8

June 1990

Stella was half awake when the helicopter began thudding overhead. She saw from the bedside clock that it was only five in the morning and lay there, rigid, praying the deafening thud-thud-thud – seemingly right outside the window of their Stoke Newington house – would not wake Jonny. It was Sunday morning, for goodness’ sake, what on earth were the police doing out there?

She glanced at her husband, but Jack was fast asleep, his floppy auburn hair curtaining his face. He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, but asleep he always seemed small and childlike to Stella. She leaned down and gave him a light kiss on his forehead. Jack stirred, took her hand and brought it to his lips, then turned over and slept on.

Not so their son. A soft chuntering came across the baby monitor, at first sleepy and calm, which gave his mother hope that he might fall back to sleep – not that she’d ever known him to do so. But increasingly, Jonny’s voice became more insistent. ‘Mummy … Mummy … Mummyyy!’

Groaning, Stella lifted her pregnant body out from under the warm duvet. What the hell would she do with the boy till the rest of the world woke up?

‘Do we have to go?’ Stella asked Jack three hours later, when her husband finally wandered barefoot into the basement kitchen in his boxers and a faded grey T-shirt.

Jack shook his head and yawned exaggeratedly, stretching his long arms over his head, knuckles cracking. Then he went over to pat his son’s curls – Jonny was on the sofa, thumb in his mouth, engrossed in a tape of Bagpuss at the other end of the room.

‘Probably not,’ he said, sitting down hard at the table, where Stella was eating a piece of toast and marmite, and pulling the cafetière towards him. He looked around for a mug and, not finding one, got up and retrieved a large blue pottery cup from the wooden rack, filling it and taking a long draft of the now-tepid coffee.

Stella knew he was not serious. Jack would do this. Raise her hopes that they might ditch some of the hundreds of social events to which they were both invited – this one was a lunch party in Kent where she would know no one – then backtrack. But he was gazing at her with concern and she thought maybe she looked suitably exhausted this morning to excite his pity.

‘Oh, sweetheart …’ He came round the table and put his arms around her, dropping a kiss on her head. She leaned back into his embrace, letting out a tired sigh. ‘If you’re not feeling up to it … It’s a long trek just for lunch.’

He held her for a while longer, then let her go and picked up his coffee, standing with his bum on the aluminium rail of the gas stove. ‘We won’t go if you don’t want to. But there might be some interesting people there,’ he said, ‘and Jonny would enjoy being in the fresh air. It’s a lovely day.’ He refilled his cup. ‘I could go on my own, I suppose, but that wouldn’t be half as much fun.’

Stella weighed up her options. But the thought of being alone with Jonny all day – who would be as fractious as she was after so little sleep – did not appeal much. It was a glorious summer’s day. Maybe lunch in the country was exactly what they all needed.

‘So who are these interesting people?’

‘Oh, Giovanna knows everyone, and the ones she doesn’t know, Henry does.’

Giovanna Morrison was the long-time editor of a Sunday broadsheet magazine, and Henry was her husband: a Conservative MP for a Kent constituency. This was the reason they’d been asked. Jack had interviewed the politician recently for a profile piece and – Jack being Jack – they had bonded.

‘There’ll be both politicos and trendies, I imagine. Probably half the BBC.’

Stella pulled a face. ‘Kids?’

He shrugged. ‘Henry’s lot are teenagers, I think. But I’m sure there’ll be kids, there always are.’ He smiled at her, his blue eyes very bright and charming to her in the gloomy London kitchen. ‘You know I’ll help with Jonny.’

I hope so, thought Stella, knowing he meant what he said as he said it – Jack was a good father, as good as his work allowed – but she thought it was more probable that he’d be off networking with a large glass of Pimm’s, while she kept an eye on their son.

‘Rosie and Ben might be there …’

She laughed. ‘You’re just saying that.’ Rosie – Stella’s best friend from Bristol, where they’d both studied English – worked for Giovanna’s paper, but in a lowly capacity as a sub-editor.

Jack grinned, holding up his hands in mock surrender. ‘OK, you got me. But I don’t want to leave you, Stell. You know I hate going to things without you.’

