PART ONE
1
ENGLAND
LILY: mum’s disappeared ;-)
JULIA: ???????!!!
FELICITY: What?
LILY: am at the house now. she’s gone!
JULIA: gone where?
LILY: on an adventure
JULIA: hahahaha
FELICITY: Will someone please tell me what is going on?
LILY: mum’s gone to greece
JULIA: nice one
LILY: i know ju - cool huh?
FELICITY: When? How? Why?
LILY: this morning - by plane - don’t know
FELICITY: Well did Dad know?
JULIA: has she left him? ;-)
LILY: hahahaha - no she’s coming back on Friday
FELICITY: What?????
LILY: thats what dad said
FELICITY: But she’s having Hugo today.
JULIA: not any more she isn’t!!
FELICITY: Very helpful Ju. Shit. Got to go and sort childcare.
2
Felicity Nightingale hurled her mobile phone on to the freshly made bed, raised her hands to her forehead and gently massaged her temples with her thumbs. She forced herself to breathe steadily through her mouth until her heart began to beat a little more slowly. Wasn’t it a pressure point, the temple? How hard did she have to press before she did herself some damage? She pressed a little harder.
The garish green display of the clock radio read 7.37. On Mondays she dropped Hugo off at her mother’s at 8.00 on her way to the train station. That was the arrangement and had been since she first went back to work. It never varied, week in, week out, which was just how Felicity liked things. She knew where she was with an arrangement.
But now what was she meant to do? Her mother couldn’t just disappear off to Greece without so much as a by-your-leave when she was supposed to be taking care of her grandson. It was ridiculous. And highly inconvenient.
To make matters worse, the nanny had gone to a funeral. Supposedly. Felicity wasn’t entirely convinced that this was true, but Marie-Claude had chosen to clear the time off with Richard and not her (a fact that made her suspicious on its own) and Richard had just taken her request at face value and agreed.
Felicity knew that if she had spoken to the nanny herself her intuition would have sniffed out any lies, but Richard seemed far less adept at spotting untruths (which was quite ironic in the circumstances). Either that or he really didn’t care one way or the other. This was probably more like it. They both knew that making alternative childcare arrangements for their son would tumble into her lap come what may, particularly as he was in London again and not due back until Friday. No – this lack of her mother and their arrangement was very much Felicity’s problem.
Quickly she ran through her options as she traced a neat red line of lipstick around her mouth. She could call in sick, but she was supposed to be at an important board meeting and she wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to be in attendance, even if her opinion was rarely sought or considered. Feigning illness was not on the cards.
She could ask her sister Lily to have Hugo. Lily would just absorb another child at her glitter-encrusted kitchen table without even batting an eyelid and it would suit Hugo, too. He loved spending time with his Aunt Lily and all his cousins, although Felicity had noticed a distinct decline in his table manners after a day spent at their house. Lily was unhelpfully relaxed about that kind of thing, but Felicity felt very strongly that it was important he knew how to hold a knife and fork properly. Her son might only be four, but it was never too early to learn basic etiquette and very hard to undo bad habits.
Her sister’s lack of table-manner training wasn’t what was putting her off, though. If Felicity asked Lily to help, then Lily would tell Julia and that would doubtless lead to one of their little ‘twin chats’ behind her back. Even when they’d been children themselves, Felicity had hated it when her siblings did that. It always left her feeling excluded and alone.
Time was ticking on. If she wasn’t careful she was going to miss her train. It was no good. She was all out of options. She would have to leave Hugo with her father.
Felicity let out a deep and heartfelt sigh as she thought of the number of instructions she would need to provide him with to get him through a day with his grandson. For a start, her father had no idea what children should eat and would supply ice cream at 10.30 a.m. if Hugo asked him for it. There would no doubt be messy play, commenced willy-nilly without a thought for Hugo’s clothes, even though she knew that her mother kept a little plastic art shirt for exactly this eventuality. And she would have to make it crystal clear that the park was totally out. Her father could not be trusted to watch Hugo properly. Last time they went, Felicity had caught Hugo at the very top of the climbing frame with her father just standing at the bottom and egging him on. God only knows what would have happened had he fallen from that height. In fact, Felicity had had nightmares about the various possibilities for days afterwards.
She checked her reflection in the mirror, smacking her newly painted lips together, and removed a stray blob of red from the corner of her mouth with the tip of her little finger. Perfect. Then she reached for her mobile and rang her parents’ house. At least, she thought as she waited for it to be answered, she could quiz her father about what on earth was going on with her mother.
3
Julia sat in a traffic jam and laughed out loud. This was all too perfect. Never, in Julia’s entire thirty-five years on this planet, had her mother done something so spontaneous, so, well, just plain out of character. Taking off to Greece without saying anything first? It was unheard of. Where was the rota of who would call in on their father, which pre-cooked meals he would eat when, which plants needed watering by how much and full instructions on the television programmes to record in her absence? She hadn’t even left them the phone number of where she was staying. It was all so deliciously unlike her.
And poor Felicity. Julia obviously hadn’t seen her face as the situation unfolded via WhatsApp, but she could picture it nonetheless. Priceless. She knew she shouldn’t mock – she loved Felicity, despite all her flaws and insecurities – but what she wouldn’t have paid to be a fly on the wall at the moment when her sister’s carefully laid Hugo plans had all come crashing down around her.
She had half-expected to receive a distress call from Felicity herself, but it appeared that she fell quite a long way down the pecking order when it came to the care of her nephew. Lily had probably just whisked him up along with her five and saved the day calmly and without fuss. If she’d been in a different mood, Julia might have allowed this to niggle at her. Just because she had no children of her own didn’t mean that she was incapable of looking after one. In many ways, and definitely in Felicity’s eyes, the fact that she was a GP should have served to bump her up the rankings somewhat, and yet her phone had remained tellingly silent. Still, Julia couldn’t get herself in a steam just because she was languishing at the bottom of her sister’s ‘go to’ list. She was too far intrigued about what her mother was up to.
She pulled the car into her parents’ road, the road where she had lived until she left for university. Even though she had now been gone for longer than she had been there, it always felt like coming home and she absorbed the familiar houses, the pavements where she’d played and the copper beech tree that leaned dangerously across the street, still threatening the telephone wires as it had done for decades. The warm evening light shimmered through its branches as she came to a stop in her parents’ driveway.