Nick looked aggrieved. “I think they’re jaunty!”
Lacey shook her head. “No. You look absurd in them.” She took another sip of tea and grimaced. “I am so tired of tea. Maybe I should try some wine again, in friendly confines, and pump and dump later. We have enough milk.”
At this, Danny’s eyelids fluttered again, and he made a more demanding noise, as if he knew his food supply was the topic of conversation and he was getting concerned.
“I’ll warm some milk now,” Olly said, leaning over to take the baby.
“Nonsense, let me,” Cilla said, standing up. “I’ll feed him, too. You still need a break, and Nick’s gone well over his allotment of baby time.”
“Yes, good idea. You should take him,” I said, a little too quickly. “Nick, uh, will get all cocky about it if you don’t.”
“Oh, right, that’s very nice,” Nick said as they did the awkward dance of transferring Danny from one adult to the other. “First Lacey insults my trousers, then I lose the only person in this family who hasn’t been rude about me.”
“I haven’t been rude. Yet,” Freddie said, leaning in and popping two of Gaz’s potato crackers into his mouth. “A bit of pepper on these, I think, Gaz.”
“That’s because you also have a pair of trousers that are too wide, and you know it,” Lacey offered. “Those green ones. They’re ridiculous. Burn them.”
Freddie chuckled, and turned to Olly. “Once, we were at a club and she turned to me on the dance floor and screamed, ‘Those are practically bell-bottoms!’”
“She was right,” Bea said.
“About what?” Cilla asked, coming back in from the kitchen with the baby tucked into the crook of her arm, a bottle in his mouth, looking like an absolute pro. “Oh, please,” she said, in response to my impressed face. “I nannied for ages. I could feed this baby blind drunk. Not that I would do that.”
“It looks good on you,” Freddie offered. “You should get one of your own.”
“No, thanks!” Cilla said, cruising the room as Danny slurped, rubbing his cheek with her ring finger to keep him sucking.
“Really? I’m keen to have a baby,” Gemma said, ruffling the edges of Bea’s bob with her fingers. “They’re so squidgy and sweet. Beatrix and I have a whole binder of sperm donors.”
“You do?” I asked. “Wait, of course you do. Bea has a binder for everything. I just didn’t think…”
“I don’t know why not,” Bea said. “I’m very maternal.”
Nick’s chortle turned into a cough, and he said, “But you’ve just told us you’re not that interested in babies.”
“In general, yes. They’re very bland,” Bea said. “But I would be quite interested in my baby, because my baby would be top-notch.”
“Baked goods are my children now,” Gaz said. “Well, and my legal practice, but that’s substantially less delicious.”
“I spent enough time with my sister’s kids to know that I rather enjoy getting to give them back at the end of the day,” Cilla said. “Besides, children deserve to have adults around them who spoil them irresponsibly and will bail them out of jail and take them for expensive drinks before they’re legal. Gaz and I will have our work cut out for us as their groovy aunt and uncle.”
“Children are also very loud,” Gaz said.
“You’re very loud,” Nick pointed out.
“Yes, exactly,” Gaz said, sidling up to Cilla and tickling Danny’s foot.
“Mine won’t be loud,” Bea said. “Mine will know.”
“We could use Gaz as a donor,” Gemma said thoughtfully. “He’s trustworthy, Oxford educated, funny…”
“Devastatingly handsome,” he added, flexing comedically like a very small, portly Chris Hemsworth.
“Between us, we could make a glorious ginger,” Gemma finished. “Garamond II. Or perhaps Arial if it’s a girl.”
“We are not having another font in this family,” Bea said. “One Garamond is more than enough.”
As the conversation drifted away from babies, Lacey decided to give in to her basest desires and pump so that she could enjoy a drink while we were all together. As Freddie started telling Olly something he’d heard from Daphne about the Netherlands’ native elk population, I excused myself to the wine cellar. Not the official palace one, which contained a modest ten thousand bottles for formal company that we’d yet to put to use, but the adjunct one Nick and I had added to the basement that held our actual low-budget plonk. The guzzlers, we called them. When I came up the stairs, Cilla was waiting for me, tapping Danny in an attempt to get him to burp.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thoughtless.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The baby thing,” she said. “I was so cavalier about it, and you just had a miscarriage and you’re watching your husband with your sister’s baby…” Her face was scrunched up with concern. “I wanted to kick myself, and when you left the room I got worried.”
“It’s that elk story. I couldn’t hear it again.” I lowered my voice. “Freddie thinks it’s hilarious but I’m sort of tapped out on Daphne stuff.”
Cilla transferred the baby to her other shoulder and started whacking his back more vigorously. “No cause for alarm,” she told me. “Sometimes you really have to smack the gas out of them. What’s going on with Daphne?”
“She’s in love with him, or at least hot for him,” I said. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Who hasn’t been in love with Freddie, in one way or another? Even Bea’s shagged him. I’m the only one that hasn’t.” She looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Maybe when we’re very old,” she offered. “I can see that. Gaz is dead. Freddie still has all his hair. It’s one late night at the Connaught bar, and boom, I’m in the club with the rest of you.”
Suddenly, she looked mortified. “Shit, sorry, I’ve run my mouth again. I know you didn’t actually…My God. Do you get pregnancy brain from holding a baby?”
On her shoulder, Danny burped. It was a flamboyant belch, one that seemed too
