The Yummy Mummy (9 page)

Alice hovers into view. “No joy, I’m afraid,” she says. “It’s my fault, should have thought and booked ahead. But I just texted you on a whim, didn’t really think.” I love Alice’s bright spontaneity. “Next week.”

“Thanks, I’d really like that.” No I wouldn’t. Not at all. I don’t want to be hanging out with women who make me feel defensive and inadequate in equally cruel measures. But I’m like a Tourette’s victim, the way “yes” spits out of my mouth. Yes, yes, yes.

“And you’ll come to Pilates next week? Check out Jasmine’s washboard. Josh got her back in front of the camera within two months.”

“Modeling,” explains Jasmine quickly, shoving a baby bottle and a packet of cigarettes into her pale pink tote.

When we kiss good-bye, something rather embarrassing happens. With my friends it wouldn’t matter. You’d make a joke about it. Not Blythe. I go to kiss her but miss the socially acceptable facial orbit for kissing. Hurried out of awkwardness, I land on her mouth like a dribbly old relative.

“God, sorry.”

Blythe wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “At least no tongues,” she says tartly and joins the mothers foaming around the Electric cinema doors.

Five minutes later, mothers gone, Portobello Road reverts from creche back to street. Half the tables empty. The nannies order a bottle of wine.

I trot home slightly tipsy, energized by new faces. Open the front door to a ringing phone. Scraping the paint work with the pram, I run to catch it, miss it, and wait for the answering machine message. Mum, I bet. But it’s not. It’s a woman from the Bridge Hotel in Battle checking to see if Mr. Costello’s reservation for the weekend of August 17 still stands. She hasn’t been able to get through to his mobile. What hotel? My heart sinks and a new worry line digs its way across my forehead.

Nine

FLASHBACKS HAPPEN WHEN I’M ZONING OUT. IT’S LIKE
staring at the 3-D dot poster that Joe still, embarrassingly, keeps Blu Tacked up in the poky makeshift home office beneath the stairs. A load of old dots. Only when you stop
trying
to understand it does a coral and fish seascape emerge. Focus and the image dissembles. So there I am lying in the bath, looking into next door’s garden, the dance of their sycamore, thinking about the hotel in Battle and who Joe might be taking there and the Amy project and whether it could possibly succeed and what success means anyhow now I have a baby and how the thinner you are the better jeans hang and feeling bad that I haven’t phoned Mum for ages and smelling my fingers for that delicious trace of Evie, sad to wash it off. Then, suddenly, with no drum roll, it’s there. I close my eyes and the movie’s playing on the blood black of my eyelids. Her hair. Her squeal, hybrid of screech and laugh. The way he flicked something off her arm. Was it an insect? A bee? The cruel intimacy of the flick. The way he bent down to kiss her arm, in the tender elbow pit. That said more than any pornographic money shot.

Wooshh!
I plunge my head under water. It rushes warm into my ears, up my nose. I hold my breath. Ten seconds, fifteen, twenty . . .

“Waah waaah waaaaaaaah!”

Evie’s cry pierces through the bath enamel, distorting and ghostly. It’s supposedly her after-lunch sleep, the golden window in which I’ll read or bathe. That said, most of the time the view from the golden window is merely chores, and I find myself unloading the dishwasher, loading the washing machine, or preparing food, resentfully slipping into a gender stereotype.

I leap out of the bath, puddling the floor with water. Evie calms as soon as I pick her up: She wasn’t really ill or upset, just fancied a bit of attention. “Oh Evie,” I say, a little exasperated. And then she smiles. It’s the uncomplicated smile of a besotted fan and the annoyance disperses and I love her totally and want to eat her up and keep her as my tiny baby forever. This is when I miss breast-feeding, that transaction of love and dependence and milk. But she’s on the bottle now, doesn’t even acknowledge my boobs as old friends, despite the fact that she savaged them.

I lie Evie down on the changing mat and remove her sodden nappy, heavy as a bag of frozen peas. I don’t mind the smell, find it oddly reassuring. She is so perfect naked, creamy and hairless, the slash of her belly button the only reminder she was once part of me. From certain angles, she is all Joe. That brings it home. The irreversibility of it all. Forever three, branched through genes, through generations. Amy Crane. Joe Costello. Evie Costello. We gave her Joe’s surname because it’s obviously a much better name. Crane fly. Lame Crane. My mother always said it was a great impediment, the exception being that it came near the top of the alphabet so her files were easily found at the GP’s surgery. I wanted Crane-Costello. Joe said it sounded aspiring. It’s odd that despite growing in my womb she’s not got my name, so I avoid speaking it out aloud. Whereas Joe annunciates “Miss Costello” a lot, savoring each consonant, claiming ownership.

