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‘And the other two were great. Sophie spent most of lunch relating the entire plot of that book I bought her. And Alfie’s adorable, it’s like he’s adopted me. Ian says not to take it seriously. It’s my novelty factor, plus the fact my Spiderman tolerance threshold is unfeasibly high. We managed a full three hours. Impressed, huh?’
Clare nodded. ‘So,’ she said. ‘About this holiday?’
‘We-ell, holiday might be a slight exaggeration,’ Eve said, trying unsuccessfully to conceal her excitement. ‘When school breaks for summer they’re going to Cornwall for a couple of weeks—Ian’s parents have a place there—and Ian suggested I join them. Not for the whole time,just for a week at the end, so it’s not too much for the kids.’ Or me, she added in her head.
‘What holiday?’
Neither of them had seen Lily arrive. ‘Don’t tell me you and Ian are getting away from it all. Just the two of you?’
‘Can tell you don’t have any kids!’ Clare snorted.
Lily ignored her. ‘Not you and Ian?’ she asked Eve.
Eve grinned, aware the euphoria she’d barely been able to contain since Ian made the suggestion was now flooding her face. ‘Me, Ian, Alfie, Sophie and Hannah…’ For now, it didn’t seem necessary to mention that, for some of that time at least, Ian’s parents would be there too. Clare would have plenty of theories on that, Eve knew. She also knew that right now she didn’t want to hear them. She was more than capable of adding two and two and getting an accurate total without Clare’s help.
‘No way!’ Lily surprised Eve by flinging her arms around her. And Eve was instantly reminded of Louisa. ‘That’s great. Real progress. How did it happen?’
Eve was opening her mouth to begin the story again, when a slight draught made them turn towards the door. ‘Not now,’ Clare hissed. ‘No time.’
Even though the others had no idea what Melanie Cheung looked like, beyond the vague description Eve had given Clare over the phone, there was no doubt in their minds that Melanie was now standing in the doorway, peering across packed tables towards the corner where they sat. She was clutching what looked like a waiting-list-worthy Hermès Kelly bag to her chest as if it was body armour.
‘Oh God Eve,’ Clare murmured. ‘Tall, slim, gorgeous. Your basic self-esteem crusher.’
‘Shut up.’
Raising a hand to wave Melanie Cheung over, Eve had to share Clare’s misgivings. What could this woman—all expensive handbag, effortless style and shampoo-ad hair—possibly want with them?
‘Thank you, so much, for letting me come along. I really appreciate it,’ Melanie Cheung said, when she’d settled into the seat they’d saved for her and Lily had returned with two skinny lattes and a bottle of water. ‘Are the others on their way?’
‘Others?’ Eve looked at her, confused. ‘What others?’
‘Well…I thought…I mean, I know you said it wasn’t so much a group…’ Melanie looked flustered, as if she wanted the ground to swallow her up.
‘There are no others,’ Clare said with a smile, taking control of the situation. ‘Just us. It doesn’t matter, does it?’
Melanie shook her head, but it looked as if it did matter. A lot.
‘Eve, you already know, sort of. She’s a new stepmum…’
‘Not exactly,’ Eve protested.
‘As good as,’ Clare continued. ‘To three children—her partner, Ian, is a widower. Lily’s my sister and has a three-year-old stepdaughter.’ Lily didn’t bother to correct her. ‘And I’m not a stepmother at all,’ Clare said. ‘But I had one, so that gives me a different perspective on things when it’s needed.’
‘And when it’s not!’ Lily said, but she was smiling.
‘What about you, Melanie?’ Eve said, conscious of the other woman’s discomfort. ‘What’s your story?’
Gingerly, Melanie placed the bag she was still hugging—either as protection or in case she’d need to make aquick getaway—on the seat beside her.
‘I’m divorced,’ she said, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the low-level chatter around them. ‘My ex recently remarried and had a child—not in that order. A little boy with his new…wife. But that’s not strictly relevant. I mean, it’s not as if Barty’s my stepson. He’s nothing to me. And that’s kind of odd in itself, don’t you think?’ She paused, obviously embarrassed at how much she’d revealed so quickly. The others looked everywhere but at her, while Melanie sipped her latte and tried to regain her composure.
‘Anyway…I’ve been seeing this guy for a couple of months now, I met him through work. His name’s Vince, his company set up personalshopper’s computer systems. It was all going really well, no pressure, just an easy-going thing. No strings—well, not many. Exactly what I needed after…well, after…you know…’
They did. Even if Eve hadn’t already filled them in, Melanie’s divorce was well enough documented for anyone who ever read the gossip columns.
