The Yummy Mummy (33 page)
“You kiss all your friends on the arm, do you?” He shifts from one foot to the other. “She said you tried to go further but
she
stopped
you
!”
“Oh, for God’s sake. That’s a total lie. I swear on Evie’s life. . . .”
I feel a little assured; Joe would never use those words carelessly. Then I remember another incriminating detail. “But you said the meeting was canceled? You said it was work.”
Joe has the decency to blush. “I did. I lied. Kate begged me to see her on my own. She’d phoned up in a terrible state about Pete, said I was the only one who understood. She was already on her way and I didn’t want us all to meet and have to explain. . . .” He squeezes the bridge of his nose with his fingers and looks down, sighs. “One lie led to another and it all just seemed too complicated to deal with. I behaved like an idiot.”
“Why did you meet her so often?”
“I . . . I . . .” The truth sticks in Joe’s throat and he has to cough to release it. “. . . didn’t think I was doing any harm. I suppose I was kind of lonely.” He looks down, ashamed. “You didn’t seem to want me around.”
“How can you possibly say . . .” I pummel him again.
Joe grabs my fists. “Please . . . Amy, calm down. Let me try my best to explain. Will you sit down?” I perch next to him on the sofa, goose-bumping in the morning chill, wanting to snuggle up close but too proud to do so. “You were so preoccupied with the bump. You seemed so down, so tired, kind of weirdly closed off in your body.”
“I was pregnant.”
“But I couldn’t reach you. I felt so damned useless, made worse by problems at work. . . .”
“What problems?”
“Big ones. Like I thought we were going to go under. We’d lost two major contracts. But I couldn’t tell you because of the baby.”
“What’s this got to do with Kate?”
Joe flinches. “I had to talk to someone. And she was just there. She was always there, saying she was in town, offering to meet for coffee, a quick work lunch, a walk,” he hisses. “I was stupid, really fucking stupid.”
I knot my arms tight across my chest. My engagement ring glints brashly, inappropriately. “And you knew she liked you?”
Joe grimaces. “Not really. Perhaps I should have. She was very unhappy with Pete. We kind of moaned to each other. . . .”
Deep breath. I steel myself. Prepare for the consequences of the question. “Did you sleep with her?”
Joe grins, a weak, relieved grin. “No! God, no!”
“But you fancied her.”
Joe blinks, as if an airborne object had narrowly missed him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“The truth, Joe.”
“Well, the truth . . . is . . . if I’m being totally honest, at that moment in the park I was attracted to her, for some reason. There were no other moments like it, I promise, please believe that,” he implores. “Big mistake.”
“A big mistake!” Is that all? It ruined my daughter’s birth, my early motherhood. It made me feel about as attractive as a fat-camp evictee.
“She’s never let me forget it. She thinks it is proof . . .”
“
Proof?
That you should be together?”
Joe nods wearily. “I’ve tried to avoid being alone with her since then.” He shrugs. “I’m so sorry.”
No, sorry isn’t enough. Because I close my eyes and the movie is still looping on the blood black of my eyelids, him kissing her arm, over and over again, stop, rewind, stop, rewind. “You still kissed her arm. That’s such a horribly intimate thing to do.”
As I shout, hurling curses like hard red LEGO bricks, it suddenly occurs to me that actually, well, we’ll probably be fine. This isn’t quite as bad as I’d imagined. It’s like sitting through
The Blair Witch Project,
expecting to pass out with terror at the ending, steeling yourself, and then not finding it so frightening after all. I stop and pause.
“Okay now?” Joe looks relieved.
Okay? No, actually, not okay. My inner diva is furiously put out. So I shout louder because it’s my prerogative and I’m smarting and he deserves this right now.
“Amy, please . . .” Joe’s hands are raised, palms open, pleading.
Joe can’t expect me to just forgive without a fight. He needs to know it meant something. And
then
we’ll get on with our lives, become a had-hard-times-but-we-stuck-together couple. That’ll be our story, what we’ll tell Evie when she’s older. “So, did it happen more than once?”
“Oh, come on, Amy. This is all a bit bloody rich considering . . .”
So he hasn’t forgiven me, then. “Considering that I fucked up twice . . . no, I mean . . .”
Too late.
“Twice?” Joe whispers, eyes screwed shut.
ONE WORD, THE TINY HAIR FRACTURE THAT REDUCES
everything to rubble. I tried to deny everything but just dug a deeper hole. He didn’t believe me. The next day, Joe left London, texting to say he was going to work from Leo’s ex-girlfriend’s holiday house in Cornwall for a while, to get his head straight. He’d call to sort something out about Evie soon. Nothing more, just that. Like we were colleagues or babysitters organizing a timetable rotation.
