The Yummy Mummy (39 page)
I switch the subject. “How’s Annabel? Did she say? I wonder if I’m allowed to visit.”
“Funny you should ask. Alice told me to tell you that Annabel’s now fit for public viewing and would love to see you.”
“Great. I’ll pop round tomorrow. And how’s Milo? Annabel was worried about him.”
“The doctors think he might be partially deaf in one ear. Just one of those things. No one knows why. But he’s basically perfectly fine, adorable apparently.”
Nicola sips her coffee thoughtfully, sits up straight, and fixes me with a direct stare. “How do you fancy meeting Alice tomorrow, with me? You can talk about all this stuff face to face.”
“You are joking?”
“Well, she suggested it,” says Nicola apologetically. “I was a bit surprised, I have to say. But she wants to see you desperately, make her peace, thinks it may be easier with me, someone neutral.”
“She probably thinks you can make me come.”
Nicola’s face scrunches into a smile, freckles colliding like stars.
I SLIP THE DRESS OFF ITS HANGER AND OVER MY SHOULDERS
, pulling the fabric down with hot fingertips. The silk clings to my tummy like gauze on a round of cheese. But I don’t care. Joe loved my tummy. Why should I hate it? This dress is in my DNA. My mother’s, now mine. It has been at some of the happiest and saddest moments of our lives, as both witness and participant.
I drag mascara over my trembling eyelashes. Rouge, as Alice taught me, in concentric smudges on the apples of my cheeks. Slip on my soft silver—pancake flat—ballet shoes.
“What do you reckon, sweetie?” Evie pulls herself up onto all fours and tries to crawl toward me. “You can do it . . . go on, Evie!” She grins and, trembling with the strain, takes one huge determined lurch forward—“yeah!!!”—before belly flopping to the ground. Her first crawl. I could swoon with love and pride. “Clever girl! Again, again.” But that is enough effort for one day. Evie refuses to move.
“My turn. Watch this!” I twirl and twirl like a ballerina in a box, loving the
swish
of the dress and the skid of the shoes and Evie clapping her hands clumsily, palms missing each other. Around and around, dizzy and exhilarated as an actress at curtain fall, imagining Joe watching, until I collapse in an umbrella of upturned dress on the floor and realize he isn’t.
PORTOBELLO. THE TATTOOIST. ALICE SO DOESN’T DESERVE
this. But Nicola’s persuasive and a part of me needs to say good-bye, confront her head-on. I squint up at the blue neon sign—
THE ELECTRIC
—and walk confidently into the café, knowing, for once, I’m dressed to deal with it.
A waiter guards the gateway to the back tables.
“Amy Crane,” I say.
His eyes flicker over the names on his clipboard. He shakes his floppy fringe.
“It could be booked under Alice Hope.”
Hearing Alice’s name, he smiles broadly. “Ah, Alice! Of course.” More attentive now, he leads me to a little round table, tucked in the corner.
No Alice. No Nicola. Late. Of course. Why didn’t I think of being late first? Evie grumbles. I put her on my knee and scan the restaurant. To my left is a couple with a very young baby, probably a few weeks old. The parents are trying hard to enjoy themselves. But the father looks nervous and the mother looks exhausted. There is a damp patch growing on her left breast. Their baby, the chaperone, is wedged firmly between them in a car seat, asleep but frowning. The parents eye their baby warily, knowing it could wake and detonate at any moment.
To my right, in contrast, is a pair of young fashionable twentysomething women. They flick their long blond hair a lot. They exude sex and freedom. One of them, who is particularly leggy and blond and knows it, is smoking, occasionally glancing guiltily at the baby and drawing harder on the cigarette. The other one is bent forward on her chair, rapt by gossip. Funny to think that I’ll never be like that again. In the same way I’ll never be eight again. Quite a relief, actually.
“Dadada,” Evie says.
“Mamamam,” I correct, fruitlessly.
The waiter, smirking slightly, slams a bottle of smoking cold champagne on the table.
“I didn’t order champagne.”
“From Alice.” Typical Alice, trying to buy her lateness off. “She asked me to give you this.” The waiter passes over an envelope.
Inside is a pale pink sheet of Smythson notepaper. The handwriting is neat, swirly, like a French schoolgirl’s.
