The Accidental Mother (17 page)

Tess could tell them.

When that was settled, Sophie began the chapter on nutrition. It told her that chocolate can be fatal to dogs.

“Thank God we’re not dogs, hey, Artemis?” she said to her cat.

Artemis did not dignify the comment with a response.

T
ess sighed and looked out the window. Sophie, who usually enjoyed the winter because it was much more sensible than the summer and gave a girl opportunities for much better clothes, was not enjoying the end of January because the sun persisted in shining in crisp blue skies day after day. Sophie was not a fan of sunshine. It seemed to give usually normal people an excuse to wear far fewer clothes than suited them, turn up late for work, take weeks and weeks off, and dawdle about being wistful over some romantic liaison or another. She had hoped for a typical wet and gloomy English winter. But no, the sun kept shining, interfering with people’s moods and, worse still, their daytime TV viewing. Sophie was glad she had blackout curtains, because she didn’t know what she would have done without the TV in the last few weeks. TV, Sophie had decided in the small dark hours of the night, was the world’s greatest invention, superseding the wheel, antibiotics, and, yes, even the open-toed sandal.

Tess sighed again.

“You seem a bit pissed off to be here, actually,” Sophie said with an edge of recrimination.

Tess pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “it
is
Sunday. A day recognized in many cultures to be one of rest. But as the many messages you left me were so adamant that you had to see me, here I am. At your service.” Tess was making no attempt to hide the irritation in her voice, which frankly, Sophie thought, was just plain unprofessional.

“Yes, well, you want to try having two kids in your house. Rest? What’s rest? There are no days of rest around here,” she said, raising a now rather bushy eyebrow. She backoned Tess into the kitchen and closed the door.

“So you’ll want to know why I’ve asked you here today,” Sophie said.

“I can hardly bear the tension,” Tess replied dourly. “Look, if you want to tell me you’ve changed your mind about keeping the girls until we get Louis, then just tell me. That foster place has gone now, so I’ll need all the notice I can have to—”

“How long did you say it would take your lot to find Louis?” Sophie asked, regretting the absence of a spotlight to shine in the social worker’s eyes.

“Well, you know.” Tess looked uncomfortable. “A couple of weeks—three or four at the most.”

“Yes, that is what you told me,” Sophie said. “Funny that, because you told Mrs. Stiles it would take
months.
”

Tess was momentarily flustered. “Ah well, yes. Because that was what
she
wanted to hear. I promise you, we have done our best,” she protested feebly. “As much as resources and time will allow. And you know…” She faltered under Sophie’s stony glare. “I can assure you that every possible undertaking has been…er…undertaken to—”

“So,” Sophie interrupted her. “You are in the business of telling people what they want to hear instead of the truth, are you, Tess? You tell Mrs. Stiles it will take months so she doesn’t have to worry about Louis stealing her grandchildren away and me that it’s a matter of days so I’ll be your free babysitter. How is that ethical?”

“Look…,” Tess began. “It’s a question of priorities, and I genuinely did think it might be very quick to find Louis—but all things being equal, allowing for administration difficulties and intergovernmental authorities’ communication—”

“It’s all right. You can cut all the social worker speak. You don’t have to look for Louis Flipping Gregory,” Sophie said, enjoying her moment.

“I don’t?” Tess asked, blinking.

“No, you don’t, because I found him. Or rather, a private detective I hired did. It took two weeks. It was easy, actually.” Sophie found that she had to press her lips together in order to prevent herself from sticking her tongue out and going “na-na-na-na” at Tess, Izzy style. “He’s coming back to ‘get his girls’ apparently.” Sophie did a passable impression of his deep and slightly gruff voice. “As if he owned them or something.”

“Oh,” Tess said again, sounding ashamed. “Well, that changes things.”

“Yes, it does a bit, doesn’t it? So do you want to tell me now why you lied about finding Louis, or shall we save it for another time? Perhaps for a formal complaint hearing?” she said icily. “Because I don’t mind telling you I thought you were supposed to tell the truth. I thought it was in your job description?”

Tess screwed up her mouth into a tight knot. “I did tell you the truth, mostly. Look, they needed a place to stay and you seemed to think it was important that Louis might be back on the scene soon—so I let you draw your own conclusions. The point is—”

“My own conclusions!” Sophie raised her voice and then, remembering the children in the room next door, took a deep breath and forcibly lowered it again. “You lied to me. That’s misconduct probably.”

Tess paused before answering. “The point is I did what I thought was best for Izzy and Bella. And I didn’t lie. Not exactly.” She tested a half smile on Sophie. “Look, I know you want what’s best for those children as much as I do. Don’t you?”

