“I think she meant food tea, Aunty Sophie,” she said slowly, as if English wasn’t Sophie’s first language. “Like dinner?”
Sophie sat down on the sofa next to her. “Obviously I knew that!” she lied. “I was joking! Ha-ha. Get it?”
Bella shook her head. “No,” she said deadpan. “It wasn’t funny.”
For a moment Sophie was reminded of a film she’d once seen where the world was taken over by evil aliens disguised at kids. She forced the thought to the back of her mind. She was the adult, they were the children. She was in charge. It wasn’t like, for example, The Omen, at all, nope, not in any way. These were Carrie’s children. Not the Antichrist’s—although Sophie really hardly knew Louis, so she couldn’t rule that out entirely.
“So tea!” She said with renewed vigor. “Let’s go and see what’s in the fridge, shall we, Bella?”
There was nothing in the fridge except for half a pint of skim milk, three shriveled spring onions, low-fat margarine, and two Marks & Spencer low-fat ready meals, Thai green chicken curry and seafood pasta. They would have to do.
Sophie took the two meals out of the fridge, forked their film coverings with enthusiastic aggression, and shoved them in the microwave. Bella watched Sophie display the extent of her culinary skills, her brown eyes just about reaching over the rim of the counter.
“What is that?” she asked Sophie.
“It’s seafood pasta and chicken curry,” Sophie said. “Yum yum.”
Bella said nothing but eyed the microwave warily for a moment. She looked around the narrow galley kitchen. “Your kitchen is very small,” she said. “Where do you eat?” It was a valid question.
“On the sofa usually,” Sophie said. “Is that okay?”
Bella looked skeptical. “Well, it’s okay for me, but…”
“Excellent, that’s settled then,” Sophie said. Just at the moment that the microwave beeped there was a crash from the bedroom and the screech of a furious cat, followed closely by the cries of a distraught child.
Sophie and Bella ran into the bedroom. Izzy was lying sprawled on Sophie’s bed, with Sophie’s old-style umbrella in one hand and half of one leg trapped underneath Sophie’s empty and fortunately lightweight suitcase.
“Catty!” Izzy sobbed, waving the umbrella wildly at the open window. “Catty, come back!”
Sophie looked out the small window that she always left open for Artemis to come and go as she pleased. She was sure that leaving the window open pretty much negated her insurance policy, but she couldn’t bear the thought of cooping Artemis up in the flat when she’d been imprisoned in the shelter for so long. Artemis had certainly been glad of the escape route on this occasion. She must have scooted across the little balcony onto the downstairs extension roof, and off into the evening in double-quick time. Sophie didn’t think she’d be coming back anytime soon, and she felt a pang of helpless anxiety. She didn’t know why she worried about Artemis. Artemis was a pretty tough cat.
Bella climbed onto the bed and pushed the suitcase onto the floor with a thud. She put her arm around Izzy and pulled her into a sitting position. Kissing the younger girl’s light brown hair, Bella patted her firmly on the back three times. “There. There. There,” she said with each pat. Sophie wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. Perhaps she was supposed to hug Izzy and do a bit of patting too, but she didn’t quite know how to go about the whole hugging and patting thing, so she left it to Bella and sat on the edge of the bed instead.
“What happened, Izzy?” Sophie asked her.
“Catty was stuck, I was helping Catty, like when Bob the Builder helped Pilchard,” Izzy sobbed. “But she ran away! I wanted to cuddle her up!”
Sophie guessed that Izzy had spotted Artemis on top of the wardrobe and, unable to reach her, had climbed onto the bed with Sophie’s hook-handled umbrella, which had been propped in the corner of the bedroom, and tried to hook the cat down. An event that would have horrified poor old Artemis. Still, it proved that Izzy had at least as much reasoning power as a border collie after all.
Sophie ventured out a hand to pat Izzy’s knee, then quickly withdrew it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Artemis will be back when she wants to be. Probably best not to cuddle her up next time she comes home. She’s not a big fan of the cuddle as a concept.”