She tutted and shook her head. She loved him so much. It still seemed like a miracle she had found such a soulmate. ‘You know I’d normally be well up for lunch in the country,’ she said, ‘especially in this gorgeous weather. But …’ She was thinking of work on Monday, and the script she ought to have finished by then for the BBC pre-school children’s series for which she was the writer/director. It was a punishing schedule: scripts to be written and approved, rehearsals, long days shooting a week’s worth of the daily twenty-minute episodes in the studio, editing on the hurry-up and getting them accepted by her boss … Stella loved every minute.

‘Poor sweetheart, I know it must be hard, being pregnant.’

She got up, mollified by his concern, and he put his coffee cup down and grabbed her, pulling her into his arms.

‘Ooh, but I do love you,’ Jack said into her left ear before he kissed her. ‘Mmm,’ he nuzzled her neck, ‘would Bagpuss allow us a quickie, do you think?’

The Morrisons’ weekend place was beautiful. Cosy, rather than the grandness she had expected, it was two Regency cottages knocked into one, set on a hill at the edge of a small village. Painted white with a grey slate roof, it was backed by a mature but rather unkempt garden, in a quiet road that led into the village. The view across the Weald, seen over the mature shrubs and trees that separated the property from a neighbouring field, shimmered in the hot midday sun: peaceful, buzzing with insects and butterflies, so English. But it was a view that would soon be burned on Stella’s mind, forever haunting her with its deceptive prettiness and calm.

Stella looked around at the assembled guests and was glad she’d decided to come, despite the dreary journey out of London. The atmosphere was relaxed and Henry was not the dreaded cliché of a Tory MP. He reminded Stella of Mr Briars, her nerdy chemistry teacher from school, with his neat grey beard and rimless specs, carefully pressed chinos and striped cotton shirt. Giovanna, by contrast, was a magnificent whirlwind of Mediterranean exotic: huge eyes flashing, shiny black hair glinting, lipstick a stunning crimson, her jaunty sun-yellow dress seductively tracing her generous curves. It was as if she’d been dropped into the quiet Kent countryside by mistake. But she and Henry were genuinely welcoming, making a fuss of the sleepy Jonny, guiding them through introductions and fetching them both cold drinks.

Jack made a beeline for an older man with a raucous laugh and a huge belly straining his pink polo shirt and was immediately immersed in intense conversation. Stella thought he might be another journalist, but Jack didn’t introduce her, and she was relieved she could be left to wander after Jonny as he explored the garden. It was the better option, in Stella’s opinion, although it mildly irked her that their son was always her responsibility at these events.

Beyond the lawn and herbaceous borders where the guests were gathered, the garden had been left to itself. Clutching a glass of homemade lemonade, she slowly followed the path through the azaleas, which wound round past a thick, ancient yew hedge bordering the neighbours’ land, a grove of spindly ash trees, a dilapidated garden hut with tar-paper roof, and back to the lawn. Jonny was in seventh heaven, running in and out of the trees, hiding from his mother behind the hut, crouching to examine some curiosity on the path. It made Stella think – not for the first time – that they should live in the country, give the children a proper, fresh-air childhood, rather than restricting them to the dirty London parks and urban gardens that were currently Jonny’s only playground. But she knew work would prevent this.

‘Mummy, Mummy, look!’ Her son was sitting on his haunches beside what appeared to be a not-long-dead field-mouse, its little legs and long tail angled stiffly from its body. Jonny’s large, violet-blue eyes looked up at her, huge with excitement. ‘What is it?’ he asked, prodding it gently with a stick.

‘It’s a mouse.’

Jonny frowned. ‘Why isn’t it moving?’

‘Maybe it’s asleep.’

She winced at the lie, but he didn’t question it, just waited patiently, watching the animal intently. And for Stella, time stopped. It was just her and Jonny in this garden on a warm, still, summer Sunday, under the ash trees, soft leaf mould beneath their feet, insects buzzing in the air. Just the two of them. There was nothing to say, nowhere more important to be. Stella felt the rest of her life fall away in that moment and a sense of intense happiness engulf her.

‘Will it wake up soon?’ Jonny whispered hopefully.

‘I don’t think so, sweetheart,’ she said, reaching out to take his hand and raise him to his feet.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘Let’s go and find Dadda. He’ll be missing us.’

Stella had no notion, as they made their way contentedly back to the lawn and the guests, that the dead mouse, so insignificant in itself, would feature in her dreams for the rest of her life.