Laurie was all too aware that her attention kept drifting off in Molly’s Club, picturing how Pete’s dad’s party was going. She thought how proud his dad must feel having two strapping sons who loved and cared for him so obviously and she wondered if one day that might be her.
At first it was Alex who had been the keener of them both to have children. Meredith and Brendan had been loving parents and Alex and Naomi had grown up with their support and the best they could give them. Laurie had been less keen to have them, because she hadn’t had that family dynamic to use as a template. Neither had she ever felt the burning desire to carry a baby inside her, though she would have – for him, and fully embraced motherhood. But she’d always thought there were too many children out there already in need of a family to love them, look after them. If she and Alex hadn’t, for whatever reason, been able to conceive, she would have pushed him to adopt a child, the way she wished she’d been adopted by a couple who would have painted a bedroom pink for her, taken her to the park on a shiny new bicycle, been there waiting for her to come home from school in a warm house that smelled of dinner cooking. She knew first hand that just because people could have children, didn’t mean they should.
Laurie would probably have been taken into care if one of the neighbours had reported that she was so often in the house by herself overnight. Maybe if the curtains at their windows would have been dirty and they’d had a sofa rotting in the front garden, the De Veres might have slipped onto the social services radar but outwardly all looked respectable. Laurie was well fed because she fed herself well and beautifully turned out because she’d been using a washing machine and an iron since long before she became a teen. Laurie always handed her homework in and revised for her exams because she loved school and she knew what she needed to do to go to university and study law. And Paula De Vere, with her pretensions of being middle class, was always so friendly with everyone and glamorous, a product of self-funded elocution lessons and lucky tasteful bargains in charity shops. No one suspected that her daughter wasn’t cared for because she was – but by herself.
Alex’s dream of a houseful of mini-mes wore through Laurie’s reservations and she knew that with him she could build the sort of family she’d never had, a second chance to have a happy home with the excitement of Father Christmas calling and hunting the Easter Bunny’s eggs in the garden. Her children would never have to make themselves crisp sandwiches for tea or hunt around finding coins to put in the meter to fend off the dark and cold. She’d tortured herself in the weeks after he died that she might have altered the path of their fate if she’d thrown caution to the wind, come off the pill and let nature take its course; then perhaps she wouldn’t have felt that slight shift in their relationship, like a ship testing the weight of its anchor. She’d told herself she was imagining things, Bella had told her she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. There was a reason why he’d had his bank statements sent to his mother’s house and though she knew Meredith had been trying to hurt her with her line about Alex not letting them in on the secret that he was going to propose, she was right – it was exactly what Alex would do, include his parents in the big decision. So what was he going to tell her, the ‘something important’, if not that? She had pinned all her hopes on it being the proposal, because if it wasn’t, then it might have been something bad, a shock not a surprise. Why had he said tell and not ask? There was a hairline crack in their relationship that his passing had widened to a fissure, a canyon, taking him to the other side of something that couldn’t be breached. Had he died not being hers? Had he died being someone else’s?
‘It’ll be odd for Pete going to a party without his wife there,’ said Maurice openly, but looking at Laurie as if he had unconsciously bracketed them together. ‘I do hope he’s all right.’
‘I wish I were sixty-five again,’ said Mr Singh, who was as much at home behind a teashop counter as he ever was in an operating theatre.
‘I never liked birthdays,’ said Yvonne. ‘At least not my own. I always made sure my daughter had a nice day but no one ever bought me a cake with candles on it and I always wanted one.’
‘What, never?’ asked Sharon.
‘Never.’
‘Then we will certainly remedy that this year, dear Yvonne,’ said Maurice, quite vociferously. ‘When is your birthday?’
‘April Fool’s Day,’ said Yvonne and gave a little laugh. ‘You couldn’t make it up.’
‘I shall make a note in my diary and I’ll take you to Betty’s in York for afternoon tea, if you’ll let me,’ said Maurice. ‘There will be cake coming out of your ears by the time we’ve finished.’
‘What a treat,’ said Laurie. She didn’t ask Yvonne if she’d ever been to Betty’s before because she could guess what the answer would be.
‘Really?’ said Yvonne. ‘You would?’
‘We should go before, give it a trial run, in case you don’t like it, then we could pick somewhere else instead.’ Maurice smiled at her and Yvonne beamed back at him in such a way that it was as if it was the first time she had properly smiled. Laurie felt overcome with a blast of emotion. Some people had seen such little kindness in life, it was pitiful.
She wished she had gone to the party with Pete, wished politeness hadn’t stood in her way and to hell with it being too soon to meet his family. If anything, they both knew that you shouldn’t sit around and wait, but take what was on offer when it was offered. She wondered if he would ring her that night on the pretext of telling her all about it. She had felt like a bottle of shaken champagne since Sunday, and that she was taking sure steps forward into something special and sweet and new, a landscape devoid of unanswerable questions and uncertainty. It was as if a giant hand had reached down and scooped her out of a dark pit at a speed that barely allowed her to catch her breath.
She couldn’t wait to see him again.