“Okay.” Izzy sniffed. Sophie wasn’t sure whether or not to take that as agreement.
The microwave beeped again. “Tea’s ready!” Sophie said brightly, and both girls did look more cheerful. They must really be hungry, poor kids, Sophie thought.
In preparation, Sophie positioned them both on the sofa and gave each of them a paper towel to prevent spillage. She gave them each a fork and a knife, and looked through her practically medieval five television channels for something they could watch, settling in the end for a talk show, Richard & Judy.
“Oooh, a knife,” Izzy said, inspecting the implement she had been handed as if it were a lethal weapon.
In the kitchen, Sophie tipped out each ready meal onto a separate plate. She thought for a moment and then tipped the seafood pasta onto the Thai green curry plate and mixed it around until it was slightly lighter shade of green. Then she split the mixture in two and slid one half back onto the second plate. That way there’d be no arguments about who was having what, she thought, feeling pleased with herself. Foresight, that was what she had displayed there. Foresight. A key problem-solving skill was to solve the problem before it even occurred.
She took the plates to the living room, where Izzy was endeavoring to cut open the sofa with the blunt serrated edge of her knife.
“Um.” Sophie made especially sure that she did not raise her voice. “Izzy, don’t do that darling, okay?” she asked her, wondering if the exorbitant cost of the sofa would mean anything to Izzy. Probably not.
“Okay!” Izzy said, sawing away regardless.
“Here’s tea now anyway,” Sophie said. She handed the girls a plate each. “Okay, enjoy, I’ve just got to make a couple of quick calls, so I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”
“Okay!” Izzy said, transferring her sawing attentions to the food.
Bella looked at her food suspiciously and poked it with her fork. “Okay,” she said with much less enthusiasm.
Sophie picked up the phone in her bedroom and called Cal first.
“How’s it going?” he asked her, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice.
“Fine, it’s fine actually,” Sophie said, wondering if her voice sounded as high on the other end of the phone line as it did in her head. She made a conscious effort to lower it a half octave. “I’ve given them their tea, then I expect they’ll go to bed after.” she said confidently.
“What, at five o’clock?” Cal did not sound so confident.
“Never mind that,” Sophie said, brushing his doubt aside. “Did the contracts from the bank come through okay?” Cal confirmed that they had. He gave her a rundown of the day’s events and the inside scoop on how Lisa had handled all of her new duties. “Pretty well, actually,” Cal said. “She hasn’t cried for the whole afternoon. Barely even a sniffle. Well, maybe the occasional sob—but mainly I think you being out of the office is good for her. She’s too scared of me to mess me around.”
Sophie ignored the last comment. “Good. Listen, I want you to come round in the morning, okay? Bring my laptop. I didn’t have time to pick it up when we went. Bring all the stuff we talked about today and our schedule for the week. I want to sort out exactly who’s doing what when.”
“Okay, sir,” Cal said. “Should we synchronize our watches, sir?”
Sophie did not laugh. She did not like it when Cal called her “sir.” “Any other calls?” she said.
“Jake called to see if we’d heard from you. He asked me for your home number, and I said it was against company policy and all that, but he said what about your cell phone number, and I said I supposed that would be okay if it was really important, and he said he needed to talk t
o you about the party. So I offered to see if I could help him, but he said he’d just give you a ring and see how you were doing, so he clearly fancies you even though you’ve just become a single mother. I think you should marry him. He’s a keeper.”
Sophie gave a short, hysterical laugh. “Look, Cal, I need to get my head round this. Carrie’s gone, and her children are in my living room. I can’t think about any of that stuff—so please, for my sake, just give it a rest, will you?”
There was short pause.
“I’m sorry, Soph,” Cal said, his voice softened. “You know me, the more complicated and emotional things get, the bigger and more stupid my mouth gets. Look, if I can help you with anything, you know I will, don’t you?”
Sophie smiled. “I know,” she said. “You’re a mate. Just come over tomorrow—at lunchtime, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Cal said resuming normal service. “Over and out, sir!” And for once Sophie didn’t mind.