Sophie considered the question and found somewhat to her surprise that she did. “Of course I do,” she said, glancing out the window and over the row upon row of rooftops and TV antennae that made up the cluttered horizon and wondering exactly when that had happened. She looked back at Tess and gave her a conciliatory half smile. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s forget that—for now. What is important is that you do your job.”

“Of course it is,” Tess said, sounding mildly offended.

“You have to vet Louis, make sure that he’s fit to be father to those girls. You have to check and double-check everything he’s been up to for the past three years.”

“Of course,” Tess said. “It goes without saying.”

“And what if they don’t like him—what then?”

Tess didn’t waver. “We have to try our best to reconcile them, we will reconcile them.”

Sophie nodded. There it was again—that absence of a decent Option B.

“And I thought it would be better coming from you,” she said quickly, breaking eye contact.

“What would?” Tess asked her.

“The news—you know, about Louis coming home.” Sophie glanced sideways at her. “You’re trained to do that kind of thing, aren’t you? Explain stuff like absent fathers and all that.”

Tess sighed. “Right,” she said. “Will you be there too?”

Sophie rolled her eyes. “Obviously.” Admittedly, it had only just become obvious to her.

A strange thing had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours, something she hadn’t expected. When she thought about the girls and what the future might hold for them, her stomach churned and she felt a deep sense of unease, as if the world she had once stood so firmly on was tilting and swaying. She wondered if for the first time in her life she was having an actual gut feeling, about Louis Gregory. If her rarely utilized woman’s intuition existed deep within her after all, and now it was kicking in, telling her to be cautious.

So before Tess had arrived Sophie had sat on the loo for a long time (just in case it was indigestion) and concentrated on the feeling. It had, she realized, taken her an amazingly short time to feel totally responsible for Carrie’s children. She concluded that the churning of her stomach was genuine fear. She knew that somehow she would have an impact on how they were going to live the rest of lives and that it would be up to her, at least partially, whether they were happy. Sophie closed her eyes and tried to visualize Carrie the last time she had seen her, getting that train at Paddington Station, until she could see Carrie smiling at her. Sitting on the loo with her eyes shut, Sophie smiled back at her.

She couldn’t say she loved the girls exactly, because she wasn’t exactly sure what that felt like. But she realized that gradually she had begun to feel something for them, an almost new emotion that she had only experienced once before, when she saw Artemis alone in a pen at the shelter. It was a strong and immovable impulse to protect them from anything harmful. She knew then that she had to make sure they were going to be okay, that she would have to do whatever it took to ensure their happiness.

“Look,” Tess said. “I promise you absolutely that I won’t let you or the girls down. I’ll put Louis through every mill going, and until then—”

“Until then,” Sophie said almost casually as she directed her gaze back to the urban horizon, “those girls aren’t going anywhere.”

I
need a couple of minutes,” Sophie said to Tess, patting her cheeks, which she knew had flared up during their conversation.

“Okay, you go and take some deep breaths, and then—Well, we might as well tell them, hadn’t we?” Tess said, biting hard on her lip.

Sophie nodded and slipped past the girls, who had lost interest in the
EastEnders
omnibus and were in the process of making camp out of the sofa and the chair and Sophie’s full-length leather coat. They both paused as she passed them, standing stock-still like a couple of meerkats expecting to be pounced on at any second by an enraged predator, but Sophie barely even glanced at her coat and offered them only an absent half smile as she headed to her bedroom.

“Right, now all we need is some tent pegs,” she heard Bella say as she shut the door. She sat on her bed for a moment and stared across at the dressing table mirror. She thought about using her red-patches-green-cover-up-stick thing, but it had disappeared recently, quite probably another casualty of Izzy’s apocalyptic attack on her makeup bag. Instead, she picked up a spray can of deodorant and held its cool, smooth surface against first one cheek and then the other.

As she sat on the bed, Sophie noticed a corner of pale pink material peeping out of her tightly shut closet. She opened the door, still clutching the deodorant to her face, and pulled the trapped garment free. It was a new dress that she had brought in the no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year’s. She had bought it at the full price, 359 pounds, even thought she knew that less than a week later it would inevitably be half the price, because she had fallen in love with it instantly and because there was only one in her size. And she’d made a mental note not to go back to that shop until at least April so she wouldn’t see how much the reduction was. Sophie didn’t normally spend that much money on dresses—although, to be fair, she needed party dresses a lot more than most people—and she had never even heard of the designer, Shelli somebody. But for some reason that dress, with its twenties-style soft pink chiffon shift sliding over its deep pink silk underslip, had appealed to the closet romantic in her. She loved the four tiny velvet-covered buttons at the scoop neck and the extravagant beadwork, hundreds of beads on the fabric that radiated from the princess waist and flared into a handkerchief hemline. It was the kind of dress girls wore in musicals when dancing with their true loves for the first time under the light of the silvery moon. Plus, it was very flattering around the hips.

