Laura lifts an aluminium lid from a plate and her nostrils contract with disgust. 'There is no excuse for food of this quality. It's just laziness. Look at that sandwich. Appalling. The bread is stale. Are you hungry? We'll get you something when we get home. When I spoke to Veronika she mentioned the freezer was very well stocked. She counted eleven lasagnes.'
'Callum's favourite,' says Grace.
'You always said your lasagnes were better fresh.' Her mother pauses and pokes a manicured finger at the offending sandwich and says, 'Did you deliberately eat that samosa last night?'
Grace pleats the thin white hospital blanket between her fingers and breathes. In. Out. In. Out. She doesn't want to think about the failure of the Plan. She just wants to enjoy breathing.
'You're just normally so careful,' says Laura.
Grace manages to speak. 'I forgot. I was distracted.'
'Distracted,' repeats Laura. 'Distracted by what?'
Grace says, 'Do you remember that day when I nearly ate a sesame bar in front of you?'
Laura smiles, as if pleased to be reminded of a favourite joke. 'Of course I do. You were a little minx at that age.'
'I thought you were going to let me die.'
'I sure called your bluff.'
'I seriously thought you were going to let me die.'
'Oh.' Laura rolls her eyes. 'So, what, did I psychologically damage you or something? Is that what you're saying? Because life wasn't easy for me after your father left. All very well for Margie to be the perfect mummy. She had a husband!'
'She had Ron!' Grace is talking in her normal voice. She feels invigorated. 'She wasn't exactly blissfully happy!'
'She wasn't a deserted wife like me.' Laura examines her nails critically and takes some hand-cream out of her handbag.
'Anyway, the fact is, I was never motherly like Margie. She played with dolls while I played with Mum's make-up. So, I'm sorry, OK? Some people just aren't motherly. I've been thinking a lot while I was travelling and I've come to realise that. I wasn't ready to be a mother. I didn't even especially want to be a mother, it was your father who wanted a baby! I hope that's not traumatising for you to hear, but it's the truth, and it's about time we all started telling the truth in this family. And then, when he left us for that bitch who was a size fourteen and couldn't cook to save her life! I never dealt with it, you see. I let it fester like an abscess. I haven't been happy for years. I've wasted my entire life mourning a dentist, for heaven's sake. It hit me while I was looking at the Mona Lisa. I had an epiphany. It was something about that knowing smirk of hers. She's thinking, Yep, all men are bastards but we women just have to knuckle down and get on with it. I decided I needed to make some fundamental changes in my life. I'm going to start by having a chemical peel because my skin is just dreadful-what?'
'You had an epiphany while looking at the Mona Lisa and decided to have a chemical peel?' Grace laughs and it feels like the first taste of fizzy champagne after a long period of non-drinking.
'Well, the chemical peel was just about regaining confidence in my looks. I'm going to start from the outside in. I also want to do a course. In art history, perhaps. Or ceramics. You're not the only arty one in the family, you know. You certainly didn't get your talent from your father's side of the family! And I am going to try and be a good grandmother to Jake. Not a snuggly, cuddly nana but an interested, involved, stylish sort of grandmother. You know, I'll take him to museums. That sort of thing. When he's older, of course. Not now. I won't be so much help with him now. To be honest, I find babies quite terrifying.'
Well, so do I, thinks Grace.
'Of course, you've got Margie to help you.' Laura finishes massaging the cream into her hands and offers the tube to Grace, who shakes her head. She replaces the lid and takes a deep, brave breath. 'Is there something the matter, Grace? Have you been finding it hard coping with Jake? Callum mentioned one of the doctors thought you might have postnatal depression. Look, you don't need to tell me if you don't feel comfortable talking about it. You'd better see a psychiatrist, don't you think? You can tell him. Or her. Which would you prefer? A woman would be more intelligent, obviously.'
Grace says, 'I didn't know you carried around an EpiPen. Callum said you were so calm when you used it.'
'When you were younger I used to practise giving injections to a banana. I was a nervous wreck at the thought. It's not that difficult, of course. Any fool could do it. You should have had your own in your handbag! But then, I suppose if you were trying to kill yourself, that was the point.' Laura's face crumbles slightly and Grace notices spidery wrinkles above her mother's upper lip. They make her feel protective towards her-big-sisterly.
