The Accidental Family (32 page)

“No you don’t,” Sophie told him, despite the evidence to the contrary that was quite clearly visible in his chinos. “And neither do I. You love Stephanie, I could see it all over your face when you talked about her, and I love Louis. I really do, and I don’t know what I’m doing kissing you in a back alley, because kissing you only made me miss him more.”

“Ouch.” Jake sighed, picking up her hand and kissing it. “You know, it kills me to say it, but I don’t think I would ever have been the right man for you, even if Louis hadn’t come along.”

“Maybe not—but judging from that kiss, Stephanie’s a very lucky lady,” Sophie said, smiling tentatively.

“So can we still have lunch?” Jake asked hopefully, holding her hand. “We can swap wedding plans.”

“I’d love to have lunch with you. But I don’t actually have any wedding plans yet,” Sophie told him as she followed him back into the restaurant.

“Really? You’re not like any bride I know. Listen, if it’s not too awkward you should talk it through with Stephanie. That woman is a wedding-planning machine.”

“Is she …?” Sophie suddenly had visions of a transatlantic wedding-planning empire as they settled back into the booth. “Jake?”

“Yep?” Jake asked her, considerably more relaxed than he had been when they’d left.

“Thank you. It’s so good to have you as a friend.”

His smile was perhaps a little sad as he kissed her on the cheek and then said, “Sophie, I was always going to be your friend.”

Sixteen

Sophie stood in the pharmacy on the corner of Highbury Grove for a long time, looking at its meager selection of nail polish. She thought of Stephanie Corollo’s long, glossy red nails and then examined her own broken plain ones, still a little Cornish sand collected in their corners, and she picked up a bottle of Scarlet Woman from a little basket of bargain items located next to the copper arthritis bracelets.

The woman behind the counter watched Sophie closely, her facial expression set in mistrust and disapproval. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t used to lengthy browsing in the tiny pharmacy where people probably usually knew exactly what they wanted when they dashed in on their way home from work or while rushing the kids off to school. Perhaps, in her designer black knit dress and Dolce & Gabbana shoes, Sophie looked the type to try and run off with a bottle of nail polish worth fifty-nine pence. Most likely though, Sophie concluded, it was because the woman knew
that Sophie had not come in to buy nail polish, or an emery board, or indeed any of the other miscellaneous items she was clutching in her hands, but the pregnancy-testing kit she kept looking at, sitting on the shelf, which she hadn’t yet had the courage to pick up.

It was foolish, Sophie knew, for a woman her age and in her circumstances to feel embarrassed about buying the item she needed. She was not some irresponsible teen or some good-time girl who’d end up on a morning chat show waiting for the results of a paternity test. She was a woman in her thirties, and an engaged woman to boot, with a ring to prove it, even if she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d left things with her fiancé. By almost anyone’s standard in the modern world, she was probably perfectly entitled to be buying a pregnancy test without anyone judging her.

The trouble was that Sophie judged herself. If her mother was right about her condition, she hadn’t noticed any difference in herself for over two months. She was on the brink of motherhood and had taken about as much care in approaching that responsibility as a lemming careering over a cliff—and what kind of mother would that make her? Once, when the girls had first come into her life, she had moaned to Iris about her lack of any kind of maternal feeling, not to mention a total absence of the women’s intuition that people, mostly other women, harped on incessantly, hinting that the female of the human species was ever so slightly psychic when it came to her offspring. Iris had told her that she had just as much maternal instinct as the next woman and that all she had to do was listen. Yet for possibly two months she had been potentially pregnant, and she hadn’t experienced the merest flicker in her subconscious to alert her to what would be the most pivotal, life-changing moment in her existence on planet earth.

At that second her phone burst into life in her pocket, causing her to drop the merchandise she was holding onto the floor. The
woman behind the counter sighed and folded her arms under her breasts.

“Sorry,” Sophie said to the woman as she fished the phone out of her bag and saw Louis’s name on the display. The sight of his name set her heart racing, but she was prepared for it to be anyone on the phone but him, including Bella and Wendy.

“Hello?” she answered.

“It’s me,” Louis said. Sophie tensed; his voice sounded flat, distant even as it nestled in her ear.

“I know,” Sophie told him, picking up the items she’d dropped.

