“Fair enough,” she said. “Well, I suppose we’d better go and clean up your sister.”
“Yes, before she starts eating the cat food,” Bella said.
Sophie laughed. “You’re joking, right?” she said.
Bella wasn’t joking.
Sophie gave her mum a cup of tea and her very best resentful look. Iris looked offended. “I got here as soon as I could, dear,” she said.
“Mum, it’s twenty to ten! I was hoping you’d be round before they went to sleep. That’s when I needed help the most.”
It was shortly after Sophie had discovered Izzy snacking on the dry cat food that she had made what would later prove to be a critical discovery. When a three-year-old girl is determined to do something, she really, really means it.
In this case, Izzy had refused point-blank to remove her fancy dress, even for a much-needed bath. At first Sophie had tried reason and logic to persuade the child out of the dress. But then, as Izzy’s screams had grown to eardrum-perforating levels and Sophie had clutched at all the available straws, she had turned in desperation to Bella.
“What do I do?” she had asked the older girl, who was watching with detached interest, her hands clapped over her ears.
“Let her keep the dress on?” Bella had suggested casually. Simple, brilliant, and entirely effective.
A few minutes later, Sophie had washed child and dress in her bath, tipping in large amounts of Chanel bubble bath in an attempt to mask the smell, too fraught to resent the sacrifice.
“She’s always happy if you let her get her own way,” Bella had observed, sitting on the toilet.
“I’m not letting her get her own way,” Sophie had said with determination. “I’m multitasking.”
Iris was unrepentant. “I would have been here earlier, Sophie, but Oedipus Rex started having one of his turns, and I had to stay with him until he settled down. I don’t want the neighbors complaining again, do I?”
Sophie shook her head. “You should move, Mum. You should sell that house and move to the country. You’d get somewhere much bigger for your money, and it wouldn’t matter so much that you have the canine version of the von Trapp family.”
Iris sniffed. “I don’t know anyone in the country,” she said, looking a little hurt.
“You don’t know anyone here anymore,” Sophie reminded her. “No one wants to come round in case they catch rabies.”
Iris sighed. “I want to live near you, anyway,” she said wistfully.
Sophie covered her surprise. Her mother loved her dogs so much that sometimes Sophie forgot she was probably fairly fond of her daughter too.
“So what do you think about the cat food thing, then?” Sophie said, deciding to change the subject before they somehow got embroiled in one of their long, consistently unsatisfactory, and ultimately life-draining conversations about what it meant to be a good daughter.
Her mother considered the question for a moment. “I think it will be fine,” she said. “There was an article about an old lady who couldn’t pay her gas bill in the Express last week. She’d been living off cat food, the poor old dear, even though when the neighbors broke in they found thousands of pounds in cash under her bed.”
“Why did the neighbors break in?” Sophie asked her.
“Because she was dead, dear,” her mum said, as if it were a stupid question.
“Dead!” Sophie panicked momentarily as she wondered what the maximum sentence was for involuntary manslaughter.
“Oh, no, no,” Iris said quickly. “She didn’t die of cat food. No, she died of hypothermia. All alone in the world, you see—her children had abandoned her.”
“Oh, thank God,” Sophie said with relief. Her mother raised an eyebrow at her. “Well, you know what I mean.” Sophie sighed and drew her legs up under her on the sofa. She wrinkled her nose. It still smelled decidedly spicy. “The thing is, Mum, I have no idea what I’m doing. I know I’m only having them for a week or so, but right now that feels like a week or so too long. I’m useless.”
Her mother reached into her bag and pulled out a book. She tossed it to Sophie, who was expecting something useful on child care. She should have known better.
“Dr. Robert’s Complete Dog Training and Care Manual?” Sophie read out the title in disbelief. “Mum! They’re children, they’re humans—or at least that’s what I’ve been told! How’s this”—she wagged the book at her mum—“going to help?”
