He puts the tray on the floor and wrangles Teddy into calm. It’s like watching a TV vet dealing with an unruly calf.
‘Want that,’ says Teddy, pointing a finger at one of my croissants.
‘How much sugar did she eat?’ I ask Dan, my eyes grateful to him for distracting the children from my tears.
‘More than she should have,’ he says after a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what, Teddy, why don’t you play with ...’
‘The telly,’ says Lexi delightedly.
The television in our bedroom, not an enormous thing jammed to a wall but rather an old set put up on a chest, has also been connected. I do not see it getting a lot of action from me or Dan, because normally we fall into bed too shattered to watch anything. These days even the Netflix binges on Dan’s laptop are over.
I will never catch up with myonce-favourite shows because I have missed whole seasons.
I reach out to hug Lexi, who hugs back. Then Liam wriggles into my arms and I hold him tight, with the tears threatening to come up again.
This is ridiculous. I know moving house is supposed to be stressful but either my hormones are running amok or I am losing all my marbles.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘I have to kiss Daddy and have some coffee. What time is it?’
‘Half ten,’ answers Dan. ‘You deserved to sleep. I woke up in the night and you weren’t here.’
‘Yeah, I couldn’t sleep for a while,’ I tell him, as he lifts the tray off the ground and puts it onto my lap in bed. I grab the takeaway coffee first and take a deep drink.
‘Beautiful. The machine still isn’t working?’ I ask him.
‘No,’ he says, ‘but you know what, with that coffee shop around the corner and people leaving us pots of jam and ...’
‘I got two doughnuts for free,’ adds Liam.
I laugh.
‘Maybe we don’t need to make so much coffee at home.’
‘Coffee at home is cheaper,’ I add, thinking of both the mortgage and the latest unwrittenSimplicity 5: Freya’s Kitchen Jewelscookbook.
Dan sits on the edge of the bed, puts an arm around me and kisses me on the temple. I love this man. I think I have loved him since the first time I met him, which was thirteen years ago.
It was at a party, the time when I actually still went to parties, in other words:pre-children. PC. And we’d stared at each other over the heads of so many of the other people. I was wearing my coral velvet heels and Dan, who wassix-four in his socks, big of shoulders and with an intense, hot gaze that burned right into me and made me want to yell ‘He’s mine, girls, back off!’, stared right back at me. We’d sat in a corner for the rest of the night talking and I felt as if I’d known him for ever, corny though it sounds. In the same way as you have children and instantly can’t imagine life without them, I felt that my lifepre-Dan was not quite right. With him, I was where I was supposed to be.
He’s not just sexy: he’s clever, thoughtful, brilliant with our children and I still fancy him rotten. Even better, he’s a kind man, which should be on every woman’s ‘must have’ list for prospective men and sadly often isn’t.
He held my hair when I was hunched over the toilet bowl with morning sickness; clutched my hand during the first showing of my first ever cookery show episode when I thought I’d explode with a mixture of (faint) pride and embarrassment. In short, Dan always has my back. That fierce loyalty and love is immeasurable.
This morning, our children arguing over what channel to watch on the hopeless bedroom TV, Dan’s eyes glint at me and I glint back. He mouths the words ‘later’, and I nod. We are on a promise.
4
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade
The sound of Sunday bells from the nearby church are filling the air when the hordes begin to arrive. My mother, grandparents, two sisters, and threebrothers-in-law; Dan’s brother, Zed, without his current girlfriend. My brother Con is away and I know we’ll miss him andhiscurrent girlfriend, Louise, who is unlike his usualflash-in-the-pan dates and we have all been begging him to marry her and stop fooling around.
Dan’s mother, Betty, had been devastated she couldn’t come, as she’s such an eager grandmother. She’s a complete sweetie and was probably too anxious to come after having been set upon by Elisa’s bloody mother.
‘She has a church thing,’ says Dan.
When they all get here, that’ll be eight extra people in a house where only five mugs are clean and the couches need to be vacuumed to get thehouse-moving dust off them. I forsee chaos.
I had pleaded a day to get the first of the boxes sorted before my family turned up and they had taken me at my word. We have been in Kellinch less than two days and when I make it downstairs, it looks far more chaotic than I had felt it was the night before.
