‘No, OK.’
‘Support group or counselling. Have it set up by this time next week. I’ll phone.’
I feel like a chastened child sitting in the headmistress’s office after she’s been given a telling off.
‘If I didn’t have ten patients sitting in the waiting room, I’d take you out for a coffee and a talk. We’d work through this. But I don’t have time, so help yourself, Freya,’ says AJ. ‘You have serious issues but you need help and perspective. There are people in here who are dealing with cancer, are watching relatives sink into dementia, are terrified their child will die, you name it. Not everyone can get through these things. Some crack because the burden is too huge but so many, in unbelievable circumstances, get through. You’ve got to get help, other than pills to make you sleep, Freya. Obviously, if you feel in crisis, come right back in. You have my mobile number and I’m always available for you. Unless Carla is cooking up something completely amazing, in which case you’ll have to wait till I’m finished.’ We both laugh. Carla is an amazing cook. ‘But deal with this, I know you can. Find a group, phone one of those therapists I recommended.’
‘’K,’ I shuffle out of his office, clutching my Zimovane prescription and feeling like Gollum muttering: ‘my preciousss’.
The small baby, whose crying has reached a crescendo, is called next as I wait to pay.
I suppose I’m going to have to do this bloody group thing, because I’ll never sleep without the tablets, but how do I sit down in front of people I don’t know and tell them stuff? Tell them about the nightmares, discuss it all?
I can’t. But AJ says I must.
I’m sitting at home, reluctantly looking up victim support groups when I’m supposed to be spending the rest of the day working on recipes, when Scarlett phones.
‘Hi, sis,’ she says.
She sounds as if she’s been crying.
‘What’s up, honey?’ I ask.
‘I’ve been asked to a christening and I need advice on whether I have to go or not.’
The baby being christened has been born to her old school friend, Charlotte.
‘Alfie,’ she says, her voice low and sad. ‘That’s the baby. He’s Charlotte’s second baby, and she’s having a big day out because she and Mick have been trying for another baby for so long. You know what they call it when you have one child and you can’t seem to have another baby?’
I say no, although I do know what this is called, but Scarlett wants to tell me,needsto tell me. I let her.
‘Secondary infertility,’ she says. ‘So you’ve one baby and you want another baby, and you can’t have that child: that’s called secondary infertility. It must be horrendous. I, I can feel their pain but ...
‘They have one child.’ She’s husky with pain and weeping. ‘That’s all we are looking for.One child. We’ll stop at one. We don’t care, we’re happy, but just one.’
‘Scarlett, can I come round to you? You shouldn’t be on your own.’
‘I’m like this so much of the time,’ she says wearily. ‘Trust me, nobody can live with metwenty-four/seven. Even Jack can’t cope. But I just can’t help it.’
I’m silent on the other end of the phone. Scarlett’s pain is another ache in our family, another reason nobody should have to know what I’m dealing with. Because I’m strong but this has weakened my beloved Scarlett so much.
Before I can start comforting her, she gets there: ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ she says simply. ‘I feel like such a bitch for hating Charlotte. No.’ She corrects herself. ‘I don’t hate her, I just ... but she has two children now, and she knows how hard it’s been for me and she hasn’t given me an out for the christening. She could have said,look, don’t come if it’s too much for you. But she hasn’t. So I have to go and smile, hold the baby and pretend ... ’
The pretending is the hardest, she told me once. Seeing other people’s babies – because they are everywhere, Scarlett insists – and then pretending to be happy for the new parents.
‘They don’t see how hard it is for anyone else.’
And now in two weeks she’s got this christening and I honestly think, for the first time ever, that this battle is going to break her.
I glance briefly at my notebooks which are empty of recipes and I close down the computer with its support group details.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘I’m coming round to you now, OK?’
‘I’m at home,’ she says dully. ‘I called in sick, I’m not going to have a job soon and I need one because we are so in debt, but who am I kidding? I don’t really care anymore.’
I hop in the car to drive to her house and want to cry myself. Scarlett is three years younger than I am, closer in age to me than I am to Maura. And Maura is always giving out about Scarlett’s name.
‘It’s so much fun,’ she wails, ‘Scarlett O’Hara it’s the best name ever. Why is she called Scarlett and I’m called Maura?’