She listened for any sound of disturbance from the living room. All was quiet on the Western Front except for the faint jangle of the Richard & Judy theme song. She dialed her mother’s number. As usual, it rang only twice before she heard the receiver clatter to the floor and the sound of dogs baying and yapping. Her slightly hard of hearing mother had trained her Great Dane cross, Scooby, to answer the phone when it rang. She had not, unfortunately, trained Scooby to take messages or, perhaps more vitally, to let her know that someone was waiting on the other end of the line. Sophie had always thought that was an essential bit to leave out.
“Mum!” she yelled into the phone. “Mum! Mum! Mum!” It was a bit of a lottery as to whether her mum would work out that she was on the phone at all. But the more Sophie yelled, the more the dogs barked, which meant the more likely her mum was to come and see what they were barking at, which usually resulted in a conversation. Usually it did, but one evening when Sophie had called her, she had not answered at all, and after listening to dogs for twenty minutes, Sophie had been forced to go around to her mum’s house and let herself in just to double-check that her mother wasn’t lying dead in the hallway having her toes nibbled by her pets.
Finally there was a clank and the sound of her mother’s voice conversing with the dogs. “Get down, poochies—get down! Hello?” Her mother spoke into the receiver at last. She always sounded surprised when she answered the phone as if she’d forgotten that it had been invented until each time it rang again.
“Mum, it’s me,” Sophie said.
“Hello, dear.” Her mother’s voice warmed. “Oh, I am glad I called you. I’ve got a lot to tell you. Felicity’s got to go back to the vet’s again—same upset tummy—”
“Mum! Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got something to tell you.” Sophie told her about Carrie and the children.
“Oh dear,” her mother said after a long pause. “How terrible. How terrible.”
Sophie agreed once again that it was, she knew it was terrible, but she worried that she was secretly thinking it was terrible for all the wrong, selfish reasons.
“The thing is, Mum, I don’t really know what I’m doing, you know. I thought maybe you could come over? Give me some tips? Please, Mum?”
Her mother hesitated, as Sophie had known she would. “Tonight, dear, do you mean?” she said uncertainly.
“Well, it is sort of an emergency,” Sophie said. She was disappointed at her mum’s reluctance, even though she knew that prying her away from her dogs was near impossible, especially in recent years.
“Please, Mum,” Sophie said, resenting that she had to ask for help twice. “I need you.”
“All right,” her mother said, with slow reluctance. “But I won’t be able to stay for long, okay? Mitzy’s expecting, you know—it could be any minute.”
Sophie said good-bye and looked at her reflection in her dressing table mirror. She looked exactly the same as she always did. Neat and efficient. Calm and in control—so why did she feel as if she’d suddenly been sent into a war zone, thrown in among the bloody chaos without the faintest clue what to do, not even any basic training? She made herself take a deep breath. Managing children was no different than managing any other project. It simply required a broad depth of knowledge, a cool head, and brilliant negotiating skills. That and twenty-four tranquilizers and a large bottle of whiskey. Sophie smiled at herself in the mirror. Things were not quite that bad. Yet.
“It’s just two weeks,” she told herself. “You’ll be fine.”
The bedroom door opened a crack, and Bella’s bangs peered around the corner, followed a fraction of a second later by her eyes.
“Um, Aunty Sophie,” she said ominously. “I think you’d better come and see this.”
Sophie instinctively steeled herself as she followed Bella back down the hallway to the living room, imagining the very worst that could have happened. She did not imagine hard enough.
“My sofa!” Sophie cried, ignoring the child who was covered from head to foot in Thai-curry-seafood-pasta. “Oh, my God! My sofa! My…sofa.”
Half of her cream leather sofa was now a greenish color, and so were her two faux fur cushions, their once strokable softness now converted into punklike sticky spikes.
Izzy grinned at her. “Tea was all bleugh and yuck,” she said reasonably, by way of explanation. “So look, I made a painting with it on the sofa!” Izzy clearly thought that the artwork was something that should impress and not depress Sophie. “Is there any ice cream please?” she asked.