For the last two days, I’ve been sitting here, on my Tracey Emin–style bed, lunching on Wrigley’s gum, not sleeping, unable to comprehend any future, only just able to look after Evie. Joe hovers close like an amputee’s removed limb, on the right-hand side of the bed, the empty unloved Eames chair, the silence where his thud and clatter should be. And I can still smell him, his aftershave, the plastic keyboard on his fingers, even his farts in the bathroom seem to linger like stale ghosts.
There’s a rattle of the key in the lock. Joe? Thank God.
“Only me!” Mum. I hunch into the duvet as she steams up the stairs.
“No more mooning!” She flicks on the light. “Oh! Goodness! Oh, Amy! You look terrible. What’s happened? Come here.” Mum hugs me to her chest, suffocating me in a crunch of freshly laundered linen. We rock back and forth for a few minutes in silence. “Darling Amy.” She kisses me, masters her tears, picks up Evie from her cot. “Let’s go out. It’ll do you both a world of good,” she says. Five minutes later, I’m outside, squinting in the sunlight. Mum walks so fast, so vigorously, I can hardly keep up. What ever happened to the bad back?
“The worst thing you can do is waste away inside. You owe it to Evie. . . .”
“Sorry.” I want to scream, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” like a demented adulterer on a morning chat show.
Mum bends down from the waist, like someone twenty years younger, and tickles Evie under the chin. “Looks a bit peaky. Is she okay?”
Evie grins at her. Entertainment at last.
I nod. “Teething, waking up a lot during the night.”
“Well, that can’t help. Still, pulling yourself together is the only way. . . .” Mum continues, grabbing my hand—we haven’t held hands since I was a child—and steering me toward the bakery café on the Salusbury Road, opposite the pub where I first saw Josh with his rainbow bicycle and kaleidoscope smile.
We sit down at a large communal oak table scattered with yoga leaflets and newspapers and tips from the just-departed lunch crowd. Evie sits on Mum’s knee and fiddles with Mum’s gold bracelet. Mum eyes the prices and rolls her eyes. She’ll never understand why anyone would pay £3.90 for a loaf of bread. “Tea for two, please,” she commands. “Earl Grey if you’ve got it. Two scones, slightly warm. Jam. Cream, clotted if possible.”
The French waitress, not used to such explicit directions, gives an amused nod.
“Mum, not hungry.”
“You are thin as a carrot stick. This is taking things too far, Amy. Men like something to grip hold of.”
Men? What men? There’s only one man I want and I’ve screwed that up. “I’ve just kind of lost my appetite.”
“You will eat a scone.”
The scone arrives, pale, craggy as a lump of seaside rock. Mum, muttering “daylight robbery,” butters it, rolls on a thick carpet of jam, and cuts it into quarters as if I were a toddler. “When’s Joe back home from Cornwall?”
“Dunno.” I should warn her, she looks so hopeful. “He may not come back, not back home anyway, Mum.”
Mum’s blue eyes, Evie’s eyes sixty years on, crinkle anxiously. “He
will
. I know he will. He is a good man. Whatever went on between you . . . and I wish you’d be clearer but I’m not going to push you. It will pass. You’ll forgive each other.”
“Hmmm.” If only she knew.
“Joe loves you. I can see it in his eyes. You can’t fake that.”
“Not anymore.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?”
I shake my head. Mum thinks any problem can be solved by a chat over a cup of steaming Earl Grey. She orders more scones and applies lip gloss. Lip gloss? This is the woman who single-handedly kept Revlon’s Matte Rose in demand for twenty years. She rearranges the increasingly heavy love lump that is Evie, one foot flicking up to balance the weight. I notice, even through my self-absorbed smog, Mum is wearing
flat
strappy sandals (surely her heel-shrunk tendons will snap), which take years off her feet and, combined with her new linen olive kaftan-like dress and relatively undone hair, give her an unlikely bohemian buoyancy. I note these things but don’t care about them. I can’t imagine ever caring about clothes again.
“That’s the problem with love, Amy,” says Mum between nibbles of scone. “You can’t just turn it off. Think you can. But when the initial hurt and anger recede you’re left with the love again, leaking like my bathroom tap.”
“You can’t know how I feel.” I gulp the threat of tears back down my throat with a dry lump of scone. “You hated Dad. It’s
not
the same.”
