Me and My Sisters (6 page)

6

Sophie

I don’t think I’ve ever been more shocked in my life. Louise pregnant! It was the least likely thing to happen. She didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. And to think it had happened when she was blind drunk. It was so out of character. Louise didn’t drink much because she didn’t like losing control and she hated the way hangovers made her lethargic.

Yet here she was, five months pregnant at forty-one after a drunken shag, and planning to go back to work when the baby was three weeks old.

‘Lou, I think you need to be more realistic about your maternity leave,’ I suggested. ‘Having a baby is tough. It’s really hard going. You’ll be physically and mentally exhausted.’

‘She’s right. The first four months are a bloody nightmare. You’re leaking from everywhere, your brain is fried, and if someone says boo to you, you fall apart,’ Julie agreed. ‘As capable as you are, even you can’t just give birth during a coffee break and carry on with your meetings.’

‘My job is very stressful. I’m used to intense situations. I’m used to pressure. I’m used to being up all night working. I’m used to multitasking. How hard can it be?’

I looked at Julie. We shook our heads.

‘It’s the hardest job you’ll ever have,’ Julie explained.

‘I’ll be fine. Everything’s organized. I’ve got a night nurse booked for the first six weeks to get me over the hump and to train the baby to sleep through the night. All the books say that if you get the baby into a good routine by six weeks, they’ll be good sleepers for life.’

‘Routine!’ Julie screeched. ‘Good luck with that.’

‘I’m not having triplets, Julie. Look at Sophie. She had an easy time with Jessica.’

‘She doesn’t work and she had a full-time nanny and a night nurse,’ Julie said. ‘With no job and all those staff, of course she found it easy.’

I tried not to let the comment get to me, but it did. It really bugged me the way my sisters dismissed me. They always assumed that my life was easy. That all I did was sleep in late and get my nails done. I knew Julie had had a much harder time because she’d had triplets and Tom, and they never really slept, but it hadn’t been plain sailing for me either. Just because I didn’t talk about it didn’t mean that I hadn’t struggled with being a new mum. I had. No one knew how badly, not even Jack. I pushed the memories away.

‘What are you going to tell the baby about her dad?’ I asked Louise.

‘Just the truth.’

‘Come on, Lou, you can’t tell a child that her dad was a one-night stand you can’t even remember,’ Julie objected. ‘You’ll have to think of something nicer, less honest.’

‘Like what?’

‘What about telling her that you fell in love in Venice, but her dad died tragically in a car crash?’ I suggested.

Louise and Julie looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was like being a kid again, sitting in their bedroom while they laughed at me. I hated being the youngest girl. I always felt left out. When I came along, Mum moved Louise and Julie into the same room and they had shared it until Louise went to Cambridge. I’d slept in the small room next door. When Gavin arrived, fourteen years after me, the attic was converted into a bedroom for him.

Growing up, I’d hear my sisters talking and laughing through the wall, but whenever I went in they’d kick me out and tell me I was too young to listen to their conversations. I’d stomp back to my room and try to listen by putting a glass up against the wall.

When Louise went to college, Julie and I had become a bit closer, but then she had followed Louise to England and they had seen a lot of each other while I stayed at home and modelled. I’d got closer to Julie when she moved back to Dublin and got married, but when she had the triplets she kind of disappeared for a few years. And when I’d tried to include her in my group, it had been a disaster.

I’d invited her to a girls’ dinner about six months after the triplets were born. She’d arrived an hour and a half late. Her breast milk had leaked through her blouse. She was wearing one brown and one black shoe and she had yoghurt in her hair. When I served the main course, a spinach, pear and walnut salad, she asked if I thought she was a rabbit and proceeded to eat the entire basket of olive spelt bread, which none of the other girls touched.

She drank four glasses of wine, while everyone else sipped half a glass. Because she was so sleep-deprived, the alcohol went straight to her head. She rudely commented on the fact that no one was eating or drinking and said we were all ‘ridiculous stick insects’, before passing out, face down, at the table. I hadn’t asked her back.