‘And then I found out he’s been married before. Vince, that is. He just tossed it into the conversation, like it was nothing; just one of those things everybody did in their twenties.’
‘Not me,’ Clare said.
‘Me neither,’ Eve agreed.
‘That’s what I mean,’ Melanie continued. ‘And on top of the unmentioned marriage, it turns out he has a daughter who’s ten. She lives with her mother but he sees her every other weekend, and a week or so in each of the school holidays.’
‘How d’you mean, you “found out”?’ Lily asked, sketching inverted commas in the air. ‘You mean he kept it secret?’
‘No, not exactly,’ said Melanie. ‘He just hadn’t thought to mention it and I didn’t think to ask. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? But I know what you must be thinking. I mean, how do you date someone for two, nearly three, months and not tell them something that significant? And, to be honest, I feel like an idiot. How can you not know your boyfriend has a kid?’
‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ Lily said, with a shrug.
‘Really?’ said Clare turning to her. ‘I was.’
Melanie gave a nervous laugh. ‘But it’s not just that. It’s like one minute it’s all easy-come, easy-go, the next he’s got a ten-year-old daughter and therefore, by extension, so do I.’
She paused, clearly panic-stricken. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to meet her. I do. It’s just…I’m terrified. I don’t have the first clue how to handle it. What to say, what to do.’
Taking a deep breath, Melanie looked around at the other women. ‘I’m pathetic, aren’t I? I’m scared of a tweenager I haven’t even met.’
‘And, not unreasonably, a bit pissed off with Vince for putting you in this position without warning,’ Lily added. ‘I don’t call that pathetic.’
‘Not at all,’ Eve added. ‘If we’re anything to go by, out-and-out terror is entirely normal.’ She was gratified to see that Melanie, who’d looked on the verge of tears, smiled.
‘When did you find out your guy was a dad?’ Melanie asked Eve. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘It was a bit different,’ Eve said. ‘I knew long before I met him.’ And she ran Melanie through a potted history of her and Ian.
‘What about you?’ Melanie asked Lily, when Eve had finished.
‘Pretty much straightaway,’ she said. ‘A week in, maybe two at most. But that’s Liam for you. He wouldn’t see what the big deal was. It was, “Can’t see you Saturday babes, it’s my turn to have the kid. Don’t suppose you fancy coming round too, do you?”’
‘Really?’ Eve said, eyebrows raised. ‘You’re kidding? Liam let you meet Rosie that soon? How did he know it was going to last? You and him, I mean.’
‘What? You don’t believe in love at first sight?’ Lily grinned to show she wasn’t serious. ‘And I didn’t meet Rosie that soon. But only because I refused. Liam would have wheeled me along on our second date, no doubt about it. To him, it’s not that big a deal. He thinks we think too much. And, sometimes, listening to us beat ourselves up, I wonder if he doesn’t have a point.
‘Anyway,’ said Lily. ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. I didn’t meet Rosie that first time. It would have been too soon for Rosie, and frankly it was too soon for me. I mean, you meet this guy, you basically laugh each other into bed, then you wake up next morning and he’s like, “Oh by the way babe, how d’you feel about brat sitting at the weekend”. Call me old-fashioned, but I say that’s a bit too soon!’
The group burst out laughing and Eve took the opportunity to start a coffee run. As Melanie reached for her purse Eve waved her away. ‘You get them in next time.’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ Lily said, reaching for her jacket and backpack. ‘I’ve got to be back at work five minutes ago. Lovely to meet you, Melanie. Sorry to run out on you. See you soon.’
Melanie watched Eve and Lily hug each other and then head in different directions, Lily to the door, Eve to the counter, as Clare called her daughter to check she was where she said she’d be, doing what she said she’d be doing. At home doing homework.
Did they realize what they’d just said? Melanie wondered. Next time. For the first time since landing in London, Melanie felt on the verge of something, some people, who might truly, in time, become her own friends.
‘That whole Lily/Liam thing kind of puts things in perspective,’ Melanie said when Eve had returned with two more coffees and a herbal tea for Melanie. ‘I mean, this might sound odd to you…but, Vince and I, it’s just not that kind of relationship. If he’d gone straight from first date to “meet my kid” I would have run a mile. I’ve so had it with big romantic gestures…’ She paused. ‘Vince is nothing like my ex. Thank God. We just like each other’s company. So I guess I can understand.’
‘That’s all very well,’ Clare said and Eve winced, knowing her friend was about to punch right to the heart of the matter. ‘But didn’t he have any photos of her? Of his daughter?’
‘Um,’ Melanie looked uncomfortable. ‘He might do. I mean, yes…yes, I’m sure he does but usually we hang out at mine. It’s not much, just a couple of rooms. But it’s above work, so it’s easy. I’ve only been to his place once and it was, late. You know…’ Her voice trailed off.