Her mother pursed her lips. “You’d be surprised, actually. The principles are more or less the same. Sit, stay, come, et cetera. House training. A spot of doggy psychology. It could work wonders, I expect. I wish I’d known all that when I had you. That’s the trouble with you cat people. No imagination.”
Sophie tossed the book to the floor in disgust. “You must know something about looking after children, Mum, you brought me up after all—more or less.”
Iris nodded and looked slightly abashed. “I know, darling, I know, but I’ve—Well, I’ve forgotten how I did it. It sounds silly, doesn’t it, but it was rather a long time ago, and I don’t know—it’s just gone out of my head. The only thing I do remember is feeling like I was always getting it wrong. I can’t have done too much of a bad job, though—look at you. Successful, independent. Can’t get a husband, but that will come…”
Sophie sipped her tea and felt it warm the back of her throat. “Don’t want a husband, Mum. Don’t want one,” She said irritably. “There is a difference.” Sophie’s mother looked skeptical. Sophie thought about Jake. “And even if I did, I never exactly know when one wants me.”
“That’s the easy bit, dear.” Iris chuckled, thinking that her daughter must be joking. “It’s what to do with them after you’re married that’s the hard part.”
“You and Dad never had any trouble,” Sophie said.
“Yes, well.” Iris smiled fondly. “You father and I always had incredible sexual chemistry. I can’t tell you how I’ve miss—”
“Mum!” Sophie did not want to think about her mother as a sexual being. Especially when she did not think of herself that way.
“All I’m saying is that a woman has needs. I know since your father passed—”
“Mum!” Sophie hissed, afraid to raise her voice. “I don’t want to talk to you of all people about ‘needs’—mine, yours, or anyone’s—okay? I need your help with these children!”
Iris shrugged. “Alex was a nice young man,” she said, willfully ignoring her daughter’s attempt to change the subject. “He seemed to really care about you, and he bought me some lovely flowers.”
Sophie felt the muscles tighten in her chest with anxiety and frustration. She had told her mother time and time again why things didn’t work out with Alex.
In the end, Alex had told her he was tired of going out with her. Tired of the amount of effort it took to get her to leave her job alone for even a few minutes and spend some time with him. He said he’d jumped through hoop after hoop to get her attention, but nothing seemed to work. So he’d tried a last-ditch attention grabber.
He’d asked her to marry him.
Crucially, Sophie had hesitated. Not for a few minutes or days but for nearly three weeks. When he’d left her that evening with a ring in a box on her coffee table it was the last time she talked to him face-to-face. She just didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
Eventually, Alex had sent her an email telling her he assumed her silence was a no—unless she wanted to let him know otherwise. Sophie had never replied to that either. She’d let the biggest and potentially most important relationship in her adult life slip out of her hands simply because she didn’t know who to be in it. No, it was worse than mere negligence. She had deleted it.
And although her friends, especially Cal, had told her she was crazy to let him go, she’d told them she couldn’t keep him, because she wasn’t absolutely certain she wanted to.
Sometimes, though, she did miss Alex. Well, not him exactly, more the warmth h
e left in bed in the morning. Sophie shook her head. Her mother was managing to railroad again. “Can we just for one moment try to think about the most immediate problem?” Sophie asked.
Iris looked rather vague.
“The kids!” Sophie had to remind her mum.
“I’m sorry I’m not more of an expert of motherhood,” Iris said, the slight sharpness in her tone going over Sophie’s head. “But, well, I think you just have to trust your instincts. Listen to your intuition and you won’t go wrong.”
“I think that’s the problem,” Sophie said glumly, wishing she hadn’t smoked all five of her remaining cigarettes shortly after the girls had gone to bed.
“What is, dear?” her mum said.
Sophie looked up at her blankly.
“What’s the problem?” Iris pressed her.
“Well, most women have intuition built in, don’t they?” Sophie asked, remembering her point. “Give ’em a kid and they know what to do with it instantly—at least that’s what we’re all led to believe. But obviously I have that particular gene missing…. I never get any intuition about anything, Mum. I mean, how do I know what’s for the best, unless I have all the available facts in front of me—unless it’s there in black and white? This intuition business sounds like total nonsense to me—like reflexology or astrology.”
