Laura shook her head.
‘I’ve told you, you need to stay mad, at least where he’s concerned, at least when you’re talking to him or his lawyers. He’s counting on your being broken. He needs you to be weak and weepy when all this is negotiated. That’s what they do. Be broken inside. Be broken with me. And your family. But you be coldly, furiously, productively enraged with him, and you let him get away with nothing.’
‘Your divorce wasn’t like that.’
‘So I’m the exception. I actually left a nice guy. My bad. Trust me, you never know a guy until you’ve met him in court.’
‘Isn’t it “You’ve never known a woman until you’ve met her in court”? I think Norman Mailer said it.’
‘Yeah, well, he was absolving men. Hell hath no fury and all that. Plus ça change … I’m more Ivana Trump, “Don’t get mad, get everything!”’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘Except that you only get everything by BEING MAD and STAYING MAD.’
‘Is this daytime-TV wisdom?’
‘Rude.’ Mel put her hands on her hips indignantly. Then she smirked. ‘Some of it. Girlfriends. Lots of girlfriends getting divorced from shits. Books. Life. You need to listen to me.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘I know it is. And it’s hard for you to hear.’
Laura smiled ruefully. ‘Will you come with me? To the next lawyer’s meeting?’
‘You know I will.’ Mel mimed an undercut punch.
Laura did. She could almost feel sorry for Alex, confronted by this energy and will, and she felt a sudden rush of love for her friend.
They’d been walking the whole time, and they were suddenly at the top of the hill. The trees had given way to a clearing, and the view was distractingly wide and far. Laura stared out at it, and breathed.
Next to her, Mel nodded decisively. ‘Okay. End of sermon. Back to the car or down the next hill to the teashop. More walking, but with cake.’
‘Cake. Definitely cake.’
‘You have to have some too. You can’t just watch me eat it. Promise.’
‘If they’ve got lemon drizzle.’
Mel smiled. ‘Oh, they will. Come on.’ She strode off confidently, yelling for Hector.
9
He was going to be late for the childminder. Again. He never meant to be. He set an alarm on his watch and on his laptop. He started every day with the best of intentions. It was just that stuff came up when you were trying to be all things to all people. You couldn’t just drop everything in the middle. Important phone calls and deadlines mattered, and they took precious little account of the fact that Arthur had to be collected from the childminder before Delilah and Bea from nursery and school, or that if he wasn’t, the entire routine was shot, and Nick would collapse on the sofa, or back at his desk when the last of them fell asleep, and feel that he’d completely and utterly failed. Today it was a pernickety client, making changes and tweaks for the sake of it, demanding to see a finished piece of artwork now when tomorrow would almost certainly have been fine. Nick had made two, three, four changes, each one, in his opinion, detrimental, each one bringing him perilously closer to his deadline for leaving the house. No fight left in him for what looked best, he pressed send on the final version, and switched on his out-of-office reply angrily. He was going to be late.
Karen was kind, and he knew she was incredibly sympathetic to his plight. He didn’t necessarily enjoy being the subject of her pity, but it was helpful sometimes. It was Karen’s retired and omnipresent husband, James, who often stood behind her at the door, with a countenance that said he shouldn’t play the young-widower card, at least not on Karen’s time. Fran had helped him find Karen in the dreadful weeks after Carrie’s death. Carrie would have liked her, she said, and the way she ran things. Karen had raised three kids of her own, fostered a handful more, and was unflappable and competent but, far more importantly, fun as well. He still felt as if he was abandoning Arthur, the first time he handed him over, although Arthur, oblivious, had beamed at Karen and immediately started trying to gnaw at the large amber beads she wore around her neck.
He would always be oblivious, baby Arthur, to the tragedy of losing his mother so very young. Bea had clear and definite memories of her. Delilah would think she had, her subconscious weaving together fragments of what was real with photographs and pieces of video. Arthur could barely even pretend to remember her. It was crazy – what they had shared, in those brief weeks and months after his birth, was entirely central to his very being: she had delivered him, fed him, rocked him against her chest at dead of night. And he wouldn’t have any recollection of her at all. The sadness he felt for himself was sometimes dwarfed by the sadness he felt for his poor motherless children. He’d had her for years and years, Arthur for no time at all, really.
If it wasn’t for Carrie’s intensive campaign, there’d have been no Arthur. Nick had been very happy with his two girls. A colleague at work had said something in passing about two kids being manageable and three tipping him over the edge, and another knew someone who’d gone for just one more and fallen pregnant with twins. There was so much that could go wrong. He’d been ignorant of all that stuff the first time, then sleep-deprived and unaware of the risks at the second. Now he felt wide awake to them. What if something went wrong? What if it was twins?
Carrie wasn’t done, she said. She knew she had one more baby in her. Nothing would go wrong, she promised. She was still only thirty-four, fit as a flea. Two straightforward pregnancies and two perfectly healthy babies. Far from agreeing with him that these were two good reasons not to push their luck, she saw it as proof that they were lucky and that the luck would hold for one more baby. She didn’t need it to be a son, she claimed, when he took that tack. She just knew that their family wasn’t complete yet. One more baby. She’d seduced him when his guard was down, and fallen pregnant almost at once. She’d taken a test before she was technically supposed to, but he already knew – something softened in the curve of her face almost on conception, and she’d started to look just like she had when she was carrying Bea and Delilah. Her complete joy had swept away his reservations, because it would have been churlish not to let it do so. One more baby.
That one more baby was making life very complicated. Karen answered the door almost simultaneously with his knock, ready. Mercifully James was elsewhere this afternoon. He apologized as usual, even though she always told him it was all right, grabbed Arthur and his changing bag, and bundled him into the car seat without interacting with him beyond a quick, dry kiss on the top of his precious head. He thanked God, not for the first time, that Arthur was such a genial and easy-going baby. He chuntered away incoherently in the back. There were interminable three-way temporary traffic lights on his usual route. If the car in front of him had just gone a tiny bit quicker, they wouldn’t have changed to red, he’d have got through and he wouldn’t have been late for Delilah. Nick smashed the steering wheel with an open hand, much harder than he’d meant to, and caught the horn unintentionally. It blared, loud and unnecessary, harmonizing with his mood, so that two mothers pushing buggies alongside the traffic jumped in fear, and turned to glare at him. He shrugged his apology. In the back Arthur, who had his limits, scrunched his face, ready to cry at the discordant sound.