that Edmund, who noticed everything, would undoubtedly blame Mel and that this would not look good on her file. Mel knew that herself. And mistakes on the file of a working mother were multiplied by a factor of ten. Being a working mother was like being a marked woman in Lorimar. Once a woman had children, no matter what sort of ambitious powerhouse she’d been beforehand, she was living on borrowed time afterwards. One child was seen to be careless, two was asking for trouble.
The fact that Hilary herself had three children was not a help. In all the years Mel had been working for Hilary, she’d never seen her boss either leave early over some child emergency or take a sick-baby day off.
‘How does she do it?’ Vanessa used to ask in September, when she was up to her eyeballs getting Conal sorted out with school books and uniform, desperately trying to take half-days here and there, while Hilary was at her desk at all times, mercilessly watching out for people skiving off.
‘They can’t be kids, they’re robots,’ Mel decided. ‘That’s the only answer.’
‘Or is it having a husband who works from home and a nanny who gets paid more than the chairman of Microsoft?’ asked Vanessa.
‘You could have something there,’ Mel agreed.
By five, Mel had returned all her phone calls and was finishing a batch of letters. There was still a report on the month’s publicity activity to write for Hilary but she had to be out the door by five fifteen or she’d miss her train and be late to pick up the girls. She’d have to take the work and do it on the journey home.
Twenty minutes later, Mel swapped her heels for her commuting flats, filled her travel Thermos with coffee, and raced off into the cold. With luck, she’d be home by seven.
It was ten past seven before Mel parked the car in the drive and she helped Sarah and Carrie out and gathered up all their bags. It was a relief, as always, to be home.
‘Carrickwell is such a gorgeous, mellow place,’ their friends had all agreed when Mel and Adrian had given up their apartment in Christchurch to move to the country. Sarah was still a bump beneath Mel’s ‘Under Construction’ maternity T-shirt then. ‘Perfect for bringing up children. And the schools are great.’
Mel and Adrian had agreed and, catching each other’s eye in the almost telepathic way of a couple who knew each other inside out, had said nothing about how they’d muddled their way to their decision.
Both of them were city people, born and bred, so the idea of this country idyll wasn’t as appealing as everyone else seemed to think. There were other factors involved.
Mel’s parents had moved out of the city ten years before to a small house halfway between Carrickwell and Dublin, which meant Mel’s mum would be nearby to help take care of the bump.
In Dublin, they wouldn’t have been able to afford a four-bedroomed semi in such a pretty road. And both of them felt it would be good for the children to have the countryside on the doorstep, perfect for family picnics. Or that was the theory. In reality, all Mel saw of the countryside now was from the confines of the train to and from work.
The clincher had been the local schools. However, they were now made to feel they had missed the boat there. Sarah and Carrie were down for all the best Carrickwell schools but the local Mummy Mafia had it that they should have had their names listed when they were embryos to guarantee a place in the very best, the Carnegie Junior School. Not to mention the fact that learning the recorder wasn’t a part of the curriculum at Little Tigers. Serious mummies had their four-year-old poppets playing Bach on their recorders to impress the panel at the Carnegie. Sarah could play the television remote pretty well but Mel suspected this wasn’t the same thing.
It was the large back garden at Number 2 Goldsmith Lawn that had really sold Carrickwell to them.
‘We could have apple trees in it,’ Adrian had said as they flicked through the auctioneer’s brochure and saw the long, narrow swathe of lawn with a shabby green shed at the end.
‘And we could put a swing on the cherry tree,’ sighed Mel.
They’d smiled and she’d patted her burgeoning belly, conveniently forgetting that neither of them was able to so much as hammer in a nail without bringing down a shower of plaster.
Five years later, there were still no apple trees in the garden and the weeds had declared an independent state over by the shed, but there was a plastic swing under the cherry tree. Sarah loved it.
She ran happily ahead of her mother to the front door now, holding her pink and white spotted rucksack, while Mel struggled in behind with her briefcase, Carrie, and all Carrie’s belongings.
The front door of Number 2 was a glossy green, flanked by two dwarf conifers in matching green wooden containers on the step. When they had moved in, Mel and Adrian had spent two months’ worth of weekends sorting out the front garden so that it was maintenance-free and would fit in with their neighbours’ beautifully cared-for gardens. The tiny sliver of grass had been replaced by beige gravel with various ornamental grasses and plants grouped in the two planting areas at either end. It all looked well cared for but this was a clever illusion.
Once Mel opened the front door, reality prevailed. The hall looked tired, the peeling paintwork and battered wooden floor badly in need of a month of DIY enthusiasm. Everything in their house needed work – don’t we all? Mel thought grimly. There was never enough time. Adrian worked in IT in an industrial estate thirty minutes’ drive from their home and since he’d been doing a Masters degree at night, he never had a moment for anything as mundane as Destroy It Yourself.
‘Hi,’ yelled Mel as she dumped her load onto the hall floor and kissed Carrie on the forehead before putting her gently down on her chubby little legs.
No reply, but the kitchen door was closed. With yells of delight, Sarah and Carrie erupted into their playroom. Mel felt that you needed somewhere to keep all the kids’ stuff or it just took over the house, so the dining room was now the playroom, with the table shoved up against the wall and toys spilling out of all the big pink and purple plastic storage boxes. In the rigid tradition of children’s colours, everything for little girls was lurid pink and purple. Mel longed for some subtle colours to take over.
‘The dishwasher’s broken,’ announced Adrian as soon as she walked into the kitchen with the gym bags of dirty clothes from Little Tigers.
Sitting with his course books spread out over the kitchen table, he looked up at his wife and gave her a weary smile. Adrian had Scandinavian colouring, with short blond hair, pale blue eyes, and skin that reacted to a hint of sun so that he always looked golden, unlike Mel, with her Celtic complexion. Sarah and Carrie both had his fair hair and skin, but their mother’s fine bones and lovely eyes. When Mel had first met Adrian, he’d had the build of a marathon runner, despite living off Chinese takeaways and pizzas. But over the years, lack of exercise and a fondness for the wrong sort of foods had made him more solid. Cuddly, she said.
‘Needing to go to the gym,’ Adrian would remark good-humouredly.
If they could afford the gym, that was.
Mel patted him affectionately on the arm on her way to the utility room to get a wash going.
‘Are you sure the dishwasher’s really broken?’ she asked.
Broken appliances meant organising someone to come and fix them at a time when someone would be in, a task on a par with choreographing