Ding dong! Ding dong!

Damn. Who’s that? I wedge Evie onto my hip and take the stairs carefully. Do not drop baby!

“It’s me!” shouts shrilly through the letter box.

“Kate!”

I open the door to a punch of Jo Malone and damp dog. Kate looks taller and slimmer than last time I saw her. “I needed a dose of fresh London air. Too much country, I had to break free!”

“Come in, come in. Evie, say hello to Aunty Kate.”

Kate brushes Evie’s cheek and strides through to the kitchen. I follow, Evie star-fished over my shoulder. Kate fills the kettle and puts it on. She never asks, treats this place like her urban pad. “I’m famished,” she says, delving into the bread bin.

“There’s some organic posh bread in there somewhere with crunchy bits.” I dunk green tea bags into chipped mugs. “What’s been going on?”

“Nothing, Amy. Fuck all. And that’s the problem.” Kate sits down at the table and, sighing with the enormity of nothing, sweeps her lush brown hair over one shoulder. She’s got new highlights and a new top, silk and expensive with a dark purple and pink flower print trailing like a cottage trellis across her cleavage. “Toast?” she asks.

I look at her thigh. It hardly squishes on the chair at all. This gives me the willpower to resist. “No thanks. Hey, you’ve lost weight.” Kate was always the plumper one. She’s not anymore. It’s like we’ve swapped our old dress sizes.

“Ooo, thank you.” She barely skims her toast with butter. “I’ve been trying to do this no-carbs-after-six rule. I noticed everything was doing a thirty-five-year-old slide south.”

Thirty-five? I always forget that Kate is merely four years older than me. I see her as much older, as the big sister I never had. In truth she looks a little older, too, not in a craggy or unpleasant way, it’s just her features are more lived in, cross-hatched by too many Tuscan holidays. She may not be nubile, but there is something that catches about her face. Her eyes are the soft brown of demerara sugar, her lips plump with a slight overbite. She’s always had what would once have been called a big-boned figure, in more tactful times, curvaceous. But in the last few months, as she’s lost weight, she’s developed new angles and an unexpected vampiness. I thought she’d move to the country and start wearing tea dresses with flowery Boden Wellies, embrace the pastoral. The opposite has happened.

“So what brings you here?”

“I was hoping to meet Joe for lunch but he had a meeting or something so I thought I’d chance it and see if you were in. Off for some retail therapy later.”

“Yes, you’ll have to make do with me. Joe’s manic at work, new business.”

“So I gather.” Kate twists her wedding ring round and round like a broken screw.

“Yeah, he’s always so bloody busy. He came back at ten last night.” And as I say the words I’m aware of how cuckolding they sound. Where the hell
was
Joe last night?

“Really? And he’s busy for the rest of the week, according to yesterday’s e-mail. I don’t know when I’m ever going to get slated in for lunch.”

I shake my head. Joe and Kate have been having lunch together for as long as I can remember. His friendship with Kate predates mine. While Kate’s a civilizing influence on Joe, he calms her neuroses down. It’s always been like this. Fortunately, today, Joe’s absence is my gain: I run through things that I can do now I have an extra pair of hands: phone back the Council Tax office, hang the washing out . . . leg waxing!

“Kate, do me a big favor?”

Kate doesn’t say anything. She’s not one to commit blindly.

“Will you accompany me to the local beauty salon so I can get waxed? It’s so difficult with Evie, and it’s a nice day for a walk.”

“Sure.” She’s at home in salons.

Kate pushing, we set off down the street. In the daylight, Kate looks drawn. She has things on her mind.

“Everything okay?”

“Not really, no.” The words shoot fast, ready-formed. Evidently I should have asked her earlier. “Pete, bloody darling husband, we’re just not getting on at all. He comes in late, if he comes in at all. He’s spending more and more weekdays at the flat in Pimlico. We argue about the silliest things. . . .”

“Hmmm. Arguments aren’t always bad. Better out than in.” And better than emotional muteness. The great unsaid.

“I wouldn’t object if the rows were about the big issues, the things that need expressing. Hell knows what they
are
about, dirty shoes in the hall, the filter on the swimming pool. Never get a swimming pool. Marriage wreckers.”