Sophie resisted the urge to weep. She ran through all the legal and moral reasons she knew of why it was not a good idea to throw a child out the window until she was sure she had stopped herself from screaming. She took a deep breath and counted backward from ten just to be on the safe side.
“What have you done to my sofa?” she said, after the countdown with much more control than she felt. “Why have you…ruined my sofa?” She turned to Bella. “Couldn’t you have stopped her? Couldn’t you have come and got me? I mean, you’re the responsible one.”
“I’m only six and a half,” Bella said, looking irritated. “And anyway, you were on the phone and you said it was okay for us to eat on the sofa and I thought you realized that she might be a bit messy and I didn’t know that she was going to do that, did I? I just went in the kitchen to get some more water and when I came back she’d tipped it everywhere and—” Bella stopped talking, and Sophie was worried that she had made her cry. But when Bella looked up at Sophie, her eyes were dry.
“Really,” she said, giving Sophie a look of pure recrimination. “Izzy needs adult supervision.”
“All right, I appreciate that it’s not your fault,” Sophie said. She looked at Izzy, narrowed her eyes, and tried a phrase her mum had used on her frequently as a child. “What have you got to say for yourself, young lady?”
Izzy giggled and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Ooops,” she said. “I done a wee-wee in my pants!” The child giggled and pointed at a trickle of warm liquid running over the edge of Sophie’s sofa and dripping onto her sheepskin rug. Sophie wanted to break down and cry over her sofa, she wanted to weep for her rug, she wanted desperately to mourn her faux fur cushions, but she could not, she told herself. She could not be crying over rugs or cushions or sofa when so far she had witnessed neither one of these children cry over the loss of their mother. Whatever way you looked at it, they had the moral high ground. And children are more important than sofas or cushions. Apparently.
Gingerly, Sophie picked Izzy up and held her at arm’s length. This was harder than she’d imagined; Izzy was pretty heavy and, what’s more, very ticklish. She giggled and kicked, sending a fine spray of goo all over Sophie’s dry-clean-only skirt. Sophie gritted her teeth and thanked God that she had removed her new boots and locked them safely away in her wardrobe.
“I’m just putting you in the kitchen for a minute, Izzy,” Sophie told her. “Just while I clear up the mess, okay?”
“Okay!” Izzy said.
Sophi
e was not reassured. She set Izzy down on the floor by the window and cast an eye about for any more potential disasters. There were no sharp objects in view, no toxic substances, and no box of matches. Everything should be fine, she thought.
“Okay, let’s play statues, okay? You stand very, very still for as long as you can and don’t move. Okay?”
Izzy nodded. “Okay,” she said.
Twenty minutes, two rolls of Bounty, and three bowls of warm, soapy water later, Sophie and Bella had made quite a good job of cleaning the sofa, although Sophie suspected there was no hope for the cushions, which she consigned regretfully to a garbage bag that she put outside the flat’s front door in the communal hallway.
“Thank God,” Sophie told Bella sincerely. “That Marks and Spencer doesn’t use artificial coloring.”
“Thank God,” Bella agreed. Sophie noticed her food also uneaten but mercifully still congealing on the plate.
“You didn’t like it either, did you?” Sophie asked.
“It was rather disgusting,” Bella said, wrinkling her nose.
Sophie suppressed a smile. For a small child, Bella had a remarkably large vocabulary.
“I’m sorry Bella,” she said. “This is all new to me. I’m not very good at it, am I?”
“No,” Bella said. “But you’re trying.”
Sophie somehow found the energy to get off her knees and stand up again and held out a hand to help Bella up.
“Aunty Sophie?” Bella said, still holding on to Sophie’s fingers. “I love Grandma and everything, but I’m glad we came to stay with you.”
Sophie felt herself smile and her resolve strengthened. “Really?” she said, warmly deciding to fish a bit further. “Why’s that?”
Bella shrugged. “Grandma doesn’t have a telly,” she said.
Sophie nodded and glanced at the TV, where the end credits for Richard & Judy were rolling.
The Accidental Mother Page 6
