by Jo Lovett
Laura (next-door neighbour; you met her, she took your parcels in – yes the island grapevine does stretch across the Atlantic and yes the island grapevine does stretch to discussing exciting matters such as parcel taking on behalf of neighbours) is elderly and, while in excellent health, not quite as sprightly as she once was.
Basically (and of course please do feel free to say no), I wondered if you would be able to check on her from time to time. Dina’s around but sometimes very busy with work.
Thank you! (But please do ignore if you don’t have the time.)
Best,
Cassie
Well, this was perfect. Cassie was apparently going to ignore their argument, clearly because she wanted him to do her a favour. And he was going to reply politely today, visit Laura tomorrow, and then call Cassie with a friendly, chatty update. And when they’d had a few conversations and established good relations, he’d call her again to broach the land purchase.
Ten
Cassie
Cassie twizzled her pen between two fingers and thumb and stared hard at the panelled wall above her laptop. She really needed to make some progress on her plans for Books 2 to 6. She’d never had a mind blank like this before. It was like London was too big and there were too many choices about settings. If she was honest, it was also because she kept obsessing about the IVF decision. She was having her final investigations on Monday, in case she wanted to go ahead. If she wanted to go ahead. Did she?
She really needed to focus. She was seeing Jennifer this evening for dinner, and a lack of concrete plans always made Jennifer tetchy.
It felt weird to finally be meeting her. Cassie, a Glaswegian in the US, and Jennifer, an American in London, worked together remotely. Cassie had become Jennifer’s client and got her first book deal with a big London publisher, who she’d also never met, just before she left Glasgow. When she’d lost the baby, she’d just wanted to escape. Luckily, as a writer you could live anywhere. She’d bought the island house with an inheritance from her grandfather, the sale proceeds from her Glasgow flat and her publisher’s advance. And then when she’d got her TV deal, she’d used the money to buy a wildlife haven on the island.
A message pinged in on her phone. Dina. Much more fun to be texting her than panicking about work, and clearly Cassie had to check that something bad hadn’t happened to the animals.
Hey babe. How you doing? I’ve been busy – soooo much work the last couple days. My news: BEEN TALKING TO JAMES. Even hotter up close (AND PERSONAL SOON I HOPE). Little bit more friendly than I thought but turned down invite to the island dinner on the weekend – not gonna be popular. Laura’s good. Tonight your agent dinner? Have fun xxxxx
It was a mistake on James’s part to have decided not to go to the island dinner. Everyone went. He seemed so unfriendly. Although, to be fair, he’d sent a surprisingly nice reply to her – unashamedly arse-licking – email asking him to keep an eye on Laura. Maybe in fact he was just too busy to go to the dinner.
James himself called her just after she’d finished her text conversation with Dina and was reluctantly returning to her notes.
‘Hey, Cassie. How are you?’ That was an oddly warm greeting from him.
‘Good, thank you. How are you?’
‘Yes, great, thanks.’ He actually sounded quite smiley. His deep voice was bordering on very sexy when he wasn’t biting out grumpy comments. ‘I thought I’d just let you know how Laura was.’
‘Oh my goodness, is she okay?’
‘Yes, she’s absolutely fine. I just went round to check on her. She was up a ten-foot ladder, clearing ivy away from the top of a wall. I had to promise to drink a lot of tea and eat a lot of blueberry pie before she’d get down.’ This was like talking to a different person from the grumpy man with the Wi-Fi issue. Very Jekyll and Hyde.
‘Thank you so much for checking on her,’ Cassie said. ‘Kind of you.’
‘Honestly not a problem. That’s what neighbours are for.’
Really? Cassie had arranged to have tea with James’s London neighbour Anthony at the weekend, and Anthony had repeated that he’d never met James. Well, whatever. It was great that James had visited Laura.
They exchanged a few more platitudes before ending the call.
Well. That had genuinely been pleasant.
‘Come in, come in.’ Jennifer was beaming at Cassie like nobody’s business.