The women I hung around with were all like me, stay-at-home mums. We took care of our appearance – worked out, watched what we ate and liked a nice life-style. I didn’t see anything wrong with that, but Julie did. I actually think she was jealous because we all had full-time help and no money worries. But she had always said she wanted a big family and she had four healthy sons. She and Harry seemed happy, so I didn’t understand why she had a problem with me having money. Besides, I was always buying her kids presents and offering for Mimi to go over and clean her house. But she’d always said no. I didn’t know why: her house was a mess and she needed a good cleaning lady. The one she had, Gloria, was fifty-eight years old and suffered from arthritis.

Gloria did nothing. She sat on her bum while Julie made her cups of tea, all the while complaining about her stiff joints and her useless husband, who was banged up in prison for trying to rob a post office. The only thing she seemed to do was the ironing. I called in to Julie one day to find her on her knees cleaning the oven, while Gloria was sitting on the couch watching
Loose Women
and absentmindedly rubbing the iron over one of Harry’s shirts.

I told Julie she needed to manage her staff better, but she just glared at me and said Gloria wasn’t ‘staff’, she was a friend. I pointed out that she was a friend who was getting paid eleven euros an hour to sit on her arse. Julie said that Gloria was the only person she could leave all four kids with, and therefore the most important person in her life. The only time Julie could ever properly relax when she was out was if Gloria was babysitting. Unfortunately, Gloria was only able to look after the boys occasionally because she was too busy watching TV in her other employers’ houses. People had always taken advantage of Julie. She was far too nice.

It’s not that I was mean to my staff. I treated Mimi very well, but I never made the mistake of becoming her friend. Once you crossed that line you were screwed. I’d seen it a million times with friends who got too close to their nannies or housekeepers. They’d start asking for loans of money, days off, extra holidays, sick days … They’d start telling you their problems and expecting you to solve them. Olive, a good friend of mine, had a housekeeper who asked if her daughter could come over from Hong Kong, stay in her room and go to college here. Olive agreed to it. When the housekeeper came back from the airport, she had her sister and her niece with her too. Olive ended up having to put them all up until she could find jobs and accommodation for them. I told Mimi when I hired her that I didn’t want any family members coming to live with her in my house. If they wanted to come over, they had to get their own place. I was very good to Mimi: she had her own little apartment within the house – a bedroom, bathroom and a small lounge with a TV and computer. I gave her my old clothes, shoes, handbags, even some jewellery that I no longer wore, and I paid her more than any of the other housekeepers were paid. It was a win-win situation: everyone was happy. Gloria wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in my house. I didn’t want a new friend: I wanted a clean house.

‘Come on, Sophie, don’t look so pissed off. I’ll take your suggestion on board,’ Louise said. ‘I’m just not sure about the car-crash ending.’

‘Why don’t you keep it close to the truth, but make yourself sound less like a slut?’ Julie suggested. ‘You could tell her that you met her dad at a conference in Venice, which is true, that he was gorgeous, also true, and irresistible – she’s the living proof of that. Explain that you had a weekend of romance and passion in Venice, but that her dad hadn’t left any number or address or surname. That you just knew him as Giovanni. That’s a nice Italian name.’

‘Not bad. I may use that. But can I remind you that the baby hasn’t even been born yet, so I won’t need to come up with a story for at least three or four years? I’ve got plenty of time to figure something out.’

‘What are you going to do about Mum? You know she’s going to keep at you about the father being involved,’ Julie said.

‘If I was you I’d pretend I was really upset,’ I said. ‘If she thinks you’re devastated about being dumped and are just doing your best to get on with it and to put the relationship behind you, she’ll back off … for a while.’

‘Good idea,’ Louise said. ‘Anything to get her off my case.’

I felt a bit sorry for Mum. I knew she yearned to have a better relationship with Louise, but my eldest sister never let her in. She kept her firmly at arm’s length. Mum didn’t know how to handle Louise. She was so intelligent, strong-willed and capable, she could be a bit overwhelming at times.

Louise was impatient and dismissive of people who were weak or indecisive or not very clever. Sometimes she made me feel like a total idiot, especially when she talked about business or current affairs. I had no interest in either. I never had had and I never would. They bored me. I’d much rather talk about fashion or interior design or new restaurants or which celebrities were dating each other. I didn’t want to talk about boy soldiers in Africa. I didn’t want to talk about which bank shares were up or down. It bored me rigid.

