The Accidental Mother (15 page)

“Oh, right, okay then,” she’d said slowly, supposing that she had the result she wanted. “Let me just give you some details…”

She’d heard Louis scrabbling for a pen as he took down her address and number.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done,” he’d said. “But I’m coming to get them, now.”

“Do you know when—” The dial tone had buzzed in Sophie’s ear. “We can expect you?” She’d finished the sentence into thin air.

Sophie had learned very little about Louis from that phone call. He had hardly reacted to the news that the mother of his children was dead, and he had just more or less assumed that he could waltz back into the girls’ lives after three years away and take them off to God knows where to God knows what kind of life without so much as a by-your-leave. She experienced yet another unfamiliar sensation, a sharp protective pang in her gut, followed by a surge of unexpected fierceness. She found herself thinking, Over my dead body, and then she smiled to herself as she realized just how apt and inappropriate that phrase was.

She looked at a bemused Cal. “He says,” she told him, “he’s coming. Not big on details like how or when, but he’s coming apparently.”

Cal rested his lightly stubbled chin in the palm of his hand. “
And
—what’s he like?”

Sophie shrugged again and felt a worm of worry begin to insinuate its way into her chest as she contemplated all the possible consequences of the chain of events she had just set in motion. She bit her lip and looked at Cal. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

T
he girls were delighted to see their grandmother. Izzy twirled and pranced around the small front room of Mrs. Stiles’s new ground-floor apartment, bumping happily into the crowd of old furniture, and Bella, although less showy than her sister, did quite a lot of discreet toe pointing and heel lifting in a bid to show off her new shoes to their maximum advantage. Unfortunately, in the midst of Izzy’s balletic craziness, only Sophie, a fellow toe pointer, noticed, so she bent down and whispered into Bella’s ear. “Your shoes look fabulous.” Which made Bella smile.

“Calm down, Izzy!” Mrs. Stiles ordered as Izzy threw her arms around her legs and buried her face in her skirt, declaring, “I love to see you, Grandma!” at the top of her voice.

“I love to see you too, darling,” Mrs. Stiles said, looking flustered but pleased by the sign of affection. “But I’d also love to keep my knees in one piece. This arthritis—it’ll be the death of me if the blood pressure doesn’t get me first,” she said, patting Izzy on the head.

“Or the cancer,” Bella reminded her.

“Oh yes, well, you’re right. It might be cancer, bowel probably, I’ve got terrible constipation,” Mrs. Stiles said matter-of-factly, and Sophie realized that the children must have discussed the exact nature of Mrs. Stiles’s demise quite often during their stay with her, which she found rather disturbing. A philandering father or a morbid grandmother—there wasn’t much of a choice when it came to close relatives.

“Oh, you’ll outlive us all,” Sophie said with forced joviality.

“I sincerely hope not,” Mrs. Stiles said bleakly. Her face took a downward tumble, as if somebody had just switched the gravity back on, and Sophie realized exactly what she had just said.

“I’m sorry, I only meant…” She sighed. “Oh, look, I don’t know what I meant,” she said with a vague gesture to back her up. “I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Stiles ignored her. “Do you two girls want some lemon barley and a French fancy?” she said. The girls nodded, and Sophie followed Mrs. Stiles into the small kitchen and stood in the doorway watching Bella and Izzy lean up against the window of the living room and breathe hard against the glass, drawing faces in the mist before it faded, and then, flinging open the patio doors, they ran out onto the small shared courtyard and began marching around the central bird bath with apparently motiveless enthusiasm.

“I’ve just cleaned those windows,” Mrs. Stiles said to Sophie, pressing her lips together. It wasn’t that she didn’t want the girls here, Sophie decided, it was rather that she didn’t like them turning up unexpectedly. She didn’t like any unannounced pebble rippling the calm surface of her routine. Sophie didn’t blame her; she supposed that two sudden if minor strokes and the death of your adult daughter would make you cling to the belief that every tomorrow was much better off being exactly the same as yesterday, because at least then you knew where you stood. This was why it was a shame really that Sophie was about to throw a bloody great big brick into her pond, so to speak.

Once again Sophie had cause to reflect on the fact that she had been so keen to find Louis, so certain that his arrival would be the answer to everyone’s problems—mainly her own—that she hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of him turning up for anyone else. Not for Mrs. Stiles, not for Tess Andrew, and not for the girls. However, Louis was coming now, and there was nothing she could do to stop that, so she had to tell her, and if there was one thing that Sophie had learned over the last few days, it was that if you had to tell somebody something she didn’t want to hear, there was no way to dress it up.

