children’s.’
Eve was shocked. She’d only come because she didn’t want to let her friend down. Now Clare was stitching her up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lily had frozen, her latte halfway to her lips.
‘Don’t look so surprised.’ Clare seemed almost pleased by their reaction. ‘When you’ve had one like ours, you’re hardly going to side instinctively with the stepmonsters.’
‘Oh for crying out loud,’ Lily said, banging her cup down hard enough to slop coffee over the edge. ‘If you’re going to start whingeing on about Annabel again, I’m leaving.’
‘I’m not. I’m just saying, remember what it’s like from the kids’ perspective. They don’t ask for a stepmother.’
‘But we barely even saw her,’ Lily said crossly.
‘Yes, we did.’
‘No, we didn’t.’
Eve started to rummage in her bag, looking for her mobile, a lipstick, anything to remove her mentally, if not physically, from this conversation.
‘We did. What about that trip to the cinema and…’
‘Yes. I know!’ Lily almost shouted. ‘The pizza from hell.’
‘Maybe I should go?’ Eve started to get up.
‘No!’ Both sisters rounded on her so swiftly the students crowded around the next table turned and stared.
‘Dad left us for the stepmonster,’ Clare resumed her story as soon as Eve had returned to her seat.
Eve knew what was coming; she’d heard it all before.
Drunken midnight rants at their student house, with one ear on a baby monitor, segueing into hissed updates every time a birthday or Christmas was missed. When her father began missing Louisa’s birthdays too, Clare was livid. The fact he didn’t even know his granddaughter existed was deemed irrelevant.
Clare’s hatred was impressive in its consistency. Annabel was a blonde-bobbed, designer-clad bitch who stole her father from under his children’s very noses. Her father wasn’t exactly an innocent party in this particular fairy tale, but Clare never seemed to mention that.
Stealing him, however, wasn’t Annabel’s number one crime.
Her number one crime, the sin that led to rows, recriminations, and ultimately an estrangement lasting nineteen years and counting, was that Annabel had tried to usurp their mother. When, as Clare never failed to point out, they had a perfectly good one, already.
The scene of Annabel’s crime was an Italian restaurant in north-west London. And the way Clare told it, it began with Annabel sending Clare and Lily to the toilets to wash their hands before eating, and went downhill from there. Couldn’t they sit up straight? Why weren’t they using napkins? Hadn’t their mother told them how to hold a knife properly?
The list grew longer with each telling.
Finish their mouthfuls before starting another. Surely their mother didn’t allow them to leave their crusts at home? (The answer was no. But what self-respecting thirteen-year-old would admit that?)
When the woman asked Clare if she’d ever heard of the words please and thank you, lunch turned ugly. Who could blame her, Clare said, if she accidentally knocked an almostfull glass of Coca-Cola over her father’s girlfriend’s smart cream trousers? (She was thirteen, for crying out loud. Thirteen and trapped. Who wouldn’t do the same?)
Lily sighed loudly.
But as Eve pictured a teenage Clare nudging her elbow towards that glass, it wasn’t her friend she saw. The skinny face that stared defiantly as sticky brown liquid splashed across the table was Hannah’s. And suddenly the story didn’t seem as clear-cut.
‘Liam’s got a little girl, hasn’t he?’ Eve asked Lily. Her attempt to move the subject on could hardly be less subtle. ‘How old is she?’
‘Rosie,’ Lily said. She’d obviously planned to say as little as possible, and leave as quickly as she could, but even she looked grateful that Eve had stopped Clare in her tracks. ‘She’s three. Adorable, in a girly way. Yours?’
‘Not really mine.’
‘They never are,’ Lily said, sounding far older than her years. ‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it? So, how old are they?’
‘Hannah’s twelve, going on fifteen. Sophie’s nine and Alfie’s five and two months. And don’t you dare forget the two months!’ Eve smiled. ‘I’ve only met them once. And that was terrifying enough.’
‘Three of them! I can barely cope with Rosie.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Eve said. ‘I had no idea it would be so hard. They’re just kids, after all.’
‘Just kids? ’ Clare said. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Of course,’ Eve smiled weakly. ‘I wanted them to like me so much. That’s why I bought them the books,’ she explained to Lily. ‘That was my big mistake, right there. I shouldn’t have bothered. Especially without running it by Ian first. I opened myself right up and now I’m afraid I’ve blown it.’
‘What does Ian say?’ Lily asked.
Eve stared at her hands. ‘I haven’t told him,’ she admitted. ‘We haven’t really seen each other properly since. And I don’t want to worry him.’
Don’t want him to think there might be a problem, more like, she thought.
‘Is that usual?’ Lily asked.
‘What?’
‘Going a fortnight without seeing him properly?’
‘Not really, but it’s not unusual. It depends on both our work, his childcare arrangements—he has an au pair, but he tries to be home as much as possible to cover homework—that kind of thing.
‘We talk about it all the time,’ Eve continued. ‘How to spend more time together, I mean. But Ian wants to take it slowly—for the sake of the kids. It’s a difficult balancing act. I’m trying to understand, but it’s not easy.
‘So much of our relationship has been like this,’ she continued. ‘Cups of coffee, quick drinks on his way home, dinner and the odd evening at my place. We’ve managed a night away a couple of times, but overnighters are rare…Understandably enough,’ she added, for fear of sounding bitter. ‘They’re going to their grandparents’ in a couple of weeks, so he’ll stay with me then.’
She felt like a teenager, aware her face lit up at the mere thought of a whole twenty-four hours together.
Said out loud it sounded paltry, embarrassing. A grown woman excited by a Saturday night sleepover. ‘It’s the kids,’ she repeated. ‘He wants to ease them in gently.’
It was a well-worn line. One she trotted out every time anyone