Her mother smiled. “Your stars did say you were facing great upheaval.”
“Really?” Sophie looked interested for a moment until she realized her mum was teasing her. “Anyway. I don’t think intuition really exists. I think it’s a myth.”
“It isn’t,” her mother said.
“You would say that. And anyway, how do you know?” Sophie challenged her.
“I just know, the same way I know that you have it, Sophie,” Iris said, pausing to find a way to talk to her prickly daughter without offending her. “Sometimes I think, with all this work and career and promotions, that you’ve forgotten yourself. You’re always working toward something, but sometimes I wonder if you even know why.”
Sophie rolled her eyes. “Mum, things are different now. I know what I want from my life. I want to get to the top. I don’t need a man or children to be happy or successful or fulfilled. I want to be successful.”
“But why?” her mother asked her.
Sophie looked at her mother and wondered how it was they shared the same language, because she never seemed to understand what Iris was going on about.
“I want to be the best I can,” Sophie said, frustrated that the conversation had somehow drifted onto her mother’s favorite subject—Things That Are Wrong with Sophie. “And anyway, this isn’t about me,” Sophie reminded her irritably. “It’s about now and the next couple of weeks. I’ve got to come up with a coping strategy, and I thought you could help me. I should have known better.”
Iris dipped her face and looked at her tea, and immediately Sophie felt sorry. “I’m not saying you’re not a great mum. I mean, you are great and you are my mum and I love you. But you were never exactly conventional, were you?”
Her mother shrugged. “Possibly not,” she said. “It was the seventies, dear. Nothing was.”
“I know. All I’m saying is that I don’t have it. I don’t have that way you’re supposed to have with kids. I understand Artemis better than I understand children, and Artemis is not an easy cat to understand. She’s got issues.”
Her mother finished her tea and set the mug down on the coffee table. “I don’t think anybody would expect you to instantly turn into an expert under these circumstances, Sophie. I’m sure Carrie wouldn’t. In fact, if I remember Carrie correctly, I’m sure she’d think the whole thing was pretty funny.”
Sophie felt the corners of her mouth creep into a smile. Carrie would be seriously tickled by everything that had happened this evening.
“I’m sure you’ll pick it up eventually, a capable girl like you,” her mother reassured her.
“Eventually, maybe,” Sophie conceded. “But not in two weeks.”
Five
Aunty Sophie!” Sophie opened one reluctant eye and looked at Izzy. She felt like she had been asleep for a total of forty-seven minutes. “Psssssst, Aunty Sophie,” Izzy whispered at the top of her voice. “Wake up, wake up. I want breakfast. I want Cheerios and Shreddies and Crispies and Coco Pops and milk!” Izzy’s eyes widened as she spoke in clear anticipation of the delights that her cereal feast would bring. She would be unlucky, though. Sophie did not eat breakfast and so did not have any of the cereals on Izzy’s optimistic list. She didn’t even have any bread anymore—they’d eaten it all last night.
Sitting up, Sophie rubbed her eyes and looked at her watch. It was just before 6:00 A.M. It turned out that she had been asleep for a total of forty-seven minutes.
Her mother had left just after eleven, and Sophie had been sitting on the edge of the sofa wondering exactly how she had come to this point in her life when she had heard a loud buzzing. For a few moments she’d thought the day was being topped off nicely with an invasion of giant killer wasps. Then she’d realized it was her cell phone vibrating on the coffee table. Nobody ever called on it outside office hours. Its loud thrum against the blond ash had been rather disconcerting. Sophie had picked it up and looked at the display; it had said “Number withheld.” Compulsively unable to leave a phone unanswered, Sophie had pressed the Call button.
“Hello?” she’d said uncertainly.
“Sophie?” It was Jake Flynn’s voice. Sophie had looked at her watch. Jake at this hour?