“Louis is coming back to London. He’s coming to see the girls,” she said. Mrs. Stiles poured water into the two cups of lemon barley she had prepared and set the jug down on the counter before turning to look at Sophie.

“They found him then,” she said. “I had hoped they wouldn’t; I told that Tess not to bother. She more or less told me it would take months. I’d hoped for the girls’ sake that she was right.”

Sophie didn’t know how to react to that piece of information, so she said nothing but watched Mrs. Stiles shake her head and twist her swollen, knotted fingers, her left side slow and heavy.

“Well, now he’ll be happy, won’t he?” she said bitterly. “Now he’ll get everything his own way, won’t he? My daughter’s dead, out of the way for good, and he can come waltzing in like some kind of hero and drag them off to God knows what kind of life.” She shot Sophie a red-hot look. “I certainly won’t ever see them again, once he’s got them. He won’t let me.”

Sophie tucked her loose hair back behind her ear and chewed her lip for a moment. She had to be straight with her. “It wasn’t Tess that found him,” she said. “It was me, sort of. I spoke to him earlier today.” Sophie remembered the sense of unease the conversation had left her with. “He sounded really worried about the girls. He said he’d come straightaway.” But her uncertainty sounded in her voice, and Mrs. Stiles looked skeptical. “Look, I can’t suddenly have two children, Mrs. Stiles. As much as I…like the girls, none of us can go on the way we are. It’s not fair to them or me, and what’s the alternative? I thought that this was what Carrie would want.”

Mrs. Stiles looked over Sophie’s shoulder and out the window to where the girls continued to circle, the winter sun blanching all the color out of her skin.

“Carrie wanted you,” she told Sophie pointedly. “That’s why your name was in her will. Besides, you hardly knew her at all when she died—how would you know what she would want now? Well, I’ll tell you what she didn’t want. She didn’t want a husband who ran out on her and her children at the first sign of trouble. And she wouldn’t want him taking those two girls, she wouldn’t.” Mrs. Stiles narrowed her eyes. “Oh, he might play at being a dad for a while—but for how long? How long before the novelty wears off and he’s bored again? What will happen to them then?” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I just wish, I just
wish
I was twenty years younger and I could look after them myself. If I could, I’d fight tooth and nail to keep them from him, to do
something
for Carrie at last. To be able to help her. She would never let me help her, she never wanted it. Sometimes it felt like she hated me, but I don’t know why, Sophie, I don’t…Because I loved that child
so
much. She was my
life.
”

Sophie was appalled to see a tear track its way through the powdery surface of Mrs. Stiles’s skin. She reached out a hand and touched the older woman’s thin shoulder.

“I’m all right,” Mrs. Stiles said, taking a step away. She reached for the kettle with her right hand and filled it at the tap.

“Look,” Sophie said. “Tess won’t let him just walk off with them. I won’t let him, I promise you. He can’t anyway. There’s all sort of orders and things protecting them.”

Sophie looked toward the living room as the girls marched in through the double doors, around the ancient coffee table, and back out again. “They don’t even know he’s coming yet.” She lowered her voice. “Do they even know who he is?”

Mrs. Stiles put two tea bags in a pot and watched the boiling kettle.

“All they know is that he had never been there for them, not even when they needed him the most,” she said, picking the kettle up the moment it boiled and filling the pot to the brim. “Carrie would never have a bad word said against him, but I told her—they should know. They should know what kind of man he is.”

Sophie hesitated for a moment before asking Mrs. Stiles the question she’d really come to ask. “Did Carrie tell
you
straightaway that Louis had left her? Because, well…I didn’t know.”

Mrs. Stiles looked sharply at her. “She never told you?”

Sophie shook her head.

“No,” Mrs. Stiles continued. “She didn’t even tell me after the christening. I daresay she never would have told me at all if it had been up to her. But she started having money trouble. I know she didn’t want to ask me for help, but she had no choice. She needed some money to keep going with the mortgage payments until she could start this new full-time job she’d got. Of course I asked what Louis was doing to get them out of trouble, and that’s when it came out. He’d been gone nearly a year before she told me.”

