Isabelle giggled.
‘Is that it?’ said Pixie. ‘I don’t want to eat one of those seeds because I don’t want a baby. Babies cry all the time, like Posy.’
‘I don’t cry.’
Suddenly there was a full-scale riot going on, complete with screaming. Posy, who had clearly been having ninja training from somewhere, began hair pulling.
‘I’d cancel the karate lessons,’ remarked Ted. ‘No need for them.’
‘Mummy, she pulled my hair,’ screamed Isabelle.
‘You were mean to me,’ shouted Posy, and to prove that she was indeed the youngest and most injured, she let forth a few blood-curdling roars that made her father pick her up. Her mother went to comfort the other two girls.
‘You stay there,’ said Ted to his wife, putting a kiss on her forehead as Patrick and Joanne defused the row. ‘I’ll finish the tidying up. It’s only fair.’
‘OK,’ said Sam, content now to just sit there.
The rioters were eventually calmed by their parents with threats of timeouts. Joanne and Patrick made it look so easy, Sam thought.
She just hoped she’d be able to calm her own child half as well. Ted would be brilliant at it but, for a moment, she had a glimmer of anxiety: what if she was hopeless at that type of thing? What if she hadn’t a maternal bone in her body and should have stuck to dogs?
After all, her mother had swanned into the lunch, spoken little to the children and had had the gall to think that an email was an acceptable form of contact to find out how her pregnant daughter was.
What, Sam thought again – the thought that was circling endlessly in her brain – if she was just like her mother?
Cold, unyielding, unable to form a bond with her child?
What then?
PART THREE
The Birthday
Callie
It was nearly eleven o’clock on the night of her birthday and, in her bare feet, Callie stepped delicately around the plastic bags and piles of books in Brenda’s tiny spare room and tried to work out which suitcase contained her make-up remover and night cream.
She needed to get this faceful of make-up off. To brush her teeth. To scrub the day clean from herself.
Her skin itched with the desire to be clean. Then, she wanted to fall into the single bed covered with a simple white duvet and sleep. Forever. Like Sleeping Beauty, except there would be no prince kissing her awake.
No prince at all.
No husband.
Nothing but an aching emptiness in her heart. She couldn’t cry – not because crying would make her make-up slide down her face, but because if she started to cry, she wasn’t sure how she’d manage to stop.
How long ago had it been since she sat in the chair in the hairdressing salon, drinking coffee and thinking about the party.
Years ago: that’s what it felt like.
Feeling like an addict desperate for the fix of her special remover oil and some rich face cream, she shoved and pushed the cases, wrenching them open and then shoving them to one side when they weren’t the right one. The packing had been so haphazard. Callie had just watched Brenda do it, too numb to help.
There was barely any space in the tiny spare room for all the suitcases, so Callie tried to stack them on top of each other as she searched. She had slowly managed to half pack one at home before Brenda had taken over, ripped things from the wardrobe and stuffed it all into the old cases at speed. Not the Mandarina Duck leather suitcases, she’d said and Callie, who’d sat slumped on the floor of her and Jason’s dressing room, still in her charcoal party dress but with her Manolos off, had seen a look exchanged between Brenda and the female police officer watching them.
Nothing was said but Callie understood because Brenda had explained it to her brusquely in a brief moment alone: it might be better if she took nothing valuable. Nothing that might be the proceeds of a crime which was being investigated.
‘What do they think Jason’s done?’
