Now”-she refilled Gemma’s cup and her own with a briskness that seemed more like her old self-“tell me about you. How’s your mum?”
Gemma blinked back an unexpected and infuriating prickle of tears. Her seemingly indomitable mother had been diagnosed with leukemia in May. Ongoing chemotherapy seemed to have effected a partial remission, but they all felt as if they were walking a tightrope. “She’s holding her own. Dad’s had to get in extra help at the bakery, but his biggest job is keeping her hands out of things.”
“I can imagine.” Hazel smiled. “I’ll go see her, shall I? One day next week.” She gave Gemma an appraising glance. “And what about you? You haven’t said a word about the wedding plans and the summer has almost gone by.”
“Oh.” Gemma’s mind froze for a moment, then she felt the ever more frequent squeeze of panic in her chest. She forced a breath and a smile. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”
“Gemma! Don’t tell me you’ve got cold feet.” Hazel looked so alarmed that Gemma gave a strangled laugh.
“No. Not about Duncan, anyway.” The proposal had been hers, after all. She and Duncan had been partners, lovers, friends, and now, parents in their blended family, and the decision to commit to being together she didn’t regret for a moment. She hastened to explain. “It’s just the bloody wedding business. It’s driving me mad. I thought we could just get married-silly of me, I know,” she said, forestalling the comment she knew was going to accompany Hazel’s raised brows. “But everyone’s got involved, although I must say Duncan’s family have been decent about it. Mine, though…” She rolled her eyes. “And it’s not just Dad and Cynthia, demanding this and that for Mum’s sake. The boys are even in on it. They want a reception at the Natural History Museum. Can you believe it?”
“Yes,” said Hazel, laughing. “But I thought you wanted Winnie to perform the ceremony.”
Winnie Montfort was the Reverend Winifred Montfort, married to Duncan’s cousin Jack, and dear to them both. But she and Jack lived in Glastonbury, and Winnie, nearing forty, was expecting her first child. “Her doctor doesn’t want her to travel, and of course Jack’s frantic with worry.” Jack Montfort’s first wife and their baby had died in childbirth and he had taken the news of Winnie’s pregnancy with mixed feelings. “But even if she could come, she couldn’t marry us in someone else’s church.”
“Why not just ask the vicar at St. John’s to do the ceremony, then?” St. John’s was the Anglican church near their house in Notting Hill. “That seems simple enough.”
“Because it’s high church. My parents were brought up chapel, and to them St. John’s might as well be Catholic. My dad says it would kill my mum, which of course it wouldn’t, but my mum says to try to humor him-”
“Then a civil venue-”
“Just as complicated. The boys want in on the choice, and if we hold a proper reception, the guest list turns into a nightmare. We’d end up having to invite everyone either of us has met since primary school.”
“A register office-”
“Then we’ll disappoint everyone.” Gemma shook her head and looked out the window so she wouldn’t have to meet Hazel’s eyes. “I don’t know. I’ve done this before-it seems now that the wedding was the beginning of the end for Rob and me-and I don’t want to go through that again. I’m just about ready to chuck the whole thing.”
The heart had gone from the house. Tim knew it, and Holly knew it, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to fix it.
During the longest and darkest days of the winter, he had painted the kitchen. Not that he was very good at painting and decorating, but it gave him something to do to fill the seemingly endless evenings and weekends, and when he was finished he’d been quite proud of his handiwork.
Gone were Hazel’s soft greens and peaches. The cupboards were sparkling white, the walls a deep maize yellow. A new beginning, he’d thought. Then Holly had come for a much-anticipated visit and burst into tears at the sight of it. “Where’s Mummy’s kitchen?” she’d wailed, and he’d been powerless to comfort her.
She got used to it eventually, of course, just as she’d got used to their routine, but he’d never stopped feeling he had to try too hard. Holly would be six in a few weeks, and he’d argued the case for her starting proper school here with him as persuasively as he could. Hazel, however, had capitulated more easily than he’d expected, and now he found himself wondering if he would be able to cope.
“Where’s Mummy?” Holly asked for the hundredth time that afternoon. She sat at the kitchen table, kicking her heels against the chair rungs. He had given her one of the fizzy drinks Hazel didn’t allow, and it had only made her more cross.
“I’ve told you, pumpkin. She’s having a girls’ day out with your auntie Gemma.”
“I want to go. I’m a girl,” Holly said with irrefutable logic.
“You can’t this time. It’s grown-up girls only.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, I suppose not.” Tim sighed. “We could have cheese on toast,” he offered.
“I don’t want toast. I want to play with Toby.” Holly’s pretty mouth, so like her mother’s, was set in a scowl that would have done justice to a troll.
“We’ll arrange something.”
Gemma and Duncan had gone out of their way to keep up the connection between the children, and they often included him in social invitations. Decent of them, but he was always aware that there was an element of charity involved, and it made him awkward. Their lives had diverged, the only point of contact the children, and making the effort to talk casually about Hazel exhausted him. But it was one of the few anchors in his life these days, and he was unwilling to let it go.
“Now,” he said to Holly, “let’s stop kicking the chair.” Why, Tim wondered as he heard himself, did adults talk to children in the plural? It wasn’t as if he were kicking the bloody chair. If the inclusiveness was meant to be persuasive, it didn’t work.
Holly kept kicking the chair rungs. He ignored it. “We could go to the park after Charlotte visits.”
“I don’t want ta play wi’ Charlotte,” said Holly, and Tim heard the Scots accent that had been popping up intermittently since she’d come back to London. He found it both endearing and annoying, but on the whole wanted his daughter to sound like her old self. “Charlotte’s a baby,” she went on with disdain.
“And you’re a big girl, so you’ll do a good job of looking after her while I talk to her daddy.”
Mollified by this appeal to her bossy nature, Holly’s mouth relaxed. “Can we still go to the park?”
Tim glanced at the kitchen clock. Naz and Charlotte were now almost an hour late, and that was very unlike Naz. “We’ll have to see, pumpkin,” he told Holly. He tried Naz’s mobile, but it went straight to voice mail.
He didn’t normally see clients on a Saturday, and especially not when he had Holly. But Naz Malik was an old friend-they had been at uni together-and considering Naz’s situation, Tim had been willing to juggle his own schedule to suit his friend’s. He’d thought they could talk in the garden, and the girls could play.
And Naz had been insistent when he’d rung that morning, almost distraught, in fact. Why would his friend, who was punctual to the point of obsession, say he had to see Tim, then not show up?
“Let’s make the cheese toast,” Tim suggested. “I’m sure Charlotte would like some when she gets here.” Restless, he added, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll make a proper Welsh rarebit, like Mummy does.” Opening the fridge, he dug out some cheddar, mustard, and milk. Then he foraged in the cupboard for Worcestershire sauce, and cut thick slices of some slightly stale bakery bread.
“It won’t be as good,” Holly intoned with certainty.
“I know.” Tim repressed another sigh as he poured milk into the saucepan. “But we’ll do it anyway.”
By the time he had spread his cheese sauce on the toast and popped it under the grill until it bubbled, he was beginning to feel seriously worried about Naz. He rang his mobile again, with no result. He took a bite of the toast, which was better than he’d expected, and watched Holly make gratifying inroads on her slice, but he couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the clock. It was an old-fashioned clock with a big face, and its second hand seemed to tick at glacial speed as the light in the garden grew softer.
“Can we go to the park now, Daddy?” Holly scrubbed her greasy hands against her jeans, and Tim absently got up and dampened a cloth to wipe her fingers.
“Not quite yet, pumpkin.” He rang Naz’s mobile once more, then pulled up his home number and
