Chapter 14
MARY
On Friday afternoon, while I was cleaning mud off the pram wheels after taking it for a test-drive through the forest, Sofia sent three messages in quick-fire succession.
Sofia
Coffee mums meet-up
That ok?
Mary
Am I really so sad and boring you’ve assumed I’m not already busy?
Sofia
Mary, you had a baby like a month ago. You’ve no family here and we’re your only friends
Of course you’re not busy
Mary
I could be doing something with Beckett and Marvin!
Sofia
Nah, Moses already checked for me
But I take the point that you do have 2 other friends
* * *
Despite being awake since six, I was nowhere near ready to go when Rina pulled up in a grey estate car.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, opening the door in the hope I could deter her from entering into the mess that had accumulated over the past few days. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’
I was hurriedly hunting for baby wipes when Rina appeared in my living-room doorway, seemingly unfazed by either the baby shrieking as if being tortured, or the chaos.
‘What can I do?’ she asked, scooping Bob out of his new bouncy chair. ‘How about I take that, and you sort your hair out?’
She gently prised the changing bag out of my hand.
‘It needs restocking. I’ll do it if you can hold Bob.’
‘Mary, I have two small children. I can do up a bra, bake brownies and certainly shove nappies into a bag while holding a baby. Don’t worry,’ she added, noticing my perplexed expression.
‘It took a lot of practice. When Jock was this tiny, I couldn’t even drink a glass of water without putting him down.
Then my husband went AWOL, and I had to learn.
Make use of my hard-won expertise, and go and brush your hair. ’
‘That’s the second time you’ve mentioned my hair. Is it really that bad?’
Rina’s hair had been a mess when we met at Sofia’s the week before, so either she was a hypocrite, and slightly rude to boot, or there was more toast stuck in there. She did look a lot less dishevelled this morning.
‘It’s really not. Forget I said anything. There’s a brush in my bag if you change your mind.’
Feeling a prickle of apprehension about this irregular coffee-mum meet-up, I went upstairs and swapped my leggings for a slouchy, cream knit-dress I’d worn earlier on in my pregnancy, that wasn’t too unflattering to my deflating bump and had buttons so I could breastfeed, and thick tights.
Instead of brushing my hair, I twisted it up into a bun and even added a dab of concealer under my bloodshot eyes before grabbing a jade fake-fur coat left over from an advertising shoot.
‘Wow. You do not dress like a woman who lives in a place like this,’ Rina said when I met her in the hallway.
‘I’ve had the clothes since way before a baby decimated my housework schedule.’
‘Oh, gosh, no, I don’t mean the mess,’ she scoffed, carrying Bob to the car. ‘But I’m surprised that someone who clearly has impeccable taste and values aesthetics would choose an interior as beige as an Aldi buffet. Plus, that outfit is pure city chic.’
I opened the back door, finding Jock and Mitch snoozing in their car seats.
‘I’m renting the cottage and haven’t had the energy to do much with it yet.’
‘Where were you living before?’ Rina asked once she’d jammed Bob’s seat between the other two and strapped him in. ‘And, more to the point, how did you end up in this place?’
‘I was in Sheffield. Not having a car meant it was hard to view places in person, and it looked a lot better online.’
As Rina reversed out of my drive and started heading down the lane towards the main road, I didn’t add why I’d left Sheffield, or how, when frantically searching for a place to live, the cottage was the first place I stumbled across that was affordable, fully furnished and immediately available.
Crucially, it was also far away from anyone else, but not so far I couldn’t afford a taxi to get me there.
‘What brought you to Sherwood Forest?’
I shrugged. ‘I came this way with work a couple of times, and to a wedding at Hatherstone Hall. It seemed as nice a place as any, and a lot cheaper than the Peak District, which was my other option.’
Rina gave me a shrewd glance. ‘Escape to the country?’
She didn’t add the obvious: while pregnant, and alone.
I wanted to reply with something light-hearted, make a reference to the fresh air or peace and quiet, but I’d heard these coffee mums sharing, witnessed the depths of their friendship, and I’d missed that so fiercely I ached.
I might not be ready to reveal everything, but I wasn’t going to deny that she was right.
‘I’d left the business I helped run, under difficult circumstances, but also happened to share an apartment with the CEO.’
‘Awkward.’
‘Yeah. Sheffield has always been home, so I thought a new start was the best option. Or a break, at least.’
‘Right.’
‘How long have you lived here?’ I asked, redirecting the conversation to avoid her next question, which was surely about Bob’s father.
