“How lovely,” Nancy spoke brightly, despite the sinking feeling in her gut.
“We should be there in about half an hour,” Maria, an old friend from Suffolk, yelled over the Bluetooth transmitting from their car, although there was no need to shout: Nancy could hear the bad news perfectly well.
She was still tired from the festival weekend, tired from too much lovemaking and not enough sleeping, tired from the ongoing excitement and turmoil generated by Jim’s presence in her life. Monday was going to be a rest day. Jim was busy packing for the move next week and they’d agreed he wouldn’t stay over that night because Louise and the girls were due back. But now Maria and Hugo were descending on her.
Distracted, she raced upstairs, selected a pink shirt and a pair of clean jeans, glared at her hair in the mirror—it needed washing—pulled the bed together, raced back downstairs, cleared away the plates from breakfast, wiped the crumbs from around the toaster, swept the tiled floor, plumped the sofa cushions, threw away some dead roses Jim had picked from the garden, recycled a pile of newspapers and emptied the filter in the coffee machine. Bob the cat had slept the night in the armchair—her favorite spot—so she emptied the cat litter too. She had barely finished when she heard the crunch of tires on gravel and went to open the front door.
Hugo Olorenshaw was a conductor, an old friend of Christopher’s. Tall, very thin and pale, iron-gray foppish conductor-hair trailing below his ears, he was a restless, intense character whom Nancy had never found very comfortable to be around. It was as if he were constantly listening to something—music, she assumed—inside his head, his expression almost permanently distracted.
Maria, his wife, was an extreme contrast, so much so that Christopher had dubbed them the Sprats, after the “Jack Sprat” nursery rhyme. She was small, plump and bosomy, her dyed-brown hair in an untidy French pleat, dressed today in a striped matelot T-shirt and, like her husband, jeans. But whereas Hugo’s jeans looked too pressed, too clean, too formal even to pass for jeans, Maria’s looked as if she’d slept in them for a month, unidentified stains and dog hairs from their dopy Cavalier King Charles spaniel—now careering round the garden—clinging to the crumpled blue denim.
“Darling, it’s so wonderful to see you.” Maria gave Nancy a warm hug. “It’s been years.”
Had it? Nancy wondered and realized with surprise that Maria was right. When she’d first moved to Brighton, she had made the effort to visit her friends back in Suffolk. But she found she was pained by the careful editing in her friends’ conversation concerning her ex, and couldn’t settle when she was out and about in familiar haunts in case she bumped into Christopher and Tatjana holding hands—for example, on the high street. Aldeburgh was a very small town.
“We miss you,” Maria was saying.
They settled at the kitchen table with their coffee and some Jaffa Cakes bought for the girls. Hugo immediately grabbed two and crammed them into his mouth, one after the other, munching fiercely as if he hadn’t seen food in a week. Nancy saw Maria giving him a disapproving frown, which he ignored as he reached for a third.
“You know Sally’s had breast cancer?” Maria said. “She’s okay now, but she had to have lymph nodes removed and all sorts. She’s been quite low.”
Her friend spent the next half an hour filling her in about people who were no longer part of Nancy’s life, some of whom, even in the short time she’d been gone from the area, were already fading from memory. Hugo chipped in occasionally to correct his wife on some small detail—a habit she remembered only too well from the years with her own pedantic husband. Neither, however, mentioned Christopher or Tatjana, although their presences prowled around the conversation until Nancy could bear it no more.
“So how is Christopher? This wedding seems a bit of a number,” Nancy said, keeping her tone light.
She saw the slight wariness that settled over Maria’s open features. “He seems fine,” her friend said noncommittally.
“Except for the baby,” Hugo put in. “Christopher’s not so fine about that.”
Nancy felt a jolt to her chest, as if someone had hit her. “Baby?”
Maria, seeing her expression, looked as if she would happily kill her tactless husband right then and there. But Hugo, insensitive as usual to the atmosphere around him, sailed blithely on. “You can’t blame the silly old bugger. He’s my age and he’ll be dealing with a screaming infant, up half the night, paraphernalia everywhere. Quite ghastly if—”
“Hugo!” Maria’s voice cut across him like a rifle shot.
Nancy was feeling dizzy. “Tatjana’s pregnant?”
Only now did Hugo frown with understanding.
“I thought Christopher would have told you ages ago,” Maria was saying, her kind face creased with concern.
“Ages? Why? How pregnant is she?”
“Not sure, must be at least four months, maybe more. That’s why they’re getting married.” Maria tutted angrily. “You’d think he’d have had the decency to let you know before someone else did.”
“Sorry, Nancy.” Hugo was uncharacteristically humble as he fiddled with the handle of his mug, not meeting her eye.
