2

Eve felt the insistent bash of her son’s hand on her face – indiscriminate, untargeted, his open palm landing on her eyes and nose, forehead and mouth with vigour in his attempt to wake her – and struggled to open her eyes. It had been light for hours and she’d witnessed the summer dawn during one of her many pee trips. But then she’d sunk into a dead sleep from which it was hard to surface.

She rolled over to face Arthur and lifted him on to the bed, pulling the duvet over them both. He had dinosaurs on his blue cotton pyjamas, his pale-auburn curls – courtesy of his grandfather, Jack – squashed from sleep, his feet bare and cold against her swollen belly as he grinned at her round the thumb he’d popped in his mouth. She just had time to grab him and lift his pyjama top – pressing her face in the soft, squidgy warmth of his tummy, inhaling the delicious scent of her son and making him giggle – before he wriggled free, pushing her away.

‘Get up, Mumma,’ he said, sliding out of bed again and pulling on her hand. Arthur didn’t say a lot, yet – probably because Eric was always away and she didn’t get out much. She’d been resistant to joining a local playgroup with all those country mums, who would no doubt think her weird with her very visible tattoo and her London past, so much of their day was spent in contented silence. She knew her mother was worried that Arthur wasn’t talking more, though, with his third birthday only three months away.

Mum, she thought, and sighed as she got out of bed, her feet touching the cool, dusty floorboards, reminding her she really needed to get on and order the carpet – choose the carpet, indeed – before the baby arrived. What had she done, asking Stella to come and stay for so long?

Settling her son in the Tripp Trapp wooden high chair in the kitchen that his grandfather had bought for him, Eve put a plastic Peppa Pig bowl containing Rice Krispies and milk in front of him. While the kettle boiled, she pulled back her long, straggling hair – a bright, red-gold that everyone thought she dyed, but which was just an intense version of her father’s lighter auburn – securing it in a raggedy brown ponytail holder she dug out of the wooden bowl of bits and bobs on the kitchen table.

It was not yet seven, and the day – warm, beautiful – stretched ahead in a monotonous haze. She’d have to think of something with which to occupy Arthur. Her mother had said she wouldn’t be arriving till the afternoon and Eve supposed she should try and tidy the bedroom where Stella would sleep. But the effort seemed too much right now. There were still boxes in there from the move from London, six months ago now, and no curtains at the window, no carpet on the floor. Where, she wondered, are the sheets for that bed?

She couldn’t concentrate on anything, though. Whenever she attempted to focus, her thoughts skittered away in the face of an overarching anxiety about the baby she was carrying. Every time she went to pee, she would tense as she checked for spots of blood – although there had been none for over a week now. Every time she felt a twinge, she would stop what she was doing, hold her breath and listen to her body. Intensely aware of every flutter, crick and ache, she felt as if she were existing purely as a vessel for her baby, not as Eve, a thinking, feeling woman.

She smoothed her hands protectively across the twenty-four-week swell of her belly under her T-shirt. Please, she spoke silently, please, please let it be all right. And for the first time in years, she realized she desperately wanted her mother. Stella’s tough, organized, no-nonsense approach to life – albeit bordering on the detached – would take away some of the responsibility for this small mass of child currently floating precariously in her womb.

She felt tears building behind her eyes and bit her lip to stop herself from crying in front of Arthur. The person she really wanted was Eric. Even if it were just to tell him what was happening to her body. Her thoughts drifted back to their last night together, before he had set off on the gruelling three-day journey, ending in a five-and-a-half-hour flight in a Dash-7, high-wing, turboprop plane. If the weather were good, it would take him from Stanley in the Falklands to the Rothera Research Station, sitting west off the Antarctic Peninsula.

God, she had so longed to tell him about the baby – her periods irregular, it was her tender breasts that had prompted her to do a test only days before his departure. She’d almost blurted it out then and there. And it was burning on the tip of her tongue as they made love that night – more attentively, more tenderly, more consciously than usual, under the shadow of parting – then lay awake afterwards, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his warm, thin body.

But Eric had been ecstatic, so full of excitement about his trip. He’d been to the Arctic twice before, but never the Antarctic. Maybe feeling guilty for the five-month separation they were facing that night, he had reminded Eve – not for the first time, as he tried to convey his passion for his work to her – that the area was a hot spot of climate warming, the perfect place to study climate change, an opportunity of a lifetime. And the words had died on her lips. She’d made her decision. She knew if she’d breathed one word about her pregnancy to her partner, he would postpone his trip.

Almost as soon as he got into the taxi that would take him to Ashford Station and then London on that miserable March morning, she had regretted it. Panic had overtaken her, and guilt for a silence she’d seen, till that moment, as strong and self-reliant. Eve was not used to relying on a man. During her childhood, her journalist father had often missed the every-other-weekend he’d been allocated after the split, because of some urgent last-minute assignment. ‘Ten, nine, eight.’ She remembered sitting on her bed, her young self staring out through the barred windows at the steps that led up to the front door. ‘Seven, six …’ she would deliberately slow the count, shutting her eyes tight, willing her father to be there. Then her mum’s head would pop round the door. Eve always knew from her expression what she was about to say. ‘Daddy’s just rung, sweetheart …’ Then the crushing disappointment.

When she told Eric about the baby a week later, in a phone call spanning the entire globe, he’d been furious, uncomprehending. He reminded her that this was his baby too. But he hadn’t been angry for long.

‘Will you be all right?’ he’d asked. ‘I can come home.’

But Eve had heard the dragging reluctance in his voice. She’d quickly assured him she was managing just fine. Which was true, until the blood.

Arthur had finished his ‘peas’, as he called Rice Krispies, and was loudly slurping the milk straight from the bowl, much of it cascading down his chin.

