Daniel needed to be a Wise Man for the school nativity play. And he needed to be one urgently.
‘A letter was sent home in the book bags several weeks ago,’ said Mrs Russell with a sigh, her arms crossed, her glare no more friendly than the last time Eve had seen her. ‘All the other children have already brought their costumes into school, Miss Glover. The dress rehearsal is tomorrow afternoon and the nativity performance itself is on Thursday. Presumably you have heard about that and have ordered your ticket?’
‘Of course,’ said Eve, who hadn’t ordered anything.
‘Please ensure Daniel brings in his costume first thing in the morning, and, as usual, everything needs to be labelled.’
‘No problem,’ said Eve, smiling so much her cheeks hurt.
She grabbed Daniel’s hand and started walking away towards the car. ‘Which other boys are Wise Men?’ she hissed at him. ‘I need to speak to their mothers to find out what you’re supposed to be wearing.’
‘Jonathan’s one of them,’ said Daniel. ‘His mummy hired him a costume from the theatre; he’s got a big shiny pot as well, with frankly sense in it.’
‘Oh, great.’ There was no way she had time to get to a costume hire shop. This would have to be a cobbled-together, homemade effort. ‘What about the other Wise Man? Quick, Daniel, who is it?’
‘Toby. But he’s not here today.’
‘Damn and bugger,’ said Eve. ‘Okay, we’ll have to wing this. Let’s go home and look up some pictures online.’
‘Mummy, you shouldn’t swear,’ said Daniel. ‘Especially when you’re talking about our nativity play. God wouldn’t like it.’
Jake and Katie were due at 7pm, but by the time the doorbell rang, Eve had only just served up Daniel’s tea.
‘We’ve had a crisis,’ she explained, letting them in. ‘Daniel has to be a Wise Man in the school nativity and I forgot – or rather, I didn’t forget, I just didn’t get the letter. So, I’ve made him a costume, but I’m not really sure it works. Daniel, stand up and show them.’
The boy put down his knife and fork and scraped his chair back from the table.
Katie and Jake stared at him.
‘What do you think?’ asked Eve. ‘It’s one of my old shirts, and the cord is from a curtain. I’m quite pleased with the crown though – apart from the wonky bits at the back. What do you think?’
‘Seriously?’ asked Katie. ‘It’s awful. It won’t do at all.’
Eve put her hands up to her head and groaned. ‘But I haven’t got time to sort out anything else – he has to take it into school in the morning.’
Katie put her hands on Daniel’s shoulders and turned him around to get a better look. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me.’
By the time Eve and Jake got down to the wine bar, there was only one free table, beside the door to the gents’ toilets.
‘Sit here and I’ll get the drinks in,’ said Jake. ‘Wine? Prosecco? Gin?’
‘Yes please,’ she said. ‘All of those.’
He came back with a bottle of white wine and two large glasses. ‘I thought you ought to stick to this,’ he said. ‘It’s that Chablis we were talking about. Gin might make you maudlin and you’ll get pissed too quickly on fizz. Cheers!’
Talking to this man was so easy. They started with Eve’s appalling attempts at costume-making, and went on to discuss their children, their work, their irritating colleagues and all the repair jobs that neither of them had got around to tackling in their respective homes.
‘I’m sorry I was useless with the mower,’ said Jake. ‘I’m much better with an electric screwdriver if you have any DIY that needs doing? I can put up shelves or take down shelves. I can paint shelves. I can do anything with shelves really.’
Eve went to buy another bottle of wine; when she came back Jake had loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt. She wished he’d taken the tie off: it had cartoon Dalmatians on it. He refilled their glasses and held out his to clink against hers.
‘Cheers again,’ he said. ‘Your very good health. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how are things, with Ben?’
Her face flared as she remembered the afternoon a few weeks ago when she had gone round to thank Jake for the flowers, and ended up bawling on his sofa while he provided her with tissues and an increasingly damp shoulder.
