As well as a man who liked her as much as she liked him, Margot suddenly acquired the one thing that she’d always longed for: a family.
But first, Rowan and Sage took her out for drinks to a Muswell Hill bar, which only served organic wine and made their own pickles. It had been billed as a girls’ night out, but it soon became clear that they wanted to make sure that Margot’s intentions towards their big brother were honourable.
‘They couldn’t be more honourable,’ Margot assured them over a bottle of Sancerre, because she couldn’t tell them that this was one last victory lap before she went on to find that kind-faced man who was probably not going to be as great in bed as Will was.
‘Whenever we visited him in New York, he could be a bit weird when he was seeing someone. Never wanted us to meet them,’ Rowan said lightly, as if she wasn’t quite sure if Margot knew what the reasons behind that weirdness were. ‘You just have to ride it out.’
‘And don’t break his heart, because then we’re going to have a problem,’ Sage said so darkly that Margot quaked in her Veja trainers, even though she was almost old enough to be Sage’s mother. ‘We’ll have you blackballed by every florist within the M25. You’ll never be able to buy a bunch of mixed blooms again. Right, Ro?’
‘Damn right, but you’re not going to break Will’s heart.’ Rowan raised her glass of organic Sancerre, which didn’t taste any different to non-organic Sancerre. ‘I have such a good feeling about this.’
‘I hope so,’ Margot said, trying to quell the optimism that had dared to raise its head. She’d never been one of those women who’d envisaged what she’d look like in her wedding dress (blush pink, duchesse satin with fitted bodice, three-quarter length sleeves, a mid-length ballerina skirt and pockets, thanks for asking) but now she skipped right ahead to three years in the future.
A noisy, chaotic kitchen, something bubbling on the stove, Blossom snoozing on the sofa (in Margot’s most fevered fantasies, she and Will could afford a house big enough to accommodate an eat-in kitchen, which in turn was big enough to accommodate a sofa) and a chubby-cheeked little boy of two in the IKEA high chair that all of Margot’s friends had, Will smiling indulgently as his son spooned pasta everywhere but his mouth. And Margot was taking a cake out of the oven while she herself had a bun in the oven. A little girl this time. Although the Blooms were all about nominative determination – it turned out that Will was named after the flower, the sweet william – Margot would call her Judy, after her own mother.
But she tried to keep this to herself, was actually horrified at where her thoughts kept wandering, because it was never going to happen. Will didn’t want any of that. And Margot was ever mindful of Judy Millwood’s own advice: ‘It’s best to always keep a little bit back, Margot.’
When times were good was when Margot missed her mother most. There had been many occasions when she’d longed to be able to cry in her mother’s arms, but the happy times were rarer, and she wanted to share them with the person who’d loved her best.
Maybe it was missing her own mother so keenly which allowed Margot to form such a fast bond with Mary Bloom. Five weeks in and they’d set up a regular date for a long walk on Margot’s work-from-home Wednesdays. As Margot had suspected, how a person behaved on Christmas Day was absolutely no indication of what they were like the other three hundred and sixty-four much saner days of the year.
The Mary who she walked around Highgate Woods with, stopping for a coffee and a flaky pastry at the café halfway through their circuit, certainly wasn’t the same woman who’d been in floods of tears over a decorative prawn ring. She was very panicky about Blossom being off-lead but was as enchanted as Margot with pretty much everything that Blossom did.
‘She bustles about like she’s doing inventory,’ Margot remarked on their second walk, as Blossom wiggled her backend officiously and checked every tree and supervised every other dog’s behaviour.
‘She really needs a hard hat, a hi-vis jacket and a clipboard.’ Mary smiled proudly. ‘I’m afraid that if Blossom was human, she’d be the most appalling jobsworth.’
‘Yes! She would be the ultimate Linda from Accounts, always pinning notices up on the staff message board about people not respecting the tea-making rota,’ Margot added.
It was funny how you could go from taking the piss out of your own dog to suddenly going deep, but over the course of a few weeks, Margot found herself confiding in Mary. How sad she was that Tracy’s departure to New Zealand was imminent. How much she missed her own mother more, not less, as time went on.
Both of them skirted around the topic of the man who’d brought them together, though Margot longed to pump Mary for information. Had she met any of Will’s previous girlfriends? What had Will said about her? Had he told Mary that they were just taking things day by day?
In turn, Mary talked a lot about her own mother, ‘mighty Mo’, and her beloved dad, Bernie, and how their passing had ripped the heart out of their family.
‘I suppose I should step up, become the matriarch, but it’s very hard to stop being one thing and become another,’ she said obliquely to Margot, who nodded, but would never betray Will’s confidence about the family’s unhappy past. ‘That’s why I was so happy when Will decided to come home. Although I’d lost Mum and Dad, I’d got my son back. He said it was only for a while, but he’s put down roots now, with Blossom . . . and you.’
‘He has,’ Margot agreed, though she could hardly squeeze the words out past the lump in her throat. She was meant to be a pragmatist, and here she was getting notions. Hopeless, romantic notions.
‘I know he has to get back to his career at some point, that’s he probably missing the hustle and the bustle, but there are banks in London, aren’t there?’
She and Will were seven weeks in by then, halfway through a glorious May when the woods were studded with bluebells. The two women walked under a canopy of green leaves, pierced with shafts of sunlight.
‘Maybe Will likes the change of pace,’ Margot murmured, as she daringly removed her cardigan because the morning was warm with the promise of summer.
‘But he’s always been so driven. Always on to the next thing,’ Mary insisted. But then she’d changed the subject to how she was thinking of branching out from a flaky pastry and having a scone instead, and the moment was over and the little flame of hope that Margot had dared to light was abruptly extinguished.
Week eight and it was time for Will to meet Margot’s friends en masse. He’d already spoken to Tracy and Den on New Year’s Eve but that had been fleeting. And he’d met Sarah and her family: husband Paolo, three-year-old Maisie, baby Bertie and mini-dachshund, Dorothy, when they’d gate-crashed a monthly dachshund walk and gone for Sunday lunch afterwards. At one point, when Sarah was in the loo and Paolo had gone to the bar, Will was left holding Bertie, who grabbed huge handfuls of his hair and tugged hard. It would have been a perfect opportunity to ask Will if his boundaries had shifted. Specifically, if he ever found himself even idly thinking about having children with Margot, but Will’s pained expression had said more than words ever could.
But Will hadn’t met Jess at all, and now it was also time for the very last of the last goodbyes: Tracy and Den’s leaving party in their almost empty flat in Walthamstow because the international movers had come the day before.