Laura says, 'You're not going to try and do it again, are you?'
'I forgot the samosas had walnuts in them,' insists Grace.
'Really?' asks her mother.
'Really.'
Laura looks at her fingernails again and says, 'Grace, I wasn't going to let you kill yourself when you were thirteen. I had my hand hovering over my bread roll ready to throw it at you and knock the sesame bar from your hand. I can assure you it was never even going to get close to your mouth.'
'Oh.' Grace's voice sounds hoarse.
'I know I don't exactly qualify as mother-of-the-year material and I know I made some silly mistakes, but you're my daughter. I would have died for you, for heaven's sake.'
Grace examines her own fingernails.
'I still would. That's just, you know, the way it is.'
Grace looks up and meets her mother's eyes. Laura smiles uneasily and then brightens, peering closer at Grace's face. 'Your eyebrows look like they could do with a wax. We could get Margie to mind Jake one day and you and I could go and have facials done. Would you like that?'
'That would be nice.'
It would be awful. Grace hates facials, they make her feel claustrophobic, but still, the principle of the idea is nice.
They lapse into silence. Grace watches her mother twiddling the red stone on her new necklace, glancing around the room with that familiar mix of tension and disdain. She imagines Laura, about the same age that Grace is now, sitting alone in the kitchen, jamming the EpiPen into a banana, two lines of fear etched between her eyes. Grace breathes in and out, in and out. Oxygen flows in through her nostrils and expands her chest. There is a vase of flowers sitting on the windowsill. The flowers are a deep grape colour, similar to the colour of Aunt Rose's new jumper. She'd like to paint them and discuss mixing the right colour with Rose. She would quite like a cup of tea. She is looking forward to having a shower and washing her hair when she gets home.
Beneath the rhythm of her breathing she can just discern a whispery thought: Maybe it's going to be OK.
Gublet McDublet came back from the moon to find that his mum had been off having a chemical peel and her face was all red and flaky.
'Oh, Gublet,' she said sadly. 'Why did you run away to the moon? You silly billy, didn't you know I'd miss you?'
Gublet just gave her an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, because actually he hadn't known that at all.
'You seem glum today, Sophie darling,' says Rose as she's leaving, wrapping her new pashmina around her.
'I guess I've got a hangover from all that mulled wine,' says Sophie. 'And I feel especially ugly today with this horrible cold sore.'
'Oh, well, it will get better,' says Rose. 'You're a very pretty girl.'
'Hmmmph,' says Sophie disbelievingly, like a sulky teenager.
'Well, of course you are. Oh, you know, there's something I keep forgetting to tell you! I was thinking about you the other day and your search for the right man, so to speak, and you know what I suddenly remembered? I remembered that one day Connie said to me that she'd discovered the perfect man for you. The darndest thing is I can't remember who it was-although I do remember thinking that I sort of agreed with her, although I felt disloyal to Thomas.'
'Was it Rick?' Sophie touches her cold sore. 'Or Ian, perhaps?'
&
nbsp; 'I really can't remember who it was. I was just thinking about how funny it was that Connie was so convinced that this man was your soul mate!'
Wonderful. Fabulous. Oh, what does it matter anyway? The thought of meeting a new man at this stage, while she's still so raw over Callum, seems ridiculous and pointless.
'His name's on the tip of my tongue! It will come to me. I'll call you as soon as I think of it,' says Rose. 'Of course, you might not fancy the fellow at all!'
Rose kisses her on the cheek and Sophie breathes in her powdery scent.
'Thank you for telling me the story about Alice and Jack.'
'My pleasure, darling.'
56
It is the weekend after the Anniversary Night and Callum is taking Grace to see their house in the mountains. They haven't been up for months and he's hoping that they will be pleasantly surprised by how far it has progressed since they've seen it. Their builder has assured him that they will be thrilled, but Callum no longer likes the builder, in fact he hates him, and has secret fantasies about knocking him out with a plank of wood, sending that smug orange hard-hat flying.
Jake is in his capsule in the back seat, singing to himself. This week he has discovered his voice-a wonderful toy capable of creating a whole spectrum of interesting noises. When Jake is making his sounds he squints his eyes in deep concentration, which is exactly the same expression that Callum used to see on Grace's face when he interrupted her working on one of her Gublet paintings. It twists his heart.
