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  I stumbled through the shop. It felt weird, perhaps even wrong, to be standing in the shop amid the samples and lush fabrics in a fluffy nylon dressing-gown with baby sick down the front.

  I turned the key and opened the door to let Heather in. She was a strange blue colour, as if her waif-like stature couldn’t take the pressure of standing outside in anything lower than 15 degrees Celsius for anything more than ten minutes.

  “Thank God. I was starting to think I would never feel my toes again,” she said, pushing past me and huddling against the radiator. “Do you know where Beth is?”

  “Erm no. I haven’t heard from her.”

  “It’s unlike her to be late.”

  I nodded, wrapping my dressing-gown closer around me and glancing down. I was wearing my furry slippers. I thanked God there was no mirror in the kitchen, I dreaded what my auburn mop was doing right at that moment.

  “She has been a little stressed out lately,” Heather said, walking into the small kitchen and switching on the kettle. “She flipped out at the Rodgers’ place on Monday because the paint looked a shade too dark on the wall. I told her it was fine and she shouted at me what would I know about fine.”

  Heather looked at me, her doe eyes almost misted over, and I know she wanted me to tell her that Beth must have been having a bad day and not to take what she said seriously, but all I could do was nod again – my mind racing.

  This was not like my friend. She was normally so laid back. Nothing ever phased her. When she fell asleep while pulling an all-nighter over her final-year project, she simply woke with a smile on her face and declared that she must have needed the rest. While I would have freaked out and spent an hour crying and hyperventilating, Beth had just got down to work and finished the project with fifteen minutes to spare.

  When she was getting married and the baker phoned her three days before the wedding to tell her he had forgotten to make her cake, she laughed it off. “If that is all that goes wrong with my Big Day I’ll be doing brilliantly,” she cheered in her posh English tones before phoning her florist and asking her to make a gorgeous display to decorate a Marks and Spencer cake and no one ever noticed it wasn’t the £400 original she had planned for.

  Beth was one of life’s problem-solvers, so to lose the head over a shade of paint unsettled me. Not that it took much to give me that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach any more.

  Heather was sipping from her cup of tea when the phone rang.“That will probably be Beth now,” she said and I nodded, walking to the counter.

  “Hello, Instant Karma,” I said.

  “Aoife, darling, how are you?”

  At the sound of Anna’s voice, her warmth and the sheer love in the way she called me darling, I felt myself wobble a little.

  “I miss you,” I said in a small voice and Heather looked up at me with a sad little look on her face. Beth and I were once her idols. We were the coolest interior designers Richmond had and yet now here was me in my Frosty the Snowman dressing-gown, a strange odour which was either perspiration or sour milk emanating from me, while Beth was missing in action.

  “Can I call you back in five minutes?” I asked and of course that was okay with Anna – because let’s face it everything was always okay with Anna and that was why I loved her so much.

  Before I called her back, I checked my mobile. No texts from Beth and none from Dan either. Usually I got some sort of explanation if Beth was taking a day off, but not today.

  I went upstairs, sat down and dialled Anna’s number.

  “Sweetie, I’m worried about you,” Anna soothed.

  “I’m grand,” I lied,

  “You’re lying,” she countered.

  “Just a wee bit,” I offered.

  “Come on, sweetie. You know you can tell me anything.”

  “Ach, it’s just I thought coming back here would be easier and it’s not. Things are very bad with Beth. Oh Anna, how could I not have known?”

  “Not have known what?”

  “She’s been trying for a baby with no luck. And she doesn’t know I know, but I found her posts on an internet forum. She’s had tests and everything but she still can’t get pregnant and it’s tearing her apart. How could she not have told me?”

  Anna took a deep breath. “Sometimes people keep secrets for all sorts of reasons known only to them. All you can do is pick up the pieces when they eventually let you in.”

  Touché. Anna was a sly fecker when she wanted to be and she always got to the point.

  “But what do I do now?” I asked. “Do I confront her?”

  “Well, the problem with that, darling, is that she’ll know you were checking on her. She obviously didn’t want you to know or she would have told you. How would she feel if you told her you were reading her innermost thoughts on the internet?”

  “Hmmm. You have a point. But how can I not confront her? How can I have this knowledge and not share it? I can’t pretend not to know, Anna, can I?”

  “If you want to protect your friendship then you are going to have to try. You know more than most that people deal with things when they are good and ready to.”

  But how long would that be?

  In my case I had held my secret close to me for eight months. In my mother’s case, she had yet to talk to me about the secret of her depression or openly admit that she had never bonded with me. She had yet to accept it. Lord only knows how many of us were carrying around secrets at any one time, wondering whether there would ever be a right time to tell people about them, or hoping the time would come when they wouldn’t need to be a secret any more. I had been waiting for Jake to come back and make it right. It dawned on me that my friend was probably waiting for the day she could tell me she was pregnant and then inform me of the horrible journey she had been on over the last couple of years. And of course then it wouldn’t matter because she would have her happy ending.

