“Aunt Cress? It’s me!”
The back door opened and banged shut, heralding Jojo’s arrival. Cressida, in the kitchen putting together a mushroom risotto, called out, “In here, sweetheart,” then turned and opened her arms wide, keeping them outstretched as Jojo bounced into the kitchen and gave her a kiss.
“Trying to fly?”
“Trying not to get onion and garlic smells all over you.” Cressida indicated the chopping board and waggled her fingers. “Good day?”
“Brilliant. Swimming, tennis, and making cupcakes. I was going to bring you some, but we ate them.” As they both worked full time, Sacha and Robert paid for Jojo to attend a summer vacation day camp run by one of the private schools in Cheltenham. Luckily Jojo enjoyed it. Watching her at the sink as she ran the cold tap and glugged down a glass of water, Cressida experienced a rush of love for the girl who had brought more happiness into her life than any other living person. Jojo was twelve now, with fine, straggly dark hair, her mother’s neat features, and Robert’s long legs. Today she was wearing denim shorts, the sea-green T-shirt that Cressida had bought her last Christmas, and beneath it a padded pink bra she didn’t need but had insisted on buying because when you were twelve everyone at school teased you if you didn’t wear a bra.
“Are those from the garden?” Jojo had noticed the freesias in a vase on the kitchen table.
“No. Someone gave them to me.”
“Oo-er.” Jojo raised her eyebrows. “Man or woman?”
“As it happens, a man.” Cressida tipped the chopped onions into the frying pan and turned up the heat to maximum.
“Aunt Cress! Is he your new boyfriend?”
“I made a card for his mother. He wanted to thank me, that’s all.”
“But he brought you flowers. Proper ones, from a shop,” Jojo emphasized, “and he didn’t have to do that, did he? So does that mean he’d like to be your new boyfriend?”
Time to change the subject. Vigorously stirring the onions in the pan, Cressida said, “I shouldn’t think so for one minute. Now are you going to give me a hand with these mushrooms?”
“That’s what I call changing the subject.”
“OK then, no, he definitely doesn’t want to be my new boyfriend. And it’s just as well because he lives two hundred miles away. And these mushrooms still need to be chopped.”
“But—”
“You know, I had such a lovely time this afternoon,” said Cressida. “I was thinking back to the very first time I looked after you. You were ten months old and you couldn’t talk at all.”
“Ten months.” This time Jojo was diverted; she loved hearing about the antics she’d gotten up to as a baby. “Could I walk then?”
“No, but you were an Olympic crawler. Like a little train. You were eleven months before you started to walk.”
After that first successful day, Sacha had known a soft touch when she’d seen one. Less than a fortnight later she had asked Cressida to babysit again, and Cressida had been only too happy to oblige. A week after that, Sacha and Robert had been invited to a smart wedding in Berkshire, and Jojo and Cressida had spent a glorious day together, culminating in Jojo taking a series of tottering steps across the living room floor before stumbling triumphantly into Cressida’s arms. That evening, when Sacha and Rob had arrived to pick her up, Cressida had remarked on how active she’d been. Sacha, smiling smugly, had said, “Oh yes, she’ll be walking before long. She’s very advanced for her age.”
Astrid hadn’t come back. She was replaced by a series of unsuitable nannies and even more wildly unsuitable au pairs. If Sacha had asked Cressida to give up her job in the lawyers’ office and look after Jojo full time, Cressida would have done it in a heartbeat. But that had never happened. Maybe it would have been just too weird. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that Jojo had once accidentally called Cressida Mummy. Whatever the case, Cressida carried on babysitting whenever she was asked and helped out during emergencies. It was a situation everyone was happy with.
“What’s the worst thing I ever did when I was little?” Jojo was at last slicing the mushrooms.
“The most embarrassing, you mean? Probably the time you took your diaper off in the middle of the supermarket and left it in the rice and pasta aisle.” Cressida paused, then said, “It wasn’t a clean diaper.”
“Eww!” Shaking her head and laughing, Jojo said, “Tell me the best thing I ever did.”
Cressida pulled a face. “Can’t think of any.”
“That’s not true! Tell me!”
“Oh, sweetheart. The best thing?” Abandoning the sizzling onions, Cressida enveloped Jojo in a hug. “I really couldn’t say. There are too many to count.”