“It is okay for me to call you, isn’t it?” Louis asked her edgily. “You said you’d call and you haven’t.”

“I have called,” Sophie said, surprised by the chill in her voice. “Wendy answered, and I left a message for you to call me back but you didn’t.”

Louis was silent for a long moment. “You didn’t try again though,” he said, not leaving Sophie any wiser as to whether or not Wendy had passed on the message.

“Neither did you,” Sophie said. She wanted to talk to him about her call from Bella, but she knew that would be the worst possible thing she could bring up now. He had called her at last and she didn’t want to overwhelm this fragile contact with a rush of information.

“I’m really glad to hear the sound of your voice,” she said softly, desperate to draw them a little closer together, even over so many miles. “I’ve missed you.”

“Have you?” Louis sounded uncertain, defensive, but perhaps just a fraction warmer. “It’s just that I wasn’t sure if you’d walked out on me and the girls or not.”

“I would never do that,” Sophie promised him.

“So you’ve just walked out on marrying me?” Louis asked her tightly.

“Look, Louis—”

“Yes, I know—you need space. You don’t need to explain anything to me, that’s not why I’m ringing you. We’ve been looking for Seth all week, but he’s nowhere. One of his flatmates says he met this girl in Tottenham at a gig the other day, and apparently he really liked her. She lives in London. Wendy’s really worried about him. He hasn’t answered his phone all week or tried to contact her—she says he can be a bit rash if he’s upset about something. She’s really worried, so we’ve got the girl’s address and we’re coming up to see if he’s there. We’ll be leaving in an hour or so. The roads should be pretty clear, so we’ll make good time. I thought I’d let you know in case we bumped into you.”

“Right,” Sophie said, fighting both the irritation that rose in her chest at the very mention of Wendy’s name and the urge to point out that the chances of Louis “bumping into” her anywhere in the capital city of several million were slim to nil. But she didn’t want to sound facetious and unreasonable.

“What about the girls?” she asked.

“Mrs. Alexander’s said she’ll mind them; hopefully we’ll get back by Sunday, otherwise I’m not sure about school on Monday …” Louis trailed off.

“Look, Mum’s house is sort of on the way to Tottenham,” Sophie said. “Bring them to me. Mum would love to see them, I’d love to see them, they’d love to see the dogs. They can stay the night while you go and see Seth and then perhaps tomorrow I could take them to see their grandma.” Sophie was referring to Carrie’s mother, who lived in an assisted-living home a short drive from her mother’s house. “And if they miss one day of school it won’t be the end of the world. If you and Wendy need to stay in London longer, I’ll take them back home.”

As Sophie said the last word of her sentence, she felt a pull in her chest and pictured Louis’s living room, lit only by the electric fire. She felt homesick for a place where she didn’t fully belong yet.

“And perhaps we could have a few minutes to talk things over?” Sophie added.

Sophie again eyed the selection of pregnancy tests on the shelf. She wasn’t exactly sure how Louis would take the news of yet another surprise child at the moment, and suddenly she felt very sad. If she was pregnant, if her body could possibly be playing host to a fledgling human life without having the common decency to drop her a line and let her know she was expecting company, then it should be an occasion for joy, delight, and wonder. A special time for both herself and Louis. But, as it was, the news would have to be juggled with another new arrival, even if he was six foot two. Louis seemed to have a surplus of children right now. And after what he’d said about not wanting any more children, she wasn’t sure that news of another one would give him any kind of joy at all.

“It’s a long way to bring them for a couple of nights, but they would much rather be with you than Mrs. Alexander,” Louis said thoughtfully. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure—and if you and …Wendy need a place to stay, you could stay at my mum’s too. Wendy could have the sofa—although she would have to share it with Scooby and he can get a bit frisky at night.”

Louis did not laugh, and too late Sophie realized that she had managed to sound flippant again.

“Thanks for the offer,” Louis told her. “But I’m not sure what we’re doing.”

Sophie swallowed her irritation at his use of “we” without her being included in it.

She gave him her mother’s address and said, “So I’ll see you at Mum’s then? Call me when you’re nearly here.”

“Thanks, Sophie,” Louis said.

“No problem, and, Louis—I love you,” Sophie said. A beat of silence passed before she realized that Louis had already hung up.