  Looking around my flat, at the absence of Jake’s clothes thrown over the sofa the way they once had been, and at the picture of my parents – my father smiling, my mother stony-faced – I realised that not everyone got their happy ending. Even Anna – happy, bubbly, gorgeous Anna – didn’t have a happy ending. She still wore her wedding ring and, even though she didn’t admit it, I knew there were still nights she went down to Moville and wailed at the sea, giving passing men out walking their dogs in the dark heart attacks at the thought the banshee was coming for them.

  “Are you okay?” she piped up over the phone.

  “Anna, I really love you,” I said and wished with all my heart that we didn’t live so far from each other.

  We said out goodbyes and I got dressed. I could hear Heather bustling about downstairs, but no matter how much I strained my ears I could not hear the phone ring, or the bell above the door ring and Beth shout her usual hellos.

  Realising I had to do something to stop myself going completely doolally, I strapped Maggie in her pram (the fancy Bugaboo that Beth – infertile Beth – had lovingly bought) and went for a walk.

  The air was fresh, a slight frost thawing on the footpaths as we walked. I looked down at my daughter, encased in her snowsuit, a white dummy getting the battering of its life in her mouth and for a second I felt jealous. How nice would it be to only have to worry about dummies and boobies and snowsuits?

  We walked while my brain tried to come to terms with all that was going on and we walked right up Gardiner Street until I found myself staring in the window of Austin Flowers.

  Tom was inside. I could see him through the door wrestling with some Cala Lilies and assorted greenery. He seemed engrossed in his work and I wondered what his story was. Here was this man – this very handsome man – and he had taken to hanging around our street – our shop – and telling me I looked amazing. He was singing to himself as he tied some raffia around a glass vase, and I came to the only conclusion that a modern woman living in the posh part of Richmond could. He was clearly gay and he clearly wanted Beth and me to be his fag h
ags. When he told me I looked fabulous, it was obvious he was just one of those guys who liked to tell women – all women – they looked amazing.

  And we were his dream girls when you thought about it. We had a shop full of hand-painted silks and luscious wallpapers. We were attractive (well, we were, especially Beth) and I had a baby he could no doubt pretend was his own on some level. We could help him and his new business and he could help us. I blushed crimson when I thought about how I’d had found myself staring at his manly hands the previous day, but then I smiled. I could do with a gay friend. We could be like Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding. He could be the one to dance with me when Jake married someone else and make it all better.

  I was about to turn and leave, walk on back towards Morelli’s for a hot chocolate (me) and a breast-feed (Maggie), when Tom looked up and waved at me. He smiled and he certainly didn’t look very gay – but then what does ‘gay’ look like anyway? I may have grown up in Derry but I should not let my parochial upbringing get in the way of my perception of others.

  I smiled back, waving.

  He walked to the door. “Come in for a chat,” he smiled. “I’m just finishing this order and then maybe I can treat you to a cup of coffee.”

  “That would be nice,” I replied, looking around me at the shop decorated in plush creams, golds and purples. “You must tell me who your designer was so I can have them bumped off.”

  “I inherited most of it from the previous owner,” he said. “The floristry side of things was hers too. I’m just finishing off a few of her standing orders before I concentrate entirely on the gardening.”

  “Austin Gardens doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?” I said.

  He laughed, walking to the kitchen and switching on the kettle. “I’m afraid the coffee won’t quite be to Morelli’s standard. I only have instant.”

  “Instant will be lovely,” I shouted to him. “With just a drop of milk, please.”

  Maggie started to wriggle about, letting out a ferocious hungry cry.

  “You don’t mind if I feed her here, do you?” I called, stripping off her sleeping suit and sliding my T-shirt up to unclip my breast-feeding bra.

  “Not at all,” he said, clattering about, before appearing again. “Do you need me to heat a bottle for you or any . . .”

  He stood, his mouth gaping open at me, his eyes fixed on my boobs which in fairness to me were barely exposed. The nipple at least was completely clamped in my daughter’s mouth.

  I sensed his embarrassment. Funny, I hadn’t thought he would have minded. I didn’t think for one second that he would be one tiny bit interested in my boobs or that he – being a modern man – would have a problem with breast-feeding.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think you would mind,” I said, probably emphasising the ‘you’ too much.

  “No. I don’t . . . I just wasn’t expecting . . . you’re fine . . . here’s your coffee,” he bumbled before turning and walking back into the kitchen, his face red as the roses in the bucket by the door.

  Maybe he wasn’t as gay as I first thought.

  I knew I had to salvage this, and quick. “Tom, sorry. I’ll go if you want!” I shouted at the door.

  “No, it’s fine. Carry on. I have a design here for a garden I’m landscaping. I’ll just work on it until you’re finished.”

  And that was how I ended up sitting, boobs out, in a florist’s/gardener’s on Gardiner Street at the exact moment Elena Kennedy walked in.

  “Oh my darling Aoife!” she said, moving closer to me and stroking Maggie’s cheek (and very nearly my boob) while she air-kissed me. “Oh, this little one is darling! Absolutely precious. How wonderful to see you here! I didn’t know you knew Tom, He’s marvellous, isn’t he? He landscaped our garden last summer and he does all the arrangements for our little soirées. He’s quite the catch, you know,” she winked.