He and Grace are all tentative tiptoes around each other at the moment. They're so polite it's almost comical, but Callum can't relax because he's lost trust in his own character. He is completely appalled by himself. He thought he was superior to the sort of sleazy, shallow man who gets drunk and kisses another woman just a few months after his wife gives birth to their first child. He thought he was more evolved than that. And it wasn't just the mulled wine. He actually teetered on the brink of an affair. An evil, lecherous part of his mind was thinking it all out: Where can we go? Her house? Now? He'd wanted to sleep with Sophie. He still wants to sleep with Sophie. He wants to talk to Sophie, listen to CDs with Sophie, dance with Sophie, make love to Sophie, make her laugh, tease her...oh for Christ's sake. He is driving along with his wife beside him and his son in the back seat, having fantasies about another woman. But he doesn't want to leave Grace. Oh no. Not at all. That's not an option. All these treacherous thoughts about Sophie seem quite separate from his helpless, hopeless love for Grace. He wants to have his cake and eat it too-just like every fat, balding, middle-aged, unfaithful businessman throughout history. He is a tired cliche. A dirty joke. He has even caught himself thinking whiny, self-pitying thoughts like, But Grace doesn't get me the way Sophie does. My wife doesn't understand me.
And he doesn't understand her. He doesn't know what she's thinking any more. He doesn't know if she does have postnatal depression or not. She says she doesn't. She says the doctor who suggested that had only spoken to her for ten minutes and had no idea what she was talking about. She says she's fine. She smiles her beautiful smile and says don't worry.
He will never forget the panic he felt when she had her allergic reaction on the Anniversary Night. It was nightmarish. It was punishment for kissing Sophie. He doesn't know if Grace ate the samosa on purpose, like Laura is suggesting, because each time he goes to ask Grace, he's terrified she'll say, 'Yes, I did,' and then he'll have to say, 'Why? Why did you do that?' And what if she answers, 'Because I saw you kissing Sophie'? It gives him a stomach-lurching feeling of vertigo just thinking about it. So he says nothing at all. He acts as if it was just an accident, as if the doctor never mentioned postnatal depression, as if they're just a normal married couple, as if everything is fine, as if they still have sex, as if they still touch each other, as if a few weeks ago she didn't say, 'You don't even know me.' He talks to her each day like he's reading lines from a script. 'Good morning!' 'How did you sleep?' 'Shall I put the baby down?'
He speaks more naturally to the man at the service station where he buys his petrol each month than he does to his own wife.
He tries out one of his jovial-husband lines now. 'Do you want to stop for a coffee before we see the house?'
'No, I'm OK,' answers Grace. 'Unless you want to stop?'
'Only if you want to.'
'I'm fine.'
'Well, I'm fine too.'
Callum clenches the steering wheel and looks straight ahead at the highway peeling away before him.
57
'Oh dear. Oh damn. Where is she, I wonder? Oh. Ah. OK. Well. Here we go. HELLO! SOPHIE! IT'S ROSE! I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT I REMEMBERED THE NAME OF THAT FELLOW CONNIE HAD PICKED OUT FOR YOU. IT'S CALLUM'S FRIEND AND...oh dear, I don't think this silly machine is working, is it? HELLO? Oh sugar!'
58
Sophie wakes up early and goes to the bathroom to look at the progress of her cold sore, which looks quite pretty now, just like a smudge of pale pink lipstick. It's a pity all those horrible, humiliating feelings for Callum can't just dry up and fade away too, until there's nothing left but a nice, socially acceptable smudge of friendship.
As she's cleaning her teeth she decides to give herself her own version of electric-shock aversion therapy. Every time she thinks of Callum she will pinch herself hard above the elbow. She will train her mind like a rat in a maze. Today should be a good day to start training because she has something new to preoccupy her mind: a new life. Yesterday, at yum cha, she and her mother unexpectedly came up with a new plan for Sophie's career.
Gretel had started talking about that 'fraudulent psychic' they'd met at the Korean baths, and 'who ever heard of a caramel aura' and 'why would Sophie, of all people, need a positive career-change when she was already doing so well in her career!'