‘Fine,’ she answered automatically, before realising there was no need to put on any kind of brave face. ‘Actually, not fine at all. Things are a bit shit. Ben and Lou are still planning on moving to Glasgow, and we fell out the other night, over Daniel. He told me I was a bad mother and didn’t deserve to have custody of him, so I’m now waiting to find out whether he’s going to challenge me through the courts.’
‘That’s dreadful,’ said Jake. ‘How can he accuse you of being a bad mother? You do a great job with that little boy.’
‘Not great enough,’ said Eve, looking down as she twisted the stem of the wine glass between her finger and thumb. ‘Ben said I’ve been distracted recently and I haven’t noticed Daniel’s not happy at school. And that’s true. There’s so much going on at the moment; I feel I’m pulled in so many directions and I’m not dealing with anything properly. Take the nativity. I bet none of the other mothers have completely missed all the letters about providing costumes. I just can’t seem to get myself organised and keep all the balls in the air.’
‘So, what has Ben done to help?’ asked Jake.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Does he know what’s going on in Daniel’s life at school? Does he empty his bag every night to check for letters? Does he speak to the teacher? Does he fill in his reading record? Does he make his packed lunch in the morning? Does he iron his uniform?’
Eve smiled. ‘I don’t do that last one either,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the most wrinkled child in the road, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘You know what I mean,’ said Jake. ‘He’s blaming you for not coping well, but I bet he doesn’t do any of those things himself.’
There was a question Eve suddenly wanted to ask. It was possibly something that should wait until she knew Jake a little better, but she was fuelled by Chablis, and also felt he wouldn’t mind if she asked it now. ‘Have you always been on your own with Katie? I’ve never heard you talk about her mother.’
‘You won’t have done,’ he said. ‘We separated when Katie was five and Michelle moved to France. She had mental health issues and having a young child caused her lots of emotional problems. She promised she would stay in touch with Katie, but she didn’t. We haven’t heard from her now in about ten years.’
Eve’s mouth fell open: how could a mother just walk out on her own child? She was distraught at the prospect of Ben taking Daniel to live hundreds of miles away; the thought of never having any more contact with him was unbearable.
‘For a while I worried Katie had turned into a vile teenager because she didn’t have a mother around during such an important stage in her life,’ said Jake. ‘But actually, we’re surrounded by some wonderful women – friends and family – who have been involved in her upbringing and been great role models. I’ve decided Katie is a vile teenager because of a combination of hormones and social media. It has much less to do with my single dad parenting skills – or lack of them.’
Eve smiled. ‘It can’t have been easy, bringing her up on your own.’
‘Not always, but it’s been a lot of fun too,’ said Jake. ‘Things have got even more interesting now that boys are on the scene. I have to play it cool and pretend not to care whether she tells me about her love life or not. If I do that, I know she’ll tell me everything. She split up with her latest boyfriend last week, and she told me about it in great detail – most of it was stuff I’d rather not have heard.’
Jake drained his glass and stood it beside hers on the table. ‘It’s really important to me to be a decent father. My own dad was a bit of a bastard, to tell the truth. He had a nasty temper and a cruel tongue. He was never violent or anything like that, but he wasn’t loving and he didn’t have any time for whatever my sister and I were doing. He didn’t care how we did at school or whether or not we got good grades. When I applied to study sociology at university, he said it was a namby-pamby subject and not the sort of thing a son of his should be studying. Bizarrely, the fact that I was the first person in our family to go to university didn’t seem to matter. He was just pissed off that I wasn’t doing something manly like physics or engineering.’
‘Given the family history, it sounds as if Katie has been lucky you’ve turned out to be such a great dad,’ said Eve.
‘Ah, but you don’t know I have,’ said Jake. ‘You don’t know me very well at all, Eve.’
‘No,’ she said, leaning forward over her empty glass, and running her finger down a Dalmatian’s tail. ‘But I think I’d quite like to get to know you better.’
‘Hussy,’ he said, and winked at her.