The Accidental Mother (30 page)

Sophie cried because she missed her friend. But she also cried for all the things she had lost before Carrie’s death. Her father, her childhood. Her friendship with her mother. Her sense of self. Her courage and adventurous spirit. The things that losing Carrie had somehow seemed to give back to her, one by one.

She had fallen in love with two children who should never have been hers to love. Somehow this complicated whirlpool of events had woken her up, and now she wanted what Carrie had had and would never have again. And that made Sophie cry all the harder, because if that was true, wasn’t she trying to steal Carrie’s life? And if she was, she knew she would be hopeless at living it. She could never have a tenth of the energy, audacity, and verve that Carrie had brought to every day. That was the woman whom Louis and his daughters loved and missed so much. Just as Sophie feared she might never pull herself together, there was a knock on the door.

“Aunty Sophie?” It was Izzy. “I need a wee.” Sophie took a deep breath, dried her face with her palms, and arranged her mouth into a smile before pulling open the door and ushering Izzy in. Izzy pulled down her trousers and underpants and, lifting the toilet lid, edged her way onto the seat. She examined Sophie’s face as she passed water.

“Your eyes have gone all black,” she observed. She cocked her head to one side, stretched out both her arms, and said, “Don’t worry, baby. Don’t be upset.”

If just over a month ago anyone had told Sophie that very soon she would be openly weeping in the embrace of a three-year-old girl, who comforted her as she sat on the loo, Sophie would have laughed in her face. But now Izzy’s arms around her neck, her hot breath on her cheek were exactly the sensations Sophie needed to feel calm again. Izzy patted her on the back several times as Sophie knelt before her, and after a while Sophie broke the embrace, cupped Izzy’s face in one hand, and kissed her forehead. “You’re a lovely little girl, aren’t you?” she said, realizing she wasn’t going to cry anymore. At last she felt connected to the world again, for the first time since that freezing day at the crematorium she stood up, knowing that the first tears she had shed for Carrie wouldn’t be her last, but for now at least, she felt lighter and stronger. Strong enough to give the support she had intended. As Izzy concentrated on her business, Sophie looked in the cabinet mirror and washed her face in cold water until all traces of tears and makeup were gone. Her skin remained burnished, but her eyes looked fairly clear, as long as no one looked into them too deeply.

The toilet flushed behind her, and Izzy pulled up her trousers, a trail of toilet paper poking from the back of them like a tail. Sophie plucked it out and put it down the loo. She was about to lift Izzy up to the sink to wash her hands when the little girl picked up a three-legged stool that had been left by the bath and carried it to the sink.

“Do you like coming back here?” Sophie asked her as she washed her hands with the kind of enthusiasm that was bad for the environment.

“I do like it,” Izzy said thoughtfully, “and partly I don’t like it because, well, it’s funny and a bit sad.”

Sophie watched her hop off the stool, pull open the door, and head back toward the living room. Sometimes she couldn’t tell if Izzy was being curiously insightful or just mimicking the conversations of grown-ups. But on that occasion she felt certain the three-year-old had said exactly what she meant.

When they returned to the front room, Louis was sitting on the sofa with what looked a photo album open on his lap. His expression was unreadable, hidden by the forward seep of his long hair, but Sophie thought she could see the tension and sadness in every line of his body.

“Whassat?” Izzy asked, climbing up and kneeling beside him.

“It’s you,” Louis said brightly for her’s sake. It was strange, Sophie thought ruefully, how all four of them were pretending to be stronger than they were for the sake of the other three. “It’s your baby book. I found it with Bella’s. I took all the photos of Bella. I think your mum must have taken most of these. She’s only in one of them. I’ve missed so much.” He sighed.

Izzy traced the outline of her own baby footprint in the book and giggled.

“Is Bella upstairs?” Sophie asked, looking up the narrow staircase.

“Yes,” Louis said. “She wanted to go and find some things. I offered to go with her, but she said no thank you very politely.”

Sophie nodded. The atmosphere was so full, so ripe with Carrie that it seemed easier to be apart from him. To somehow disperse the intensity of emotions.

