Anna had noticed, since she had become the only mother among her university friends, that she had taken on, along with the unasked-for and often uncomfortable mantle of Responsible Adult, the role of a sort of bellwether for bad behavior in her friends—rare though it was that she was out late enough to witness it these days. On Sunday afternoons, the gauge for whether a second pint would be replaced with a third. At the end of a dinner party, whether the dessert forks would be swapped for taxis home or for rolled notes. If the latter, as the night descended with Anna having neither partaken nor scolded those who had, she would invariably become the subject of ever more anxious and apologetic, placatory looks cast in her direction.
It was as though she were an elderly relative or some kind of religious icon whose beatific visage might crack at the merest suggestion of sin.
“It’s because you’re a lawyer!” Steve would prod her when she complained about always having to be the sensible one.
“No,” she always replied, shortly, her jaw set in irritation at being rendered everybody else’s Plimsoll line for squareness. “It’s because I’m a mother.”
And he would do his sacred martyr impression at her—the same one he did when she sighed too loudly over the washing up: hands mock-clasped in prayer, eyes lifted to the heavens—until she cracked a smile. Which seemed to take longer and longer these days.
Anna looked at her husband now, eyes closed on the next sunbed along, his fingers laced across the stomach beneath his faded rock band T-shirt—softer now than in years before, like hers—and his skinny legs crossed in front of him. Steve could fall asleep anywhere. He regularly did so on the floor of the nursery while gently shushing a chatty Sonny back to drowsiness in the middle of the night, to the effect that Anna usually had to step over—and take over from—his inert form.
Anna stayed resolutely silent. Her noiselessness prompted Steve to open one eye, as if in expectation of chilly disapproval.
On the sunbed next door to his, Iso—already accessorized with a fizzing glass, round John Lennon sunglasses, and a lazy smile—had managed to change into a bikini with impressive alacrity. It wasn’t, as Anna had assumed it might be, the sort of swimwear earned in the gym and woven from dental floss, but a sophisticated black two-piece, high of knicker in a retro Bettie Page style, with a plain bandeau top knotted into a twist at the front.
Not as tarty as I thought it’d be. Just as stunning as I expected though.
“Do you really think we should be…?” It was Effie who said it in the end, and Anna’s heart leaped: a rare chance to play good cop in her designated role as one half of the fun police.
But Effie’s concern was not for the invoices as yet unsigned nor the deposits that might be unreturnable in the event of their indulgence, Anna realized. Her worries were for Lizzie, dosed into docility indoors.
“I mean, isn’t it a bit harsh? To be glugging the stuff we were supposed to be cheers-ing her with?” she finished hesitantly, wringing her hands in an effort, Anna thought, not to grab the nearest flute and swiftly drain it.
Guilt flitted across Iso’s features like the shadows of the clouds across the valley floor below them, and she looked at the glass in her hand as though it were tainted, then glanced at Charlie for reassurance.
Charlie sat up and removed his own sunglasses. “I wasn’t about to suggest a toast!” He looked pained. “But there’s absolutely stacks of it in there. They aren’t going to miss a couple of bottles. And besides, it’s our holiday too.”
The blunt narcissism of the self-righteous was weapon enough to cudgel Anna’s misgivings into silence. She had been waiting long enough for this break, and how often was it—after all—that the mother of a toddler found herself next to a pool, totally unencumbered, with an endless supply of free champagne at her disposal? She could excuse practically anything on those grounds. Was she really prepared to reason herself out of enjoying her holiday, just because her better judgment told her to? Anna spent the greater part of her working days listening to the old men of the judiciary hand down their reasoned opinions—surely she was allowed to disregard the spinning arrow of her moral compass on holiday.
“That food’ll only go off in the heat if we leave it,” Steve volunteered, sipping from his own flute and winking at his wife.
He has a point.
Anna and Effie looked at each other, one stern-faced but her severity melting away like the droplets coursing down the side of the green bottle in front of them, the other already shrugging a half-apology for what she knew she was about to do.
Effie reached a slender wrist over to the table where the glasses stood, took one and passed it to Anna, then picked up another for herself. She raised the honey-colored liquid so that it filtered the warm Luberon sunshine onto her face into an even deeper gold.
Lizzie’s sadness was not hers to wallow in; Anna had come away in order to feel better about her own life too.