“Right,” Sophie said, turning to look the shop assistant in the eye. “This is ridiculous. I am a grown woman.” She dumped the items she had collected on a display of cough medicine and turned around and picked up the first pregnancy kit she could lay her hands on.

Iris and Sophie stood outside the bathroom while they were waiting for the results of the test.

Iris had suggested Sophie bring the test out of the bathroom with her, but Sophie said that, pregnant or not, she had not yet reached the point in her life where she felt comfortable about walking around with a plastic stick she had recently urinated on. Besides, knowing her mother’s dogs, the odds were high that one of them would make off with it and bury it in the back garden at the first opportunity. “All right then,” Iris had said. “Let’s go downstairs and make tea while we wait.”

“No, I’ve only got to wait three minutes, less than that now,” Sophie said, peering in through the crack she had left open in the bathroom door. She could see the test kit glinting innocuously in the September light. It just didn’t look like it had the power to change your life completely, she thought. The manufacturer should endow them with more gravitas, perhaps a chrome trim and a red flashing light, something that said “Your life will never be the same again.” White plastic didn’t seem to do it.

“Three minutes minimum,” Iris said. “We could have tea and then come and look. Another five minutes won’t make you any more or less pregnant.”

“No, Mum, I’m standing here until the three minutes are up and then I’m going in.”

“I’ll cover you,” Iris said, her smile fading when Sophie didn’t laugh. She crossed her arms and leaned against the textured wallpaper. Miss Pickles trotted up the stairs and eyed Iris for a moment
before walking past, no doubt intending to catch a nap on Sophie’s bed.

“I know,” Iris sighed, rolling her eyes as if she and the animal had just had a conversation.

There were several beats of silence, punctuated only by hearing Miss Pickles throwing any unwanted items of Sophie’s off the bed as she prepared for her nap, and then Iris piped up, “Is it time now?”

Sophie glanced at her watch.

“Twenty more seconds,” she said, continuing to study the watch face. “Ten.”

The two women watched each other, reflections of their pasts and their futures, and silently counted down the last ten seconds remaining between Sophie and her fate.

“This is it,” Sophie said and she pushed the bathroom door open.

“I’m not sure you should have out-of-date peppermint tea now that I know you definitely are pregnant,” Iris said, putting the kettle on the stove, which was her stock response to most of life’s ups and downs. On the day her dad had died, Iris must have made a hundred cups of tea. Sophie remembered being sent out to the grocer to get another box of eighty tea bags.

“I’ll just pop out to the corner shop now and get some fresh,” Iris offered, picking up her purse.

“No, just give me a glass of water,” Sophie said. “Don’t go out, please.”

Iris put her bag down and filled a glass, setting it in front of Sophie.

“Isn’t it funny how things can change just like that,” Iris said conversationally, snapping her fingers to illustrate the point.

“I’ll say,” Sophie replied absently.

“Listen, sweetheart, I know it’s a shock—but you know you love Louis and you’re going to marry him. Perhaps a baby now is a little sooner than you might have planned, but I promise you that once you’ve had a chance to get used to the idea, it will be fantastic. It will be wonderful.”

“It’s just so final,” Sophie said slowly. “It’s just so definite.”

“Yes, babies do tend to be quite definite.” Iris looked perplexed. “What do you mean?”

“I meant that up until this point I still had choices. I could still have come back to London, got my old job back or one like it. I could still have flown off to New York and disrupted Jake’s wedding. I could still have told Louis that I’ve had enough of him and his crazy ex and his secret son. In fact, up until this point I could have cut the last year out of my life and never looked back, but I can’t do any of that now. I definitely can’t, because I am that thing. The
p
word. Pregnant. That is me, I am it. Knocked up.”

“Yes you are,” Iris said, sitting next to her. “And I can see how it seems as if the world is suddenly closing in on you. But ask yourself—if you weren’t pregnant, would you really have done any of those things? Would you have come back to London and worked in an office job that took over your life? Would you really have flown to America to break up the marriage of some man I’ve never heard of, but who I suspect is probably who you went to lunch with today? Would you really have left Louis because he’s got an annoying ex or would you have helped him sort things out with Seth and stood by him because even though it scares you to death you love him? And most of all, Sophie, would you, could you, ever cut those little girls out of your life? Baby or no, I don’t think you would have done any of that. Because that’s not you, that’s not my daughter who I am so proud of.”