The Accidental Family (37 page)

“You’re right,” Sophie said, sitting up. “That’s probably what he’s done.”

“Well then, go home and check it now and then phone me and tell me exactly what he said.”

Sophie glanced at the girls, who were still eating.

“I’d better wait for them,” she said, tapping her fingernails on the gingham tablecloth.

“Leave them here with me, they’ll be fine,” Carmen offered. “They can help me close up and then I’ll take them out the back for a bit of telly.”

“No,” Sophie said. “Thanks, Carmen, but no—I promised I wouldn’t leave them, and for today at least I think that means not even for five minutes.”

•     •      •

The girls were tired and irritable when Sophie finally let herself into Louis’s house. She made herself wait to check the phone for messages until she got them undressed and washed and into bed.

“I’m glad I’m home,” Bella told her as she kissed her good night. “And I’m so glad we’ve got you.”

“Always,” Sophie promised her.

Downstairs she stared at the phone, hopeful that it would contain some news of Louis and his whereabouts. She picked it up and heard the altered dial tone that signified there was a message. Sophie found her heart was racing as she dialed 1571 and waited to hear the one new message.

“Hello Mr. Gregory, this is Mrs. Tallen from St. Ives First School, calling on Friday afternoon. Bella’s teacher informed us you took her out of school early for a weekend trip to London. We are calling to remind you that early departures are against school policy. We’d be very grateful if you would call back and confirm you understand this policy.”

“You have no further messages,” the automated female voice told Sophie primly.

She hung up the receiver and sat down on the bottom stair with a bump. Her mum had promised to call her if she heard anything from him, so he couldn’t have been there. Where was he?

Suddenly exhausted, weary to the bone, Sophie climbed up the stairs and fell, fully dressed, onto Louis’s bed. She dragged the covers over herself and hugged her arms around her shoulders. Dimly she became aware of another presence on the bed and, opening one eye, saw Artemis turning in three circles before settling down next to Sophie, her back pressed against Sophie’s belly. It was so odd, so uncharacteristic of the cat to ever seek Sophie out for any kind of companionship, Sophie worried the cat was sick. Hesitantly she reached out a hand and ran it along the cat’s sleek back,
expecting a tooth-and-claw protest any second. But Artemis remained still, her breathing steady and sedate beneath Sophie’s hand, and far from seeming ill, Sophie noticed that she looked better than she ever had; her natural, always hungry feral thinness seemed to have disappeared and her rib cage had filled out to pleasant house-pet plumpness. Sophie smiled to herself as she let her heavy-lidded eyes close once again. There were four mixed-up females in this house and somehow they had all found a place in the world with each other.

Sophie’s shattered brain had been halfway through forming yet another question when she fell asleep, all her worries and fears still unanswered as she drifted into fretful dreams.

“Sophie …Sophiee
eeeeeee
…Aunty Sophie, wake up! It’s a school day!”

Slowly, painfully, Sophie opened her eyes to find Izzy’s face looming millimeters from hers, her big eyes looking out of focus as she peered at Sophie.

“Oh god,” Sophie moaned, rolling onto her back and rubbing her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Eight forty-five,” she heard Bella say somewhere in the periphery of her vision. “It’s a really good job you went to bed with your clothes on, otherwise we’d be
really
late for school.”

Sophie sat upright too quickly, the blood rushing from her head and leaving her dizzy, the corners of the room wheeling around her as she put her heavy head in her hands.

“Right,” she said, waving her arms at the girls, her eyes still closed. “Go and find cereal and I’ll get you some clothes together …we’ll be late but we can blame your father—”

“But we’ve had breakfast already,” Bella informed her. “We had Coco Pops and a cornetto each from the freezer for dessert, because we were thinking that breakfast is the only meal without dessert
and we didn’t think that was fair. Plus, we’ve been dressed for hours.”

“And hours and hours,” Izzy reiterated.

Sophie blinked her eyes open and looked at the girls. Sure enough, they had cobbled together an approximation of their school uniform, with a few customized touches gleaned from the dressing-up box. Izzy was wearing one of Bella’s school sweaters pulled over a yellow sundress, which she’d accessorized with her gray school tights and topped off rather optimistically with play high heels that Sophie wasn’t keen on her wearing in the house, never mind out of it. Bella had done a little better, squeezing herself into one of Izzy’s school sweaters, the sleeves of which ended just below her elbows. She wore it over a blue-and-white-checked summer school dress with pink socks and her sneakers that flashed lights every time she jumped up and down.

