Promoted: to Wife and Mother

into his pockets, trying not to get angry. She was slipping away from him, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

‘It felt like a very good idea on Saturday night,’ he reminded her, knowing that he was being unfair but unable to help himself. ‘Or are you going to pretend that you didn’t enjoy it?’

His voice was harsh and the colour in Perdita’s cheeks deepened painfully, but she met his eyes steadily enough.

‘No, I’m not going to pretend that, but I do regret it now. I would rather we were just friends.’

‘I’ve got enough friends,’ said Ed bitterly. ‘I don’t want you as a friend. I want you as…’

‘As what, Ed?’

He didn’t answer immediately. Unable to stand still, he went over to the window and looked out, his back to Perdita, his shoulders rigid. ‘You’re the first woman I’ve wanted since Sue died,’ he told her without looking at her. ‘I think…I thought…that we could have something good together.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Perdita said quietly. ‘I just don’t think it could work. Our lives are too different.’

‘Are they?’

‘You know they are. You’ve got three children who demand all your attention.’

‘Not all of it,’ he protested.

‘Almost all of it. When they’ve had the attention they need, and work has the attention it needs, how much would be left for me? Enough for a brief affair, maybe,’ she said, answering her own question, ‘or an occasional fling. I know, because I’ve been there before,’ she said. ‘I don’t want that again. I promised myself that if I have another relationship, it’ll be a proper one. I deserve more than being someone who just gets squeezed in every now and then between other commitments.’

‘I see.’ Ed turned from the window, bitterly disappointed. It had felt so good the other night, so right, that he couldn’t believe that she was pushing him away.

But he couldn’t argue with her. He was hardly going to propose marriage after one kiss, if that was what she wanted, he thought, disappointment feeding an anger that was so much easier to deal with than hurt. He would have to know her a lot better before he could be certain that she would the right stepmother for his kids, even if he was sure that she was right for him.

‘Well, there’s not much I can say, is there?’ he said. ‘Except I’m sorry. But of course I will respect your decision. You don’t need to worry about me hassling you to change your mind.’

That ought to make her feel better, oughtn’t it? Perdita thought. So why did she feel so awful?

‘I hope it won’t make it difficult working together,’ she said awkwardly.

A glimmer of a smile lightened Ed’s face. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘We’re both adults, Perdita. We should be capable of keeping our personal and professional lives separate.’

Easy to say, Perdita thought as the days passed. Doing it was another matter. It was very hard when her heart leapt at the mere mention of Ed’s name in a meeting, when the sound of his voice set her heart hammering and a mere glimpse of him walking down the corridor was enough to make her hollow with desire.

And it wasn’t just at work that she had to be on her guard. There was always the chance that she would bump into him when she visited her mother. She never did, but was constantly on edge in case he appeared.

Every week, she turned up dutifully at the garden project. It made her feel better to know that her colleagues were also required to contribute to the community in some way and, when she heard about some of the projects the others were involved in, Perdita couldn’t help thinking that she was better off where she was. She and Tom cleared and dug and dug some more and, although she grumbled as a matter of form, she didn’t mind it nearly as much as she said she did. The more often she met Grace, the more she liked her, and it was a chance to catch up with Millie too, who had thrown herself into her new job with gusto.

There was something surprisingly satisfying about hard physical labour too. Perdita dug the heavy clay soil until her back ached, but in lots of ways it was a welcome respite from thinking about Ed or worrying about her mother.

Being with Tom was bittersweet, a constant reminder of Ed, but the closest she could get to him too. Tom was a restful person to work with. He was quiet, uncommunicative even, and the exact opposite of Perdita in many ways, but they made a good team. He might be sullen with his father or at college, but never with Perdita, who liked his quiet sense of humour and the sense of self-containment obviously inherited from his father. If he was still guilty of a “bad attitude” she at least could see no evidence of it.

After the first time, when Ed had picked him up, Tom had to make his own way home from the project and, as she was usually going to see her mother anyway, Perdita would give him a lift. She was never sure if she longed to see Ed or dreaded bumping into him on these occasions. Tom was frustratingly taciturn about life at home so Perdita gleaned little from him, although he did volunteer once that Ed had been in a filthy mood ‘for weeks now’.

It seemed that she wasn’t the only one suffering then. Again and again, Perdita told herself that she had done the right thing, but she couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss down by the river. She replayed it endlessly in her head and even when she managed to think about something else, like work, it was always there, simmering at the edge of her consciousness, ready to flare up into vivid memory at the slightest provocation: the sound of rain on an umbrella, the smell of the river, the sight of Ed’s name on a report. Perdita was torn between wishing that she could rewind time to before Cassie’s call and congratulating herself on her narrow escape.

‘I just wish that I could forget it,’ she sighed to Millie one evening over a bottle of wine. ‘All I want is to not think about it any more.’

She should have been more careful what she wished for, Perdita thought wearily a few days later. Her mother caught an infection that proved stubbornly resistant to antibiotics and she grew alarmingly weak. For the next fortnight, Perdita had no time to think about Ed as she dealt with doctors and ferried her mother to and from hospital for tests.

It was soon clear even to Helen that she couldn’t manage on her own while she was unwell, and it was a mark of how ill she felt that Perdita finally persuaded her to accept some help. A carer came in three times a day for half an hour, for which Perdita was enormously grateful, but she still went round first thing in the morning to get her mother out of bed and help her to get dressed. She would try and coax her to eat a little breakfast, and then drive to the office, but it was difficult to concentrate on work and everything seemed to take twice as long as normal.

After work, she went back to check on her mother and spend most of the evening with her before she went home. Perdita felt horribly guilty about not moving in permanently, but she held back from letting out or selling her flat. Some days Helen seemed to be getting better, and Perdita clung to the thought that she could somehow get her old life back eventually.

The tests provided inconclusive and the doctors suggested in the end that her mother was simply at an age when it took longer to bounce back from an infection. Perdita held on to the hope that this was just a temporary situation and made herself concentrate on the signs that Helen was indeed getting stronger. When those were few and far between, though, she would spend the night at her mother’s house, sleeping in her old room, and those were the times she found hardest.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother, but she hated living with her. Their personalities had clashed at the best of times. She was too impatient to be a good nurse, Helen James too old and set in her ways to be a good mother any more. Perdita hated the fact that she was old and ill and resented her for her stubbornness. Too often she would end up snapping at her mother, and then spend the rest of the day feeling guilty.

At least she still had a job, Perdita reminded herself constantly, although she worried, too, that her performance was not as good as it should be. Still, the situation could be so much worse. She ought to feel grateful for what she had.

But as the days turned into a week and one week into two, and she was still staying with her mother, it became harder and harder to feel grateful instead of exhausted and frustrated and dangerously near the end of her tether.

She reached the end of it one cold, wet November evening when she put some of her mother’s clothes into the washing machine and helped her upstairs to bed, only to find when she came down again some time later that there was water all over the floor.

Close to tears of tiredness and strain, Perdita rang a few numbers, but it was almost ten o’clock at night and