‘Thank you so much.’ Cassie stepped over the threshold into Jennifer’s hall and Jennifer flung her arms round her, nearly squashing the flowers Cassie was holding. Fortunately, Cassie’s biceps were more powerful than she’d suspected – must be all that kayaking recently – and she managed to hold the bouquet away from her. You didn’t want a lily stain on a silk dress.
‘Those flowers are gorgeous. Thank you. And I love Sancerre.’ Jennifer took the flowers and wine from Cassie, led her through the hall and laid them on the worktop of the island that stood in the middle of the Tardis-like, quite narrow but gigantically long, kitchen. ‘It’s so wonderful to meet you.’
‘I know,’ Cassie said into another huge hug. Actually, so weird to finally meet. On email, social media and the phone, Jennifer was ferocious. The kind of woman Cassie imagined wore monochrome, edgy fashion and extreme lipstick, lived in an amazingly glamorous industrial warehouse apartment in a trendy location and could use chopsticks perfectly. And didn’t cook. She’d be too busy going out for power drinks and dinners. The kind of woman who, if you were having drinks with her, would constantly be looking over your shoulder for someone better to talk to. The headshot she used on all her profiles definitely backed up all of those assumptions. Cassie had been astonished when Jennifer had suggested that she come over to her house for dinner. She’d thought they’d be going out to a restaurant.
In fact, Jennifer was dressed in a long, floaty, floral skirt and lived in a beautifully but traditionally decorated and furnished Edwardian semi-detached house in the lovely and leafy but not edgily trendy London suburb of Barnes.
And in the extended kitchen at the back of the house there were quite a lot of baby accessories. A playmat. A highchair. Some toys in a wooden chest. Jennifer had never mentioned children.
‘Yes, I’m a proud mom,’ Jennifer said, gesturing towards the baby stuff. ‘Angela, my wife, is just doing Sammy’s bath time and then she’ll bring him down to introduce him, before he hopefully goes down for the night, and then we can eat without interruption.’ Jennifer’s face had lit up just talking about them. So at odds with her over-the-phone work persona.
Never judge a book by its cover. Which was what Dina had said about James, and until their phone call today he’d turned out to be exactly like he looked.
‘Wow. I had no idea. How old is he?’
‘Six months. Yeah, I kind of don’t mix business and pleasure unless I’m going to meet someone in person. So I don’t post about home stuff, or talk about it on business calls.’ To be fair, there was a lot that Cassie didn’t share with most people.
‘Well, wow again. Congratulations. I can’t wait to meet him.’ Not totally true. She adored babies but, in the middle of huge indecision over whether or not to go ahead with fertility treatment, she was worried that she might actually cry or something if she met one today, and she didn’t want to blub in front of anyone else.
No choice. A truly stunning woman walked into the room holding a gurgling baby dressed in a Babygro and waving a rattle manically around his head. He was beautiful. Cassie swallowed, hard.
‘Hey, Sammy.’ Jennifer walked towards him, arms stretched out, and he reached for her, chortling. ‘And Angela, of course. Hard not to relegate your partner to behind the baby at times. Cassie, this is Angela. And Angela, this is my wonderful client Cassie.’
Angela smiled at Cassie. She had a gorgeous smile. Cassie had the strange sensation that she was looking into a mirror that massively improved the way you looked. She and Angela both had a lot of dark, curly hair and olive skin and dark eyes, but Ange
la was very tall and slim, which Cassie was not, and her hair was very under control, which Cassie’s was not. And she had an air of swan-like serenity, which Cassie was pretty sure she didn’t.
‘Hi, Angela. So nice to meet you.’
‘Likewise, I’m so pleased to meet you. And this is Sammy. Say hello, Sammy.’
‘Hi, Sammy.’ Mega heart-lurch. He was so cute. ‘I love your tooth.’ His wide, gummy smile, with one little front tooth just showing, was adorable. Sammy held his arms out to her.
‘He likes you,’ said Jennifer.
Angela lifted Sammy into Cassie’s arms. He was so gorgeously chubby and cuddly. Cassie closed her eyes for a moment. It was a surprise that neither Jennifer nor Angela appeared to be able to hear the frantic ticking of her biological clock.
