The Sunday Lunch Club

by Juliet Ashton

  Meandering up the concrete path, Anna slowed as she neared the door. Trees hung damply over the lawn, and the flats seemed to sink into the mulch. It had rained for three days straight, and the path was pockmarked with dark patches yet to dry.

  In the five weeks since the last meeting of the Club, Anna had barely seen Sam. She was accustomed to spending every working day with him in the glorified shed, working hard at Artem Accessories, but he’d been out of the country, visiting their factory in Romania, schmoozing a new client in New York. Their day-long chats had been replaced by snatched minutes on Skype. Time differences meant he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as she was inserting herself under her duvet.

  Anna wasn’t complaining; Sam’s globetrotting was a byproduct of Artem’s success. The company had turned a corner and could finally afford to employ them both full-time. She was doing what she’d dreamed of during her years down the salt mines of a large department store, designing fussy handbags for mothers of the bride. Artem was a carefully curated selection of timeless yet modern, fastidiously crafted leather handbags and purses. When Selfridges had placed a big order, she and Sam had got drunker than they’d ever been before, only to find that Bloomingdale’s in New York was also keen to stock their deep red, true blue and Arctic white handbags.

  Hence Sam’s flitting around, and hence Anna’s secret still being exactly that – a secret.

  Hands in pockets, Anna stared at Sam’s windows, barely noticing the crocuses and daffodils nodding a hello from the flower beds. It was time to come clean. Today she’d make a man a father.

  Whether he liked it or not.

  The doorbell made a tinny noise. A shape grew behind the dimpled glass of the front door. Anna prepared herself to speak as soon as Sam opened up.

  ‘You must be the famous Anna!’ The shape wasn’t Sam. It was a woman, about Anna’s age, her streaked hair loose, her belted dress casual but classy.

  ‘I am I suppose.’ Anna took a step back. ‘You are . . .?’

  Sam’s face appeared over the stranger’s shoulder. He seemed to be lit from within by a thousand-watt bulb. ‘She’s Isabel.’ He kissed the woman’s cheek. ‘My Isabel.’

  ‘Oh stop it, you!’ laughed his Isabel.

  ‘Yeah, stop it, you,’ echoed Anna, feeling ambushed as she brandished the mandatory bottle. ‘This . . .’ – she pointed first at one of them, then the other – ‘is a surprise.’

  Sam threw her a briefly questioning look, as if he’d heard the edge Anna was unable to keep out of her voice.

  ‘We speak every day, you see.’ Anna turned to Isabel, who had welded herself to Sam. ‘He didn’t mention you.’ She saw Isabel wince, pull away from Sam, only for him to tug her back into position.

  ‘I could have told you,’ said Sam. ‘God knows I wanted to, but I decided to keep it to myself for a while. Until I knew Isabel was as keen on me as I am on her.’ Sam jiggled the woman’s shoulder, mock-fearful. ‘You are, aren’t you?’

  ‘God yes!’

  Sam beamed. ‘Just checking.’

  The couple’s meet-cute was described, but Anna barely heard the tale of them reaching for the same bottle of bleach in the minimart. She was reeling inwardly, and wondering why she was reeling inwardly. This man was not her property. Once she’d had the right to police his private life, but now Sam was allowed to have lady friends.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said absently, hanging her jacket up under the stairs. In the six years since the divorce, Sam hadn’t been on a single date. He’d always been available, there. ‘Has Sam taken you to see the lifeboat station at Southwold yet, Isabel?’ His geeky love for lifeboats was a standing joke.

  ‘He didn’t have to.’ Isabel’s nose crinkled, and Anna had time to notice how perfect that nose was, and to feel suddenly that her own nose was a mallet made of flesh. ‘I’m a member of the Southwold Lifeboat Society.’

  ‘She’s been to Southwold more than I have!’ Sam seemed ready to burst with joy at this evidence of their ‘rightness’ for each other.

  Anna sat on the burnt-orange sofa. A cat leapt onto her lap, his motorbike purr drowning out the lovebirds clattering pans in the kitchen. ‘Caruso – hello, my darling.’ She scratched the creature under his chin. Sam got custody of Caruso in the divorce. Stroking his sleek stripes was like going back in time. ‘I wanted to tell him about you-know-what,’ she whispered into the cat’s soft ear. ‘Your master always did have terrible timing.’

