of the previous day cleaning and polishing Number 27 The Beeches from top to bottom; immaterial that she’d used up her precious day off work cleaning instead of swanning around the shops buying last-minute bits and bobs for her holiday. She’d toyed with the idea of going into Debenhams to see if she could get one of those black uplift bikinis she’d spotted in a magazine. Even if you were as flat as a pancake boob-wise, this bikini would give you a cleavage that’d take the sight out of people’s eyes, or so the magazine claimed.
As the only way Emma’s cleavage was going to take somebody’s eye out was if a wire from one of her AA cups escaped and actually poked them in the eye, she desperately needed a new uplift bikini.
But as usual, the only overdeveloped part of her person, namely guilt, had swung into action and put the kibosh on the shopping trip. Emma’s sense of guilt was like a medical textbook description of the heart: a large muscle which contracts unconsciously. Guilt at leaving Peter on his own at home for an entire week while she sailed down the Nile with her parents overcame her desire for a skilfully padded bikini, so she’d given Debenhams a miss and spring-cleaned the house instead. Peter, who wouldn’t notice if he had to eat his dinner off the table because they’d run out of plates, would be unaware of her feverish scrubbing. However, Emma’s Guiltometer had worked out that an entire day of cleaning would go a long way (fifty-five per cent) to making up for having a holiday without her beloved husband. Buying him an enormous present she couldn’t afford and cooking him his favourite dinners for a week after her return would almost compensate for the remaining forty-five per cent.
Sadly, she’d forgotten to buy new rubber gloves for the cleaning fest so her hands were now dry as an overcooked chicken thanks to scrubbing the toilet bowls with bleach. But the house was a veritable palace, with clean carpets, clean loos and not an unironed item of clothing anywhere.
All that and her mother was still tut-tutting over the only visible blemish in the entire premises. Emma could just picture Pete wrenching open the couscous and eating it with his finger beside the fridge that morning, shoving the greasy tub back in carelessly afterwards before grabbing the orange juice carton for breakfast. He adored couscous – and he hated shepherd’s pie with a vengeance. Still, what was the point of telling her mother that? Anne-Marie O’Brien wouldn’t listen: she never listened to anyone. Except her husband, James P. O’Brien, boss of O’Brien’s Heating Contractors, master of all he surveyed and the person who absolutely always had to have the last word on every subject.
Emma sat down wearily on one of her kitchen chairs and examined her newly painted nails. The rosy pink colour she’d bought for her holiday was pretty but still didn’t camouflage either the bleach damage or the nibbled bits. She’d chewed her index fingernail into an ugly stub during a long phone conversation the night before where her mother had fussed about the heat in Egypt, the food, the locals, the thought of covering up her shoulders at tourist sites and ‘…would your father be able to get proper milk for his tea.’ That idea had summoned up a bizarre mental picture of her father trying to milk a camel, him red and sweating as he stood with his teacup in one hand and a camel teat in the other.
She nibbled a stray sticking up bit of index fingernail. Well, who’d be looking at her bloody nails anyway. She felt too tired to care: she hoped she could sleep on the plane to Egypt. If she could steal one of her mother’s Valium tablets, she could blank out the entire journey.
While her mother busied herself with the fridge, Emma surreptitiously touched her breasts through the soft fabric of her denim dungarees. She’d been doing it all day, giving herself a pleasurable thrill that had nothing to do with sex. This thrill was provided by her biological clock heaving a sigh of relief. Nervously, she slid one hand under her T-shirt to reach her bare breast and touched it cautiously. Sensitive, definitely.
They’d looked bigger in the mirror earlier, she was sure of it. The nipples were bigger, weren’t they? Yes, yes, yes, she grinned. She was pregnant. It was quite incredible how happy she felt when she thought about the baby, her baby. The glow filled her up inside, like that advert for breakfast cereal where the boy cycling to school was lit from within because he’d eaten his Ready Brek that morning. Emma felt lit from within with a combination of sheer joy and relief. Relief that after so long hoping, it was finally happening. She wanted to dance around the room with delight, but her natural caution advised her to be careful. Say nothing to jinx it. Wait until you’re sure and then tell darling Pete the wonderful news, she told herself. All she had to do was get through the hateful week with her parents and then everything would be wonderful. Her secret would keep her going during the next week. It was only a week, after all.
Ignoring the ‘this place is a mess’ monologue, she picked up a pad from the table and began writing a quick note to Pete, telling him she loved him and would miss him desperately.
‘Well, madam, having a rest while your poor mother works as usual.’
The sound of her father’s voice made Emma jump to her feet guiltily. She felt as if she really was doing something wrong, the way she felt when she passed a police car with a radar gun out the window, even if she was only crawling along at thirty miles an hour. His very presence could plunge her into nervous tension, even now when she was so very hopeful about her precious baby.
‘Anne-Marie, there’s really no need to be doing Emma’s dirty work for her,’ Jimmy O’Brien said, treating his elder daughter to a disapproving stare. ‘She’s big enough and ugly enough to do her own housework. I won’t have you skivvying for her.’
‘I wasn’t skivvying,’ said her mother, her voice losing its liveliness and becoming weary.
‘Mother was just rubbing up something spilt,’ Emma protested, feeling all her good humour fade away as it so inevitably did whenever her father was involved. ‘I cleaned that fridge out yesterday…’
But her father was no longer listening. Striding over to the bin, he knocked out the old tobacco at the bottom of his pipe and began to fill his wife in on his recent activities.
‘I’ve filled the car with petrol, checked the air in the tyres and put in half a litre of oil,’ he announced. ‘We’re all shipshape, if you’re ready to go, Anne-Marie.’
You’d think we were driving to bloody Egypt, Emma thought with irritation.
For about the hundredth time since the trip had been booked, she wondered why she was going. It had been her father’s idea: the holiday of a lifetime to celebrate his and his wife’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Emma couldn’t figure out why he’d picked such an exotic destination as Egypt. Her father was a man who, for the past fifteen years, had been perfectly content to go to Portugal, sit watching sports coverage in a bar and comment loudly on how downmarket the place was getting what with all the football hooligans and brazen young girls running around with suitcases full of condoms looking for men.
‘Tarts,’ he’d say darkly every time a gang of carefree, tanned girls in skimpy T-shirts and bum-skimming shorts appeared on the scene.
Emma used to gaze wistfully at these modern babes: she was damn sure they wouldn’t still be going on holiday with their parents when they were in their twenties, too afraid of the furore to suggest a holiday with their boyfriends. Until she’d been married, she and Pete had only been away to the sun once when she’d pretended to be away with some girlfriends.
His comments about how young people’s standards were dropping notwithstanding, her father appeared to enjoy Portugal. But one holiday programme presenter enthusing over a Nile cruise had changed everything. Jimmy had ordered a vast assortment of brochures and spent many happy hours over Sunday lunch reading out the bits he was most interested in.
‘Listen