The others smiled to show they knew. Well, Eve did. She’d only set foot in Ian’s house once so far. But it was a long time since Clare had been anywhere else with anyone else. Late, or otherwise.
The Tube to Finchley took even longer than usual. The Northern Line was sweltering, not just from that day’s heat but from decades of muggy, smoggy summers, the memory of which seemed to have lingered in the tunnels, just waiting to burst out at the slightest rise in temperature above ground. Why was it, Clare wondered, leaning her head against the murky glass, that seventy degrees above ground translated into ninety degrees below?
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the delay,’ came the driver’s voice over a tannoy. ‘We are being held in the tunnel and hope to be on the move again shortly.’
Clare sighed as her watch reached and then passed nine.
Damn it, there went another seven pounds.
She’d been hoping to make it back in time to sneak under the wire of three hours. But 9.05 might as well be 9.55 where babysitters were concerned. Even the, supposedly cheaper, teenage variety. Like traffic wardens, they showed no mercy. A minute was as good as an hour.
Perhaps Lou was right, Clare thought, totting up the cost of that evening’s meeting and feeling nausea rise as the sums approached forty pounds. Forty? How could four hours out of the house and a couple of cups of coffee set her back forty quid? Maybe Lou had a point. Perhaps she was old enough to stay home alone. Her daughter was now fourteen after all, and if the girl was to be believed, all her friends were allowed to stay home without a sitter.
Mind you, if Lou was to be believed, her friends were allowed to do a lot of things she wasn’t. Staying home alone was just the tip of the iceberg.
The train lurched, then lurched again. As it gained momentum a through-breeze temporarily relieved the cloying heat.
It was tempting, Clare had to admit. Lou got the appearance of freedom and Clare would be twenty, even thirty, pounds richer; and maybe the concession would buy Clare a reprieve. Not to mention a little more time to decide what to do about the many other things that Lou’s friends had that she didn’t. Those grenades Lou lobbed willy-nilly at Clare when they had one of their few, but increasingly ferocious, rows.
Well, ferocious on Lou’s part, at least.
Recent grenades included, in no particular order: a dad (always a direct hit, that one), a family (obviously Clare didn’t qualify), grandparents (not granny, proper ones, two sets, they came in pairs, apparently), an iPod, a TV in her room, cousins, free run of Topshop, a Saturday job, a holiday…
The orange glow of streetlights made Clare blink as the Tube train clattered out of the tunnel on its approach to East Finchley station.
Nearly home.
Clare knew the storm was coming. She’d felt the clouds on the horizon as Lou banged around their tiny kitchen picking holes in everything her mother suggested she eat for supper. Pasta was boring. Fish fingers and chips were for kids. Jacket potato was too slow because we don’t even have a microwave. And no, she wasn’t interested in the remains of a moussaka Clare had soothed herself cooking for last night’s supper.
Nothing was right.
Nothing was good enough.
Everything was crap.
‘Don’t say crap,’ Clare said instinctively, earning herself a scowl from her daughter. The signs were familiar. Blissfully rare, at least to date, but Clare had seen enough to know they heralded a fight. What she couldn’t work out was what this one was going to be about.
‘Why not?’ Lou shouted, giving the fridge door a slam. ‘It is crap. My. Life. Is. Total. Crap.’
Clare opened her mouth to rebuke Louisa, and shut it again. The storm was coming, she might as well get it over with.
‘Everybody else goes on holiday,’ Lou had yelled. ‘You don’t have to listen to them talking at school. Bridget’s going to Ibiza. Her mum and dad have rented a villa for a month. A WHOLE MONTH. Madeleine’s mum and dad are taking her to Crete. And they’re letting her take Callie with her. And Charlie’s going to Turks and Caicos.’
Clare was pretty sure Lou didn’t even know where Turks and Caicos was, but that didn’t lessen her daughter’s frustration.
‘Amy’s going to her mum and dad’s cottage in Norfolk for the whole summer…’ she continued. ‘The whole summer, Mum! All my friends are going somewhere. And I’m stuck here!’
Groaning audibly, Clare wondered if she’d be able to get away without telling Lou that Auntie Eve was going to Cornwall with her boyfriend and his children, to stay in their grandparents’ holiday house. Lou would find so many faults with that sentence Clare could hardly bear to think about it.
