‘Not here,’ Joe said. ‘We’ll see Mum when we get home.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, we’re going home tomorrow,’ Joe told him. ‘You know that.’
‘But will Mum be at home tomorrow?’ Ben asked.
‘I’m not sure, champ,’ Joe told him. ‘It depends if she got bored spending time with Ant, I guess.’
Ben wrinkled his nose at this information. ‘But what about us?’ he asked, and I thought for a moment that maybe he was going to cry.
‘We’re good, aren’t we?’ Joe told him. ‘We’re having fun here in the sun with Lucy and Sarah.’
‘I s’pose,’ Ben said. ‘It seems a bit funny, though.’
‘You’re right,’ Joe said. ‘It is a bit funny. But we’re OK, aren’t we?’
‘I s’pose,’ Ben said again. ‘Can we go and find the pig later on?’
‘I thought we might go back to that lake,’ Joe said. ‘If we go early, we could grab that shady spot under the tree and spend the whole day swimming.’
‘But we could look for the pig on the way home,’ Ben said.
‘Sure,’ Joe said. ‘Why not?’
As we gathered our things together ready to leave, I thought about how well Joe had dealt with Ben. He hadn’t wanted to lie to him, and so had managed to tell him the truth – or at least a version of it – without upsetting him. I found that combination not only clever, but rather touching.
Kids do love repeat performances, so the idea of returning to the lake pleased everyone. The only thing was that they wanted the day to happen exactly like before – they wanted to eat the funny tapas in the restaurant (rather than the picnic we’d prepared) and they wanted ‘Macarena’ on the radio. The picnic they finally came around to, but Sarah, particularly, was not happy at all when we explained that we didn’t get to choose what songs played on the radio.
Lucy seemed a little quieter than usual, and I guessed that she was pondering what she’d overheard, trying to square the circle of it in her young mind. She was also no doubt picking up on my own mood, which swung violently and unpredictably between brief sensations of deliverance and longer periods of despair. Joe had been right – the feeling had not lasted.
It wasn’t until I was showering her that evening, back at the house, that she dared to ask the question that had been troubling her. Perhaps she simply hadn’t wanted to ask it in front of Joe and Ben.
‘Mummy?’ she said. ‘Is it true that Amy is best friends with Daddy?’
‘Yes,’ I told her, as I rinsed her hair. ‘Apparently that is the case.’
‘So will Daddy be at home when we get there tomorrow?’
I swallowed. Here it was, the heart of the matter.
‘No, dear,’ I told her, inspired by Joe’s strategy of simplified honesty. ‘I’m not sure that he will be. He might be off spending time with Amy somewhere.’
‘Oh,’ Lucy said. ‘So who’s going to read us the bedtime story? Will it be Joe?’
I laughed drily at this. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it won’t be Joe. Joe will be in his house with Ben. You remember Joe’s house, don’t you?’
Lucy nodded.
‘I expect I’ll have to read you the story, won’t I?’
Lucy looked into my eyes quite piercingly then, and I braced myself for a terrifying moment of from-the-mouths-of-babes honesty. But instead, she simply bopped me on the nose with her finger and said, ‘Well, just make sure you do, Mummy. Or there’ll be trouble.’
Joe had bought too much food – way too much food – plus, due to all of the pizza we’d been eating, we’d hardly consumed any of it. So that final evening, we loaded the excess into bags and took it next door to our neighbours.
The Spanish family were particularly strange about this, sifting through the bags and dividing the items into two piles: acceptable food items and rejects, which were essentially all of the vegan bits.
The French boys enthusiastically took all our offerings, hemp milk and tofu included, and insisted that we go round for a drink before we left, so once we’d eaten, that’s what we did.
They had a tiny but incredibly loud wireless speaker with them, and though they sadly didn’t have ‘Macarena’ for Sarah, they did have some eighties disco stuff that all three kids seemed to enjoy. So while we drank our beers outside, the kids strutted around like idiots to the Bee Gees.
Amy had been right, it transpired: they were a couple, albeit a rather long-distance kind of couple. The tall one, Valentin, ran a record shop in Paris, while his partner was a clothing designer from Montpellier. He showed us some photos of the jackets he made on his iPhone, and they were really quite amazing pieces of high-fashion art. I was impressed.
‘So what about you?’ Valentin asked eventually. ‘How long have you been together?’
‘Oh, we’re not,’ I explained. ‘We’re just friends on holiday.’
‘Oh,’ Valentin said. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s because you look like a couple,’ said his friend, who had a much stronger accent. ‘You look like family with the children and everything.’
‘Yeah, well, we’re not,’ Joe said, and I wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the fading daylight or whether he was actually blushing.
‘There were more of you before, right?’ Valentin asked, missing the vibe. He swigged at his beer. ‘I talked with an American woman, I think. A blonde woman.’
‘Amy,’ Joe said. ‘My wife.’
‘She’s nice,’ Valentin said. ‘She’s really cool.’
‘Yeah,’ Joe said, looking uncomfortable. ‘Yeah, she’s great. But she had to go home early.’
‘As did Anthony,’ I said, getting the information in before he asked me. ‘He had to go home early too.’
‘And now, lovely as this is,’ Joe said, gulping down the remains of his drink, ‘I think we need to get the kids home to bed. We’ve got a really long day tomorrow.’
With the exception of checking Joe’s car in at Malaga airport, which for some reason was incredibly complicated, the journey went by without a hitch. Ant and Amy’s seats remained empty