Darling Amy,
Sorry.
Love always, Alice xxxxx
The waiter puts down two glasses.
“Actually, we might need three,” I say, wondering whether to accept Alice’s pale pink apology, and whether she’ll turn up at all.
“No we don’t.” A voice behind me. Evie yelps with excitement.
“Joe!”
Joe hovers awkwardly for a second, then scrapes a chair toward me and sits down. He is thinner now, cross-hatched and handsomely craggy, like when he returned from a punishing Himalayan trek. Lighting up at Evie’s smile, he reaches out for her.
“What are you doing here?” My voice is quick, panicky, and unprepared. How am I meant to behave? What am I meant to say? “I’m meeting Alice and Nicola.”
Joe smiles gently. “No, I’m afraid you’re not.”
“I don’t understand.” How very odd it is to have the warm rock of Joe’s flank next to me after all this time, odd because it’s so extraordinarily familiar.
“You are here to meet me.” My stomach curdles. “You’ve been set up, Amy Crane.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“Nicola and Alice got me here.” Joe leans forward. I can smell his breath. It smells of nothing, merely carries with it the heat and moisture from the engine house of his chest. He talks quietly, almost in a whisper. But his body is so solid, his knee so square, his thigh like a trunk of young hardwood. I have missed his physicality, his absorption of space. “They turned up at my work yesterday morning. . . .”
Nothing makes sense. “But I saw Nicola yesterday afternoon, she didn’t say anything. . . .”
“Alice told me what went on.”
“Oh.” Game over.
He puts one hand over his mouth and speaks through the gaps in his fingers. “She said that she got this Josh guy to . . .”
I slump back in my chair, wracked with shame. “It’s all right, Joe, I know. Don’t go over it.” For a brief moment there I thought, well, what the hell did I think? Of course he won’t.
“She said she’d put him up to pouncing. That he’d just lunged when I walked in and saw you.”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Supernova bitch,” he hisses. “I should have known. But I suppose at least she had the decency to tell me, even if it was under Nicola’s duress.” He reaches for my hand tentatively. His is so big, warm, and familiar. “Amy, I am so sorry that I didn’t hear you out and I am so sorry for running away to Cornwall. But I kept visualizing you two together. It completely did my head in.”
A weight eases itself off my shoulders. Like when you take off a heavy rucksack and feel like you’re floating.
“And I’m sorry for being so crap.” His face knits. “You were right. I did work too late, sought refuge in the pub too often.” Such minor faults as to be negligible, I wave them away. “Amy, I want to make it up to you.”
Make it up to
me
? I’m the one who needs to do the making up. And, yes, Joe deserves to know the truth, that it wasn’t just that kiss in the studio. How can we be together with a wedge of lies between us like lumps on a bad mattress? “Joe, there’s something I should . . .”
Joe looks up sharply. “Please, enough. I can probably guess.” He lowers his head and in that quiet decline I can see that he has a fair idea. “No more talk of Josh. Whatever happened, it was orchestrated by Alice, and, well, I have to bear some responsibility, too. And I never thought I’d be able to say this, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about you, not fundamentally. It doesn’t change the fact that we are family and we still have a future, well, if you want it. We both messed up. But maybe we needed something like this to happen. Maybe this saved us, in a weird way.”
I nod, stunned at what I am hearing. “Joe, sorry. I’m so sorry for everything. It’s my stupid fault, all of it. . . .”
“Shussh. I love you, Amy. I’m not going to have my family torn apart.” He picks up a scrunch of my dress fabric and fingers it softly. “The dress, isn’t it?”
“You remember?”
“Of course. Oxford, punting . . .” He looks down at my feet, smiles. “New shoes? I like.” Joe pulls me toward him, strong arms like cranes. “Just say we’ll work it out. . . .”
The waiter skids a bowl of olives onto our table, his physical intrusion creating room for me to catch my breath. Delighted that her two favorite players are back on the same stage, Evie grins and looks at me expectantly. There’s a long pause. Joe’s grip loosens.
He slips his face into his hands, eyebrow tufting through his fingers. “It’s not too late? Please don’t say it’s too late.”
THE WAITER REFILLS MY GLASS AND SCUTTLES AWAYFAST
, removing himself from our table’s obvious potential for drama.