The words echoed inside Clare’s head as the Tube doors finally opened and she stepped off the train into a balmy north London night. The venom with which Lou had spat her resentment at the comforts she didn’t have that her friends did…And unspoken, the words that had sent Clare fleeing from their flat for fear of hearing them, knowing she couldn’t bear it if she did. Knowing that if she let Lou say those words, the words she knew her daughter was thinking, things would change for ever between them. ‘And I’m stuck here,’ Lou had screamed before her bedroom door slammed shut behind her.
With you.
EIGHT (#ulink_0761a739-7f5d-5384-b39c-f2101698b65e)
‘This it, love?’
Eve peered from the taxi’s window across a gravel drive littered with dusty four by fours and expensive but lowkey cars to a solid farmhouse built from weather-beaten Cornish granite. Above the screech of seagulls she could hear the squeals of small children.
‘Sounds like it,’ she said, pushing a ten pound note and some loose change into the driver’s hand as she took the case he hauled from the boot.
It looked like it too. Eve wheeled her case between a Subaru and a Lexus, and narrowly avoided squashing a Power Ranger standing guard on a manhole cover. She bent to collect it, then stopped. Alfie was here, it said. He might not thank her for moving it.
The front door was on the latch for late arrivals and opened at first push. Dragging her case across a flagstoned hall, she lent it against a wall and slipped Hannah’s birthday card and present (Topshop vouchers—no chances this time) from her handbag, then folded her jacket—creased from the heat, the journey and being clutched too tightly—and dumped it on top of the case beside her handbag. There was no doubt the house itself was empty; but the shrieks of children and low-level murmur of adult conversation was louder now. Eve took a deep breath.
She was in no doubt what a big deal this was, not just for Ian and his children, but for his entire family. For more than two years since Caroline’s death, there had been nothing and no one in his life but the children, and getting them from one day to the next. And now, here was Eve…
Although, somehow, meeting his parents had turned into something even bigger. What Ian hadn’t made clear—at least not until there was no turning back—was thatshe’d be meeting the extended Newsome clan at the same time.
‘It’ll be great,’ Ian had promised when he’d called from Cornwall earlier in the week to check her train times. ‘The weather’s amazing and it’s meant to hold. So Ma thought it might be fun to have a barbecue in the garden, Saturday lunchtime. It’s Hannah’s birthday, so it’s her party really. My parents will be there, obviously. My brother, his wife and kids are coming over from their place in Devon. There’s a cousin or two, nothing too terrifying. Oh, and a couple of neighbours.’
Safety in numbers, that was what he’d said. Hiding in plain sight. There’d be so much going on it would take the focus off her, off them. Far from being the main event, she’d be just another guest on a lazy summer’s afternoon. And that had made sense to Eve. At the time. But that was before engineering works on the line from Paddington had added ninety minutes to her journey and she’d felt obliged to call Ian with an offer of making her own way from the station. How hard could it be, after all?
Smoothing down her top, she followed the noise.
An open door to her right led into a large sitting room that stretched from front to back. Its parquet floors were barely visible beneath a chaos of threadbare Persian rugs, and mismatched chairs and sofas covered with cushions and throws. The effect should have been a fight in a jumble sale, instead it was relaxed and cosy.
At the far end, French doors spilled out onto a terrace and lawns that led across to the fields beyond the garden’s limits. This was some holiday home, bigger by far than her own parents’ only home. A fold-out table inside the doors was laden with presents, some opened, some still neatly wrapped, and in the middle, in pride of place, stood a large birthday cake iced in pink with a large, garish number thirteen, marked in candles. To Eve’s eye, the pastel icing bore Sophie’s unmistakable hallmark.
Propping her card against a pile of unopened presents, Eve moved to the French doors. The lawn was packed. A few friends? She’d hate to be around when Ian’s parents organized a large party. Where the terrace met the grass she could see Ian, standing by the large brick barbecue, talking to a stockier man wearing a navy and white striped apron. At first glance he looked nothing like Ian, but on closer inspection his nose gave the relationship away. Eve guessed she was looking at Ian’s younger brother, Rob. The ‘boys’ were obviously on barbecue duty. Ian’s eyes found her and his face broke into a grin.
‘Eve!’ he called. ‘You made it! Over here!’
A dozen heads swivelled, Meerkat-like, faces full of illsuppressed curiosity. Smiling nervously, Eve looked for the quickest route from where she stood to Ian’s side. Not that she expected this to afford her much protection. As she did so a small whirlwind swirled through the tanned legs and deck shoes of a group that stood drinking Pimm’s on the terrace.
‘Eeeve!’ shouted Alfie, hurling himself at her, another small boy in tow. ‘Did you bring me a present?’ Although they had now spent several Saturday lunchtimes together with no further gifts forthcoming, this was still his preferred opening gambit.
Resisting the urge to hug him, Eve bent down to ruffle his hair instead.