“That’s my girl,” she said, before calling up the stairs, “Bella? Are you all right up there?”

“Come up!” Bella called in response. Sophie glanced at Louis, but he didn’t look up from the baby book.

Sophie felt foolishly apprehensive as she climbed the stairs. She had never imagined herself to have an overactive imagination, but in this house it was easy to let thoughts run wild. And anyway, after the last few weeks, especially since Louis had arrived in her life, she wasn’t at all sure of the sort of person she
was
anymore. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find Carrie at the top of the stairs waiting to ask just what she thought she was playing at, falling for her husband.

“Hello?” Sophie called out once on the tiny landing, annoying herself with the note of tension in her voice.

“In here!” Sophie followed Bella’s voice to the small second bedroom, expecting it to a child’s room. But as she entered she realized immediately it was Carrie’s room. Her grandmother’s Art Deco wardrobe that she had loved so much dominated the small space, and there was just enough room remaining for a single bed and a former dining chair on which a pile of folded laundry still waited to be put away. Bella was sitting on the bed, her head peeking out of a huge red mohair sweater. She rolled the sleeves up until her hands appeared. “This was Mum’s favorite sweater,” she said to Sophie, smiling. “It still smells like her a bit. Smell!” She thrust out a sleeve toward Sophie, who sat down on the bed and sniffed the garment, which did have a faint aroma of Carrie’s favorite rose oil, and wondered how—out of all of them—Bella seemed to be so relaxed here, and happy. Sophie had expected exactly the opposite, but for possibly the first time since she had met Bella again at her grandmother’s house, all of the lines of tension that had characterized the girl’s small body seemed to have melted away. Sophie looked at Bella and realized she was six and a half years old again, not some small, noble adult carrying the weight of the world around on her shoulders.

Bella rose on her knees and picked up a black leatherette jewelry box off a shelf that had been put over the bed. Taking it down carefully, she tipped it up and turned the handle to wind the clockwork mechanism before gently lifting the lid, holding the box at eye level.

As the red felt interior was revealed and the tiny plastic ballerina within began to twirl and pirouette, Sophie smiled in recognition. “Carrie got that for her fourteenth birthday,” she told Bella, who was watching the tiny dancer. “She said she
hated
it, said she wished she could burn it—that all she wanted was money for clothes and records and that your gran had got her this just to pi——to annoy her. But she never did throw it away. She always kept her jewelry in it, even when she was grown up.” Sophie listened as the tinny rendition of the “Blue Danube Waltz” began to slow. “Maybe your gran knew her better than she thought she did after all,” Sophie said. “You’ll have to tell her about the box. She’d really like to know.”

Bella set the box down on the bed and pulled out a couple of strings of glass beads, dropping them over her head. She took out some earrings and looked at them in the palm of her hand for moment before dropping them back into the box and taking out a butterfly brooch. Sophie pinned it on the sweater for her.

“Can I take this?” she asked Sophie, shutting the lid of the box before tugging at the sweater. “And this?”

Sophie nodded. “Of course you can,” she said, and she impulsively hooked her arm around Bella’s neck and planted a kiss on her forehead. Unwittingly, Bella was making this visit to Carrie’s house easier for her, when it should have been the other way around. “You seem happy to be here, Bella. Do you think you’d be happy living back here with your dad?”

Bella stared at the faded and rubbed gold border that decorated the box’s lid for a moment. “This is my home, mine and Izzy’s,” she said. “Not his.”

Sophie was prepared for that response. “But, darling, you know you will have to live with your dad eventually and—”

“I know I have to live with Dad,” Bella said with less venom than Sophie had expected, and using the word Dad instead of
him.
“But I want to live
here,
Aunty Sophie. I want to come back home to St. Ives and school and my friends. Here, where I can nearly touch Mummy. It’s like I left one morning and I didn’t even know that I wasn’t coming back. But I didn’t. I didn’t ever come back until now. And now it seems right to come back even if—even if not all us
can
come back.”

