“We’ll get out of your way,” said Tess. “So you and Will can sleep together. Finally. Take my bed! I changed the sheets this morning.”
Other things came into her head. Far worse things she could say.
To Felicity: “He likes you on top, so lucky you lost all that weight!”
To Will: “Don’t look too closely at all the stretch marks.”
But no, they were the ones who should be feeling as sordid as a roadside motel. She stood up and smoothed down the front of her skirt.
“So that’s that. You’ll just have to deal with the agency without me. Tell the clients there’s been a family emergency.”
There certainly had been a family emergency.
She went to pick up the row of Felicity’s half-full coffee cups, linking her fingers through as many handles as she could carry. Then she changed her mind, put the cups back down, and while Will and Felicity watched, she carefully selected the two fullest cups, lifted them up in the palms of her hands and, with a netballer’s careful aim, threw cold coffee straight at their stupid, earnest, sorry faces.
THREE
Rachel thought they were going to tell her that they were having another baby. That’s what made it so much worse. As soon as they walked into the house, she knew there was big news. They had the self-conscious, smug expressions of people who know they are about to make you sit up and listen.
Rob was talking more than usual. Lauren was talking less than usual. Only Jacob was his normal self, tearing through the house this way and that, flinging open the cupboards and drawers where he knew Rachel kept little treasure troves of toys and things that she thought might interest him.
Of course, Rachel didn’t ask Lauren or Rob if they had something they wanted to tell her. She wasn’t that sort of grandma, not her. She took meticulous care when Lauren visited to be the perfect mother-in-law: caring but not cloying, interested but not nosy. She never criticized or even made so much as a suggestion about Jacob, not even to Rob when he was on his own, because she knew how much worse that would be for Lauren to hear: “Mum says . . .” This wasn’t easy. A steady stream of suggestions ran silently through her head like those snippets of news that ran along the bottom of the TV on CNN.
For one thing, the child needed a haircut! The two of them must be blind not to notice the way Jacob kept blowing his hair out of his eyes. Also, the fabric of that dreadful Thomas the Tank Engine shirt was much too scratchy on his skin. If he was wearing it on the day she had him, she always took it straight off and dressed him in a nice old soft T-shirt, and then madly re-dressed him when they were coming up the driveway.
But what good had it done her? All her careful mother-in-lawing? She may as well have been the mother-in-law from hell. Because they were leaving, and taking Jacob with them, as if they had every right—which they did, she guessed, technically.
There was no new baby. Lauren had been offered a job. A wonderful job in New York. It was a two-year contract. They told her at the dinner table when they were having dessert (Sara Lee apple custard turnover and ice cream). From their breathless elation, you’d think she’d been offered a job in bloody paradise.
Jacob was sitting on Rachel’s lap when they told her, his solid, square little body melting against hers with the divine limpness of a tired toddler. Rachel was breathing in the scent of his hair, her lips against the little dip in the center of his neck.
When she had first held Jacob in her arms and pressed her lips to his tender, fragile scalp, it had felt as though she were being brought back to life, like a wilting plant being watered. His new-baby scent had filled her lungs with oxygen. She’d actually felt her spine straighten, as if someone had finally released her from a heavy weight she’d been forced to carry for years. When she’d walked out into the hospital parking lot, she could see color seeping back into the world.