“That’s all?” says Joe. “Well, I can answer that easily. No. I
never
ever loved Kate. Listen, I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you, way before you loved or even tolerated me. You are the real deal, Amy, always have been. And if you asked me to, I’d happily never see Kate again as long as I live.”
“I may just ask that.”
“I don’t think she’ll be bothering us. She’s happy. . . .”
“Now that she almost ruined everything.”
Joe shrugs and smiles. “Kate is pregnant. Pete finally managed to get her up the duff.”
The hormonal typhoon pregnant? Thank God. “The nursery Osborne and Little wallpaper won’t be wasted, then.”
Joe shakes his head.
“One more question.”
“A deal breaker?”
“Oh yes.” I grin. “You weren’t catapulted into another woman’s arms because I grew into a tub of butter?”
“You were
never
fat!” groans Joe loudly. The mother—the one who doesn’t realize she’s leaking—glances up anxiously to the source of noise and then checks the baby for signs of waking. Joe, understanding instantly, softens his voice to a whisper. “You were curvy. I loved your curves. When you were pregnant I thought you were so beautiful, just the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
While her partner studies the menu, the mother pretends to, listening intently to Joe.
“You never told me that,” I say quietly.
“Didn’t I?” Joe slides a hand over his mouth. “But I thought it all the time. You know me, Amy. I’m crap like that.”
“It would have made a difference.”
“Sorry. But you know what? I love you even more now, despite the fact you’re still a bit skinnier than I’d like and your forehead doesn’t move.” He flutters his long black lashes. “Can I fatten you up again? I still fantasize about your pregnancy thighs.”
I harrumph, playfully reluctant, knowing that I’d rather Hollywood-wax my head than let him leave again. In fact, the realization that life doesn’t always conform to expectation and that I’m not doomed to repeat the mistakes of my parents and, yes, it’s possible to choose a happy ending, makes me dizzy with joy.
“Anything else?”
“One last question. Were you in Penzance or Polzeath?”
“Penzance.”
“Of course.” Laughter froths up, like my heart’s been swirled with Fairy Liquid.
“Enough talk.” Joe stretches open his arms, palm upward, eyes puddling with tears. “I’m craving broken nights and the smell of nappy napalm in the morning. . . .”
Suddenly, in my head, Mum. The late seventies. She’s wearing her bad-henna-day gypsy head scarf and is crying over the kitchen sink, scrubbing the avocado-green plates too hard. Has she just turned Dad away? Chosen not to believe him when he says he still loves her? She tells me nothing’s wrong. I go back to Connect Four and wonder why Mum’s normal cheeriness has tailed off like the airplane trail haloing her head in the greasy kitchen window.
“Amy?” Joe’s eyebrows question mark.
I try to whisper, “Come home, we love you,” but I’m drowned out by a cutlery-trembling screech from the baby at the adjacent table. Cue a panicky flutter of muslin cloths and pacifiers and desperate soothing noises that serve only to inflame the baby more. A set of newly seated diners move tables. The baby’s father, red-faced, mouths sorry, and the baby carries on screaming until the mother whips out a huge purple boob. After slurping noisily for a few seconds, the baby detaches itself—milk still spurting from the exposed nipple—and decides to scream some more. Evie, recognizing a kindred spirit, gurgles approvingly. I shoot a quiet smile at the mother—who looks like she’ll never dare leave the house with the baby ever again—a smile that I hope says, “It gets better, I promise.”
Of course, the fashionable twentysomethings don’t smile. They wince. The leggiest one recoils back into her chair and exhales a cone of dense cigarette smoke into my eyes. I squeeze them tight. Blood black on the back of my eyelids. I squeeze harder, rub. No images. For once, the park, the kiss, that bad movie, is no longer playing. There’s just happy yellow light, like yolks.
A huge heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped get this book from my head to the shelves, especially Peternelle van Arsdale, Ellen Archer, Kim Witherspoon, David Forrer, Lizzy Kremer, Julia Williams, and Ben Chase. Thanks also to Vanessa Friedman, Sharon Krum, Eve Claxton, Louise Chunn, Marion Hume, Angela Matusik, and Bridget Harrison for helping get the book out there.
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