‘I grew up in Middlebeck, a tiny village a few miles from here. When I married Alex, he wanted to live in the city so we rented a place not far from the church, which is how I met Sofia. When everything imploded, I moved back to Middlebeck. Mitch was about six months.’
‘That must have been tough.’
‘Yeah. Thankfully, I have family right around the corner who I only want to throttle half the time. Also, Sofia and the others were ridiculously good at bringing around meals and helping out, making sure I didn’t lose it altogether.
’ She glanced at me, eyes serious. ‘It’s been close, a couple of times.
I couldn’t have got through it without them. ’
‘Yet you still manage to work, even with two small boys?’
‘Do you know the Enduring Life series?’
‘The anime?’ Kieran used to watch the show about a girl travelling through time, trying to find each generation of her family and save them, or something like that.
‘It’s also a set of manga books.’
‘You’re not the author?’
She grinned. ‘Best-selling author and illustrator, these days, thanks to Netflix.’
‘That’s very cool.’ I’d met enough celebrities through ShayKi not to be starstruck by this, but I had learned to value creativity – especially when people found a way to earn a living from it.
‘I mean, it’s not quite brought fame and fortune, but I don’t have to rely on my ex for anything, and I’m saving nicely for a house deposit. I also get to attend some very fun Comic-Con events.’
We chatted a bit more about her job, the boys, some tips about how to manage as a single mum. I grilled her about the Christmas carol concert, and to my relief she was clear that it was an amateur production that nobody took too seriously.
‘Honestly, I think most people come for the bloopers. No one will care how well made the costumes are. It won’t really matter whether we can tell what they are, because usually the storyline makes no sense anyway.’
A couple of minutes later we turned off into a long driveway, just inside the Nottingham city boundary.
‘This is it. Don’t be intimidated. When we met Li, she lived in a dingy bedsit above a kebab shop.’
I wasn’t intimidated. Li’s home was stunning, but it was startlingly similar to where I’d been living for the past eight years.
The house was a modern design made up of blocky shapes and lots of glass, all on one floor.
Li welcomed us into a wide hallway, with light oak floors and gleaming white walls.
She led us into a kitchen about the same size as my entire cottage, one half of which contained a seating area with sofas, a fireplace and what appeared to be a lot of Not Coffee Mums.
‘Surprise!’ everyone chorused.
I turned to Rina, assuming the surprise was on her. She was beaming at me, green eyes expectant.
‘Smile,’ she said, without moving her lips. ‘Pretend you’re happy about this, even if you hate surprise parties and people so much that you moved to a hovel in the middle of the forest to avoid them.’
‘Happy about what?’ I replied, forcing an anxious smile. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Welcome to your baby shower!’ Li cried, giving me a tight hug. ‘We guessed you hadn’t had one before Bob was born, seeing as you had absolutely no baby things, and New Life Coffee Mums always throw each other a shower. It’s one of our rules.’
‘Besides,’ Sofia added, nudging Li out of the way so she could hug me next, ‘even if you have had one, no one’s going to complain about two baby showers, are they?’
‘I can’t believe this,’ I said, genuinely flabbergasted as I looked around.
Rosie was there of course, but also Patty and Yara.
I spotted two pairs of antler horns bobbing on top of ginger heads, and Cheris and Carolyn gave me an enthusiastic double thumbs up.
There were a couple of women who’d also been at the carol-concert lunch, and maybe three more who I was pretty sure I’d never seen before.
All the coffee mums’ children were there, as well as a few older ones.
I noticed then the huge vases of pastel-coloured flowers, the white and gold banner over one of the bi-fold doors spelling out ‘welcome baby Bob’, confetti-filled balloons and paper pompoms, napkins and a tower of white cupcakes with gold B’s on them, as well as a table in the corner containing a pile of wrapped presents.
While still taking this in, I was ushered over to a giant white armchair, and someone swapped Bob for a pink mocktail in a martini glass, pinning a badge on my chest saying, ‘New Mummy’.
I glanced at Rina, giving her a nod of thanks for the heads-up about not arriving looking as wrecked as I felt.
‘Okay?’ Sofia asked discreetly, perching on the arm of my chair. ‘Is this too much? We’d deduced from your coat and boots that pre-pregnancy you were used to a bit of sophistication, so Li’s level of hosting seemed ideal.’
I tried to unhunch my shoulders, not sure whether to be touched that these near strangers had bothered to spot the clues to my other life, or feel creeped out by their brazen nosiness.