I hadn’t said a word but he’d somehow worked out my state of mind from the simple fact I was gripping the roof handle in the van as if my life depended on it.
By the time we got to his place I felt lost and deathly, as if being anywhere else, being anywhere without Lucy, was something I’d forgotten how to do. ‘What now?’ I asked, standing on the polished floorboards of the newly decorated lounge.
Rob shrugged and took his bomber jacket off. ‘Run yourself a bath,’ he said. ‘Have a look around the house. Sit in the sun and read a book. Do whatever you want. And in a bit I’ll make you brunch.’
‘I need to call Mum,’ I said. The second I’d spotted his phone on the shelf, the desire to call home had become urgent.
‘She said she’d call you if there’s a problem,’ Rob reminded me, but he was already handing me the phone.
Once Mum had reassured me, I went upstairs to run a bath. I was shocked by how much the house had changed over the past few weeks, and the bathroom had been entirely remodelled. Rob had tiled it in glossy white and installed one of those old-world standalone baths with poncey gold taps. ‘There’s a shower on the top floor if you prefer,’ he called out from downstairs, so I went on up to the top floor to see what he’d done there.
The front bedroom had been painted in a pleasant dusty-red colour, and simply furnished with a single bed and a wardrobe, both of which looked second-hand but recent. At one side of the room he’d built a half-length wall and behind this a minimal en suite bathroom had appeared. ‘Wow,’ I murmured. ‘Someone’s been busy.’
I returned to look out of the window at the grey swell of the sea beyond the lido and for a minute or so I got lost in my own tiredness. But then the clatter of a saucepan downstairs dragged me back to the present moment.
I returned to the landing and, as I pushed open the door to the rear bedroom, I gasped.
Rob had redecorated it as a nursery, painting the walls baby blue and installing a pink cot in the middle of the room. He’d even suspended a mobile above it.
The room was basic but struck me as beautiful just for existing. His gesture was breathtakingly generous but, I quickly decided, also super-presumptuous.
I stood on the landing in a daze, glancing back at the front bedroom with its sea view and then in at the nursery and back again as I tried to work out what it all meant.
And then I leaned over the bannisters to listen just long enough to check that Rob was still in the kitchen before creeping back down to the bathroom so that I could pretend I hadn’t seen any of it.
By the time I got home, late afternoon, not only did I feel desperate to see my daughter, but my body was demanding access to her as well. My boobs were actually leaking, leaving damp patches down the front of my T-shirt.
But when Mum greeted me at the front door, she raised one finger to her lips. ‘She’s only just gone down,’ she whispered, ‘and if you wake her, I swear, I’ll brain you.’
Wondering if my boobs might actually burst, I pulled my cardigan more tightly round me and followed Mum to the lounge, quietly closing the door behind me. ‘And Wayne?’ I asked.
‘In his room catching up on homework,’ Mum said softly. ‘He’s been really struggling, what with the baby crying and everything.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He told me. Repeatedly.’
‘So how was it?’ Mum asked, smirking.
‘How was what?’
‘Your day?’ she said. ‘Wha-cha-get-up-to? Anything nice?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘… had a bath, ate brunch and had a snooze on the sofa. That’s about it really.’ I was being deliberately nonchalant about it all, but the snooze had, in fact, been amazing. I hadn’t slept so deeply since Lucy was born, and I’d woken to the sun on my face and the sound of seagulls squawking. It had felt like being in a dream.
‘And what did you think?’ Mum asked.
‘About what?’
‘Well, about the rooms.’
‘The rooms?’
‘The top floor,’ Mum said. ‘The ones Rob’s done up for ya. I chose those colours, by the way. That red… that was me. It’s called Tufted Killim.’
‘Tufted Killim…’ I repeated. ‘What the buggery isTufted Kilimwhen it’s at home?’
Mum shrugged. ‘It’s just the name of the colour, I think.’
‘But you chose it?’