‘Bibi’s coming today,’ she said, her voice artificially cheerful.

Arthur grinned, banging his bowl down and clapping his hands. ‘Bibi coming!’ he shouted.

Eve had expected a dutiful grandmother rather than a devoted one, and had warned Eric before the birth, ‘Mum won’t be much help.’ In fact, Eve had been – and still was – almost jealous to see the tenderness on Stella’s face when she looked at Arthur, to witness the hours she would sit patiently playing with her grandson, the way she would ask after Arthur before finding out how Eve was when she called. There was no stored consciousness of her behaving that way with Eve, not ever.

The landline rang and Eve automatically glanced at the clock. Eric was four hours behind them in Antarctica: it was too early for him. He’d called the day before yesterday, anyway. He tried to ring at midday on Wednesdays and Sundays, planned so they wouldn’t miss each other – the signal was too erratic for Skype. But as the weeks went on, he didn’t always remember and neither did she. Their talks were becoming stilted, constrained by the different lives they were leading – him, hunkered down with his fellow scientists in darkness and sub-zero temperatures; her, looking after Arthur and basking in the summer sun – the big lie about the progress of her pregnancy making her edit every word she uttered.

Probably someone trying to persuade me to claim back PPI I never had in the first place, she decided, not bothering to get up and answer it. But a minute later her mobile rang.

‘Hi, Dad.’

‘How’s it going, sweetheart? How’s the boy?’

Before his recent retirement, her father had always sounded rushed when he rang; it felt to Eve as if it were more duty than pleasure. But these days he liked to settle in for a good natter.

‘I’m OK … you know, surviving.’

‘Can’t be easy, all on your own. Listen, we’re down tonight. I thought we might pop over tomorrow, bring some lunch?’

‘Yeah … you haven’t forgotten Mum’s coming today?’

There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘Oops.’ She heard him take a deep breath. ‘Better get used to it, though, eh? If she’s going to be around for a while.’

‘Will Lisa want to come?’

‘Of course! I’m hardly going to leave her alone in the cottage, am I?’

He sounded as if the idea were absurd, which it was, obviously, since Lisa was his new wife. But Eve longed to have her father and mother to herself, together for the first time since she could remember, aside from the terse handovers of her childhood.

Then, Stella would keep her father firmly on the doorstep while Eve got her things together, as if he were a Jehovah’s Witness or someone equally unwelcome. And Jack’s open invitations to her mother to have lunch or supper as a family, or even just a cup of tea at the Sunday-night pick-up, were always bluntly refused. It had proved the stumbling block every time she and Eric talked about getting married. The thought of her hostile parents snarling at each other over her wedding vows was something of a deal-breaker. Although, according to her Grandma Patsy, it hadn’t always been like that between them.

‘OK, but Lisa and Mum have never met and you know what Mum’s like.’

Her father laughed. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. There’s absolutely no animosity between me and Mum any more.’

‘Really, Dad? How do you know? You haven’t spoken to her since I was about fifteen, and you were hardly mates then.’

As soon as Eve was old enough to make her own decisions, she had chosen to see her parents separately and avoid the unbearable tension that existed between them. Even when Arthur was born, she’d made sure the visits to see their first grandchild were staggered. Bringing them together again was a risk, Eve was well aware.

‘I have spoken to her, occasionally …’

Eve could tell from his tone how that had gone.

‘Well, I’m telling you right now, there’ll be no sniping over the lunch table. I’ve got enough stress in my life at the moment. I’d even rather you talked about Brexit.’

She heard her father laugh. He was a passionate European, spoke two of its languages and claimed a lifelong love affair with France. But he had always hated the Union – never wanting to join the Common Market, even back in the seventies – and had battled hard to turn his mostly Remain friends during the referendum – despite his cajoling monologues invariably falling on deaf ears.

‘I’ll behave, promise.’

His words were not reassuring. Because Jack Holt, Eve knew, was capable of powering through tricky situations, deliberately ignoring the tension around him in his quest for an answer. It was what had made him such a good political journalist. Where anyone else might baulk and step back, Jack carried on regardless.

Eve admired this trait, knowing herself incapable of such self-assurance. But it wasn’t going to be much help if her mother and stepmother kicked off. Or her mother and father. Or, indeed, her stepmother and father – because it was not unknown for Lisa and her dad to bicker about what he was eating, for example, or how much he was drinking.

‘How’s Lisa?’ she asked, because she felt she had to. She hadn’t exactly bonded with her stepmother.

‘She’s OK,’ Jack sounded doubtful. ‘I think she works too hard. She has to be up in the middle of the night, practically, to do the breakfast show.’

Eve couldn’t bring herself to say anything sympathetic, so she murmured, ‘Hmm,’ in the hope he would see it as such, and changed the subject, making arrangements for Saturday.

Whatever she thought of Lisa, Eve knew she just had to suck it up, because her father seemed to love her. And she didn’t begrudge him his happiness, he’d been pretty much alone for a long time. She also didn’t want to lose the bond she had latterly forged with her dad.

Eve had been in awe of Jack, as a child. He was a charismatic figure, who made their time together a whirlwind of activity and fun, but with whom she never felt totally at ease. It was only since Eve had grown up and become independent that she and her father had started to get to know each other properly.

He had pitched up unannounced one Saturday at the pub on the river where she worked. ‘What are you doing here, Dad?’ she’d asked, amazed to see him. Since she’d reached eighteen the previous year and the access visits had stopped, they rarely met up. ‘Thought you might fancy a Chinese after your shift?’ he’d replied. Then he sat quietly with a half of Peroni and waited for her. Over the meal, they talked and talked. It was the first of many such Saturdays, and they’d gradually begun to relax with each other, forming a bond that had been missing in Eve’s childhood. She was not going to throw away all that effort over Lisa.