  Anna loved what she still thought of as Sam’s ‘new’ flat. A few minutes’ walk from her place, it was manageable, rather bare, pleasingly masculine. The clean lines of the nineteen sixties architecture were complemented by the mid-century furniture. A spindly-legged black coffee table sat by the vinyl sofa, knowingly kitsch artwork hung on the white walls. After living with Anna’s clutter – she left a wake of tissues and make-up and paperbacks wherever she went – Sam kept things minimal.

  ‘A mojito for the lady.’ Sam entered with a glass on a tray.

  ‘Mojito?’ said Anna. ‘You normally have to run out for Blue Nun when you host lunch.’

  ‘Isabel’s in charge today.’

  ‘I’ll pass, thanks.’ Anna was taking the pregnancy guidelines seriously. ‘Got any juice?’

  ‘Eh?’ Sam looked dumbfounded. ‘Jesus, don’t tell me you’re dieting again.’

  ‘Just trying to cut down.’ Anna looked up at her ex-husband in his omnipresent jeans, his hair shaggy, trendy new glasses drop-kicking him into line with fashion at last.

  ‘So, what d’you think of her?’ hissed Sam, cocking his head towards the serving hatch. ‘Isn’t she great?’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said Anna, truthfully. Isabel was wholesome, fresh, like a dollop of cream on a slice of apple pie. ‘She’s not really your type.’

  ‘She’s exactly my type.’ Sam was amused by this nonsense. ‘It’s as if she was made especially for me.’

  Anna had thought that she was Sam’s type. She felt him wait avidly for her to say something positive. ‘She seems very very nice. Lovely hair. And shoes.’ Normally a bottomless well of positivity, Anna struggled to be generous. She blamed the pregnancy; the squiggle of cells was a handy scapegoat. ‘Isabel’s very nice,’ she repeated. But I wish she’d bugger off so we could talk.

  ‘She’s . . .’ Lost for words, Sam crouched in front of Anna. ‘She’s so . . .’

  ‘I get it,’ said Anna. ‘You like her.’

  ‘It’s important that you like her.’ He was urgent. ‘You do, don’t you? You like her?’

  ‘I’ve literally just met the woman.’ Anna shoved him playfully so he toppled onto the rug.

  The others arrived, in dribs and drabs. Maeve breezed in, shedding faded ethnic layers as she rattled through the pitfalls of the Brighton–London line. ‘There was a bus replacement for part of the way. We’d have been quicker coming from Scotland.’ She prodded Storm, propelling him towards Anna. ‘Kiss your aunt.’

  Even though Storm had to be told to do it these days, Anna loved his kisses. He was in a Liverpool trackie; from a distance he was A.N. Other teenage boy, but to Anna he was still the miracle she’d helped into the world thirteen years ago.

  The memory of holding Maeve’s hand through the birth jolted Anna; in a few months she’d be on that front line herself. Births were messy things. Gory. Painful. Overwhelming. Anna held Storm tightly and he protested. She let him go; births are joyful too, she reminded herself.

  It required some effort to think of herself as a mother. After tiptoeing around the idea for so long, Anna had no option but to face it head-on. She felt only the violent glare of Mother Nature’s headlights.

  ‘Look who’s here!’ Maeve shepherded an arrivee into the room, as if he was a guest on a chat show.

  ‘Josh!’ Anna could have clapped. ‘You made it!’

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’ Josh shrugged. He was dark, like Maeve; they both had the Piper gypsy gene. Dark gentle eyes, velvety brown hair that lapped at his collar. ‘Sam, mate!
’

  There was a butch slapping of backs. Sam and Josh had always got on.

  Isabel was introduced, looking prettily shy as she nodded and smiled and did the whole New Girlfriend thing. Anna watched her, then felt the prickle of somebody watching her. It was Sam, with a question in his gaze that she ignored, turning instead to greet Neil and Santi.

  ‘Who’s this goddess?’ Neil bent to kiss Isabel’s hand, his forehead still slightly pink from his recent hair plugs.

  ‘She’s the amazing Isabel,’ said Anna, wondering if perhaps baby hormones had seeped into her brain and encouraged her inner bitch.

  ‘Encantado,’ said Santiago with his exquisite Spanish manners. He introduced Isabel to Paloma, who was in yet another new outfit, kicking happily in her father’s arms.

  Or one of her fathers. The plan was for the child to call Santi ‘Papi’ and Neil ‘Daddy’, but that day was far distant. Paloma was still a gurgler, taking in her new world with eyes like scraps of sky. She had a level gaze, slightly unsettling in a baby of four and a bit months.

