My Husband's Wife (2 page)

‘What’s her notstril?’

‘Her nostril, her nose hole?’ Rosie pointed to her own face, remembering to keep her patience.

‘Up
one
of her nose holes, yes.’ Naomi gave an elabor-ate nod.

‘I know I’m going to regret this, but what does she have up her other nose hole?’

‘Erm, it’s a piece of my compass.’ Naomi picked at a loose thread on the men’s underpants she was wearing.

‘Please God, not the pointy piece?’ Rosie’s tone was becoming more urgent.

‘No, Mum, it’s like a little silver bolt thingy that holds the end on.’

Rosie ran her fingers through her thick, dark, wavy hair, gathering it into a knot at the base of her neck, as was her habit. ‘And why does she have this piece of compass up her nose hole?’

‘Because it wouldn’t fit up the other hole because she already had my poo rubber up it!’ Naomi widened her eyes at having to state the obvious.

‘Of course she did. Where is your sister now?’

‘Under the kitchen table.’ She pointed along the hallway.

‘Of course she is.’

‘It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t anything to do with me, not really.’ Naomi avoided her mum’s gaze, telling Rosie all she needed to know.

The two hurried to the little kitchen. Rosie dropped to her knees and smiled at her five-year-old, who sat huddled forward between the chair legs with her arms and legs folded and a pirate patch over one eye.

‘Hey, Leona.’

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Naomi says you might have some things up your nose that you can’t get down, is that right?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’ It sounded more like ‘Djes’.

‘Can you come out from under the table so I can have a look?’ Rosie coaxed gently.

Leona shook her head vigorously and closed her one uncovered eye. She still believed that if
she
couldn’t see anyone, then no one could see
her
. She had been doing this since she was a baby, when Phil used to call her Little Ostrich.

‘All right! All right!’ Rosie lifted her palm. She was worried about what vigorous head-shaking might do to the small compass part and tiny eraser that were currently lodged inside her youngest daughter’s head. ‘I do need to have a closer look, love. I’ll try and come to you.’

Rosie moved one of the four chairs from the kitchen table and poked her head into the cramped gap. Her knees hurt from contact with the cold, tiled floor and a tiny round pebble, probably delivered from the sole of a shoe, bit into her skin. It was on Phil’s list of jobs to lay some lino and remove the tiles that she found quite hard to keep clean. ‘Shitstar!’ she muttered at the sharp pain. This was all she needed. ‘Nearly there!’ She kept the tone light and jovial rather than give in to the panic at the images that had started to creep into her mind. She wondered how close to your brain ‘up your nose’ actually was.

Wedged between two chairs, she smoothed the long fringe from her youngest daughter’s face. Leona’s beautiful, curly, caramel-coloured hair sat on her shoulders in waves. It was Rosie’s pride and joy and caring for it one of her great pleasures. It was one of the things she had dreamt about when she was a little girl – having a mum who would wash and style her hair, brush it and fix it in a bun for parties.

It was cramped under the table and Rosie wished she was a more comfortable size twelve so that she didn’t have to heft her size-sixteen bottom into the small space.

‘Right, let’s have a look at you.’ She gently held her daughter’s chin and tilted her face to the right, swallowing her horror at the unmistakeable bump that sat almost at the top of Leona’s nose. A quick investigation revealed a similar shape on the other side.

‘Okay, well that’s all good,’ she lied. ‘I need you to come out, Leona, so I can have a better look in the light.’ Rosie began reversing out, only to find Naomi blocking her exit from under the table.

‘Did you get them out, Mum? Can I have my rubber back?’ she asked.

‘Not yet, darling, but we will. It’s all going to be fine.’ She looked back at Naomi and smiled. It was this particular combination of words and actions that had proved to be the best weapons she had as a mother, a combination that could make monsters disappear from under beds, quash nervous tums before special events and even soothe pain when they were poorly.

‘Shall I call Dad and tell him he needs to take us to the hospital again?’ Naomi was now bouncing on the spot, delighted by the drama and the possibility of more to follow.

‘No! Of course not! Don’t be daft!’ She squeezed Leona’s hand. ‘I’ll have a little wiggle in the light and they will pop out, I’m sure. If you could just move out of the way, Naomi, so I can get out.’

