by Fanny Blake
‘Do you want some supper?’ Beth asked.
‘Good game?’ Jon spoke at the same time.
Beth knew instinctively that he felt, as she did, that there was no need to involve Amy in Ella’s situation. They would have to continue their discussion later.
‘Rubbish.’ Her daughter slouched across the room and flung herself at a chair. ‘We lost thanks to that effing bitch Suzy Featherstone. Like she missed two goals. Can you believe it?’
‘Amy, please. Language.’ Beth observed Amy’s sunny mood cloud over in an instant. Beneath the too-long fringe that never quite fell enough to one side, a sullen expression took shape.
‘Well, she is. She’s an utter cow. You don’t know.’
‘Salmon?’ Jon pointed to the congealing remains of roast fish, wilted vegetables.
Amy shook her head, at the same time pulling at her skirt, which certainly did not meet the not-more-than-eight-inches-from-the-knee-when-kneeling rule that Beth remembered from her own school days. ‘Nah! We had pizza at Hannah’s.’
‘But—’
‘It was home-made,’ Amy protested before Beth could object to pizza as a school-night meal.
A sudden blast of unidentifiable tinny music interrupted them. Amy reached into her hoodie pocket for her phone and held it to her ear, glaring at them all the while. Her face lit up. ‘Yeah. You’re joking. He’s dope. No, I’ll text her now. Yeah, thanks. Laters.’ As soon as she cut the call off, she was texting, thumbs going at a million miles a minute, head bowed as she concentrated, a small smile on her lips.
Jon raised his eyebrows at Beth. They knew perfectly well the impossibility of imposing their opinions or lifestyle on their younger daughter, although they hadn’t given up trying. She was a law unto herself. They had to choose their moments carefully, and perhaps they’d had enough upset for one evening.
‘I’m going up,’ Amy announced, scraping her chair across the floor. She swept her fringe towards her left ear, where it stayed for a nanosecond before flopping back over her face.
‘Homework?’ ventured Beth tentatively.
‘Maybe. I’ve got stuff to do, though.’
Beth could imagine. In the jumble that passed for Amy’s bedroom, the still small centre was the area of desk reserved for her laptop and the chair in front of it. Hers was the one room in the house where disorder prevailed, as her clothes were pulled out or taken off and dumped unceremoniously on the floor or the bed. Occasionally Beth ventured in there. Since her own disordered childhood, chaos of any kind was anathema to her. But if she said anything, or tried to impose some sort of order herself, she was shouted at. Apart from that, she had lost count of the number of family rows that had stemmed from their daughter’s unyielding preference for social media over her schoolwork. She couldn’t face another one right now.
As Amy left the room, Jon went over and pulled a bottle of red wine from the wine rack. ‘A drink, I think,’ he said, as he opened a drawer to find the corkscrew.
Beth fetched two wine glasses from a cupboard. The more she thought about it, the more she leaned towards the arguments for Ella not keeping the baby. She felt an urgent need to talk to Megan. But this wasn’t the moment to call her – not when she and Jon were recovering together from the shock. Her closest friend would understand where she was coming from. She would understand how torn Beth was feeling. She loved Ella and Amy as if they were her own daughters, having known them and often looked after them since they were babies. And Beth loved Jake and Hannah likewise, although her work had stopped her from getting to know them in quite the same way. She and Megan had spent hours discussing their children; their hopes and fears for them. They had been equally proud of Ella’s achievements, particularly given the lack of academic prowess shown so far by the other three.
Ever since Ella was born, Megan had been there for Beth as a constant source of advice and friendship. Beth liked order. She’d been reassured by a schedule, feeding every four hours, knowing when Ella was due to go down or get up. Except of course Ella didn’t always oblige. And that provoked flurries of panic, of diving into the manuals, reading and rereading them as if an answer to a sleepless or food-refusing baby would come rearing out of the pages. When it didn’t, Beth would consult Megan, who had endured all this and survived to tell the tale. With three years of motherhood, albeit of a rather undisciplined nature, under her belt, Megan was considered by Beth as the fount of wisdom. Unlike Beth, she had binned the baby books after those initial weeks of barely suppressed panic and adopted a more laissez-faire approach. She ignored scheduled feeding, scheduled naps and scheduled bath- and bedtimes. Jake ate when he was hungry. She was completely relaxed about when he spoke, crawled or walked. She wasn’t looking for any signals that he was more or less advanced than other babies the same age. He was who he was. Beth envied her approach and tried to emulate it – without much success, but without any harm done to Ella, who became as obliging a toddler as Jake had been before her.
From those early days, they had debated motherhood, marriage, life, the universe and everything over countless cups of coffee and bottles of wine. They made each other laugh. They calmed each other’s worries. They had become part of each other’s story. Mothers-in-arms. That was what they were. Bonded by motherhood. Friends for ever.
They were due to meet for supper the following evening. Less than twenty-four hours away. Together they would work through the situation, through Beth and Jon’s reactions, and what the best course of action might be. Without having to contend with Jon’s emotions as well as her own, Beth would be able to consider the situation more objectively. Megan would be that valuable sounding board they so often were for one another.
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Copyright
An Orion ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books Ebook first published in 2013 by Orion Books This updated ebook published in 2014 by Orion Books
© Fanny Blake 2013
The right of Fanny Blake to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4091-2846-5
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