  ‘Are we all here?’ asked Neil, restless as ever, already bored by the lovebirds.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Sam. ‘Guys, you haven’t even noticed the table.’

  ‘Whoa! Cutlery?’ said Anna, bemused. Nobody expected much from Sam’s lunches, punctuated by the ping! of the microwave, and eaten off laps. Anna had once drunk her Pinot Grigio out of a vase, but today an actual table, laid with honest-to-goodness glassware and crockery stood by the window.

  ‘And clean plates,’ laughed Santiago, looking around for somewhere to put Paloma as he shed the various bags of baby kit she necessitated. He held her out to Neil, but he was too busy exclaiming over the table.

  ‘This is what happens,’ said Neil, ‘when you let a woman into the house. Bravo, Isabel.’

  ‘And,’ said Sam, squeezing the ‘woman’, ‘the food will be edible.’

  ‘It’s only beef Wellington.’ Isabel coloured up.

  ‘Only!’ squeaked Storm, who’d come out of a vegetarian phase and was now a rampant carnivore.

  ‘But first,’ said Sam, with the smugness of a magician about to astonish his audience, ‘the starter!’

  As the club members gasped at such sophistication, Sam beetled out to the galley kitchen. Anna found him swearing mildly as he burned his fingers on a baking tray of tartlets. She helped him arrange them on a dish she’d never seen before; Isabel was certainly making her mark on the flat. ‘Sam,’ she began, and her gravity made him stop and look at her.

  ‘What?’

  She meant to tell him about the tiny brain currently knitting itself together inside her. Instead, she said, ‘How come you never found a moment to tell me about Isabel? I mean, it seems as if you really like her, but, nothing, nada, as Santi would say.’

  Sam became very still. ‘What’s this about?’

  Puzzled by her question being answered with another question, Anna threw him another. ‘What’s what about?’

  ‘This attitude.’ Sam kept his voice low. ‘You’ve been spiky with Isabel since you met her.’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘You know you have.’ Sam let out a long breath. ‘Look, if you really want to know, I kept Isabel to myself because, well, it’s precious, you know? I didn’t want everybody chipping in with their opinion. I wanted to get to know her, and work out how I really felt, before going public.’

  Smarting at being lumped in with ‘everybody’, Anna said, ‘But I tell you all about my disasters.’

  ‘This feels different,’ said Sam. ‘Be happy for me, Anna, yeah?’

  ‘Of course I’m happy for you.’ She meant it, she was, and yet . . . ‘Sam, listen, there’s something I need to—’

  ‘About time,’ muttered Sam, looking past her.

  ‘I know I’m late, sorry, man.’ Tall, golden-haired, with wicked eyes, it was the barman from Neil’s big bash. ‘Lead me to the drinks and I’ll get going.’

  ‘Everybody,’ said Sam, ushering him into the small sitting room. ‘Remember Dylan?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maeve emphatically, sticking out her chest.

  ‘Dyl?’ Neil was delighted to see one of his lame ducks. He met many out-of-work actors and models through his advertising agency, and was always on the lookout for odd jobs to earn them some money. These ducks had one thing in common: they were all gorgeous. ‘Are you on bar duty again?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dylan caught Anna’s eye and winked. ‘Yours, madam, is a G and T, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘A fizzy water, please,’ said Anna shyly. The Northern Irish lilt of Dylan’s words should have been available on the NHS for drooping female libidos.

  The beef Wellington was a triumph. Anna had seconds.

  ‘It’s so nice,’ whispered Santi in her ear, ‘to see Sam with somebody.’

  ‘You old romantic, you.’ Anna wanted to agree.

  Paloma, struggling on her papi’s lap, thumped her little palms onto Santiago’s plate and the lunchers all sprang back as gravy rained down on them.

  ‘You can’t eat and baby-wrangle.’ Anna wiped brown goo from her eyebrows. ‘Neil! Take your daughter for a minute.’

  ‘I’m busy, darling.’ Neil was ‘busy’ scrolling through snaps of Paloma on his phone for the benefit of Dylan, who, bar duties forgotten, had sat down to eat with the club members.

  ‘S’OK,’ said Santi, but Isabel scampered over and scooped Paloma off his lap.

  ‘Let me!’ she smiled. ‘I love babies.’

  Possibly the woman had a handbook somewhere on her person: Cutesie Things to Say to a New Boyfriend’s Chums. ‘We all love babies, surely,’ said Anna, aware she’d prompted some odd looks around the table.