Mum’s jaw stops mid-chew. “I did hate your father,” she says quietly. “For all the things he did. For leaving with that bloody woman. But . . .” Mum nervously strokes invisible crumbs off the edge of the table. Evie copies her. “I did love him. I loved him for a long long time after he left. I tried but couldn’t turn it off,” she says. “He wasn’t a totally bad man, Amy, not in lots of ways.”
“You
loved
him? What, after he left? You told me you hated him!” A flush of muted anger against Mum, who, in one breath, has kicked away the certainties of my story: Dad, bad, me, a progeny of a loveless marriage.
“I never stopped loving him, silly sentimental creature that I was.” She twists her teacup around in her hand. “Perhaps I should have taken him back.”
“You couldn’t. He disappeared.” Out of all of our lives for a long time. Just sent expensive birthday cards, but usually on the wrong day. “There’s nothing you could have done, Mum. He left,” I add wearily, not really being in the mood for a dissection of painful family history.
Something blows behind her eyes. “Well, not exactly. Um . . .” Mum takes a deep breath. “He wanted to come back, Amy. He wanted a second chance.”
The words sit in the air like smoke. I watch them, letters just graphics at first. Then they hit. He wanted to come back? We could have been a family again. “You never told me. You told me that he left. I
hated
him for that. . . .” The waitress stares at us from behind a bucket of baked granola.
“It was impossible to explain to you, so young.”
“Why?
Why
didn’t you take him back?” I plead, voice high as a nine-year-old’s.
“I had all this anger bottled up inside. The anger poisoned everything.”
“But he was my
dad.
. . .”
“He was,” says Mum, thrown back into her chair by the force of twenty-odd years of guilt. “I know, love, he was. We should have tried harder, your father and I. Sorry.” She grabs the teapot handle. “Top up?”
“Let me do it. Evie’s ready to pounce.” I pour. Evie watches in wonderment. “But that’s so terribly sad. You’ve been on your own ever since.”
“There’s life in the old dog yet!” Mum shrugs and smiles, relieved that I haven’t punched her and run howling to the nearest therapist. “I was young. . . .” She stops talking but I can still hear the rattle of her thoughts, the conversation she must have had with herself over the years, as she washed up, took us to school, went to bed alone. I soften a little. “Divorce felt new then, full of possibility, almost fashionable. Everyone was doing it. No one knew the impact on the kids it might have a few years down the line. We all thought we were doing the right thing and”—she rolls her eyes—“would happily remarry.”
“More tea?” interrupts our waitress, undaunted by our outburst.
“Lovely,” Mum says, composing herself. “More tea would be lovely.”
“Why are you telling me this, Mum? Why now?”
Mum smiles. “Something about forgiveness. You seem to harbor a lot of anger toward Joe.”
It’s there all right, sandwiched inside my love for him like a cheap livid jam.
“And I thought it might help you to know that very few men are all bad. Men do silly things. We must forgive them. Am I making any sense?”
No. Nice try, but you’re counseling the wrong person.
I’m
the one who needs to be forgiven. I am about to say something to this effect, when suddenly, like a hard stale scone flung across the table, a question whacks me on the head: If I’d
known
that Dad wanted to return would I still be the kind of woman who thought all the men in my life would leave eventually, the kind of woman who can’t ever believe in the happy ending?
“What are you thinking?” Mum asks quietly.
And if I hadn’t presumed the worst, perhaps I would have had the guts to ask Joe about what I saw in Regent’s Park. And perhaps I would have felt less vulnerable as a pregnant person, more able to cope when motherhood turned me inside out and made me feel like a howling mono-breasted lunatic.
“Please talk to me, love,” Mum says, voice muffled because she’s resting her mouth in the downy nest of Evie’s hair.
“Sorry. Just thinking maybe I got Joe wrong.”
She sighs. “Oh, it’s so good that you can say that. You’re more mature than I was at your age. I was just furious when your dad left! But I had the weight of seventies feminism behind me. I was the victim.” Her jaw clenches tight and pulses. She’s upset.
“Which you were, really,” I say quickly, trying to make Mum feel better. Because I now understand how a family is a magnifying glass. How it turns little decisions made by an individual into raging fires that burn through generations. Josh? An ache between the legs. A longing for a lost identity. Ten years on, he’s the reason that Evie will spend alternate weekends in different houses. The reason her world will tilt awkwardly on its axis as she grows up and tries to make sense of boys and commitment and the mum and dad who separated when she was so young.