Sophie nodded and kissed Bella again.

“I don’t know if Izzy feels the same way,” Sophie said, releasing Bella from her hug. “And as far as your dad is concerned—well, it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. But I think you’re right about coming back here.” Sophie looked around the room. Despite the cold outside, the back of the house seemed to trap the morning sun, and it was bathed in glowing warmth.

“Do you feel happy about living with Louis now?” Sophie asked Bella.

“Well…I’m prepared to discuss it with him,” she said. “If it means I can come home.”

Sophie nodded, trying not to smile at the small girl’s formality and trying not feel a sense of rejection.

Suddenly Izzy’s scream reverberated through the small house.

Sophie, who was getting used to Izzy screaming the place down over nothing in particular, wondered what they would find as she and Bella went downstairs. But any residual apprehension she might have had dissipated the moment she saw the three-year-old.

Izzy was standing in the middle of the livingroom, her face rapturous as she almost strangled the life out of a huge ginger tomcat.

“It’s Tango!” she cried joyously. “Tango! Tango!”

“Tango!” Bella leaped the last two stairs and joined the group hug of which Tango was the remarkably compliant center.

“Okay, guys,” Louis said, laughing. “You’ll scare him.”

“Nothing scares Tango,” Bella said, hefting the giant cat out of Izzy’s grasp and lumbering with him to the sofa. “He’s the toughest cat in St. Ives!”

Louis took Tango from Bella as she climbed up and sat beside him, then plonked the animal back in her outstretched arms.

Sophie, who was not used to seeing cats handled so roughly without the kind of protest that resulted in at least the loss of an eye, looked on in awe. Tango appeared to be twice the size of Artemis, had half of one ear missing and a little bare patch over one eye that meant he must have survived a few fights. He looked like a real bruiser, but there he was purring like a, well, like a pussycat in Bella’s arms as she scratched him behind one ear.

“How can he be here?” Bella asked. “He went to a cats’ home!”

Louis nodded. “I know, I was going to tell you. Leslie from next door, the lady that was coming in every day,” he added for Sophie’s benefit, “said she found him here one morning about four months ago. She called the cats’ home and they told her he had been relocated in Mousehole, ironic or what? Anyway, he can’t have liked it, because he left his new home the first chance he got and came back here. She didn’t know how he’d made it so far in one piece or how long he’d been living off scraps and that before she found him. The cats’ home phoned his new family and they took him back, but the next chance he got he was here again. So everyone agreed it was best to just let him live here. Leslie’s been feeding him. I think he divides his time between here and next door now. They’ve become quite good friends.”

“Tango,” Izzy said softly as she knelt at Bella’s feet. “Can we take him home too?” she asked Sophie. In a moment of confusion, Sophie tried to work out the logistics of fitting two children and two cats (one psychotic, one freakishly huge) into her small flat before realizing that her flat was no longer home for Bella and Izzy.

“It’s not up to me,” Sophie said, nodding at Louis as she tried to suppress an unexpected pang of loss. She sat down on a chair.

Louis reached out and scratched Tango under the chin. “All right, old mate,” he said, with fond familiarity before saying to the girls, “Well, it’s not up to me either.” He looked at Bella. “Izzy told me she’d like to live in a new house, when we come back.”

“With my own bedroom,” Izzy said firmly.

“Well, maybe,” Louis said cautiously. “But anyway, Bella—what about you?”

“I want to live here,” Bella said into Tango’s neck. She glanced up at Louis and pressed her lips together, stubborn and resolute.

Louis looked around the small front room, with good and bad memories stuffed into every corner and crevice. Sophie could see that this was the last place he wanted to come back to. But she could also see that he desperately didn’t want to let Bella down.

“It’s just, I thought a fresh start maybe…,” he said tentatively, “for us all.”

“
This
is home!” Bella insisted, her voice heavy with the threat of tears. She pointed at Louis. “You can’t just take us away from here and make us forget Mummy. You can’t just pretend that we’ve always been happy and that
nothing
happened.
You
left us here! Here at
home
!”