‘I can’t, sorry.’ Lucas never elaborates on his plans. Who knows what he gets up to or whom he sees? He coughs awkwardly. ‘Anyway, the reason I was calling is I need a witness for a signature, some legal document, so can I drop by later?’
‘Sure,’ I reply, resigned to Lucas never changing, before we hang up. The doorbell rings, making Spud bark. ‘It’s only me, Spuds,’ Lizzie calls through the letterbox.
My heart lifts when standing in front of me is Lizzie carrying two cups of coffee and an overnight bag. ‘I’ve got films, magazines, chocolate, booze, anti-ageing face masks and a toothbrush.’ She dumps her bag on the sofa. ‘But first things first, go and get changed, I’m taking us all out for a slap-up lunch. You too, Spud, get your coat on. I checked with the pub. They love dogs.’
Later that night Lizzie and I watch a film, share a bottle of wine and sit side by side with our broccoli-coloured face masks on, saying we’d give any burglar a scare. I imagine Dan, Fiona and Isla’s day; they probably spoilt Isla rotten and let her eat dough balls as well as pizza for lunch. I imagine Isla telling Fiona all about school and home and how her boring old mum nags her to wear her splints.
Lizzie switches off the television, turns to me. ‘You’re thinking about them, aren’t you?’
I get up and walk over to my bookshelf. I pick up a photograph of Isla as a baby.
‘You don’t need to feel threatened by Fiona,’ Lizzie reassures me.
‘I’m trying to get my head round it, but…’
‘Don’t panic, Jan, it’s early days.’
Seeing Lizzie with her mushy green face looking so serious makes me smile. ‘Thank you for being my 3 a.m. friend,’ I say, returning to the sofa and clutching her hand.
‘And thank you for being mine. You never know, Jan, Fiona might be a really positive person to have around.’
She turns the film back on and I pretend to watch, but I’m anywhere but in this room. I’m back with Isla when she was a baby. Lizzie is right. We have been through so much together that we have become a team, which is exactly why it’s hard letting other people come on to our side.
15
2004
It’s seven o’clock. Isla is thirteen months old and finally, after her warm milk and bath, she’s asleep.
Lizzie and I spent the day out with friends and she’s staying over tonight. ‘To do my godmotherly duties and give you a night off,’ she had suggested, ‘before I go back to all my moaning guests.’
Lizzie still works for the travel agency in South Kensington, the same job she’d found when I was dating Dan. While I was pregnant she spent nine months in the London office, before they sent her out last year to Greece, from April to October, to be the island rep on Paxos. She’s in charge of all the villas and guests. Despite the memories of her doomed relationship with the married man, Lizzie loves to travel so it seemed too good to be true to be paid to do it. Besides, she wasn’t going to let a rotten old cheat stand in the way of her love affair with the island. However, as she discovered, it wasn’t all floppy sunhats, olives, cocktails, white sand and turquoise sea. ‘I earn every penny,’ she said to me, roughly four months into the job. ‘You wouldn’t believe the guests and their questions, Jan. “When will the sea be calm?” As if I’m psychic. “Can you tell the donkeys to stop braying.”’ Lizzie’s accommodation is a rundown cottage in an olive grove, surrounded by goats and chickens. ‘If the weather is bad, it’s my fault,’ she’d continued. ‘If there’s turbulence, it’s my fault. But I have to smile all the time, and if the disco music kept them awake last night…’
‘It’s your fault,’ I’d said.
During my first year with Isla, Lizzie and I would call one another regularly. I missed her desperately, Dan’s disappearance and his rejection were still raw. Whereas my news was limited to walking Isla to the park, the health visitor visiting or staying with my grandparents in Cornwall, Lizzie would always have a hairy-moment story to tell about a villa not being ready on time or a boat that had crashed into the harbour the night before, right outside one of the bars because someone had forgotten to throw the anchor out. ‘Oh, and Jan, you should see the single girls in floods of tears when they leave. They believe they’ve had this perfect holiday romance, just as I did. Then I watch as their Greek gods wave them goodbye before they’re back on the pull when the next lot of tourists arrive.’
I’ll miss Lizzie when she goes back to Greece. The truth is, as much as I love Isla, I’m finding it lonely being a mother. I miss my job at the literary agency and miss my salary, but if I did work, as I’d originally planned, I’d calculated that virtually all of it would be spent on a childminder. And besides, I haven’t found Isla’s first year as easy as I’d hoped. I’ve had to remortgage the house. I keep on telling myself I’m lucky to have a home. Money will be tight being a single mum, but it’s tight for everyone. Millions are worse off. Daily I have to remind myself that I made this choice.
Lizzie breaks into my thoughts as she says, as only a best friend can say, that I look knackered, so she demands I have a lie down while she opens a bottle of wine. I’m not breastfeeding anymore. I step round the toys and books on the floor and collapse on to the sofa. I close my eyes and enjoy getting the weight off my feet, trying to put aside my worries about Isla. Throughout her first year I’ve been back and forth to the GP. Isla wasn’t sitting up properly like other babies her age, then her hips weren’t abducting, but more than anything it’s the tightness in her legs that worries me.
Isla was born on 31 January 2003. It was agony. She was stuck in the birth canal, sliding back and forward, the pain making me understand how some mothers used to die in childbirth. I thoughtIwas going to die. Isla came out with a bump on her head, but the moment I held her in my arms, all that pain was taken away. She looked so lovely and pink, and when the nurse told me all was well, that she was breathing normally, my heart filled with relief and joy. I have never been happier than lying in that hospital bed, exhausted but exhilarated, holding a miracle in my arms. For a moment I’d thought about Dan and felt tearful. I recall how she’d gripped her little fingers around mine and I knew then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even if I was alone, I had made the right decision. Granny had popped her head round the curtain and joined us. She sat on the bed, watching Isla and me, no need for words until finally, she said, ‘Your mother would have been so proud.’
I thought back to my childhood, a confused five-year-old asking Granny, ‘Shall I call you Mum?’
She had held both my hands. ‘You could, but I’m your granny. Timothy is your grandfather. I think we should keep the order of the family, don’t you?’
I rocked Isla in my arms. ‘Butyouare my mother,Granny,’I said tearfully. I thought of the last six months, and how she and Grandad had done nothing but support me with no judgement, only deep-rooted resentment towards Dan that they did their best to hide, but was impossible not to see in Grandad’s eyes. Men didn’t behave that way. This Dan, he might be the father to my child, but he was no gentleman.
A few days after Dan and I had met in the bar on that fateful night in Notting Hill, after Dan had made his views so clear on the subject of having, or not having a child, I’d called him, hoping we could try and work it out. His mobile number wasn’t recognised. I visited his flat off the North End Road. ‘He’s gone,’ his gormless flatmate said.
‘Gone where?’
‘Abroad, I think.’
‘Abroad!’
‘Yeah, well I saw him looking for his passport.’ He’d shrugged.