Sophie had been secretly looking forward to wearing it this week, at the Madison Corporation’s New Year’s party, which she had been so painstakingly organizing for Jake, and before Jake had announced quite plainly that he was attracted to her, she had been looking forward to him seeing her wear it and wondering whether it would make him notice her as a
woman.

Unlike most corporate seasonal parties, it didn’t fall on or as near to the actual holiday as possible, when nobody would really want to come anyway, but had been scheduled, rather cleverly Sophie thought, mainly because it was her idea, at almost the end of January. For exactly the time when all everybody could see was another long gray year exactly the same as the last year stretching out remorselessly ahead of them and a party was just what they needed. Jake had wanted it to be extravagant, a flagship event, and Sophie had made sure that it was going to be. It was Cal, though, who had found a venue which could make that requirement literally come true; a first-class ocean liner that was docked at Tower Bridge for a week every two months with a full-scale ballroom and top-notch catering staff that were occasionally available to hire for the right price. Guests could even book a berth for the night.

Ever since Cal had discovered it, they had both been waiting for the right client with the right schedule and the right budget to book it, too afraid to tell anyone, even Lisa, in case the idea somehow got leaked and someone else got the credit. The Madison Corporation was that client, and the event was going to be magical. It was the first party in ages that Sophie had actually been excited about.

Unconsciously, she marked the passing of time by the events she created and by what she wore to them. That dress had been hanging in her wardrobe silently ticking like a kind of alarm clock, counting down the routine days until something different and mildly thrilling happened.

Now, Sophie realized, the party, the bright pinnacle in her diary for weeks and weeks, didn’t really matter anymore. It might boost her promotion chances. Jake would still be impressed by her looking blond and lightly fake-tanned in dusty pink. But the excitement a of wearing a floaty dress and matching satin shoes had somehow faded. Sophie fingered the edge of the material and took a breath as she hung the dress back in her wardrobe.

“Never mind,” she told herself, patting her considerably cooled cheeks. “It won’t be long before frocks and parties are the highlight of your life again.” Except that, as Sophie padded back to the living room, where she heard Tess and the girls laughing, she had to admit she wasn’t exactly sure if she wanted that to be true.

Tess had positioned the girls side by side in Artemis’s armchair, where they sat wriggling and elbowing each other reflexively. As Sophie left her bedroom, Artemis had appeared through the open window and slunk past her, taking up her new favorite position on the arm of the chair by Bella’s side. She ducked and tilted her head for Bella, who scratched her ears obligingly, and gave Sophie her usual glare.

“Well, here we are,” Tess said, beaming at the girls.

It was exactly the same smile that she had offered to Sophie just before announcing Carrie’s death. She really had to work on her delivering-important-news face, Sophie thought. She made it look like you were about to find out that you’d somehow won the lottery even though you never play, not that your world was about to be tipped upside down—again. Bella knows, Sophie thought, watching the girl narrow her dark eyes at Tess. She recognizes that smile.

“You two have had a lot to cope with, haven’t you in the last few months?” Tess’s smile widened.

“Yes, we have!” Izzy sang in agreement, assuming her grown-up face.

Bella nodded and crossed her arms.

Sophie looked at each girl’s expression and felt an unfamiliar tightening in her chest.

“I know you’ve been moved about a lot, one place to another, and I know that…” Tess paused and rubbed her knees with her palms, making a rasping noise over her tights. “I know that you must miss Mummy very much.”

“I do,” Izzy said sadly, her narrow shoulders slumping. “I do, but she can’t come back, because Aunty Sophie said she was in the sky, which is very far.”

Bella put her spare arm heavily around Izzy’s shoulders, pushing her slightly deeper into the cushion of the chair with the weight of her embrace.

“And you both have been very brave and very good. Aunty Sophie has told me how
especially
good you have been since you came to stay with her.”

Sophie, Bella, and Izzy all looked at Tess with openmouthed disbelief.

“Well, mainly good, anyway,” Tess said, hurrying along. “And you like it here, don’t you?”

“I like the telly,” Izzy said, brightening a little bit. “And I used to like chicken nuggets, but I don’t anymore. I think I’d like fish fingers next and carrots. We used to have carrots, didn’t we, Bella?” Bella nodded. “We had loads of butter on them so they wouldn’t be too yucky.” Bella nodded again. “Orange food is my favorite actually,” Izzy finished.

“Tess,” Sophie said, sort of under her breath, “just get to the point.”

“So girls,” Tess said, reinstating her beam. “Do you remember your daddy?”

“No,” Bella said quickly. “We don’t.”