  ‘Not me,’ said Dylan happily, sitting back. ‘Can’t stand ’em.’

  ‘I knew you’d say that!’ Maeve, changing seats with Storm, plonked herself beside him. ‘I’m a bit psychic. I know things.’

  ‘She means,’ said Neil, holding up a shot of Paloma dressed as a mermaid, ‘she’s a bit psycho.’

  ‘My big brother’s a concrete thinker.’ Maeve leaned into Dylan. ‘Whereas I’m very open. I feel vibrations. I sense auras.’

  ‘And you drink your own weight in Rioja,’ said Neil.

  Anna could tell he was riled at Maeve for poaching Dylan, who’d turned in his chair to gaze at her. Anna didn’t blame him; her sister was a beauty, with a mesmeric quality to her fine, dark looks despite the tie-dye grunginess. She drew men in, even when her allure was blunted by booze. Anna caught Storm’s eye; the youngster had inherited his mother’s glamour and then added an austere loveliness of his own. He was sad, Storm; he had been a grave toddler and now he was an introverted teen. She stuck out her tongue and he smiled despite himself; watching his mother flirt was high on his list of unbearable agonies.

  Josh, who’d eaten less than anybody else, said mildly, ‘We’re all a bit psychic. Everybody has intuition, don’t we?’ All families have sides, and Josh tended to have Maeve’s back. No matter how eccentric she was.

  ‘Remember the night Mum and Dad announced they were emigrating?’ said Maeve, her face close to Dylan’s. ‘I knew they were going to say it. Didn’t I?’ she asked the table at large.

  ‘No,’ the table replied.

  ‘What you actually said,’ said Sam, amused, pulling Isabel and Paloma closer to him, ‘was that your parents were going to announce their divorce.’

  ‘Did I?’ Maeve never minded being the butt of the joke. She blew a kiss Paloma’s way, which Paloma acknowledged in a queenly manner. ‘When is P going to meet her grandparents? Her English grandparents, I mean.’

  Santiago’s mother had been on the first flight from Barcelona, bearing frilled dresses and gingham bonnets and a tiny crucifix on a slim gold chain.

  ‘Soon,’ said Anna, as Neil said, ‘Never, probably.’ Their relationship with their parents was subtly different to their little brother and sister’s.

  Isabel jiggled Paloma as she asked, ‘How
long did it take to adopt this one?’

  ‘Too long,’ said Neil.

  ‘A couple of times we almost came close with other children – a toddler, then a lovely boy of four, but . . .’ Santiago blew out his cheeks. ‘It didn’t happen.’

  The months of interviews and home visits and background checks had taken its toll on the men. Neil had been vocal – as usual – but Santi had absorbed it all, only showing emotion on the day they went to collect ten-week-old Paloma. He’d cried and cried and cried. And then he’d cried some more. ‘I am bursting,’ he’d sobbed, ‘with love.’

  Now, the inevitable happened. Paloma reacted to Isabel’s jiggling by vomiting all down her sugar-candy dress. As her sobs rose, Isabel stood hurriedly and offered her to Neil, but it was Santi who took their daughter and spirited her away with much shushing and kissing and ‘there there’s.

  ‘What?’ Neil felt Anna looking at him. ‘Santi’s better at that type of thing.’ He turned, addressed Isabel, who’d taken her seat again. ‘Adoption isn’t for the faint-hearted. We’d have turned back if he, we, didn’t want a child so much. Paloma’s mother had problems.’

  ‘She was a druggie,’ interrupted Storm.

  ‘We don’t call her that,’ said Neil gently. ‘But yes, the poor girl has issues. There was never a question of her keeping the baby.’

  ‘Jesus, poor kid,’ said Sam.

  Anna shifted on her chair. It was all so close to home. ‘Do you think Paloma will ever want to get in touch with her birth mother?’

  That was serious stuff for the lunch table, and Neil’s expression told her so. ‘We’re going to be frank with her. I mean, basic biology will tell her that two daddies can’t make a baby. We won’t hide the facts. What she does with them,’ he said, ‘is up to her.’

  Facts. Those hard-headed, sharp-elbowed busybodies. Anna was full of facts.

  ‘So,’ said Isabel brightly, turning to Anna, as if moving on to less personal matters. ‘You and Sam were married?’

  If anything, this subject was more personal. ‘Yup,’ said Anna, nodding. ‘For a long time.’ She laughed. ‘A l-o-n-g time!’