“Look, I know it’s late, and I’ve been wondering about calling you all night,” he’d said quickly. “I wanted to see how you were. I nearly didn’t call you, but then I thought if I were you, I’d be sitting up all night worrying. Tell me to go away if you like, but I thought you might like someone to talk to.”
Sophie had chewed her lip. “Um, no—thanks for calling. It’s very…nice of you,” she’d said. She would have to ring Cal in the morning and ask him to verify, but she was fairly sure that phone calls at this hour of the night were quite a good indicator of Jake being interested in her on more than just a business level.
But what if he did like her? She had had a secret and happily unattainable crush on him for sometime now. But that was when he was just her most important client. Not a man who phoned her late at night to ask her how she was. If he did like her like that, what did it mean? How would she feel abut him then? A real, three-dimensional, fleshy version of him that would want her in the real world instead of when she was daydreaming in the bath?
Sophie’s labored thought processes had crashed, and she’d shut her eyes for a moment to reboot. He still might not fancy her. He could just be being American again. Americans were famous for not being very good at observing boundaries. That was always a possibility.
“So how are you coping?” Jake had asked her, and Sophie had realized that he was the first person to ask her that.
“I don’t really know, Jake, there’s so much to take in. I mean, Carrie’s gone…” Sophie had paused to listen to those words out loud again. She still could not make sense of them. “It’s a bit surreal,” she’d finished after a moment. The mistress of understatement, Cal called her.
“You know you’re not alone, don’t you?” Jake had asked her.
“I know,” Sophie had said. “I’ve got this Tess woman, the social worker, and Cal and Lisa will handle everything in the office until I can get back in. You don’t have to worry, Jake, I won’t let anything get in the way of—”
“That’s not what I meant,” he’d said. Sophie had heard him breathe out. “Look, Sophie, I really like you, and just in case you were in any doubt about what I mean by ‘like you,’ I mean I like you in a nonbusiness, personal kind of way. I’m very attracted to you.”
“Oh,” Sophie had said. That cleared that up then.
“I know you have a lot going on now, and maybe I should be stepping back and letting you get on with things, but like I said, I really like
you, Sophie. I don’t want to let this go before it’s had a chance to become something else. Something that might be really great. I understand that right now you just can’t think about anything like that, so in the meantime I want to be your friend. I guess that’s why I’m calling you at this hour of the night, to put my cards on the table. To let you know I like you and that if you need me I’m here for you.” Jake had laughed. “I’m hoping you’ll be so impressed by my chivalry you’ll fall for me and let me take you out on a date once all the dust has settled.”
There had been a short pause in which Sophie had realized that Jake had been asking her a question. “Of course,” she’d said automatically.
“And I was thinking I could come by and take you all out one day. To the zoo or something? I have all this vacation time coming to me, and after all, I’m the boss. I’m sure I can give myself a day off on short notice.”
“That would be lovely,” Sophie had said, her mind still on the fact that Jake Flynn definitely “liked” her, which left just one question—did she definitely like him?
“So—it’s okay if I call you on a nonbusiness footing?” Jake had asked her again, just to be totally clear.
“It is,” Sophie had said, painfully aware of her stilted responses.
“Then good night, Sophie,” Jake had said, and that time he’d said her name it had sounded different.
“Night,” Sophie had said, and he’d hung up the phone.
Sophie had then sat on the edge of the sofa with her phone in her hand and wondered about how different her day might have been if Tess Andrew hadn’t turned up. She wondered if Jake would have been so open and up front at their lunch date. She wondered if he had, if they might have met that evening for dinner and he might have escorted her home. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him kissing her and then opened them quickly again. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to Jake, but she was glad in a way that this obstacle had thrown itself up between them. Speculating on what might or might not happen with Jake was far too complicated to fit into her present worrying schedule. She had so many other things to worry about. Abandoned children, absent fathers, dead best friends. Sophie’s stomach clenched as she ran down the list.
The Accidental Mother Page 7
