*
After the cake had been carved up and people were tucking in to slices of it, Pete went into the kitchen to get some tap water. He opened the cupboard where the tumblers had always been kept and was startled by a voice from behind.
‘What are you doing?’
He turned around. Cora.
‘I’m just getting a glass of water.’
‘There are glasses outside and a tap on the wall,’ she said, a snap in her voice.
There were no pint glasses, he’d checked and no one was drinking water at this party, least of all out of a spidery hosepipe tap. ‘Thanks.’ He’d do without rather than annoy her further. He took a step towards the door but she barred his exit.
‘Why have you bought your father a snooker table?’
Presented with a chance to take the heat out of the situation, he grabbed it with both hands.
‘The honest answer? Because it was an offer that Griff couldn’t refuse and he knew that Dad had always wanted one. You needn’t worry, Griff will keep it in his garage for him.’
‘It will not be coming into this house,’ she said, pronouncing each word precisely.
Pete kept his tone level, calm. ‘As I said—’
Cora didn’t let him finish. ‘You did this to cause trouble, didn’t you?’ She fixed him with her small bird-like black eyes that looked permanently cross.
‘No, we didn’t, really.’ He couldn’t let this continue. His dad loved the woman, they had to try and get on with her. He didn’t want his dad suffering repercussions from this night. Pete sighed. ‘Look, Cora, I have never treated you with anything but respect.’
‘Huh.’
‘I know it must have been hard for you coming into a close-knit family, but we have one thing in common and that is we all want Dad to be happy. And we want you to be part of the family thing, especially when children come along.’
‘Close knit?’ There was a smile dancing on the corner of her lip, twisting her face. ‘You lot – close knit?’
She was dangling a hook full of bait and he couldn’t resist rising to it. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked her.
‘There aren’t going to be any children. Hasn’t anyone told you yet in this “close-knit” family of yours?’
Pete swallowed hard. She was trying to wound. She obviously had only half the facts about Lucy’s condition but he wasn’t going to discuss that with her now and put her right.
‘I’m sure that there will be—’
She sliced off his words yet again. ‘Your brother’s tests came back. He can’t have children.’ As if in slow motion, he watched her tongue snake outwards to dampen her lips before disappearing again, as if she wanted to savour the words sliding from her mouth. ‘And neither can you.’
Chapter 38
Laurie was all too aware that her attention kept drifting off in Molly’s Club, picturing how Pete’s dad’s party was going. She thought how proud his dad must feel having two strapping sons who loved and cared for him so obviously and she wondered if one day that might be her.
At first it was Alex who had been the keener of them both to have children. Meredith and Brendan had been loving parents and Alex and Naomi had grown up with their support and the best they could give them. Laurie had been less keen to have them, because she hadn’t had that family dynamic to use as a template. Neither had she ever felt the burning desire to carry a baby inside her, though she would have – for him, and fully embraced motherhood. But she’d always thought there were too many children out there already in need of a family to love them, look after them. If she and Alex hadn’t, for whatever reason, been able to conceive, she would have pushed him to adopt a child, the way she wished she’d been adopted by a couple who would have painted a bedroom pink for her, taken her to the park on a shiny new bicycle, been there waiting for her to come home from school in a warm house that smelled of dinner cooking. She knew first hand that just because people could have children, didn’t mean they should.
Laurie would probably have been taken into care if one of the neighbours had reported that she was so often in the house by herself overnight. Maybe if the curtains at their windows would have been dirty and they’d had a sofa rotting in the front garden, the De Veres might have slipped onto the social services radar but outwardly all looked respectable. Laurie was well fed because she fed herself well and beautifully turned out because she’d been using a washing machine and an iron since long before she became a teen. Laurie always handed her homework in and revised for her exams because she loved school and she knew what she needed to do to go to university and study law. And Paula De Vere, with her pretensions of being middle class, was always so friendly with everyone and glamorous, a product of self-funded elocution lessons and lucky tasteful bargains in charity shops. No one suspected that her daughter wasn’t cared for because she was – but by herself.
Alex’s dream of a houseful of mini-mes wore through Laurie’s reservations and she knew that with him she could build the sort of family she’d never had, a second chance to have a happy home with the excitement of Father Christmas calling and hunting the Easter Bunny’s eggs in the garden. Her children would never have to make themselves crisp sandwiches for tea or hunt around finding coins to put in the meter to fend off the dark and cold. She’d tortured herself in the weeks after he died that she might have altered the path of their fate if she’d thrown caution to the wind, come off the pill and let nature take its course; then perhaps she wouldn’t have felt that slight shift in their relationship, like a ship testing the weight of its anchor. She’d told herself she was imagining things, Bella had told her she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. There was a reason why he’d had his bank statements sent to his mother’s house and though she knew Meredith had been trying to hurt her with her line about Alex not letting them in on the secret that he was going to propose, she was right – it was exactly what Alex would do, include his parents in the big decision. So what was he going to tell her, the ‘something important’, if not that? She had pinned all her hopes on it being the proposal, because if it wasn’t, then it might have been something bad, a shock not a surprise. Why had he said tell and not ask? There was a hairline crack in their relationship that his passing had widened to a fissure, a canyon, taking him to the other side of something that couldn’t be breached. Had he died not being hers? Had he died being someone else’s?
‘It’ll be odd for Pete going to a party without his wife there,’ said Maurice openly, but looking at Laurie as if he had unconsciously bracketed them together. ‘I do hope he’s all right.’
‘I wish I were sixty-five again,’ said Mr Singh, who was as much at home behind a teashop counter as he ever was in an operating theatre.
‘I never liked birthdays,’ said Yvonne. ‘At least not my own. I always made sure my daughter had a nice day but no one ever bought me a cake with candles on it and I always wanted one.’
‘What, never?’ asked Sharon.
‘Never.’
‘Then we will certainly remedy that this year, dear Yvonne,’ said Maurice, quite vociferously. ‘When is your birthday?’