“Nope,” Alice said quite firmly. “No, you won’t. You told me that on no account was I allowed to let you do any work during the first six months. You made me promise, Natalie . . .”
“Yes, but . . .”
“You said that no matter how much you begged and pleaded I had to keep you off.”
“But I didn’t mean it . . .” Natalie pleaded.
“You said you’d say that. You said to ignore you.” Alice was adamant.
“Alice!” Natalie heard another phone ringing in the background.
“Oh,” Alice said breezily, “the caller display is showing a call from abroad—perhaps it’s your mom. Now, if you want to stay in China then I suggest you go and put your feet up.”
“But I’m bored and lonely!” Natalie protested pitifully.
“Go and join a mother and baby group or something,” Alice said and the line went dead.
Natalie looked down at Freddie. A mother and baby group, she thought, wrinkling up her nose. She couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting around with a bunch of brain-dead housewives going on about married bliss and family life endlessly.
“Fancy a game of poker then?” she suggested to her baby.
He didn’t seem too keen.
Natalie woke up with a start when Freddie started crying. The house was dark and gloomy and when she looked at the clock she saw it was almost five. She must have fallen asleep where she had been sitting after speaking to Alice, because the phone was still in her lap. That was something she was still trying to get used to: impromptu napping. The maternity nurse said that she was lucky to be able to nap at the drop of a hat when Freddie was sleeping, and that too many new moms tried to spend all night and all day staying awake. But Natalie didn’t like it. It reminded her of the days when she used to drink too much and wake up in places where she didn’t remember going to sleep.
Natalie’s twenties had been tumultuous, to say the least. It had been a decade filled with a catalog of terrible decisions that she had then attributed to living life to the fullest. Living life like an idiot was more like it. Things had improved as soon as she and Alice became unlikely friends. Alice was the sales rep for a large lingerie company and Natalie the junior buyer for a small chain of budget-clothing stores based in and around London. They had nothing and everything in common, and after several months of talking about every subject in their meetings except for the pedestrian garments that Alice was supposed to be selling, they decided to form a partnership and launch their own lingerie company. It should have failed, two half-strangers throwing all their savings and hopes into a business together. But it had worked better than either of them had imagined, because by some amazing piece of good luck Alice and Natalie brought out the best in each other, pushing themselves to peaks of inspiration and hard work that they had never thought possible in their previous incar-nations.
Natalie had given everything in the intervening eight years to Alice and to the business, so much so that she had inadvertently straightened out most of her chaotic behavior and lifestyle choices along the way. She had grown up considerably.
However, there was still room for the occasional and usually highly visible setback, the most recent of which was now crying to full capacity.
She scooped Freddie out of his carrycot and rocked him against her shoulder.
“Are you wet, hungry, or fed up, little man?” Natalie asked the angry baby. “All three, I bet. Let me just switch on the lights and I’ll get you changed and fed in a jiffy, and after that we’ve got a whole evening of great conversation and soaps to look forward to! Yes we have!”
Natalie flicked on the light switch by the living-room door. Nothing happened.
“Bulb’s gone,” she told Freddie, swaying him from side to side as she made her way down the hallway and toward the basement kitchen. “Naughty bad bulb. We’ll just go into the kitchen then, won’t we . . . yes, we will, we’ll just go into the . . . oh.”
The light at the top of the stairs that led down to the kitchen was also not working.
Natalie carried her crying baby into her study. Nothing. And the light on the base unit of her phone wasn’t working either.
“Oh, I know, I need to reset the fuse box,” she told Freddie. “Silly old Mommy.” But the fuse box just kept tripping.
“It must be a power cut,” she cooed in Freddie’s ear as if she had spoken fluent idiot all her life. “Naughty bad power cut!”
She went to the front door of the house and opened it. There were lights on across the road. Sheltering Freddie under her cardigan as she walked out onto the steps, Natalie peered up and down the road. There were lights on in both of the houses on either side of her, too.
“Bastards,” she whispered as she went back into her house and shut the door.
“Not a power cut then,” she said. She looked around the hallway filled with long, dark shadows. No electricity meant no light, no heating, no hot water, no fridge, no TV. It was a disaster.
Natalie took her cell phone out of her bag, sat at the bottom of the stairs, where the hallway was partially lit by the street lights outside, and put Freddie to one breast. As he quietened and settled into feeding, she set about finding an electrician who was cheap, honest, and most of all available—now.
ALSO BY ROWAN COLEMAN
The Runaway Wife
Lessons in Laughing Out Loud
The Home for Broken Hearts
The Accidental Family
Mommy by Mistake
Another Mother’s Life
The Accidental Mother
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Rowan Coleman
Previously published in 2006 in Great Britain by Arrow Books.
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First Pocket Star Books ebook edition October 2013
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ISBN 978-1-4767-2525-3
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