“But at least you’re not battling it out in London.” I’d love a pool. Rather than the litter, the slab of sky, the tall leering zone two houses split meanly into flats like fractured faces.

“We’d get on better with the stress of London, with something to divert us, something to blame.” She speeds up her walk: I have to trot breathlessly beside her. “I’m bored, Amy. Bored of decorating and painting watercolors and pretending I don’t mind not having a proper London job. Oh, I don’t know. I love the peace. I do. And, of course, the house is beautiful.” She takes one hand off the pram to gesticulate, which is worrying since we’re waiting to cross a busy road. “But I’m a bit tired of all that having to drive to buy a pint of milk, the locals, their hunting bloodlust, their defensive paranoid politics.”

I tense, poised to grab the pram in case it rolls forward.

“You’ve always said they’re nice enough,” I say. Kate can’t make out that they’re just a load of village idiots. Her neighborhood is full of families who’ve downshifted from London in search of better schools and bigger houses. Most of them are too squeamish to kill a harvest spider let alone a fox.

“It’s the way they keep asking me how I am, you know, with that coy smile on their faces.” A lorry roars past, lifting Evie’s cap of hair. I look at Kate blankly. “Babies, Amy! They are thinking about babies!”

I never bring the baby subject up. Kate must do it. Unspoken rule of our friendship. As is the fact that Kate talks about her problems and I listen. She assumes I don’t have any problems because I’ve got a baby.

“I feel like a useless Friesian cow. The chicken that can’t lay an egg. It offends the rural natural order.”

I laugh. “Don’t be silly. Maybe they’re not talking about babies. Maybe they’re just inquiring how you are.”

Kate rolls her eyes. Nothing is straightforward in Kate’s world. There are hidden meanings behind everything, the way her next-door neighbor eyed her bag of groceries in the checkout queue or the way her husband greets the pretty farmer’s wife. Kate has far too much time on her hands. She needs either a baby or a job.

“You’re too hard on yourself. On average it takes many couples—”

“Over a year to conceive,” snaps Kate. “Don’t. It’s been two.” Her fingers A-frame up, about to lift from the pram handle. I immediately grab it. She glares at me and puts her gesticulating hand back on the pram. I take mine off. A silent bicker. We cross the road safely.

“But you’ve been to the doctor. You know there isn’t a problem,” I shout over the roar of traffic.

“Not with my workings. But Pete still refuses to get checked out. The idea that he may be unable to produce a son to inherit his father’s trash bin empire is inconceivable.” Kate flicks off a toast crumb embedded in her lip gloss. “Amy, I’m over waiting. It’s going to take some kind of witch doctor to get me pregnant.”

“You
are
having sex?” Candid. Is Alice rubbing off on me?

Kate looks at me, surprised—she knows me well enough to hear a new voice—and, thankfully, laughs. I can never guess with total accuracy how she’ll react. “You’re not sleeping with anyone else? Romping in the hay with the young farmer boy?” I have to ask. Kate’s the kind of person who says, two months after the event, “I didn’t tell you then but . . .” She releases information as and when it suits.

“The farmer boys! Suicidal middle-aged men on Prozac more like.” Kate suddenly stops, serious. “Although we aren’t exactly a hot young couple in love, we
do
have sex occasionally and at just the right time of the month. Believe me, I’ve made sure of it.” Kate uses charts and thermometers and the wily arts of her “fertility pants,” navy gym knickers that Pete has a thing for. “My therapist suggested it could be an emotional thing. That somehow the egg and the sperm are choosing not to fuse because we’re not, like, fused emotionally. Our instability undermines their survival.”

“Hmmm. Dunno, Kate. That would preclude half the babies in the world being born. I certainly wouldn’t be here if reproduction was that emotionally intelligent.” Would Evie? I point up the road. “Look, we’re almost there. That’s the salon.”

Kate ignores me. I realize she is talking things out to herself. I could be anyone. A wall, a plant, Joe. “Pete even asked
me
if I was having an affair. Can you believe it?”

More likely Pete is. Kate could extricate herself pretty easily and meet someone else. But she’ll never understand that there’s a freedom in childlessness. “If you’re really unhappy you can leave, you know, Kate. You’ve got options. Hey, this is it.”

We stand in front of Klass Beauty’s dirty pane of glass. I’m looking at the menu, checking prices, when I become conscious of Kate glaring at me, brown-sugar eyes hardening. This changes all the features on her face at once.