Sophie looked at her watch and weighed the pros and cons of delivering the girls in their own versions of the school uniform on time, or getting them changed and scrubbed and taking them in an hour late. Trying once more to shake the sleep out of her head, she stretched her arms above her head and looked at Bella and Izzy.

“You’ll do,” she said. Painfully Sophie hauled her body out of bed, briefly running her fingers through her tangled hair.

“You know, Bella, you’re right, it
is
lucky that I’m already dressed.”

If Sophie had not been exhausted, angry, confused, and pregnant when she dropped the girls off at school, she might have felt a little paranoid about the looks that some of the mothers and guardians gave her as she shepherded them through the sea of shiny, newly washed hair and perfectly turned-out uniforms.

But for once she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to
care what other parents might think of her, the interloper, the girlfriend. Besides, Bella and Izzy were the toast of the school, drawing crowds of admirers around them as they showed off their unique styling. As Sophie headed out of the gate, still rubbing last night’s sleep from her eyes, she knew there would be a message left on Louis’s phone detailing the unsuitability of the high-heeled shoes and asking for a replacement pair to be brought in. And no doubt when she picked them up this afternoon there would be a letter in their book bags reminding Louis of the school’s dress code and their policy on glitter-gel eye makeup, but Sophie didn’t care.

Louis had gone, he had walked out on her in the middle of the night to help his first love, not to mention getting her pregnant without her full permission. He’d made her fall in love with him, enticed her away from the life she knew and understood, and then left her, the selfish bastard. And if getting him into trouble with St. Ives First School was the only way she could strike back at him for all he had done to her, then she was damn well going to take it; she wasn’t proud.

Desperately in need of some clarity, Sophie decided to walk, leaving her car parked outside the school gate as she headed toward the B & B where she could find some sanctuary in her twin room, a place where she could think and look in the mirror and try and see her own reflection once again.

It was a brilliant chilly morning as Sophie walked into the heart of the town. The sky dazzled her, reflecting light off the flat and glassy ocean that ricocheted in turn off the whitewashed houses. This was the light that Carrie had loved so much, Sophie thought as she headed instinctively for the shoreline, the magical radiance that seemed to bend over the coastline throwing even the smallest rock into sharp relief, making it seem possible to see every blade of grass or grain of sand from miles and miles away. Sophie had lived with the St. Ives light for a while, but it was only now, when her
head was so muddled and brimming with confusion, that she really felt that particular atmosphere, that sensation that you were just a little closer to the sky here than anywhere else in the world. She paused, taking a moment to breathe in deeply, feeling the cold air numbing her from the inside.

The tourists were almost completely gone, and the cobbled streets were largely empty, so Sophie decided to take the long way round to the B & B, walking through the town and around the harbor, stopping briefly at the tacky gift shop, its entrance garlanded by pirate hats and slogan T-shirts. This was where Izzy had been pestering her father to buy a life-size inflatable dolphin for weeks.

She paused in the crook of the harbor, looking out at the boats that were currently bobbing on the high tide. In a few hours the tide would be out and the boats would be stranded on the soft golden sand, beached on their sides, many of them, their fat bellies billowing skyward, waiting for the water to come back and make them beautiful again. Only a month ago she and Bella and Izzy had walked in among the boats almost every day, when the tide was out, collecting rocks and interesting shells. The girls had liked to imagine that they were mermaids swimming beneath the surf, in and out and under the hulls looking for treasure. That had been only a few weeks ago, but it seemed like centuries, so much had changed since then.

“Where are you?” Sophie whispered into the wind, absently hoping that it would carry her words to wherever Louis was. “Please, Louis, don’t do this to me. Don’t disappear on me now that I finally know how much I need you.”

Nineteen

You never know, he might be lying in a hospital bed somewhere,” Mrs. Alexander said, patting Sophie gently on the shoulder, offering her own unique brand of comfort as she set an extra-large cooked breakfast down in front of her. “From the sound of things, I wouldn’t say he’s really left you, love. It’ll be something to do with the boy and that Wendy woman.”