‘I know what you need, Mum, one of those beeping warnings that lorries and forklift trucks and diggers have, so you don’t run anyone over!’

‘Yes, thank you, love. I probably do.’

‘Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Beeeeep!’ Her daughter’s sound effects accompanied the rather ungainly manoeuvre.

*

It was an hour ater, as the trio sat in the A&E department of North Devon District Hospital, that Phil arrived, harried and covered in plastering dust but grinning at his girls.

‘How you feeling, Leo?’

‘Okay.’ The little girl shrugged and then yawned. It was getting late.

‘The nurse said it shouldn’t be too much longer and it’ll be a quick solution.’ Rosie turned towards her husband, twisted her index finger into a hook and mimed putting it up her nose and pulling down.

‘Are they going to stick something up her nose?’ Naomi leant forward in her chair, quick to comment, as her sister’s eyes widened at the prospect.

‘No! Well, maybe, and if they do, she won’t feel a thing,’ Rosie said soothingly.

‘What
do
you look like?’ Phil stared at his eldest, taking in her school skirt, which was crumpled into a creased mess, and her matted hair. ‘You look like you’ve been living in a barn!’

‘Leona May Tipcott?’ The doctor stood in the brightly lit, rectangular room and called her name, louder than was strictly necessary, Rosie thought, considering that the only other patients waiting were an elderly man who had cut his head and a young male footballer with a dodgy looking ankle, neither of whom were likely to go by that name.

Naomi answered her dad just as loudly. ‘I haven’t been living in a barn, Dad. I’m all screwed up because I was wearing your pants, but Mum said I couldn’t go out in public like that.’

Rosie smiled at the young medic and wondered what their little family must look like to a stranger: she in her jeans, blue Converse and sweatshirt, stressed and with the fish pie she had made for supper splattered over her front; Phil covered in plastering dust; Naomi with her sparkly purple face, wild hair and screwed-up skirt; and Leona with a pirate patch on her forehead and a bump up each nose.

‘Yep, that’s us!’ She stood up.

Taking Leona by the hand, she smiled at her husband. ‘This is nearly as embarrassing as the time we went to look at that show house and she took a dump in the bidet!’

‘I remember.’ He laughed.

As Rosie bent to pick up her little girl, a wad of loo roll fell out of her bra and landed on the floor, in the middle of which sat her pregnancy test.

‘What’s that?’ Naomi yelled and jumped on it, pulling the plastic from the paper and removing the lid, before placing the soggy tip in her palm. ‘Urgh!’ she shouted, then held up her hand for her dad’s inspection.

Rosie held her husband’s eye, gave a gentle shake of her head and swallowed the desire to cry.
I wanted this baby, Phil. I wanted it so very much...

*

‘They’re both asleep.’ She sighed, grateful that it was bedtime. It had been a very long day. She popped her soft bed socks on. The cold wind seemed to rattle down the redundant chimneybreast in their bedroom and straight up under the duvet; socks were her salvation.

‘Only us, Rosie, eh?’ Phil pulled back the duvet and patted the space in the bed next to where he lay.

‘I swear I only turned my back for a single minute to go to the loo and she had them up her nose! Why she would think that was a good idea, God only knows.’ She pulled off her dressing gown and adjusted her bra; her large chest made her too self-conscious to sleep without one. She sank down onto the mattress, embarrassed, as ever, by the way it sagged under her weight.

‘There’s no point in trying to fathom that girl, she is a law unto herself, always has been. In fact they both are.’ Phil smiled, as if this fact delighted him. ‘The doctor said Leo had her own filing cabinet, she’d been there that often. I think he was only half joking.’

She laughed. ‘It’ll be something to put in your wedding speech.’

‘Love, if I was to go through everything those two have been up to, I’d be there all night, we’d have to cancel the disco! And I hate to think what’s to come – they’re not even in double digits yet!’

‘Oh, don’t say that! We’re not cancelling the disco! I think about that day, you know.’

He smiled. ‘Me too. I just hope I’ve paid off the credit card by then, or it won’t only be no disco, it’ll be no dress, no sausage rolls, nothing. I’ll be encouraging them to elope.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m going to win the lottery. That’s my pension plan.’ She snuggled against his warm body.