‘Hey, Sammy,’ she said, hoping that her voice sounded normal. He smelled so lovely and his skin was so soft. And he was pulling her hair. Hard. Really hard. ‘Ouch,’ she yelped.
‘Sorry, should have warned you,’ Angela said, disentangling Sammy’s hand and holding out her fingers for him to play with instead.
Cassie smiled and shifted Sammy around in her arms and told him that he was very cute and very clever. She could totally act normally and non-broodily around a baby.
‘You know, I feel I know almost as little about you as you did about me? Do you have children?’ Jennifer asked, pulling champagne flutes out of a cupboard.
‘No.’ Oh no. A voice wobble. Hopefully Jennifer wouldn’t have noticed.
‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. So insensitive of me.’ She’d noticed.
Cassie shook her head. ‘No, honestly, not at all insensitive. I don’t have kids and I’d love to have them one day, if the situation ever arises, but equally I’m very happy with my life if it never happens. I don’t currently have a partner, so it isn’t really likely to. And I do have three alpacas and eleven chickens, so they keep me pretty busy.’ Always a winner, mentioning the animals.
‘Alpacas! Hey, that’s so cool.’ And bingo, off the ‘do you want babies’ topic. Although, Cassie had some questions of her own. Meeting Sammy had got her veering back towards going for the fertility treatment. She’d regret it if she didn’t try. Maybe Jennifer and Angela had gone down the sperm donor route and would have some useful advice for her. It was a tricky question to bring up politely, though.
Angela took Sammy to put him to bed and, after some chat about childhood hobbies, Jennifer suddenly said, ‘So how’s it going with choosing a location for the books?’
Cassie only registered Jennifer’s words when she realised that she was looking at her differently, and that she’d used her business-mode voice.
Business Jennifer was a lot less appealing than Friendly Dinner Host Jennifer, frankly.
‘Not too bad,’ Cassie lied. ‘I’ve been researching all the different areas.’
‘Okay. And how far have you got? Because time is of the essence.’
Sammy gurgled over the monitor. So cute.
‘Cassie?’
Ow. That whole Listen-To-Me shrillness was right back. Cassie hoped for Angela and Sammy’s sakes that Jennifer never got like this about domestic matters. She experienced a sudden wave of sympathy for Future Sammy when he hadn’t made his bed or he’d dropped a grade at school.
‘I’m thinking that it’s so hard to choose a single area to focus on that I should have a different one for each book. So it’s like a pan-London series, rather than a Hampstead Heath or Hyde Park or whatever series. So they could be set in different-seeming places. More of a something-for-everyone vibe,’ she said, panicked.
‘That’s perfect,’ Jennifer said. ‘I’m sure they’ll go for that. Great work.’
Oh, okay, no decision to make then. It would involve more research but that was cool because Cassie was going to enjoy being a tourist in London.
Jennifer had a few more work-related points that she wanted to make before Angela came back into the room and then she switched straight back into nice Home Jennifer mode and served their main course, a restaurant-standard sea bream dish.
‘Do you both cook a lot?’ Cassie asked. It was remarkably difficult to reconcile Jennifer’s two personas. It was as strange as the recent change in James.
‘Angela normally does more of the cooking but she’s still breastfeeding, so it’s more difficult for her at the moment,’ Jennifer said.
‘Yep. It’s nowhere near as time-consuming as it used to be, except before bedtime, when he likes a long feed,’ Angela said, ‘so it’s fine but it isn’t great timing for evening meal preparation unless you do it a lot earlier in the day.’
‘It must be lovely having those cuddles with him,’ said Cassie, trying not to sound wistful.
‘It is.’ Angela’s face lit up. ‘But I tell you what, breastfeeding’s a lot harder than it looks. And I had mastitis at one point, and that was horrendous. I’ve never felt so ill so fast in my life.’
‘It sounds awful.’ Cassie knew that it was awful because she’d had mastitis herself, after she’d lost the baby. Awful didn’t begin to describe how bad that had been. ‘Did you have any help from wider family after the baby was born?’ Genius, almost the ‘is there a sperm donor in the picture’ question.
