Promoted: to Wife and Mother

It had been hard enough for her, and she had been coming back to a place she already knew. ‘How do they feel about leaving London?’ she asked carefully.

‘They’re complaining like mad, of course,’ said Ed, ‘but they’re much more sociable and confident than their brother. I think they’ll cope OK-I hope so, anyway, as it’s too late now. I’ve bought a house and we exchanged contracts yesterday, so if all goes well we’ll be able to move at the beginning of September.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Not far from the centre. It’s an area called Flaxton-do you know it?’

Perdita nodded. ‘It’s the other side of town from me,’ she said. ‘My mother lives there, in fact.’ Flaxton was a part of the town known for its big, comfortable Edwardian houses, but she would have expected Ed to have chosen somewhere a little more exclusive. He must have earned a packet in London. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t go for one of the villages around Ellsborough, though. Some of them are lovely.’

‘It’s too easy to spend all evening as a taxi service when you’ve got three teenagers in the house,’ said Ed wryly. ‘They want to be out with their friends, not stuck in the country with me. And since I’m making them move away from London, buying a house near the centre is a compromise I can make.’

He was putting his kids first, the way Nick had always done, thought Perdita, and that was how it should be. Still, she couldn’t help feeling depressed as they trudged the rest of the way to the river.

Not that she had any business feeling depressed. It wasn’t as if there had ever been any prospect of a relationship, anyway. Ed hadn’t given the slightest indication that he was ever likely to see her as more than a colleague. But if he had Perdita tried to reason with herself, it would have been depressing to realise that it would never have worked.

She had already had a relationship with a single father, and it had been too hard. She wasn’t going to put herself in the position of always being second-best again, so it would never have been a runner with Ed, anyway, she told herself firmly.

Oh, and a relationship with your boss was never a good idea either, she remembered a little belatedly. No, Edward Merrick was definitely out of bounds for all sorts of good reasons.

The fact that he had a mouth that made her weak at the knees was neither here nor there.

‘It wasn’t as if he was that attractive,’ she told Millie when she got home the following day and had endured an interrogation about Edward Merrick and his entire emotional history.

Millie wasn’t convinced. ‘It sounds a sinful waste to me,’ she said. ‘The poor man’s been a widower for five years. This move will be a fresh start for him too, remember. I bet you anything he gets snapped up as soon as he arrives-and if you hold his children against him, you’ll miss your chance and you’ll only have yourself to blame!’

‘I don’t want a chance,’ said Perdita loftily. ‘All I’m looking for with Ed Merrick is a good professional relationship.’

And, given that she had started off by insulting him, followed up by grumbling about the course he’d sent her on and showing off in the bar every night, she might have to work quite hard just to have that.

Not that she had the chance to build any kind of relationship with him for some time. The dreary June turned into a changeable July and a belated burst of summer in August, but Edward Merrick made only fleeting visits to Bell Browning in that time. Perdita saw him once, getting into a lift with fellow directors, and another time walking across the car park, deep in conversation with the head of human resources, but she wasn’t invited to meet him.

It wasn’t that she wanted to see him again particularly, but she couldn’t help feeling a little miffed. Didn’t he think the Operations department important? And, come to think of it, weren’t they supposed to have bonded on that stupid course?

Luckily, she was too busy to spend too much time thinking about him. There was plenty to keep her occupied at work, and her mother caught a chill at the end of July which left her frailer and more irascible than normal. Perdita thought she was vaguer, too, although her will was as strong as ever. She was still stubbornly resistant to the idea that she might have any kind of outside help, and Perdita took to going over every evening to make sure her mother had something to eat and to tidy up as much as she could.

So it was only very occasionally that she remembered Edward Merrick. When she did, it was always with a sense of shock that she could picture him so vividly: the grey eyes, the stern mouth, that elusive glinting smile. It was odd when she hardly thought about him at all.

Well, not much anyway.

One cool evening in early September, Perdita pulled into the drive of the rambling Edwardian house where she had grown up, and where her mother still lived. A huge removal van was backed into the next door drive, she noticed with relief. It looked as if someone was moving in at last. The house had been on the market for ages and she hadn’t liked her mother living with an empty house on one side. She needed all the understanding neighbours she could get.

It looked as if the removal men were almost finished. Perdita switched off the engine and sat in the car for a minute. It was something she often did nowadays. She knew she was just putting off the moment when she had to get out of the car and go inside, but it gave her a chance to steel herself for any changes in her mother.

Sometimes there were just tiny indications that she was losing control. Perdita got her fastidiousness from her mother, and seeing her with a stain on her shirt or an unwashed pile of dishes in the sink was heartbreaking confirmation that, however much she resisted it, her mother was declining. Occasionally, though, her mother would be brighter and so much her old self that Perdita let herself hope that she might be getting better after all.

‘I hate you!’

Perdita was startled out of her thoughts by the sight of a very pretty teenage girl flouncing out of the neighbouring house. ‘I wish we’d never come here! I’m going back to London!’ she shouted at someone inside and, slamming the front door, she stormed past the removal men, who were rolling up cloths and carrying empty packing cases back into the van, and stalked off down the road.

Suppressing a smile, Perdita got out of the car at last. She remembered stomping off down that very same road on a regular basis when she was a teenager. Her mother had never bothered chasing after her either.

The memory of her mother as she had been then made her smile fade as she let herself into the house. ‘Mum, it’s me!’

She found her mother in the kitchen, peering uneasily through the window at the house next door. ‘There’s new people next door,’ she said, sounding fretful. ‘I hope they won’t be noisy.’

Perdita thought of the slammed front door. ‘I’m sure they won’t,’ she said soothingly. ‘You won’t hear them anyway.’

Picking up a can from the counter, she sniffed at it cautiously and wrinkled her nose at the smell. ‘Why don’t I make some supper?’ she said brightly, trying to distract her mother from the window as she poured the contents away down the sink and rinsed out the can. ‘I’ve brought some chicken. I thought I could grill it the way you like.’

‘Oh, it’s all right, dear. I’ve made supper.’

‘Oh?’ Perdita looked around with a sinking heart. Helen James had once been a wonderful cook, but her recent attempts had been very erratic.

‘A casserole. It’s in the oven.’

But when Perdita looked in the oven it was stone cold. She took out the uncooked stew and wanted to weep. ‘I think you must have forgotten to turn it on,’ she said as cheerfully as she could. ‘It’ll take too long to cook now. I’ll do the chicken instead.’

All through supper her mother fretted about the fact that there were new people next door. She worried about the noise and whether the children would run into the garden, repeating herself endlessly until Perdita had to grit her teeth to stop herself snapping. Eventually she suggested that she went and introduced herself to the new neighbours.

‘I’ll tell them that you don’t want them in the garden,’ she said, reflecting that it might not be a bad idea to go round and make contact in any case. She would be able to leave her phone numbers in case there was ever a problem.

‘Oh, would you, dear?’

‘I’ll take them a bottle of wine as a housewarming present.’

Settling her mother in front of the television after supper, Perdita cleared up the kitchen and then went down to the cellar where her father’s store was still kept. He had loved his wine and it always made Perdita feel sad to see