch of the road, making it dangerously slippy. But there was also a selection of smashed photo frames that had fallen out of a broken window, and Buoy was investigating someone’s laptop, sitting open in the middle of the road, its screen dark and cracked. Tamsyn rested her palm gently on the top of Mo’s head. Somehow, in the daylight, after the storm had cleared, the true extent of exactly how lucky Mo had been not to be badly hurt, or worse, was even more terrifying.