“It’s none of my business anymore, thank goodness.” She spoke with what she hoped was a conviction she was far from feeling.
“Well, no, maybe not you,” Maria said, “but Louise, certainly. Christopher says she’s coming to the wedding. Was he going to wait for the poor girl to arrive and notice the bride’s bulging dress?”
Nancy sighed. More stuff to upset her already tense and troubled daughter. But it wasn’t just Louise. Nancy wasn’t taking it particularly well herself. There was something so hurtful, so sneaky, so . . . predictable about them having a baby. Although, oddly, she hadn’t predicted it. She’d thought Christopher would be too selfish, Tatjana too ambitious, but clearly he was a slave to her whims. Anything she wanted, she got.
Into the silence, Hugo said, “I hope I haven’t caused trouble, letting the cat out of the bag.”
“Well, of course you have,” Maria snapped. “Maybe you should learn to think before you speak.”
“It’s not Hugo’s fault,” Nancy said.
“The old boy’s bitten off more than he can chew.” Hugo gave her an apologetic smile. “Should have seen her coming.”
“But he’s happy with her, no?”
Hugo shrugged. “He was. I’d say the gilt’s worn off the gingerbread a bit recently. Better the devil you know, eh?” His wife harrumphed and got up, grabbing the empty cups and dumping them on the draining board with a bang. Then she said, in a lighter tone, “Talking of seeing people coming, anyone on your horizon yet, Nancy?”
Nancy got up too, deliberately turning away from her friends to close the lid of the Kilner jar in which she kept the coffee, just in case she should blush. But the sudden thought, unbidden, of Jim’s tongue flicking repeatedly across her nipple, sent a flash of pure lust through her body, which made her tremble, sealing her fate. She could feel the provoking heat flood, like a tidal wave, across her cheeks.
Lost once more in his own distractions, Hugo seemed unaware, but a small flicker of Maria’s eyebrows, quickly gone, made it clear that her friend had definitely noticed. She gave Nancy a quizzical smile.
“Hmm,” was all she said, however, before hustling her husband out of the door and shouting for Solti, the dog, who was snuffling at something against the far fence and paid no attention whatsoever to Maria’s call. “Ring me,” said her friend, as she gave Nancy a goodbye hug.
*
“Nana! Nana!” Hope, followed swiftly by Jazzy, flung herself into Nancy’s arms as she came through the door. Both girls looked so well, their hair bleached by the sun, their skin lightly tanned, their young faces purged of that exhausted end-of-term pallor. Jazzy ran to fetch a blue bucket full of shells and pebbles, which she dumped on Nancy’s lap as she sat on the green sofa in their kitchen.
“So how was it?” Nancy looked up at Louise, as she sifted through the shells, showing suitable delight at Jazzy’s collection of razor clams.
“It was great, Mum. We did nothing but go to the beach, swim, muck about in the sand, dig in rock pools, go for ice creams. Proper old fashioned bucket-and-spade holiday. Bliss.”
“I swimmed in the sea without wings, Nana,” Jazzy interrupted.
“Fantastic. Well done, darling.” She kissed the top of Jazzy’s head, smelling the sweaty, salty tang of the sea in her thick blonde hair, then went to stand by the worktop as Louise filled the teapot. “And the kids got on?”
Louise nodded. “Sarah’s two are brilliant. Zac’s younger than Jazzy and can be a bit whiny, but on the whole they played beautifully, left us alone to read and chat.”
“So you got a proper break.”
“Yeah. It was perfect.” Her daughter’s face fell slightly as she brushed her dark hair off her face. “Too perfect. Didn’t want to come back, to be honest.”
Nancy wasn’t sure what to say. The secret of Christopher’s baby was burning a hole in her tongue. She’d phoned him after Maria and Hugo had gone, but he’d been decidedly snappish. “Don’t lecture me, Nancy,” he’d said. “Louise never picks up the phone, as you well know, so it’s damn hard to tell her something as sensitive as this. What the hell am I supposed to do? Text her?”
“Okay, okay, keep your hair on,” she’d said, wearied by his lifelong commitment to blaming others. “It’s just not going to be a good look if you don’t mention it before the wedding and everyone except Louise knows.”
“I’m not stupid, I do know that. I just haven’t found the right time.”
Now Louise handed her a mug of tea and they sat on the sofa, her daughter pushing Bob onto the floor. As they did so, Louise’s mobile rang.
“This’ll be Ross,” she said, reluctantly pulling it out of her shorts pocket and glancing at the screen. “Oh. No . . . Dad.” She held it for a moment, staring at the device. In the end she made a face and said, “Better get it, Mum. He’s probably ringing because he wants the girls to strew crimson rose petals in Tatjana’s hallowed footsteps or some such bollocks.”