The Yummy Mummy (36 page)

Pale hazel eyes. Clean-shaven, delicate, hopeful smile, like a children’s TV presenter. Pretty rather than handsome. I was expecting someone more roguish.

“Alan, this is my friend Amy.” Alan looks blank. “You know, I told you about . . .” Sue shoots Alan an intense
remember
glance.

“Of course,” says Alan nervously, clearly remembering I’m the loopy one who’s Been Left. “Amy. Nice to meet you. I hope you’re, er, feeling better.”

“Much, thank you.” I shake his hand. It is cool and fine-boned. It is a hand that has been in Jasmine’s knickers.

“Right, let me get you some tea,” says Sue, seeming to hovercraft jovially over the party litter.

Nicola returns. “Over there, the Willesden Lane bed-hopper,” I hiss.

Without turning her head too obviously, Nicola peers at Alan through a gap in her bob. “A bit fem. Sue must eat him alive,” she says.

“Evidently not.”

Hermione appears to my left, fluffy as a soft toy in a pink angora sweater. “I am so
so
sorry,” she says in a high Cartoon Network voice.

“Er, thanks.”

“Is it awful?” She points her carrot at me like a microphone.

“Not quite what I planned, but hey . . .”

“Oh dear.” Hermione gives me a weak, rather disappointed smile. She was hoping for more details. “Life really can throw up some nasty surprises. Gosh, I don’t know how I’d cope on my own, especially with a little one on the way.” Hermione still doesn’t look very pregnant. More like a post-curry bloat. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says suddenly, hand to mouth.

“Sorry? Why are you sorry?”

“It must be so hard, well, not knowing if you can have another one. Not with the same fath— Gosh, this is coming out all wrong. I’m really sorry, Amy. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. I don’t mean to offend you,” she squirms.

“It’s fine. Really. You’ve not offended me in the slightest. Please . . .”

Drawn to the fluster like a shark to a flailing swimmer, Sue surfaces from behind a large blue helium balloon. “Who’s offended you?” she demands, offended.

“No one’s offended me. Really. Hermione was just saying . . .”

“Oh, I’ve put my foot in it, Sue. I made an inappropriate comment, without meaning to, about Joe . . . ,” Hermione stammers.

Nicola steps in. “Listen, Amy is fine,” she says emphatically. “No one has died! Amy is having problems in her relationship, like we all do.”

“It’s rather more than that!” exclaims Sue. “I’d say Being Left by your husband—sorry, boyfriend—when you’ve got a small baby is rather more than having an up and down. You poor thing.” I shuffle awkwardly, don’t need this. “It is,” Sue continues, “ab-so-lute-ly disgusting behavior! If I could get my hands on Joe, what a
pig
!”

“Pig!” chimes Hermione.

“If Alan ever dreamed of doing such a thing, I’d, I’d . . .”

“Please!” I shout over the racket. “It’s not Joe’s fault. Don’t demonize him. Please. I am fine. Absolutely fine.”

All three start back, worried they’ve pushed me— an explosive Left person, so obviously not fine—over the edge. Sue reacts quickly to the crisis. “Here, have a gingerbread man, sugar-reduced.”

“Thanks. One man I can rely on.”

Everyone laughs, exaggerated relieved laughs. Hermione and Sue make their excuses.

“Shit, don’t you just want to tell her?” Nicola glares at Sue’s retreating flank. “Wet-wipe away that god-awful smugness.”

“You’d think she’d guess. I mean, look at him.”

Alan is standing flirtatiously close to the bloomingly pretty Lisa from number twenty-three, one arm around her shoulders.

“Jasmine’s got weird taste.” (Unlike me, who had good taste but didn’t realize it in time.)

“Oh, I bumped into Jasmine on my lunch break yesterday,” Nicola says. “She didn’t remember my name, of course, those kind of women never do. But I reminded her that I was the least fashionable person in the Westbourne that day. I told her I was going to see you here. . . .”

Suddenly, there is a flurry of noise by the door.

“A friend of Amy’s? Yes, yes, of course you can come in, no problem. The more the merrier,” Sue is saying. “And you must be little Martin? Oh, sorry, Marlon. What a lovely name.”

Surely not? I walk into the hallway. But there she is. Jasmine, in an inappropriately exuberant Temperley dress, smiling nervously. “Hi, Amy! Nicola said you’d be here. I was . . . er . . . just round the corner and Marlon was desperate to play with some other kids,” she jabbers, unable to meet my eye.

“That’s just lovely. The more the merrier,” exclaims Sue, thoroughly delighted to have attracted another person, and such a glamorous one, to her party. “Here, let me take your coat? No coat? Please do have a gingerbread man, still warm from the oven.”