Louise thought my life was frivolous but I thought hers was empty and lonely. All she did was work. She never even had time to spend all the money she earned. She had a stylist who knew exactly what she liked and came to her apartment three times a year with a wardrobe already picked out. Where was the fun in that? Shopping gave me such a high – I loved it. The buzz I got when I found the perfect dress was amazing.

Louise only took two weeks’ holidays a year – one week she spent at an ashtanga yoga retreat in Majorca and the other in New York, going to art galleries and the theatre; she never went to musicals – she thought they were rubbish. I smiled to myself. I wasn’t sure how many worthy plays she’d be seeing when the baby arrived.

‘So, do you have a name? Knowing you, you’ve probably registered her birth in advance,’ Julie said.

Louise laughed. Julie was the only one who got away with slagging her. ‘Clara Rose Devlin.’

‘Clara’s lovely,’ I said.

‘Not sure about Rose.’ Julie wrinkled her nose.

‘It’s after her dad,’ Louise said.

Julie and I looked at each other. ‘What?’

Louise grinned. ‘Mr X left a rose on my pillow the morning after the night before, and seeing as I don’t know his name, I thought I’d put “Rose” in.’

We all roared laughing.

Louise rolled on to her side. ‘God, it feels good to laugh. I’ve been so uptight the last few weeks trying to get my head around deciding to keep the baby and then having to tell Mum and Dad. And now, when I go back, I’ll have to tell the senior partners at work.’

‘How will they react?’ Julie asked.

‘Badly. My boss will be shocked. I just need to make sure he knows that I’m not going to be any less committed. Thank God Meredith has shown how a woman can do the mother thing and continue to be a ball-breaker.’

‘Thank your lucky stars it’s not triplets. The only balls I break these days are Harry’s, and it’s not sexual.’ Julie sighed.

‘Did you have much sex when you were pregnant?’ Louise asked.

‘Jesus, do you not remember how big I was, Lou? I could barely walk after five months, so the answer is no.’

‘What about you, Sophie?’

‘We kind of continued as normal until I got very big towards the end.’

‘What’s normal?’ Julie enquired.

‘I don’t know – two or three times a week.’

Julie sat bolt upright. ‘Twice a
week
! Jesus! Harry’s lucky if he gets it once a month. Do you really still have sex that often?’

I nodded. I didn’t tell her that sometimes I’d rather watch TV or just cuddle and talk. It wasn’t that I didn’t like sex with Jack – he had a great body and we had always been very compatible in bed – but sometimes I just wasn’t in the mood. But I was worried that if I said no he’d look elsewhere. I knew Jack wouldn’t want to cheat on me, but over time if you kept saying no to sex, a man would start looking at other women. I’d seen the husbands who’d had affairs and I knew that the main reason they cheated was because their wives didn’t want to have sex with them and the husbands were sexually frustrated. There was no way that was going to happen to me. Jack was going nowhere.

‘I’m meeting Daniel next week and I’m gagging for some sex – it’s been months. Do you think it’s weird to have sex with someone when you’re pregnant with someone else’s baby?’ Louise asked.

Julie wrinkled her nose. ‘I think it is a bit.’

‘It’s not as if you’re ever going to see the biological dad again, so I think it’s OK,’ I told her.

‘I’m with Sophie,’ Louise said. ‘The father’s not in the picture so I’m entitled to have sex.’

‘I miss great sex,’ Julie admitted. ‘I don’t have the energy for it any more. Sometimes I fall asleep when we’re doing it. Harry finds it really insulting. I’ve told him it’s nothing to do with him or his technique, just exhaustion. I really should make more of an effort, though. My underwear’s an absolute disgrace. I bet you two have gorgeous stuff.’

‘I just buy Elle Macpherson underwear in bulk,’ Louise said. ‘It looks good and I find it comfortable.’

‘I didn’t even know she had an underwear range – they certainly don’t stock it in M&S. What do you wear, Sophie?’ Julie asked.

‘La Perla mostly,’ I admitted.

‘Oh, God, their stuff is amazing. Right, that’s it. I’m ditching the grey knickers and I’m going to make more of an effort.’

‘Just be careful you don’t get pregnant again,’ Louise warned her. ‘You’ve done enough to assist the repopulation of the world.’