Before Eddy can open his mouth, Anna beats him to it. ‘It’s not safe, Eddy. I can’t risk Albie getting into a precarious situation.’
‘What are you talking about, “precarious situation”?’
Anna tilts her chin up; she really gets the hump if she feels like she’s being patronized. ‘Abi, obviously.’ She glances at the door. It’s open a little, so she goes over to close it, which is unnecessary as Albie’s downstairs listening to a football match, quietly munching through the seven Weetabix he eats every morning. ‘I can’t trust her with Albie.’
‘You can’t trust her with Albie?’
‘He’s a child, Eddy, my little boy – I won’t let a possibly unhinged bunny-boiler we barely know look after him. And besides, what will Rosie think when she finds out that I let Seb’s mistress look after Albie!’
‘Anna, you’re overreacting.’ He thinks about adding ‘as usual’ but knows that would totally derail the conversation.
‘I’m not, Eddy. Think about it. She’s obviously turned up here to blackmail Seb – she might be some kind of scammer or catfish; she might have done this many times before.’
‘Anna, we hardly know the woman! And besides, you can’t warn the whole town off her. This is irrational—’
Anna waves her hands, talks over him. ‘You’re right, Eddy, completely right! We hardly know the woman and that’s exactly why she shouldn’t be looking after our son. It’s my fault and I won’t ask people we don’t know well for help with childcare again, OK?’
She’s wired and Eddy knows she’ll have spent the early hours going over and over her arguments. He feels weak and unprepared, so he nods to show he accepts everything she’s said. Anna kisses him and says, bouncy again, ‘I’m going to get in the shower.’
Eddy leans over for his tea and, as he sips, acknowledges that he’s not feeling good. Not feeling good at all.
In their en suite, he hears Anna turn the shower on. He shared too much last night and now he’s hungover from too much honesty; his thoughts feel like scuttling mice in his head. Did he really have to tell Anna everything? He loves her – of course he does – but she isn’t known for her discretion and, besides, her loyalty lies more with Rosie than with Seb. But shouldn’t Eddy’s loyalty also be with Rosie? After all, Seb has acted and is acting like an absolute idiot. Last night, he felt so connected to Anna, good about himself, but now, in the cool, blue morning light, the revelations feel too real, too grubby, the consequences too big to comprehend. Next to him, on the duvet, Anna’s phone starts to ring. Eddy looks at the screen, the letter ‘V’ illuminated, covered in hearts. With a groan, he pulls the duvet over his head and waits for the noise to end.
Chapter 7
It’s raining again, so everyone’s hurrying, not wanting to stop and chat, when Abi goes to pick up Margot from school. It’s sad – the community she once yearned for while living in London is now something she’s actively hiding from.
After the incident at Rosie’s house, and Anna’s stiff voice-note telling her that she no longer needs Abi to take Albie home after school, she wonders if she’s someone who could ever feel like they belong in a community like Waverly. Anna who had only the other day been overly matey and keen to be friends, now sounded like she was firing a nanny. Abi replied simply with a thumbs-up.
Why should she care about Anna’s opinion of her, anyway? It was odd, Anna asking for help when their kids aren’t even in the same year. It felt more like a ploy to get inside Abi’s house, a chance to get the scoop on the newcomer. She finds Anna uneasy, nosy in a way that feels untrustworthy.
But still, Abi spent the whole of yesterday afternoon cleaning the maisonette ahead of the visit, scrubbing the mouldy grout around the kitchen units with an old toothbrush. She even hammered a few framed prints on to the walls, including her favourite, a poster advertising a Picasso exhibition from the 1960s. While the flat will never be beautiful, it is at least clean and warm. It’s as good as she can manage. Better, she reminds herself, than anything she ever had growing up.
Margot takes the news about Albie with surprising stoicism, when Abi tells her by the school gates. She’d been so excited about having someone over, something she’d never been able to do when they lived in London. But Margot simply thinks for a few seconds, before shrugging her little shoulders and asking practically, ‘Can you do my shop with me, then?’
At home, she peels off her raincoat and school shoes in the tiny hall and thunders up the thin stairs to the cardboard shopfront she painted this morning, while Abi makes a start on the fish pie she’s planned for dinner. ‘Shop’s open, Mum!’
Abi spends the next hour carefully being instructed on exactly what to say when buying imaginary vegetables and being told off by Margot when she gets it wrong. When Abi was younger, being ‘nice’ was the most important thing and it meant being quiet and doing whatever someone else wanted. Abi learnt to play on her own, so she could make her own rules. She didn’t know then, of course, that these were skills she’d depend on as an adult.
It is this kind of moment, rain beating against the window, laughing with her kid while the delicious smells of dinner fill the flat, that Abi had dreamt about ever since Lily was born. Abi would take Lily out in the pram, given to her by a new mothers’ charity, and would ride the number 19 bus for hours. It was cheap and the rhythmic motion soothed Lily, allowing nineteen-year-old Abi to sit and flick through food magazines she’d shoplifted from Smith’s. She loved the shining photos of Christmas roasts and delicate canapés, art she could taste through the page. When she didn’t have a magazine, she’d stare out of the window, her gaze always finding the other mums who seemed like a different species, their designer prams laden with Waitrose bags, feeding their kids in expensive cafes and not caring if their toddler’s £10 macaroni cheese ended up on the floor. Those mums in their space-themed yoga leggings, sipping their green juices, made Abi hold Lily to her chest and whisper apologies into her tiny, curled ear. Because, somehow, this perfect child had been made by Abi. Abi who slept on a mattress on the floor in their bedsit, Abi whose own mum cuddled bottles of cheap Polish vodka and didn’t notice if Abi went to school or not. Abi who had tried to hide her pregnancy from the restaurant where she washed the huge greasy pans until she’d practically given birth on the floor. She apologized to her daughter for all those nights out when she hadn’t known she was pregnant, apologized to Lily for all that she was and all that she wasn’t, and then she’d stare at those other mums and her apologies would morph into promises. Promises about decorated Christmas trees, bouncy castles on her birthday and delicious, hot food made by Abi, in a real oven not a microwave. Abi promised Lily all these things, as despite her own lonely childhood she was still a dreamer and had started to feel the tug of possibility, the whisper of a better future for herself. She just needed to figure out how they were going to go from riding the number 19 for an entire day to taking a table in one of those expensive cafes.
While Margot is happily serving imaginary customers, the front door flies open.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Lily calls, the door clicking shut behind her.
Abi stops stirring the white sauce and watches her beautiful Lily, a flash of long red hair and silver jewellery. She waits until Lily’s ready before she opens her arms and holds her. She smells earthy and a little chemical from the art studio and Abi whispers in her ear the words that she never heard as a teenager, ‘Sweetheart, I’m so happy you’re home.’
Lily sits on the cheap plastic countertop, kicking her legs against the cupboards, and begins telling her mum about the other kids in art club, while Abi finishes up the fish pie.