“Of course he hasn’t left you,” Grace Tregowan affirmed. “Not for good anyway. He might be having a final fling before he settles down with you, that’s not uncommon. You can’t move at the Wednesday-afternoon tea dances for fellers feeling you up in the hopes of getting their way one last time before they pop their clogs. It might be a bit like that for your young man—although in his case he has sown a fair bit of his wild oats already.”

“Oh great,” Sophie said, poking at her scrambled eggs with her fork, feeling her stomach turn at the thought of it. “So he’s either dead or groping some woman under a mirror ball. What on earth am I worrying about?”

“I didn’t say dead,” Mrs. Alexander reminded her, refilling the salt and pepper cellars. “I said lying in a hospital bed. He doesn’t necessarily have to be dead.”

“He doesn’t necessarily have to be anywhere!” Sophie’s anger flared like a lit match. “He should be here with me, looking after his
daughters,
looking after his
pregnant fiancée
, that’s what he should be doing.”

“Pregnant?” Mrs. Alexander gasped.

“He’s got you up the duff, has he?” Grace asked her. Sophie nodded, pushing the plate of bacon and eggs away.

“I knew it wasn’t like you wanting the decaffeinated tea,” Mrs. Alexander said. “Pregnant. Well, I’ll say one thing for Louis. If there was a sperm Olympics, that man’s stuff would win the gold.”

“You poor love,” Grace said, covering Sophie’s hand with her own, her palm feeling tight and cold against Sophie’s boiling skin. “But he won’t have walked out on you.”

“Won’t he?” Sophie asked her in dismay. “After all, he’s done it before. He did it to Carrie.”

“Well yes, that was a scandal,” Mrs. Alexander said thoughtfully.

“You knew about that when we first met you?” Sophie asked her. “You’ve never mentioned it before.”

“Didn’t really seem appropriate to mention it before, and besides, it was gossip and you know I’m not one for gossip,” Mrs. Alexander said, pursing her lips. “And you were my guests here then and now you’re my friends. I know Louis and I know that he’s not the sort of man who’d just run off and leave his little girls and pregnant wife.”

“Oh, he’s left a pregnant wife before, has he?” Mrs. Tregowan said. “That doesn’t look good.”

“Yes, but this is different, totally different,” Sophie said desperately. “Carrie told Louis to go. She told him she wanted to start a
life with another man. He was hurt and shocked and overreacted by going halfway around the world and not coming back for three years. But he didn’t run out on her because she was pregnant. And anyway, he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant. In fact, Louis is probably the only person in the entire world who doesn’t know I’m pregnant. I was just about to tell him when he walked out on me. And now I don’t know what to think. What if by himself he worked out I’m pregnant and did run a mile? He was saying only the other day that he didn’t want any more kids.”

“Don’t be so silly. You two are getting married, of course he was going to want kids,” Mrs. Alexander told her. “You’re a family. A little unit. Louis wouldn’t mess that up; he’s been through too much to get you.”

“Don’t you worry, he’ll turn up,” Grace said. “Mr. Tregowan always turned up in the end. Well, except for the last time …”

“So what was he up to then?” Sophie asked her, a little hysterically. “Was he an international spy or an octogenarian Casanova or both? What was he getting up to when he disappeared?”

“Alzheimer’s,” Grace Tregowan said, nodding once. “He’d go out and forget where he was.”

“Oh god, I’m sorry,” Sophie said, aghast at her thoughtlessness.

“Don’t be,” Grace told her, rubbing her hand. “I’m not sorry. I had the happiest years of my life with my William.”

Mrs. Alexander pushed Sophie’s plate toward her. “Come on, Sophie. Have a bite of toast.”

“I’ve not a single regret in my life,” Grace assured Sophie. “Not a one. Maybe I could have had a safer life, a more stable one. Married some nice, safe, steady man and stayed with him, ticking all the moments of my life away. Maybe that’s what being alive is about for some. But it’s not for me. It’s never been that way for me. William was my swan song, my last great love. I’m not sorry I
found him, and if it’s one thing that I know because of him it’s that love doesn’t waver through the hard times. It sticks fast and it grows stronger than ever. And I know your love for Louis will stick fast too. Even through all of this, just like that baby in your belly, it will grow and will flourish.”