‘OK, maybe three each and a puppy.’
‘Three kittens and a puppy,’ said Sonya thoughtfully. ‘You do like a challenge, don’t you?’
Meg grinned. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I love a challenge.’
On Friday afternoon, after an hour at the hotel, Savannah found that she couldn’t face going back to work. The stress of the last few days was swirling around inside in her head, gripping her temples in a vice-like grip. Her hands were shaking: they shook a lot. It still astonished her when she held them out to see the minuscule vibrations. Her stomach ached. Not the howling ache of hunger, because she’d conquered that one long ago. But the ache, the clawing ache, of naked fear. She couldn’t face the office. She couldn’t face smiling at everyone, being the cheerful boss, the person with a kind word for everyone. She felt completely depleted. Clary was in school, safe and loved.
Savannah had coaxed her in that morning and, once there, with the teacher sitting beside her and her best friend Daniel in class, Clary finally relaxed.
Calum had meetings all day – she knew because she’d asked.
No matter where he was, she was always conscious that he would want to know where she was, what she was doing. Otherwise, she rushed so much, because if he was at home, she had to be at home too. If she was late, he wanted to know why. At the weekend, if she needed to leave the house, he looked at her, querying it.
‘Why?’
‘I just need to go to the supermarket.’
‘What do we need?’
She’d list the things they needed. And he’d tell her that they didn’t need them.
‘OK, isn’t that great,’ she’d say. ‘You’re so clever.’
The thought of how she pandered to him made her slightly sick. But that kept everything even and happy. She knew that they didn’t need groceries, she just needed to get out of the house briefly. Those times when Clary was on play dates or had a sporty thing on, on a Saturday, Savannah loved that. It meant she and Clary could get out together, could escape. For all that he liked to tell Savannah how to raise their daughter, Calum wasn’t very interested in watching his daughter do anything. He was currently in a competitive cycling phase and went out every weekend clad in head-to-toe in lycra on a wildly expensive racing bike.
In Clary’s school, they played camogie, but she wasn’t an amazing player. Savannah loved the sports-morning days. They’d be up early, down to whatever place the team were playing. Savannah sometimes helped with the teas and coffees along with the other mums, and she smiled and laughed and waved like the other mums. There were dads there too, some of them definitely playing vicariously. ‘Get on the pitch, come on,’ they’d shriek at their daughters. It made Savannah jump and she didn’t understand their point of view. Winning was not the only thing. She just wanted Clary to be happy. Her being the best player on the pitch didn’t matter.
She was glad, though, that Calum so rarely came, because he’d have been angry if he had seen that Clary was not a particularly gifted camogie player. This didn’t worry Savannah in the slightest. Happiness was all she wanted for her daughter. But Calum liked his daughter to win.
‘Is Calum not with you?’ the other mums would sometimes say. Because quite often both parents of a child would be there, often with another child, younger, with them. Or sometimes there would be parental tag teaming between a couple on different pitches: the little boys playing hurling and the girls playing camogie.
‘No, he’s busy,’ Savannah would say. ‘Running your own business is a full-time job.’
Her face ached as she said things like that.
Actually, if Calum wasn’t cycling, he was probably reading the financial papers. He would then mansplain something. His absolute favourite thing when reading was to name some person in the paper and say,Do you know who that is?
She never did. And he’d want to know,How could you not know who that is? I mean really, how?
He’d look at her with bemusement and contempt. It was the contempt that was like a knife under the ribs. There were loads of people she knew of that he didn’t know anything about. People who worked in the beauty and perfume industries. And Calum, who thought he knew so much about the business, hadn’t a clue. He wouldn’t have known who they were.
Or artists, for that matter. He knew nothing about art and, consequently, refused ever to discuss it because Calum only liked talking on subjects about which he knew lots.
She pulled up outside the shopping centre. It was small but it had two expensive boutiques, one for shoes, one for clothes. She knew she shouldn’t go in. But the gaping wound inside her said, go and buy something, fill the wound. She could feel her heart racing. She paid for the parking with money. She was never quite sure if Calum could track where she was by her parking. She knew he’d been able to track her on her old phone on thefind my phonepart of it. But when she’d got this new one – which had driven him insane with rage because he hadn’t chosen it and she’d gone out and bought it – she set it up herself. And disabled the find my phone bit. It had been worth the raging that she must have done it wrong and that she was stupid.
‘You’ve no idea how to do things like that. I’m sure it’s all wrong. Have you backed everything up to the cloud? I’m sure you haven’t. So don’t come running to me when it all falls apart. You know you’re useless at that sort of thing, impulsive, you’re totally impulsive, there was no need to spend that money. There’s nothing wrong with your other phone.’
All delivered with anger. He had just bought a new phone. He never denied himself anything. And it wasn’t that Savannah couldn’t afford a new phone, the old one was four years old. It was that he hadn’t bought it, he hadn’t set it up, he hadn’t been in control. With this new one, thefind my phoneoption was not connected to anyone else. So she knew that Calum did not know where she was. He might ring the office, though, he sometimes did that. She’d go in and the girls would say, ‘Oh your husband was on.’
He was always so nice to the people on reception, except when he wasn’t, of course.
At the clothes shop, she walked in and ran her hands over the sweaters folded beautifully on a table: cashmere. She loved cashmere, but it was so expensive, she felt terribly guilty buying it. She was careful with money; her childhood had taught her that. Mum was brilliant at bargains and putting outfits together on a shoestring.
‘You don’t need money to look good,’ her mother always said. ‘See this T-shirt? I dyed it and this navy really suits me, doesn’t it? Of course, the stitching wasn’t right, but I went over it with my navy fabric pen.’
Nobody who’d ever looked at the glamorous Meg Robicheaux would ever think that her wardrobe was full of things she had dyed herself or bought in charity shops or, latterly, in TK Maxx, the discount store. Mum never lied about her clothes, but when they had the hotel, she never precisely told the truth either. She had managed to make it look as if she had a beautiful wardrobe with glamorous, expensive things, even if, in reality, the family were always broke. Mum had managed to keep it all a secret, Savannah reflected as she held up a pale-pink cashmere polo-neck, soft as angel wings. But then, Savannah thought to herself, she was pretty good at keeping things to herself. The difference was that they’d all known: Indy, Eden, even Rory, they’d known that Mum was fabulous at putting together a dress she’d got in the Vincent de Paul
shop and a pair of shoes she had from aeons back that were actually designer.