Jasmine refuses, eyes sweeping over Sue—frizzy hair, mumsy shoes—in a quick vicious glance. I’m so stunned to see her here, in a parallel mother galaxy, in Sue’s
home
, that I can only glare silently.

“Follow me!” Sue says, putting her hand on Jasmine’s narrow back. “Let me introduce you.”

As Jasmine is pushed into the party, fear knots her perfect face for a second. She composes herself, smiles, and strides forth in gold sandals. Is she drunk? No, worse, she looks scarily sober.

“Oh God, poor Sue,” says Nicola, watching Jasmine accept Sue’s compliment about her dress with the detached ungraciousness of someone who has spent her whole life being complimented on her outward appearance.

What to do? What would I normally do? Walk away, let it unravel.

Nicola grabs my elbow. “She’s hit her target.”

Jasmine is being introduced to Alan by Sue. Alan’s gone pale as milk.

“Come on, we may as well get a ringside seat.”

A heat spreads inside me. An indignant anger. No, Sue doesn’t deserve this. No more denial. No more walking away. “Excuse me, Nicola.” I stride over to Jasmine and pinch her by the elbow. “Jasmine, into the kitchen
now
.” She smiles frozenly as Sue waves and shouts, “Won’t tell if you help yourself to more from the oven!”

I push Jasmine against a Formica kitchen unit. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Giving him a taste of his own medicine,” Jasmine smirks. “I just found out he’s been seeing someone else, too.”

“His wife?”

“Very funny. Don’t worry, I wasn’t planning to tell her.”

“No, you won’t. Because you’re getting out!” I grab her elbow again.

“Hey, what is this? A roar from the mouse?”

“Sue’s in my NCT group, it’s too close. She’s kind of a friend. . . .”

“And I am not?”

I consider this for a moment. Why should I be intimidated by this woman? I have nothing left to lose. “It seems not.”

Jasmine yanks her Chloe bag over her shoulder like a rifle. “You’ll make this worse if you create a scene.”

“There won’t be a scene. You’re going to go in there, make your excuses politely, and
leave
.”

Jasmine looks at me, astonished. “What’s got into you?” Her eyes narrow and I can no longer see her cover-girl beauty, just a slightly desperate woman in need of pie and chips and, perhaps, a cuddle. “You know what, Amy? I’m not surprised your boyfriend’s left. I never did understand why Alice bothered with you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“You’re really winding me up, Amy. If you carry on I might just confess all to Sue,” she says, floundering a little.

“Leave Sue alone. Pick on someone your own size.”

With a self-righteous sniff, Jasmine strides out of the kitchen to the front door, grabbing Marlon on the way. Sue, spotting her, steers Jasmine-ward. But Jasmine doesn’t say good-bye. Jasmine slams the door. Sue’s mouth opens and shuts silently and the sugar-reduced gingerbread men slide off the plate and decapitate on the hall floor.

Fifty-four

QUEEN’S PARK, TEATIME. I SIT ON THE STEPS OF THEBANDSTAND
, watching children walk—or run or tantrum or bike-jack—home from school across the park, escorted by an assortment of carers: fashionable nonworking skinny yummies in jeans and Converse trainers with playground tans; unfashionable nonworking mums, absorbed in their children rather than their waistlines; tired but determinedly enthusiastic working mums in office attire, the lucky ones presumably, who have managed to sort some flexible working arrangement; “freelance” dads, flirting with the yummies; sixtysomething Afro-Caribbean nannies; nannies who look barely out of childhood themselves; enchanted grandparents indulging their usually sugar-restricted grandchildren with ice cream. Chattering along a different path, from the wooded area, comes a shoal of brightly dressed toddlers on an outing from a local nursery. The toddlers whoop at the older children, straining at the hands of their nursery workers, gentle Muslim women with covered heads. At this moment, London feels like a very benign place and it suddenly occurs to me that, despite parents’ attempts to pigeonhole with the right schools and rules and diets, children’s ebullience resists it. And it is children who civilize a city like London, break down its barriers and give it its humanity.

“Uh-oh.” Railing against my sentimentality, Evie spits up her digestive biscuit into my shopping bags. I stroke the crumbs away from her mouth. She looks up and grins.

“It better not have . . .”

I tug open the shopping bags, hauled back from the West End, to check for regurgitated biscuit. Thankfully, Evie needs to work on her aim. My new wardrobe is intact: Zara wraparound dress, blue jersey, flatteringly hitting just below the knee, smelling deliciously of shop; new jeans, Gap; machine-washable blue boat-necked jumper, the kind of thing Alice would dismiss as “a bit Jigsaw”; flat-front olive-green trousers; silver ballet shoes. I kick a trainer off and slip a ballet shoe on.

“You approve, Evie?”