“I don’t,” Izzy agreed. “I haven’t got a daddy, have I?” she asked with genuine curiosity. “Or a grandpa? Or…a dog?”

“Well, actually, Izzy you have—got a daddy, I mean.”

Izzy’s face transformed into a picture of pure delight and surprise, which Sophie would have been moved by if she hadn’t seen her use exactly the same expression when she was confronted with a pair of her damp pants that she had cunningly slipped behind one of the last remaining sofa cushions the last time she hadn’t quite made it to the loo.

“Oooh, Bella—we’re getting a daddy!” she said, drumming her heels against the base of the armchair.

“No, we’re not, Iz. Our dad’s not around anymore. He left home when
she
was a baby,” Bella said carefully to Tess, jerking her head sideways at her sister.

“Well, yes, I know, darling,” Tess said. “But guess what? Your daddy is coming back to see you! And
maybe,
if you want it, girls, you might go and live with your daddy!” Tess clapped her hands together, and Izzy jumped off the armchair and began spinning. “Hoo-
ray
! Hoo-
ray
! Hooo-
ray
!” she shouted as she pirouetted.

“No he is not!”
Bella stood up and shouted over her sister so that the younger girl stopped and stood stock-still. “He is not coming back here and I don’t want to see him and she doesn’t want to see him and we don’t want him so if he comes here you can just tell him to go away again because nobody likes him or wants him!” She ran out of the room, slamming first the living room and then the flat door behind her.

“Oh, fuck,” Sophie said, leaping over the back of the sofa after her with an athleticism she hadn’t known she possessed.

Tess looked at Izzy, who returned her gaze standing perfectly still. After a moment, she unfroze herself by sheer force of will and crossed over to Tess, putting her hands on the social worker’s knees. “She’s not supposed to say
fuck
in front of us, is she?”

Mercifully, Bella had not opened the door onto the street and run under a bus, as Sophie had momentarily feared. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the girl huddled at the bottom of the stairs and walked slowly down to join her.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.” Bella lied badly, her voice slightly muffled through a layer of purple fleece.

Sophie brushed a locked of Bella’s black hair away from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “I’m sorry, I knew it would be a shock and everything, but I really thought you’d be pleased…” This was true. She had just assumed the girls would leap into Louis’s arms whether or not he was decent father material. It had never occurred to her that they might not want him.

“I’m not pleased,” Bella said, turning her face a little so that Sophie could see one eye and half of her mouth.

Hesitantly, Sophie reached out her palm and rubbed Bella’s back. “I can see that,” she said with half a smile. “But, well, do you remember your dad at all, Bella?”

Bella sat up and brushed her hair out of her face a few times. “Yes,” she said darkly. “I was a bit older than Izzy when he…he just went.”

Sophie tried to frame the million or so questions she had into one that was manageable for a girl of six and a bit. “Well, was he unkind to you or to Mummy, was he mean? I mean, did he ever…hurt you?” she asked carefully. To her huge relief, Bella shook her head.

“No,” she said. “But he went away, didn’t he? He left us all alone. He didn’t come back. He didn’t even say good-bye to me, and I thought…I thought he was my friend. He used to say I was his best friend. After that, Mum said we didn’t need him. We didn’t need any man to look after us because we looked after each other—we were the Three Musketeers.” Bella stared at her knees.

Sophie tried again. “I know that this must be hard, Bella, but well…he is coming all this way to see you—that must mean something. And when I told him—”

“
You
told him?” Bella said quickly, looking up at Sophie.

“Yes,” Sophie confessed. “When I told him what had happened, he said he’d come straightaway, as soon as he could.” Sophie pushed her own misapprehensions to one side. “So he must care about you to do that, musn’t he?” Bella did not move, so Sophie continued. “And well, you are going to need a proper place to live soon, and I just thought it would be better if it was with—”

“We’ve
got
a proper place.” Bella stared at Sophie with a deep furrow between her brows.

Sophie blinked at her and winced internally. She hadn’t expected this.

“We live here, don’t we?” Bella said. “With you? You said at that day-care place we could stay with you.”

Sophie took her hand away from Bella’s shoulder and dropped her head. It hadn’t occurred to her that Bella might have thought her stay in the flat was anything other than temporary, and that her promise at the childminder’s was more general than specific.

“Aren’t we staying here with you?” Bella said, looking worried. “Have we done something wrong again? I know we’re naughty sometimes, but it’s usually by accident and—”

Sophie shook her head and felt her chest tighten again. “It’s not because you’re naughty,” she said gently. “Look, Bella, right now I don’t know what’s going to happen next because so much has happened already that I never expected. But you have to know that when you came here it was only supposed to be for a week or two…” Sophie stopped. “You’re not supposed to live with me forever. You wouldn’t want to in my silly little flat with no garden now, would you?”