  “Erm I don’t really know him. I just called in to say hello.”

  The unspoken words “and I decided to get my baps out in front of him for I no longer have any shame after baring my fandango for anyone who wanted a look at the hospital” hung in the air between us like a bad smell.

  “Well, he is wonderful. You should really be recommending him to your clients.”

  I decided to nod in response. Everything I thought of saying would involve some half-baked innuendo about bushes or getting dirty or something equally embarrassing.

  I took Maggie from my breast, covered myself up quickly and called to Tom that he had a customer, and he walked out, the same flustered look on his face.

  “Elena, nice to see you,” he said, casting a furtive look in my direction.

  “Yes, and I see you’ve met Aoife. Great girl altogether, isn’t she?” Elena replied.

  I blushed and was about to make some comment about how I wasn’t all that great really, when my phone beeped and I saw a message from Beth flash up on screen.

  “Where are you? I’m at the shop. Need to chat.”

  “Sorry. But I really have to go. Tom, we might get that coffee eventually. Sorry for the embarrassment. I can assure you I don’t usually get my boobs out for a man before the first cup of coffee.”

  Blushing furiously, I beat a hasty retreat to the shop for the conversation with Beth where I hoped she would tell me all about her struggle to conceive a child and our friendship would be back on an even keel.

  

  Chapter 31

  Beth

  I heard the door click shut shortly after 2 a.m. and I heard Dan stumble through the flat, knocking the ceramic bowl off the hall table, toppling to the floor and swearing as he tripped on Lord only knows what.

  My heart had started to thump, waiting for him to come in and talk to me. I wanted him to tell me how angry he was and how I had hurt him. I wanted him to make me hurt the way I had hurt him. It didn’t matter that I was hurting in my own way – it only mattered that he got his revenge on me for saying those horrible things and hitting him that morning.

  I prepared myself to say sorry as many times as it took, but I needn’t have bothered because within a few minutes I heard the door click shut to the spare room and Dan swear as he stubbed his toe on the bedstead.

  It was strange how I knew every inch of this apartment. I could recognise every noise, identify every piece of furniture, where it was and the level of swearing it incited from my husband when he stumbled into it after a few too many pints.

  I thought I knew him too. I thought I knew every thought process in his head, but I obviously didn’t.

  When I was sure he was asleep – when I heard the snores – I got up and cleared up the smashed bowl, wrapping it in newspaper and throwing it in the bin and then I sat on the sofa watching nonsense until eventually I fell asleep.

  When I woke up I could hear the traffic move outside the flat. The door of the spare room was still closed, the sound of Dan’s snoring still seeping through into the living-room. I stood up, stretched and felt empty. Dan and I had never gone to sleep on a fight. We had always talked it through and yet now, here we were, two people on different sides of a closed door, not knowing what the other thought or wanted.

  I made a pot of coffee. It was my silly little peace-offering. I brewed it in the coffee machine, biting my nails and glancing furtively towards the spare-room door every five minutes. I buttered some croissants, put them with the cafetière and two mugs on a tray and walked into the room.

  “Dan,” I called gently. “You’re going to be late for work. I’ve made coffee.”

  He looked at me, and momentarily I saw the love he had for me in his eyes. But then it was as if he had remembered yesterday – remembered that I’d slapped him square across the face, that I’d blamed him for not getting me pregnant, that I’d failed once again to give him a baby – and he rolled over.

  “I’m not going in today. I’ve already let them know. I’ll get some coffee later, after you go to work.”

  “Well, I’m not goin
g in either,” I said petulantly. I could be a stubborn bitch when I wanted to be.

  “Good for you,” he said, pulling the duvet up to his cheek.

  I left the tray with its mugs and croissants on the bedside table and went back to the sofa where I took up my position of staring at the TV again. I wanted to go in and demand that he talk to me, but I figured he held all the cards now and I would be unwise to force his hand. I realised then how lonely I was. I couldn’t talk to Dan, nor could I talk to Aoife. She wouldn’t understand. Kids had never been in her game plan so how could I expect her to understand my obsession?

  I couldn’t phone my mum. She didn’t know either and she would kill me for keeping this a secret. The only people I could tell were those “friends” I had online and what would they say? Surely any sympathy they had for me would dry up as soon as they read how I’d slapped Dan and pushed him away. No, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I was in this on my own.

  After I’d showered and made a cup of instant coffee (the cafetière not having returned from Dan’s lair) I decided to take affirmative action.

  I phoned my doctor’s surgery and made an appointment. I know it had only been eleven months since our tests had come back clear and fine – and that Dr Browne had told us to go home and relax (yeah, right) for at least twelve months before coming back for more invasive testing, but I needed to do something.

  I no longer had faith that it was just going to happen, and if it did, what would the cost be? What state would Dan and I be in by the end of it? I secured an appointment for the following week for an initial assessment. All I had to do now was persuade Dan to come along. And, of course, persuade him to talk to me in the first place. That would be a better start perhaps.

  I was hanging up the phone when he came into the room, bleary-eyed.

  “The coffee is cold,” he muttered, eyeing my steaming cup with the jealous look of a hungover man in desperate need of a caffeine fix.