Simon sighs theatrically. ‘The proof’s in the pudding. Someone like Lauren, who has worked for the good old NHS for fifteen years, isn’t as high up as her peers who have chosen not to have children. Fact.’
‘When do you think you’ll go back to work?’ asks Rose in an attempt to change the subject, although Kate is quite sure that she already knows the precise date. Lauren and their mum are close like that.
Lauren throws a glance at her husband. ‘I’m not due back until the end of the summer, but if we need the money, I might go back sooner.’
‘Let’s hope that she still has a job by then,’ says Simon. ‘If the current government have their way, the NHS won’t last for much longer.’
Now, you just wait a minute. This government have gone all-out to secure the future of our healthcare system.
Those are the words she knows her conservative father would normally have said, but there’s a deafening silence. Kate looks at the chair he’d once occupied, now sitting woefully empty in the corner of the room, and feels a very real physical tug on her heart.
It’s coming up to a year since he died, yet Kate can still hear him, still see him, sitting at his place around the table. They’d left his chair empty for the first six months, none of them able to remove it from where they gathered every Sunday, but gradually they’d moved a little this way and that, shuffling ever closer, until suddenly it had been banished to where only cobwebs grew. Kate had been a reluctant visitor ever since, finding the slow removal of the man she adored too painful to accept. Where she’d once looked forward to the family getting together, excited to hear about her father’s week at work and revelling in the heated debates between him and Matt, it had now become an effort. Without her ally, the dynamics seem to have shifted, and the once light-hearted, evenly matched pairings of her and her father versus Lauren and their mother now feel heavily weighted in her sister’s favour.
Whenever Kate calls her mother, Lauren seems to be adding her two pennies’ worth in the background. And on the odd occasion Kate’s dropped in to see the children, Rose is there, preparing dinner in Lauren’s kitchen. Maybe it’s always been this way, but now that her father isn’t round at her flat, helping her out with odd jobs, Kate notices it more.
She’d lost count of how many cups of tea she’d made him on a Saturday morning when Matt was invariably on a weekend shift, and Harry had taken it upon himself to fix a leak in the shower in his DIY-shy son-in-law’s absence. Kate had always managed to find a creaky door for him to oil, or a shelf to put up, despite being more than capable of doing it herself; the pair of them as good as each other for finding excuses to spend time together.
‘I thought I’d get out from under your mother’s feet for a bit longer,’ he used to say when he’d appear on her doorstep on his way back from watching Chelsea play at Stamford Bridge. By then Matt would be home, and they’d all sit and watch the late kick-off on the telly together.
‘Do you think you two will have kids one day?’ her dad had asked once, ever so casually. She and Matt had looked at each other as they weighed up whether to share their desperate struggle. If any member of the family were to know about it, it would only have been him, but then Kate thought of the sadness that would cloud his features as he contemplated his daughter’s childless future. She’d discreetly shaken her head at Matt and said instead, ‘We’d love them when the time’s right.’
‘I’m going to make sure that whenever it happens and whatever it is, it’s going to be a Blues fan,’ he’d said, smiling. ‘It’ll be chanting “blue is the colour, football is the game” before it can say “dada”.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Matt, a lifelong Arsenal fan, had said, laughing. ‘I’m all right with its first words not being daddy, but if you think for one second that its favourite colour is going to be blue instead of red, then I think we might have to put a restraining order in place.’
They’d all laughed together as Kate dared to imagine her father holding the hand of his grandchild, the pair of them wrapped in blue and white scarves as they made their way to the stands. The thought of it had made her want to cry even more than the prospect of it never happening. Now, though, the impossibility of both scenarios threatens to engulf her.
Kate takes her plate into the kitchen, unable to stomach her food or the conversation any longer. She stands facing the units with her hands spread wide on the worktop. Just count to ten, she can hear Matt’s voice saying.
It would be a hell of a lot easier if you were here, she replies silently.
She pictures him in the high-rise tower of the Echo’s offices, pacing up and down, raking a manic hand through his hair as he is forced to go to the wire on tomorrow’s front-page exclusive. Will the government insider get the names to him on time? Will the prostitute want more money, now that Real Madrid are rumoured to be interested in signing her one-night stand?
Despite both of them being in the business for over ten years, the pressure never lessens, and the reliable sources were proving to be ever more unreliable. That’s why Kate had opted to stay where she was, on the Gazette’s showbusiness desk, instead of rising up through the ranks where the stakes and stress increased tenfold. She chose not to acknowledge that the bigger reason for not putting herself forward for promotion was that she’d not expected to be there for that much longer. But that was four years ago, when she’d thought that she’d have to hand over coverage of the next Oscars because she’d be too heavily pregnant to fly to Los Angeles. She honestly hadn’t expected to be reporting on the fashion faux pas of Hollywood actresses ever again, but she’d been there for the last three years in a row, without even the merest hint of a bump.
‘Are you okay, darling?’ asks Rose, coming into the kitchen to fetch more gravy. ‘You look a little pale.’
For the briefest of moments, Kate considers telling her why she might look peaky, why her temper seems to be on a short fuse and why everything everybody’s saying seems to be rubbing her up the wrong way. But no, she and Matt had decided they’d do it together, when there was something to say, and anyway, Rose has already disappeared through the side door and into the garage.
‘I don’t like vegetables,’ says Noah, spitting out a mouthful of chewed-up swede as Kate walks back into the dining room.
‘Come on darling, just a few more for mummy,’ says Lauren patiently.
‘No! Vegetables are yucky.’
Lauren looks at Kate, as if to say, Aren’t you glad you’re not me?
You’re exactly who I want to be, Kate says to herself.
Over the years, she’s fallen into the trap of gauging everyone’s good fortune and sense of self-worth on whether they have children or not; using their ability to have a baby as some kind of currency that makes them rich beyond their wildest dreams. So in her eyes, Lauren is a multimillionaire. Though when she looks a little closer, she notices the finer details of what her sister’s life might really be like. For example, the fact that her husband has almost cleared his plate whilst she is yet to start her dinner, as she’s too busy cutting up carrots for eighteen-month-old Emmy, chasing the peas that Noah is flicking onto the table, and manoeuvring baby Jude’s hungry mouth onto her breast.