Mrs. Stiles gazed into the distance as she reflected on the memory. “When she was a little girl, the age of those two out there, we were such good friends. So happy, you know. I wish…I wish I hadn’t let everything that happened between me and her father come between me and her. After he went, I was so hurt, so angry. Not just at him but at everything. We were never that close again. I knew I was pushing her away, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I always thought there’d be time to make things right one day. I was wrong. And now these two will be off with Louis and I won’t have any time with them either.”

Sophie reached out and squeezed Mrs. Stiles’s thin arm. “Please,” she said. “Try not to worry. Look, I’ll pop out the front now and call Tess. Once I’ve told her, she’ll know what to do, okay?”

“Don’t be long,” Mrs. Stiles said stiffly, pouring milk into a jug. “Your tea will stew.”

For some reason, Sophie had assumed that social workers should be on call seven days a week, but it appeared that Tess was not available on a Saturday afternoon after all. Her cell phone was switched off, and her work number rang off the hook. Unable to produce anything to reassure both Mrs. Stiles and herself, Sophie sighed. Noticing her breath mist in the cold air, she took a surreptitious look left and right and reached for the packet of Marlboro Lights she had managed to buy on yesterday’s shopping trip at the same time as buying the girls a king-size Snickers bar each and smoked it quickly, stubbing out the butt under the toe of her shoe and bending to scoop it up, slipping it into her pocket and taking a few more deep breaths of cold air before she went back in. Her temples throbbed as she tried to work out all the implications of what might happen next, and she felt a kind of hollow worry gnawing at her from the inside out.

Sophie had the strangest sensation that she had felt exactly like this once before, standing in the cold watching the heat of breath cool in the air, letting the tips of toes freeze rather than move her body on to the next moment and the moment after that, when things would never be the same again. It was a sense of déjà vu that was as strong and as jolting as the memory caused by a smell or a photo.

It didn’t take long to place the memory. It had been at her father’s autumn funeral. Sophie standing in her best black shoes by the little pile of flowers the crematorium had arranged for him in one corner of the courtyard. Friends and family had milled there for a while, shaking hands and avoiding eye contact, not really knowing what to say to one another until the modest crowd had drifted back toward the cars in preparation for the wake. That empty, worrying sensation had come to her just before Sophie finally realized what had happened. She had been standing beside a wreath of flowers with a card that read “To Dad, miss you so much” when abruptly the pain, the shock, and the horrific knowledge that loving her dad wouldn’t mean anything ever again had engulfed her.

She had been unable to move. She had stood watching everybody else leave. After a few seconds, Carrie had noticed Sophie was not among the group and had come back to fetch her. “Come on,” she’d said, her cheeks rosy in the cold. “It’s freezing.”

“He’s gone,” Sophie said, staring at Carrie. “Nothing’s ever going to be the same now.”

“That’s not true,” Carrie said, hooking her arm through Sophie’s. “We’ll stay the same, you and me. We will always stay the same, I promise. Always. Forever. Whatever. Right?”

So Sophie recognized the way she was feeling at that moment. She knew it was exactly the same way she had been feeling on the day she had said good-bye to her dad just before the pain became too much and the walls came down between her and the hurt. And Sophie had known at last that Carrie had been wrong and she had been right.

Nothing ever stays the same.

When Sophie finally went back inside, she was entirely unprepared for what she saw, but at least it lifted her from the complicated coil of her thoughts.

Actually, it wasn’t so much what she saw, which was Mrs. Stiles sitting on the sofa flanked by the two girls, their respective heads leaning sweetly on each of her shoulders as the ensemble rocked from side to side. It was what she heard. The old lady and two small girls were singing “Motorcycle Emptiness” by the Manic Street Preachers as if it were some kind of raucous lullaby, with Bella and Izzy filling in for the thunderous guitar solo with enthusiastic “Nee, nee, nee-nee neeeows.”

Certainly Sophie thought she would never live to see the day that Mrs. Stiles sang hardcore political Welsh rock, although the girls’ grandmother did change some of the more controversial lyrics for propriety’s sake. Still, as unorthodox as the rendition was, it sparked an unexpectedly vivid memory, which came thundering back to Sophie just as the girl’s version of the guitar riff suddenly became real again in her ears.

It was summer. She and Carrie were more or less eighteen. Still so close that they felt they would always mean as much to each other as they did on that day, that it would be impossible for them to drift apart. It had been just a few weeks before Carrie was due to leave for university, and it would be another week or so before Sophie would get her entry-level job at McCarthy Hughes. In reality they were just about to take their first steps in completely opposite directions.