After a Pinot Grigio–fueled midnight spring clean to the strains of Dolly Parton’s
Greatest Hits
, I reorganized my wardrobe, working out what I don’t wear or doesn’t fit. Most of the clothes I bought with Alice were in the Don’t Wear pile. I find this strange because it isn’t as if I don’t love those clothes. I do, really do. It’s just that they were bought for a woman who never really existed, some strange lifestyle hybrid of Alice’s imagination. And it’s not that I want to go back into my leggings and maternity pants. Oh no. But I do
need
stuff—pretty and smart—that fits this new body, which is piling on weight as quickly as I lost it and gradually returning to my pre-baby healthy size. I need new heels that I can walk in. Clothes that aren’t dry clean only. Clothes that aren’t destroyed by a smudge of banana. Clothes that are me, not me trying to be someone else. Clothes that Joe would like.

“Daddy home soon, sweetheart,” I sigh, to myself more than Evie.

Four days. He’s back in four days. I can barely contain myself, which is ludicrous because all that will happen, I guess, is that we’ll have a sad little conversation about access and money. Gosh, how much I’d give just to see him walk down that path, jaunty in his old-school trainers, head cocked forward, big molar smile. Then life plays a cruel trick. Because someone I know does walk toward me on the path, the one that feeds into the copse of wooded trees. And it isn’t Joe. It’s my mother, wind sweeping the hair off her face, sucking her skirt against her legs. And walking next to her, making her laugh, is a shortish, dark man, Moroccan, Indian perhaps, wearing a tailored coat. I can see the release in Mum’s body as she laughs. Like that photo taken with my father in the early days of their courtship. A different Jean. They turn slightly. Lord! They are hand in hand!

I feel a rush of protective fury. Who the hell is this man? Doesn’t he know that Mum is celibate! Vulnerable. And why hasn’t she mentioned anything? Unsure of the etiquette, I crouch over the pram, shaft of hair hopefully shielding me from her view.

“Amy?” Mum calls a few moments later. “Amy? Is that you? You okay?”

I unfurl and sit up to reveal myself. Thankfully mother and the man have spared me from the hand-holding and have sprung apart, red-faced, like teenagers. “Er, fine.”

Mum tucks her windswept hair behind her ear a little nervously. “Gosh! Thought you’d collapsed.” She clears her throat. “I . . . we . . . were just going for a walk. I was going to pop round later.” I look at the man next to her. There’s an awkward pause. “Amy, this is my, er, friend, Norman.” Mum blushes. “Norman Srinivas.”

Norman? I imagined Norman to be a middle-aged Anglo Saxon optician.

“My daughter, Amy,” Mum says proudly.

Norman holds out a hand and smiles shyly. “Honored,” he says, with a slight Indian accent. “You could be sisters.” Mum glows. “Now I will let you ladies spend some time together,” he says apologetically. “I was just off, wasn’t I, Jean? Don’t let me intrude. I must be getting back to work.”

“No, no, honestly, you have your walk,” I say, desperate to exit the situation. But Norman won’t hear of it. He says his courteous good-bye and walks, upright and springy, toward Queen’s Park Tube. Mum’s unable to take her eyes off him. As soon as he is out of earshot I turn to her.

“You never told me!”

Mum feigns puzzlement for two seconds, then, despite all her facial muscles straining to hide it, breaks into a wide sunshine smile. “You’ve had so much to cope with, I didn’t want to give you another thing to worry about. It seemed in poor taste, considering Joe . . .”

I brush her off. “Don’t be silly. . . .” So Norman is the secret to Mum’s new complexion. The lightness of shoe. The bed-head hair. The deeper necklines. Goodness.

“He makes me very happy. I was going to tell you when the time was right.”

Although I’d like to write this off as a fling, I know it’s not. So suddenly Mum is no longer just Mum. She is someone’s lover. Something to get my head around.

“I’d like you to get to know him.”

“Um, I’d love to. But when I’m dressed properly?” I am wearing a trainer on one foot, a ballet shoe on the other.

“Oh, Norman’s not like me. He doesn’t notice such things.” Mum laughs, a light souffle laugh, not the cough-clearance of old.

I shuffle awkwardly from trainer to ballet shoe, not quite sure how to navigate the conversation. My overwhelming feelings are curiously parental: I want to quiz her on Norman’s credentials and intentions. But I am thrilled that she’s happy and also, rather more selfishly, rather relieved. Finally, the weight of Mum’s loneliness has slipped off my shoulders. I always felt that life would be easier, and I’d just feel less guilty somehow, if she’d meet her prince, or at least a half decent non-psycho heterosexual male who would take her on minibreaks to Venice and accompany her to garden centers. That she’d concentrate on her own life rather than mine. That someone would put genuine joy back into her smile. At least one of us got the happy ending.