Promoted: to Wife and Mother

she was thoroughly disgusted with herself for making such a fuss by then.

In spite of her determination to treat the whole thing in a casual spirit, her heart was pattering frantically against her ribs as she drove over to her mother’s house.

The last time she had seen her mother, Helen James had been quite bright, but today her mood was querulous and snappy. She barely tasted the fish Perdita had bought to tempt her appetite before she pushed it away.

‘I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow.’

It would be ruined the next day, even supposing her mother remembered to heat it up correctly. Perdita looked at her mother worriedly as she picked up the plate. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘I’m absolutely fine,’ Helen snapped. ‘For heaven’s sake, stop fussing!’

‘But you haven’t had a good meal for ages.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

Perdita drew a breath, then pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her mother. ‘Mum, don’t you think it’s time you thought about getting someone in to help? It doesn’t have to be a permanent arrangement, just someone to help with the cooking and cleaning until you feel better.’

‘I am better, and I’ve already got a perfectly adequate cleaner. You know that Mrs Clements comes in twice a week.’

‘I know you like Mrs Clements, Mum,’ Perdita acknowledged with a sigh. Mrs Clements was the bane of her life at the moment. As far as Perdita could see, she did nothing but drink coffee and complain about not feeling very well whenever she came round, and it was the surest sign of her mother’s decline that she wasn’t prepared to brook any criticism of her cleaner, who never seemed to do any cleaning at all.

Perdita dug out a cloth and took out her feelings on the mess on top of the kitchen worktops. ‘Wasn’t she supposed to come today?’ she asked, wrinkling her nose with distaste as she rinsed out the cloth.

‘She did come.’

‘Where did she clean?’ It certainly hadn’t been the kitchen!

‘Where she usually does,’ Helen said sharply. ‘And you’re not to say anything else to her, Perdita,’ she warned in some agitation before her daughter could retort. ‘She was very upset after last time.’

Perdita counted to ten, very slowly, before she could trust herself to reply. ‘I’m not suggesting that Mrs Clements doesn’t come any more, just that someone else could drop in about midday to make sure you have some lunch and-’

She stopped as she saw the old familiar stubborn look settle on her mother’s face. ‘I don’t want strangers in the house, Perdita,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.’

Then why was she here, cooking and washing and cleaning? Perdita wanted to stand up and shout at her mother, but she wrung out the cloth and attacked the worktops once more instead. Her mood of excited anticipation had been steadily trickling away since she’d arrived, leaving her with the usual mixture of frustration and guilty resentment. That champagne feeling had definitely gone flat.

By the time Perdita had settled her mother in front of the television and finished clearing up, it was ten past eight and her mood had plummeted. She was tired after the unaccustomed physical activity this afternoon, and now she was tense and cross too. The last thing she wanted was an evening of small talk. She would knock on Ed’s door and explain that she really needed to go straight home. She didn’t suppose Ed would care particularly.

Ed answered the door, took one look at her face and, before Perdita had a chance to make her apologies, he had stepped back to usher her inside. ‘You need a glass of wine,’ he said. ‘Come into the kitchen.’

Perdita was suddenly too tired to argue. It had been a long day, with one thing and another, and in the face of Ed’s calm acceptance she knew with appalled certainty that if she started to explain her frustration and guilt she would start to cry, and she couldn’t let herself do that.

He didn’t seem to expect her to say anything, so she followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the table while he poured her a glass of wine.

‘I’ll just get on with supper,’ he said, pushing the glass towards her. ‘You drink that.’

Obediently, Perdita picked up the glass. A CD player had been set up since she had last been there, and there was restful classical music playing in the background. She sipped her wine and watched Ed move around the kitchen, intensely grateful that he wasn’t asking her to talk. A tea towel was flung over his shoulder and his movements were unhurried and competent and insensibly calming: washing lettuce, opening the fridge in search of Parmesan, chopping tomatoes, stirring his simmering sauce, setting a big pan of water to boil…

The kitchen was warm and the sauce smelt wonderful, the music was soothing and the wine cool and crisp, just the way she liked it, but it was Ed’s quiet, steadying presence that made Perdita’s knotted muscles in her shoulders gradually relax as her tension dissipated.

‘Thank you-’ she broke the silence at last with a sigh ‘-I needed that.’

‘I know.’ Ed gave the bolognaise sauce a final stir, tapped the wooden spoon on the side of the pan and balanced it on the edge before turning to her with a smile. ‘Have some more wine.’

Perdita let him top up her glass and then his own. ‘I’m afraid I’m not being a very good guest,’ she told him as he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her.

‘You don’t need to be,’ said Ed. ‘You just need to be here.’

In truth, he had been feeling a little guilty about the way he and Tom had made it impossible for her to refuse coming tonight. She hadn’t seemed that keen, but he had suddenly really wanted to see her at his kitchen table again. Ed couldn’t even explain why to himself, but he knew that he didn’t want to wait and make some formal arrangement for the future. He would just be nervous then, and it would have seemed more like a date, and obviously neither of them wanted that.

No, it was just that the thought of sitting quietly with her, of talking and sharing a meal, had seemed inexplicably appealing all at once and, since Tom had provided the opening, Ed had taken his chance. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he looked forward to some adult company. There were times when he could feel very alone, even with three children in the house. Perdita’s presence the other evening had been somehow warming, revitalising, and he had wanted that again.

But the moment he’d opened the door, he had seen the strain on her face and had guessed that Perdita had given enough of herself for one evening. Perhaps, though, he could do something for her, even if it were just to let her sit without talking for a while.

‘You’re very understanding,’ she said now, and Ed looked across the table at her. She was less glossy than usual. Her hair was tucked tiredly behind her ears and the chocolate-brown eyes were huge and dark, but, even weary and stressed, there was a vividness about her that illuminated the whole room.

‘I know what it’s like,’ he told her. ‘After Sue died, people were very kind, but sometimes what I really needed was just to sit quietly and not have to make an effort. The good friends were the ones who gave me a bit of time until I came round.

‘Those first few months were mad. It felt like I was running desperately on one spot, just trying to keep on top of work, making sure that I was there for the kids, trying to help them bear it and knowing that I couldn’t make it better…Everyone kept advising me to stop and think about myself, but I couldn’t just switch off like that. I’d just end up worrying about the girls and what was going to happen to them without a mother, how Tom would cope…I was the least of my worries.’

‘It doesn’t sound as if you had a chance to grieve yourself,’ Perdita said, suspecting that he was talking so that she didn’t have to. Ed was a kind man, she realised uneasily. After Nick, kindness was dangerously seductive, far harder to resist for a woman her age than any amount of bulging muscles.

‘I didn’t properly until nearly a year later,’ he was saying. ‘The kids and I had settled into a kind of routine, and I’d got very good at keeping everything bottled up. Looking back, I can see that I was completely rigid with tension and probably very difficult to live with, but I didn’t realise until one of my oldest friends turned up with his wife one Friday. They just announced that Katie would stay with the kids and Mike was taking me walking in the Dales.’

Ed’s mouth twisted in a wry smile at the memory. ‘I didn’t want to go, but Mike wouldn’t take no for an answer and, as it turned out, it was exactly what I needed. We walked for miles, not really talking at all. It was the first chance I’d had to think about Sue and how much I missed her…’

He stopped, remembering how the grief he had kept tightly screwed down for so long had erupted without warning. ‘We stopped for a rest on a limestone pavement up there at one point. It was a beautiful day and the view was fantastic…and I suddenly started to cry.’

Perdita’s throat was tight. It was hard for men like Ed to admit that they cried, but she respected him the more