That's when Sophie admitted that well, actually, she'd been coasting for the last couple of years at work and that, while she still enjoyed it, she'd really gone as far as she could go there and it wasn't really challenging her any more, and all of a sudden she was talking to her mother about how she'd always thought that when she had children-ha!-she would give up work and do something part-time, something completely different, like teaching a wine-tasting course, or perhaps using her HR skills for something different, like career counselling for teenagers or hardened (handsome, unshaven) young crims, and how she'd quite like to play violin again in a string quartet like she did when she was at uni. Her mother had said that she might have had some unrealistic ideas about just how much spare time she'd have with a baby, but seeing as Sophie owned a house outright and didn't need to worry about her mortgage payments any more, why didn't she just resign from work and take some time off and pursue some-if not all!-of these ideas.
'Why not?' cried Gretel, excitedly spilling her green tea.
'Why not?' said Sophie, thoughtfully spearing a chopstick through her steamed pork bun.
And just like that, the fraudulent psychic's prophesy came true, and today Sophie is sitting down with her notepad to consider an entirely new lifestyle and wondering why she'd never thought of it before. She thinks about how interested Callum will be and immediately pinches her arm so hard it brings tears to her eyes. She puts on her Eva Cassidy CD and thinks about what Callum said about this album-and pinches her arm again. She would have thought she might have picked things up faster than the average rat.
She is standing at the sink, pouring herself a cup of tea, when she sees a strange man standing on the balcony, with his face pressed up against the window, peering in. She jerks back in fright, spilling boiling water over her hand and dropping the mug, which shatters on the floor.
Instantly the back door swings open and a tall, lanky, pale man is suddenly filling all the space in the kitchen, saying, 'I'm so sorry for scaring you. I thought there was nobody home. I'm not an axe murderer, I'm Callum's friend, although I suppose Callum could be friends with an axe murderer, who knows,' and while he's talking he has taken hold of Sophie's wrist and is holdin
g her hand under the cold running water. 'Oh dear, I hope it's not too bad. I've probably scarred you for life. And was that mug your favourite?'
'I think it's going to be OK.' Sophie smiles up at him and he smiles back. He has a sad, accepting sort of smile, as if he knows life probably isn't going to work out but he's doing the best he can.
'I'm Ed,' he says. 'And you're Sophie. And I think I knew you a very long time ago. Do you remember me?'
And suddenly that mournful smile is so sweetly familiar.
'Eddie Ripple,' says Sophie, and to her own surprise she takes her wet, sore hand out from under the tap and stands on her toes so she can throw her arms around his neck.
Grace and Callum are making the bed together. He says, 'Ed is going to stop by at Sophie's place and see if she wants him to quote on painting it. He thinks he knows her.' Grace lifts the mattress and tucks in her side of the sheet. Sophie sent around a big bunch of flowers after the Anniversary Night, but Grace hasn't seen her yet and it's odd that she hasn't been around. It's also odd that Callum hasn't mentioned her before now. It seems to Grace that something must have happened between Sophie and Callum that night, and it makes her feel guilty because whatever it was, Grace made it happen. They were the unwitting puppets in Grace's plan to give away her husband to another woman and step out of her life. Then again, they're not made of wood they do have their own brains, they didn't have to fall in with Grace's plans quite so willingly!
Callum says, 'Do you remember how your Aunt Connie thought Ed and Sophie would make a good match?'
'Did she?' says Grace. 'I don't remember. Oh dear. Ed Ripple. Aunt Rose always said she thought Connie's matchmaking skills left a lot to be desired.'
'I'm sure Sophie will meet somebody herself,' says Callum.
Grace looks up and meets his eyes on the other side of the bed, and he looks away and pretends to be interested in tucking in the corner of the sheet perfectly. So, she's right. Something did happen that night. She wonders what it was. Just a kiss? Surely they didn't sleep together? Where would they have gone? Aunt Connie's house? She imagines Callum kissing Sophie (she'd have to stand up on tippy-toes, which would be so adorable!), his hand caressing the back of her creamy white neck. When he kisses, he does this thing with his thumb on the back of your neck, a slow, delicate, circular motion, which used to drive Grace into a frenzy of weak-kneed desire when they first started going out. And Sophie, what would she be doing? Saying something funny and cute? Blushing? She probably has kissing techniques of her own. She probably does something really unusual and stylish with her tongue. Grace has no kissing techniques. She just lets Callum kiss her and enjoys herself.