‘That, my lover, is genius. Why didn’t I think of that?’ He chuckled.

‘I can try and get more shifts at the caravans?’ she said. She was willing to do anything to ease the burden on her husband, whose salary was their main income, but like many jobs where they lived, the work was seasonal.

Outsiders who owned second homes in the area often wanted refurbishments, new decks, extensions and licks of paint before the summer season, but after that things always slowed, and the winter months were the slowest of all. Phil worked with his dad, Keith, his cousin Ross and, on occasion, when he was at home, his younger brother Kevin, affectionately known to his family as ‘Kev, that lazy, hippy, travelling bastard’.

Rosie was always keen to defend Kev. She knew it was said in loving jest, but Kev was far from lazy, just different. The more academic of the two boys, he had gone to university and now travelled the globe working in marine conservation. Phil liked to poke fun at his long hair and laid-back attitude, unable to understand that just because he got to sail the high seas and sit on paradisiacal beaches, he was still working. Besides, if it hadn’t been for him, she wouldn’t have ended up with Phil.

Kevin Tipcott had been her mate and was in her class at school. He kept an eye on her, walked her to the bus and made her roar with laughter at every opportunity; his humour was the best weapon in his arsenal. When she was twelve, Kev had taken her back to his house for tea and introduced her to his mum, Mo, who wanted to look after and spoil the poor motherless girl. And Rosie let her, willingly, pitching up at weekends for toast and honey around the family table and sitting in front of the fire to enjoy a good old gossip.

One weekend a few years later, she was sitting at the Tipcott tea table when Phil came home on R&R and informed the family that he was leaving the army, having decided it wasn’t the job for him after all. Rosie had barely heard his words but had simply stared at the man, weak kneed, as she tried to work out why her heart felt as if it had been turned inside out. A whole three years older, he seemed grown-up, sexy and able, all in one bundle. So, yes, she was keen to defend Kev; he had given her her family.

Phil sighed. Rosie’s job, even if only minimum wage, was at least regular. When the weather took a turn for the worse, surfers and walkers replaced the sunseekers at the holiday park and Rosie was happy enough to clean the caravans before and after their stays. ‘We’re okay, but thanks for offering, love. You’ve got enough on your plate and I don’t think more shifts are going to cut it.’

She nestled in closer. ‘I think about
our
wedding day a lot, and I know when I see the girls walk up the aisle on your arm, it’ll be like we’ve come full circle. I think they’ll be my proudest days, seeing them with you, starting their own books as we write our final chapters.’

‘Blimey, that’s quite poetic for you! Thankfully, I don’t think you have to worry about that just now. We’ve got a few years yet. They are only five and seven!’

‘I know.’ Rosie clicked off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into darkness. ‘I was never that fussed about the actual day for us. I remember my mates being very excited about the frock and the setting and the invites, but I didn’t feel that. I was far more interested in becoming your wife and getting on with the business of setting up our little house, cooking for you, being together. It wasn’t so much about the celebration but more what came after.’

Phil placed his arm around her shoulders and pulled her towards him as he kissed the top of her scalp. She laid her head on his chest.

‘I remember, and I loved you for it. I wondered if it was because your mum wasn’t around and you didn’t have her to share it with.’

Rosie lifted her head to try and see his face in the dark. ‘It wasn’t that, not really. They say you don’t miss what you never had but I’m not sure I would agree. I do think that’s why maybe I wanted my own little family and why I treasure you all so much.’ Discussions like this were rare. Her thoughts about family inevitably led to her thinking about the plastic spatula, which had been grabbed from Naomi’s hand and deposited in the nearest bin. Her periods had always been irregular and a mistimed fumble in haste without reaching for precautions meant that for weeks now she had harboured the idea that she might have conceived. And the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced it was the case, with sickness and sore boobs as further evidence.

‘My test was negative,’ she reminded him.

‘I know. Are you disappointed?’

She nodded her cheek against his skin. ‘A bit,’ she lied, trying to ignore the gnaw of sadness in her gut and the ache in her arms to hold a baby, their baby, one more time. She knew it was selfish, and she had so much to feel thankful for, not least their two beautiful girls, but the ache was there just the same. ‘I just know we’re running out of time. And that makes me feel quite sad. As though the opportunity might pass us by.’