‘I am not running,’ began Callie. ‘I am going to stay here and wait until Jason comes back from wherever he is and fixes it all—’
‘Fixes it? This won’t be fixed. Tomorrow morning, every newspaper in the country is going to be at your door wanting to know all about it,’ said Brenda harshly. ‘Wake up, Callie. I am your friend and I am telling you it’s all over. You have to get out. Now. For your sake and for Poppy’s.’
Poppy.
‘More brandy,’ said Callie, Brenda’s words beginning to penetrate. ‘I need another one.’
‘Not a good idea—’ began Brenda.
‘I don’t care,’ hissed Callie. ‘I need something.’
Brenda watched silently as Callie half filled the brandy glass and downed it, wincing as it burned.
Callie stood up and looked around her kitchen, the cosy kitchen that she’d insisted on decorating herself. The rest of the house was where Jason had supervised the interior décor, places that were fit for proving to people how rich, successful and gracious the Reynolds family were. It was nothing like the home she’d grown up in, a small terraced council house in Ballyglen, where the whole Sheridan family of four, and her aunt, had lived.
Callie felt an ache deep in her heart.
I wish my family were here. I wish my mother was here.
Sam
Early on the morning of her fortieth birthday, Sam Kennedy was woken up by the phone, and not by her beloved Baby Bean pressing a foot or an elbow into her bladder, which had been the case for the past few months.
She struggled out of her cosy cocoon of duvet, disentangling herself from Ted’s long warm leg which was comfortably entwined with her own, and answered.
‘Happy birthday, Samantha!’ said her mother.
‘Who’s phoning at this hour on a Saturday?’ groaned Ted, pulling his pillow over his sleek dark head, and then, remembering what day it was, pulling it off. ‘Happy fortieth birthday, honey,’ he said, putting an arm around his wife’s very pregnant body and kissing her gently on the shoulder through the curtain of her long tangle of untameable caramel curls. ‘Love you.’ He leaned down and kissed her bump, covered with an unsexy floral nightie. ‘Love you, Bean.’
Sam never stopped loving the gesture: Ted bending from his great height to kiss her and her belly with complete adoration. He was six foot two to Sam’s five foot three and their wedding photos had made her realise how incongruous they might have looked together had Sam not been addicted to very high heels. With a four-inch heel, her pocket Venus body in a simple lace dress had looked just right beside her long, lean husband. Up close, her head fitted perfectly against his broad chest and if he sometimes whirled her round with her feet off the floor, nobody noticed.
‘Love you, too,’ Sam murmured now.
‘Samantha, are you still there?’ Her mother’s voice sounded irritated at having been made to wait.
‘Yes, and thank you for calling, Mother,’ Sam said into the phone, not mentioning that pregnant women longed for their Saturday morning lie-in.
‘You sound odd. I hope you’re not getting maudlin about your age,’ her mother went on in the cool tones that commanded respect in St Margaret’s School for Girls, where she’d reigned as headmistress for thirty years. ‘Age is merely a number.’
Six-thirty on a Saturday is merely a number, too, thought Sam but didn’t say it.
Instead, she mildly pointed out: ‘I was asleep.’
‘Right. I trust you’re well and have a good day planned,’ said her mother with the same formality she probably used to address the school’s board of governors. ‘Again, happy birthday. Here’s your father. Goodbye.’
With that unmaternal sign-off, the phone was handed over.
‘Happy birthday, lovie. Sorry for the early call but . . .’
‘I get it, Dad,’ said Sam, warmly. ‘Early morning swim? The garden?’
Her parents lived close to Dublin Bay, where hardy souls swam in all weathers, Sam’s mother among them.
‘The former,’ her father said. They’d communicated this way for years: Sam would speak and he’d answer in the ‘yes/no/absolutely’ code that was hardly Enigma-machine-quality but worked for them.
Her dad, Liam, was as mild, chatty and forbearing as her mother, Jean, was cool, uncommunicative and distant. It was one of the great mysteries of Sam’s life as to how the two of them had ever married. That they’d stayed married, she put down to the social mores of the times and some concept both parents had about staying together for their daughters.
Nobody talked about the ice-cold rows between her parents when she’d been growing up, and now, this part of life appeared to have been airbrushed out of family history. It was like the fridge magnet said: If anyone asks, pretend we come from a nice, normal family.
Only she and Joanne, her younger sister, talked about the past now.
Their parents’ marriage of opposites had made Sam determined to be nothing like her mother and to marry a man she adored, rather than one she merely tolerated.
She’d succeeded. Nestling closer to her beloved Ted in bed, she thought that, yet again, being with him should feature in the number one slot on her daily gratitude list.
‘How are you feeling and how’s the little baba?’ her father asked.
‘Wriggling,’ said Sam, putting a hand automatically on her hugely swollen belly and smiling, another automatic move. She’d been smiling since she’d found out that she was pregnant, which was astonishing because, after three failed IVF cycles in her early thirties, she’d assumed that babies were out of the question.
Ted had been smiling pretty much non-stop too, a giant grin that brought out that dimple in his otherwise acutely masculine face, a dimple Sam really hoped their baby would inherit.
After many painful years of longing, they’d finally somehow come to terms with the fact that they were going to be child-free people, and that a dog/cat/hamster was the answer – or so everyone said.
They would deal with the grief, they would not let it part them. They would do their best to move on.
‘Let’s be happy with each other,’ they’d agreed.
So they’d got two dogs, Ted began the marathon running that had been put on hold during years of planned babymaking schedules (the fertility-drug years) and Sam filled her weekends with botanical watercolours and the odd yoga class, so she could learn again to love the body she’d felt had betrayed her.
And then suddenly, the previously infertile Sam had become pregnant.
Incredibly, miraculously pregnant with no help from anyone apart from Ted.