‘No, not really,’ Jennifer said. ‘My family’s in the States, and Angela’s family’s in Australia. And based on great but also bitter experience, we know that when either of our families stay with us, they’re high maintenance, so we decided to be strict with them, and we didn’t have anyone to stay until Sammy was three months old. So it was just the three of us.’
‘Apart from Doug. The father,’ Angela said. ‘A friend who provided the sperm.’
‘Yeah, we basically turkey basted,’ Jennifer said. ‘Doug’s completely hands-off, though.’ Dammit. They hadn’t done the anonymous donor and IVF route.
‘Lucky that he’s hands off,’ said Angela, ‘because we don’t really want to share Sammy.’
‘Yeah, Doug’s perfect,’ Jennifer said. ‘We know him, because with an anonymous donor of course you have no idea, and he’s great, but he works all hours so, you know, he isn’t around much. Ideal. In the nicest possible way.’
Cassie was beginning to be sure that from her perspective an anonymous sperm donor would be ideal. Prospective donors had to be rigorously screened for genetic health conditions, didn’t they? And they had to give their details so that children could find their fathers when they turned eighteen. And if someone was public-spirited enough to donate sperm you’d think they’d be kind enough to agree to meet their eighteen-year-old child.
And, frankly, with her track record with men when she was younger, it wasn’t like she’d be great at choosing an in-person sperm donor. This way, her child would probably get a better father.
Funny how sometimes when someone expressed a firm preference about something it made you realise that you felt quite differently. She’d have to make a ‘Do IVF with sperm donor’ pros and cons list later.
On her way home, Cassie read several more texts from Dina. Mega rain still on the island. Don Brown had seen a whale off Blue View Point. The more Dina thought about it, the more she was sure James could be The One. If he went to Amy’s party she was pretty sure that something would happen. James was really nice. James was going to get someone to come to the island to try to improve the Wi-Fi. James had a great sense of humour when you spoke to him properly. James was amazing. Right.
Cassie finished her reply just as the taxi driver was pulling up outside the flat.
List time.
Pros:
DESPERATE to have baby
DESPERATE to be pregnant with own baby
If it works out would then HAVE A BABY TO LOVE
A lot to be said for not having a father involved. Simon would have been a shit father
Cons:
Heartbreaking if doesn’t work out
Hard to be pregnant by self
Hard to bring up baby by self
Etc
Cassie could always be bothered to write a list out. But on this occasion there were just so many cons, big and small, it felt like a waste of time.
Frankly, it felt like madness to even be contemplating going it alone.
But the capitals said it all. Desperate and have a baby to love.
She was going to do it. She was going to bloody do it. She was going to try to have a baby.
Eleven
James
James waved at Dina as she walked past on her way to feed the animals, and carried on buttering his toast.
Maybe he should go and help her with the feeding. He needed more reasons to call Cassie, get to know her better, before he suggested buying her land, and the animals would be an obvious excuse for a call. He had the time to help with them. With no commute and close to no socialising, you could work north of twelve to fourteen hours a day and still not be that busy unless you needed a lot of sleep. And he’d be happy to hang out with Dina a little. She was good company plus she could put in a good word for him with Cassie; they were clearly close.
He finished his toast and grabbed shoes.
‘Morning, Dina,’ he said when he got to the animal enclosure. She spun straight round with a big smile on her face.
‘James,’ she practically purred.
Oh-kay. A little bit of flirting would be great, but he didn’t want to end up in a situation where she’d be bad-mouthing him to Cassie. Maybe better if he looked after the animals entirely by himself.
A good twenty minutes later, he said, ‘Great,’ as she finished a lengthy demonstration, all of which he was pretty sure would be covered in Cassie’s notes. ‘Thank you so much. I’m sure I’ll see you soon. With eggs I imagine.’ He should definitely get involved with the eggs; he had the impression that Cassie was someone who’d enjoy an egg distribution anecdote.
